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Briefly Noted in date
Quick links not blogged but blogmarked
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ALA@10
A List Apart is a decade old, and the proprietor looks back on the institution
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Canadian Oxford Dictionary: RIP
The entire staff has been laid-off putting the dictionary's future in grave doubt
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Twittering rumours
Mathew Ingram has a honest, introspective piece on the responsibility of journalists on Twitter
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Poitical sound bites
Jumping to key words in the U.S. debate (like Wall St.) videos exposes how prepped candidates are
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The Canadian political view
"Capitalist free marketers, but believe in collective action, largely through governments, to achieve social, economic, environmental and other aims."
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Homezilla
Awkward name for a good service designed to let home buyers discover the amenities in a neighbourhood
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10 tips to solidify your business
Advice for start-ups is also good for any company/business to consider
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The case for designing differently
Andy Clarke argues that progressive enhancement is what we should be doing with CSS to move designs beyond IE6
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Canadian electoral map
Map of Canadian ridings uses colours to indicate which party is leading where
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electopinion.ca
The Canadian election as reported on Twitter - very engaging
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David Foster Wallace in Harper's
Everything the late author wrote for the magazine
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WSJ.com redesigns
A big redesign from a site that hasn't in a long while
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Announcing the "Web Foundation"
Tim Berners-Lee introduces a foundation designed to support the open Web
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All about HTML's alt
With argument like this, it's no wonder HTML5 will take so long
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David Foster Wallace dead
The author of Infinite Jest and on of the best novelist of the time apparently committed suicide
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ONA win for The Globe and Mail
Ironically, the news is nowhere to be found online yet (even the Twitter account is quiet - I learned via email)
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Sample dating pop-culture
Andy Baio crunches the numbers on the samples in reveals some interesting details.
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The logic of HTML5
Understanding HTML5 issues (e.g., video, alt, 2022) is a lot easier if you know Ian Hickson's online persona
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Regulating the Internet
A CRTC requested report has some ideas for regulating and funding the Canadian Internet
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Resurfacing newspapers
Google plans to scan in old newspapers (including one from Quebec) to make them more publicly available.
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Microsoft's CSS extensions
IE8 does include support for some CSS3 properties, and will continue to support filters and extensions - but only in a W3C compliant way.
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Publish2: The Web’s Newswire
"A Web-based newswire that makes it easy for journalists and newsrooms to gather, publish, and distribute links to the best news on the Web"
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Globe's election site critiqued
Wrong sentiment, right questions. Elections sites, though, are hard to do well especially when factoring in extenuating (unspoken) circumstances.
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Everything you wanted to know about browser user-agent strings*
* But were afraid to ask
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Google Chrome's story
Like Firefox before it, Chrome is a clean attempt to create a browser for today's Web
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Shadows coming to Firefox
CSS-based box and text shadows should appear in Firefox 3.1
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Drag and drop with canvas
Clever demo of dragging and dropping using a textarea
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Joe Clark's book on Canadian spelling
It's called "Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours: How to Feel Good About Canadian English" and I can't wait
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Mobile Safari doubles usage
The launch of the iPhone 3G pushes the mobile Safari usage to 0.3%
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Google Chrome
Google's browser means there's a good chance one more test case will have to be run on future Web sites
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Seattle tech start-ups
A list of more than 60 of Seattle's tiny companies
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Toronto-area tech start-ups
A comprehensive list of almost 90 of the GTA's tiny companies
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Ubiquity in depth
Examining the interface of "Quicksilver for the browser"
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Mad Men Twittering
Fan-created Twitter accounts were shutdown until AMC realized the accounts actually was great advertising
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DIY Bumbershoot schedule
The Stranger has a simple and clever schedule maker for Seattle's annual music & arts fest
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jParallax
Impressive jQuery plugin for creating a dynamic parallax effect
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Fostering creativity
Pixar founder writes an insightful (and long) article on Pixar's secret sauce
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Bullets over Osssington
My old 'hood (and new hipster central) was the location of a four-car gun battle
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Dube leaves CBC for ABC News
CBC may have been a farm team for Jonathan Dube as he returns to ABC as a Vice President of its new site
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Experimental rounded corners
Based on Snook's example, rounded corners with VML, CSS or SVG
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EveryBlock in eight cities
The hyper-local site is now covering Seattle (and Boston and Washington D.C.)
