The WSJ's Numbers Guy looks critically at dating sites and their claims of success. Online metrics provide powerful insights but are very easy to manipulate, exaggerate and spin. The online dating industry is particularly prone to this sort of thing as these numbers are what their business live and die by

"Welcome to the museum of lost interaction; a timeline of innovation. Nine exhibits ranging from 1900 to 1979, comprising audio recording machines, wireless morse communicators, portable video to the precurser behind iTunes. The museum holds an inspirational array of invention, guaranteed never to have been found, documented or exhibited ever before…"

"Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. It doesn’t matter how good a technology is — if we, designers, don’t manage to make user interface[s] as intuitive and attractive as possible, the technology will hardly reach a breakthrough…"

"This is a collection of small multiples of game controllers of the main gaming systems from the past 25 years, spanning from the Atari 2600 to the Nintendo Wii. The images have been normalized, and the hands are all approximately the same size as each other, and thus the controllers all to scale…"

A guide to understanding flow charts, presented in flow chart form

Satirical advert about the impending bailout of the three largest American automobile manufacturers

I've got a big presentation coming up this Friday and am elbow-deep in Powerpoint. In this post Seth Godin proposes three rules for Powerpoint presentations – tell just one story, don't use bar charts and make use of motion.

The BBC have long been criticised (including by the BBC Trust) for not providing useful, effective links to external sites. Earlier this year it ran an experiment using Apture to give users "previews" of external sites – in popup windows, oddly enough. One wonders why they don't simply use straightforward text links. Anyway, they've published the results of the experiment. "We're talking to Apture to explore whether it's possible to extend their product to deliver the functionality you liked", they said. Good news for Apture, I suppose, but not so good for the rest of us who would like to see a move away from the "walled garden" mentality the BBC sometimes seem to display.

A list of ecommerce providers. Exciting, eh?

Detailed piece from Derek Dunlop at Conchango about evaluating ecommerce platforms and formulating strategies for future direction & investment

LBi is the UK's largest digital marketing agency and a competitor of ours. It's just laid off 17 of its 420-strong workforce – the layoffs affected the design and build disciplines. Ewen Sturgeon, the CEO, seems to indicate that the redundancies are pre-emptive and not reactive

Christoper Lawton of the Wall Street Journal on expected performance of online retail in the 2008 peak season. In recent years retailers have seen double-digit year-on-year revenue growth. Until recently there had been a hope that growth would be only slightly diminished by the economic downturn – but data from the first 23 days of November indicates otherwise. Only a late surge in online sales will deliver anything other than a 0-1% rise from 2007.

Blog post from Gutterbreakz discussing the recent hoo-hah about the Beatles previously unreleased "experimental" track, Carnival of Light. In short – who cares? Britain actually had a vibrant electronic experimentation scene in that period which was operating perfectly well even without the attentions of bandwagon-jumping popular musicians. Sadly not all of it exists in recorded form, but if you're interested this post contains a few names well worth tracking down