Links from 2008

Ghostly Swim: a free [adult swim]/Ghostly International compilation featuring The Chap, Tycho, Matthew Dear and lots of people I’ve never heard of.

An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose

Products such as Morae allow 'usability labs' to be constructed from two laptops and a webcam. This has made Usability Testing as practical and almost exclusively necessary part of the building of any interface or application.

Allows users to save their slideshow as a video in any QuickTime compatible format.

Building the Next Last.fm

“So, rough edges and all, we want all you subscribers — Last.fm’s ambassadors, if you will — to have first crack at the newest version of Last.fm. And we’d love to hear not just what you think, but what the less initiated Last.fm users around you think too.”

Looks like Zappos is doing things right.

A £50 million creative fund that'll see us work with partners across the UK to kick-start a wave of investment in public service digital media.

2gether Festival London July 2-3: "will bring together over 400 radical innovators practical visionaries from a wide range of fields to focus on how using digital technologies we can generate real social benefits."

Thanks to policy makers in the UN and Europe levels of pollution are now controlled. Permits must be bought by polluters to let them keep polluting. But there is a finite number of them in circulation and the good news is anyone can buy them.

A mailing list for anyone in the UK who working on web technologies to promote green issues. Discussion, networking, jobs, whatever.

AMEE is designed as a neutral platform to aggregate and distribute all the CO2 data in the world. It combines measurement, profiling and transactional systems to enable this.

The principle behind having a Secular Sabbath is not to make life impossible or annoying - it’s to help you have a single day where you don’t do any work at all, where you have time to unwind and just think.

"Undertakes R&D and investment in renewable energy and portable power technologies. Our vision is to invent technologies that provide consumers with better solutions for their mobile or home power requirements that are more usable, economic and environmen

“ This is a film about hijacking a bus stop.”

INKY – Grave

inky:

Of all the noise I’ve inflicted upon people over the years, this is my favourite. Here’s an 18-minute track I made in February last year. Starts off with distant droning, and evolves into noisy, suspenseful stuff.

Here’s a review from a friend:

> Fucking chilling. Like being in a space station and hearing it collapse around you, contemplating your insides boiling off into the freezing vacuum of space.

Good track, good description. Music for spacehulks.

Backboard makes it simple to collect feedback from friends, co-workers, classmates, or anyone. It works with documents, images, text, and URLs.

Instead of celebrating the successes, we should be celebrating issues that have been brought to our attention. A bug is a chance to analyze what lead to it to fix it.

Let me hear you say 1!

Let me hear you say 0!

I’m not transcribing the rest.

The Usage Lifecycle describes how far a person has progressed in using your web application, helping to identify the hurdles someone needs to overcome to become regular, passionate users.

I ran a few tests on coworkers this morning using the application and was simply blown away by its ease of use and useful features.

Slowing down is essential to any kind of creativity — even if it makes you unfocused, inefficient, undisciplined, or unsystematic too

In this article, I will examine a few different techniques for delivering Flash videos over the internet and compare the advantages and disadvantages of each.

A new report out today appears to confirm that a broad economic slowdown in the United States is starting to negatively effect the online ad industry.

This sums things up quite nicely.

Pool Radio: An Aggregator of Mediators – dekstop weblog

“A tool that provides access to hopefully interesting Last.fm radio stations […] People with an appreciation for the random and obscure can definitely benefit from it.”

Provides a resource for managing all geo-permanent named places on Earth.

Remove unnecessary code from fat binaries. Strip out unneeded languages.

I realize that we have to use something to represent reasonably human readable data stored in a text file, but XML sometimes feels an awful lot like using an enormous sledgehammer to drive common household nails.

The trees and landmarks of Springfield Park, Hackney, London.

A work-in-progress Google Map from James.

A blog engine, written on Django

He reveals the philosophy behind his successful flOw, the most-downloaded game on the PlayStation Network, and what led to the creation of Flower, thatgamecompany's follow-up.

Orikaso folding tableware is dead handy this time of year.

The world is changing. And changing quickly. The web is going to win, filling the market niche where Flash and other similar technologies found their hold.

brand tags

“The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.”