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The Better Way
TTC's new site has competition from a site build by some people who attended TransitCamp
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How to cover breaking news
Good analysis of how Toronto's media online covered an explosive news story
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08/08/08
The crazy 8s
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jMetronome
A script that helps a page maintain its typographic rhythm
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Flick navigation on the iPhone
Some very simple CSS can create the flick navigation in Safari on the iPhone
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Creating great search results
Advice on making a search result do what it needs to do
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Box office for 2008 visualized
Similar chart as seen in NYTimes infographic, but this is interactive and in HTML
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Implementing canvas
There looks to be a simple way to get the CANVAS element to work on Internet Explorer allowing for a lot more interesting design effects
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iPhone events
Not, not the marketing kind, the JavaScript kind
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The new "delicious"
Delicious has dropped its Web 2.0 spelling and has under went a radical makeover
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How to Show Telephone Numbers On Letterheads
Ladislav Sutnar's 1960 booklet demonstrating letterhead design
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Canadianizing film posters
Some very clever cultural plays in the Canadian Film Festival posters
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Buid your own font
FontShop's Web-based tool allows you to build simple, modular fonts quickly online
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The 2008 A List Apart survey
Work the Web in someway? Take A List Apart's Web industry survey and help create a clearer picture of the industry
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Terry Fox
Had he lived, the man who inspired Canada with his Marathon of Hope would have been 50 years old today.
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CBC.ca does Chinese
And Fake Ouimet (a.k.a., Joe Clark) hit his stride
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Recovering the bikes
Remarkable photo essay detailing the recovery of hundreds of presumed stolen bikes
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Tracking the real homicide rates
Are there more murders in Toronto than in past years?
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Movie domain names
Being both an Internet and a movie geek lets you create a entertaining review site
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49:00
Only Amazon would sell Paul Westerberg's latest album for 49 cents
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Pop art then and now
An overview of pop art in its classic and modern forms
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Nazaré Snack Bar
From the Blackout to near blackouts, I'll always love the Communist's Daughter
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The Tea Makers is back
But is now under the management of Fake Ouimet, a.k.a., Joe Clark
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How to write with style
Kurt Vonnegut wrote 7 or 8 tips one should consider
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Igor charged with bike theft
Toronto's stolen bikes always seemed to end up at Igor's place on Queen West
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NPR API
More news outlets lifting the skirts on the core of their business
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Toronto as seen by a San Franciscan
Interesting take on my home city from a resident of a city I newly appreciate
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Multitouch light table in JavaScript
Works both on iPhones and the desktop versions of Safari
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Creative or invasive?
Outdoor advertising in Toronto hits the bulls eye...or something
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Visualizing the Walmart infection
A very viral map of Walmarts explosive growth across the U.S.
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thestar.com: iPhone edition
The Toronto Star launches an iPhone enhanced version as the other Canadian papers seem woefully behind
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Information design patterns
Based on a beautifully crafted master thesis, this is a brilliant repository of patterns
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Google as the pressroom
Some thoughts about whether Google should take over the publishing duties for newspapers online
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Small screens are better
The iPhone shows that, in interface design, less really can be more
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Touch and gestures in JavaScript
The iPhone API for these new events is thoroughly deconstructed.
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Spectator's last post
Toronto Life has shuttered its blogs and the great Doug Bell signs-off with a brilliantly layered entry
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Opera Web Standards Curriculum
Chris Mills has done a heroic job developing a massive collection of Web standards-based learning resources
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Silverback review
This comprehensive review was enough to convince me of this usability program's value
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Identi.ca
Interesting concept for a Twitter replacement (I'm "saila" there) - no API at launch tho
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Canadian colour palette
Colour for each of Canada's cities
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Le chandail
NFB, Roch Carrier, and Maurice Richard
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CSS variables
WebKit nightly builds support a much desired CSS feature
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Tyson Homosexual
When political agendas interfere with the news process, the names of Olympic athletes become schoolyard jokes
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A Netflix for magazines
Interesting concept allows you to rent magazines on a subscription
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Rogers destroying Citytv
Once North America's most innovative TV station, Rogers is systematically eviscerating the channel
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Canadian iPhone pricing
Rogers rate plan means my usage of the iPhone would cost me twice as much in Canada as in the U.S.
