Is this how The CBC responds to being “scooped” by bloggers and twitter? With a one line “story” closed to comments? If so, they are missing the point.
Category: Links
Monday Morning Links
- Internet Movie Car Database – A forum that seeks to identify and catalogue every vehicle used in every movie. It’s quite incredible. They’ve even identified dprototypes used in movies set in the future (Demolition Man, Back To The Future II) and animated cars (Cars). Each make and model is cross-referenced, it’s really a very well designed database.
- Reasons Craig Ferguson is the most under-rated late night host.
- Brand New: Opinions On Corporate and Brand Identity Work – Great blog about logos and branding. If you don’t read it yet, you should. Also check out the B-sides.
Lunch-hour Link Log
- Recipe: Broccoli Curry Udon – Hungry?
- Microsoft Surface 2.0 CES Demo – Coming to an RBC near you soon.
- Angry Birds “board” game – I don’t get all the Angry Birds hype and this is just weird.
- Facebook Blocker – Hate Facebook? Block it, everywhere!
The Web: Why Wasn’t I Consulted?
Great post by Paul Ford about the purpose of the web.
“Why wasn’t I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.
~ Link
TL;DR – The web has been pretty good a emulating TV, magazines and newspaper for over a decade. But it’s real purpose is providing a voice to individuals; if you’re a business, use the web as a customer service medium – whatever that means to you.
Turns out being a dad and employed full time leaves little room for things like long blog posts. I came across a number of particularly fascinating things this week in my travels on the information super highway.
- Monday: Protocol relative URLs
Turns out, you can leave out the protocol (http, https, ftp, etc) when including a URL in html and browser will figure out what to do with it. This is particularly useful when including unsecured content on a secure page. I’m sure knowing this years ago would have saved me one or two headaches. - Tuesday: What Jason Calacanis Learned From Zuckerberg’s Mistakes
In his weekly LAUNCH newsletter Calacanis talks about his take on rollout hiccups and privacy mistakes Facebook has make over the years. In his educated opinion “Facebook’s success — and mistakes — are based on its developer-driven culture, not because Zuckerberg is some evil mastermind.” Essentially, Facebook developers have historically been allowed to roll out new features with little to no oversight, allowing the site to iterate quickly, keep ahead of the competition and occasionally annoy foreign governments. He makes a convincing argument. - Wednesday: How a quartz watch works
I already had a rough understanding of the piezoelectric effect as used inside digital watches, the video does an excellent job of explaining the concept. As usual reddit commentary filled in the gaps, explaining in detail exactly how the electronics translate the quartz vibration into time. - Thursday: Google Bookmarks exists
Someone leaked that Yahoo! would be shutting down delicious and the internet lost it’s ever-loving mind! Turns out there’s some hope for delicious. Anyways, I haven’t used delicious much since the days it was still called del.ico.us. As far as I can tell, Google Bookmarks has done a pretty good job of pulling out delicious’ most useful features, plus you get the added bonus of having your bookmarks appear at the top of Google results when your search is relevant – if you’ve ever starred something on a search results page you’ll already have some links in Google Bookmarks. I had actually been looking around for a good bookmark service, this discovery couldn’t have come at a better time. - Friday: Word Lense
This iPhone(3GS+) app instantly text on-screen. As in, you point your iPhone at a Spanish sign and the words are replaced onscreen with the english translation. This is easily the most impressive augmented reality technology I’ve seen to date! We are truly living in the future.
iTunes Link - Saturday: Boardgame Remix Kit
I am a huge fan of the boardgame revival hitting nerdom over the past 10 years, as such, I’ve become quite bored of the classics like Monopoly, Clue(do), Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble. When I came across Boingboing’s post about the Boardgame Remix Kit I was absolutely blown away the creativity and simplicity. The kit is a set of tweaks, mashups and completely new games built on 4 classic board games. It’s available as a PDF for £2.99 on the official site or as an iPhone app for £2.99 ($4.99 in the Canadian store). Both are beautiful.
There you have it, my week in links. This post contains something like 13 links in addition to the main links, I really suggest you click them all.