MetaFilter posts tagged with web

Aardvark Q&A service

The Devil Tesla — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:49:37 -0800

Aardvark is a Q&A chat service that tries find people to answer your questions among your friends, friends of friends and people who know something about your subject. In practice it's a bit like AskOmegle. Previously, about Omegle.

Britain Can Make It!

Miko — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:53:28 -0800

Making the Modern World presents a set of twisty little passages through the history of science and invention, from the eighteenth century to the contemporary era, brought to you by the UK's Science Museum.

Why do we have an IMG element?

chunking express — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:58:25 -0800

Why do we have an IMG element?

Five years from now, this post will appear in a sideblog with posts from five years ago

twoleftfeet — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 01:56:44 -0800

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google talks about what the web will look like in five years. The internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content... content will move towards more video... today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years.

Google Asks: "What Would Email Look Like, If It Were Invented Today?"

zarq — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:45:13 -0800

Google began inviting volunteers to a public preview test of their new Wave web-based collaborative email and document communications platform yesterday, which enables users to "communicate and work together in real time." Initial reviews this past May seemed positive. (Previously) Features include real-time collaboration, (including concurrent editing and control of each "wave" thread,) natural language tools and a variety of APIs which users can use to embed content in other sites. Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009 (80min video -- an abridged 10 minute version is here. Wave login page is here. Google Wave Federation Protocol is an open source project for developers. The WSJ reports that invites are now for sale on EBay. Something similar happened when Google launched GMail in 2004.

One space after the period, please.

thebestsophist — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:32:51 -0800

Read Between the Leading, is a podcast for those with a love of good design and typography hosted by two students from SCAD. Season two just started with an interview with brand designer, David Airey, previous episodes of RBtL include discussions on information visualization, the future of web design with Jason Santa Maria (previously), speculative work and why graphic design is serious business (previously). So far, the show has 22 episodes, including:

An interview with John Boardley from ILoveTypography (previously: 1, 2, 3, 4).
Stephen Coles of Typographica (previously: 1, 2, 3)
Nick Sherman from MyFonts (previously: 1, 2, 3).
Veronika and Jose from TypeTogether, whom worked on expanding the character set for Helvetica.

If that's not enough typography for you, many other new type oriented sites have cropped up the last few months, including Typedia, a new resource for anyone trying to look for background information on a typeface or type foundry. WeLoveTypography, a sort of FFFFound for type, and read about major progress in web typography and how the web is expanding beyond Arial, Georgia, and Verdana.

Design Do's and Don'ts

netbros — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 11:16:27 -0800

The Design Cubicle articles focus on design tips and resources on all subjects of design; ranging from print, web, logo, branding, advertising and marketing. Popular articles include 10 Common Typography Mistakes and understanding the importance of good type skills; and 12 Common Photoshop Mistakes and Malpractice. The strategies behind designing a successful and memorable logo involve a process which progresses through various stages of listening, research, development, feedback and changes. 11 Steps of a Successful Logo Design Process.

Helveticise your web experience

acb — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:19:04 -0800

Love Helvetica and modernist typographic design? Seen the film? Now, with the power of browser userscripts, you can have the 20th-century high-modernist experience in your favourite web applications. Scripts exist to Helveticise Gmail, Twitter and Google Reader, and work with a variety of modern browsers. Of course, you'll need to provide your own copy of Helvetica; Arial is not quite the same.

A front pages post

fatllama — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 01:54:33 -0800

Google Fast Flip: Newspaper Stand 2.0

King of the one (maybe two) liners

Potomac Avenue — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:31:24 -0800

Joshua Green Allen, who has been posting great internet for more than 15 years, if not longer, merges seamlessly with a new technology. If any twitter account is worth being renowned far and wide for hilarity: His Is. Also starring in: Diary of a Copywriter One stop shopping. Previously: 1, 2, 3

Long form journalism on the Web is "not working."

thisisdrew — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:17:20 -0800

Long form journalism on the Web is "not working." - TIME.com Managing Editor Josh Tyrangiel ..Among the detractors of this statement is David Sleight, Deputy Creative Director of BusinessWeek.com: "Really? It’s 2009 and we’re still having this conversation?" Scattered industry advice on this topic varies from moderate to extreme, and while web analytics paint a convincing picture of web readers, some wonder if long form journalism has EVER worked. Of course there seem to be other factors at play, like methods of presentation and quality of content.

An ingenious device for avoiding thought...

smoke — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 05:56:20 -0800

The brain's plasticity has some neuroscientists worried about what the internet will do to reading - and to humanity. But teenagers - the very demographic you would expect to suffer most from the google-induced inability to focus and critique - are in fact reading more than ever. Or are they? Young adult fiction might be selling, but who's doing the reading?

Suggestion

plexi — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 11:43:22 -0800

I've just finished reading ____________. Type in the name of the book you've just finished, and The Book Seer will provide recommendations for your next read.

Social software design (anti-)patterns

acb — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 01:32:20 -0800

Yahoo!'s Christian Crumlish puts forward five principles of good social software design, and five anti-patterns, or ways to get it wrong. The anti-patterns will undoubtedly be familiar to most people from sites they have used:

Briefly, the Cargo Cult means imitating superficial features of successful websites and applications without really understanding what makes them work. Don't Break Email warns against the practice of using email as a one-way notification or broadcast medium while disabling your users' ability to hit reply as a normal response. The Password Anti-Pattern is the pernicious practice of asking users to give you their passwords on other systems so that you can import their data for them, thus training them to be loose and insecure with their private information. The Ex-Boyfriend Bug crops up when you try to leverage a user's social graph without realizing that some of the gaps in a person's network may be deliberate and not an up-sell opportunity. Lastly, a Potemkin Village is an overly elaborated set of empty community discussion areas or other collaborative spaces, created in anticipation of a thriving population rather than grown organically in response to their needs (see also Pave the Cowpaths).

