Category: linkblog

There has to be cold comfort in looking at this graph and saying you were right.

I guess that means I’m half proud of the denomination in which I grew up.

Interviews with a selection of user experience specialists highlight some of the changes in the market for user centered design.

That’s me, yo.

XSS on a brochureware site should be a wakeup. If your site just uses JavaScript, you’re vulnerable, and it doesn’t matter if you didn’t write it yourself.

Glee Club alum David Temple was the first man to desegregate the fraternity system at UVa.

Glyphs to name folders is a brilliant idea anywhere, but especially on space challenged iOS devices.

I do! I do! My favorite flavors at Toscanini’s, the only ice cream store that has ever truly understood me, have been the odd ones–basil, green tea, Guinness (now almost a cliche, in 2000 a revelation). Prosciutto ice cream? Government Cheese ice cream? Bring it…

The Windows tax strikes again. Microsoft is in a hell of a place right now. If Windows isn’t central to everything that they do, they kill their core strategy; but if it is, they risk killing all innovation at the company. I think that more people there should be reading “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”

Andrew Pincus is doing some first rate blogging of the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings.

Just Another Bass gives some insight into the pleasures of working with John Oliver and the TFC.

Nifty tip for easily filling up your iBooks bookshelf while you surf.

MSNBC’s new redesign moves away from pageview inflating tricks. I say it’s about time.

Joe Gross takes a contrarian stand and recontextualizes the vuvuzela in the company of ambient art.

Shocked, shocked, I am.

Amazing transforming page that goes from one column to 4 based on browser width. Very nice.

ASCAP vs. copyright holders… no one wins.

Smart JavaScript library for detecting and taking advantage of new CSS3 capabilities.

Brilliant. I have 140 years of Virginia Glee Club concert programs to run through this.

Kind of cool.

Nice writeup of Google’s recently released Google CLI.

Odds that we’ll see a 2010 Joint Strategic Plan on Reinforcing the Intellectual Commons: million to one.

Good discussion of how launches go wrong. I think the point about sales enablement is particularly critical.

Interesting discussion of the differences between product management and product marketing. While it’s true to say that both roles need to listen to the market, at the end of the day I think the difference is what each role produces. A product marketing manager and a product manager can both produce requirements, but at the end of the day a PMM produces positioning, pricing, and sales channel enablement, and a product manager produces the product itself.

Ars Technica’s usual in-depth review covers iOS 4, the new i(Phone/Pad/Touch) OS.

Interesting interview with Laurie Anderson at the cusp of something new.

Trenchant observations on the philosophy of bundling, or unbundling, features in releases. It’s a subtlety that most people don’t think about but that goes to the heart of product management: how do you get the brilliant things that your team has done to market?

Funny discussion of marginalia in books in the New York Public Library, including Nabokov’s grading a collection of New Yorker short stories.

Drag and drop IVR in the browser — interesting stealth mode startup that’s launching Monday.

Flash Player 10.1 makes a big transition from Carbon to Cocoa. Going to do some testing tonight and see what it does for performance.

Upload your photo to NASA and it will fly into space on one of the last two shuttle missions.

WordPress 3.0 allows themes to create custom navigation menus.

That’s kind of cool.

Apple did a good job turning around what was a dreadful web mail interface and making it acceptable.

To: AT&T for hogging so much bandwidth; England for the Revolution, tobacco companies, Brownie, Milli Vanilli, and of course to BP for getting our ocean in their oil.

Just saw this post from Howard Anderson: "I refuse to live in a world where my computer appliances are now smarter and more powerful than I am."

Useful tour through the textutil utility, a command line utility in Mac OS X for converting among txt, doc, docx, rtf, rtfd, HTML, wordml, odt (?), and webarchive formats.

Stock photos! What can’t they do?

Found: one great Italian deli in Burlington, MA.

An intriguing but frustratingly unusable CSS3 example for showing and hiding content using only CSS and HTML, no Javascript. Frustrating because it “doesn’t work in Webkit,” which is mentioned as an aside 3/4 of the way down the article. So only Firefox and Opera, I guess…

The article sums up the total of user research. The comments are a microcosm of user resentment. A good capsule of how even good UI changes (and the movement of the search box in Wikipedia is a good change) engender resentment.

Two pleasant surprises–today’s new Pernice Brothers album and Joyce Linahan’s book about working with him, “Pernice To Me.”

Freaking awesome home experiment to demonstrate: standing waves, principles of electromagnetism, the speed of light, gooey marshmallowy goodness.

So this is the Apple Store App Store app. Store. Appstore. App. HELP!

Gruber sums up a dynamic that’s starting to be reminiscent of “listeners vs. RIAA”: “Safari Reader doesn’t kick in by default. It’s invoked by the user. Apple isn’t telling Jim Lynch his site is ugly and hard to read. His readers are. If your website is user-hostile, don’t be surprised when your readers fight back.”