Post-holiday link-dump of things that made me go hmmm...

  • Like stamps for the real world. If they release "sticks to poke people with" I will very likely buy one.
  • The Natural Language Toolkit: "Open source Python modules, linguistic data and documentation for research and development in natural language processing and text analytics"
  • Managing Your Own Psychology: "Ideally, the CEO will be urgent yet not insane"
  • Fast Path to a Great UX - Increased Exposure Hours: "Exposure hours. The number of hours each team member is exposed directly to real users interacting with the team's designs or the team's competitor's designs. There is a direct correlation between this exposure and the improvements we see in the designs that team produces."
  • Patterns in Functional Programming, a blog/book-in-progress about functional concepts. On the tech side of things, this is interesting me at the moment... or more accurately, a few developments internally at FP and the launch of Functional Brighton might kick me into learning Clojure, something I've meant to do for a couple of years now.
  • The cost of being first, another excellent post from The Ad Contrarian (one of my favourite blogs, a beautiful little diamond): "While everyone wants to say they are at the “leading edge” of digital media technology, it seems to me that there is little or no advantage to it. In fact, with so many new advertising and marketing technologies evolving, there may be a greater potential risk than reward in being at the leading edge."
  • Working with the Chaos Monkey, a tale of systems components deliberately set up to fail in order to test overall system resilience.
  • Stewart Lee on content: "A few years ago, I received an unsolicited e-mail asking me if I was interested in “submitting content”. I was confused. The sender explained that I was a “content provider”. Did I want to provide content?". Also "I am a curator. What a dead word. It sounds like someone stirring turds in a toilet bowl with a stick".
  • Pepsi Introduces "Social" Vending Machines: "I had never thought of a vending machine as anything other than a pay-refrigerator. Apparently to these people it is some form of mystical deity"