Inayaili is an “amazing female role model for web designers”
We knew she was great already, but we’re still proud that Inayaili has been nominated as one of 40 amazing female models for web designers at Line25.
The meaning of membership
That’s part of the secret to successful networks: everyone’s a member, no one is king.
As newspapers struggle to eek revenue from their activities many are discussing ‘membership areas’, that could include special access to forums, content or freebies. But what could membership mean? Could it mean something more radical? Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian suggests the model employed by Barcelona Football Club in which the fans own the club. Jeff Jarvis talks more about what website membership could mean…
Inayaili writes for Smashing Magazine again
CSS is one of the most powerful tools that is available to web designers (if not the most powerful). With it we can completely transform the look of a website in just a couple of minutes, and without even having to touch the markup. But despite the fact that we are all well aware of its usefulness, CSS selectors are still not used to their full potential and we sometimes have the tendency to litter our HTML with excessive and unnecessary classes and ids, divs and spans.
The best way to avoid these plagues spreading in your markup and keep it clean and semantic, is by using more complex CSS selectors, ones that can target specific elements without the need of a class or an id, and by doing that keep our code and our stylesheets flexible.
Inayaili has written another article for Smashing Magazine, this time on “Taming Advanced CSS Selectors”. It’s technical and in-depth — we would recommend it for serious web designers everywhere. Her last article for Smashing Magazine called “Take Your Design To The Next Level With CSS3” got to number 1 on Digg and Delicious, so go take a look.
17 August, 2009
The realtime stream
“I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now”
Whether we are referring to your Facebook updates, the endless list of Twitter messages or your updating news from aggregators, Erick Schonfeld on Techcrunch histrionically talks up the “stream”. So, what do we mean by this stream? It is the constant ever-shifting flow of what is happening right ‘now’. There is no hope in ever consuming it all, but it is there to immerse yourself in and feel a part of. Or, as Damien Hirst once said when he was still interesting: “I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now”.
Like many hyped ideas related to the web, streams of realtime information are not wholly new. For example, RSS feeds — arguably the backbone of the realtime web — have been in development since the dawn of the mainstream internet in 1995, but realtime is a metaphor that helps us look at ideas anew, and reminds us that the web is much more than just a set of ‘pages’. Indeed, due to changes in the way the web has been built over the last few years, with AJAX to update pages, and services bringing the web to the desktop and mobile, the concept of the ‘web page’ has become less important. The idea of streams of realtime information makes the page even less relevant.
This shift to a focus away from pages and to streams of content throw up a wide range of challenges for both designers, content creators and businesses — challenges that few web practitioners feel they have worked out yet. Some of the questions we have been discussing at FoxLand include…
- How will advertising work in the realtime stream?
- How will advertisers be able to measure their impact?
- Will the mob rule?
- When there is so much noise, how will good content be found?
- What will be the design conventions for realtime?
- How do companies harness and learn from the stream?
- How will anyone make money? And is that important?
- And most pertinently, how will people not get drowned in all this raw information?
- Oh, and how do you actually spell realtime/real-time/real time?
It will be fascinating over the next few years to see how these issues resolve themselves.
Notes:
1. Photograph of Damien Hirst’s book by ~.~ mypictography.
2. For more thoughts and ideas about realtime, we’re involved with our friends over at The Realtime Project.
3. Due to some personal situations, some of the links and initial inspiration for this piece are now getting on a bit.
30 July, 2009
Twitter and The Prince
Our friends at The Prince’s Charities have just started tweeting. Take a look at http://twitter.com/powcharities. Follow them and start asking questions!
Why support Internet Explorer 6?
Popular link sharing website Digg recently considered removing functionality from the site as they spent so much time trying to get things to work with the ancient web browser. With that in mind they did some research into their users — the findings weren’t great news for web designers. Take a look at their research results here.
Taming trolls
Troll: someone who is deliberately aggressive or disruptive in a discussion.
Read more…
Websites still not up to standard
Computerworld discusses why even in 2009, 10 years after the Web Standards Project was founded, and after huge strides from all the browser makers (including Microsoft with the release of IE8), users still find that there are major problems using websites.
Monty Python find the Holy Grail
Due to the recession there has finally been a lot of recent discussion about the expectation and delivery of free content and services online. A recent high profile winner in this are the Monty Python team who placed clips of their work on YouTube and are now reaping a huge increase in their DVD sales. While the balance for copyright holders seems to be hard to find, for some being a bit more ‘relaxed’ about it all seems to be working.
(I’ve been out of action for quite a while, so I’ve been catching up on some interesting news from around the web and work we have been doing, therefore some of this stuff may be a bit old).
Out of work? Browse the web instead.
Peter Kafka at All Things Digital parses recent results from various sources that more people are browsing the web, and wonders whether that it is related to American jobless figures. It could also, of course, be that people are simply going out less. Unfortunately and inevitably, the increase in traffic is not translating to people clicking on ads or buying stuff.
Murdoch: people are “hungrier for information than ever before”
Much of the newspaper industry was nervous even before the downturn, but now with the massive drop in offline advertising many are resigned to the idea of permanent decline. Rupert Murdoch though does not agree and he recently made an optimistic speech on why he believes newspapers will continue to be important, but also evolve into new forms. These forms may not exist as a printed edition at all: “In this coming century, the form of delivery may change, but the potential audience for our content will multiply many times over.”
He rightly sees the internet not as the ‘enemy’ that will kill them off, but an opportunity. For someone who came so late to the internet, he now seems born again, an optimist who sees the internet as a catalyst for new ways of doing things. People are “hungrier for information than ever before… Readers want what they’ve always wanted: a source they can trust. That has always been the role of great newspapers in the past and that role will make newspapers great in the future.”
Read more coverage by the Associated Press and ReadWriteWeb.
5 December, 2008
Memes
Nice couple of articles on The Guardian and The Moderate Voice about one of my favourite websites, Memeorandum. The website scours the web for the most ‘live’ news stories of the moment. These articles are partly interested in how Memeorandum is completely driven by a clever computer-driven algorithm, but intriguingly the company has just decided to start using people to help discover news as they feel it didn’t quite work well enough without them. (Found via Andrew Sullivan)
Time to restructure your business?
“…online sales have simply been bolted on to existing businesses, but retailers need to start from scratch and use the lull in sales in 2009 to restructure their businesses.” from The Telegraph, talking about the collapse of Woolworths and MFI, and whether this is the end of the high street? Note: it is probably not.
Politicians will learn from Barack Obama, but probably should not do it like this
Benjamin Netanyahu, the right-wing Israeli politician has been inspired by Barack Obama. Many people may find this inspiration slightly ironic considering the differences in fundamental world views, but learning from his successful campaign techniques makes sense. That said, what Netanyahu really shouldn’t do is copy wholesale the brand design and general look and feel of the whole campaign.
Twitter Vote Report
Take a look at this great Twitter-based website that lets people report problems and issues with voting in the US today.