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Made by Many is the first company that I’ve worked at that is solely focused on social media. This has come with its own opportunities and challenges, not least of which is knowing how to successfully design for sites that are built around user generated content and not brochure-ware or dynamic information.

This particularly came home on a recent project when we started researching our client’s competition: review and recommendation sites. One of the most interesting parts of this process was noticing how everyone is broadly dealing with the same information, yet with varying degrees of success.

Okay, this is the third and almost the last of my posts about who I met in NYC. Not for Tourists is an independent publisher of guidebooks. They do a whole load of US cities in addition to the one that doesn’t sleep, including LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Washington, Atlanta and Philadelphia and more. They’re launching the London edition in October. They are the very epitome of an indie NY publishing company and they get the Web. They get it to such an extent that they give all the content away – as in, you can get a PDF of everywhere they cover. As founder Rob Tallia says, “You either pay in money or printer cartridges and paper”. We had a really fun time with Rob and Craig and I look forward to steak and booze next time. ;-)

Another of the cool people I met last week in New York was David Ziegler, founder of Foodist Colony – a community website that allows food lovers to share restaurant recommendations. The community has been growing rapidly since David launched the site two years ago. There are lots of cool features Another of the cool people I met last week in New York was David Ziegler, founder ofFoodist Colony – a community website that allows food lovers to share restaurant recommendations. The community has been growing rapidly since David launched the site two years ago. There are lots of cool features to save people time: content is aggregated from the best food bloggers/websites and presented as a map mash-up.

I met Will Stephens for a beer last week in a pub in Williamsburg (I can’t remember what it was – very hoppy) to find out more about Beer Menus – a very cool beer, bar and map mashup covering Manhattan and Brooklyn. Will had a terrific story to tell about the new service. It launched in March this year and now carries details of nearly 300 venues/beer menus, and 1,514 individual types of beer.

MyFolia.com, an innovative new online gardening community and organiser that lets you list the plants you want to grow and matches you to gardeners who want to swap seeds. As you’d expect,MyFolia.com is packed with tools to allow gardeners to swap ideas and tips as well, but it’s the seed swapping that drew the attention of a commenter at Lifehacker and has cast a dark cloud over conversations in the groups area of MyFolia:

I’ve been meaning to check out the more complex selectors in CSS 2.1 for a long time but never seemed to find the time to experiment. So having some downtime the other day I thought I should get constructive.

Descendant selectors seem well used in CSS these days and are a powerful way to target HTML elements within the page (for e.g. div.message p, which targets all p tags within div elements that have a class of ‘message’). It’s a good way to keep your HTML as clean as possible because it reduces the need to give every element on the page a unique id or a class for targeting purposes. And they’re well supported in all the major browsers that I usually test with – Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE down to 5.0.

MOMA have established a seriously inspiring online exhibition to accompany ‘Design and the Elastic Mind‘. It explores the impact that technology, science and (increasingly) digital media has had on all aspects of design, from visualisation to bio-mimicry.

I’ve noticed clients recoil at the phrase “Rockstar Developers”. The image of a drink, drugs and – gulp – sex-crazed development team smashing up their dressing room is problematic for many reasons. I kind of recoil from it too. It’s yucky. Nevertheless, ReadWriteWeb has published a list of the ‘Top Ten Traits of the Rockstar Software Engineer‘. It makes fascinating reading, especially if you work closely with one. The official list goes up to 10, but I’ve added a few of my own, and shuffled. See if you can guess which ones are true. Please feel free to suggest some yourself.

The Swedish monitoring service Pingdom has published a couple of graphs of the Web’s growth from zero websites to 162 million. I’ve added my own commentary to the one below. This post is brilliantly, economically, unemotionally, frankly Swedish.

I was watching TV last night when the Berocca ad came onto the box.