• Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: Books: The New Yorker
  (tags: free business economics gladwell paidcontent)

• Tim Hayward on food writer Elizabeth David | Life and style | The Guardian
  I heart Elizabeth David.
  (tags: food cooking elizabethdavid guardian)

• Pulse Laser: Shownar
  Shownar tracks millions of blogs and Twitter plus other microblogging services, and finds people talking about BBC telly and radio. Then it datamines to see where the conversations are and what shows are surprisingly popular. You can explore the shows at Shownar itself. It’s an experimental prototype we’ve designed and built for the BBC over the last few months. We’ll learn a lot having it in the public eye, and I hope to see it as a key part of discovery and conversation scattered across BBC Online one day.
  (tags: radio TV shownar bbc schulze_and_webb)
• Shownar
  (tags: bbc radio TV schulze_and_webb shownar)
• Marco Brambilla: Civilization | Motionographer | Motion graphics, design, animation, filmmaking and visual effects
  wow via @brainpicker
  (tags: video art animation motiongraphics)

• Billie Tweets - a Twitter tribute to Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean"
  twitter is so deliciously agile. via @bbhlabs
  (tags: twitter michaeljackson)

Just finished Italo Calvino’s “Six Memos for the next Millennium”, newly re-released as  a lovely looking Penguin Modern Classic. Calvino was due to give the Charles Eliot Norton lectures in 1985/6, but died before he finished writing them. This book is the collected draft versions of what would have been those lectures.

Each lecture addressed a concept that Calvino suggested would define, or be worth saving by, the millennial writer, namely: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity  (Constancy, the sixth, wasn’t written).

Despite being written in 1985 and aimed squarely at literature, it’s amazing how prescient they are re all things online. In 6 words he’s pretty much nailed the internet.

But then is that really so surprising? Most people operating online are telling a story of some description, aren’t they? And, ok, what Calvino means by some of those terms might not immediately spring to mind now - In Visibility he fears the loss of the abilty to imagine up picures from the written word, of our over-reliance on visual stimuli. And we do like a bit of visual stimulus online, don’t we? That aside, it’s still interesting how these tenets of a proposed new fiction have been migrated to the web in telling those stories.

Is the web a better medium for story-telling than the novel these days? I don’t know. I can’t remember the last time I read anything new in the shape of a novel that came close to representing any of the above, but that might have more to do with my reading habits over the last few years, and especially since the loss of David Foster Wallace. And while there have been some pretty lovely uses of new media to create outright fictions (I’m thinking of Carl Steadman’s 99 Secrets, as randomised on twitter by Matt Webb), I’m not sure these are any more successful than the occasional poetry of a single 140 character missive.

Anyway. It’s a lovely little book. You should read it.

• Can Hands: Pringles
  genius banner ad shock, via @jamesdotwarren
  (tags: advertising banner awards)
• What Britain eats: three decades of grocery shopping — Times Labs Blog
  (tags: visualization food graphics)
• 10 Things I Learnt at the London Uke Festival 2009 | Ukulele Hunt
  via @LDN
  (tags: london ukulele blog)
• English Russia » The Fallen Earth
  aka the Grander Canyon via @brainpicker
  (tags: photography travel kazakhstan)

• Bergman Island (2006) - The Criterion Collection
  via @brainpicker
  (tags: cinema bergman documentary)
• The Adaptive Function of Literature and the Other Arts | Forum
  The Adaptive Function of Literature & Other Arts – creativity beyond evolutionary psychology via @brainpicker
  (tags: sociology psychology literature arts stories)

• The London Spy: A Discreet Guide to the City’s Pleasures
  "In 1966 Anthony Blond published a modern London guidebook edited by Hunter Davies * called The London Spy: A Discreet Guide To The City’s Pleasures. London was rapidly changing in those days and Blond republished an updated version in 1971. Even though it was now the seventies, and despite trying, The London Spy just couldn’t shake off its very ’swinging sixties’ feel. As a guide to the capital city the book has dated more than if Dr Johnson himself took you by the hand and showed you his streets of London." via @LDN
  (tags: london stories)
• 100 Amazing Futuristic Design Concepts We Wish Were Real | Webdesigner Depot
  via @faris
  (tags: design future technology)

• Kosmograd: Kittinger
  "In 1960, Kittinger, USAF test pilot, ascended to an altitude of 30Km, in a high-altitude helium balloon, before stepping into the void. Kittinger fell at speeds off 990Km/h, freefalling for 4 and a half minutes before deploying a chute at a height of 5.5Km, and floating to the ground. While it took 1 and a half hours to ascend, the descent totalled just 13 minutes and 45 seconds."
  via @bengoldacre
  (tags: space history youtube)
• Tenderpixel :: Ink
  "The collaborative Invisible Library project will transform the gallery space into an imaginary library filled with books that have been alluded to in novels, but have never actually existed…"
  (tags: art design exhibitions gallery literature)

Lifebuoy - Ode to a drowning man, originally uploaded by meltingman.

It’s dripping with character. The missing apostrophe, the random line lengths and spacing. It’s warming that something as flawed as this can officially exist.