There Was Life Before Google?

This fascinating project maps the correspondence-based connections between the key thinkers in the enlightenment 'project', whereby 18th century intellectuals helped realign the church and state, gave science tremendous impetus and create the modern world. The graphics on this site effectively illustrate the flow of ideas and influence and gives us some perspective on our own massively linked world.

Klout

If you'd like to see how much headway you are making with your social media and Internet strategy, try Klout. This service pries open your Facebook and Twitter accounts (among many other services), assesses your followers and their level of influence, then ranks your own level of influence. Hopefully you will prove to be a colossus astride the digital world. On the other hand, if you are at the more modest end of the influence spectrum, think of all the growth that lies ahead...

Ludicrous Stock Photos

Anyone in the design or advertising trade has spent (way too much) time looking through stock photo libraries. While some of these images are works of creative brilliance, the majority are mind searingly dull and issue from the department of the extremely obvious and literal. Huffington Post celebrates the unintentionally surreal/idiotic nature of some stock photo memes, such as people holding tiny houses and people in bed listening to bluetooth devices. The sooner someone invents a software genie that can select the perfect picture via algorithm, the better.

More File Sharing Madness

File sharing/transfer services are thick on the vine at present. A recent contender (still in beta) is GE.TT. Just click one button, tell it where your files are and who you want to receive them, and it is off and running. Cleverly, the service allows the receiver to begin downloading the file even before it is done sending it from your machine -- potentially a big time saver when sending large files. Of course, DropBox does essentially the same thing, but GE.TT doesn't require you to set aside a designated folder on the sending and receiving ends.

Table for Eight

An elderly man takes a cruise to re-start his life after the death of his wife. He discovers that he cannot escape from the reality of his situation, but gains some solace in the company of often fractious strangers. We wanted to convey the basic concept of 'sailing into the sunset' with a simple geometric composition, torn edges, informal type and bright contrasting colours.

Infinite Storage

Internet startups come and go with dreamlike rapidity. A recent instance that seems to be gaining a bit of traction is bitcasa.com. It offers the startling promise of infinite storage space, somehow seamlessly melding your hard disk with the cloud. One suspects that this seamlessness might stumble against the roadblock of slow adsl connections, but perhaps it will have wings in lands with better broadband. If you sign up for the beta, you will be advised that tweeting or posting about your discovery will hasten your journey towards actually receiving an invite.

Beautiful Type Samples from Emigre

Digital type design pioneers Emigre have released some of their old printed type sample sheets in PDF form. The sheets are beautiful examples of graphic design in their own right and many of the spreads would make excellent posters. Several of the typefaces designed by the Emigre founders are still used, such as Mrs Eaves, Triplex, Filosofia, Template Gothic and Vista Sans. Some of the experimental typefaces have had their run, but they did help create the wide open field that is modern typography. Emigre was one of the first independent digital foundries and was responsible for the hugely influential Emigre magazine, which ran from 1984 to 2005.

 

Capture Your Screen

The Windows screen capture feature is effective but pretty basic — dumping the display into memory, available for paste into image editing software. Google has released a free extension for its Chrome browser that gives finer grained control over snapshots of browser windows. Once installed, users can select a user-defined area, the entire window or the active area, and define shortcuts that invoke the various options.

Smashwords and Open Library

It's a whole new publishing world out there. Here's an interesting discussion between Open Library and Smashwords founder Mark Coker. A brief summary of the ethos behind Smashwords:

"Smashwords represents 19,000 indie authors and small presses who handle the writing, editing and pricing of their books. We distribute these titles to major retailers such as Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and Diesel. We believe that authors should maintain the creative and financial control of their work and receive the lion's share of income."

Gaining Control over Your Time

If your attention at work tends to wander at times (and whose doesn't?), you may be looking for ways of improving your efficency. A first step might be using something like Rescue Time. A browser based solution with a desktop client, Rescue Time monitors your computer use and supplies you with a whole dashboard of analysis. I found its admonitory eye made me much less likely to check out the latest news or blogs and focus on the task at hand. Time will tell if that effect fades away. Rescue Time also ranks you with other users of the service, so if you are competive, maintaining a high efficiency rating may be an additional motivating factor.  Rescue Time can be integrated with Google and offers a fairly full-featured free account.

Cloud Based Bookkeeping

Once a dominant force in small business accounting, MYOB is facing competitive pressure from two online bookkeeping solutions: Saasu and Xero. The advantages of a browser based window into your finances are many, especially in freeing you from one record-keeping location. MYOB is also offering an online solution, but it is lacking some of the features of their desktop product. Saasu allows users to import MYOB data, whereas the MYOB offering ironically lacks much of an import facility.

Slimming down your URLs

If you tweet or blog, you will usually link to other online resources. Some of those resources possess ridiculously long URLS composed of apparently random alphanumeric strings. Bit.ly (the .ly part is Libya's national web identifier, but one trusts bit.ly's servers are not located in that currently troubled locale) is a URL shortening service. You paste in your unwieldy URL and they give you a much shorter version, ideal for saving space in tweets. If you sign up with them (free), then you can customise the new link a bit to make it more memorable. The end user will click on the shortened link and bit.ly will automatically redirect them to the actual destination. Bit.ly may not last forever, but it should stick around long enough to provide a useful service to content creators on the Interweb.