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Real 3-D holographic displays
Appropriately demonstrated using a Star Wars spacecraft
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Better CSS font stacks
An excellent collection of font collections to use to ensure everyone has the best chance of seeing the type the way you intended them to
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Happy Birthday UPC
Thirty years ago, the first product ever was checked using the Universal Product Code
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What every Web designer should know
Andy Rutledge goes throw the skills Web designers should have, and most are not what you would expect
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Eric's Trip: the movie
A low-fi documentary about the low-fi pioneers filmed by band member Rick White
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The secret vault of Lego
All the Lego sets ever made have been saved in one magical place
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Seattle's newest 'hood: Radio Point
Appears that the little triangle where I live is being contested by two different neighbourhoods
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about:robots
They have a plan
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Delaying news in the Internet era
NYTimes.com talks a bit about how Tim Russert's death was leaked online
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Preloading CSS images
A jQuery plug-in walks through CSS files to cache images to improve loading time
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Ice on Mars
Real, water ice and MarsPhoenix twittered the news
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Air India 182
June 22 marks on of Canada's darkest moments and people need to know why
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Examining the new Orlando Sentinel
Candid discussions about the dramatic new design of a Florida newspaper
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Visualizing a rendering engine
Three videos show how Firefox renders Web pages
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Number Stations reimagined
Video collage of a MySpace security process feels like the shortwave espionage broadcasts
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Firefox 3 already challenging Safari
Within 24 hours, Firefox 3 around a 4% marketshare (Safari has about 6%)
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David Crow on FreshBooks
Toronto Web tech don profiles the terrific online invoicing service
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NowPublic's logo
The more I look at this logo, the more brilliant I think it is
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TimesPeople FAQ
NYTimes.com social reading experiment is now in public beta
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The paragraph in Web tyopgraphy
Jon Tangerine loving details the ways to treat a paragraph on a Web page
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Good Bloomsday to you
Also known as the secret St. Patrick's Day
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Patterns for reputation systems
Yeahoo has added nine reputation patterns to its social-design related patterns offering
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AP boycott
AP has got the bloggers mad and if the latter are dedicated the former may really get hurt
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On Tim Russert
Not being American, the reason to Russert's death surprised me; this helps explain it
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On Ken Alexander's resgination
Douglas Brown offers an honest take on the Walrus editor
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globeandmail.com free
The product that occupied the least enjoyable chunk of my time at the Globe is now gone (funny how it wasn't mentioned when I met with them tho)
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Analysing the new Canadian copyright bill
Mathew Ingram looks at the proposed legislation, and weighs it against the U.S.'s DMCA
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Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit
Wireframe stencils for a wide number of Web design elements
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Firefox Mobile concept video
Very interesting demo of a mobile Web browsing interface
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Seattle colder than Siberia
Travelling from Toronto's almost 40C weather to Seattle's low teens has knocked my body for a loop
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Media ethics and citizen journalism
Think piece from the New York Times about the need to identify oneself as a reporter
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Capitoll Hill garage sale
On June 14, 2008 there will be about a dozen sales happening throughout the neighbourhood
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CBC loses The Hockey Theme
Hockey Night in Canada will no longer have its iconic theme now that CTV has bought the rights to the song
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Beta TTC site
Looks like a corporate site designed by committee, and lacks any personality
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The Globe and Mail e-Edition Newsreader
My former colleagues put together a very usable interface for browsing an electronic edition of the paper.
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Goodbye Gardiner
A sizable chunk Toronto's downtown highway will finally be torn down (now if only Seattle could do the same with I-5)
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Phiculator
Easily calculate the golden mean
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IETester
A Web designers dream: four versions of Internet Explorer in one interface
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Google Earth in a browser
The new browser plug-in also reveals a JavaScript API to the system
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Why HTML5's video tag is dumb
Mike Chambers demos the efforts get Flash working with 'video' in HTML5
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Why ads fail online
A solid explanation on why traditional advertising models don't work online
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Google aves your scripts
Google volunteers to cache popular JavaScript libraries
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CBC being spammed?
Looks like someone if try to clog the CBC with nuisance information requests
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The New York Times API
First RSS and now this: the newspaper of record is hoping to allow others to mash-up its archive in a very atomic way.
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Translating Pork and Bean
Weezer's new video broken do into its 24 parts
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Jane's brand timeline
A clever portrait of a day rendered by the brands (and identifiably Torontonian)
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NYTimes and "link journalism"
Scott Karp shows how true online journalism can work
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Newsroom Barometer 2008
A survey of a news editors throughout the globe on what they think online news trends will be
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Client-side storage without cookies
Not really sure how this works, but it could come in very handy
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Canada finally gets movie downloads
Bell Canada has stuck a deal that lets Canadians rent movies online for too much money
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Translating Twitter's explanation
News.com has a clever parsing of Twitter's explanation of its outages
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TimesMachine replaces microfiche
If you don't know what microfiche is, then just know this is the far better way to browse old newspapers
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Virtual hosting into Parallels
Simple how-to for viewing locally hosted Web sites in a Mac and Windows environment
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"3.0" jumps the shark
William Morris has launched a new division called Agency 3.0
