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The Volokh Conspiracy's David Post shreds the Authors Guild ed­i­to­ri­al in this week's NYT. In it, Scott Turow and James Shapiro ar­gue that America should in­tro­duce COICA, an of­fi­cial cen­sor­ship law that blocks web­sites that large com­pa­nies from the en­ter­tain­ment in­dus­try don't like. It's alarm­ing to see au­thors ar­gu­ing in fa­vor of cen­sor­ship, but the ar­gu­ment put for­ward in the ed­i­to­ri­al, "Would the Bard have Survived the Web?" is al­so pro­found­ly ig­no­rant ac­count of how Shakespeare wrote his (...)

Getting some­thing for free can be a won­der­ful thing un­der the right cir­cum­stances, but it al­so has the pow­er to in­flu­ence the way you think in un­for­tu­nate ways. Dan Ariely, au­thor of Predictably Irrational, has stud­ied the pow­er of free in var­i­ous ways. The find­ings al­ways seem to point to one thing: fool­ish and/or ir­ra­tional de­ci­sions.

‘Less is More’, an apho­rism coined by the German – American ar­chi­tect for Coining suits the term ‘Minimalism’ in an apt way. In to­day’s world where ev­ery­thing is grow­ing in a fast paced man­ner, we have to com­pro­mise some­where to catch up with the speed, like a skyscrap­er can­not be con­struct­ed with all the ar­chi­tec­ture and the fine de­tails as in case of a palace, but a skyscrap­er does jus­tice to its part and ev­ery­body ac­cepts this. In the world of dark­ness, a sim­ple can­dle can light the whole (...)

Ernest Hemingway, min­i­mal­ist, good at writ­ing. The first thing ev­ery­one will know in a skill are the ba­sic prin­ci­ples and ex­er­cis­es which will be the foun­da­tion for the more ad­vanced levels. Take for ex­am­ple the mas­ters in mar­tial arts, ev­ery day they prac­tice their ba­sic foot­work, ba­sic kicks and punch­es, ev­ery­thing ba­sic. Why? Because mas­ter­ing the fun­da­men­tals of a skill is the cor­rect path in­to be­com­ing awe­some! Master the ba­sics of writ­ing a sen­tence and you’re on your way to be­com­ing a (...)

I’m sure all blog­gers won­der, “How did others make it to the top? If on­ly some­one would share the se­crets of be­com­ing a pop­u­lar blog­ger.” Summing up and cat­e­go­riz­ing the good and bad habits of high­ly ef­fec­tive blog­gers could be frus­trat­ing; you might be­gin to see that some suc­cess­ful blog­gers have cer­tain be­hav­iors in com­mon, while others ab­so­lute­ly don’t. What does it take, then, to be­come a pop­u­lar blog­ger, to be ac­cept­ed, trust­ed and fol­lowed by many? I’ve dis­cov­ered some in­ter­est­ing (...)

Add an­oth­er chap­ter to the odd sto­ry of the WikiLeaks e-book that Amazon sold, stopped selling and is now selling again: The au­thor tells me he asked Amazon’s U.K. site to re­move the book after he re­ceived anony­mous threats again­st him and his fam­i­ly. But he says he has now re­con­sid­ered and wants the book sold, after all–even if it angers some WikiLeaks sup­port­ers. To re­cap: Amazon re­ceived a storm of crit­i­cism yes­ter­day for selling this oddly named e-book “Wik­iLeaks doc­u­ments ex­pose US (...)

This post is part of our dai­ly series of posts show­ing the most in­spir­ing im­ages se­lect­ed by some of the Abduzeedo's writ­ers and users. If you want to par­tic­i­pate and share your graph­ic de­sign in­spi­ra­tion, just send us, via email, the im­age with the link from where you found it, al­so use "Daily Inspiration" in the sub­ject, and don't for­get to send your Abduzeedo user­name; or via Twitter send­ing to http://twit­ter.com/ab­duzee­do If pos­si­ble use the HTML code: Do you want to see all (...)

While I was up late one night read­ing the Copyblogger archives (yes, I know I need to get a life), I stum­bled across a great post dis­cussing some bril­liant writ­ing tips. The post in­spired me to write — but since I was on my iPad at the time, how was I go­ing to cap­ture my bril­liant in­sights on my mo­bile de­vice? More and more peo­ple are us­ing mo­bile de­vices to cre­ate con­tent — and thank­ful­ly, there are a slew of new apps that make it in­cred­i­bly easy to write on the go. Some time ago we (...)

The snap­pi­ly ti­tled tome WikiLeaks Documents Expose US Foreign Policy Conspiracies was pulled from Amazon after be­ing of­fered as a down­load on the UK ver­sion of the site. Despite the deep­en­ing con­tro­ver­sy around the whistle blow­ing site, how­ev­er, Amazon in­sists that it played no part in the re­moval of the eBook. "We did not re­move the ti­tle," a spokesper­son for the site told PCMag, "and are ver­i­fy­ing that it was re­moved from sale by the au­thor." Amazon ap­par­ent­ly opt­ed not to re­move Heinz (...)

There are a few dif­fer­ent ways to mea­sure the pow­er of a meme in the tech in­dus­try. You can run pow­er­ful sen­ti­ment anal­y­sis on blog posts and mes­sage boards, scour trend­ing topics on Twitter, or just fol­low the money. While it’s no ab­so­lute indi­ca­tor, the ap­pear­ance of well-re­spect­ed ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists and an­gels in a sec­tor is usu­al­ly re­gard­ed as a se­ri­ous mar­ket sig­nal. And “gam­i­fi­ca­tion,” or the use of game me­chan­ics to boost in­ter­est in non-game ap­pli­ca­tions, is no ex­cep­tion. The no­tion (...)

