A profile of Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive:
Tech’s walled gardens might make it harder to get a perfect picture, but the small team of librarians, digital archivists and software engineers at the Internet Archive plan to keep bringing the world the Wayback Machine, the Open Library, the Software Archive, etc., until the end of time. Literally.
A deep dive into Pixar’s sci-fi masterpiece, featuring entertaining detours to communist propaganda and Disney theme parks.
Digital things look ‘finished’ too soon. When something is a work in progress on a wall, it looks unfinished, so you keep working on it. moving things around, reshaping things, connecting things, erasing things, and making them again. Walls make it easier to iterate. Iteration, in my opinion, is massively correlated with quality.
This is the clickbaitiest of titles, but the post has some good sobering analysis of how much traffic driven by a small handful players. It probably won’t make you feel very cheery about the future.
(For some reason, this article uses all-caps abbreviations for company names, as though a stock ticker started generating hot takes: GOOG, FB, AMZN, etc. It’s a very odd writing style for a human.)
Yummy wallpapers for your desktop, tablet, and phone, from NASA and ESA.
James walks the site of London’s old wall, documenting the instruments of London’s new wall.
He wrote about his experience in “All Cameras Are Police Cameras.” It is a history lesson, a present lesson, and a future lesson, all in one.
I hate carousels, but if you’re going to have one, this progressively enhanced approach looks pretty good.
Perfectly offset with red string.
A nifty little Mac app from Tom: it changes your desktop wallpaper to a satellite view of your current location.
Alas, it requires Lion, an operating system I’ve been trying to avoid installing.
A thoughtful—and beautifully illustrated—piece by Geri on memory and digital preservation, prompted by the shut-down of Gowalla.
Use Gowalla? Want a copy of my book? Jeffrey has the details.
An interview with Veronica McGregor, the human being behind the wonderful MarsPhoenix Twitter account.
I had a very pleasant chat on the phone with Ben Worthen from the Wall Street Journal. He likes my social buzzword generator.
These are the guys that painted the walls across from the Clearleft office. Every day, at least 10 people take pictures of their work.
The idea I like most from this portfolio is the heat-sensitive wallpaper with blooming flowers.
Awesome iPhone wallpaper images from the awesome Anton.
The slides from Matthew Somerville's excellent BarCamp Brighton presentation: Is Cornwall part of England?
The need for portable social networks hits the mainstream press: Professor Michael Geist writes an article for the BBC website.
Ben Buchanan on how most supposedly open Web 2.0 (sic) sites are really walled gardens lacking interoperability.