Wolff Olins talk in the New York Times about their 2012 Olympics, New York City, New Museum of Contemporary Arts and other identities, and how they are all designed to be flexible, mutable devices that should not remain rigid. While they say that “in the era of blogging, social networking and mash-ups … a bit of flexibility is essential”, this is not such a new concept – companies such as MTV have been doing this for a long time – and surely does not need the web as a reason to think this way.

Yesterday saw the unveiling of the new MySpace Platform at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco - a move which has been seen as a clear counterstrike against main rival Facebook.

The MySpace plans are clearly a response to the huge success of the Facebook Platform, which launched last May and which has seen the creation of thousands of third party applications (some, admittedly, more annoying than others).

Showing how important MySpace is to News Corp, the announcement was made by Rupert Murdoch himself, along with Chris DeWolfe, the co-founder of MySpace. Indeed, of the $5 billion News Corp are expected to make in 2008 Murdoch predicted a significant contribution of $300 million profit will come from MySpace alone.

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.