onfocus

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]

"Perhaps they know better than we do how deeply the American people long to be done with the problem of democracy...Sarah Palin represents what many people want: a retreat from reason; a regression to childhood." [via MeFi]

Netflix has an API now. It includes their movie catalog, reviews, and manipulating queues (oauth for that). [via waxy]

A talk David Simon gave at the Berkeley Townsend Center. [via sippey]

Search the Google of 2001 when my blog was the 3rd result for "Paul". I guess Pagerank and I have drifted apart over these last seven years.

This comment on PVRblog is a neat inside look at how the Daily Show manages media clips. (It's a fairly primitive mix of Tivos, Beta tapes, and video archive services.)

Yahoo Music is shutting down and their customers are losing their music. Ed Felton reminds, "Yahoo deserves blame here, but let's not forget who else contributed to this mess."

"Here are ten things newspapers could do, right now, to improve the quality of the comments on their sites."

"Media reporting about other media's approach to producing media is pretty confusing business to begin with. Feelings...will be bruised. But that does not fully explain the scorched earth between Fox News and those who cover it." [via Fimoculous]

The Prius will go solar? [via Doc]

"While mindful of free speech and other rights, Yahoo and other companies say they must craft and enforce guidelines that go beyond legal requirements to protect their brands and foster safe, enjoyable communities -- ones where minors may be roaming."

"I do wonder, however, whether my son will someday feel that his privacy is being violated, or more likely, be embarrassed about the site." I struggle with this issue too and it's why I don't post very much in public about my son. [via Daddy Types]

"Google is to be forced to release the records of every video watched on YouTube, including user names and web addresses, to entertainment company Viacom after a US federal court ruling." Copyright trumps privacy. [via MeFi]

"Perhaps the right answer is to excise the links from the old posts and to add a note explaining why the links were removed." Rafe brings up a good reason why you might need to alter archives and how you might handle it in a way that doesn't break links.

Nice photo of rain in Pittsburgh.

Short-wave radio is still around and growing. Funny that China still expends effort blocking short-wave signals.