ARTS & FARCES internet

Censorship

Centre County (PA) Judge Thomas King Kistler ordered the Centre Daily Times and the Daily Collegian (Penn State’s student newspaper) to delete news stories about two defendants from their websites. The defendants’ lawyer “was concerned the media’s First Amendment rights to free speech were trumping his clients’ rights to have cleared records,” according to Genaro C. Armas writing for the Associated Press. The judge for the other three cases, Centre County Judge Bradley Lunsford reversed his original order to expunge the stories. Neither US federal nor Pennsylvania state law require newspapers to change archives that are factually correct. Sara Ganim, writing for the Centre Daily Times, reports that Kistler later met with fellow judges, district attorney, and the defense attorney and rescinded his expungement order.

ESRD

Apropos of nothing, but it fits as well here as any of the other categories. Jeremy Messersmith is one of the best under-the-radar songwriters to come down the pike in quite a while. He was on Minnesota Public Radio this week; here’s a video clip of him singing “Organ Donor.”

Internet

Last month Twitter reduced the number of API calls allowed for third-party applications from 350 to 175 per hour. This week Twitter third-party vendors reported that the the number of allowed API calls was reduced to 75 per hour. What that means is that Twitter is throttling its servers—if you follow a lot of people on twitter, or only a few really prolific ones—you can’t keep up with the stream. As Ryan Singel aptly writes for Wired, “... take this as another reason why communication services work better as open protocols—like email—not as proprietary platforms like Twitter and Facebook.”

Media

One of the stupidest newspaper headlines ever run is indicative of how truly far the Star Tribune has fallen: “15 homicides aside, serious crime drops on North Side.” To think that I can remember when the Star Tribune was one of the best papers in the US is simply stunning.

Politics

If you live in the Twin Cities, check out MetroWatchdog, a joint project of the Fourth (Saint Paul) and Fifth (Minneapolis) Congressional District Green Parties. Instead of focusing on electoral campaigns and the attendant personalities, MetroWatchdog focuses solely on grassroots democracy: issues and local government.

Publishing

Ann Handley accurately describes the 14 stages of writing a book. Really.

User experience

Jeffrey Zeldman explains his view of why there won’t ever be an InDesign for HTML and CSS. “HTML is a language with roots in library science,” writes Zeldman. “It doesn’t know or care what content looks like. (Even HTML5 doesn’t care what content looks like.) Neither a tool like Photoshop, which is all about pixels, nor a tool like Illustrator, which is all about vectors, can generate semantic HTML, because the visual and the semantic are two different things.” Zeldman goes on to rail that the machines can’t do what humans can: “Moreover, authoring good HTML and CSS is an art, just as authoring good poetry or designing beautiful comps in Photoshop is an art. Expecting Photoshop to write the kind of markup and CSS you and I write at our best is like challenging TextMate to convert semantic HTML into a visually appropriate and aesthetically pleasing layout. Certain kinds of human creativity and expertise cannot be reproduced by machines.” Be sure to read the comments.

I’m finding UX Myths to be more and more useful as time goes on. Written by two information architects in Budapest, the site provides links to extensive supporting evidence of its positions. And Zoltan Gocza and Zoltan Kollin aren’t afraid to refute long-held user experience axioms.

Eric Meyer has written an endorsement of vendor-specific CSS prefixes for A List Apart. Here’s his nut graf: “We ought to praise vendors for using prefixes, and indeed encourage them to continue. Beyond that, I hold that prefixes should become a central part of the CSS standardization process. I do this not for the love of repetition, but out of a desire to see CSS evolve consistently. I believe that prefixes can actually accelerate the advancement and refinement of CSS.”

When user experience experts hand-off their deliverables to the client, sometimes the transition is uncomfortable. How does the client conduct a successful implementation? Adaptive Path’s Chiara Fox has published a useful flow chart clearly outlining where strategy and design tasks end and where implementation starts, including various roles.