links for 2007-04-30

• GoLoco
  GoLoco is a service that helps people quickly arrange ride sharing between friends, neighbors, and colleagues. We also handle online payments from passengers to drivers for their share of the trip costs.
  (tags: cars community cool geo network reputation sharing ridesharing environment social car transportation)
• WNYC – New Sounds: West Africa Unwired (April 26, 2007)
  (tags: music africa newyork)

links for 2007-04-25

• George McGovern: Cheney is wrong about me, wrong about war – Los Angeles Times
  McGovern takes Cheney to the woodshed
  (tags: bush impeachment iraq news world politics 1972 nixon mcgovern rove)
• Dr. Bloglove, or how I learned to stop using RSS and love the web
  i also abandoned my RSS reader several years ago and havent looked back. I rely on social media filtering.
  (tags: rss contrarian syndication feeds blogs)

Avoid Tagged.com like the plague

On the SIGIA-L discussion list people are talking about a spammy social network site called Tagged.com. I only know about it because I received an invitation from an unfamiliar sender to a never-used spam-honeypot email address of mine. I looked at the site, it seemed shady, so I ignored it. That was months ago.
Now I’m learning that the site encourages new members to submit their email usernames and passwords. It then scours the user’s address book, sending spam invitations to all of the email addresses it finds, sent as if from the new member, and follows up with reminders. (Much like WAYN and the original version of Plaxo.)
It also make the email addresses available to “marketing partners” on an opt-out basis.
It’s nearly impossible to find out who’s behind the site. (Its registration is associated with p.o. box in San Francisco.)
It doesn’t pass the smell test.
Shun. Avoid. Eschew.

links for 2007-04-23

• Sex and the internet | Devices and desires | Economist.com
  social software challenging pr0n for preeminence online?
  (tags: internet networks sex social socialnetworking statistics porn trends web)
• Yes, you should be using personas (disambiguity)
  “personas should be edge cases”
  (tags: development ux research design personas requirements)
• Social Software Building Blocks / nForm / Customer Insight, Strategy, Design and Development
  There are lots of definitions of social software out there, ranging from the clinical (“software that enables people to connect through computer-mediated communication”) to the pragmatic (“stuff that gets spammed”)….
  (tags: socialsoftware social design community software idenity presence relationships conversation groups reputation sharing)
• Getting back to POSH (Plain ol’ Semantic HTML) at FactoryCity
  POSH (”Plain Old Semantic HTML”) is a very old idea, and constitutes the superset of semantic patterns within which microformats exist:
  (tags: html microformats semantic semanticweb web webdesign xhtml posh patterns)
• Wireframing With Patterns :: UXmatters
  Wireframes can comprise many different patterns, each of which is a discrete element that provides specific functionality and may include instructive copy, images, text fields, buttons, links, etcetera. Together, the patterns create a complete Web page.
  (tags: wireframes ia patterns designpatterns hci information informationarchitecture interaction design webdesign wireframe layout)
• Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : Where are the Women? Where are the Links?
  Information architecture. Usability. Accessibility. Web standards. If you don’t know about these things, stop designing websites until you have learned. Competence in graphic design is merely a baseline; it does not qualify you to create user experienc.
  (tags: design quotes webdesign standards accessibility usability informationarchitecture infoarch IA)
• Baseline Rhythm Calculator
  See also Webtypography and SXSW lecture by Richard Rutter.
  (tags: css design grid html inspiration layout typography tools webdesign fonts)
• Study: Teens protecting their profiles – CNN.com
  Teens generally don’t think twice about including their first names and photos on their personal online profiles, but most refrain from using full names or making their profiles fully public, a new survey finds.
  (tags: identity kids management privacy security social socialnetworking teens networking myspace statistics presence)
• The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web – a practical guide to web typography
  A practical guide to web typography
  (tags: typography webdesign design css web fonts reference tutorial)
• Web Typography Sucks | Slides and notes from SxSW 2007
  one of the best presentations I missed
  (tags: 2007 sxsw css typography design webdesign web fonts reference)

Amazon adds social networking

Following on its adoption of tagging last year, Amazon has now added a friends feature. At least I assume this is something new. I hadn’t heard of it before. The first clue I had that such as social networking functionality had been introduced was receiving an invitation in my email from a writer friend of mine:

When social networking sites started cropping up everywhere in 2004 a lot of people wondered what they were for. Some had clear purposes. LinkedIn is for business/professional networking. Others are for dating. But many of them seemed more like a proof of concept waiting for a business model. The next logical step to look out for is to see businesses and sites with existing purposes and flows of people and data embracing social networking as a service to their communities (and, incidentally, as a way of redoubling those flows.
Amazon appears to making tentative steps to test out these possibilities.

links for 2007-04-21

• ‘Pipe organ’ plays above the Sun
  much like plucking a guitar string
  (tags: astronomy music science space acoustics guitar)

I'm stuck

My first article at a new music blogzine called Stuck Between Stations went live today. It’s called Goodbye, Ruby Grapefruit. Joe Bob says check it out.

links for 2007-04-17

• YUI: CSS Grid Builder
  amazingly useful grid layout tool for CSS
  (tags: css design development free grid yui tools layout yahoo webdesign)
• Get a First Life: A One Page Satire of Second Life
  speaks for itself
  (tags: culture fun funny humor parody satire secondlife)
• Dear Internet (Ftrain.com)
  we get Paul Ford back, now that his herculean Harpers.org relaunch is done
  (tags: harpers ftrain paulford fanboy)

links for 2007-04-14

• Flickr Community Guidelines
  social web pattern exemplar
  (tags: flickr community guidelines rules blogging copyright images moderation society online patterns designpatterns design-patterns social web socialweb livingweb pattern example exemplar)

links for 2007-04-13

• About the Portland Form
  A method for writing Alexander-like patterns
  (tags: patterns design-patterns designpatterns pattern–languages pattern-writing)
• Not On This Wiki
  things the first wiki deliberately doesn’t support
  (tags: wiki html css moderation version+control)