onfocus

Ryan Tate on Oakland bloggers: "...I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as 'gadflies' — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived."

"They certainly don't make SF book jackets like they used to." Fun post about classic Penguin book covers. I enjoyed browsing through the Penguin Covers on Flickr as well, and I recommend Penguin By Design by Phil Baines for even more design inspiration.

Eric Johnson covered on a Nintendo. He mimicked the guitar tones (including harmonics) well. I can almost picture the side-scrolling shooting spree this could back. [via waxy]

Lifehacker brings down the hammer on commenters. Interesting to see what will earn someone an instant ban from their site; it's a catalog of bad online behavior.

The White House is on Flickr with great photos.

Jesse talks with Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield about their excellent NPR program On The Media. It's the only NPR show I listen to religiously, and it's fascinating to hear some behind-the-scenes info.

Interesting Twitter demographics. "...45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely."

How lulz were had with a Time poll. [via waxy]

"Joe Raiola, Senior Editor of MAD Magazine will present his one man show, The Joy of Censorship." Sounds fun. At the Corvallis library April 4th, 7pm.

A recording of The Decemberists in Austin. [via protherj]

This little plug computer that runs Linux looks like it'd be fun to play with.

Cameron expands on the Economist article: "...while the average Facebook user communicates with a small subset of their entire friend network, they maintain relationships with a group two times the size of this core."

"...people who are members of online social networks are not so much 'networking' as they are 'broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren't necessarily inside the Dunbar circle'..."

SBJ's talk at SXSW about the future of news. "...in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it's important that we try to imagine how we'd like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years."

"Las Vegas casinos increasingly pay attention to their customers - their likes, dislikes, moods and patterns - in order to create an engaging experience." This was my favorite talk at Gel 2008.

"What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09."

"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves -- the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public -- has stopped being a problem."

Paintings of alchemists in their laboratories. Posted to Flickr by the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

"People went to Google to find specific information about the President-Elect and the ceremony. People go to Twitter and Facebook to share the experience with one another. That means, Twitter and Facebook are delighting users more than Google, because they are keyed into natural human needs and emotions that trigger far greater and more addictive endorphin rushes than just finding a piece of information." [via msippey]

Tom Armitage on journalists learning to code: "Learn to think like a programmer. What's really important is to not understand how to do magical things with code, but to learn what magical things are possible, what the necessary inputs for that magic are, and who to ask to do it." [via rc3.org]

"None of which is saying you shouldn't be talking to your sources, and questioning what you're told, and trying to find other means of finding stuff out from people. But nowadays, computers are a sort of primary source too. You've got to learn to interrogate them effectively - and quote them meaningfully - too." [via migurski]

"My process of interviewing people is I do not interview people," said the cheerful Hustwit. "I'm trying to get them to forget that they're being interviewed." Also, signs of increased interactivity: "Are you a robot?" [via glass]

In a perfect world their jobs would depend on their accuracy rather than their ability to produce entertaining content. [via long now]

Matt rants about SEO, Conde Nast, and their peeing in our collective virtual pool.

Here's another way to hide Google's awful SearchWiki images with Adblock Plus.

This Greasemonkey script will hide the new Google SearchWiki buttons. Strange that Google doesn't offer a way to opt-out of this feature.

Nice JavaScript date picker.

Scandal is our growth industry.

Brian Eno put together a generative music app for the iPhone called Bloom.

"Our results showed that just the very basic metric of reply length, along with the number of competing answers, and the track record of the user, was most predictive of whether the answer would be selected. The number of other best answers by a user, a potential indicator of expertise, was predictive of an answer being selected as best, but most significantly so for the technically focused Programming category." [via waxy]

Jay Rosen: "At what point does an extreme attempt to de-legitimate the press actually de-legitimate the candidate as an extremist in the eyes of the press?"

The history and current state of product placement on TV. [via Fimoculous]