onfocus

Oh man, the Olson database is a key piece of Web infrastructure. I hope they can get legal challenges sorted out and get the database back online. [via waxy]

Ben discusses Moore's law, Internet = Modernity, and changing expectations. I love the "translator" metaphor to describe our generation that has lived in both Internet and non-Internet worlds.

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."

Area Man runs group weblog! "Thirty-five miles from Portland is the home of one of Oregon’s hottest tech properties. It’s a long way from the 'Silicon Forest' of local startups." Nice profile of Matt and his awesome Lifestyle Business that I'm happy to be part of.

This site comes in handy when you suddenly realize you're having a dream within a dream.

"...there will always be the open web for the geeks, the misfits, the eccentrics, the control freaks, and any other term we can think of to proudly express our healthy skepticism of giving up too much control over what really should be ours."

Dave Winer is correct: "Have the courage to stake out your spot on the open web. Fill it with delicious treats, and connect it to others. That's creativity."

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).

This is a free ePub book about SQL indexes. Loaded up on my iPad for light reading.

This article includes an interesting use of social media for identity obfuscation. "...we create bogus individuals around client names. One person could be a photographer, one person could be a chauffeur, or whatever. We develop about 15 to 20 web sites and create all these social media sites around you. Now if you are traveling somewhere and someone puts your name in, they are going to locate those 20 other people before they get to you, depending on how much information is known about you."

Crowdsourced documentary about life across the world on a single day: July 24th, 2010.

"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.

"In case you're as late to the party as me, it turns out that you can get web apps to behave like native apps." Nice run-down of some ways you can make a web app feel like a native app on the iPhone.

"...when you host your nameplate site (and blog) on a domain you control, it doesn't change, you never lose Google juice, and there's never a question about the canonical web page which identifies you." Gina is right!

A nice roundup of criticism of Ajax-spawned 'hashbang' URLs that sites/applications are starting to favor over traditional URLs.

Wait for it...

The lesson: "Create a service experience around what you publish and sell." Some nice words about MetaFilter and an interesting way to view online audiences: "Why Wasn't I Consulted?"