ARTS & FARCES internet

ESRD

Ever since he excluded single-payer from the discussion, I’ve never been satisfied with President Obama’s healthcare reform, but I recognize the policy’s widespread and crucial benefits of eliminating lifetime caps and exclusions for pre-existing conditions as great steps forward. Recognizing that they don’t have the votes to rollback the policy, US Congressional Republicans are intent on cutting off funding to actually implement the new law’s provisions. That’s the gist of Robert Pear’s account for the New York Times. One of the strategies, according to Pear, is to “propose limiting the money and personnel available to the Internal Revenue Service, so the agency could not aggressively enforce provisions that require people to obtain health insurance and employers to help pay for it.”

Internet

Soylent is a Microsoft Word add-in that uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as a distributed copy-editing system. The software was created by students at Berkeley, Michigan, and MIT. The key is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, in which humans do small tasks in a group for pay. MIT’s Michael Bernstein, Soylent lead researcher told Justin Ellis, writing for Nieman Journal, “The idea of Soylent is, what if we could embed human knowledge in the word processor?” The three current features are Shortn (cut word count using a slider tool); Crowdproof (crowdsourced proofreading); and the Human Macro (annotating references, altering verb tense, etc.).

Media

News Corp. has finally released the numbers on the outcome of implementing a paywall around the content of its Times and Sunday Times publications in Britain. The news isn’t very good, as both newspapers have lost an enormous number of readers. According to News Corp.‘s media release, the two newspapers “achieved more than 105,000 paid-for customers to date.” About half are monthly subscribers; the rest are single-copy, iPad, or Kindle users. An additional 100,000 or so are print subscribers and receive free online subscriptions. As Mathew Ingram, writing for GigaOm, points out, “The bottom line is that News Corp. has managed to attract just over 50,000 paying monthly subscribers in the four months since it has been running its paywalls at its two British papers—which charge US$1.60 for a day’s access to the site or US$3.20 for the week—and along the way has managed to sign up 100,000 or so who were already subscribing to the print edition, who are paying nothing….” Before the paywall, the two papers had about 3 million unique visitors each month. Traffic is down a whopping 90 percent and the company has a conversion rate of just over 1.5 percent, yet News Corp. is claiming victory.

Steve Outing, writing for Colorado University-Boulder’s Digital Media Test Kitchen, asserts that the latest generation of smartphones pack enough high-definition video punch for effective use by journalists in the field. Using a short film showcasing the Nokia N8’s capabilities, Outing writes, “Perhaps in addition to training journalism students how to use bulkier dedicated digital video cameras, we also should be teaching them to get the most out of smartphone video—since the devices can be carried at all times by all reporters.”

Politics

Nick Coleman, columnizing for the Star Tribune, takes Tony Sutton, chair of the Minnesota Republican Party to task for his Sopranos-like carping about the state’s gubernatorial recount. “We’re not going to get rolled this time,” is Sutton’s mantra, in reference to the 2008 Senate recount that put Al Franken (D-Minnesota) in the US Congress. But what caught my eye was Coleman’s Apocalypse Now premonition for the state: “If you want a disaster scenario, try this: Tony Sutton’s GOP wages a scorched-earth campaign to keep Dayton out of office as long as possible, using the Republican legislative majorities that take office Jan. 4 to slash billions from the state budget, push through a number of crazy-hat notions and help Pawlenty look like a hero in time for the GOP Iowa presidential caucuses.” Yikes.

Privacy

The European Union (EU) which already has some of the best personal privacy protections on the globe is setting out to make them even stronger after recent data breaches at Facebook and Google. “The protection of personal data is a fundamental right,” Viviane Reding, the EU justice commissioner, told Eric Pfanner, writing for the New York Times. “To guarantee this right, we need clear and consistent data protection rules. We also need to bring our laws up to date with the challenges raised by new technologies and globalization.” In the EU, data collected for one purpose cannot be used for any other purpose. So, if you subscribe to an online news service, for example, that service can’t give, sell, rent, or trade your personal data to its advertisers. The new data protections will take that even further by mandating individuals be informed clearly and transparently about how their data will be used, allowing individuals to completely delete digital information, and immediate disclosure when their data has been used unlawfully.

Technology

Google has released mod_pagespeed, a module for the open source Apache web server, capable of optimizing website performance on the fly. Google reckons that a faster web, courtesy of Google, will increase the likelihood that we’ll all use Google’s other services.

User experience

Karen McGrane addresses the Information Architecture Institute’s Idea 2010 conference with “We’re All Content Strategists Now.” McGrane self-identifies as an information architect but has tremendous insight on all aspects of user experience design.

Lou Rosenfeld has a good article on the second set of entirely new silos user experience professionals are finding themselves confronting. Most of us spent years exploding organizational content silos now only to be faced with discipline, application, and department silos in the enterprise.

Luke Wroblewski has, once again, most excellent field notes from An Event Apart in San Diego.

Jakob Nielsen’s latest study indicates that website users completely ignore random or stock photography images. Using data from eye-tracking surveys, Nielsen found that “big feel-good images that are purely decorative” are simply ignored. Conversely, according to Nielsen’s research, when the image is of a real person related to the page’s content, users will engage with the image—sometimes for extended periods of time. Nielsen’s advice for selling products or content online: “Invest in good photo shoots: A great photographer can add a fortune to your website’s business value.”

One of the perennial questions asked when working on web projects is how many people have JavaScript disabled. The notion of progressive enhancement takes this into account, regardless of the actual number because all of the content on a website should be accessible without JavaScript, CSS, or anything else. Nicholas C. Zakas, writing for the Yahoo! Developer Network attempts to answer the question. “After crunching the numbers, we found a consistent rate of JavaScript-disabled requests hovering around 1 percent of the actual visitor traffic, with the highest rate being roughly 2 percent in the United States and the lowest being roughly 0.25 percent in Brazil,” reports Zakas. “All of the other countries tested showed numbers very close to 1.3 percent.”