“The Entire Communications Industry, in Less than 200 Pages… The 2007 Digital Economy Fact Book is a tightwad researcher’s dream: In-depth, statistic-heavy, well-cited, and freely-available online. One could hardly ask for more.

This report covers so much ground that any sentences I try to write about it are positively littered with commas and semicolons, and quickly become confusingly long. So instead, I’ll just list out some of the topics covered to give a feel for the extent of the info available here. Bet you can’t get to page 188 without learning something new…”

A 1957 animated short by Charles And Ray Eames: “Applies graphic sensitivity to medium in cartoon form, and traces the history of storing and analyzing information from the days of the cavemen to today’s age of electronic brains.”

“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.”

“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.”

“An increasing number of artists are working with digital technologies and that’s posing some new and especially difficult preservation problems for museums. One difficulty is what to do when a work of art needs to keep a hard drive running, or maintain an Internet connection.”

“Rosenfeld Media is proud to announce that Todd Zaki Warfel has begun work on a book on developing prototypes. ‘A Practitioner’s Guide to Prototyping’ will help you quickly flesh out your design ideas, test your assumptions, and gather real-time feedback from users. The book will discuss how prototypes are more than just a design tool, demonstrating how they can help you market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team.” (Thanks Airbag!)

“The corruption process start by reading the binary of an image file [JPG or GIF], then some bytes are swaps [the number of replacement is a random value from 1 to 20]. The file is then “saved as” a new document. Depending on the number replacement and of the original compression, the image will have a completely different and unpredictable aesthetics.” NOTE: The system displays the last three uploaded images so here’s hoping none of them are NSFW… (Thanks 30gms!)

“The purpose of this project is to document experiences — both good and bad — presented by the millions of EULAs (End User Licensing Agreements) as they are both designed and encountered, knowingly or otherwise. This project will only last 8 weeks or so as an academic endeavor, however, this site is designed with the hopes of fostering discussion, suggestion, exposition and implementation of EULAs (electronic and otherwise) in an effort to help define, describe and mediate the nature of agreements in the digital age.”

“We kicked off an effort at the start of this year to look more closely at network research happening at university and other labs, figuring that while the technologies being worked on won’t necessarily find their way into your network immediately, they might give you something to consider in making longer-term plans. We’ve covered these stories in the physical and virtual pages of Network World, including on our Alpha Doggs network research blog. Here our pick of the 10 most interesting projects, in no particular order, that we’ve come across as mid-year approaches…”

“Y! Answers has its problems (about half the questions can be answered better by Google searches, and about half of the questions are retarded), but sometimes, there’s an absolutely brilliant question or answer. This is one of the brilliant questions, sheerly in terms of how compelling it is. ‘Which products, used by few today, will be essential in five years? Think about how much technological innovation has changed our lives in the past 5 years‚Ķand what products we use every day now. What’s the next big thing that will change the way we live?’”

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

“At first glance, the terms ‘nostalgia’ and ‘technology’ make an unlikely, even incompatible pair. Technology invites change. Nostalgia resists. Technology looks to the future. Nostalgia clings to the past. But for centuries, these adversarial ideas have been harmoniously fused together to facilitate our acceptance of change and innovation by appealing to our longing for the past. Nostalgia and Technology: Embracing the New through Art and Design explores the role of art as a mediator in society’s acceptance and use of new technologies in the home.”

“Getting organized and getting things done couldn’t be easier: Gather your ideas, to-dos, notes, photos and files online. Set email and mobile reminders so you don’t forget the little things. Easily collaborate with others. Backpack is the personal information manager you’ve been craving. Perfect for individuals and small businesses.”

“Whether they’re strapped to our belts, sitting on our desks, or jammed in an overstuffed closet, we absolutely love our gadgets. So it wasn’t exactly easy coming up with the definitive list of the 100 best gadgets ever unleashed. In the weeks we spent debating the entries, tempers were flared, fingers were pointed, chairs were smashed over heads, and feelings were hurt. But we emerged, like Moses from the mountain, with the world’s most authoritative ranking of the best gadgets of all time.”

“Planet HCI is a web aggregator of feeds from HCI-related blogs, i.e., of those who care about how computers can serve users better.”