As long as the URL resolves, a feed can still surprise you. RSS is the true web: a loose net of dark filaments. These faint tendrils of connection are almost invisible when quiescent, but then out of nowhere—hello!—they light up again. I am happy to have them.
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Robin Sloan on RSS
Mobile Only Users
This is a great article and super informative for folks who might still feel like a good mobile experience is too complicated for the return.
Mobile-only users aren’t some strange new breed of customer, signaling their desire for different messages, content, and services through their choice of screen size and form factor. They’re just your customer. You can and should speak to them in same way you address all your other customers. They just want to engage with you on the device that’s most useful and convenient for them.
Meeting the needs of the mobile-only user doesn’t mean agonizing about “the mobile use case,” trying to determine which subset of content would be most useful to users “on-the-go.” Google reports that 77 percent of searches from mobile devices take place at home or work, only 17 percent on the move. Mobile users should get the same content. It’s frustrating and confusing for them if you only give them a little bit of what you offer on your “real” website. If you try to guess which subset of your content the mobile user needs, you’re going to guess wrong. Deliver the same content as your desktop user sees. (If you think some of your content doesn’t deserve to be on mobile, guess what — it doesn’t deserve to be on the desktop either. Get rid of it.)
“…on the device that’s most useful and convenient for them.” Which could be a mobile device, might not. But they deserve the best experience regardless of their choice. In this way, we’re trying to talk about proximate use, not strictly ‘mobile only’ use. I don’t think we’re convincing businesses that mobile is every part of the customer pie so to speak as long as we continue to segment out the users when we talk about the site experience.
All customers deserve great site experiences regardless of device, and many users are choosing their devices based on what’s near them, not by some mysterious code we can’t break. Since many of those users are indeed coming from mobile devices and those numbers are rising, it’s more important than ever to treat them as well as the ‘traditional’ customers you’ve developed desktop site experiences for.
Internet Archive from Deepspeed media on Vimeo.
Video: Internet Archive Short Documentary
An incredible look at how the Internet Archive functions.
Save Internet History!
“Archive Team is a band of rogue archivists rescuing dead and dying websites from destruction. To assist their efforts, they’ve developed ArchiveTeam Warrior, a virtual appliance that makes it easy for anyone to help archive dying websites and upload the backups to their server.” Learn more.
SXSW, Where Corporate Branding is No Biggie
Festival culture itself is one of the other things linking those two Americas; in 2013, it’s almost impossible to find a music festival that isn’t branded and sponsored. What is unusual is finding a festival of branding, which is what SXSW has become. More unusual still is that its unembarrassed and uninhibited celebration of the modern capitalist spirit has not made South by Southwest an object of ridicule among the young and the hip. In fact, it is rather the opposite.
I guess this is the part where I make the cliche “Well, I’m officially old” joke. Not that I want to ridicule SXSW necessarily, I just find the whole situation so hilarious at this point, and worth talking about. The problem is that people (particularly people in Austin) get very emotional about SXSW, and it’s hard to have a conversation about the progression the festival has undergone in recent years. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just interesting.
Read the whole article, though, it’s all very interesting. I wonder how many times one of us has been in a bar somewhere overhearing a conversation where someone yells, “Write about me, I deserve to be written about!” That should be SXSW’s new tagline. Or that whole “You’re the brand” thing.
An acquisition is always a failure
“But a visionary is an implementer of visions, not an acquirer of dollars. And if you consider yourself a visionary, the only honest response to your own acquisition is to admit your failure, dust yourself off, and start building your next company.” Jake Lodwick
Whitney Phillips on Trolls
“I am certainly not of the opinion that there is and should only be ONE definition of the term. It should go without saying that language is flexible, and behavior even more so. But I will say that it is critical –if we hope our conversations to go anywhere– to acknowledge a basic difference between the definitions of trolling offered by those who self-identify as such and those who take it upon themselves to bestow the category onto others. Currently, that’s one aspect of the conversation that tends to be overlooked, I think because everyone assumes everyone else’s words mean the same things as their own words, and then proceed to rail against any number of straw men. Or straw trolls, as the case may be.”
Whether we’re talking about trolls or any other genre or people identifier, Whitney’s comments here seem more than appropriate, they feel important. Everyone who talks about things that aren’t them should always be considering these two things: 1) language is flexible 2) what something means to you isn’t the same as what it means to someone else.
Meaning is almost philosophical in this case, we can simplify by saying something like “Usage evolves in a broad cultural sense as well as in an individual lexicon sense.”
Makes you feel like it’s incredibly easy to say the wrong thing, but really, this kind of evolution of usage ultimately informing meaning on a larger scale is exactly how communication works, and it’s totally natural and it’s only when we ask questions around ‘difficult’ words (like ‘troll’) do we start to think about it too hard.
Read more of Phillips’ research and thoughts on defining Internet trolls here, and listen to the episode on On Point in which Phillips appeared with Jonathan Zittrain here.
Rex Sorgatz: What The New York Times should do next
“Using what they have learned from digital subscriptions, The New York Times should create an entirely new product around membership. This new brand would vastly expand the reach of the Times to new products, new platforms, and new revenue opportunities. To succeed, it needs to perfectly executed in two areas: It has to be cool (marketing) and it has to create value (product).”
Via.
No, I don’t want to finance your Kickstarter album
“And if I invest at all it will be because I, in some sado-masochistic way, want myself and others to feel the pain of exceptionally terrible or middling music. The goal being that Kickstarter’s music projects will reach such a critical mass of blandness and shite that investment dollars will simply dry up. That the money tree will suddenly vanish and the music trolls will retreat into their mountain lairs.”
Via.
Why is Reddit So Anti-Woman?
“I think that kasdayeh is right about geek culture, but there’s an important facet of that she left out: lack of education about society. Guys on Reddit are very typically coming from STEM fields – a lot of engineers, a lot of programmers. I really think the complete lack of basic understanding of social justice on Reddit, the lack of understanding of how past oppression continues to exert force on the present, is reflective of a larger failure of a good humanities education. It’s reflective of the increasing early specialization we require of college and even high school kids. Their STEM curriculums don’t require much of a humanities or social science foundation, so they grow up completely unequipped with the tools required to think critically about society, and totally unaware of how social structures shape everyone’s lives – and it’s especially invisible to them as mostly white, middle-class, straight males, who are told their experience and identity is the “default.”"
Textrovert’s thoughtful analysis is tempting, and you should read all of it, but I wonder… is it possible for any of us (STEM or not) to truly be “totally unaware of how social structures shape everyone’s lives”? Especially considering how pervasive these topics are online, how easy it is to access the perspectives of different kinds of people online? I’d want to counter-point that anyone so deeply immersed in the more analytical and scientific fields must also be curious enough to read and observe, even if they’re aren’t studying it critically in their respective programs.
The Death Of SEO: The Rise of Social, PR, And Real Content
“Google is in the process of making the SEO industry obsolete, SEO will be dead in 2 years.”
Via.
