January 2009
EveryBlock works with New York Times to expand NYC... →
NBC uses startup's tech to expand Web localization →
Instead of running a generic site for the entire New York metropolitan area, for instance, NBC uses technology from Outside.in to automatically create subsections with content about neighborhoods such as Brooklyn’s Coney Island.
NBC? Can we get in on that as part of the family? [tf]
IEBlog : Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate Now... →
Fabulous timing.
Font-weight is still broken in all but one browser... →
#one {
font-weight:100;
font-family:"MyriadPro-Light", "Myriad Pro Light", "Myriad Pro";
}
There are distinct downsides to this workaround. Obviously the first is that you need to specify at least three font families just to change the weight. But the main problem is that font-weight will no longer work (apart from in Firefox 3/Mac) as the font-family you are now specifying only contains...
NYT sees bigger pageview numbers... →
Landman reports that 11 million of the nearly 49 million pageviews on Wednesday went to slideshows. One slideshow of the inaugural balls generated 2.7 million pagesviews alone that day. A slideshow of the ceremony garnered 900,000, and another one took in 800,000. Other multimedia took in an additional 5 million pageviews. Staggering numbers that made January 21 — not the 20th — the biggest day...
And the Winner Is...CNN! (CJR) →
Where did they get these traffic figures? [tf]
Intelligence vs Understanding by Indi Young... →
What I mean by asking customers is not the same as what organisations have done for the past decades. Do not ask them what they want. Ask them what they are trying to get done and why. Connect with them. Try on their life for a bit; walk in their shoes for a mile. Forget for a minute that you are a designer and that you have this mechanism inside you that insists on finding a fix for a problem....
Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet... →
Deciding what does and does not legitimately belong within the national debate is—no way around it—a political act. And yet a pervasive belief within the press is that journalists do not engage in such action, for to do so would be against their principles. As Len Downie, former editor of the Washington Post once said about why things make the front page, “We think it’s important informationally....
adaptive path: Say Goodbye to Done →
Interesting breakdown of interaction types for mobile. The Nokia paper sounds interesting, too. #to-read [tf]
OnBeing | washingtonpost.com →
Pretty cool fluidity about video sizes, location and display types. And some pretty amazing content, too. I dig their volume and scrolling metaphor, too. Doesn’t work that well horizontally—the logo looks like a Q-tip. But it does have your requisite reflective wet floor though it’s all Flash. [tf]
Keeping the hot side hot and the cold side cold... →
[The sample function] WickedCool.initialize() will not only trigger the script to work all of its wicked cool magic, but it will also dynamically add the CSS file to the page. The real benefit with this approach is that users without JavaScript enabled will never download that extra stylesheet, saving them both bandwidth and time. It’s also easy on the implementer because they simply need to...
smush.it! →
Smushit.com is a service that goes beyond the limitations of Photoshop, Fireworks & Co. It uses image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images - without changing their look or visual quality. You’ll get a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and all the changed images as a single zip for download.
Can CNN, the Go-to Site, Get You to Stay? -... →
Just in case you *weren’t* aware of CNN’s backstory. However, note that both bounce-rates and duration-of-visit are now terms suitable to talking about online attention. Thankfully, no serious mention of pageviews or uniques, just general ‘visitors’. [tf]
Doc Searls Weblog · Toward a new ecology of... →
the larger trend to watch over time is the inevitable decline in advertising support for journalistic work, and the growing need to find means for replacing that funding — or to face the fact that journalism will become largely an amateur calling, and to make the most of it. This trend is hard to see. While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones, both the old and...
MediaShift Idea Lab . Two Coders Head Off to 'Fix... →
While I appreciate the idea of the Medill program, we shouldn’t cast the journalist-programmer graduates as the salvation for the industry’s major shakeup right now. It is not the journalists and their relative skills and backgrounds that are the problem. It is the amazingly flawed business models. Scrutinizing these new Holovaty-styled graduates is like raving about the band on the...
Is ad-supported journalism viable in a... →
While a great deal of what I write here is underinformed speculation, this piece is unusually speculative and underinformed. It’s possible that I’m flat out wrong about the idea I’m developing here. I’m putting it forward with the hopes that folks will react with examples and data that help prove or disprove this theory. Being told that I’m unambigiously wrong with good data demonstrating my...
BOSS Developer Fuses Yahoo News With Twitter To... →
Vik Singh of Yahoo’s BOSS team has just launched a new search engine called TweetNews that mashes up Yahoo News stories with some of the hottest topics on Twitter. The result is a news engine that is significantly more timely than common news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo’s standard news site.
