onfocus

This is even better than the Chrome extension: "If you don't like a site that appears in your search results, you can block all the pages within that site. Then you won't see any of those pages when you're signed in and searching on Google."

"Wow, the new algorithm yielded far superior results." Great to see Google responding to complaints about content farms with substantive changes. Sounds like their latest tweaks have demoted sites that are simply copies of original sources.

Hooray, Alan Taylor's new photography / journalism weblog is live!

Nostalgia-drenched photorealist still life paintings.

Nice browser extension that embeds site previews on Twitter. (It works better than that sounds.)

"...none other than Corvallis stands out as the top city in the country for innovation — after you account for its size. New York is merely average." Some theoretical physicists are looking at new ways to measure the creative output of cities.

Awesome vintage terminal emulator with a hilarious incentive to purchase. [via waxy]

And apparently the Web is for complaining. [via seanyboy]

Some auto-generated ebooks based on top Stack Overflow questions in various categories.

"Are we are evolving our contract with society through our increasing interactions with digital platforms, and in particular, through what we've come to call the web?"

Fantastic engravings from an 18th century book on religious practice across the world.

Nice description of the terrifying uniform plague doctors wore in the Middle Ages.

Matt Cutts: "...we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content." Nice to see Google responding to the recent flood of criticism.

A jQuery port of Prototype's PerodicalUpdater method that includes a polling interval decay if updates aren't happening.

"...if after a few Ajax polls there’s no data, there probably won’t be for a while. Maybe the site is overloaded or the queue is backed up. In those circumstances the continued polling adds additional unwanted strain to the site." Another polling approach: increase the interval every time.

"And the greater risk is not of Flickr’s deletion of customers, but of the market’s deletion of Flickr. Because, after all, Flickr is a business and no business lasts forever. Least of all in the tech world." Valid concerns about Flickr, advertising, and how we fund the Web.

"Dennis Delimarsky compared several weather APIs and decided that Google’s is best, despite having no documentation or support from the company." Looks nice!

A bit outdated, but full of good advice for tuning SQL Server applications.

"Eligible Kindle books can be loaned once for a period of 14 days. The borrower does not need to own a Kindle -- Kindle books can also be read using our free Kindle reading applications for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices." It's a start!

"...the Pro users of yesteryear’s products, the people with the biggest investment in old technologies, are not the people who should be calling the shots in the design of their successors." Let Beginner's Mind have a shot! [via torrez]

More Google Books Ngrams fun.

"The ability to quantify things that had once been subjective 'hunches' on the part of scholars...is nothing short of revolutionary."

"...a new project available in Google Labs today - Books Ngram Viewer - highlights some of the other benefits of digitizing texts beyond better reading and storage."

Noteworthy photos from Google Street View. [via rafe]

Pictures from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.

yep, has comedy potential.

"Without a Steve Jobs, Facebook is going to become the new Google. A technical powerhouse that can't build usable software, because the super-smart engineers have lost touch with real user problems."

Bloglines is shutting down and people are leaving Google Reader in droves. [via pkedrosky on Twitter via my social netw...OH, I see what's happening.]

Turn any Flickr RSS feed into The Big Picture by resizing the photos from Small to Large. I have my issues with Yahoo Pipes and their agressive scraping, but I have to admit this does make viewing Flickr photos with Google Reader fun.