Month: May 2013

Lance 3.0: Lay down your cudgels, please | Cycling in the South Bay

Lance 3.0: Lay down your cudgels, please | Cycling in the South Bay:

If you hate Lance because he “ruined the sport,” maybe it’s time YOU moved on. The pro sport is rotten. If you follow it and still bury your head in the jocks of its stars, there’s a problem all right, and the problem is with you. If you can watch Nibali repeatedly hit the gas in the snow at the end of the most grueling stage of the most grueling stage race while his competition is rolling over and dying on the slopes, you’re the one who needs to analyze my modification of this old saw: “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me over and over and over, and I’m a f***ing moron who enjoys being fooled.”

[Well said.]

Wikipedia Corruption

Wikipedia Corruption:

Andrew Leonard, writing for Salon, unmasks a blatantly corrupt Wikipedia editor:

The mind boggles. After years of styling himself as someone who specializes in scrubbing Wikipedia pages clean of “conflicts of interest,” Qworty/Young admitted to editing “the Wikipedia articles of writers with whom I have feuded.” How can Wikipedia possibly allow this man to keep his editing privileges? And how are we, the general public, supposed to trust Wikipedia, when Qworty’s record shows how easy it is to work out personal grudges and real-world vendettas in this great online encyclopedia for years without anyone taking action?

[Troubling.]

Source: Daring Fireball

Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface | MIT Technology Review

Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface | MIT Technology Review:

“What could be more natural than staring at something to select it, nodding to approve something?… For privacy, you’ll be able to use imperceptible movements, or even hidden ones such as flicking your tongue across your teeth.”

These designers think that the difference between effortless tongue-flicking and Glass’s crude chin-snapping is simply one of refinement. I’m not so sure. To me they both seem equally alienating–I don’t think we want our bodies to be UIs. 

[Yeah, it’s a mess. This stuff never seems to work out.]

At WordPress, Happiness is Automattic | Unencumbered by Facts

At WordPress, Happiness is Automattic | Unencumbered by Facts:

Now that I have worked on this team for a while, I have come to realize it is anything but silly or cute; in fact, it’s quite brilliant. The impact of having this title is subtle but powerful. The Happiness Engineers truly do an incredible job helping WordPress users with every problem they report, even ones not related to WordPress. There is an infectious helpfulness that permeates the interaction between team members that can best be described as the exact opposite of the “not my problem” attitude. Your problem is their problem and they want to help resolve it.

[—]

Source:

Strongbox and Aaron Swartz : The New Yorker

Strongbox and Aaron Swartz : The New Yorker:

Aaron Swartz was not yet a legend when, almost two years ago, I asked him to build an open-source, anonymous in-box. His achievements were real and varied, but the events that would come to define him to the public were still in his future: his federal criminal indictment; his leadership organizing against the censorious Stop Online Piracy Act; his suicide in a Brooklyn apartment. I knew him as a programmer and an activist, a member of a fairly small tribe with the skills to turn ideas into code—another word for action—and the sensibility to understand instantly what I was looking for: a slightly safer way for journalists and their anonymous sources to communicate.

[An amazing story. What other bits and pieces are hanging around from AS?]

→ Tail wagging

→ Tail wagging:

Matt Gemmell on skeuomorphism and intuitive design:

Matt, a programmer by trade, addresses the skeuomorphism debate more effectively than most designers I’ve heard arguing about it.

[Here’s my pull quote:]

Children don’t seem to be having problems grasping those concepts, even if Jakob Neilsen thinks they should. They’re not confused by interactive data-surfaces; they’re frustrated when actual, printed content in the physical world doesn’t respond the way they now expect it to.

Intuitiveness has become unhelpfully conflated with familiarity. The reasoning is simple enough: things that are already familiar don’t have to be re-learned, so we assume that they’re more “intuitive”. That’s a big assumption, but we treat it as if it’s fact.

Sometimes, familiar things aren’t as intuitive as they could be, and a new, unfamiliar thing might be more so. Another possibility is that a new thing might be equally intuitive, but also have other benefits which justify its initial unfamiliarity. In either case, intuitiveness cannot be divorced from context.

∞ Permalink

[Spot on.]

Source: Marco.org

When Everyone is an Eye-Witness, What is a Journalist?

When Everyone is an Eye-Witness, What is a Journalist? | Storyful Blog:

Yet, from the vantage point of the social web, there was no apparent need for a third person to mediate. In the blatant first-person world of YouTube and Twitter, we all get to decide the meaning.

That concept strikes fear into the heart of those who believe there is eternal value in journalism. Even those of us who have mastered the tools of the social age have a deep ambivalence about where they are taking us.

On the night of the Boston bombings, my Twitter timeline was filled with the ambivalent cry of those who saw danger and opportunity around them. In the words of one angst-ridden tweep:

“Today reminds me how Twitter has become one of the greatest tools as well as one of greatest threats to true journalism”.

I share the sentiment. But I also despair at the failure of the guardians of ‘True Journalism’ to develop a coherent response to that contradiction. Perhaps the problem is that too many journalists still believe they are the rightful ‘owners’ of breaking news.

[Mark Little nails it.]