Below you'll see a link to Code for America. Here is a related TED talk.

From about page: "We make it easy and attractive for the web generation to give back through our Fellowship, which connects technologists with cities to work together to innovate; our Accelerator, which will support disruptive civic startups; and our Brigade, which helps local, community groups reuse civic software."

"Adopted by the NCTE Executive Committee, February 15, 2008 Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies."

Finally (and what will appear first), all this talk about digital technology and web design pulls up an equal impulse in me to talk about other skill sets that get undervalued in an information economy. I read this a bit ago and enjoyed it. There also seems to be a trend currently that is leading us toward a sort of steam punk utopia where we will have a mixture of high and low technology. For more on the philosophical argument being put forward in this article, I highly recommend Shop Class as Soulcraft and The Mind at Work. To see some indications of the trend I'm talking about watch How It's Made (which tends to skew toward human components of the production process and is based in a tactile fetish of understanding modes of production since you do not learn how to make things ... or really how things are made) and check out all the books on craft skills, cooking, and carpentry that are exploding all over Amazon with noticeably nostalgic titles. Speaking of which, did the knitting craze end or am I just not around 50 people that have recently taken up knitting anymore?

Oh! Also add to the "evidence" list farming/gardening and the back to earth books ... and psychologically the zombie and (to a lesser extent) virus craze in movies, books, games, etc.

I've only given cursory attention to this site (when I checked it out, I found it less useful than I had thought it would be), but we've talked about technology monitoring people, breaking their identity into tiny bits of data, etc. and this website encourages people to do that to themselves to live a productive life ... in some ways it is kind of like the guy who photographs all his food, combined with an OCD, capitalist mindset. See also: any website that tracks your miles run, your calories consumed for the day, etc.

Another trend on this Diigo group and class discussion seems to be Facebook. If there is one thing Facebook users love more than Facebook, it is making fun of Facebook.

The previous post referenced in "Connect With Your Creation Through a Real-Time Editor"

Looks at "responsive design" and navigation menus. And if you couldn't already tell, I've fallen behind in my Webmonkey reading and am now bombing the Humanities Computing group with any article that I think is interesting and/or semi-relevant. I'll stop soon.

Another common topic has seemed to be blogs and blogging, especially following the readings for last week. This seemed like a blog post that might add to the discussion.

I thought this might be interesting, especially as we head toward the section of the class where we discuss games. Here is an excerpt from the default blurb: "Victor has worked on experimental UI concepts at Apple and also created the interactive data graphics for Al Gore's book, Our Choice. In the talk Victor showed off a demo of a great real-time game editor that makes your existing coding tools look primitive at best."

There have been a lot of posts about web tracking in light of the recent changes in Google. This is an interesting article, but one of the things I like the best is the Collusion display of who's tracking your data.

I know we would all have access to this via our reading and a Google search, but I thought I would throw it up here for easy access in case anyone was interested in checking it out.

Another resource for thinking about design.

The changing privacy policy for Google came up in last class (I think Dibs mentioned it), and I thought this was an interesting article that talks about how difficult it is to navigate around the changes.

One more website that I think some may find helpful. It is a website the highlights some menu designs. As such it offers some cool ideas for thinking about homepages, layout, and typography.

Here is the other website that I look back to frequently. I don't want to spam the message board with websites that are largely just "inspiration" sites, but if any of you are interested in others, I have a bunch and am always looking to trade.

This is a website that offers limited print, affordable art. I like to look at what is being done other places to get ideas for my own work. This website and one other one (which I will post next ... which you'll see first) are two websites that I like to look at a lot for stylistic ideas of how to do poster designs, typographic designs, website designs, and book covers.

... and another one of my favorite typography websites.

One of my favorite typography websites ...

Another article from Smashing Magazine ... the title gives the sense of what the article is all about.