onfocus

Wired is celebrating 20 years and put together this chart of people who worked at Blogger and their connections. I'm happy to say I still work on a blog.

Photography from the National Geographic archives.

Photography from the New York Times archives.

Not only words, but it's important to think about all of the digital artifacts of living. They're all moving toward the domain of companies in the name of convenience. This conversation explains some of the problems with that. [via waxy]

Nice to see MetaFilter at the top of this list--we've been working on site bandwidth. And I agree on the jQuery problem. There's a bandwidth cost associated with easier development.

Looks simple, sharp! Nice update.

I'm talking weblogs with a few other old fogey edge cases.

Does what it says on the tin. !important

"Linux, and the Internet broke everything wide open. It’s taken 20 years to get a lot of it boxed back up again. I hope there are still air cracks by the time my kids are old enough to jam screwdrivers in there."

Interesting look at how MailChimp helps their employees write for different types of communication with customers. Their blog is laid back and funny. Their tweets are focused and to the point.

Andy put together a handy list of geeky Portland spots. Wish I could be up there for ROFLcon tomorrow.

A great blog about futures past has moved to the Smithsonian Magazine. Seems like a good fit.

huh, Corvallis has the largest percentage of bicycle commuters in the country.

Oh boo! Google is going to change the name of Blogger to "Google Blogs". Sounds pretty bland to me, but I'm biased for obvious reasons.

Derek's original design for Blogger. I remember the code name: Blue Note. It'll be a shame to lose that personality, but corporations gonna corporate.

Hooray, Alan Taylor's new photography / journalism weblog is live!

Nostalgia-drenched photorealist still life paintings.

Nice browser extension that embeds site previews on Twitter. (It works better than that sounds.)

Interesting thinking about the current state of weblogs. Will all blog-like activity be consumed by Facebook, or will new tools emerge to help with privacy? And how do private blogs mix with public tools like Newsreaders? Complicated questions to answer.

Nelson has a good roundup of the issues surrounding the Wikileaks story.

"Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow."

"If you host your content on a commercial provider or on a social network, there are different points at which you can be cut off." The Wikileaks case is pointing out a weakness in the completely libertarian web ideal.

The case for Instagram. I must be a photography snob. I can not see the appeal of a community based solely on heavily-filtered photos. 

Nice sanity check in the mobile Web App vs. Native App debate. Often a Web App will do.

"A naval officer told the present writer that he had often, when on deck, been both amused and surprised at the accuracy with which some of these girls used this form of signalling out of pure fun." People have always found ways to communicate over distances.

Bruce Sterling on Flipboard. "I would counter that what this thing really massacres is weblogs. Flipbook makes weblogs look archaic, much more than it makes magazines look archaic."

I always wondered about those people at library book sales with scanners. Now I know. [via TYWKIWDBI]

A browser extension that blocks all of those annoying 'Like on Facebook' buttons.

This work by a Slovenian painter in the early 20th century is eerily similar to our own century's Jim Woodring.

Learn the constellations the 1940's Navy way!

I don't care what science says, Mexican Coke is better! (Glass bottles alone are better.)