Linked List: August 5, 2010

Thursday, 5 August 2010

The Talk Show #2 

This week’s episode of The Talk Show, a so-called podcast featuring yours truly and Dan Benjamin, is now available for your enjoyment. In its new incarnation at 5by5, we’ve got video, but in my heart it’ll always be an audio show. If you want something to look at while listening to the audio, I recommend the car chase scene from Bullitt on a repeat loop.

This week’s show is sponsored by MailChimp, and our main topic is the question of what “market share” means for new mobile platforms like iOS and Android.

Khoi Vinh on Tumblr and Identity 

Khoi Vinh:

My biggest complaint, by far, has bothered me for some time but has taken me only until recently to put my finger on. Tumblr discourages identity. Or, to be more specific, it promotes shallow identity. Moreso than other blogging systems like WordPress or ExpressionEngine, Tumblr blogs frequently offer only scant few details about their authors. I can’t recall how many Tumblr sites I’ve visited where it wasn’t clear who was behind the posts, what their background was, or what their intent was.

I run into this all the time. It’s my policy to give credit by name whenever I link to or quote from someone; I often run into sites on Tumblr — thoughtful, interesting, well-written sites — where the author’s name isn’t indicated. In many such cases, I just don’t link. Yesterday I did link, but I felt weird about it.

And a separate problem is that when “reblogging”, the original source on Tumblr is hard to track down. I try to be scrupulous about linking to the original writer/creator of things, but Tumblr sites sometimes make that hard to do, or make it hard to even notice that what you’re reading/looking at originated on someone else’s Tumblr site.

Interarchy 10 

Speaking of good file transfer clients, Interarchy 10.0 is out, and it looks like a great upgrade, with support for Amazon S3, Google Storage, and Rackspace Cloud Files; Quick Look for remote files; and a new plugin API that allows you to execute code on the server.

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Sharp designs by Aaron Draplin.