Web 2.0

"Radical cartographer" Bill Rankin has been creating informative mapping projects long before Google Maps was born. And his work makes clear that a map can be abundantly educational and strikingly presented without being a mashup or even interactive.

In this example, titled "City Income Donuts," he illustrates the distribution of income levels in the 25 largest U.S. metropolitan regions. The goal, as Rankin states, is to "test the 'donut' hypothesis--the idea that a city will create concentric rings of wealth and poverty, with the rich both in the suburbs and in the 'revitalized' downtown, … Read more

Wikis may face an uncertain future where profits are concerned, but by no means does that cast doubt on their usefulness. Case in point: Jeff Sandquist's AirPower Wiki.

Until battery issues are resolved--and until airline schedules become more reliable, if that's possible--practically everyone will likely find a need for such a wiki at some point to plug in the laptops and various devices that run our lives. So it may behoove all of us to contribute to the collaborative resource, which has just gotten off the ground. (Apologies for the pun.)

The AirPower Wiki is also a … Read more

Sex and ego sells, students in a project at Stanford University have confirmed, but so does religion.

Students at the Stanford school of design were assigned to come up with ways to promote Mozilla, the open source competitor to Internet Explorer. The first group devised a variant of the Mozilla browser called Faith Browser, said Diego Rodriguez, a professor at the school and a director at design firm IDEO.

With the faith browser, the home icon was replaced with a church and a halo icon was slotted in where the refresh icon usually goes. The idea was that Christian ministers … Read more

Just keeping up with the proliferation of Web 2.0 logos can seem like a full-time job at times, but some people apparently just can't get enough. Take, for example, the Yay Hooray community site, which has assembled a collection of famous logos redesigned in Web 2.0 style.

When it comes to design, as we all know, everyone's an expert. But this post on the SEOmoz Blog takes a different approach to the subject, which may convey its design principles more effectively than the countless other essays and lists of tips we've come across.

A designer who goes by "Oatmeal" posted the irresistible notion that the quality of Web design is inversely proportionate to the number of people involved--in other words, things literally get uglier with more opinions. How ugly? Oatmeal's charts include such designations as "horrible abomination" and "… Read more

YouTube. Google Video. Not to mention all those sites that specialize in fuzzy clips of swimming pool mishaps and skateboarders falling off roofs. There are a lot of sources for online video out there, and no really effective way to aggregate all their content has emerged.

But now, a small start-up is trying to take over that niche. Lifehacker, the Gawker Media-owned tips-and-tricks blog, recently steered its readers to Dabble, a beta search engine that claims to be able to paw through data from nearly 250 video hosting sites, as well as a whole slew of independent sites, in order … Read more

Google Blogoscoped has posted a new interactive click survey that, depending on your view, could be either an interesting study in human behavior or another irritating example of useless research.

Unlike its earlier survey, at least this one provides an explanation (albeit buried in the comments section of the blog): "The general question is how do certain shapes influence click behavior."

It's not surprising that libraries have been a driving force on the Internet since its inception, especially in the pre-Web days when the medium was all about text. But who would have thought that a photo site would become such a popular way for them to network? Library Stuff has kept track of an ever-growing list of libraries that use Flickr, from Copenhagen to Santa Monica.

Kathy Sierra has been writing about featuritis long before Web 2.0, so we understand the pain she must feel in observing the renewed life behind this ugly trend.

In a typically entertaining post titled "Ignore the competition," she hits the nail on the virtual head once again: "I'm so tired of seeing so many products with the same features that nobody wants. It's bad enough to let feature requests from users get out of control, but when we start adding features just because our competitors have them, we're all screwed."

Sierra goes … Read more