If..Else Log

Typeworkshop explain some of the issues and concepts in type design. Lovely sketches and a wonderful introduction to the world of typography.

Google have released the zeitgeist of 2005 as determined by search queries on their site with lists, categories and pretty graphs galore. Lovely stuff. [via]

It turns out that looking at the aggregation of billions of search queries people type into Google reveals something about our curiosity, our thirst for news, and perhaps even our desires. Considering all that has occurred in 2005, we thought it would be interesting to study just a few of the significant events, and names that make this a memorable year. (We’ll leave it to the historians to determine which ones are lasting and which ephemeral.)

Well, for no other reason except to overshadow my own photo-gallery launch, Reuters have launched pictures of the year gallery for 2005:) [via]

Well, I've finally decided to put phuly.co.uk to productive use and launch it as my official photoblog. My photos have flickered between various places but this should hopefully be their long term home.

The site's not quite finished yet (still a few things to sort out and put into place, not least enabling comments) but what do you guys think of the design? Thoughts and opinions?

John Berry posts some analysis on the decline of community activity on Slashdot, why it may have occured and what it all means.

Hidden amongst the announcement of Google will invest $1 billion investment in AOL is the following agreement: "Enabling Google Talk and AIM instant messaging users to communicate with each other, provided certain conditions are met"

An interesting development for the instant messaging world; I wonder what the certain conditions are and how Yahoo and Microsoft respond?

Ahem… Quite the interesting message for a teddy bear. Makes that picture of the guy cradling the teddy on the bottom of the page slightly creepy.

There's a good writeup by Ari Paparo on why Blink failed but del.icio.us succeeded despite $13 million of investment and first-mover advantage due to years of head-start.

Whilst I'm not sure I'd be as dismissive of timing being a factor, I agree with Ari's analysis that a lack of consideration of the benefits of social networking, folksonomy, and choice of focus/strategy proved to be too severe a handicap.

Eric Meyer writes a post about using XHTML and CSS to visualise graphs which follows on from Apples and Orange's article on the same subject.

UX Magazine is sporting a pretty cool design; resolution dependent, XHTML Strict and powered by TXP to boot! I like!