Posts from June 2011

Support MLKSHK!

Remember when the Web was about people making cool stuff and no one knew about it except a couple hundred of us nerds? We had a blast finding each other, our ranks grew, and then the normals moved in. Corporations started buying up the things we built and that was ok. More people on the Web means more of us can work on the Web and earn a living at it.

The independent Web is still out there though, and it needs people supporting it. If you like web applications that are built by people who love the Web, check out the image sharing community MLKSHK. It's fun. I'm a big fan and supporter. Amber and Andre need some help to keep it running so I'm spreading the word. It's also in my self-interest—I don't want MLKSHK to go away.

If you already use Flickr or Picasa or some other image sharing service, that's great. So do I. MLKSHK is less about original photography or the tech (though that is good) and more about the community of people using it to share cool things they find. So that's my pitch: check it out. If you like it, considering supporting it. The Web still needs indie corners where fun things happen.
  • Excerpts from the style sheet of the Kansas City Star, where Ernest Hemingway worked as a reporter in 1917.
  • Yes, this. There's no easy answer. "So the dis­cus­sion is re­ally about whether, on one hand, you build your mo­bile app with JavaScript and HTML and CSS, or on the other, you ship com­piled code that talks to a frame­work like Co­coa­Touch or An­droid or Win­Phone7."
  • Fascinating presentation about the current state of gameification, and some suggestions for where application designers should be headed. Along the way he asks, "What vision of The Good Life do your designs convey?"
  • Check your work.
  • Does what it says. Having common device names on the presets is a nice touch.
  • Disappointing exchange, and a textbook example of how not to respond to critics online. Like Derek I'm a huge fan of On the Media so, ugh.
  • The Internet Archive is now archiving physical books. "Brewster noticed that Google and Amazon and other countries scanning books would cut non-rare books open to scan them, or toss them out after scanning. He felt this destruction was dangerous for the culture."
  • "...Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship." Excellent rant about the ephemeral nature of Facebook (among other things).
  • "Buzzwords are frequently used in news media. These are words that do not typically occur in everyday speech, but are common among newscasters, talking heads, and pundits on cable news." Often misused, this site collect media buzzwords and provides the real definition.