onfocus

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.

Zen medium format photos by Ryan Carver. Nice to see his photos outside of Flickr. [via mathowie]

Danny Sullivan on the unhappy relationship/different norms between blogs and the mainstream media. [via mneznanski]

This site uses open health and crime data to rank your county on the seven deadly sins. [via anil]

Love these long exposure night landscapes--uniquely Midwestern.

It'd be great to hear her speak and the W+K space is cool.

"The Federal Trade Commission will try to regulate blogging for the first time, requiring writers on the Web to clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products." I wonder how many people they have dedicated to this. Because they're going to need more.

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."