Fast Company: Hidden Asset: All great ideas have at least one of these three key elements: You do things right, you do the right thing, or you do something new.

Field of Schemes: Casting a critical eye on the roughly $2 billion a year in public subsidies that go toward building new pro sports facilities all over the country. (See also: Trying to assess the value of naming rights)

Kempa.com: Vinyl Data: One strategy that major record companies have been employing lately to deter downloading is adding bonus computer content to new CD releases. I recently discovered that this technique is not unique to CD’s, but had in fact been practiced in the vinyl era as well. That’s right: there were a handful of records released in the late 70′s and early 80′s that contained computer programs as part of the audio. This is totally insane, and totally great.

The Degree Confluence Project: The Degree Confluence Project is a global image mapping project where people visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures and stories and then posted together. The project is an organized sampling of the world.

Why CDs are slipping down the charts: The music industry is being sustained by middle-aged men who can’t use the internet.

Why Sugar Pills Cure Some Ills: “Many people see placebo as just about that doctor-patient relationship, that laying on of hands, that trust… that placebo is some kind of poor man’s psychotherapy. It’s just the interaction, and any interaction is good.”

People who take placebos don’t always get better, and in some cases, they actually feel worse. In recent years, researchers have begun exploring the so-called “nocebo” effect: People who take placebos sometimes develop the side effects of the drugs they think they’re taking. (“Nocebo” is Latin for “I will harm”; “placebo” means “I will please.”)

Turns out not only does my hometown of St. Paul have a new official city (events) logo that I was unaware of, but Minneapolis (my current residence) is looking to rebrand as well.

Understanding visual communication: They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Indeed, some pictures are better at conveying some things than words. Still, not all pictures are created equal, and the power of visual communication is sometimes misunderstood, if not misused. Pictures are no panacea; some words may well convey concepts better than a thousand pictures, too.

With its numerous examples, during the workshop, the speaker took the audience on a journey into the nature of visual communication. He clarified the fundamental differences between visual codings (pictures) and verbal ones (text), underlining the strengths and the weaknesses of each. Focusing on pictures, he then proposed a way to classify them, and hence to select the right visual representation for a given purpose. Finally, once a representation is selected, recommendations on how to optimise it were presented.

NBS: Theory: EBay as Flea Market: “Let’s assume EBay looks the way it does (not great) because not a lot of attention was paid to the design. Now let’s say they had contracted the design to a professional services firm that practices user-centered design. What would the result look like? Most likely something pretty slick. What if, like a flea market’s rough, seller-created environment, the amateur design communicates the idea of bargain?”

I have always thought that some poor designs are purposely left alone (and some are even done poorly from the beginning on purpose) because the idea behind good design appearing “slick” or “selling out” is what some places don’t want to convey (because poor designs convey a “hand made” or “mom and pop” feel, perfect for grassroots orgs or companies who don’t want to appear like a big faceless corporation.) It also sort of tells the users “We focus on people and saving you money, not spending your money on fancy shmancy web site consultants.”

reBlog.org: reBlog, the software behind Eyebeam, is now available as an open source software project, so you can start your own version.