An acquisition, or an aqui-hire, is always a failure. Either the founders failed to achieve their goal, or – far likelier – they failed to dream big enough. The proper ambition for a tech entrepreneur should be to join the ranks of the great tech companies, or, at least, to create a profitable, independent company beloved by employees, customers, and shareholders.
The litany of open standards that Google has been abandoning: RSS, XMPP, WebDav…
A fascinating analysis of a super-cheap phone from another world.
Welcome to the Galapagos of Chinese “open” source. I call it “gongkai” (公开). Gongkai is the transliteration of “open” as applied to “open source”. I feel it deserves a term of its own, as the phenomenon has grown beyond the so-called “shanzhai” (山寨) and is becoming a self-sustaining innovation ecosystem of its own.
Just as the Galapagos Islands is a unique biological ecosystem evolved in the absence of continental species, gongkai is a unique innovation ecosystem evolved with little western influence, thanks to political, language, and cultural isolation.
It’s baaa-aaack!
This time Brighton’s superb Maker Faire will span two days: the two days right after dConstruct.
This is going to be one helluva weekend.
These are mostly just mean …but kinda funny.
Keep it under your hat, but Paul has soft-launch his Project Portillo. And very nice it is too.
A really great interview with Nick Bostrom about humanity’s long-term future and the odds of extinction.
Jeff Noon and Markov chains—a heavenly match by Dan.
Revolutionising the way you revolutionise email.
A cute and fun way to put together a colour palette.
Trent and I answered a few questions for the Responsive Design Weekly newsletter.
Here’s a treasure trove of web history: an archive of the www-talk list dating back to 1991. Watch as HTML gets hammered out by a small group of early implementors: Tim Berners-Lee, Dave Raggett, Marc Andreessen, Dan Connolly…
The best review of The Hobbit.
There is an elephant in the Microsoft store.
A great in-depth explanation by Aarron on why Mailchimp dropped their Facebook and Twitter log-in options. Partly it was the NASCAR problem, but the data (provided by user testing with Silverback) also brought up some interesting issues.
CSSquirrel shares my feelings on the email notification anti-pattern.
This looks handy: a video-sharing service designed specifically to work with Silverback
Jason has set up a mailing list for open device labs. If you are running one, or thinking of setting one up, you should sign up to share ideas and knowledge.
James Craig is a mensch. This is how you give feedback to a working group.
Honor compares next week in Brighton to Austin in March.
Natalia is as excited as I am about the first week of September in Brighton: Reasons To Be Creative, dConstruct, Improving Reality, BrightonSF, and Maker Faire, now with added speakers.
The Ballardian beauty of a dying Baikonour.
This is so crazy, it just might work. Matt wants the internet to buy Wardenclyffe and turn it into a Tesla museum.
I’m going to be attending Seb’s CreativeJS and HTML5 course in Brighton on September 13th and 14th …and I strongly suspect that it’s going to be great.
Lance Arthur uses a tweet from Paul Ford as a starting point for a text adventure.
Thoughts on artificial intelligence, computation and complexity.
Strangers on a train.
Vernor Vinge’s original 1993 motherlode of the singularity.
I thoroughly agree with Lea’s approach. It’s all about the craft.
Aaron should definitely skyblog more often if this is the result.
A spot-on analysis by Khoi of the changing perception of the value in product design, as exemplified by Apple.
Some smart thinking from Harry Roberts on standardising the direction of your margins in CSS i.e. all top-margin or all bottom-margin declarations.
Some sensible ideas about having a consistent CSS writing style.
I am a mermaid.
Chris Anderson interviews Mark Andreessen.
Brighton’s Mini Maker Faire (which was fantastic last year) will take place the day after dConstruct and this time, they’ve got a lot more space. Want to get involved? Get involved!
This seems like a sensible way for browsers to approach implementing vendor-prefixed CSS properties.
I want to go to there!
This is what Photoshop is for. Be sure to watch the slideshow.
Existential ennui delivered through interface copy.
A handy little script that attempts to check email inputs for misspelled domain names. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t need to be written as a jQuery pug-in, though: anyone want to fork it and create a non-jQuery version too?
Now this is some prioritisation I can admire:
I’m going to build valuable, reliable, sustainable web services that will last forever.
The slides from Andy’s tour-de-force presentation at South by Southwest on CSS best practices.
A detailed overview by Filament Group on progressively enhancing navigation for responsive sites.
Andy sounds a cautionary note: the password anti-pattern may be dying, but OAuth permission-granting shouldn’t be blasé. This is why granular permissions are so important.
A lovely piece from Matt examining agency and behaviour in the things we surround ourselves with: frying pans, houseplants, pets, and robots.
These are the droids you are looking for.
Funny but creepy. Freepy.
Where men meets moustaches meets hair meets moustaches meets hair meets MOUSTAIR.
