A Brief Message by designers for designers.

In this time and era when information overload is ubiquitous and gunning for Inbox Zero seems to be more like a fantasy, it’s refreshing to see A Brief Message which, in their own words, “features design opinions expressed in short form—200 words or less”. It publishes short articles from individuals who are involved in design in one way or more. What I like about it is that these articles are thought-provoking and they invite you to think about how design affects you and your life. Not to mention the design of the site is also very well-done (got to love the layout and the use of typography). While you can easily subscribe to the RSS feed, I would encourage you to check out the site itself because the articles are accompanied by really nice illustrations that you will find well worth the effort to load up the site outside your RSS reader!

What is Scribd?

Scribd lets you publish and discover documents online. It is like a big online library where anyone can upload. We make use of a custom Flash document viewer that lets you display documents right in your Web browser. There are all sorts of other features that make it easy and fun to publish, convert, embed, analyze, and read documents.Part of the idea behind Scribd is that everyone has a lot of documents sitting around on their computers that only they can read.

With Scribd we hope to unlock this information by putting it on the web.

Now, what more can we do on the web? Think… start thinking…

I have Google Earth on my desktop and now I’m going to start flying with my flight simulator. Check out TechCrunch for more info.

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We’ve always known that Google has wanted to challenge Microsoft’s desktop dominance in a number of areas, but to date we didn’t know that extended to gaming.

Hidden inside Google Earth is a secret Flight Simulator that takes full advantage of Google’s extensive satellite imagery.
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I’ve always enjoy reading plasticbag.org and one of the post was on OpenID. As quoted from his blog.

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OpenID—fundamentally—is a solution to the problem of having a million user accounts all over the place. Instead of getting hundreds of user names all over the place you go to a site that provides OpenIDs and choose one username and password. These sites then give you a pretty simple web address which is probably easiest to think about as a profile page for you. Then when you want to sign into any other site on the Internet with an OpenID all you do is type in the address of this profile page. The site you’re on wanders over to that address, the other site asks you for your password, you tell it your password and then you’re bounced back to the original site where you are logged in and can get on with your business unfussed. Sometimes the local site will ask you if you want a different user name. That’s all there is to it.
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What strike me is that the Singapore government started one sign in function for all of their government portal long before this OpenID concept came about. Something simple yet no one really start to think about it in bigger scale until OpenID.

Check out plasticbag.org for more.