silencematters

There is a post on Publishing 2.0 that is worth reading – What Newspapers Still Don’t Understand About The Web. It talks about how newspaper websites are still talking to a print audience.

“And what’s the root cause problem? The useless article with no real-time data and no links was written for the PRINT newspaper. And the homepage is edited to match what will be important in the PRINT newspaper. And the navigation assumes I think like I do when I’m reading the PRINT newspaper. Want local news? Go to the metro SECTION.”

It is nice to see that the blog ghetto is more favorable and usable than Washington Post:

“Here’s an idea for newspaper website homepages — just a search box and a list of blogs. Seriously. Instead of putting all the web-native content and publishing in the blog ghetto, like NYTimes.com does, why not make that the WHOLE site? (I mean seriously, having a blog section on the website is like having a section in the paper for 14 column inch stories.)”

While he makes a number of good points, I still think there is a great deal of work that needs to be done to encourage, change, shift (enter adjective here) our culture to get their news and updates online. It will gradually happen, give it time… I think most people are still going to turn to TV and radio to get the most current information, and both of those forms still have something that the webs doesnt – a human connection.

John Medina’s Brain Rules -

EXERCISE | Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power.
SURVIVAL | Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too.
WIRING | Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently.
ATTENTION | Rule #4: We don’t pay attention to boring things.
SHORT-TERM MEMORY | Rule #5: Repeat to remember.
LONG-TERM MEMORY | Rule #6: Remember to repeat.
SLEEP | Rule #7: Sleep well, think well.
STRESS | Rule #8: Stressed brains don’t learn the same way.
SENSORY INTEGRATION | Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses.
VISION | Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses.
GENDER | Rule #11: Male and female brains are different.
EXPLORATION | Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers.

(via – Deric Bownds’ MindBlog)

Absolutely remarkable,

He wrote a column that goes well with this video.
Also, more wisdom and daily recipes from Mark.

A long times ago, humans used to store all their knowledge on thin plastic discs.

Photo: NASA

The image of the DVD on the Phoenix Mars Lander is the first image that shows any recognizable human element on Mars, and simultaneously dates ourselves in 2007. The medium is the message in this case.

Am I trying to solve a problem with a formula more complicated than the problem itself?

This originally comes from Thoreau’s Walden (1854), via an opinion piece by Verlyn Klinkenborg published last week titled, The Cost of Smarts..

“ferns and bells” – Photo by silencematters

Juliette and I live right next to the Brookyln Botanic Gardens, and each weekend we try to make it out to see the slowly changing expression of plant life on display.

A few weeks ago, my hard drive on my MacBook crashed, so I have been going through and re-installing all of the firefox plugins that I had, plus a few others I found in the process. It has actually been kind of enjoyable using this as an opportunity to re-think some of the browser plug-ins that I use.

FireBug
Edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. This is essential.

TypeGauge
Type Measuring for Firefox

Foxmarks Bookmarks
Synchronizes your bookmarks between two or more computers running Firefox. Includes a feature to access your bookmarks from any computer.

GrApple
Helping Firefox to look a little better than it does out of the box.

PicLens
This is by far, one of my favorite plug-ins that I use. I originally came across it in this article by John Markoff, and now I can’t live without it. I use this daily to browse images both on Flickr and Google

Page Saver
By far, this is the best way to take a screenshot of a whole web page. Much much faster than Paparazzi, which is also very nicem but uses Safari as the rendering engine.

User Agent Switcher
Perfect for switching your broswer to another user agent. I use it to test out iPhone apps I may be working on.

Web Developer Tool Bar
I used to use this more than I do currently. Firebug now handles most of the features I need on a daily basis. However, I like that I can specify that I can Disable Cache on each load of a page (which I always have set) and that i can turn styles off on any given site. It is still a must have.

GridFox
Adds a customizable grid overlay to any web page. The nice part about this grid solution is that it doesnt rely on code in the web page to function. The only downfall is that it is not easily activated through a key command.

ScribeFire
I am going to give this a try fairly soon. There are far too many links and posts that I could bang out, and most of the time I would like to not have to login to WordPress to do it. I think this might be my answer.

Sxipper
Sxipper accurately fills in forms, manages passwords and your OpenIDs.

HTTPFox
HttpFox monitors and analyzes all incoming and outgoing HTTP traffic between the browser and the web servers.

iMacros for Firefox
There has to be repetitive tasks that I do from time to time where this would come in handy – still havent had a chance to try this out.

Clay Shirky’s article on our society’s surplus of cognitive thought is a really great read. ( via @om) It really helps you take a step back and remind you that we are really at the start of (and part of) a great transformation in our society.

[If] you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

I recommend watching the video over on blip.tv. It’s truely fantastic.

I just found Eric Case’s Blog through twitter, and have been enjoying it tremendously. I immediately found a number of posts that resonated with me, and I added them to my google reader shared items – especially the ones about the proliferation of Open ID, which I’m really in favor of.