{Each week, our own resident technologist “Dr. Brisko” scours the Interwebs to find examples of the arcane and interesting. They are first shared privately in the inner FINE sanctum, where we retain some as pure trade secrets. But we switch a short list public to give you just a taste, from technology deep dives to design to the, well, unclassifiable info that just may be the cure for what ails you.}

I, Interface
Applying Asimov’s three laws of robotics to UX.

The Ruins of Dead Social Networks
A requiem for BBSes, the forerunner to today’s social networks.

Samuel L. Ipsum
[BEEEP!]ING PLACEHOLDER TEXT! In keeping with the expletive theme, for those who want to generate some saucier placeholder content.

SEO for Non-[BEEP!]s
With this great quote “Good SEO is a by-product of not being a [Beep!]” We’ve edited this NSFW title, but if you’ll click through you’ll read about practices worthy of an expletive.

List of Changes in the Star Wars Re-releases
Han shot first!

The Great Lie – Lorem Ipsum
Content shot first!

Portland ranks 11th in list of world major bike-friendly cities
… “The smallest city to make the Top 20 list is Portland. We are aware that it doesn’t technically fit into the major cities category, but we were curious to see how the USA’s top cycling city would fare… Besides, we’ll never hear the end of it from Portlanders if we leave them out…”

PointPoint
A Plugin For Pointing To Things

Not sharing is caring
Facebook’s terrible plan to get us to share everything we do on the Web.

Unfolding the IKEA Effect: Why We Love the Things We Build
The IKEA Effect refers to the tendency for people to value things they have created/built themselves more than if made by someone else – in fact, nearly as much as if an expert had created the same item.

Radiolab:
An appreciation by Ira Glass

There’s more than meets the eye to aFINEsite. Here’s a glimpse at some of the behind the scenes technology evolution that’s going to enable us to deliver more and better web experiences through the magic of Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails aims to promote good ideas and technologies. As the Rails community (and the FINE PDX basement) get excited about the release of 3.1, it’s easy to see that gospel in action. Not only is Rails 3.1 dropping Prototype for jQuery, but we’ll see the addition of a couple slick dependencies: CoffeeScript and Sass.

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Our new user interface upgrade release to the Chateau Ste Michelle mobile site brings your location into the picture.  Through use of a cleverly engineered location-sniffing retailer locator, the new mobile winery website locates your exact position right before it locates the nearest purveyor of CSM wines.

Let’s call it a new breed of sniffer – a DOUBLE sniffer! The technology determines a) whether you are [sniff] accessing from a mobile device, and b) from what location you are [sniff] accessing it.

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Continuing the multi-year rollout of Ste Michelle Wine Estates tools and touch points, you can now dial up the Chateau Ste Michelle website from your smart phone at http://www.ste-michelle.com/mobile/. The content and design is pared down and tailored to the medium, allowing for a simplified map, events, tours and other information you might need if you were literally on your way for a visit (hands on the wheel there, buddy). It facilitates channel partners who might be looking for tasting notes, and sharing of event and product info in social media, not to mention clicking on over to Ticketmaster for tickets to the concert series. Look for some added features, like the ability to run QR code-based promotions, in the near future.

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Beginning today, we’ll all have a little more visibility into the daily battle against cybercrime. The Norton Cybercrime Index (“CCI”), a free tool available to the public via Norton.com and other link points, will measure and warn cyber-citizens about real-time cybercrime happening around the world and how it can affect them. You’ll even see it displayed in on-location installations in places like London and New York’s Times Square. FINE Design Group is proud to have played a key role in helping Norton to design, build, and roll out this important new program.

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Technology & poverty. Does applying technology to solve the problems of poverty work? Fail? How & why? What’s the best way to make a real difference for the better? Tough, essential questions.

The Boston Review has a forum going this month with essays responding to the question: “Can Technology End Poverty?” Four of the ten responses (by Kentaro Toyama, Nicholas Negroponte, Dean Karlan and Achon Fung) are available online now. Looks like the rest will be available next week.

Is the optimism of new technologies inevitably dashed by the realities of typical human intent, not to mention logistics? Or does technology help individuals and communities take amazing leaps forward? Do computers teach or teach learning? Does technology expand or shrink social & economic divides? When money is limited (and when isn’t it), is that money better spent on laptops or on de-worming medication? Or a combination? The authors do not agree on the answers.

Use your technology to engage with the forum here.

Funny you never know where or how the things you help with will find their way to the ‘interweb’.

FINE knowledge and kudos from a friend.

In this case, I was lucky to get it right. Funnier yet, is that I just recently reviewed an SEO recommendations document from the second largest recruitment firm in the country that got it all wrong, <sigh> and they charged big bucks for that doc… shame shame.

Thanks, Beth, for the kudos.

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

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

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