September 30th, 2009General
Just a quick food-for-thought quote from Clay Shirky’s speech at the Shorenstein Center last week. Here he’s addressing the false dilemma fallacy that keeps popping up in industry conversations about the “future form” of journalism:
So we don’t need another different kind of institution that does 85 percent of accountability journalism. We need a class of institutions or models, whether they’re endowments or crowdsourced or what have you. We need a model that produces five percent of accountability journalism. And we need to get that right 17 times in a row.
Point noted? There is no one-to-one, monolithic replacement for the existing media models waiting in the wings. Nothing that we can just swap in and be on our merry way. What’s eroding now was the product of intent mixed with historic coincidence, to a scale present economics won’t replicate.
The future will be small, messy, and enumerative. Now let’s get on with it, shall we?
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September 24th, 2009Design
If you haven’t seen it yet, Google launched their latest project, Sidewiki, this week, to a somewhat rancorous reception. Sidewiki uses the existing Google Toolbar to park a comment panel next to any site in the browser window. The site owner can’t control it, and Google hosts the whole affair from their own servers. As of this writing, sites can’t even opt out of it.
The problems with this are myriad and ugly. Jeff Jarvis quickly dispatched a post covering the salient sticking points. (And, appropriately, there are good issues being raised in the comments.) I’m in agreement with Jarvis and others that this is an all-around bad idea.
Chalk it up to a failure of empathy.
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September 16th, 2009Flash, JavaScript, Web Development
Up until now, if you’ve used advanced Web techniques like AJAX or Flash to create interactivity on your site, you’ve been punished when it comes time to tally up your traffic. Even at this late date, most off-the-shelf tracking software remains ignorant of clicks that don’t involve simple HTML pageviews. Since your fancy Web 2.0 app doesn’t transfer HTML with every click, those clicks don’t get counted.
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May 27th, 2009Design
In the annals of design, “Make the logo bigger,” might be the most infamous request you’re likely to hear. But his little kid brother, “Can you fit this in?” is far and away the more frequent interloper to our inboxes.
For the sake of fitting it all in, we sometimes condense (or forget to expand) a design to the point of impinging on hierarchy and causality. Often, the pieces we’re putting together as web designers have relationships that cannot be effectively illuminated through simple adjacency alone.
Debussy defined music as the space between the notes. So should it be with design.
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May 20th, 2009Design, UI, Web Design
“You can’t do long-form writing online.”
Really? It’s 2009 and we’re still having this conversation?
The human brain is extraordinarily well adapted for associative thinking. It helped ensure the survival of our ancient ancestors. Even lacking direct empirical experience of a danger, they were able to piece together the puzzle from snatches of previously acquired data. (Enter predator: “Woah. Never seen that one before. Big claws? Check. Nasty fangs? Uh-huh. Run like hell? You bet.”)
It also, unfortunately, is what leads us to constantly ascribe properties and biases from an old medium to a new one.
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