Lukas Mathis of Ignore the Code points out a well-written article on Swiss German from a travel blog called Thinking Coral. The Schwiizerdütsch post is from July 2007, and the last post on Thinking Coral was written in August 2009.  It is a 3-year-old post on onomatopoeiac qualities of a Swiss dialect that appears to have been written by a New Zealander in her wanderjahre. I am not able to locate the author’s name. This is truly an example of the long tail concept.

From the Thinking Coral post on Schwiizerdütsch:

• Swiss German is technically a spoken language, and only turns up in written form in informal mediums of communication such as email and internet writings. I find the language in stark contrast to the image and understanding most people would have of Switzerland and its citizens. Namely that of being orderly, reserved, clean and staid. It’s a language that implies movement. Simply put, its sounds are very up and down. Descriptively put, some parts of their words create sounds like that of a smallish round stone plopping into the river; of sand shaken within a container to slosh against and fall back from its walls.

Above: header image from the travel blog ‘Thinking Coral.’

Chinese news media are skeptical about whether a vocational school known for training bulldozer operators is responsible for hacking Google. If a story published on 18 February by The New York Times is true, rival Microsoft should send recruiters immediately to the Lanxiang vocational school in Shandong Province and compete against Chinese search engine Baidu for value-priced graduates.

Roland Soong’s EastSouthWestNorth blog translated a 21 February story from the Qilu Evening News, a newspaper based in Jinan, capital of Shandong Province. One parody of a Lanxiang commercial, quoted by the Qilu newspaper: “Which is the best place to learn to operate an earth extractor?  Come to Lanxiang in Shandong, China.” The new version: “Which is the best place to learn to become a hacker?  Come to Lanxiang in Shandong, China.”

A Jonathan Stray story from Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab cites the Qilu report as one of the few pieces of original journalism filed on the latest Google hacking story.

Above, the scene in which King Arthur’s knights face off against the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

Conclusion to a story on Vancouver luge track design in the 17 February edition of The Wall Street Journal:

“As often happens during Olympic controversies, numerous committees and federations are involved and it is often unclear who bears ultimate responsibility. The IOC and Vanoc have both said they aren’t responsible for the tracks because they essentially subcontract technical specifications out to the luge and bobsleigh federations. Within a few hours of the accident, those two groups declared their work flawless and blamed the Georgian athlete.”

Women’s freestyle aerialist Emily Cook of the U.S. Olympic Ski Team, from a series of photographs by Ryan McGinley in the Sunday 7 February edition of The New York Times Magazine.

Emily will compete in the women’s aerials qualification event on Saturday 20 February at the Cypress Mountain venue, with the finals on the evening of Wednesday the 24th.

Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker deconstructs a typical television news report.

Brooker so hilariously and accurately captures the formula that his video could serve as a template for young journalists.

Favorite part — dowdy man opens letters in his kitchen: “When I’m watching the news, you know, there’s a person talking to me, telling me what’s going on, and I don’t really listen to what they’re saying.”

And while we’re on the subject of formulas in journalism, Beijing communication strategist Kaiser Kuo’s dead-on deconstruction of news reporting out of China is available on Danwei. Again, so accurate that it could be used as a guide for new (and lazy) correspondents.

How do the buttons and functions on software tell their own story? How do the mute little creatures say that they are, in fact, a button, and that you should push on them if you want to do something?

A short, outstanding post by Swiss designer Lukas Mathis in his blog Ignore the Code summarizes key lessons about how developers create icons and buttons that actually communicate what they do, without communicating more than you need to know. His observations on how comic books serve as models for communication are fascinating.

Designer Lukas Mathis praises the “leaf” application icon for Panic’s Coda software, an icon developed by the design firm Iconfactory.

The Google story in China now has a “Deep Throat” insider leaking information on a Chinese review site.

An anonymous poster on the Douban social media review site alleged on Friday 15 January that Google is shutting down in China to block access to source code by spies from the Chinese Community Party.

“The code theft this time caused Google to face a total collapse crisis,” the post reads. “To put it bluntly, the survival of the entire company would be threatened if they stayed in China.”

The post, no longer available on Douban, was translated into English on the EastSouthWestNorth bridge blog. The post says a spy was planted inside Google’s Shanghai office, and already had provided some source code to the party.

To protect the code, the post alleges, Google froze out Chinese engineers from servers hosting their work and assigned USA-based programmers to assess damage and rewrite the code.

Created for an educated Chinese audience, Douban publishes reviews of books, music and films. It’s like Digg meets The New Yorker. We’ll see how the tip plays out next week.

German designer Richard Sapper creates tools that become an essential, understated, almost invisible part of everyday life. He’s been doing it for several decades. Visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York and you’ll see half a dozen Sapper designs. He conceived the original ThinkPad in 1992, once describing it as the calling card for IBM.

Richard Sapper

Lenovo design leader David Hill today provided a rare look inside the way Sapper collaborates with companies to conceive and refine products. In this case, the project is “Skylight,” a computer announced one week ago that is defining a new smartbook category. Hill wrote about the project in Design Matters.

The story is remarkable for several reasons. Sapper conceived Skylight while he was traveling, imagining the design from hotel rooms, guest bedrooms, and in one case, the violin studio of a friend. The project was developed within one month, during the holidays. Creating art is one thing, but creating it on deadline, working in someone else’s studio — that’s another.

Skylight photograph from Lenovo’s Flickr photostream.

Social media are serving numerous operational roles today in response to the earthquake in Haiti. The Christian Science Monitor reports people are using Twitter to report infrastructure status, share needs, raise funds and provide links to resources. Relevant tags are #haiti and #eq.

Twitter users Sebastien Barrau (@sebastienbarrau) and Marvin Chery (@reveiled) today created the Web site koneksyon.com to help people obtain updates on missing Haitians. The Twitter list http://twitter.com/georgiap/live-from-haiti provides reports from people on the ground in Haiti.

Image from the American Red Cross Flickr photostream.

Consumers invented the newest flavor of Coca-Cola’s “Vitaminwater” brand in the United States — black cherry and lime, otherwise known as “Connect.” Vitaminwater ran the co-creation competition on its Facebook site and announced the winner on 7 January. Vitaminwater has 1.1 million Facebook fans. The product’s label contains Facebook branding and social media references, and is scheduled to be available for sale in March.