ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

It’s always heartening to see a user community deservedly bust a developer/vendor’s balls, especially when it’s done with a level head and respectfully. Kenny Meyers does exactly that with his “A Plea To EllisLab” on theNerdary. EllisLab is the small development company that makes the software, ExpressionEngine, that’s been running this website for, well, longer than I can remember. It’s been a bumpy ride and as EllisLab continues to grow—as more web folks discover the powers of ExpressionEngie—that ride just gets bumpier. The EllisLab response appears to be a gatekept podcast with the blessed. Not the best idea if you really want to have a conversation with your users.

Censorship

Apple’s artist requirements for its Ping (.pdf; 594KB) social networking site have been making the internet rounds and while it’s mostly what was to be expected, there’s a bit in two different sections that is quite disturbing. Artists can’t link to sites outside of iTunes. Telling musicians they can’t link to their own websites or other social media presences is just stupid and, sadly, not at all unexpected from Apple.

ESRD

Are US dialysis patients the new Tuskegee Syphilis Group? That’s the question asked by Peter Laird, writing for Dialysis from the sharp end of the needle. “Today, once again in America, under a government controlled program, dialysis patients are the subject of intense study, but at present, only approximately one percent of us have access to optimal hemodialysis delivered in the comfort of our own homes,” writes Laird. Laird goes on to note that US dialysis patients have a “worse projected survival at time of diagnosis and intervention than the average breast cancer or prostate cancer patient.”

Intellectual property

Michael Geist covers Canadian copyright law better than anyone else in the Great White North, and he’s edited From “Radical Extremism” to “Balanced Copyright:” Canadian Copyright and the Digital Agenda. The 652-page book is available online under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commerical, no derivatives, 2.0 license. Each chapter is also available for download in .pdf format.

The US Library of Congress has released a study on recorded sound preservation that concludes that US copyright law makes the practice virtually impossible. “Were copyright law followed to the letter, little audio preservation would be undertaken. Were the law strictly enforced, it would brand virtually all audio preservation as illegal.”

Internet

Last week Happy Cog launched Cognition, a studio blog, with what just may be a big step forward in commenting systems. Instead of a traditional commenting system, that quickly degrades without active moderation, Cognition readers can either publish a link to a response on their own blog or publish a response on Twitter.

Law

In his column for the New York Times, Paul Krugman asks the question of “whether our economy is governed by any kind of rule of law.” As Krugman well knows, the answer is always embedded in a question like that: Of course not. For my entire lifetime, the sole purpose of US law is to maintain or enhance corporate profit. Anything else is an unintended consequence—sometimes positive; mostly negative—of this prime directive.

Politics

Leave it to the BBC to figure out American politics better than the US media. Americans “resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best,” according to the article. And “stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win.”

This is going to be a tough pill for some to swallow, but given current public policy in the US, we’re on target to be running a deficit of more than 30 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050, mostly because of members of the boomer generation “retiring.” This looming problem was clearly articulated by The Economist, citing the “Global Aging 2010: In Irreversible Truth” report from Standard & Poors. As The Economist points out, the choices are limited to two and both are distasteful. Screw the creditors or future pensioners. Raising the retirement age appears to be the only equitable solution, based on the increased and increasing longevity of the general population.

Privacy

Tanzina Vega, writing for the New York Times, is reporting that HTML5—the fifth major revision of the web’s hypertext markup language—will expose users to additional privacy risks. HTML5 is capable of storing a database (or collection of databases) on the user’s computer. Information stored in the database “could include a user’s location, time zone, photographs, text from blogs, shopping cart contents, emails, and a history of the web pages visited.” What Vega fails to report is that users have the option of not allowing these databases to be stored on their computers. I’ve done so regularly for the past few months with no ill effects or resultant usability issues with HTML5-based websites. Vega shows inordinate cluelessness when writing in the second to last graf: “But software developers and the representatives of the World Wide Web argue that as technology advances, consumers have to balance its speed and features against their ability to control their privacy.” Really? Which software developers? And I didn’t know the web had “representatives.” Who voted for them?

Publishing

Amazon has announced “Singles” for its Kindle ebook reader, mini ebooks that are “twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book.” Amazon, so far, is keeping mum on price points, wholesale pricing, and who gets to play.

User experience

This week Johnny Holland rounded up five of the best content strategists to explain how content strategy can solve problems. Brain Traffic’s Meghan Casey kicked off the series with “Problems with Owning and Organizing Content,” providing examples of how bad process leads to bad websites.

E3 Content Strategy does an absolutely stellar job of demystifying content strategy process in six steps: Content audit > review existing research > conduct primary research > create customer personas > define your content strategy and tactics > set guidelines and processes to support your strategy. The process really is only marginally more complicated than that (E3 leaves out the content governance bit).