Refavorited is a Tumblog (do people still say that?) where my favorites from Etsy, SoundCloud, YouTube, Flickr, Fancy, Twitter and Wikipedia go, automatically, via ifttt.

Etsy is not yet an official channel on ifttt (but is so ready), so I’m using my Etsy favorites RSS feed as a trigger. As for Wikipedia, for a long time now i’ve felt compelled to save articles I learn from and like in a Delicious account for lack of something better and the time to build it, as a sort of record of random learning, and Delicious is a channel available on ifttt.

Other channels I would love to see on ifttt: Simplenote (I broke up with the ifttt-supported Evernote for Simplenote earlier this year and have never looked back; they have a backroom API), Findings (API on GitHub), Pinterest and Quora (no official APIs yet) (what’s up, Palo Alto?).

This all arose from extended rumination on sharing, and what motivates people to share things they like online. There is a good Quora thread on why people share; every answer is worth reading. Deena Varshavskaya’s is the broadest and most succinct:

Sharing is a basic unit of socializing. Humans are social animals and socializing is at the foundation of who we are. When people approve, appreciate or relate to something we do or say, we feel good. This can be explained in evolutionary terms. Social validation means reduced risk and uncertainty. Life is all about managing risk and one way to reduce risk is to do things the same way as other people do it (i.e., a lot of people are statistically less likely to be wrong than a single person).

Sharing various aspects of ourselves gives us a chance to get validation (validation = reduced uncertainty) in our life choices.

Validation is really at the heart of it, and systems that facilitate validation—alerting you when someone out there likes something you posted—keep you motivated to continue sharing.

There’s also this slightly crazy presentation on discovery from a few years ago that I return to regularly and still find valuable. Basically, enabling discovery is about allowing people to:

1. Discover new, valuable information
2. Get discovered by others
3. Discover more about themselves

Which is another way of saying discovery is about facilitating social validation.

The New Delicious tagline is “Discover Yourself!” Services that can get you hooked on doing that can help other people discover things that they never would have thought to search for—like everything I’ve ever favorited on Etsy, SoundCloud, Flickr, Fancy, YouTube and Twitter.

Alternate filtering in effect for followers here on Etsy.

No official API yet, but that hasn’t stopped Kellan.

Here are two standouts that kind of smacked me in the face.

Stripe plops you inside the user’s dashboard and has you run a test charge with their payments API immediately. By using it, you see how simple it is. You use it as “Unsaved account.” You appear to be logged in with this unsaved account. You create a test payment by using it, which goes under ‘Recent payments’ in your dashboard. It’s your first payment. Look, you did that. Now enter an email address and password in step 2 and you have an account.

Codecademy gets you started by getting you started. You use the site by typing in a console in response to some friendly, conversational direction. You earn your first badge by making an error on purpose, as directed by the site. Then zoom through lesson 2 of 8. Feels good. As part of the third lesson, you end up providing Codecademy with your full name. It isn’t until you’ve completed this lesson that you’re asked to create an account to save “all the awesome progress you’ve made.” You need to do so to continue.

On Wikipedia, onboarding, “also known as organizational socialization, refers to the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills and behaviors to become effective organizational members and insiders.” It makes a lot of sense that this term we use for getting new users involved with your site comes from the world of employment, when you think about it.

In other words, everything that makes the old Treasury unique is related to the fact that it’s a Flash application: its constraints, and its real-time feel. These things are inseparable from its origins in Flash. But at Etsy an entirely new infrastructure for collections is being created, powered by MongoDB.

So we launched Treasury East as a testing ground for a new unlimited Treasury world, where anyone would be able to create a curated list of items, and that curation activity would be rewarded and harnessed as the important signal it is in a marketplace of one-of-a-kind items made by humans. Etsy is filled with things you never knew existed and never knew you wanted. People welcome guidance and clues from other people in this environment.

And the birth of Treasury East has been remarkable. It feels like the flowering of something new and great, as fascinating items and shops are surfaced by people with a talent for finding things.

