I’m tired of my artist friends fetishizing pre-web media, feeling that to matter they have to print a book, get published at a magazine, or get funded to film a cinema movie or start a “real” startup. Fuck that.
You know how those over 40 make fluffy pronouncements about new digital literacies?
Well, the new literacy is PUBLISHING: reaching hundreds, thousands, millions through web media, for next to nothing, and learning to hold their attention. It’s only tangentially a technical challenge.
End rant. I love you artist friends.
Walmart, (Sam) Wal(ton’s) mart. The Walton fortune has long been split among 4 main heirs and still each shard is listed in the top 4, 5, 6, and 7 of America’s richest, each with over $20 billion.
The story Sam Walton tells of how he started Walmart is one of my favorite autobiographies and business books. My old, scribbled paperback is long lost but I can now safely share the book with you digitally through the 3rd-party magic of Scribd: read it online.
It’s time to (re)read Sam Walton and be inspired by history’s most successful practitioner of commerce, there are too many opportunities out there waiting for us!
 It is a story about entrepreneurship, and risk, and hard work, and knowing where you want to go and being willing to do what it takes to get there. It’s a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don’t, and about sticking to your guns. But I think more than anything it proves there’s absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary working people can accomplish if they’re given the opportunity and the encouragement and the incentive to do their best. Because that’s how Wal-Mart became Wal-Mart: ordinary people joined together to accomplish extraordinary things. At first, we amazed ourselves. And before too long, we amazed everybody else, especially folks who thought America was just too complicated and sophisticated a place for this sort of thing to work anymore.
I believe the Google-China faceoff a momentous occasion. A major fallout between 2 of the very most powerful organizations on Earth.
So I created this experimental summary to try to wrap my head around it. The idea is to aggregate all the developments of a major news story, linking even more aggressively than Wikipedia and straight to first sources as much as possible. The favicon bullets are links to that paragraph’s source. All emphases mine.
Styling tables presents lots of fun infodesign opportunities that are largely still untapped. Backbars is of course an example of that.
At a recent project, I stumbled on another subtle styling that I’m descriptively calling highlows from ignorance of precedents. Here it is, on the left part:
The idea is to highlight the first occurrence of a row value and to lowlight the next occurrences, until a new row value comes up and then the high switch is turned on again.
It’s a simple, useful way to help scan column values in category tables.
Mixtecs are an indigenous group of southern Mexico, one of the most classic, important and populous. Well, this number of the Antropologia Mexicana magazine buriedly reports that there are now more Mixtec speakers in the US!
 
No wonder then that I heard more Native American languages in California than in my Mexican hometown.
Mexico should make peace with the fact that, under the pressure of geography and economic complementariness, it is now more linked to Anglo America than to Latin America.
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