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Best news I’ve heard all year.

Paul Krugman:

We seem to be turning into a country where crony capitalism doesn’t just waste taxpayer money but warps criminal justice, in which growing incarceration reflects not the need to protect law-abiding citizens but the profits corporations can reap from a larger prison population.

Scary yet unsurprising story about how organisations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are not only supporting, but writing wholesale legislation to benefit their corporate benefactors.

Of course, if it’s happening in the US, it’s happening here in Britain too. Indeed, I was reminded of this fascinating article by Adam Curtis, which charts the rise of the political think tank:

If you go back and look at how they rose up – at who invented them and why – you discover they are not quite what they seem. That in reality they may have nothing to do with genuinely developing new ideas, but have become a branch of the PR industry whose aim is to do the very opposite – to endlessly prop up and reinforce today’s accepted political wisdom.

Our political leaders are no longer interested in the concerns of the electorate and increasingly led by lobbyists – regardless of what destruction (societal, economic, environmental…) may result from their policy suggestions.

It surely can’t carry on like this, can it?

Ben has posted his photos from our recent US road trip; five states, four days, three nights, two drivers, one misbehaved passenger.

Eliel Saarinen:

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

Nelson Minar:

I refuse to give in to a cynical view of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto; that ethos was very real, a sincere and important guiding principle. And if a big company like Google can’t avoid being evil, then what world-changing enterprise can? But I think Google as an organization has moved on; they’re focussed now on market position, not making the world better. Which makes me sad.

Google is too powerful, too arrogant, too entrenched to be worth our love. Let them defend themselves, I’d rather devote my emotional energy to the upstarts and startups. They deserve our passion.

Sound familiar? As much as I despise Facebook, Google isn’t any better behaved. In fact, its crimes are often far worse.

I still have a Google account, although the only services I rely on are search and Reader. DuckDuckGo is looking like a promising replacement for search, but nearly every decent RSS reader still syncs with Google Reader (even if through unofficial and undocumented APIs). As soon as that changes, my Google account will be deleted.

A truly stunning time lapse of Yosemite National Park, a collaboration between Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty. More information about the project can be found at projectyose.com.

Marissa Mayer addressing Google designers, as quoted in In The Plex by Steven Levy:

“It looks like a human was involved in choosing what went where,” Marissa told them. “It looks too editorialized. Google products are machine-driven. They’re created by machines. And that is what makes us powerful. That’s what makes our products great.”

This explains everything.

(via Buzz Andersen)

Pinboard’s Maciej Ceglowski:

Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.

Because their collection methods are kind of primitive, these sites have to coax you into doing as much of your social interaction as possible while logged in, so they can see it. It’s as if an ad agency built a nationwide chain of pubs and night clubs in the hopes that people would spend all their time there, rigging the place with microphones and cameras to keep abreast of the latest trends.

Required reading.

Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement address is a lesson on how to lead a life of fulfilment:

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

And death allows for no excuses:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

I aim to do so.

I will never grow tired of this commercial. Even less so this version narrated by Steve Jobs.

Thank you, Steve.

David Sim:

When I fell asleep in front of BBC1, dinosaurs were on. When I awoke, Richard Madeley had traced his ancestors. Seems a waste of evolution.

Whatever you may think of British Airways, it’s hard not to be impressed by this latest campaign. Part of a brand repositioning exercise that sees the return of the company’s coat of arms, this advert meticulously recounts the history of BA through its planes, people, ancestor companies and branding. It also features a nostalgic nod to Concorde, which still looks like an aircraft of the future rather than one of the past.

In many ways, I’m reminded of a similarly retro themed advert that BA’s arch rival Virgin Atlantic produced to celebrate their 25th anniversary in 2009.

Garrett Murray perfectly sums up my thoughts on the changes to Gowalla:

This version steps away from the straight-forward check-in functionality and replaces it with a more social version called “stories” The basic idea is that you create a story at a location, tag your friends, upload photos and comment. I think this is a terrific idea, and I think it’s something relatively unique in the check-in app space.

But it’s not what I want.

I’m willing to keep the app on my iPhone for a little while, if only in the hope that the new city guides will prove useful during my forthcoming trip to the US and Canada. Still, it’s hard to see myself using this application much more than I used to, if at all.

I quickly tired of posting my presentations to SlideShare as the service became increasingly laden with features and countless advertising.