Because as any collector knows, it’s fun and satisfying to find things, and can be an outlet for self-expression. Here’s a list I made this morning while on a vintage mid-century modern housewares binge (it happens):

Already we’re seeing games emerge organically, some reminiscent of the Etsy Sneak Attack and PIF (Pay It Forward) phenomena, like Treasury East BnR (Buy and Replace), started by Grace of Homespun Handmaiden. BnRs are bemoaned in the old Treasury world but in this new environment they start to feel like a primitive social-commerce life form that might evolve into something more interesting.

OK I’ve started a treasury east that’s a BnR (buy and replace). Basically you can buy any of the items in the treasury and post the transaction link in the comments. I then go to YOUR shop and replace the item you bought with one of your items! It’s a win-win for all involved. This is a great way to promote your shop and support fellow etsians at the same time!

Keeping an eye on the constant stream of Treasury East blog mentions and Twitter mentions for more.

• Tangentine: My Treasury East and thoughts on SEO, usability and opportunities
• Etsy’s Treasury East Rocks!
• “I tried out the new Treasury East feature on Etsy with this Malcolm McLaren-inspired collection from DIY crafters.“
• On Curating and Treasury East
• Treasury East… oh, the possibilities!
• “The whole world of Treasury East is cleaner, fancier, and just screams ‘buy me!’“
• “So, if the new treasuries never expire, why not explore this idea even further? Why not, in fact, create a treasury/inspiration board for each of my items?“
• East vs. West
• Etsy Treasury Tuesday
• “While fears of dilution are real, I don’t think persistence necessarily = creativity, and I’m confident Etsy will refine its Treasury East algorithm until the best of the best surface.”

1.
A few months ago I started picking up books on architecture, urban planning and social psychology and reading them with software design in mind. Christopher Alexander‘s ’77 classic A Pattern Language towers above the others in richness and hasn’t left my bedside. If you’re familiar with the use of design patterns in software development and the classic book on them, the format of A Pattern Language will be familiar: it was its inspiration. Jon Udell and Erin Malone have both written recently on the relevance of A Pattern Language to software design.

2.
Also been sifting through books, papers and presentations on neuroscience while thinking about software design. Neuro Web Design distills many of the key lessons from the field into one thin volume. Topics include the power of social validation, building reciprocity and concession, invoking scarcity, using similarity, mass interpersonal persuasion and the power of storytelling.

3.
Douglas Rushkoff spoke recently at Etsy on the creation of value and how to exchange it directly with others. His book, Life Inc., has been on my mind since the fall, and helped kickstart a line of inquiry I’m still following regarding the nature of currency. Watch Life Inc. the Movie for an worthy introduction. Stacey Brook also wrote up a recap of the Etsy event.

4.
If you’re familiar with the Yahoo Design Pattern Library you’ll be familiar with much of this book: Christian Crumlish is the curator of both. I crack it open regularly, though in some ways I prefer Joshua Porter’s older Designing for the Social Web. See 5 Steps to Building Social Experiences from co-author Erin Malone and the Social Patterns wiki for more.

5.
Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future is an Etsy Book Club selection. It’s a lucid book articulating the need to explore new economic ideas and create more localized economies. The big idea is that localization is the only way to achieve economic resilience, and Bill makes the case obvious.

6.
Been reading up on games and game mechanics for a while like a lot of people (see Amy Jo Kim and my favorite category on Wikipedia), and teaching myself Go, but was unaware of how great Games magazine was (is?) until I came across some early issues circa 1977 and ’78 at an antiques market. In between scholarly articles on ancient African games there are pages of logic puzzles, unusual crossword variants and ads for ’70s classics like Mastermind and Othello—plus the magazine itself is a game, with hidden contests in every issue. NYT crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz was an early contributor.

