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New York Times interactive features are getting better and better. Check out this Flashy way of displaying movie box office earnings and theatre run longevity.

It's beautiful.

Note that it's almost a year old. One thing I've struggled with in making web features for magazine I work for is: how much time can you afford to keep them updated? So far our answer has hinged on how many readers are still looking at them. In general it seems that certain features become unpredictably "pass-alongable." Things like quizzes, and if they contain timely info we update them.

Essence magazine did nice job in integrating the site look into Ning for its community site.

The community has about 2,500 members, and doesn't look very old.

I was about to get all huffy, but no.

Hulu offers embeddable video. If you're trying it out with a local file, as I did, and thought it wasn't resizable -- that it was clipped rather than scaled from the 512-pixel width -- just publish it anyway. It actually does scale like YouTube or most other embeds, once you get it online.

For example here is last night's SNL Weekend Update.

I've limited the width to 450 pixels because that's the space I have available for it in the main column of my blog.

These days, to figure the proportion for such things, I fire up Paint Shop Pro. (I don't want to pay for Photoshop at home, and though I remember how to solve for X, I've grown too lazy to haul out the pencil.)

I think I threw away my proportion wheel 35 years ago right after I took a newspaper editing class. You'd measure a photo, then slide the wheel to match up the photo width with the column width. The wheel calculated the column height, so you could draw a box of the correct number of column inches on your layout, and a percentage, so you could scribble it on the photo with a grease pencil.

Review sites like PC Mag and Cnet should weed out old reviews. Example. What are you going to do with a 2-year-old camcorder review? It's good they show the date, though (I guess), so you know not to bother with it.

I like eWeek's slideshows. This one's called "Online Sharing Dons Pinstripes." Catchy title that probably appeals to its audience though not so much to me.

Business Week and other magazines and news sites are doing this more and more to summarize articles. I think people like to page through short bits of copy and pictures. When I make them I always let the user have control rather than letting them run automatically, believing that people don't like to have the speed at which they read dictated by anybody else.

The only other complaint I have about the eWeek method of displaying is the show is I'd rather have it open in a new window. That way you don't have to scroll down each time you advance the slide. Annoying.

Yahoo Answers' design is all Web 2.0ish.

I don't know how to say this. It's going to sound conflicted.

I don't really like those little skinny buttons you see all over the place. Like this.

I think there have become too many of them.

But I do really like at least the idea of this tool for making them as PNGs online.

Actually, I think I'd like it a little better if it made the buttons in HTML with CSS, since they come out all unanti-aliased anyway.

An ad on the paidContent.org site might indicate that Web 2.0 design principles are creeping into advertisements. I popped over there from my aggregator to see if there was more on the Lucent story. Yes, but alas, no. There's only a link to a subscribers-only Wall Street Journal article. Lucent's an important employer in Naperville, my town. Or it was. It's sad to see the empty parking lots around those big buildings.

I love the graphics on Jeff Harrell's blog.