Seven years ago, at Project BBQ, I predicted a "convergent technology" device that would be a phone, a camera, an iPod, and a web browser -- two and a half years before the first iPhone was released.

Feedback Without Frustration (YouTube) -- Scott Berkun at the HIVE conference talks about how feedback fails, and how to get it successfully. He is so good. Americhrome -- history of the official palette of the United States of America. Discovering Talented Musicians with Musical Analysis (Google Research blgo) -- very clever, they do acoustical analysis and then train up...

Solitude and Leadership -- an amazing essay on the value of managing one's information diet. Far more than yet another Carr/Morozov "the Internet is making us dumb!!" hate on short-form content, this is an eloquent exposition of the need for long-form thoughts. I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is...

FMOD for Android is like peanut butter and strawberry jam, together for the first time!

The Email Game -- game mechanics to get you answering email more efficiently. Can't wait to hear that conversation with corporate IT. "You want us to install what on the Exchange server?" (via Demo Day Wrapup) Stratified B-trees and versioning dictionaries -- A classic versioned data structure in storage and computer science is the copy-on-write (CoW) B-tree -- it...

I just want reality to sound a bit more like science fiction ...

Google Acquisition Spending Spree (Venturebeat) -- Google is now on track to acquire a new company every two weeks this year. (via azaaza on Twitter) Where Good Ideas Come From (YouTube) -- this perfectly describes Foo. A Taxonomy of Data Science -- great first post on a new blog by data practitioners. Rockbox -- open source (GPL) firmware for...

Arranging Things: The Rhetoric of Object Placement (Amazon) -- [...] the underlying principles that govern how Western designers arrange things in three-dimensional compositions. Inspired by Greek and Roman notions of rhetoric [...] Koren elucidates the elements of arranging rhetoric that all designers instinctively use in everything from floral compositions to interior decorating. (via Elaine Wherry) 2010 Mario AI Championship...

Free as in Smokescreen (Mike Shaver) -- H.264, one of the ways video can be delivered in HTML5, is covered by patents. This prevents Mozilla from shipping an H.264 player, which fragments web video. The MPEG LA group who manage the patents for H.264 did a great piece of PR bullshit, saying "this will be permanently royalty-free to consumers"....

Working Audio Data Demos -- the new Firefox has a very sweet audio data API and some nifty demos like delay pedals, a beat detector (YouTube) and a JavaScript text-to-speech generator. (via jamesaduncan on Twitter) Estimating the Economic Impact of Mass Digitization Projects on Copyright Holders: Evidence from the Google Book Search Litigation -- [T]he revenues and profits of...