I hadn’t heard much about Google’s new open source browser when I tried searching for it. Obviously searching for a new Google product in their own search engine was going to point me at whatever they wanted it to, so I was surprised to find that instead of the about page for the browser (currently just a Windows beta), the second result after Google News coverage was a beautiful comic explaining the new browser and the various technologies it thinks will be game-changing in the browser market.

While reading it I kept thinking, wow, this reminds me so much of Scott McCloud’s stuff: the blue shading, the way the panels are being used, the whole information heaviness…. The credits were only at the end, so I gave myself a gold star when I was right.

McCloud wrote two mind-blowing books about how comics work and why they are so awesome, Understanding Comics (Wikipedia link) and Reinventing Comics, that really influenced me back when I was feeling the first urges to start making my own comics. He made really solid arguments for using comics as a serious means of conveying information too complicated for written or verbal explanation but with a much lower budget than an ideal film production.

You’ll have to decide for yourself whether this comic about Chrome lives up to the dream of information utopia though sequential art. It’s very complex and actually does explain the core concepts behind their browser programming, so it’s fairly hard to understand everything happening on every page. It’s definitely beautiful though, and makes the programming concepts way more approachable than any text based article ever could have.

In a fit of shortsighted kindness, the organizers of Wordcamp San Francisco (a conference/unconference about my favorite headache, Wordpress) have invited++ me to come and speak about Global Voices and how we use Wordpress to do the crazy thing we do.

I’ve heard only great things about past Wordcamps (they’re all over the place, there’s one in Toronto in October and a New York one on the same day!), and I’m deeply honored to be able to represent Global Voices and all the amazing people that make it a reality at the SF meeting. I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be, let alone be the one speaking.

If anyone is in the area and into Wordpress you should check it out, if I know you and you’re from SF drop me a line, I’ll be in town for a few days.

(via. icanhascheezburger)

Not that anyone would check here, but I will be out of town on vacation surrounding the Global Voices Summit in Budapest starting tomorrow and lasting about a month. I’ll be seeing Morrocco, Spain, Hungary and London (Note: NOT London, ON). Thanks to GV for the cross-atlantic travel opportunity, hopefully I’ll even post some photos if I see anything good out there.

And because i made this badge and love how it looks:

P.S. if you’re looking for some actual content check out Jim Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation, that’s what’s on my mind.

Great essay about understanding and wrangling your pet nerd by Rands In Repose:

A majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”. Nerds know how a computer works. They intimately know how a computer works. When you ask a nerd, “When I click this, it takes awhile for the thing to show up. Do you know what’s wrong?” they know what’s wrong.

Your nerd has control issues. Your nerd lives in a monospaced typeface world. Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest fumble around with a mouse.

While I really wouldn’t want this to all be true about me, there’s definitely a lot of plain facts layed out. Great read if you are or know some serious nerds (with a bent towards tech pros/programmers specifically).

(via. Lindsay, photo from Mental Floss)

(hit the banner to see their site, which tries to explain RSS for normal people)

RSS is what happens to the web after we stop wasting our time and get down to business. It’s like if we all got our news on differently shaped cue cards and someone offered us a magazine instead. At first you’d think “oh, but I like the colors on the cue cards” and “this paper is boring, it all looks the same”, but pretty quickly you’d realize how much more convenient it is to carry the magazine, and how much more time you can spend reading the stories in it rather than organizing your cue cards.

Info-junkies of the world REJOICE, today is RSS Day!

(I like NetNewsWire as an RSS reader for Mac, but I hear even the online Google one works really well. )

This is so good, but completely meaningless unless you’re in on so many nerdy internet things. For reference see Fail Blog, an example of Epic Fail (which is originally a D&D joke) and Unix Time, which sets it’s zero moment as Jan1 1970 (a.k.a. the Unix Epoch).

Is XKCD the best thing ever? Yes.

I hate to post things that are already on the front page of YouTube, but this is just too sweet, thoughtful and funny. I’m also a sucker for acoustic guitar and immaculately performed lo-fi camera tricks, both of which are excellently executed in this one.

Dan and Dan in “Requiem for a Wardrobe”

Candy Chang points out how the urban grind can make people lose sight of the bigger questions in their lives, and puts those questions on the sidewalk for people looking down:

(more photos at the link above)

This is an amazing idea. Artistic graffiti is beautiful and wonderful, but simple questions like these can be so powerful and visceral for the people who see them, regardless of how they’d normally feel about art or vandalism. I usually use chalk.

(Found via. Spacing Montreal)

I had to. Via lolbots.

Also on the subject of unnecessary electrical violence, this amazing techno/video remix of the original ‘Dont’ Tase me Bro’ student situation. The mix is just so catchy, I saw it a few months ago but still randomly get it stuck in my head. YouTube Link.