onfocus

Hell yes, ethics. "When people are saying ruinously cruel things about each other, and you're the person who made it possible, it's 100% your fault. If you aren't willing to be a grown-up about that, then that's okay, but you're not ready to have a web business. Businesses that run cruise ships have to buy life preservers. Companies that sell alcohol have to keep it away from kids. And people who make communities on the web have to moderate them."

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.

"Metafilter moderator Josh Millard talks to Brooke about what you do when a celebrity joins your website anonymously in order to attack his critics." Great interview with Josh on one of my favorite radio shows.

"Admit it. You stereotype people by their email addresses." How Hunch user demographics break down by email domain. [via swissmiss]

"I've argued that the ultimate endpoint for Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the pay-per-swing hammer." MetaFilter member adipocere takes DRM to its logical end.

"A single meta tag to control prefetching reduced our DNS queries by 350 million per month." Wow, if you use subdomains extensively this is something to watch out for.

A Belkin employee used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to hire people to write positive reviews of a Belikin product they'd never used. The funny part is that Amazon is one of the companies he scammed. [via waxy]

Matt rants about SEO, Conde Nast, and their peeing in our collective virtual pool.

"Stifling bullying online won't make bullying go away; it'll just send it back underground. The visibility gives us an advantage. If we see it, we can work with it to stop it."

YouTube can play HD, but you have to hack the URL to make it happen.

The Ignite theme is coming to my town November 13th. I wonder what I'd present about for five minutes.

"Apple's current practice of rejecting certain applications at the final hurdle - submission to the App Store - is disastrous for investor confidence." We're already running into problems with the centrally-controled application distribution system for the iPhone. [via waxy]

Polls got you down? Sullivan offers a pep-talk: "We can only tell the truth as fearlessly and as relentlessly and as continuously as we can until November 4. We must do our duty. And if the American people want to re-elect the machine that has helped destroy this country's national security, global reputation and economic health, then that is their choice. But I am not so depressed to think that they will."

One question that Ed misses: do we want to have a group of people whose job is to sit around and solve captchas all day? If raising transaction costs works, move it to the world of money by charging a fee instead of relying on outsourced human attention.

A list of "Best City" lists that include Corvallis. [via UnderStory]

"That's the lesson. You spit in Congress's face, and they'll give you what you want." [via Schneier]

"This is going to sound a little weird at first considering what I do for a living, but I want you to stop using FTP." Agreed! [via 43Folders]

"This, no less than the defiling of the Constitution, is the legacy of an administration that not merely rationalized the immorality of torture but shackled our national security to the absurdity that torture could easily fix the terrorist threat."

This is a lot easier than whatever I've been doing.

"Differences between Republican and Democrats exist...but those differences are often dwarfed by the differences between those entrenched in and dependent upon the Washington Establishment and...American citizens -- who are not." [via rc3]

"The U.S. Senate this afternoon passed the FISA Amendments Act...granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the president's illegal domestic wiretapping program." Discouraging.

This is going to change my life.