The second type of list this article mentions, social lists so to speak, is definitely valuable to users and probably isn't receiving the specific attention it deserves. Foursquare as a "public itinerary" for a trip through select art galleries in NYC is a great example. Informal, public education could also be orchestrated with these "social lists"; reading material / exercises listed out in a syllabus and shared among interested parties.
Something that I think is pretty silly is the novelization of the fact that there are not many "single user list apps" that have transcended themselves and become "social / public list apps". I think that's because a whole heck of a lot of people will write lists on platforms which are not list-centric, ie: a physical notepad, text messages / emails sent to yourself, nodepad smartphone apps, or even just notes written on your freaking forearm in sharpie!...
Lists are an interesting topic though, and when you think about it, an enormous portion of the internet really only functions as a list delivery system. Lists of popular links (Reddit, hackernews), lists of friend's pictures (Instagram), lists of friend's life updates (Facebook, Twitter et.al), lists of categorized media (Pintrest, Tumblr), lists of queried results (google, duckduckgo, search et.al)...
But I gotta say that lists as an integral motif of IT is a really cool concept.
I'm really glad you brought up GitHub in this way. I have been using GitHub for much more than versioned code storage.
For example, I've been using it as a collaborative writing zone with a friend of mine. Our use is definitely nothing too remarkable, but as far as collaborative writing goes, it's not easy to imagine a product with more technical capabilities than git.
The real hurdle is just non-technical people being intimidated by the terminal / command prompt. I'd like to think that stigma is on its way out, but wouldn't we all?
This just in: Humans almost certainly drink water, and have for at least the past two millennium.
haha, but in all seriousness, I always thought when people said "medieval people didn't drink water" that they really meant "medieval people didn't drink as much water, or drank dirty water".
There was a lecture I watched from someone who explained the Medieval period as "everyone drinking beer because the water was so filthy" and the Enlightenment as "everyone drinking tea because the beer was so intoxicating" and the Industrial Revolution as "everyone drinking coffee because tea wasn't strong enough".
I laughed at that and considered the whole idea of Medieval peoples drinking beer instead of water as mostly hyperbole.
I've really liked using Apiary
http://apiary.io/
It lets you build sample output and URI address for your API's, document multiple routes, and stores everything nicely on your account on their cloud.
I've used it for 2 projects this year already and have really liked it.
Leaving college with such powerful to convictions of social evolution, scientific pragmatism, and the power of Art as a mental practice left me with some hard facets of reality to contend with. This is the struggle of one of the the main characters, Leigh-Cheri. She is a wide eyed idealist who is thoroughly disenfranchised with the way the systems in the world abuse and exploit people.
She meets a mad-bomber outlaw named Woodpecker, a revolutionary with bordering mythical aspirations. Their affair is a wild journey of growth as characters and citizens, not of a royal bloodline or America, but of Earth and the ideas, and actions, which make this world a vibrantly beautiful place.
Most important book of the year for me, with close runners up:
"The Nature of Code" by Daniel Shiffman. Excellent book on simulation of the natural, chaotic world in the Processing programming language.
http://natureofcode.com/book/
I've always loved that you can get such profound geometry out of spinographs: flowers of life, toruses, and what look like pentagonal solar-magnetic bands... a reality hack to be sure.
I was at Stuipd Hackathon. I've never been to anything so unabashedly motivated to be pointless and irreverent.
Workshops included: "3d printed sex toys", "how to be come alan ginsberg in 30 minutes", and "pissing off my landlord".
All the projects there were so beautiful because they were liberated from the whole motif in tech of products constantly "revolutionizing field-xyz and solving 1000 major world problems".
If we are going to enter into a truly tech-literate, post-internet phase of humanity, we gotta be making dumb, hilarious junk like this.