I will be post­ing some fresh free fonts ev­ery Friday, yes I know it's awe­some. I will look for­ward to bring a lot of great fonts that will sure help you im­prove your ty­pog­ra­phy work. Check out what I se­lect­ed for you on the FFFF#78 and make sure to come­back for more next week. Click here to view all Friday Fresh Free Fonts Augustus by TechFonts LatAm Download Augustus CheapProFonts by CheapProFonts Download CheapProFonts Retro Stereo Wide by Gus Thessalos Download Retro (...)

“It’s been a great year for web de­sign books; the best we can re­mem­ber for a while, in fact!” So be­gins Goburo’s re­view of the Top Web Books of 2010. The list is ex­treme­ly se­lec­tive, con­tain­ing on­ly four books. But what books! They are: Andy Clarke’s Hardboiled Web Design (Five Simple Steps); Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers (A Book Apart); Dan Cederholm’s CSS3 For Web Designers (A Book Apart); and Eric Meyer’s Smashing CSS (Wiley and Sons). I’m thrilled to have had a hand in three of the (...)

Although it's easy to cal­cu­late the im­pact of ad­di­tion­al green­house gasses on the tem­per­a­ture, the­se sim­ple cal­cu­la­tions don't cap­ture the po­ten­tial for feed­backs in the sys­tem. The easi­est feed­back to un­der­stand is the ice-albedo re­spon­se. As tem­per­a­tures rise, ice melts; that ice nor­mal­ly re­flects back most of the sun­light that hits it, so its loss leads to in­creased ab­sorp­tion of sun­light and hence, a fur­ther in­crease in tem­per­a­ture. Ice is hard­ly the on­ly feed­back, how­ev­er, so (...)

Insane: the word that comes to mind when I first saw the work of Anselm von Seherr-Thoss. I hap­pened to be ca­su­al­ly check­ing out videos on Vimeo, and some­how I stum­bled upon his vi­su­al ef­fects show reel. I was so im­pressed, in­spired; ec­stat­ic at the thought of pos­si­bly in­ter­view­ing him. After get­ting in con­tact, I knew he’d be per­fect for an in­ter­view. What a great guy, he’s very knowl­edge­able in his field; sim­ply put, he knows what he’s talk­ing about. Without fur­ther ado, I pre­sent to you an (...)

This 2-part tu­to­ri­al on Design Instruct, our other site, will walk you through the cre­ation of a Photoshop mock-up as well as provide you with a de­tailed guide on how to con­vert the de­sign in­to an HTML5 tem­plate. Final Result Click the pre­view im­age be­low to go to Part 1 of the tu­to­ri­al series on Design Instruct (or go to Part 2 in­stead). Other Things to Do Subscribe to the Design Instruct RSS feed Follow @de­signin­struct on Twitter Related Content How to Make an Elegant Patterned (...)

The idea in this series is to show beau­ti­ful and in­spir­ing hous­es. Houses that are re­mark­able for its de­sign, el­e­gance, ele­ments, con­cept or sim­ply be­cause they are beau­ti­ful. So if you like ar­chi­tec­ture, in­te­ri­or de­sign and beau­ti­ful­ly de­signed hous­es, you are at the right spot. Check out this week beau­ti­ful house and stay tuned for more... This week we pre­sent you the beau­ti­ful K3 House. The K3 House is a pro­ject by Bruce Stafford Architects, an award win­ning stu­dio based in Sydney, (...)

The Logo Design series is up and run­ning! We're think­ing ahead and we want to find new ways to sort the­se list­ings. Last week we had a post on lo­gos with Smiles... to­day it's all about moun­tains! As usu­al, we'll search for lo­gos in the­se gal­leries: Logopond, Logo Faves, Logo Moose, Logo from Dreams, Logo Gala, WS Logos, The Logo Mix and Wolda. We hope you all en­joy our se­lec­tion! Cheers. (...)

Matt Mullengweg (the founder of WordPress and Automattic) re­cent­ly was able to an­swer some ques­tions re­gard­ing the strength of WordPress at Le Web (one of the lead­ing tech con­fer­ence in Europe). While some of the ques­tions an­swered at Le Web were not sur­pris­ing (i.e.  his de­sire for Automattic to avoid be­ing ac­quired), a few an­swers re­gard­ing rev­enues for WP.com were. Are you mak­ing money? We’re fo­cused on growth right now, so we’ve in­vest­ed a lot in in­fras­truc­ture and so on. We haven’t been (...)

This post is part of our dai­ly series of posts show­ing the most in­spir­ing im­ages se­lect­ed by some of the Abduzeedo's writ­ers and users. If you want to par­tic­i­pate and share your graph­ic de­sign in­spi­ra­tion, just send us, via email, the im­age with the link from where you found it, al­so use "Daily Inspiration" in the sub­ject, and don't for­get to send your Abduzeedo user­name; or via Twitter send­ing to http://twit­ter.com/ab­duzee­do If pos­si­ble use the HTML code: Do you want to see all (...)

UPDATE: Amazon UK is no longer selling the WikiLeaks book; a note on the site says the self-pub­lished ti­tle “has been re­moved by au­thor.” Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener says he doesn’t know why au­thor Heinz Duthel pulled the book, and says Amazon has had no con­tact with him. UPDATE 2: And now it ap­pears to be back. Here’s an in­ter­view with Duthel ex­plain­ing why he pulled the book, and why he asked Amazon to start selling it again. ————————- EARLIER: Last week Amazon pulled the plug on WikiLeaks (...)