This is a linkdump

At the risk of doing what I’m best at — overstating the obvious — you might have noticed that I don’t use this blog much anymore.

Actually, I do use it, maybe once a year or so, to communicate the fact that I don’t write many blog posts these days, and you should just follow me on Twitter or somewhere else if you’re interested.

But that’s barely true. I don’t “talk” about “media” stuff much on Twitter, although I sort of do, depending on how you feel about reading between the lines, but sometimes a GIF is just a GIF.

That’s the end of the preamble.

This is a linkdump.

I’ve been using Pinboard (again) for a couple months now to “save” links to “read” later. (Is there an Emoji for air quotes? Wait, I’m going to tweet that, brb.)

Is there an emoji for air quotes?

— Ryan Sholin (@ryansholin) April 10, 2013

The air quotes are because I haven’t really used these tools for anything other than reducing the amount of guilt I have over not reading the entire Internet.

Really, who reads everything they save to “read later?” Nobody. It just sits there, festering. I used to share first, read later, but in modern times, it often feels silly to re-share something everyone has already shared, so I’ll just “like” or “favorite” and let that be a passive form of sharing, rather than crafting a shiny new headline and point of view around some interesting article, where “interesting” equals “this caught my eye and it seems important.”

So, instead, I present this unscheduled, imperiodic link dump of a bunch of stuff I’ve saved. Maybe I’ve read it, maybe not. Maybe it’s useful, maybe not.

You be the judge. An ordered list in no particular order follows, although it might end up in chronological order, we’ll see.

1. Matt Waite for Source on the hey-wasn’t-this-hotly-debated ethics of a mugshot news app.
2. 10 years of NFL play-by-play data, in CSV form.
3. A List Apart article on small-screen (iPhone, for example) navigation patterns.
4. Software to help humans figure out if that pic was ‘shopped, marketed to insurance companies.
5. “Don’t learn how to code; learn to make things.”
6. A painfully basic lesson for product managers and entrepreneurs: Solve Existing Problems
7. If you’re going to have meetings, Always Be Capturing, so you don’t have to have more meetings to review what you decided in the previous meeting.
8. On the perils of including edge case legacy functionality in your application to satisfy power users: Checkboxes That Kill Your Product
9. Hey guys, remember when Netflix was a useful social network?
10. Solid notes on *how* to measure audience engagement in news apps, although I would argue that *what* to measure is critical.
11. For the completely uninitiated, a perfect explanation of the (current) state of open graph tags and making content shareable.
12. Lorem Ipsum for avatars.
13. The accidental limerick detector.
14. The year-old Zeldman-approved recommended replacement for the ol’ -9999px trick.
15. “Could you make a list of cute animals that gets 5 million views?”