Interesting Things on the Internet in Q4 of 2013

This year the run up to Christmas seemed especially manic, so I seem to have accumulated an impressive list of open-tabs-to-blog-about-later, even by my standards. As usual, the original this-should-be-a-carefully-thought-out-blog-post moment has gone, but if they made it as far as a left-open tab they’re definitely worth sharing…

• How I Built Emojitracker A great, in-depth explanation of building a web service at a massive scale (even though he didn't intend to do that when setting out to make it...)
• Following on from that, Stream Updates with Server-Sent Events was a good overview of how web servers can send multiple events to a client. A good way to avoid polling if you don't need bi-directional communication
• Disability Mapping with OpenStreetMap - one of the benefits of open-data such as OpenStreetMap is that new communities can repurpose it to better suit themselves, and everyone benefits from their work
• A fantastic overview from Tod E. Kurt of how they took blink(1) from prototype to production
• They may have the money, but we have the tools of technology, which is a longer-winded hint that more of the tech community is starting to realise that they can't pretend that tech is apolitical. For a more direct approach in a similar vein, see OpenPolitics
• The Inferno of Independence. Lots of this rang true, from the stress of being independent (see also Dan Catt); to the frustration at watching (and participating in) talented friends struggling to be paid for their good work while barely talented chancers cash in; to the importance of language and the words we use.
• Shared under sad circumstances, as an eulogy to Red Burns, but it's a wonderful list of maxims for thinking about technology and design
• In what's turned out to be a follow-up to my last post, which also linked to him, Jeremy Keith's transcript of his talk at Beyond Tellerand is a superb talk about the future of the Internet, caring about data, and longer-term thinking
• David Simon (creator of The Wire) speaks out about the divide between rich and poor in "There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show"
• More post-Snowden thinking from Bruce Schneier - The Battle for Power on the Internet
• Maciej Ceglowski's talk from XOXO - mentioned in The Inferno of Independence that I linked to above, but worth its own link - Thoreau 2.0