“Smartpox is a mobile ‘viral messaging’ application that allows you to create and share links, phone numbers, email, and text using 2D barcodes and your Java-enabled camera phone. You’ll be able to create encoded messages to share with friends, acquaintances, or complete strangers. You can also create projects to link your offline world with your online world, and meet and collaborate with other Smartpox users.” (Thanks Heather!)

“Most Americans believe that if you play fair and work hard, you’ll get ahead. But this notion is threatened by legislation passed Thursday night by the U.S. House of Representatives that would allow Internet service providers to play favorites among different Web sites.” (Mike McCurry presents an opposing viewpoint in an accompanying commentary.)

“Watergate also changed America, in ways that journalism hasn’t evolved to handle. In the three-and-a-half decades since Woodstein’s stories first began appearing in The Washington Post, while journalists have been busy honing their ability to uncover hidden information, the world has become a place where the scarcity of info isn’t the biggest problem. Its proliferation is. And by and large, journalism organizations don’t have the skills or tools to sort through all the data.” (Thanks kottke.org!)

“A little HTML, a little CSS, and a little Javascript should do the trick. In my HTML, I used two divs, and a link to clear the results. One div is the search control div, and the other is a wrapper for the search control div. I put it near the bottom of my html files so it appears on top of the content on each page.”

“Begin typing and it will render as you type. Click the css tab to alter the style sheet.”

“Esteemed graphic designer Michael Bierut will speak at our User Experience Week 2006. Michael is a partner at the design firm Pentagram, and a former president of the AIGA. Though we at Adaptive Path love him for his impassioned contributions to the Design Observer blog. To help us set the stage for his talk, he agreed to join me in a conversation. I will post the discussion in parts. I encourage readers to pose questions for Michael in the comments section.”

“Lightroom is Adobe’s breakthrough photo management application. Currently in public beta, Lightroom is designed specifically for serious photographers who want to quickly organize, process, and output their images in a powerful, friendly environment… Here at Inside Lightroom you’ll learn how to quickly master this application with the help of downloadable tutorials, podcasts, and weblog posts. Soon you’ll find that you’re focusing more on taking pictures rather than endlessly wrangling with them on your computer.”

“Affordance is one of the more important elements of design; one closely tied to usability. In fact, without proper affordances the rest of the design doesn’t matter — it will simply fail, partially or entirely. An affordance is a property of an object or environment that indicates how it can or should be used.”

“Designers don’t have many advocates as enthusiastic and highly-placed as Bruce Nussbaum. An assistant managing editor at Business Week, he’s spearheaded the magazine’s coverage of design and innovation for years, and has become an important online voice for how business can use design as a strategic tool. That influence will only grow this week with the debut of INside Innovation, his new magazine that promises ‘a deep, deep dive into the innovation/design/creativity space.’ I’m as intrigued as the next guy about what’s to be found in the dark recesses of the ‘innovation/design/creativity space.’ But I suspect there’s one fact about the genesis of this new magazine that will disturb many of my fellow innovation enthusiasts: the actual design of INside Innovation was created largely through an unpaid competition.”

“Contract, legal, management, and financial resources for freelancers and entrepreneurs looking to more successfully manage their business.”

“Shopify is an application that we host which allows you to setup an online store to sell your goods. You can accept credit card payments, track and respond to orders — all the perks of a physical store without the hassle.”

Matt Haughey: “I’ve been meaning to write about this for weeks now, but this July I’ll be speaking at the Webvisions conference in Portland on how to make a living blogging. I haven’t talked about it very much here, but ever since I started dabbling in making a little revenue from my blogs, things have went well and revenue grew to the point that last fall I got to quit my job to tend to my web things full time. It’s been both stressful to make the leap and tremendously rewarding.”

“Convert photos of whiteboards and documents into searchable PDF files.”

“since a couple of weeks, the infosthetics website contains a sparkline diagram of its relative daily Google Adsense earnings, updated hourly. in contrast to the quite static ‘unique visitors’ graph, this sparkline is more volatile & shows more complex patterns that are interesting to grasp. it is loosely based on a script that creates an Adsense RSS feed. instead of a RSS file, it now parses the data into a sparkline.”

“Something sunk in a couple of weekends as I attended DCamp. I am without a professional tribe. This realization has grown as I attend various industry events. I’m just not really grooving with the crowds I’m part of.”