I love contests, and 20things is having a temporary tattoo design contest. The project is collecting entries until 12:00pm PST, July 22nd. While you're their, check out the other interesting projects that 20things sponsors.

The final decision regarding royalty rates for internet music webcasters was announced on June 20th. Things don't look good for the state of internet music broadcasters, to say the least. Soma fm and Monkey Radio have ceased operations, as have numerous others. A sad end to internet music? I hope not.

Luckily for us, 37signals still has time on their hands to crank out visionary web site prototypes. 37bettermotors is their vision of how automotive web sites of the future might function. Quite a bit of research went into the piece, and a number of salient thoughts were presented on the topic of telematics. Well worth the 10 minute read.

One bullet I would have added to the "Why hasn't the telematics industry taken off?" list would have been the usability of the current systems - both telematics and mobile phones. Given that your average user has a hard enough time programming their address book into their phone and the time into their VCR, an easy to use system is of utmost importance. Especially if the goal is mass adoption.

Feel like blogging 24/7 and making a difference at the same time? Can you free up July 27th? If so, go sign up for Blogathon 2002.

Bored? Looking for something to do? Simply enjoy working on things but don't like coming up with the idea of what to work on? Here are 52 projects to whet your appetite.

Mulberry Technologies, Inc. has a pair of valuable XML and XSLT/XPath quick reference cards that have come in handy for me in the last couple of hours. If you're building websites based upon an XML/XSLT architecture, I think you'll enjoy having the two of them handy.

Stumbled across w.bloggar, a Windows-based weblog editor that provides post and publish access to Blogger, b2, MovableType, Nucleus, BigBlogTool, BlogWorks XML, and Blogalia blogs. I spent some time over the weekend peaking under the hood and I'm impressed - the feature set is amazing. I'll be using it regularly once the Blogger RPC interface stabilizes...

Not entirely sure what I think or how I feel about the Nielsen Norman Group/Macromedia love fest. My cynical side thinks its a ploy by Macromedia to throw a little money at the usability wolves to keep them off of their backs. What better wolf than NNG - not exactly Macromedia's biggest fan over the years. My hopeful side, is - well - hopeful, because Flash needs standards. No doubt the whole deal falls somewhere in between.

The funny thing about the announcement for me is that I just spent a good portion of the day hunting around for Flash banner animation design best practices. Not much to be found - bits and pieces. Here's hoping that Jakob and Don get going on this soon - I have a project due at the end of the quarter...