Awesomeness from Merlin Mann: “’Making Time to Make’ is a 3-part series about attention management for people who do creative work. It’s designed to help you firewall the time and attention you need to get out of the lite communication business and into your studio.”

“Ah, URL, we hardly knew ye. As has been widely reported and almost uniformly lamented, the ICANN has decided to “relax” naming rules for website addresses, ditching the nearly universal .com, .org and .net for things like .dot, .awesomenewending, and .fart.”

“The adage that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ is truer than ever on the Internet”

One of Michael Wesch’s new videos: “This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.”

“Regrettably I don’t have as much time as I’d like to author this article in polished format, but I wanted to put my thoughts out there while they’re fresh. You’d think I’d have time to slow down now that the book is done, but with running a job site, preparing material for several presentations before the year is over (including a ginormous workshop), maintaining this site, oh and a family and full-time job, “busy” is a severe understatement… I could probably summarize my thoughts in one sentence: The process of self-publishing isn’t as glamorous as some (myself) thought it would be.

One evening shortly after the book was published, I recounted with Suzanne everything I had done over the last 10 months to go from an idea for a book to a finished, published book. Having already co-authored one book through a publisher, I compared the experience of self-publishing, and here’s roughly what I described…”

“This application example uses live questions from Yahoo! Answers to generate an overall, up-to-the-minute impression of people’s raw feelings and thoughts on the network. Typically such language visualization applications screen out common words, such as our Answers Cloud. When we look at such pronoun words and see how often they are used on Yahoo! Answers, an overall pattern of common meaning and usage emerges.”

“I’ve been spending much time with ad agencies and focus groups lately and can only conclude that–with some exceptions–they are mostly clueless. Three years ago they had a traditional knowledge about consumers but didn’t know much about social networking and web 2.0 technology. Today, most of them don’t know about consumers and don’t know much about social networking and web 2.0 technology either. Mainstream ad agencies have one refrain–one message to their corporate clients–do social networking, do social networking, do social networking.”

“10 years from now what will we look back on as important to the web? That’s what we asked 16 top designers, developers and entrepreneurs… We asked them all this question:”

What’s one thing about today’s web (company, technology, movement, etc.) that you think we’ll look back on in 10 years and say ‘that was important’ or ‘that was really a turning point in the history of the web’?

“Under the guidance of experienced practitioners from Adaptive Path and other top companies, this four-day conference introduces user experience practitioners to new rich internet application design approaches, practical prototyping techniques, effective cross-organization communications strategies and more.”

“Last Sunday I casually wrote a post about the most common pitfalls in photography. I had written the post a long time ago, but I never put it on this site. The story ended up on the front page of Digg, stayed there for nearly 12 hours and was picked up by a bunch of secondary sources, resulting in 100,000 Visitors within a day (most of them within the first 12 hours). Trying to keep my server up and alive, I learned a lot about what it takes to keep the server alive, hence I decided to slide a non photography related post in, hopefully giving everyone who finds themselves in a similar situation some points to consider.”

“The vision of the Semantic Web is to extend principles of the Web from documents to data. This extension will allow to fulfill more of the Web’s potential, in that it will allow data to be shared effectively by wider communities, and to be processed automatically by tools as well as manually.”

“Google announced the launch of Version 2 of Google Analytics today. Over the next few weeks Google will upgrade current GA users to the new version. Many of the most frequent GA users (big or small) already have access to V2 as of this morning (please log into your account and check). Version 2 is so radically different and provides such a compelling value proposition to users of web analytics that I am excited to write a blog post about a product (the first time I have done this in 11 months of existence of this blog).”

“One of the new terms on the horizon is Microformats (sometimes abbreviated µF or uF) - formats, which make it possible to create meta-content which can be not only read, but also understood by machines (which was the basic idea of Semantic Web, which is not Web 2.0). This post is supposed to give you an idea, what Microformats actually mean, which advantages they have and how you can use them to enrich your content and make it more visible and understandable for search engines.”

A weblog by Matthew Hurst, a scientist at Microsoft’s Live Labs and co-creator of BlogPulse, that cover text mining, visualization and social media.

“What did ‘millennial anxiety’ look like in 1998 and 1999? The End as I Know It is a fictional portrait of the paranoia of that period. This section of kshay.com offers a real-world glimpse into what people concerned about the Y2K bug were actually saying on the Internet. On This Day Pre-Y2K is updated daily with one or more verbatim quotations drawn from a variety of online sources, from today’s date, eight years ago.” (Thanks kottke.org!)