onfocus

I was quoted in this article about the history and state of Web comments.

Popular Science is turning off user-submitted comments. "A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics."

Google Reader's massive database is full of Web history that no longer exists anywhere else. The Archive Team is trying to pull as much out as they can, but they need lists of feeds. I just shared my list of subscriptions. If you have an OPML file sitting around gathering dust, consider donating.

Wired is celebrating 20 years and put together this chart of people who worked at Blogger and their connections. I'm happy to say I still work on a blog.

Jason Shellen talks about the origin of Google Reader.

Photography from the National Geographic archives.

Photography from the New York Times archives.

This is a nice take on the idea that Everything is Amazing and Nobody is Happy. "Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make amazing things happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards." [via merlin] See Also: The future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed.

What does it take for a society to be sickened by its own behavior and to change its attitudes? Where is our threshold for self-awareness? [via kottke]

Great article about the difference between Twitter and Facebook from Matt Haughey. Short version: Twitter = present, Facebook = past. See also: kottke, torrez

Errol Morris on Walker Evans, photography, documentation, and history. This is part three of a seven part series from 2009.

This article is a good reminder to mix math games into the daily routine. We do some of this, but we have more fun with language than math.

You might need some fancier desktop wallpaper.

The Kleptones did some exhaustive research into the music that inspired Paul Simon's Graceland and put it all together into a fantastic mix and story.

Rushkoff looks back at Boorstin's seminal media book written in the Mad Men era. He describes our collective nostalgia for those times as: "Those last wonderful moments before we drifted off to sleep."

"HistoryTag records the histories of specially tagged things, so you can see how they were made and how they live in the world." The Internet of Things is off and running. This is a great idea.

Joshua Schacter's latest project: tagging people's Twitter handles with skills they can perform. It's a way to see what people are known for among their peers. More tagging!