Once a day, a zoomable map from their archives depicting an historical news event or milestone, accompanied by a short article and a related trivia question.

BlackBerry’s 3G response to the iPhone looks much nicer, but I’m not sure it breaks any paradigms.

“Although Nokia and Microsoft gave us an endless supply of concept products over the years, they haven’t produced, for example, anything like the TiVo, the iPod, the iPhone, OS X, the iTunes App Store, or created brand new user experience paradigms, transformed calcified markets, captured the imagination of people, and so on. They didn’t have the organizational and intellectual discipline to go from concept to product.”

Dan Cederholm proposes a simple and clever solution for specifying ampersands in CSS. Also includes visual chart of some of the “more interesting italic ampersands available as default fonts on Mac and Windows.”

A six-minute primer on avoiding dealer treachery. I may actually be in the market for a new car soon.

In which the authority on information visualization discusses “computer administration debris” and his maxim “to clarify, add detail.”

Holy moley. A treasure trove of iconic, exquisitely designed posters, tickets, stationery, pamphlets and more Games-related collateral from a modernist master.

“Gary Armstrong, chief marketing officer for Wenner Media, pointed to Vanity Fair, which has lower overall circulation than Rolling Stone, but nearly three times the single-copy sales. With a standard format, he said, it should be possible to raise newsstand sales significantly.” Probably a smart but nevertheless a somewhat sad economic decision.

Insightful if not conclusive commentary on what went wrong with Apple’s shaky launch of the MobileMe service, from a veteran of Apple. Gasée accurately characterizes seamless synchronization as an underestimated challenge, but lets Apple off too easily, in my opinion. They had more than just the lead up to MobileMe to get synching right; they also had the several years when they were running nearly the exact same service as .Mac. And it was hardly seamless then, too.

Saul Hansell contends that “the basic dynamics of the iTunes store are much better than those of Amazon,” and “the iTunes business model looks more profitable than that of eBay, which despite its current problems, has been the most successful e-commerce business in the world.”