May be of interest. A few excerpts:

Navigation must always be consistent.
There is a magic number seven (plus or minus two).
Users must get to all parts of the site all the time.
Users must know where they are at all times.
The user experience must be seamless.
Short is better, and long is sometimes better too.
Razorfish interviewing 8 people a day, hiring 3 people a week

Seven Lies of Information Architecture

Year-end 2006 estimates for monthly Internet traffic (GB per capita)
Australia 0.7
Western Europe 1.5
Japan 2.0
U.S. 2.0
Hong Kong 13.5
South Korea 12.0

Monthly GB per capita, and other data

The following list was prepared by Alan Kay for his students and is presented here for those who want to learn more about the ideas and philosophies that influenced the creation of Squeak.

This ought to keep you busy in 2008.

Alan Kay's Reading List | Squeakland

DataMapper is a Object Relational Mapper written in Ruby. The goal is to create an ORM which is fast, thread-safe and feature rich.

Datamapper

Flower is a new kind of user programmable web service, especially well suited for applications which process, store, and query XML data sets. Clients of a flower web service interactively modify and extend the code the server runs. This is is the ordinary way to build new flower applications. Flower is a true web operating system in the sense that it forms a self-contained, web-addressable computing environment.

Flower 0.5

More than 200 years ago it was already possible to send messages throughout Europe and America at the speed of an aeroplane – wireless and without need for electricity.

Email in the 18th century

Online shopping has become a popular way to purchase items without the hassles of traffic and crowds. However, the Internet has unique risks, so it is important to take steps to protect yourself when shopping online.

Shopping Safely Online: National Cyber Alert System

Howard Zinn has called Robert McChesney “one of the nation’s most important analysts of the media,” and Mark Crispin Miller describes him as “the greatest of our media historians.” Now McChesney brings both his authoritative analysis and unparalleled historical knowledge to bear on the growing but only fitfully successful field of media criticism and scholarship.

In this sharply argued book, McChesney explains why we are in the midst of a communication revolution that is at the center of twenty-first-century life. Yet this profound juncture is not well understood, in part because our media criticism and media scholarship have not been up to the task. Why is media not at the center of political debate? Why are students of the media considered second-class scholars?

McChesney’s concise history of media studies shows how communication scholarship has grown increasingly irrelevant in recent years, even as media became a decisive issue of our times. Now the burgeoning media reform movement, in which McChesney has been a key player, has made it even more clear that the revolution in communication calls for a transformation in the way we think about media.

"Communication Revolution" by Robert W. McChesney

Will your discarded TV end up in a ditch in Ghana?

This reminds me of one segment in Manufactured Landscapes. One village in China specialized in CRTs. For a while, anyway. The heavy metals got into the water supply and the area had to be abandoned.

High-Tech Trash

Efficient management of RDF data is an important factor in realizing the Semantic Web vision. Performance and scalability issues are becoming increasingly pressing as Semantic Web technology is applied to real-world applications. In this paper, we examine the reasons why current data management solutions for RDF data scale poorly, and explore the fundamental scalability limitations of these approaches. We review the state of the art for improving performance for RDF databases and consider a recent suggestion, “property tables.” We then discuss practically and empirically why this solution has undesirable features. As an improvement, we propose an alternative solution: vertically partitioning the RDF data. We compare the performance of vertical partitioning with prior art on queries generated by a Web-based RDF browser over a large-scale (more than 50 million triples) catalog of library data. Our results show that a vertical partitioned schema achieves similar performance to the property table technique while being much simpler to design. Further, if a column-oriented DBMS (a database architected specially for the vertically partitioned case) is used instead of a row-oriented DBMS, another order of magnitude performance improvement is observed, with query times dropping from minutes to several seconds.

Scalable Semantic Web Data Management Using Vertical Partitioning