475 Square Feet of Ideas: June 2009

Best of the Web, Early 2009

Published Wednesday, June 03, 2009 by James.

as told by the Librarian in Black

100 Million CC-Licensed Images on Flickr

Published by James.

Ever wonder what the licensing breakdown is? Check this out.

Poetry to a Non-Literary Type

Published by James.

Prototype as if you are right.
Listen as if you are wrong.

Helene Blowers

Why Text Messages Are Limited to 160 Characters

Published by James.

In 1985, alone in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters. That became Hillebrand’s magic number—and set the standard for one of today’s most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging.

Los Angeles Times, May 3