Nerd-apalooza: Rejoice gift nerds, photography nerds, mapping nerds, Trek nerds, Christmas nerds, online design nerds, hyper local citizen’s media nerds and more!

UPDATE: Jay Small addresses my concerns about corporate templates on his blog. I added this comment: “Thanks for addressing my concerns, Jay. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great base template (easily better than 90 percent of the news sites out there). I just haven’t seen many Scripps sites break the mold and experiment with more visual ways to bring people into stories, which I’ve found can very easily and exponentially drive traffic (compared to short teases with words). Hopefully, as the dust settles from the redesigns and changing to Ellington, they’ll begin to experiment and really knock it out of the park. Creativity and competition makes us all better.”

Ed. Note: Welcome to all the new readers! Especially you, Justin Gilken. Welcome to regular readers, too. You may have noticed I’ve been posting alotta journalism stuff recently … especially news business news … so I’m going to try and infuse this edition of Journerdism with more nerd stuff. (Of course some journalism stuff, too.) Enjoy and season greetings! -Will

77 Design Gifts Under $77
[Design / cool gift nerds]
There’s so much cool stuff in there. Greyscale Rubick’s cube. Flipbook home movies. Wooden War Engine Kits. Even, 2 35oz. UTZ Cheese Balls Barrels! (Via digg)

The biggest mistakes in web design 1995-2015
[Web design nerds]
The WebPagesThatSuck.com 2004 diatribe has been refreshed and extended into the next decade. This is quite possibly *THE ULTIMATE* list of stuff that makes web sites suck. They should make a textbook out of this. It should be required reading for anyone that registers a domain name.

Fimoculous.com: 2006 Lists
[List nerds, meet your god]
Holy Toledo. That’s a lot of lists.

Nokia 6639 Concept Does it All
[Photo nerds]
This would be quite awesome if it hits the streets.

MAKE: Blog: Rolled up newspaper sculpture
[Print newspaper nerds]
More good uses for the printed newspaper.

Scripps adds 2 more Ellington sites
[Django design nerds]
Good for them with the continued Django/Ellington roll out. But seriously, the Scripps corporate cookie cutter template is getting old. Bulleted lists are good for occassional peppering throughout the site, not for 98 percent of the site’s content structure.

Sin Destroyers - Gifts of the World
[Christmas nerds]
This is probably the best death metal Christmas song/video I’ve seen this week. (Thanks, Peter!)

The Hubble Deep Field: The Most Important Image Ever Taken
[Space nerds]
Nice use of the Numa Numa and Pink Floyd.

9 Awesome Community Mapping Websites
[Mapping nerds]
(Via digg)

Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About
[Nerds with ladies]
That’s a hell of a long list.

Star Trek map of the galaxy
[Trek nerds]
I never knew Starbase 117 was so close to Starbase 36!

Pegasus News launches
[Hyper local citizen's media nerds]
Django-based entertainment site TexasGigs.com goes to a full-fledged online hyper local news site. They explain the switcheroo.

Compare and contrast: online college news sites
[Online news design nerds]
Murley goes all Luke Stevens on college newspaper website design.

Techdirt: Plagiarism vs. Inspiration
[Ethics nerds]
Interesting discussion.

College Papers Launch Nationwide Protest over USC Editor dismissal
[College newspaper nerds]
“More than a dozen college newspapers today carried the same editorial, denouncing the denial of reappointment for the editor of The Daily Trojan, the student-run newspaper at the University of Southern California.” I definitely don’t know everything about this, but it seems that the student EIC was looking to do improve exactly what newspapers need: “Fox said he wanted to delegate the daily production duties and use his position to tackle big-picture improvements, including beefing up the Web site, recruiting more production designers and improving staff training.”

Presstime magazine 20 under 40
[Magazine award nerds]
Further evidence the NAA is one of the most behind-the-times journalism organizations in the history of the planet earth: Rob Curley was *just* named to their 20 under 40 list, along with a bunch of marketing people …and the head of AP’s asap venture (Which I predict in it’s current form will not last another two years).

5 ways to make ‘important’ (politics, civic, social, etc.) news interesting
[Reporting nerds]
Ok, maybe it’s actually 4 ways because #4 and #5 are basically the same thing. … But buried in #3 is the real focus: tell readers “…why you should care and how you can engage…” (and I’d add “quickly and clearly” to that statement…)

How to Build a User Community
[Online community nerds]
Step 1: Stop calling them “users.” But seriously, there’s good stuff here.

First NPPA Multimedia Contest winners announced
[Multimedia nerds]
I’m not exactly sure about some of the ranking on these. But it should be cool to see this contest grow.