Giving a user a clear instruction on ‘how’ to move on in their task, rather than just ‘what’ they’re moving on to, is a good thing. Copyblogger and GrokDotCom discuss.

Jakob Neilsen talks about getting introductory text right. It sounds simple, but, as is typical when writing for the web, it is not.

Radiohead have announced the release of their new album ‘In Rainbows’ on the 10th October. They’re doing it on their own without a record label as a pay-as-much-as-you-want download and a fancy expensive CD/vinyl/book behemoth. This is pretty fundamental stuff: the record companies know it, and are scared of it. Time (which features the above quote from an anonymous exec) and many others are discussing what it all means.

Now, more than ever, is the time to fine tune your brilliant web idea that will change the world – or at least get bought by Yahoo/Google/Microsoft/News Corp. Techcrunch UK (which has recently relaunched) discusses a study that shows growth in venture capital in the UK and Ireland. So, if you ever thought that it might be difficult to get venture capital unless you were based in Silicon Valley, now is the time to dust down your ideas.
Update: Venture Beat has more about how venture capital is leaving Silicon Valley.

The New York Times has an article up about how the web’s users are getting older, and (as with other areas of the media) people are realising how they can be a more important and valuable audience than the much desired youth audience.

The Functioning Form blog summarises a talk by Liz Danzico about web design ‘rules’ that don’t stand up and should be seen as ‘considerations’.

Call it the influence of MySpace or a reaction to the slick clean design status quo, but the Creative Review blog discusses what it is (possibly) calling “The New Ugly”. The most high profile example of this is, of course, the Olympics 2012 logo.

Milissa Tarquini in Boxes & Arrows discusses the myth of the fold. One of the great false truisms in the field of web design is that users don’t like going ‘below the fold’ - the area on a web page that users would have to scroll down to see. Happily for designers, there is no evidence to support this myth.

Facebook seems to be everywhere at the moment. Everyone suddenly seems to be using it, it’s all over the newspapers and television news, and weblogs debate whether it is the new MySpace/Google/Microsoft/AOL. Recently there has been talk of Facebook bankruptcy and fatigue, but while the discussion is interesting, we love it here at FoxLand where it seems to have taken over from email, texting, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace and instant messaging. And that’s only in the last 2 months or so that we’ve used it.

Sometimes, change is not welcome, and ‘feature creep’ can be a real risk to a product and brand. Allen Salkin in The New York Times discusses an issue that also effects how we change and evolve websites (via Daring Fireball).

Jakob Neilsen argues that for certain organisations or people, it is better to avoid quickly written blog entries (like this!), and concentrate on longer more in-depth articles. It’s an interesting article, but not for everyone. Various good discussions have been started on the topic, and are worth scanning at The Guardian and Robert Scoble’s blog, who takes it almost personally. We primarily write short posts on subjects that we find relevant to our business and our clients. We would at times like to write longer posts, but find that not only do we not have the time, we also want to be as succinct as possible.

While working with People’s Archive, we’ve investigated various video hosting sites, such as YouTube, Vimeo, etc. LifeGoggles has a great page making it easy to compare their embedded players and the quality of their video.

Using Web 2.0, Steve Jobs and the iPhone as prime examples, Bruce Nussbaum in Businessweek argues that rather than just employing designers, CEOs should be designers.

A post from Lines & Colors, a blog about artists and illustrators, on the frustration of many artist’s websites, but there are many points that ring true for anyone.

Along with a whole host of new tidbits about upcoming software at their WWDC, Apple also relaunched their website. Not only have they updated their rather tired looking global navigation, there is a huge range of effective Ajax-style elements that (mostly) add to the usability of their site. Their (possibly Google-powered - if you check their code) search is a particularly nice example which offers popular shortcuts even before you’ve pressed return. The amount of work and attention-to-detail that has gone into this is very impressive.