Hoefler & Frere Jones’s updated website is totally tricked out with a great new blog and a beautiful new Scotch Roman face (my favorite style) called Chronicle. But a secret joy is to discover that they’ve also created their own in-house fictional character, Steve Gibbs. Mr. Gibbs’s bio explains, “Despite the fact that there is nobody named Steve Gibbs at H&FJ, the above e-mail address attracts hundreds of pieces of correspondence every day. A review of this e-mail, most of which deals with investment opportunities, exciting holiday gifts, and various solicitations of a personal nature, is useful in separating the wheat from the chaff in our own mailboxes.” Brilliant.

You already know about Lipsum.org, but how about the incredibly valuable Cut & Paste Word Count? Or the equally wonderful Change Case? (Who needs MS Word?)

“Using a list of countries generated by The World Factbook database, flags of countries fetched from Wikipedia (as of 26th May 2007) are analysed by a custom made python script to calculate the proportions of colours on each of them. That is then translated on to a piechart using another python script. The proportions of colours on all unique flags are used to finally generate a piechart of proportions of colours for all the flags combined.” A great project, Flags by Colors, by media designer Shahee Ilyas (via Manystuff).

An online museum of every kind of audio tape casette you could ever hope to see. Consider my visual nostalgia itch scratched.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee speaking at Princeton on his vision for the future of the web [iTunes link]. The slides from his talk are posted here.

“Recently, Wikipedia had been the object of much controversy over the reliability of the its articles, and the frequent anonymity of its contributors. But during some recent critical events, like the Virginia Tech killings, the Southeast Asian tsunami in 2004, and the London bombings in 2005, the site has been transformed from an ever-growing reference book into a ever-updating news source.” NYT on Wikipedia’s coverage of the Virginia Tech killings.

Let me join the chorus of supporters: Miranda July’s new website is refreshingly homemade, poetically funny, and totally brilliant.

I love Daniel Eatock’s new content management system and porfolio tool, Indexhibit (Indexhibit=Index+Exhibit). Use it, love it, and pass it on. Thanks to Daniel and Vaska for this awesome tool. And when you’ve got a few minutes, check out Daniel’s great talk at the Walker Art Center earlier this month.

Chris Fahey’s thoughtful series on “Class and Web Design” (via Subtraction).

“Without the guidance of institutions and armed only with the ability to crudely search for text, the Internet’s version of art history slightly differs from the academic version. For instance, on the Internet, actual artist videos are placed next to user generated karaoke remakes. The control systems that normally govern the systematization of art are dismantled by the search algorithms and whims of home users.” Hanne Mugass and Cory Arcangel’s massive online video archive entitled “Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet).”