Snarkommenter Saheli has written out her thoughts on creating a massive global database for volunteering, an especially useful resource post-disaster. Go read Saheli’s thoughts, at Socialtext and on her blog. I posted some thoughts on her blog and I’ll cross-post an excerpt in the extended entry of this post.

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Engadget says iPod 6.0 will be able to show episodes of shows like “Desperate Housewives,” downloadable for $2 a pop. Insanely hot. Update: Here’s Apple’s press release.

Jakob Nielsen gives a succinct overview of user interfaces from command-line to WYSIWYG. Clicking on menus to choose commands represented an improvement over command-line interfaces when the range of available choices was still small, Nielsen says, but today, menus provide a poor navigation interface. Noting Microsoft’s new UI announcement, Nielsen heralds the age of results-based user interaction, where you choose what you want your application to do by selecting from a gallery of possible outcomes.

Note that command lines aren’t exactly going anywhere. The other day, at a conference, Jarah Euston mentioned how fond she is of Yubnub, the Web’s command line. Anyone else using it?

This is kind of pathetic on CNET’s part. Six women bloggers in CNET’s list of 100? Six? (Susan says five, but Staci Kramer of PaidContent.org adds herself in the comments.)

Remember how I promised to review Fa

This printable emergency Scrabble game is the best ever. More peez. (Via.)

Wired is blogging now, but so far nothing blows the mind. More importantly, Stanford won this year’s Grand Challenge! If you’ll recall, last year, DARPA promised a million bucks to whichever team could create a driverless vehicle that would automatically navigate a treacherous obstacle course. No team won. In fact, the best-performing vehicle conked out after eight miles on the 142-mile course. This year, DARPA upped the ante to $2 million, and voila! A winner.

Update: Previously unknown fact — Congress wants a third of all military vehicles to be riderless by 2015.

I didn’t know until I read this awesome list of musician bloggers that The New Yorker‘s Sasha Frere-Jones had a blog! I love his criticism.

Addendum: I love it because of incisive thoughts like this one, from his latest column —

The catchy chorus [of Fiona Apple’s song “Extraordinary Machine”] is a warning to those (her fans included) who underestimate her resilience:

Bifurcated Rivets links to the incredible Leo Burnett Web site (Flash). (Who is Leo Burnett?)

If you’re not as avid a Lego aficionado as Robin is, you might have missed many of the company’s incredible moves into the Age of Amazon. Lego has made CAD artists out of its customers, and has done a generally awesome job of encouraging, ahem, citizen-created content. As well as utter product customization. Chris Anderson lays it all down on his blog, tagging also to an excellent FastCompany overview. It has been fascinating watching how a 73-year-old company can completely reinvent itself. If I can think really hard, I can think of some other organizations that might learn some lessons from all that.

Related: Try a Lego pinhole camera, via BoingBoing. Or buy a half-ton of Legos, via Kottke.