George Oates from Flickr talks about what they learnt building and working with their community. Very relevant for us right now…

More and more people just use Google to get to websites rather than bother typing in a hard to remember web address. Read more on Search Engine Journal.

While we have had mixed feelings about Twitter in the past, we’re working with a client on a super simple news feed system (wanting to avoid a blog or full news system) and we realised that Twitter would be ideal. With that in mind FoxLand has finally climbed on board, as have Christian, Calum and Andrew. 

A fantastic article about how the website for the magazine Monocle came about, the thinking behind it, the design and the style. Written by Dan Hill who has worked for the last year on the site, it goes into great detail about the challenges staying true to the style and brand of the magazine while also working in the medium of the web. There are many good insights made, many that remind me of our projects. For example, while discussing whether user-generated content should be in the Monocle site: “my view was that we didn’t need comments on the site as people increasingly have their own spaces to talk, discuss, comment - whether that’s blogs and discussion fora, or the social software of Facebook et al.” — an insight many organisations could learn from and feel comfortable about. Monocle, the magazine and website, are also recommended.

In testing we know that many users search for websites rather than ever enter a web address, even when they search using a term such as “fox-land.co.uk”. As Cabel Sasser notes, in Japan things have gone one step forward, and web addresses are now not even used in advertising.

Suddenly, mixtapes are the new ‘new thing’. In an age of endless digital music on tap, both Mixwit and Muxtape are attempting to bring back that magic of making mixtape compilations for your friends. Both methods are pretty nice looking, but ultimately I’m a sucker for the retro look of Mixwit’s dirty tatty tapes. Note: for people under the age of 30 or so, find out what cassette tapes and mixtapes actually are.

The web is a buying medium, not a selling medium. Matthew Creamer in AdAge on online advertising.

Newsweek on the Barack Obama “brand” – including a reference to how Hillary Clinton is actively copying it, typeface and all.

Imagine if Saul Bass had designed the Star Wars intro. Via Jason Kottke.

“Usually, applications fail because they (a) solve the wrong problem, (b) have the wrong features for the right problem, or (c) make the right features too complicated for users to understand”. Read Jakob Neilsen’s Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes.

While we work on complex web applications, such as for CBD/TPdb or Faculty of 1000, we have to consider the balance of ease-0f-use and creating context for users so that they can understand what they are looking at. Cathy Shive discusses ‘Computer Administrative Debris’ in applications (found via John Gruber).

The New York Times (login required) compares the relative website design of US presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, to the debacle between Macs and PCs.

The U.S. is going through a period of concern about literacy in the young, but it is not all as it seems. Steven Johnson in The Guardian talks about how many people are reading more than ever.

The internet is often thought as being a vast virtual ‘cloud’ that spans the world, built primarily by software. It is then somehow a surprise when you are reminded just how physical the infrastructure the internet is built on actually is. Whether it is by the recent news that a single cable in the Mediterranean broke so Asia and the Middle East had to do without their MySpace fixes, or maps such as this that show just how we are all connected.

Adrian Shaughnessy for the Creative Review visits Wolff Olins, the company he was critical of due to their Olympics 2012 logo… and has his expectations confounded.