Links from 2008

You give 4 hours of your time to your community, and you Get Given 1 ticket to a gig featuring the best acts around. You can't buy a ticket. You have to earn this ticket.

Registration keeps out good posters and attracts trolls? Who'd have thought that?

FORA.tv – Neal Stephenson: Science Fiction as a Literary Genre

“Neal Stephenson delivered a talk entitled The Fork: Science Fiction versus Mundane Culture at Gresham College. Four professors discuss the origins of science fiction, its overlap with other genres…

The best way to explain it is to start with an example of where specificity gets confusing and perhaps doesn’t behave like you would expect. Then we’ll take a closer look at how to calculate the actual specificity value to determine which selector takes precedence.

New Minotaur Shock album on 4AD: "Instead of doing a Radiohead and asking you to pay what you think the music is worth, I have decided to try and explain what I feel the music is worth, and explain my reasoning. Of course, in an ideal world I would charge you £20.00 per track, but I’m a realist."

According to the company behind the widely used sharing widget ShareThis, after emailing a link, the most popular method of sharing is now Facebook. The numbers are interesting - but there are also some big caveats to keep in mind.

soundamus

“Enter your last.fm username to create a feed of new and upcoming music releases from the artists you scrobble.”

Imeem is the third-largest social network in the United States after MySpace and Facebook; and it's now the No. 1 streaming music site in the US. That puts it above one of our favorites, CBS-owned last.fm.

Search Flickr, capture images via your WebCam or drag-n-drop images from your computer. Click a button and the colors are saved to Illustrator, Photoshop or as an XML file for Processing

Allows you to efficiently synchronize files and folders from one disk location to another.

Good perspective on Flash/browser penetration from John Dowdell at Adobe.

Intelligent schema migrations for Django apps.

New mp3 shop with a twist; users set up their own shopfronts using site's catalogue. Ex-Bleep people involved, apparently.

Looks like an excellent TextMate plugin. Thanks, Tom!

Companies should create rich and immersive website experiences, drawing from some of the techniques for game design to build brand affinity and differentiate their sites.

Digital media recruiters near Old Street.

A tool which will translate RSS newsfeeds into 24 languages using Google Translate.

A technology and design consultancy that offers technological support to creative minds and projects.

ARGs are not grassroots. They are not about community, or word-of-mouth. They really are about saturating the market with brands in order to generate interest in something, just the way old-fashioned advertising is.

Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to build GIS web applications and harness the power of spatially enabled data.

Improved PNG fix.

Trends over time for job advert keywords.

New Suburb site.

Orwell Diaries

“To mark the 70th anniversary of the [Orwell] diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written.”

For PH.

From 2006. "The report hailed the Home Office as the clear winner in design and navigation, scoring 80.5 points out of 100."

One of the most significant findings of our research on web-site usability is that users are perfectly willing to scroll. However, they’ll only do it if the page gives them strong clues that scrolling will help them find what they’re looking for.

Heh, funny.

David Shrigley – Obsessed

git is a distributed version control system. No, you don't need to know what that means to use this guide. Think of it as a time machine: Subversion or CVS without the suck.

A simple Django CMS that can be used stand alone or with your existing Django site.

"A creative digital and video production agency" Web, TV, video and mobile.

QR and other 2D code recognition for iphone

"A simple prefpane utility to let you use one single mouse and keyboard to control several of your Macs." Similar to synergy but Mac-only.

A GUI wrapper around the synergy command line tool that lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems without special hardware.

Last.fm, which announces a major relaunch today, will start showing advertising that can tap into the community features of the site, making adverts more engaging, the site said.

Interesting. Hadn't considered the possible legal implications of 'send to a friend' before.

"Timeago is a jQuery plugin that makes it easy to support automatically updating fuzzy timestamps (e.g. "4 minutes ago" or "about 1 day ago")."

CASH Music: Deerhoof

shrinkwrapped:

Download the sheet music for Deerhoof’s forthcoming single, Fresh Born, create your own interpretation and share it with the band before they release theirs. Excellent idea.

Fantastic idea. If I could read sheet music or, in fact, make music I’d do this.

Raw Scotch beef with land cress, parsley & capers, Roast hake with artichoke & roast tomato, Lemon salad, Quaking pudding.

When I got to the sIFR method (scalable Inman Flash Replacement), the Windows based screen readers read out the heading twice.

If I'm making an album available on the web, whats the best album art file names and dimensions to include with the download? Is it worth it to include a playlist file?

[Matt Cutts] generally uses descriptive titles for blog posts but his URLs are short, neatly written and use only relevant keywords.