Poor old misunderstood Comic Sans – created with the best intentions – but either hated or poorly used. Take a look at this story on Wall Street Journal about the font, and its creator Vincent Connare.

Troll: someone who is deliberately aggressive or disruptive in a discussion.

When the new whitehouse.gov went live many people questioned why it wasn’t open to comments and discussion. We have worked on a few projects where this is a very sensitive issue. We’d have loved the comments to have been more open, but issues of the appropriate use of language on sensitive websites could have opened them up to various problems (a subject for a much longer journal entry). That said there have been some intriguing innovations in how to handle commenting on blogs, discussed in this article on Wired.

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.

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).

There has been some debate recently about how plausible it is to make money as an independent writer on the web using advertising. Daniel Lyons who used to famously be ‘Fake Steve Jobs’ wrote an article about how becoming rich as a blogger is nigh-on impossible. Two people who do make a living from blogging, Jason Kottke and Andrew Sullivan, have some interesting responses: Kottke has a nice metaphor; while Andrew Sullivan says “I wrote this blog for years as a labor of love. If you expect nothing, especially at the start, you’re doing it for the right reason.”

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.

A good Content Management System (CMS) can be a fantastic help for people to easily update their website while keeping design consistent and use supporting technologies (such as RSS or clean, SEO-friendly semantic code). That said, if you use a CMS limitations and costs inevitably occur -it is a case of balance and what is important for your website. For example, in some situations a website that is highly focused on marketing a product or service and needs to be highly stylised may well find a CMS a hindrance. Paul Boag discusses some of these issues in his article The 5 Hidden Costs of Running a CMS.

David Carson, a leading ‘grunge’ designer in the 90’s designer, talks about design, found images and humour from TED Talks.

You probably hate Flash-based websites that display a ‘loading’ bar, but the website Pretty Loaded makes you almost love them.

Labour are attempting to engage fully with the web with LabourList - an ‘independent’ network of blogs and social tools. It feels a little bit forced or fake, but it is the right strategy for them to try and counteract the potent force of online Conservative opinion (such as conservativehome.com). More about the initiative at The Guardian.

Bill Higgins talks about the danger of web designers trying to create online applications look and act too much like their regular desktop-based cousins. This is an interesting point, but regarding an issue that is still very much in flux. Web design needs new metaphors for getting things done, and what happens to the tools that are a natural mix between web-based and desktop apps, such as the iTunes Store, Twitterrific, Evernote, RSS readers, etc.?