There will soon be a HTML native method to retrieve a device appropriate <img>. It too will repeat the very same environment tests that both our CSS and JS have performed in order to modify their behaviour to the client’s capabilities. And in the case of HTML it will repeat these environment tests for every single <picture> on the page.
This is incredibly inefficient, and has the potential to make hand-authoring web documents implausible. Not to mention the problem that’s really to blame: Our technologies need to sense the environment in unison and adapt to a design, not to a device.
Matt Wilcox: Impending problems with authoring responsive designs
Nowadays our orientation is very often not longer based exclusively on the actual geography and their landmarks. There are loads of alternatives, from street numbers to GPS routing in our smartphones, to guide us to a destination. All of those wayfinding devices have in common that they are abstracted projections of the real world’s spatial arrangement. Which brings us to two interesting implications: First, because abstraction means in this case a decrease of information, something is lost. And second, the longer you are using a device the more you accept it or get used to it. For instance the geographical structure of transportation networks are often reshaped to provide users with more understandable transit maps. These distortions have a major influence on people’s perception of a city’s geography, to the point they get stored mentally and become the collective representation of the real world’s geography.
‘Metrography’ attempts to explore this phenomenon using the most famous of transit maps: the London Tube Map.
Benedikt Groß: Metrography – London Tube Map to large scale collective mental map
Deadlines rarely align with the amount of time needed to complete work, and so technical compromises are made along the way. There’s a short-term tradeoff to get something working initially. The developer knows the lifetime of the solution and accepts that he or she will have to go back and create the longer-term solution later on. While those looking in from the outside might consider this to be sloppy engineering, it’s actually what allows products to be released on time. And also how tech debt accumulates.
NCZOnline: Understanding technical debt
The amount of political “heat” surrounding the government’s Work Experience programme seems to be in inverse proportion to the amount of policy “light”. Critics describe it as akin to “slavery”, while the Secretary of State retorts by describing them as “modern day Luddites”. Not only is this exchange of insults neither sensible nor constructive, it obscures the more interesting and important issues.
Not the Treasury view: Work experience: does it work?
Rather than examine the role new technologies and platforms can play in improving customer relationships and experiences, many businesses invest in “attendance” strategies where a brand is present in both trendy and established channels, but not defining meaningful experiences or outcomes. Simply stated, businesses are underestimating the significance of customer experiences.
Fast Company: Why User Experience Is Critical To Customer Relationships
This list represents the dire state of our democracy. The financial and vested interests of our MPs and Lords in private healthcare. Why are these people allowed to be in charge of our NHS, to vote on a bill that they clearly have something to gain from. Who cares that they have put it in the register of interests. This doesn’t excuse their interests, it merely highlights clearly why they should have no part in the privatisation of the NHS. It is privatisation, despite the media’s continued use of the word ‘reforms’. The question must be asked. Are they public servants or corporate servants?
Social Investigations: NHS privatisation: Compilation of financial and vested interests
Having decided to be more active on Facebook, Nate [Lanxon, Wired Magazine] stressed that just pushing an automated headline feed wasn’t good enough. On Twitter he said you can pretty much publish “Wow! Look at this!” and a link and generate click-throughs. If you do that on Facebook though, people don’t feel like you are actually talking to them. He made a vital point about the way that the Facebook newsfeed algorithm works. The chance of your content appearing increases when people interact with your content, and one interaction is likely to lead to more interactions.
Nate said that one of their key learnings was that having a presence on Facebook wasn’t about driving fans to Wired, it was about driving Wired to fans.
Currybet: “Me and my big photo of Mark Zuckerberg” – Wired’s Nate Lanxon at news:rewired
The problem is, the media is not built for relationships because our industry was born in a time of factories, not services. We rarely know who our readers are (and we still call them just readers or at best commenters, not creators or collaborators). We do not have the means to gather, analyse and act on data about their activities and interests at an individual level. Thus we cannot serve them as individuals.
The Guardian: What the media can learn from Facebook