Massive Scale Data Mining for Education – Companies invented Big Data techniques for mining useful information from a mountain of behavior information to optimize shopping sites, and now they're well-understood I'm excited to see how they can be applied to other areas. This post outlines one idea for applying them to education – I've no idea how well this would work in practice but I'd love to see the results.
Giant Tesla Coils – A project to create 200 foot-long bolts of artificial lightning. I don't have to explain how awesome this is.
Zynga's tough culture risks a talent drain – There's something about 'fun' industries like games or films that seem to encourage terrible working conditions. Much as I love data, it's really hard to use it to drive personnel decisions, see Enron for a classic example.
Forward Secrecy – Google's doing great work by supporting this improvement to https, including code contributions to OpenSSL.
Common Crawl Email List – CC is a fantastic project to create a sharable data set of web content, and I'm glad to see a community starting to grow up around it. Now, who will post the first message?
Pete Warden's blog 