I liked this series of videos from bigthink.com featuring an interview with nytimes.com design director Khoi Vinh. Best quote? He says that the hardest part of the job is often “Reminding yourself that what’s obvious to you is not always obvious to the users.”

Next on Wired week here on my blog: a video outlining the work Adobe and Wired are doing on creating a prototype digital magazine for touch devices. If anyone can do it right, I’m sure it’s Wired.

Curious about Google’s back end? Check out this great article from Wired, which describes how Google’s search algorithm has developed over the years – and how cool it really is. Take how Google is learning language:

This is the hard-won realization from inside the Google search engine, culled from the data generated by billions of searches: a rock is a rock. It’s also a stone, and it could be a boulder. Spell it “rokc” and it’s still a rock. But put “little” in front of it and it’s the capital of Arkansas. Which is not an ark. Unless Noah is around. “The holy grail of search is to understand what the user wants,” Singhal says. “Then you are not matching words; you are actually trying to match meaning.”

Not as easy as it might seem.