Great reading this week. Enjoy.

  1. The Listening Machine

    Wicked cool concept from the BBC and the Arts Council England, The Listening Machine is “an automated system that generates a continuous piece of music based on the activity of 500 Twitter users around the United Kingdom.” If you’re looking for some background music to listen to while designing, hacking, etc. then this is worth checking out.

  2. Responsive Images and Web Standards at the Turning Point

    A must-read article from A List Apart that lays out where we are at with responsive images and how best to move forward. Instead of writing with hosility toward the WHATWG, ALA takes the high-ground and offers an alternative to the awkward solution proposed by the WHATWG for responsive images.

  3. With Spotify and its ilk, there’s no ‘my’ in music anymore

    I can’t tell you how reluctant I am to hold on to my CD collection, even though I can’t remember the last time I listened to one. Randall Roberts at the LA Times captures my feelings to a T: > All this activity has rendered meaningless three pregnant words — “I have that” — which always gave me a metaphorical leg up as a geek, critic and would-be tastemaker. It’s not easy to impress a kid with your Roc-A-Fella vinyl when she’s got the entire Jay-Z catalog, complete with cameos, collaborations, covers and karaoke versions, a few finger-bumps away. “Garvey’s Ghost,” the stunning dub version of Burning Spear’s “Marcus Garvey,” used to be rare. Now it’s been Spotified.

  4. Zeldman’s Web Design Manifesto 2012

    Zeldman defends his recent redesign progress on his site by writing a great piece about how personal site designs should be the place where we can experiment and innovate. > This is my personal site. There are many like it, but this one is mine. Designers with personal sites should experiment with new layout models when they can. > This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the problem of most websites’ pointlessly cluttered interfaces and content-hostile text layouts by actually removing the designer from the equation.

  5. Two Universes

    Rands has a great writeup about how rewarding users through your interface in order to intice them to keep learning can be a great idea.