2010. A new year, no resolutions, but a strong, well rested desire to embrace writing all over again.

A draft set of rules for groups playing multiple, simultaneous games of Settlers of Catan, enabling trading of resources between games (and rewarding the establishment of trade routes.)

A copy of my vitriolic response to James Aylett’s dissection of the Tenth Doctor’s finale, ‘The End of Time’.

There is value in email, and that value is communication. Over years, service providers and publishers have taken advantage of email’s ubiquity to adapt it for push, notification and automation. Better solutions to those use cases are emerging (or already exist), so this is the time to reclaim the inbox, reduce your email throughput back to what the medium is really good for. I’ve already seen that a little bit of persistent effort can greatly increase the quality of email as a tool.

Part one of my Designing for Location series. Back in 2008 I worked for Yahoo! on Fire Eagle, in 2009 I tried to present everything I’d learned to an audience at Chromatic in San Francisco, and this is the long delayed write-up of what I know.

I like the iPad; I’d like to buy one for my parents.

Many of the restrictions around the iPhone OS are well documented and infamous. Here though, I lament the loss of a less regarded capability of open systems; the extensibility of existing applications themselves, and explore the closest alternative on the iPad: The web browser, and the web itself.

Some months ago, Apple acquired a music service that I didn’t care about: Lala. I didn’t care because between my personal library in iTunes and on my iPod, Spotify (via proxy), Last.FM, and Hype Machine I was well hydrated for music discovery and appreciation. Lala was famous for its ‘web songs’ model, where you pay a small fraction of the retail price for a song or album in order to stream it repeatedly from its site. Neat, but I’m sceptical of ‘renting music’.

The Web does suck at APIs, and hardware devices, and 3D acceleration. None of those things have anything to do with being a web of information. This essay tries to explain why I disagree so strongly with recent detractors, and why I passionately believe in the web’s true, native architecture: Interlinked information.

Leo Hickman wrote about FourSquare. Badly. But not entirely incorrectly, which means swallowing geek pride, and focus on a the major social behaviour problem that he highlights.