7.
This was a birthday gift from a few years ago, but there’s so much in it it’s still speaking. An extended abstract philosophical discussion among forest animals against a backdrop illustrated with obsessive detail, Kevin Hooyman’s The Language Change is one of the books that doesn’t leave the active stack because I’m still getting my head around it. In “Chapter One: The Animals Speak Amongst Themselves,” a bird asks, “Are numbers real?” A bearded dog answers, “They are useful but they are not real.” &c.

8.
My Piece of the Pie by Donald Brown. This is my grandfather’s autobiography, which I’ve been editing and designing. Family review copies have been circulating and I’m now trying to track down his patents to include them as an appendix. It will be available on Amazon eventually via Lulu.

9.
Beautiful Data is a collection of the stories behind elegant data solutions. Almost a book version of the kinds of things I was thinking about when I started working on Datamob, with many of the same players discussing different approaches to tackling the challenges of working with data. Michal Migurski of Stamen Design, whose 2009 Flea Market Mapping presentation still gets me excited, comes through with a detailed chapter on the process of freeing and beautifying urban data. There’s also a fine chapter from Jeff Hammerbacher tracing the history of Facebook’s data team and the evolution of the tools used for information processing at that scale.

10.
I spotted a pile of back issues of Evergreen Review circa 1970 and ’71 at the Beat Museum in San Francisco and found them irresistible. I had seen issues from the ’60s but in the ’70s things apparently got a lot sexier. Writing from counterculture greats, beautiful photography plus fascinating ads for underground book clubs and defunct concerns like Truth and Soul Fashions.

A new stack is forming now with The Pragmatic Programmer, Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn, Carl Jung’s Red Book, Coders at Work, and whatever I can manage to score from the Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Re-Make the World.

There are many strategies people use to make discoveries on Etsy. This is my favorite.

Find a shop you like? Check out the shop owner’s favorites. Find an item in their favorites that you like? Check out that shop owner’s favorites. Repeat until you realize three hours have gone by and you have 26 browser tabs open to Etsy pages.

I never stop at the shop level on Etsy. If I find an item of interest, I go past the shop to the shop owner’s favorites, and enter an affinity feedback loop. Below are some favoriters I’ve been digging lately, and here’s a Yahoo Pipes-generated meta-feed consolidating all their favoriting activity which you can subscribe to if they strike your fancy.

Protip: If you find yourself past page 3 of someone’s favorites, subscribe to their favorites feed add them to your Etsy circle.

corduroy‘s items populate most of my favorite sellers’ favorites, so being pulled into her favorites was inevitable. She’s led me down some fruitful paths.

Etsy all-star hearter TeenAngster hipped me to the favorites of groundwork (among many others), who happens to be corduroy‘s sister. Their mother, pogoshop, is also an active hearter. They share a great eye.

Just now after following a thread from groundwork’s favorites I was led to siiso (hearted this painting of hers). Her favorites led to half-dozen other eye-openers so she joins this list as well.

Icebear, aka Sofia Arnold, is in India right now but she left behind lots of quality favorites leads. I was taken with this free bird and French hermit crab.

Domestikate favors the witty. She likes “color, humor, good design, wood and skies of blue.” She also finds and sells parrot staplers.

yaelfran is one of Etsy’s heavy hearters, with a massive number of favorites. They’re a bottomless source of unusual illustrations and prints.

I’m a fan of Virginia Kraljevic‘s intricate line drawings and her favorites have led me to some interesting places, like Hillarie Tasche’s graffiti train drawings and Betsy Walton’s world.

More found daily.

Capitol Words visualizes the most frequently used words in the Congressional Record and does so in more useful ways than those Wordle word clouds we see all too often. They have a blessedly simple API as well.

ReadTheStimulus.org has made the full text of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 (House Stimulus Bill) searchable with comments for each page enabled. Actual dollar appropriations from the bill have been parsed out by volunteers and entered into a Google spreadsheet. Their tagline says it all: “$850 Billion, 941 pages, and counting… somebody needs to read it!”

The Legislative Lookup API from Mobile Commons is a database that matches latitude and longtitude with the U.S. congressional and state legislators for that location. Could be put to good use in your pet mapping application. They even made it available as a standalone Rails app.