Thankfully there’s now an alternative in the form of Speaker Deck, which publicly launched this week. Designed by Ordered List, this new service gives presentations the distraction free environment they deserve, and is an exemplar of detail-driven design. Don’t let the simplicity of the product fool you. Attention has been fostered on even the tiniest details; skim over thumbnail images to see what I mean.

If you have presentations you wish to showcase, I encourage you to try Speaker Deck. You won’t be disappointed.

Adrian Short:

You can turn your back on the social networks that matter in your field and be free and independent running your own site on your own domain. But increasingly that freedom is just the freedom to be ignored, the freedom to starve. We need to use social networks to get heard and this forces us into digital serfdom. We give more power to Big Web companies with every tweet and page we post to their networks while hoping to get a bit of traffic and attention back for ourselves. The open web of free and independent websites has never looked so weak.

A timely post. When read in tandem with Nik Cubrilovic’s post Logging out of Facebook is not enough, the features announced at Facebook’s most recent f8 event aren’t just creepy, but downright sinister.

Cennydd Bowles:

In essence, editing is critique for the written word: review, question, revise.

Another video showcased by Adam Buxton at last month’s Edinburgh BUG. You can find a complete archive of BUG videos at http://www.bugvideos.co.uk/.

George Monbiot writes about another boneheaded reform from a Conservative-led government nobody voted for. He concludes:

Plutocracy passes through a perpetual cycle. It lobbies against the restraints that curb its destructive greed. It succeeds. As a result it collapses. It gets rescued, at enormous cost, by the forces it fought: regulators, planners, tax collectors, an interventionist state. It recovers, dusts itself down, then resumes its attack on the people who rescued it. This assault on planning belongs to the cycle. But the damage the plutocrats mean to inflict will not be reversible.

These are the times in which we now live.

Bobbie Johnson at GigaOm:

“What is Google? What do they sell?” asks Don Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things and a demigod of the design world.

It’s a question that gets asked a lot, especially as the company’s power and products continue to expand. In a talk on Friday at the dConstruct conference in Brighton, England, he pointed out that – despite the complexity of the organisation – the answer usually looks pretty simple.

“They have lots of people, lots of servers, they have Android, they have Google Docs, they just bought Motorola. Most people would say ‘we’re the users, and the product is advertising’,” he said. “But in fact the advertisers are the users and you are the product.”

Then he went further. “They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them.”

Whilst some bemoaned the fact that his opening keynote shared little new, I think it’s important to be reminded how the industry works, and how it’s changing – sometimes for the worse. The world needs more people like Don Norman.

This was the final video shown during Adam Buxton’s BUG show in Edinburgh. I’ve been “fucking the replay button” (you had to be there) ever since.

August has been a crazy month in the technology press, but no story has had the same impact than Steve Job’s resignation as CEO of Apple. Whilst I’ve been enjoying commentary and many stories regarding his 14-year tenure, it’s the man’s own words that have been most insightful. From this collection of Steve Job’s quotes, an answer given during an interview with Wired caught my eye:

I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that.

But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light – that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

Only a few weeks ago I was bemoaning the overuse of the phrase “change the world”. I heard this said far too often when I worked in the Valley, so it was heartening to read Jobs’ thoughts on the matter.

I do so hope Steve will have plenty more opportunities to part with such wisdom as he enjoys his retirement.

Zerply is a professional network that helps you find like minded people by tags, skills, location and more. Essentially it’s a simpler, classier replacement for LinkedIn. It gained a degree of traction this week after being featured by Tina Roth Eisenberg, who perfectly summed up my problems with LinkedIn:

I had fallen out of love with LinkedIn a long time ago, but last week’s sneaky move (read about it here) pushed me over the edge. What a lost opportunity. LinkedIn was built on such a fantastic core idea. And then they tried to be twitter-and-facebook-and-everything-else at once. Bummer.

I’ve deleted my LinkedIn account. You can now find my professional profile on Zerply.

Sniff Petrol:

Murdoch’s money brings F1 to Sky. “Are Red Bull running team orders? Let’s hack into their radio messages to find out…”

Clayton Miller:

Microsoft’s Metro UI owns the square. Apple has a corner on the roundrect, from the Springboard launcher to the iPhone hardware itself. Nokia, despite its late entry with MeeGo’s Harmattan UI, found the squircle unclaimed and ran with it beautifully. Palm has used the circle from the early days of PalmOS, and in WebOS, HP continues the tradition with care (one might even note that both Palm and HP structure their wordmarks around the circle).

I have a nagging feeling this observation will become useful on future projects. (Via John Gruber)