14

Safeguarding music | Global Music Vault | Svalbard

This sounds like an interesting long-term storage project, but colour me extremely sceptical of their hand-wavey vagueness around their supposedly flawless technical solution:

This technology will be revealed to the world in the near future.

Also, they keep hyping up the Svalbard location as though it were purpose-built for this project, rather than the global seed bank (which they don’t even mention).

This might be a good way to do marketing, but it’s a shitty way to go about digital preservation.

Global performance insights for your site | Lighthouse Metrics

I hadn’t come across this before—run Lighthouse tests on your pages from six different locations around the world at once.

WindowSwap

Look out someone else’s window somewhere in the world.

There’s something indescribably lovely about this. It’s like a kind of positive voyeurism.

I lost a lot of time to this.

s08e05: There’s only one rule that I know of, babies - Things That Have Caught My Attention

A global communications network now exists that’s cheap enough or in some cases even free to access, offering a pseudonymous way for people to feel safe enough to share a private experience with complete strangers? I give Facebook and Twitter a bunch of shit for their rhetoric about a global community (no, Facebook’s billions of users are no more a community than the television-watching global community) and creating authentic connection, but I will very happily admit that this, this particular example with people sharing what it is like to be me and learning what is it like to be you is the good.

This is the thing that makes free, open, networked communication brilliant. This is the thing that brings down silos and creates common understanding and humanizes us all, that creates empathy and the first steps towards compassion.

That someone can read about this insight and have a way to react to it and share their perspective and not even know who else might read it, but feel safe in doing so and maybe even with the expectation that this sharing is a net good? That is good. That is what we should strive for.

I <3 the cascade! | Go Make Things

Chris makes the valid observation that JavaScript programmers who bemoan the “global scope” of CSS are handily forgetting that JavaScript also has global scope by default.

JS is also global by default. We use IIFEs and wrapper functions to add scope.

And for all this talk about CSS being global, you can actually scope styles when you need to. It’s more-or-less the same way you do it in JavaScript.

Flags are not languages – A blog about designing global user experiences: beyond language, location & culture.

It’s a bit finger-pointy but this blog should be useful for anyone working on internationalisation.

This blog has two general aims: to show the fundamental flaws in using flags to represent languages and how to create good experiences when dealing with multilingual and multi-regional content.

Our World In Data

If you’re in need of some long-term perspective right now—because, let’s face it, the short-term outlook is looking pretty damn bleak—then why not explore some of Max Roser’s data visualisations? Have a look at some of the global trends in inequality, disease, hunger, and conflict.

Global Defense

Dave is making a nifty in-browser game that you can play by yourself or in co-operative mode. If your device has a gyroscope, you can use that to aim. Very cool!

(And it looks like it’s all set to become a progressive web app once it’s running on HTTPS.)

No Really, For Everyone | Benjamin Listwon

A heartfelt call to web developers to consider the needs of the many and varied people trying to use what we build.

None of this is about Javascript. None of this is about CSS transforms or WebGL. None of this is about technology at all.

It is about making products that serve all users equally. It is about putting ourselves in others’ shoes. It is about trying to imagine the frustration and difficulty of using our products when the conditions aren’t what we’re used to. It is about being human.

Creating a physical internet to save money and energy on logistics

I remember a talk and discussion at SxSW a few years back about trying to improve the efficiency of trade networks by making them more web-like: there are ships full of empty cargo containers, simply because companies insist on using the container with their logo on it. I really, really like the idea of applying the principles of packet-switching to physical networks.

But here’s the hard part:

The technology is not a problem. We could do it all in 10 years. It’s the business models and the mental models in people’s minds.

Internet Users in Developing Countries Drag on Sites’ Profits - NYTimes.com

A sobering article on the cost of being a truly global website. This gives some context to Last.fm's recent pricing model decision.

Salon.com News | Apocalypse now

Mike Davis makes some conservative predictions about the near future.

Smithsonian Global Sound

A fantastic online music store from the Smithsonian. You can download MP3s and liner notes.

plazes.beta

Geo-tagging meets social software. I must check this out and investigate the API.