Represent from The New York Times is the kind of application you could use the Mobile Commons Legislative Lookup API for. It’s a nice way for New Yorkers to find their elected representatives and see what they’re up to.

The New York Times Congress API is what actually powers Represent (Represent!). The great thing about it is that it was built to work with other publicly available data sources, so you can use it with the seven-character code used to identify members of Congress in the official Biographical Directory, or the numeric ID assigned by GovTrack to individual member responses.

DC Bikes is another example of a good local application, mapping bike routes, bike thefts and bike-related Craiglist postings for Washington, D.C. bikers. It uses the same Mapnik toolkit EveryBlock uses to get their nice maps. Built by Development Seed for the D.C. Data Catalog‘s Apps for Democracy competition.

iLive.at also came out of Apps for Democracy. Enter a Washington, D.C. address and receive information tailored to that location and organized into categories like Errands, Emergencies, Recently Reported Crimes, People, Transportation and “Did You Know?” I would love to see a New York version.

You can keep up with all the action in this space on the Open Government, PoliParse and Sunlight Labs Google Groups.

Full disclosure: I tend to be partial to notebooks of the pocket-sized, reporter-style, durable, flexible, wirebound and blank variety, but I use and sample all kinds. To my mind there are two types of notebooks: portable and desktop. Portable notebooks should be easy to carry around and fit comfortably in your pocket. Which pocket you use, and therefore which notebook, can depend on the season. In the warm months I require a slim, flexible notebook for my back pocket. In the winter, a harder-backed notebook can go into my inside coat pocket. Many notebooks that are marketed as portable—hello, Moleskine—are actually desktop notebooks in my opinion because they don’t fit comfortably in your pocket. They have their place.

Pluses: Pretty. Moderately hackable.

Minuses: Unoriginal. Low-quality paper that can’t handle fountain pens, so pen nerds shun them (pen reviews is another post).

Pluses: Free of artifice. Also cheap! Many of their notebooks are $1.

Minuses: Very few. Available in New York at the MoMA Store, Muji Soho and inside the New York Times Building.

Pluses: Striking. Orange. Endorsed by poet-blogger Ron Silliman.

Minuses: Too clunky for portable use.

Pluses: Ultra high-quality paper.

Minuses: Their portable model, the CD5, is a bit too small for serious note-taking.

Pluses: Like Moleskine but much more flexible, with higher quality paper.

Minuses: Pages won’t lay flat. Owners of the most annoying website in the world.

Pluses: See above.

Minuses: Hard to come by. I recommend subscribing to his shop’s feed if you want in on the next batch.

Ecoteca was a sturdy and stylish Portuguese brand of notebook that now appears to be defunct.

Pluses: Rounded corners.

Minuses: Impossible to find.

Pluses: Pocket-friendly. Heavy paperstock. Futura typeface.

Minuses: Seemingly designed with Urban Outfitters in mind. Tries too hard. Staplebound.

Pluses: Waterproof authenticity.

Minuses: None.

Pluses: Closes with a sensible horizontal elastic band.

Minuses: Too thick for portable use (twice the thickness of a Moleskine). A bit overzealous in their marketing.

Pluses: Pocket-size. High-quality paper. Durable green cover.

Minuses: Only available in Japan.

Pluses: Stiff yet flexible. Pages open flat. Back flap can be used as a bookmark. Made entirely in Italy. Not a Moleskine.

Minuses: The newer versions don’t have the creamy paper or colored page edges of old.

• usa
  26
  (52%)
• government
  23
  (46%)
• maps
  14
  (28%)
• language
  7
  (14%)
• business
  7
  (14%)

Recent blips: interactive Voronoi treemaps, basketball data visualizations, Watchdog.net.

Datamob-compliant APIs: MAPLight, GovTracker, AMEE, Project Vote Smart, Civic Footprint.

Coffee table: The Alphabet Abecedarium, Mashups, Miscellany.