How To: Choose the right colors for your web site

[We like to use, celebrate and design products that are both useful and beautiful. Here’s the first in an occasional series of quick tips for improving your designs. Add yours in the comments or in a guest post.] Here are two tools I use to help select and code the right colors for my designs. […]

Read More

SocialMedian: New ways to share and discover relevant news

This spring we noted the launch and alpha testing of SocialMedian, a new link aggregator that five months ago looked something like a more social version of delicious or Diigo. It has been undergoing continuous development since then – and the newest release should be especially noteworthy for bloggers, researchers, journalists, marketers and activists. If […]

Read More

Game changer: scramble intersections

A scramble intersection stops all traffic. Pedestrians cross every which way. Tokyo has one. So does Toronto, at the corner of Yonge and Dundas streets. Everything about this makes my head spin and drift inward in wonder: the compression of movement and mass through time lapse, the blink and it’s gone, the birds-eye view, the […]

Read More

Newspeak alert: NYTimes

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Right? Somehow newspeak in The New York Times reeks just a little bit more when it’s from The New York Times. April 2008: Pulitzer prize winners Linda Greenhouse and David Cay Johnston, pioneering multimedia producer Naka Nathaniel, and many others, are among some 100 journalists trimmed […]

Read More

Pepper spray and arrests: Welcome to St. Paul

If you’re bored with the talking heads, check out the action on the streets of St. Paul. Police there conducted “a pre-emptive strike against disruptive protests” ahead of the Republican National Convention, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Liliana Segura writes for AlterNet that the raids targeted video activists. Which leads to at least one […]

Read More

Bloggers and the Net investigate: Who ate the AT&T weenies?

Comment and Confession: I’ve been sleep-walking through the coverage of the Democratic National Convention in Denver this week. I thought I’d enjoy and benefit by watching from afar, like TechPresident’s Micah Sifry. The truth is, I haven’t watched much from anywhere. I should have been paying more attention – and thankfully, someone else has been. […]

Read More

How to blog without losing my mind

I’m trying to speed up my blogging – and here, ta-da, I’m writing my first post with a Firefox extension called ScribeFire Blog Editor. It isn’t new – it’s been downloaded more than 1.7 million times. But it’s new for me. I’ve long heard about Flock, a browser that’s supposed to be great for bloggers. […]

Read More

News futurist prophesied air traffic failure 8 years ago

Eight years ago media futurist Kerry Northrup of Ifra, a newspaper technology organization based in Germany, produced a visionary video anticipating a world of media convergence – imagined then to be a world of big media companies distributing news and information on multiple platforms: web, on-demand print, mobile, broadcast. The video was ingenious on many […]

Read More