Over the past 2-3 years, the homepage slider (or "carousel") has become a ubiquitous feature on institutional websites. While the design convention of the slider has been around much longer, two key developments made it a veritable must-have for many NGO sites: more

For those of us who celebrate Christmas, few things are as evocative of the season as the brightly-colored nutcrackers most of us set on our window sills and mantlepieces. Growing up around Pennsylvania Dutch country probably made them even more part-and-parcel of the season for me. more

Malcolm Gladwell has folks in a bit of a tizzy over his latest New Yorker essay, "Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted." A lot of excellent writing has come out as a result. Zeynep Tufekci makes a whole slew of good points, especially with her analysis of strong and weak ties.more

Over at Wired's Threat Level blog, David Kravets chronicles the recent (and conflicting) court battles over how much privacy one can expect when out in public.

Specifically, in this case the Obama administration is pushing the court to allow the tracking of suspects' vehicles using a hidden GPS device without first getting a warrant. more

Late last week, Rosita Cortez (herself a confessed Apple fan) took a hard look at Apple's performance in the realm of "giving back": more

If your facebook and twitter feed is anything like mine, you've run across "RSAnimate" videos more than once over the past few months.

Taken from lectures given at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (let's stick with "RSA" for short!), our ears hear the standard lecture that we would get if we were in the room with the presenter, but our eyes are afforded a wonderful gift: sequential and overlapping illustrations of the topic at hand, synced up with the speech. more

Photo by Flickr user prometheusradio

Two weekends ago I was lucky enough to get to Detroit for the 2010 U.S. Social Forum. The USSF is a gathering place for more than ten thousand activists & organizers from all over the country to meet and learn from from each other - and attempt to chart a course forward for the many U.S. social movements represented there.

The USSF started as a result of the first World Social Forum in 2001, which was itself set up to be a counter-balance to the elite-centric World Economic Forum. 2010 was USSF's second incarnation (the first was in 2007 in Detroit).

Having been to both U.S. Social Forums, there are quite a few differences, though all pointing in a positive direction. Here are three: more

For those of us plugged into tech news, the development of Diaspora is a promising one: true decentralization of social networking.

Diaspora is a grassroots-funded open-source project started by four NYU students. The idea? Instead of hosting photos, links, messages, and friend connections on a centralized server, host it on your own computer. Each person's host is called a "seed" in Diaspora lingo, a borrowed term from bittorrent. more