“Everyone loves to get free stuff. Free After Rebate will point you to stores that sell products that end up being free after you send in for a rebate. Youíll have to pay for the item up front, then submit the rebate materials. Some time later (usually six to eight weeks) youíll receive a rebate check. We only list products with 100% rebates, but those rebates usually donít reimburse for shipping and sales tax.”

“Folklore.org is a web site devoted to collective historical storytelling. It captures and presents sets of related stories that describe interesting events from multiple perspectives, allowing groups of people to recount their shared history in the form of interlinked anecdotes. Folklore is still incomplete, and undergoing active development… Currently, the Folklore site only supports a single project, about the development of the original Macintosh, but that will be changing soon.”

“WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability… WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog, as b2 development has stopped. We hope by focusing on web standards and user experience we can create a tool different from anything else out there.” FYI: We moved bBlog and xBlog over to Wordpress last month and have been very happy with the system!

“Our agency receives its share of RFPs, and sometimes these requests stipulate that our proposal include layouts. Even if the project looks promising, we just say no. There are good reasons never to design on spec…”

“For nearly 30 years Dieter Rams served as head of design for German appliance company Braun. Until his retirement in 1997, Rams designed all types of products, from radios and record players to coffeemakers and calculators, many of which entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art… Dieter Rams: ‘I have distilled the essentials of my design philosophy into ten points. But these points cannot be set in stone because just as technology and culture are constantly developing, so are ideas about good design.’”

“Below are templates that you can use to make custom cards, envelopes, and boxes. Simply print out the image, use it as a template to cut your fine papers, and fold along dotted lines.”

“We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit, ‘consumer advocate’ for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.”

“The debate about the promised value of the Semantic Web seems to me to be missing a dispassionate examination of the success, or otherwise, of existing ontology based solutions. Clay Shirky is obviously right when he states that a single monolithic ontology will never work. His critics are equally right when they claim the Semantic web will only work if it is a melange of multiple interoperable ontologies.”

“After two years of secrecy, brainstorming and sometimes zany company maneuvering, Apple Computer Inc. will unveil a new personal computer Jan. 24 that is the size of a stack of paper and, for about the same price, contains more power than the basic IBM PC.”

“Along with just about everything else that incorporates typography, I’ve been collecting snapshots of hand-painted and hand-crafted signs for quite some time. However, it was only about two years ago when I purchased a digital camera that I consciously began to document my visual landscape in any organized manner. Living in New York City, it’s easy to come across some fine examples of hand made signage amidst the suffocating cacophony of computer-generated lettering and imagery.”

Language Log is a group weblog that posts thoughts and opinions on things such as “dangling conjuncts,” “snowclones,” and “quantifiers,” while also covering adjectives, pronouns and other basics.

This looks like a useful forum site with over 77,000 members and more than two million posts. Features reviews and discussions on mobile phone manufacturers, models, and carriers. Also has a buy/sell area.

“At the start of the twentieth century, in the depths of an ancient Egyptian turquoise mine on the Sinai peninsular, an archaeologist called Sir Flinders Petrie made an exciting discovery. Scratched onto rocks, pots and portable items, he found scribblings of a very unexpected but strangely familiar nature. He had expected to see the complex pictorial hieroglyphic script the Egyptian establishment had used for over 1000 years, but it seemed that at this very early period, 1700 BC, the mine workers and Semitic slaves had started using a new informal system of graffiti, one which was brilliantly simple, endlessly adaptable and perfectly portable: the Alphabet. This was probably the earliest example of an alphabetic script and it bears an uncanny resemblance to our own. Did the alphabet really spring into life almost fully formed?”

“How weblogs are turning corporate machines into real conversations… Provided that weblogs are not co-opted by rigid corporate policies that aim at stifling the creative spirit that fosters innovation — one of the reasons for having weblog communities at the first place — weblogs can be successfully deployed within the organisation with a pervasive effect across all the stages of the value chain ‘achieving a greater return on connection from employee, customer and partner relationships.’ As an extension, they can possibly involve all interested groups; regardless of their level of attachment to the company.”

From the book: Design Research: Applied Exploration of People, Culture, Context, and Form, edited by Brenda Laurel. “Why New Methods are Needed: *Experiences have always been the point of differentiation and problems–whether you design for them or not; *User-centered Design is more than mere Usability; *Computers and related devices are more sophisticated…”