oreillyradar:

This excellent post shows how subtle tweaks make Google Maps more readable than the competition.

The following image (from the post) contrasts Google Maps with Bing:

(Click to enlarge image.)

I’ve been waiting a long time for something like Adobe’s BrowserLab:

Designers can compare a site in two browsers side by side as well as use an “onion skin” mode that shows a site in multiple browsers overlaid one on top of the other.

This piece focuses on the top-down vs. bottom-up approaches of design, but some of the insights apply to citizen journalism as well.

I’ve always believed that the best Web-based content efforts involve equal portions of top-down editorial decisions from trained journalists with bottom-up insight from the community. Alone, neither method is particularly useful, but together you see a symbiotic relationship form between content, community, feedback and editorial experimentation. This is why the Web is so profound; no other platform has this feedback loop built in.