February 2011
13 posts
Much of Rural America Still Struggles With... →
Brian Depew of the Center for Rural Affairs on the importance of rural broadband, as reported by Kim Severson for the New York Times:
“You often hear people talk about broadband from a business development perspective, but it’s much more significant than that […] This is about whether rural communities are going to participate in our democratic society. If you don’t have effective broadband,...
io9: The things in the city that are beautiful are... →
‘Minimum Monument’ ice sculptures by Nele Azevedo:
Her point, she says, is to remind people that the city isn’t just official monuments designed to last centuries. It’s also filled with tiny, ephemeral monuments … like human beings themselves.
Marco.org: Webstock →
Marco Arment recaps Webstock 2011:
The presenters wanted to be great, to push ourselves, because the rest of the conference was just so good that we were motivated to raise the bar as high as possible. Greatness inspires greatness.
It’s an honour and a privilege to have anything to do with Webstock, as I have been fortunate enough to do for the past three years. Mike and Tash have...
The City-States of America →
Samuel Arbesman:
through a bit of number-crunching of data from the United States Census, I have found a new way to think of city-states when it comes the United States: those states where the majority of their populations lie within a single metropolitan area.
Google Street View captures 'dead girl' →
The most troubling thing about this story isn’t the fact of social panoptic surveillance—though that certainly is troubling—it’s the implication in the comments of the clucking wowsers that there is a social norm that you (even or perhaps especially if you’re a 10-year-old) should behave as if you’re under panoptic surveillance.
(Via the twitter hashtag for Stamen Design’s Citytracking...
Patterns, refraction, and pods
Ben (@neb) Cerveny describes himself in his Twitter bio, awesomely, as:
a pattern moving through the biomass, refracting memes
Change a few words and you have a great description of life in a networked city: “a pattern moving through the network, refracting data.”
I dimly remember reading, years ago, an aside about the name “iPod”: the “pod” of the title was not the white object with your...
“The battle of Tahrir Square means we can all be... →
Ken Macleod:
…humanity as a rational and political animal died in 1979, and went to hell. There it did what the damned do: tormented others and itself. The instrument of torment was identity. As some philosopher said, identity politics is zoological. If we don’t see our partial struggles as part of a general project of human emancipation, we turn on each other and fight over crumbs.
...
Iceland Wants to Be Your Social Media Campaign →
Detailed case study of the completely awesome “Iceland Wants to Be Your Friend” social media ad campaign.
‘Death by GPS’ in Death Valley →
Sacramento Bee article on people who follow their GPS units into oblivion.
Overreliance on the network will kill you.
Things with an end →
This is just amazing. Nike make a pair of running shoes called “Mayfly”, that are—I’m going to reproduce Matt Jones’s italics in full, here—only built to last for 100km.
Jones says he runs 10km on a good day. So what we have here is a shoe that says “I can afford to drop a Grant on something that lasts for two weeks.” The apotheosis of disposable culture and conspicuous...
The Daily: Indexed →
The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad newspaper, posts all its articles to the web, but doesn’t provide a browsing interface—you have to use the iPad app to browse. So Andy Baio made a Tumblr that indexes them all.
Tweets Craig Mod:
If someone whips up an rss feed or twitter account reposting those The Daily articles then you can read it in Flipboard as well.
The internet...
January 2011
7 posts
The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero →
Kickstarter project for a think book by Frank Chimero on the “why” of design.
More generally, I think it’s amazing the way people are using Kickstarter to fund the kind of esoteric, high-quality, short-run, awesome books that would probably be a losing proposition for the conventional publishing industry. This is, finally, the future of small-batch publishing that...
Different counsel →
China Miéville:
Some argue for ‘restraint’ - oh, ‘on both sides’, if you please.
Up from the streets comes different counsel.
People are already hailing the photo of a woman kissing a policeman as the iconic image of this uprising, but I would put my money on the far greater resonance of “HOLD YOUR GROUND, EGYPTIAN!”
Egypt Leaves the Internet →
Analysis by security firm Renesys of the Egyptian internet shutdown, including a breakdown of how it actually unfolded.
HTML5 Reset →
Enormously elegant CSS reset and framework for HTML5.
The Importance of Internet Choke Points →
Andrew Blum at the Atlantic:
one of the single most important buildings on the global Internet, a giant fortress on the edge of Miami’s downtown known as the NAP of the Americas. …
more than 160 networks from around the world… meet there because the building is “carrier-neutral.” It’s a Switzerland of the Internet, an unallied territory where competing networks can...
“A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod...”
– The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, chapter 12
The future of cities
Chris Luebkman of Arup, at Davos 2011:
October 2010
7 posts
White Cloud Worlds →
White Cloud Worlds is a never-before seen collection of
science fiction and fantasy artwork from New Zealand,
‘The Land of the Long White Cloud’.
Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has... →
Microsoft is pushing HTML5 now for the exact same reason Apple invested so aggressively in WebKit back in the day: because when you’re not the dominant market player, open, cross-platform standards are the best way for you to compete with the guys on top.
“…that’s one of the problems with crazy sci-fi design in the real world: it never...”
– Warren Ellis
“[M]ost people don’t schedule their work. They schedule the interruptions that...”
– The Chokehold of Calendars
September 2010
11 posts
Dark Patterns →
Compiling “black hat, anti-usability design patterns.”
Brainjuice: a reading list
Being an irregularly updated list of resources on urbanism, urban publics, networked society, and cityhacking. This is a reading list of things to explore, rather than a bibliography (at least right now).
Lots of brainjuice to be squeezed from Adam Greenfield’s preliminary bibliography for The City is Here for You to Use, with which this list currently has an enormous amount of overlap.
...
August 2010
2 posts
“…corporate effluent pipes (email, calendaring, VPN)…”
– Carlos Bueno: The Soul of a Portable Machine
January 2010
2 posts
Iconic Photos →
What a marvelous idea for a blog.
November 2009
1 post
October 2009
1 post
“The only thing gayer than Kristen Chenoweth singing a Liza Minnelli song from...”
– Gawker, on episode 5 of Glee.
September 2009
20 posts
WatchHeather Gold: “People are getting over themselves!”
Bittersweet, now. Turns out people weren’t quite as over themselves as we thought.
The MTA discovers open data →
MTA Director of Corporate and Community Affairs, Christopher Boylan:
“All of a sudden the word ‘apps’ has become part of the lingo,” [Boylan] said. “We probably wouldn’t be having this conversation six months ago, exactly like this.”
Authority officials readily admit that their Web operations could use sprucing up. “We don’t have a staff that sits around thinking about apps,” Mr. Boylan...
“You have GOT to get Phillip Glenister on Leverage. And John Simm. Pleeeeeeease?”
– From the comments on John Rogers’s post about Life on Mars. I endorse this so hard, you have no idea.