By Bruce Mau. I like these ideas a lot: “#4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). #14. Don’t be cool. #26. Don’t enter awards. #40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. …Renowned designer and communications luminary Bruce Mau has changed the face of cultural institutions and earned the respect of architects and designers around the world.” Or you could start here.

I hadn’t realized Communication Arts had so much good archive stuff online. “Paul Rand was only 32 years old when he completed Thoughts on Design and he was still in his thirties when we met. My impressions of that meeting are still vivid — the quick, curious, and intensely analytical look in his eyes framed by dark-rimmed glasses; the close cropped hair above a forehead where a frown always seemed to lurk ready to pounce on the first banality that had the effrontery to rear its ugly head; all of this over a conservative suit marked by a black-knit tie — the trademark of his Madison Avenue days.” By Allen Hurlburt. Be sure to look around the whole “Creative” section. Yum.

“The following timeline provides a brief overview of the evolution of creativity in visual communications and its relationship to society, culture and technology. While never intended as a comprehensive history, we’ve included projects and campaigns that were either noted as influential in our magazine, other published sources or by individual creatives. Our selection, of course, is open to debate as each creative professional will certainly cite different projects as having an influence on their career.”

A reformulation of HTML 4 in XML 1.0. This is my favorite part, from the Differences with HTML 4 section: “4.1 Documents must be well-formed.” Good luck! Anyway, this is how Jeffrey Zeldman summed it up: “One language (like HTML, but better) that lets you create sites that work on cell phones as well as the desktop. Sites that can include text, database functionality (think: Amazon.com) and even lush media like moving images and music. The next few years should be very interesting.”

Good job, Bloggerfolk.

A dang good reading and reference list for any visual communicator. “This bibliography contains a list of sources of additional information on the topics discussed in [the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines] book. The bibliography lists books and journal articles in sections organized by topic.” Scroll down.

“i live in a very large city, full of people and buildings and hot, roasted peanuts. a friend recently posited that, for an urban dweller, approximately 70 per cent of their visual stimuli is some form of advertising. it’s probably true. if you leave your home, and especially if you deign to travel on public transportation, advertising is an overwhelming and inescapable form of communication. no matter how much you keep to yourself, you’ve always got someone talking to you. this diary will be a dialogue with my constant urban companion: advertising.”

“Say goodbye to anonymity on the Web. DoubleClick Inc., the Internet’s largest advertising company, has begun tracking Web users by name and address as they move from one Web site to the next, USATODAY.com has learned. The practice, known as profiling, gives marketers the ability to know the household, and in many cases the precise identity, of the person visiting any one of the 11,500 sites that use DoubleClick’s ad-tracking ‘cookies.’” DoubleClick claims you can opt out of this profiling hoo-hoo: Go here to kill your cookie.

For emergencies, I think I could like this: Edit your website anywhere, anytime. “OmniEdit is a free, browser-based web page editor that liberates you from your web development computer. Now you can edit web pages anytime, anywhere in the world: at home, in the office, at Internet cafes, public kiosks — anywhere that you have Internet access. And you do it right in a browser using OmniEdit! Imagine correcting a typo, updating a headline, price or date and even fixing a broken or changed link, on the fly, right in the browser. And you don’t have to configure a single thing. Moreover, it is completely free! Access your existing ftp account with the same level of security as with a normal ftp client and editor. No account information is stored by OmniEdit.”

We’re talking pretty good coverage here: from prehistory to Rome to the Renaissance to the Jeffersonian, Industrial, Modern and Post-Modern ages.

A web-based place to store memories. Interesting only in a voyeuristic way because, obviously, this isn’t where I’m going to keep the thing I don’t want to forget.

“Introducing Ceiva, a digital picture frame that has the power to load its own pictures directly from the Internet. At first, the new Ceiva digital picture frame looks, feels and acts like a traditional wood picture frame. Plug it in and you’ll discover that Ceiva is anything but traditional. Ceiva can receive pictures directly from the Internet. It’s not a computer. In fact, it’s remarkably simple.”

“Introducing Ceiva, a digital picture frame that has the power to load its own pictures directly from the Internet. At first, the new Ceiva digital picture frame looks, feels and acts like a traditional wood picture frame. Plug it in and you’ll discover that Ceiva is anything but traditional. Ceiva can receive pictures directly from the Internet. It’s not a computer. In fact, it’s remarkably simple.”

“These free services enable you to access your bookmarks with any web browser… this section of Useful Bookmarks is comprehensive rather than selective.”

“The internet industry seems to change daily. New companies appear, existing companies find partners, older companies buy younger firms[and occasionally vice versa], while poorly positioned players disappear in the chaos. [This] is an interactive map of key players in the internet space along with a portion of the alliances they have formed. This visualization demonstrates the forces that agents exhibit upon each other in a complex interconnected system. The interactions amongst the nodes emerge from the pattern of direct, and indirect, ties throughout the network.”