Watching it in the lead up to the inauguration. I think TweetNews will bring up old debates...
xui - A simple javascript framework for building... →
Why another JavaScript framework?! When development of PhoneGap was under way we noticed slow load times for modern JavaScript frameworks (such as Prototype, MooTools, YUI, Ext and (yes) even jQuery. A big reason why these libraries are so big is because is mostly they contain a great deal of cross browser compatability code. The mobile space has less browser implementations (so far) and...
More on developing naming conventions,... →
…back in May 29th 2004…I surveyed forty designers’ sites to see what conventions they used for common page elements like headers and banners, navigation, content and footers….
…I followed up on some comments by Eric Meyer and published a set of naming conventions. I am always really pleased when I find a site that has adopted these naming conventions and I still...
LittleSis » Barack Obama →
Fake-Facebook site showing the networks of “the powers that be” across a few different organizations and data types. Wiki-style updating by us non-powers-that-be. Could be interesting fodder for visualizations. [tf]
HTML5 enabling script →
I like the ideas of these scripts working, but I think I side with Allsopp in ALA that the semantic questions is a total mess. Handy…but only if you’re working in generic web content without its own semantics. Shorter CSS, but with all the enhancements along those lines, are those gains significant? Not really. [tf]
Fatten Up Your Corpus - Open Blog - NYTimes.com →
As Google’s example has consistently shown, more data usually beats better algorithms, and if you’re a researcher looking for a new motherlode of high-quality textual data — who also has a love of The New York Times’s writerly chops — where better to start than The New York Times Annotated Corpus? Available for noncommercial research license from The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), the corpus...
Twelve techies who could help nurture and save... →
John Cook (former P-I, now TechFlash) names people he thinks would be good to run a new version of the P-I. Cory and MikeD both get shout-outs. That’d be funny. It’s interesting that TechFlash doesn’t really put together than msnbc.com is effectively a macro example of an all-online biz model being shopped to folding newspapers. They still think we’re cable. [tf]
Ten steps to save the Seattle P-I, and maybe the... →
Some decent advice in this post about what the P-I could do from former P-I tech bloggers/journalists. They make a good point about how the P-I’s transformation could be an example for newspapers who need to make serious changes in 2009. [tf]
10 Smart Javascript Techniques For Manipulating... →
Not really worth the code examples. More interesting to look at them as interaction patterns. Animated slideshows, carousels, infinite scroll, content sliders, show/hide effects, lightbox, etc. [tf]
Five Things Google Could Do For Newspapers |... →
graphpaper.com - Interaction 101 →
This one’s hard to summarize. Basically, Chris Fahey starts a discussion about interaction methods. He’s after a list of optimal computer skills, like the ability to mouse, boolean search, select things, zoom, pan…actions that convey enough computer vocabulary for their (in?)actor to be considered a “power user”. The comments tease out a bunch of interesting...
The State of the Web survey results | Web... →
Way, way too much information about web design & development trends. Take the overall findings. I hope the Web Directions folks (John and Maxine) keep it up for a few years—that’s where it’ll show its strengths. [tf]
Networked link journalism: A revolution quietly... →
#waflood hashtag does some interesting things for Washington flood coverage. Cool story. I wish I’d caught it via Twitter. [tf]
“First the standard caveat: designing a major media site is not as easy as it may...”
– Mike Davidson - Thoughts on the ESPN.com Redesign All hail MikeD. [tf]
News as a bludgeoning device | Zac Echola →
I’d like to think of news the same way I think of a Google map. Each news item we come across is a pinpoint fully zoomed in. Except we don’t have the best controls to see the relationships between news items. We can’t easily zoom out for a wider view. Explanatory journalism–that is, news items that step back to take a wider survey is a step in the right direction, giving news consumers one more...
Advanced Color Correction Tutorial that will Knock... →
A List Apart: Articles: Semantics in HTML 5 →
John Allsopp summarizes the challenges of adding new element types to HTML5. Good read. [tf]
We don’t need to add specific terms to the vocabulary of HTML, we need to add a mechanism that allows semantic richness to be added to a document as required. In technical terms, we need to make HTML extensible. HTML 5 proposes no mechanism for extensibility.
Hyperlocal Websites will Boom in 2009 as Community... →
I’m interested to see if this really happens, or if the advertising goes to community blogs. Starting up a blog v. starting up a hyperlocal website both avoid the question of who writes the articles and where the quasi-journalistic credibility comes from (if it’s there at all). I’d be surprised if the end of the year shows any progress at all. There’s a play available...
Rewriting Twitter for web best practices →
A tour of programming and app-design best practices by rewriting Twitter. [tf]
