• “During the 1860s, several photographers based in Moscow and St. Petersburg produced a series of cartes-de-visite showing Russian ‘types.’ These remarkable portraits provide a fascinating record of working-class townspeople, artisans, street vendors and peasants, some staged performing an activity, such as drinking tea or gaming, and some photographed in the performance of their occupation.”
• Chicago’s Adler Planetarium could get a Space Shuttle when they are retired next year, but competition is fierce from Texas, Florida, and New York.
• I knew Groupon was doing well, but I didn’t think they were doing THAT well: according to Forbes, it is one of the fastest companies to reach a $1B valuation (YouTube being the fastest, but it has yet to see profit).
• Finally, a particularly depressing list from Wikipedia: list of last occurrences.

• Tracking the evolution of the Windows through its icons. Makes me a touch nostalgic actually.
• This extensive ‘oral history’ of Galaxie 500 on Pitchfork recounts the band’s history in their own words.
• John Pozadzides, CEO of Woopra, analyzes where most of the referral links on the web come from (and where marketers ought to spend their time).
• Design homages: If Saul Bass had continued doing movie posters, and a motorcycle that looks like something out of the Rocketeer.

oflate.org is an experiment in aggregating and presenting content. It combines the utility of an RSS reader and the casual browsing of a blog into one simple stream.

The site developed out of my own needs—there was no good way to get a snapshot of all the New York Times blogs without adding 60 different RSS feeds. This site does all the work for you; it updates in real-time with posts from dozens of the best NYT blogs.

You can filter by blog, by category, or by update frequency. Each entry gives a 1-3 sentence preview, but the headline links directly to the original post. With the “Save” link next to each headline, you can save posts for later reading (to access them, use the “My Saves” link on the top bar).

oflate.org is starting with a collection of blogs from the NYT, but I’m planning other aggregation topics. Please check out the site, and use it if you like it. Send an email to oflate.org@gmail.com if you have any thoughts.

• Google’s interests extend into the energy industry. Google Energy, a new subsidiary, is registered as a power utility company in Delaware. At this point, they plan to be a reseller to wholesale customers.
• The Times created a neat interactive graphic to demonstrate how incredibly close the Olympic finish times are. Click the play button on the left and imagine them all racing at the same time.
• I would love to stand in front of this 3D, perspective-bending painting from the British Library, but this Flickr clip does a good job of showing it off.

Google is beginning to release more information about it’s long-planned dive into the world of the operating system. The video above offers some hints at its user interface. As expected, everything will be done through the browser.

• The White House has switched to a Drupal platform to run their site. It might be the best evidence yet that open-source software can be run dependably and securely. O’Reilly has some thoughts.
• A ‘Hey Jude’ flowchart.
• The annual ultimate frisbee championships were last weekend in Sarasota, FL. UPA has a recap.

If you don’t watch out, you could really get lost in a site like TV Tropes. Or at least I could. To be sure, the site appeals to a particular type of person. Someone who likes patterns and categories.

The easiest way to understand what it’s trying to do is to look up a show that you know, like The Wire or So You Think You Can Dance.

A wiki-style site is perfect for TV Tropes. Traditional ideas, like Chekov’s Gun, are outrageously annotated and linked. On some shows there’s a bingo game waiting to happen.

CNet reports that Comscore and Omniture, two industry standards when it comes to web tracking, will be working together to form a new service. This is the second big news of the month from Omniture, which is also being acquired by Adobe.

The announcement is tentative good news, since there has long been a discrepancy between internal analytics numbers like Omniture and the survey-based approach of Comscore (to the point where you can’t compare Comscore to anything but Comscore). More accurate reporting can only be good in the long run for advertising on the internet.

• Wired considers how much everyone is writing these days. “Paradigm shift” alert.
• Karl Pilkington, Ricky Gervais’ laconic friend, radio partner, and perhaps the only person who can put up with him for extended periods, “reviews” Gervais’ new film The Invention of Lying: Parts 1 and 2.
• A 1000 km long dust storm swept across Australia yesterday. The Big Picture collected images of the storm, all of which have a post-apocalyptic feeling with all the red dust in the air.

In June, Google released a Labs project called Fusion Tables which at first looks a lot like a spreadsheet app, but there are some exciting differences. In the words of the developers:

Fusion Tables is a service for managing large collections of tabular data in the cloud. You can upload tables of up to 100MB and share them with collaborators, or make them public. You can apply filters and aggregation to your data, visualize it on maps and other charts, merge data from multiple tables, and export it to the Web or csv files. You can also conduct discussions about the data at several levels of granularity, such as rows, columns and individual cells.

It seems perfect for large datasets that need crunching, aggregating and visualizing, as opposed to a a spreadsheet that needs editing. To test out some of its features, I pulled ridership data from the CTA website. Unfortunately they only provide PDFs, and I couldn’t format the data as automatically as I would’ve liked, so I limited the set to the Red Line on the North Side. I made the file public, so you can see the imported file and explore here.

Even with a small dataset, the visualization features were impressive. You can do bar graphs, pie charts, and all the tools typical of a spreadsheet, except they are more useful because they are clickable and optimized for the screen. What you can’t do with a spreadsheet is the map visualization. With a single click, I get this:

To be fair, I ensured an accurate map display by adding the station addresses in a separate column before I uploaded it. But it really was that easy.

While very cool, if I started using Fusion Tables heavily, there are a number of features that are probably more useful. You can create virtual copies of files that show only the columns that you need. You can filter rows from a simple but effective set of rules. You can merge datasets by simply selecting columns. And you can collaborate and leave comments exactly where they need to be.

Fusion Tables is a new tool, and even in my small test I found some things wanting. Unless you have national or global data, the intensity map is useless. I’d like to see a more granular map that allows for city or regional data, like my demo set. I’d also like to be able to sort the axes of the different graphs, be it alphabetically or low to high. Currently, the line graph sorts alphabetically, and the bar graph keeps the imported order. Finally I hope we will see some improvements to the way aggregation is presented—maybe an option to add an aggregated row or column to the table itself.

Anyway, small points for tool that I’m excited to see improve.