"I hope kids are still finding some way, despite Google and Wikipedia, of not knowing things. Learning how to transform mere ignorance into mystery, simple not knowing into wonder, is a useful skill. Because it turns out that the most important things in this life — why the universe is here instead of not, what happens to us when we die, how the people we love really feel about us — are things we’re never going to know."

"Facebook seems to believe that the quirky ingredients that make flânerie possible need to go. “We want everything to be social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said on “Charlie Rose” a few months ago."

"(...) if you took an open poll of his friends, or any large enough group of people, “Satantango” would almost always lose out to something more mainstream, like “War Horse.” It might not be everyone’s top choice, but it won’t offend, either — that’s the tyranny of the social for you."

"It's this idea that the individual experience is somehow inferior to the collective that underpins Facebook’s recent embrace of “frictionless sharing,” the idea that, from now on, we have to worry only about things we don’t want to share; everything else will be shared automatically. (...) Sadly, frictionless sharing has the same drawback as “effortless poetry”: its final products are often intolerable."

Mining Subcultural Attention / Impersonal Secret Handshakes / Patterns of Social Organization / The Taming of Subcultures / The Fabrication of Subcultures / The Fortune at the Bottom of the Attention Pyramid

"They have lots of people, lots of servers, they have Android, they have Google Docs, they just bought Motorola. Most people would say ‘we’re the users, and the product is advertising’, but in fact the advertisers are the users and you are the product.”
"They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them."
"Real names, they say, turn out to be the names on your driver’s license and your passport and your credit cards so that they can track you. Are you happy to be a product?"

"dotjs is a Google Chrome extension that executes JavaScript files in ~/.js based on their filename. If you navigate to http://www.google.com/, dotjs will execute ~/.js/google.com.js"

Baidu (Google's analogous company in censored China) has introduced a street view feature that renders all buildings in isometric pixel-art (SimCity-style). I am both amazed and disconcerted by what seems to be an immense effort. (map.baidu.com)

High resolution artworks from famous museums around the world, presented by Google.

Google's JavaScript style guide.

“Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds…Not news but olds, telling people that what they think they already know is true.”
-- Terry Pratchett through the character Lord Vetinari from his novel, “The Truth: a novel of Discworld

"An interactive film by Chris Milk / Featuring "We Used To Wait" / Built in HTML5"

[todo] look this list through for interesting information