The talk is great, but if you’re impatient, skip to 6 minutes for a very impressive demonstration.

Doug McCune has done some interesting data visualization studies using San Francisco’s crime statistics. Also check out his Night Light series.

Nice work Smokescreen.

Check the demo, running strongbad, of course:

Google announced that they are releasing high quality open source fonts in the Google Font Directory. Since these are open source you can even download the original font files yourself at the font code.google.com project.

Google has made it very easy to include these fonts into your page using the new Google Font API.

Original post from Ajaxian

That’s what I said.

Flash is dying and here’s why. Let’s all get over it. (Sorry, Jon)

Robert Mondavi’s passion and vision had a profound influence on American culture. And the new site at http://www.robertmondavi.com/ is a celebration of that.

A few years back, industry giant Constellation Brands bought the Robert Mondavi family of wine brands for a whopping $1.2 Billion. It made a big statement about how much equity the Mondavi name had built while Robert Mondavi was helping to build Napa Valley and the American wine and food culture we know today. Along with perhaps 1-2 other famous wine and foodies, you can probably thank Mr. Mondavi for the fact that our Wonder Bread and Kool Aid culture has been infused with a little more food and wine sophistication, including everything from organics to the Food Network.

The new site is the first time his vision of a populist wine and food culture has ever been presented in one consolidated public venue. It takes you through the timeline of how his vision evolved, integrates the on-site events and educational programs that helped make his ideas accessible. It’s peppered with his quotes and ideas, and back-ended with a CMS to keep it all fresh. And above all, it creates a brand platform, using everything from color palette to navigation to content and imagery, where everyday wine and expensive wine can co-exist in an unified vision of gracious living.

Somewhere, Mr. Mondavi is tossing back a nice Cab and smiling.

An interesting article from the NY Times yesterday about mobile technology and how it is being used to communicate with customers.

A good read on the importance of humanity in software, by Amy at Cheerful.

After all the hard work creating, iterating, designing, refining, and crafting your website, do you ever wonder about what kind of black magic it takes to make the site (live, damn you, live!) appear when someone types http://www.yourincrediblebrandexperience.com into their browser’s address bar?

I came across a breakdown this morning (for those who need words AND pictures) of estimates as to the number of servers some of the major hosting and technology companies own.  The most interesting part?  Not how many servers it takes to power the delivery of LOLcats and anonymous screeds against the government, but how many servers it takes Google to organize and deliver a relevant list of that data back to you in less than a second.

That yellow bar?  That’s 1,000,000+ servers.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

via intac.net