As with many things that I blog about here, a couple of articles and a podcast have come along at once to suggest a change in the air. This time it’s the end of the expectation of free stuff that we’ve come to love on the Net. OK, so it’s not the end of them […]
Category: Technology
Martha Lane Fox was appointed by Gordon Brown as the UK Digital Champion, and has founded the RaceOnline2012 campaign to get all people of working age on the Internet (10 million of us Brits haven’t used the Net, but to do so would help us a lot). Lane Fox says that getting the ‘unconnected’ online […]
Another fascinating – and in parts infuriating – podcast from Sitepoint, who bring in two User Experience Designers to repsond to Ryan Carson’s tweet that “‘UX Professional’ is a bullshit job title. It’s just a way to over-charge naive clients. All web designers should be UX pros”. They discuss the meaning of ‘user experience’, and […]
One of the things that has occured to me about this Engagement lark (and perhaps explains why I’m interested) is that those whose work I’ve read are trying to design systems which encourage the best default behaviour. When any system is designed, it automatically encourages one way of using it more than others, for better […]
The challenge, according to Jack Fuller in the Summer 2010 Edition of Nieman Reports, is ‘to induce people to want what they need’. In this way journalists – and I’d say content producers by extension – can go some way to improve engagement in dialogue with other members of our community, including those with opposing […]
I used Windows for a long time, and then I moved to Linux. I was all fine and dandy until I took a quick glance over my shoulder at the then-new Windows 7. It struck me exactly how Linux and Windows compare in terms of their strengths, and those differences brought me back to part-time […]
Even though it’s still the aftershave your dad wears, and you’ll never buy it, the campaign worked. It doesn’t matter if the product is a dud one (I don’t think the brand mattered here), social media campaigns can win nevertheless.
Brian Kelly’s paper From Web Accessibility to Web Adaptability and his Web Accessibility 2.0 paradigm advocates that access should be provided however the student chooses. This includes disability, but also preference – including open source (i.e. I choose the platform that I learn on/via). Instead of fitting some guidelines for accessibility of the web, it […]
Many academics and other professionals worry about social media and the loss of authority in other voices which often now have equal power. On the other hand, those ‘less authoritative’ voices are just the latest in a long history of people complaining how the ‘establishment’ fails to let others in. But the very reason that […]
I mean proper geeks. Not gadgetophiles, not Stephen Fry. I mean Cory Doctorow, Jonathan Zittrain, Richard Stallman and me. The first of these men have been quoted on Nick Carr’s post The iPad Luddites, and Nick suggests that we should all just shut up about the fact that the iPad may usher in an era […]