Links for 06-10-2010

• Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Urban Rail Transit Maps
• John Nack on Adobe: Brief thoughts (and a question) on tablets & styluses - "When did my finger start resembling a giant breadstick? More on that in a moment."
• ignore the code: Gestures - "In a way, gestural user interfaces are a step back, a throwback to the command line. Gestures are often not obvious and hard to discover; the user interface doesn’t tell you what you can do with an object. Instead, you have to remember which gestures you can use, the same way you had to remember the commands you could use in a command line interface."
• Locals and Tourists - a set on Flickr - Fascinating maps of local vs. tourists in many cities using geotagged photo data.
• Urban Photo Data Uncovers Local Hot Spots - Yet another interesting example of the sort of information that can be mined from widespread "instrumentation"
• The 'Cloud Computing Bill of Rights': 2010 edition | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News - "Possibly the best thing cloud vendors can do to extend their community, and encourage innovation on their platform from community members is to open their platform as much as possible. By making themselves the "reference platform" for their respective market space, an open vendor creates a petrie dish of sorts for cultivating differentiating features and successes on their platform. Protective proprietary vendors are on their own."
• Balkinization - "The fictional high school chorus at the center of Fox’s Glee has a huge problem — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability. For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it’s surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned. But it does, and week after week, those zany Glee kids rack up the potential to pay higher and higher fines."
• Session videos from Google I/O 2010 now available | Google Earth Blog - I've been wanting to get back to playing with Google Maps again but I haven't had the time.
• Lessons from Apple on Advertising and Aesthetics | Smarterware - "They aim for your heart, and show you how technology can make your life better during its most important moments. Contrast this with the Droid ads, which actually scare my friend's two-year-old daughter away from the TV when they come on. The dark, rainy background, the spinning globe of glowing apps, the robot hands poking at them, nary a human in sight. Droid does. Does what? Show, don't tell."