onfocus

Visualize the most viewed wikipedia articles, or compare the views of different articles. Here's more information about the launch from Jeff Veen: Announcing Wikirank.

"I've always thought their status updates design was brilliant. Not because it was usable or attractive, I've always thought it was terrible. But because their design didn’t make promises they couldn’t keep." Painful and true advice: make sure you can deliver what you promise through design. [via rc3]

"The pupil measurements showed that 3-year-olds neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present. Instead, they call up the past as they need it."

"As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?" [via davenetics]

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]

"The culture of individualism is so strong that we sometimes forget how powerfully and silently social networks and those around us influence our health..." [via cshirky]

"Researchers are increasingly coming to understand that people are also 'programmed' to care about others." [via cshirky]

"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.

[via kottke]

Texas highway department: "roads simply don't pay for themselves." [via migurski]

Fantastic post about subterranean tunnels and the Federal Writers' Project that exposes some darker parts of the American West psyche.

"Start expressing fuel efficiency as gallons per mile (gpm) for some standard (meaningful) distance. We prefer gallons per 10,000 miles because it makes clear that seemingly small mpg improvements are valuable."

This Yahoo! Stencil Kit looks like a good way to mock up iPhone apps in Illustrator. [via CreativeTechs Tips]

"Buying a new home, rearranging your room, or moving into a new office? You can save time and have more fun if you lay out your ideas ahead of time." Looks like nifty web app.

tl;dr

A web comic about branding. [via Brand New]

The Web's favorite tinsmith resigns his post with the Yahoo Web Trust for a more pastoral way. [via waxy]

[via sterling]

Gary McGraw: "People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network," he said, "but I'm already part of a network, it's called the Internet." Jon's right, we can think bigger than our current data islands. [via o'reilly radar]

Tired: focus groups. Wired: immersion research. Ugh, when will people stop agreeing to be guinea pigs for marketers? If a marketer asks to live with you, say no. [via SOTD]

New blog by Dan Lockton about the intersection of psychology and business. [via Mind Hacks]

Great article on the current state of password "recovery", and how you can choose passwords that are somewhat more secure. Schneier's PasswordSafe is an essential program for me.