Of all the fuckwittery that PayPal have engaged in (and that’s a lot), this one really takes the biscuit.
Rather than have the violin returned to me, PayPal made the buyer DESTROY the violin in order to get his money back.
Ballardian astronaut paintings by Scott Listfield.
James Bridle in untrue art exposé: read all about it!
The comments are simply epic.
Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl seems even more prescient now.
Looks like Lyza’s presentation at Over The Air at Bletchley Park was really excellent.
A cute glanceable interface onto Foursquare that turns it into your own private railway station.
An eye-opening insight into web usage on mobile devices in Asia from Paul Rouget.
Brighton hacker Jason Hotchkiss demos his music-generating lava lamps in this promo video for the Brighton Maker Faire taking place the day after dConstruct.
Portraits of people that tweet, what they tweet, where they tweet.
An online book about website performance by Stoyan Steganov, released into the public domain. Excellent!
Hardware hackers, you’ve got until June 30th to submit something for Maker Faire in Brighton this September (the day after dConstruct).
A wonderfully made video on the story of A Book Apart. Mandy should have her own show.
Animatronic rabbit ears powered by brain waves …in Japan. Of course.
A comprehensive look at some of the problems with taking self-hosting to its logical conclusion: running your own web server.
How the Mormon Church are storing and preserving genealogical data inside a mountain.
Superb in-depth analysis of Ryanair’s website dark patterns and nasty brand strategy.
Apparently I’m the anti- David Cameron. I’ll take that.
If I were an American, I’d now be saying something like “ICANN have jumped the shark”. Instead, I’m British, so I’ll say “ICANN are fucking useless twats who need a firm kick in the bollocks”.
We want the finest Star Wars parodies known to man—we want them here and we want them now!
The Google voicemail transcript, which begins at 11 minutes in, cracked me up.
Matt is, as usual, eloquent and inspiring.
A photograph so beautiful, it doesn’t look real.
Bobbie documents the work of Jan Chipchase, currently looking into the design decisions behind counterfeit goods on sale in Shanghai.
A handy template for releasing code into the public domain.
A great write-up of the latest additions to the Guardian's Open Platform API including a lukewarm assessment of Semantic Web technologies like RDF.
A fantastic talk by Craig Mod on publishing, from this year's Do Lectures. I wish that the audio was available for huffduffing.
An excellent way to document a journey.
Well: this is an odd one: the entire duration of the trans-siberian railway on video and simultaneous map.
A laugh-out-loud email exchange ...because if you didn't laugh, you'd cry.
Sending a cease and desist letter to an obvious parody just makes the parody even funnier.
Of plush toys and tentacle porn.
An interesting proposal for a Huffduffer-style mad-libs ad-posting form for Craigslist.
A good example of the correct way to approach new interactive elements in HTML5 (the details element in this case): test for native support and then emulate with JavaScript if required.
A beautiful reminder.
Loving Godzilla 17 syllables at a time.
The challenges of the long tail.
The redesign of everyday things.
The popesquatter reveals all.
Some Ruby on Rails code for enhancing sign-up forms using Google's Social Graph API, inspired by Huffduffer.
Best. Domain name. Ever.
The results of the second screen reader survey from WebAIM are, once again, required reading.
Maciej Stachowiak is an inspired choice as co-chair of the HTMLWG. His evenhand peace-making has already made him an HTML5 hero.
It turns out that the brain is a scale-free small-world network in a state of self-organised criticality. Just like the internet.
Bert Bos's 2000 Treatise (published in 2003) is a must-read for anyone involved in developing any kind of format. "This essay tries to make explicit what the developers in the various W3C working groups mean when they invoke words like efficiency, maintainability, accessibility, extensibility, learnability, simplicity, longevity, and other long words ending in -y."
A poster campaign aimed at encouraging IT departments to upgrade company browser policy.
"Messages in bottles, smoke signals, letters written in the sand; the modern equivalents are the funny, sad, beautiful, hopeful, hopeless, poetic posts on Missed Connections websites. Every day hundreds of strangers reach out to other strangers on the strength of a glance, a smile or a blue hat. Their messages have the lifespan of a butterfly. I'm trying to pin a few of them down."
A surface skim of maintainability in front-end development.
Ben calls bullshit on Microsoft's defence of Outlook's rendering. Ben, as usual, is correct.
All the chairs in Pixar's The Incredibles.
Start here, click through to each next message, and enjoy. Pretend Office is like Spinal Tap for office workers. Funny in an uncomfortably real way.
An online animated spaceship and experimental aircraft art magazine. Gorgeous.
Help keep your culture error-free by proof-reading small pieces of literature from Project Gutenberg.
The start of a campaign to get a blue plaque for Sussex Uni, site of the world's first transatlantic email.
This list of screenreader survey results is required reading. Conclusion: "there is no typical screen reader user."
This is the plain vanilla look.
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