SubPubHubbub

griffey — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:46:17 -0800

SubPubHubbub The real-time web, manifested by services like Twitter and Friendfeed are all the rage these days. What happens if everything online could be real-time? It can, thanks to Google PubSubHub and their ongoing effort to add it to their products. A ton of digiterati are paying attention to this lately, starting with Anil Dash's great post on how it works and can change the web, Gina Trapani's look at how Google is implementing it, and even Dave Winer loves it. Run your own Wordpress blog? You can implement your own SubPub service, at least to Friendfeed.

Trying to even out the false middle

lumpenprole — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:15:55 -0800

Can a firefox extension extend rationality? Wherein intel labs attempt to add rationality to the web. Good freaking luck. One of the things that has always driven me crazy in media, is when they call a dispute covered by putting on two people who disagree without considering the truth of either claim. Sometimes referred to as False Dilemma or The Fallacy of the Excluded Middle. That's why I was interested to hear an interview (from the excellent On The Media) with a researcher from Intel who's trying to solve that problem. Dispute Finder scans what you are reading and tries to point out alternative information from a source you are likely to trust. It's raising considerable interest. On the other hand, it could just make the problem worse.

internet mapping

nickyskye — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:55:12 -0800

Internet Mapping Project l slide-showl more about it here. Please draw a map of the internet, as you see it. Indicate your "home". You can download a blank PDF here and email it to [Kevin Kelly] when done. In posting the images on Flickr I suggested that they would make great fodder for a creative scholar. Much to my surprise two days later, a professor in Argentina wrote the first paper with a first attempt to classify this initial set of maps. Other innovative mapping of the internet: The xkcd internet and online communities map. Data-Visualization maps. The Dmoz tree map of the whole internet. The DIMES map and related site. Mapping movements/feelings within the internet.

Meet the new type

msalt — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 09:38:42 -0800

A new type of newspaper for a new type of world One story from it previously. About us: "The Faster Times is a collective of great journalists who have come together to try something new. As we launch this July, we will have more than a hundred correspondents in over 20 countries. We have someone on the ground in Kenya and someone else reporting from Lebanon. Our arts section will cover not just film and books, but also theater and dance and photography. We will launch with seven writers on books alone. These writers are not “citizen journalists” but among the most accomplished and recognized names in their respective fields."

pinboard.in is like del.icio.us

chunking express — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:53:54 -0800

Maciej Ceglowski of Idlewords has made a new bookmarking service called pinboard. The goal seems to be to recreate and improve on del.icio.us, which is kind of crazy now. The site has a membership fee which grows as the userbase grows (number of users * $0.001). Maciej Ceglowski calls this a financial CAPTCHA.

Text Utilities

grumblebee — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:06:23 -0800

"Text Utilities" is a useful browser-based tool for geeks. It's a web page that does all sorts of operations on text, e.g. escape/ unescape, hashing, regexp testing.

Gets a job, you dirty hippie!

spiderskull — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:31:05 -0800

"So, basically I put a pop/historical figure into a funny job for their personality or whatever." "gets a job" is an ongoing webcomic series that explores what would happen if JAWS gets a job at an office, Mario gets a job as a plumber, and more.

Uniting by dividing

crayz — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:11:37 -0800

Opera, the inventor of tabbed browsing who just won't quit, today released a trial version of Unite, a dramatic attempt to reverse the centralization of the web as well as Opera's own decreasing relevance in a market dominated by far larger companies Unite is basically a one-click way of running web applications (aka services) on your local machine. The services are written in JavaScript and interact with a basic library built into Opera. There's API documentation available for writing your own services, which can then be distributed much like FireFox extensions. Opera has already released services for running a file server, media player, and more Many home users now have always-on computers with robust operating systems and faster hardware and uplinks than hosted servers had just a few years ago. Is this the beginning of a newer, more decentralized web?

Whack-a-mole

infini — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 02:03:27 -0800

With the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on Thursday, China's ever-vigilant censors have stepped up the reach of the "Great Firewall," blocking Western sites like Twitter, Flickr, and (just one day after its launch) Microsoft's Bing. via The blocked sites include Twitter, Flickr and Microsoft’s Hotmail, according to the Telegraph. FoxNews added The Huffington Post, Life Journal and the MSN Spaces blogging tool to the list. BBC viewers in China also saw their screens black out when the news service broadcast stories about the anniversary, and foreign news crews have been barred from filming in the square. Readers of the Financial Times and Economist magazine found stories about Tiananmen ripped from their pages. Authorities also plan to begin cracking down on unapproved internet cafes, according to reports from state media. via

It's a wonderful day in the Neighborhood. Would you be my Comrade?

Benny Andajetz — Wed, 27 May 2009 11:24:50 -0800

"When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it's not unreasonable to call that socialism."The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online, a provocative article in the new Wired magazine, examines the effects of the growing influence of online collectivism. I thought this might make for an interesting read and discussion by members of an online community.

The Web OS

GuyZero — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:17:01 -0800

Grabarz & Partner's website looks oddly familiar... A German ad agency, apparently they couldn't be bothered of thinking of something original so they ripped off an existing concept.