onfocus

"As a personal archive tool, it's pretty impressive, as a shared space to find interesting bookmarks, it's problematic." I completely agree with Matt, and check out Maciej's comment after the post. It sounds like more social tools are coming to Pinboard.

Devastating critique of the damage Yahoo! has done to Web culture. "All I can say, looking back, is that when history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say: 'Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the Internet, built a huge fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it.' Great work, guys."

More Google Books Ngrams fun.

"The ability to quantify things that had once been subjective 'hunches' on the part of scholars...is nothing short of revolutionary."

"...a new project available in Google Labs today - Books Ngram Viewer - highlights some of the other benefits of digitizing texts beyond better reading and storage."

Handy tool to help you find your delicious contacts on pinboard.

I'm setting up bookmarking shop over at Pinboard. Hope to see you there!

ugh. Very disappointed that del.icio.us is closing.

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.

Interesting take on Montessori-inspired apps: "In a Montessori classroom, children work from the concrete to the abstract. I fear that exposing young children to virtual Montessori materials may hamper this important developmental process."

Tax patriotism is on the rise!

Noteworthy photos from Google Street View. [via rafe]

Pictures from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.

Gloves that work with an iPhone. Great idea!

This post is a great antidote to all of the benchmark lists you see that tell you where your child should be. [via caterina]

Interesting discussion about different approaches to managing an online community.

A quick behind-the-scenes look at "20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web" that explains some of the unique features of HTML5.

Nicely designed "book" about the Web.

Interesting experiment that creates web icons with pure CSS.

yep, has comedy potential.

"Without a Steve Jobs, Facebook is going to become the new Google. A technical powerhouse that can't build usable software, because the super-smart engineers have lost touch with real user problems."

"...by permitting a third party to own and control access to the customer database, restaurants have unwittingly paid while giving away one of the crown jewels of their business, their customers."