1. Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People

We've written before about how green design gets attention, but often misses the mark. Here's something we can get behind: a book about good design that does good for people.

Via.

2. Are You a Digital Sharecropper?

Jeff Atwood has a thoughtful post about the investments we make in user-generated content. He asks: in the long run, what's really in it for us?

In essence, any website where user generated content is the website, that is also a for-profit business (not a non-profit organization, ala Wikipedia) -- is effectively turning their users into digital sharecroppers. Digital sharecroppers typically get nothing in return for the content they've provided, and often give up all rights to what they've created.

The issue is complex —not something that can be resolved in a blog post— but it got me thinking. What are the design ethics of user-generated content sites? Atwood hints at this when he says there should be a "healthy, reciprocal relationship", but I'd like to develop it further....

3. People as pixels -- soldiers line up to create American images

Check out these photographs. These images are, in fact, thousands of US soldiers carefully arranged to depict symbols of the USA and US Military.

The Living Emblem of the United States Marines
Arthur S. Mole and John D. Thomas, Photographers

Impressive. Those are buildings in the distance. That's some serious scale!

4. CrossBrowserTesting.com

Paul shared this great service the other day. It's a virtual client where you can view your websites in nearly any version browser on any OS. Useful!

You can check out what your design looks like in, say, IE6 on WindowsXP without needing another rig.