People don’t like being told what to do. We like to explore, change things around, and make a place our own. Hefty design challenges await the makers of websites where people feel free to engage; both with the system itself and with each other. Embrace the idea that people will warp and stretch your site in ways you can’t predict—they’ll surprise you with their creativity and make something wonderful with what you provide.

At Flickr, we’ve worked very hard to remain neutral while our members jostle and collide and talk and whisper to each other. Sharing photos is practically a side-effect. Our members have thrilled and challenged us—not just with their beautiful photography, but by showing us how to use our infrastructure in ways we could have never imagined.

It’s only in hindsight and with analysis that the strategies I share in this article have emerged.

Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow

On the East Coast, of course. A psychological tour of the United States, in five maps.

Where do all the neurotics live?

Technology can be sublime, but machines aren’t something that happens to us; they’re something we make. That is, they’re less like meteors that come crashing into our planet (actually, “billiard balls” appears to be the preferred metaphor) than like toddlers (O.K., that one’s mine): sure, they crash into you a lot, and change your life, but they didn’t come out of nowhere and, if you set your mind to it, you can teach them manners before they get to be bigger than you. “The story of the power revolution offers more than an interpretation of the origins of industrial America,” Klein writes. “It suggests another insight into the most elusive riddle of all: What is an American?” Klein’s answer to the question Crèvecoeur famously asked in 1782—“What then is this American, this new man?—is disheartening, to say the least. He is a man whose machines run roughshod. I don’t know about you, but I’d take the toddler over the meteor every time. Setting limits. They say it’s all about setting limits.

Our Own Devices

Just months ago, Northern Virginia residents and elected officials were expecting hundreds of millions of dollars in improvements to such roads. Now, because of budget cuts and state lawmakers' failure to reach a deal on regional transportation funding, drivers can expect only more misery.

Little Relief For Choked Secondary Roads in Virginia

The U.S. does not often look north to gauge its own security prospects. But over the past few months, Canada has been quietly embroiled in one of the most revealing political and international-security debates since the end of the cold war. It's a debate critical to the future of NATO. And its outcome may tell us a lot about the fate of the U.S.'s struggle against terrorism.

Keeping Canada in Afghanistan

RapidXml is an attempt to create the fastest XML parser possible, while retaining useability, portability and reasonable W3C compatibility. It is an in-situ parser written in modern C++, with parsing speed approaching that of strlen function executed on the same data.

RapidXML

Next time you are lost in an unfamiliar city, console yourself with the knowledge that the layout of its roads are probably much the same as in any other.

City road networks grow like biological systems

Despite some eerie parallels between the position of the United States today and that of the British Empire a century ago, there are key differences. Britain's decline was driven by bad economics. The United States, in contrast, has the strength and dynamism to continue shaping the world -- but only if it can overcome its political dysfunction and reorient U.S. policy for a world defined by the rise of other powers.

The Future of American Power - Fareed Zakaria

The Bush administration's new strategy in Iraq has helped reduce violence. But the surge is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state and may even have made such an outcome less likely -- by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni tribes and pitting them against the central government. The recent short-term gains have thus come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.

The Price of the Surge - Steven Simon

The sex of new babies is influenced by the mother's diet before she conceives, a new study suggests. According to a survey of 740 British mums to be, a high-calorie diet is more likely to lead to a baby boy in nine months' time.

An appetite for sex : Nature News