Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University

I'd like to share 20 websites that have broadened my knowledge, expanded my skill set, and improved the quality and efficiency of my web development projects. Most of these (hopefully) you've already encountered, but if you come out with just one or two links you've never heard of or you end up bookmarking a link or two, I would've accomplished my goal.

The SXSW MUSIC AND MEDIA CONFERENCE showcases hundreds of musical acts from around the globe on over eighty stages in downtown Austin. By day, conference registrants do business in the SXSW Trade Show in the Austin Convention Center and partake of a full agenda of informative, provocative panel discussions featuring hundreds of speakers of international stature.

When Matt Florian signed onto his Facebook account recently to check the status of his 400-plus friends, he had a friend request. It was from his dad.

The US defence department has banned the giant internet search engine Google from filming inside and making detailed studies of US military bases.

On a week when Microsoft landed a big deal to put Silverlight on Nokia phones, Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, tells Adobe that there won't be Flash on the iPhone. This is a real bummer for Adobe and many users and developers, because most of the world's casual games are written for Flash. Just go over to game site Kongregate. Or, look at the world's video like that on YouTube (or any other video site like the Qik one that I use on my cell phone). Almost all of it is done in Flash. Now developers at those sites will need to find some other method to get those games and videos onto the iPhone.

Thanks to the wonderful world of spammers most websites these days rely on CAPTCHA images to force users to prove they are human before accepting comments or other user feedback. In fact humans solve roughly 60 million CAPTCHAs a day according to a the people behind reCAPTCHA a group that wants to leverage that effort to help digitizing books.