Brian Oakes was the graphic designer behind the infographics on IOUSA, a film that achieves the near-impossible in explaining the US national debt and problem it poses. This is an interview with him

An engaging and entertaining presentation by Gail Leija that explores who information architects are as well as what it is that they actually do.

Details leak out about the story behind the BBC's strange focus on "Red Button Day", September 10th, and how its odd coverage of the LHC's "turn-on" resulted from a generalised incomprehension of the subject matter. Of "particular" (ho-ho) interest to physicists

A fairly huge list of websites and web utilities, a lot of which do look genuinely useful. From browser-based equivalents of Excel and Visio to project management and online file backup services.

Are you a heavy user of Gmail? It's handy to have so much information in one place isn't it? Phone numbers, addresses, logins for various websites, and so on, and all nicely searchable too. But what if your account got disabled? It happens, and it happened to someone close to me once. She had to effectively reboot her online life. It's worth taking steps to make sure your gmail information is backed up locally.

Collection of underwater photographs, including beluga whales and a Bengal tiger looking ready to take on a shark

A somewhat racy exercise in visualisation, using heatmaps and other techniques to display statistical information about erogenous zones, common nipple patterns and the occurrence of body parts in song titles, by genre. The hand is most mentioned in blues songs, apparently, while hip-hop artists are obsessed with the behind.

This 3D Flash site utilises a visual metaphor based around the solar system to display tag relationships from Flickr. Related tags "orbit" the core tag and matching photographs form the surfaces of the "planets".

A 3D web browser that I've yet to try.

A useful online tool for extracting audio from video files embedded in websites

Splashup is a browser-based image editing tool that mimics the functionality of Photoshop.

BBC News feature on typography in cinema art. You've probably seen this already…

Review of an iPhone application released by the Barack Obama election campaign. The application does more than you'd expect – rather than just download speeches and videos it integrates with the phone's address book and GPS to identify contacts living in battleground states and the location of the nearest Obama office. It indicates that the campaign "gets" digital communications to a large extent and one would hope that this level of savvy will persist in a possible Obama presidency

Samples and reviews of a number of clear, monospaced fonts suitable for programmers specifically and typography fans in general.

A clearly-designed interactive graphic allows you to flip between October 2007 and September 2008, seeing the difference in market capitalisation among 29 financial services firms. Well, there are 29 to begin with, but only 27 by September 2008…

Bookmarking this for future listening, as I really enjoyed the explanatory post. The producer's now dead father made a number of background recordings back in 1977, when the producer was eight and the marriage of his parents was experiencing problems. Apparently the calm and relaxed nature of the recordings belies the emotional situation of the time.

A Flash animation visualising the spread of Walmart across the US from its inception in 1968. To paraphrase Jamais Casco, it's a powerful visual argument for treating the study of markets as a form of epidemiology.