onfocus

A rant about the problems with using social connections in advertising.

Adrian Holovaty's latest project helps guitarists learn songs via collaborative annotations. Very nice design.

This puts the concentration of media into perspective. [via mlkshk]

Time often uses a different cover in the US.

"I hope publishers will see that conscious sharing is better than passive sharing, and that content delivery is better than app delivery." Me too. Quantity of traffic beats quality in many people's minds so I'm not optimistic.

Nice demo. I'm not sure I buy it yet. You still have to download the entire font to use a single icon. If you're using a large number of icons it might make sense.

Hello Brightness shortcut icon! This is great.

"Your actions directly threaten the safety of our students." A UC Davis professor is asking the chancellor to resign after the OWS pepper spraying incident.

Aaron Straup Cope of Flickr fame has put together some scripts to mirror your Flickr photos at a private domain. It uses Flickr auth and maintains privacy settings in the process.

Brian Lam from Wirecutter on those soon-to-be ubiquitous holiday gadget guides. Nice axe!

Oh boo! Google is going to change the name of Blogger to "Google Blogs". Sounds pretty bland to me, but I'm biased for obvious reasons.

Derek's original design for Blogger. I remember the code name: Blue Note. It'll be a shame to lose that personality, but corporations gonna corporate.

Nice collection of the way popular iPhone applications have approached splash screens, user profiles, lists, etc.

"That's what the beer commercials are going after--the enthusiastic desperation of the underage drinker."

Interesting changes for ColdFusion within Adobe. CF development has been separated from Platform (ie. Flash) development.

This is a good CBC show about advertising and they recently added an official podcast link.

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.

Bruce Sterling on Flipboard. "I would counter that what this thing really massacres is weblogs. Flipbook makes weblogs look archaic, much more than it makes magazines look archaic."

I always wondered about those people at library book sales with scanners. Now I know. [via TYWKIWDBI]

A browser extension that blocks all of those annoying 'Like on Facebook' buttons.

This work by a Slovenian painter in the early 20th century is eerily similar to our own century's Jim Woodring.

Learn the constellations the 1940's Navy way!

I don't care what science says, Mexican Coke is better! (Glass bottles alone are better.)

Turn YouTube videos into MP3s, with options to add title, track, and artist info before you download. [via waxy]

Nice image-based feed reader for the iPad. [via uncrate]

The ad folks at W+K are thinking hard about games. [via migurski]

ColdFusion code to geocode locations with Google Maps.

And Google gets in on the Twitter Archive goodness. I'm glad Tweets are becoming less ephemeral.

The Library of Congress is going to archive every tweet. It'll be interesting to see how they make the archives available.

"Slate ad critic Seth Stevenson tries out a Google service that allows you to run your own commercial on national TV for as little as $100." (Neat. But Slate 5? Did I miss 2-4? har har.)

Excellent analysis of the difference between Posterous and Tumblr. "Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product." [via Emptyage]