That’s an $9 billion dollar check, quite possibly the biggest physical check ever written. Well, besides the ones they give to golf tournament winners.

Last.fm’s 2009 zeitgeist pages are fantastic

Make no mistake, I hate end of year lists, but last.fm has gone beyond that lazy trope that shows up every December. They poured over the mountain of data, figured out who listened to what, built pages for each artist with real information (not just some boring, arbitrary opinion), added data visualizations, photos, events and made something great. Dig the design, too.

I’d love to see this extended into a broader trend application, broken down by genre maybe, available at any time.

I mean, despite his namesake line of sports drinks, Gatorade may not want to feature Woods’ face above the phrase “Is It In You?” anymore.

—@gordonshumway on the Tiger Woods thing. She may be the first person to ever make me wanna read more about sports.

Times Skimmer looks like an interesting project from the New York Times

Seems like the combination of a few past experiments, like Times Extra and Times Reader. I like the idea of a full page digest of news and the execution is quite well done – all markup and javascript, works in a browser without fancy plug-ins. Mobile render is a bit hard to use, though.

After all, he’s been turning out team after team of cocky, whitebread under-achievers for the last two decades, and it’s time someone showed him how the rest of the country feels about his brand of basketball.

—From a Craigslist post from someone looking for cheap tickets to the Wisconsin-Duke basketball game so he can moon Coach K. This looks like it could be my first Kickstarter project. [via my awesome baby brother]

Google is deprecating Gears in favor of HTML 5’s offline storage support

They’ll still support Gears so that things don’t break but fully expect developers to move towards HTML 5.

Microsoft is finally telling people to upgrade from IE 6

IE 8 is better than nothin’ I guess…

I love being from North Carolina and the Avett Brothers make me love it all the more

Western Union has the skills and experience that uniquely qualify if for such a role; the public need for such a new utility is growing at a rapid rate; the field is already large and the potential tremendous - probably at least as large as any other national utility that exists today.

—From a memo written in 19_65_ outlining Western Union’s role as an “information utility company”. The whole thing is a fascinating read, both for its prescience and limited view of data as something scarce, something to be metered. Imagine if the internet worked like your power or water line. Imagine if Western Union had become Google. [via Nicholas Carr]

Congratulations, you two