That's what I tell my Gutenbourgeois friends, if they'll listen. I say: Create a service experience around what you publish and sell. Whatever “customer service” means when it comes to books and authors, figure it out and do it. Do it in partnership with your readers. Turn your readers into members. Not visitors, not subscribers; you want members. And then don't just consult them, but give them tools to consult amongst themselves. These things are cheap and easy now if you hire one or two smart people instead of a large consultancy. Define what the boundaries are in your community and punish transgressors without fear of losing a sale. Then, if your product is good, you'll sell things. (Don't count on your fellow Gutenbourgeois to buy things. They're clicking the little thumb icon on YouTube like everyone else.) If you don't want to do that then just find niche communities who might conceivably care about your products and buy great ad placements. It's a better online spend.

This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

Introduction to and history of online advertising.

I’m going to attempt the impossible: to tell an engaging story accessible to relative laymen using a hex editor (a program for manually editing binary files). The above is the binary content of a very simple test GIF I made in order to better understand the GIF specification. Here it is, if you want to play along at home: . I’ll walk you through each part of the file, and explain each part as it pertains to the history of the GIF.

People aren’t just eating Facebook’s Shit Sherbet of overnight upgrades, of lack of guarantees and standards, of enveloping tendrils of web standard breaking. They are shoveling it down. They’re grabbing two crazy handfuls of Facebook every minute of every day when they’re not forced to walk down a hallway or look up from their phones or ipads or laptops or consoles. They’re grabbing buckets of Facebook and finding ways to shove it down with one hand while pawing around for a second bucket.  People have bought the fuck in.

Remember that week when Facebook decided which of your friends would show up on your what’s new thing? That was great. Remember a week or two ago when they changed the behavior of the Enter key in text boxes? Awesome. How about that nosebleed you got when they changed privacy/information standards six different ways, trying them on like new Malibu Stacy hats, as an audience ranging from barely literate mouthbreathers to computer scientists got to experience One True Rogering Of Personal Information. And there we all were! We wondered if there was some sort of App we could install in Facebook to give us a third bucket and arm to keep that Sherbet coming.

On a recent long jaunt around the Aegean, I realized something important about the Kindle: it’s the ultimate travel gadget.

It can be hard to overstate how much of a difference headlines make on the Web. A great headline can be the single difference between a story that spreads and one that sinks.

If you’re thinking about charging for content, this high-quality infographic could save you from making a big mistake:

We’re quickly figuring out how to navigate our trail of data — don’t say anything private on a Facebook wall, keep your secrets out of e-mail, use cash for illicit purchases. The vast majority of it, though, is worthless to us and a pretty good exchange for frequent-flier miles, better search results, a fast system to qualify for credit, finding out if our babysitter has a criminal record and ads we find more useful than annoying. Especially because no human being ever reads your files. As I learned by trying to find out all my data, we’re not all that interesting.

What's on the back of a web page?

UK radio in one place

So our new policy, adopted last week (wherever you are in the world), is to omit time references such as last night, yesterday, today, tonight and tomorrow from guardian.co.uk stories. If a day is relevant (for example, to say when a meeting is going to happen or happened) we will state the actual day – as in "the government will announce its proposals in a white paper on Wednesday [rather than 'tomorrow']" or "the government's proposals, announced on Wednesday [rather than 'yesterday'], have been greeted with a storm of protest".

ifttt puts the internet to work for you by creating tasks that fit this simple structure:<br />
<br />
ifthisthenthat<br />
<br />
Think of all the things you could do if you were able to define any task as: when something happens (this) then do something else (that). 

By providing us with new ways to share what we’re doing right now, the real-time web also captures something we might not have created otherwise: a permanent record of the event. We’ve all been so distracted by The Now that we’ve hardly noticed the beautiful comet tails of personal history trailing in our wake. We’ve all become accidental archivists; our burgeoning digital archives open out of the future.

f you’re original, you don’t even need to be good to advance in the popularity game. Simply by virtue of producing something yourself, of broadcasting an opinion in a slightly different form than anyone else, by expressing your interests and feelings through original creations rather than through recycled garbage, you suddenly become that much more interesting.

The internet’s most ruinous effect on literacy may not be the obliteration of long-format journalism or drops in hardcover sales; it may be the destruction of the belief that books can be talked and written about endlessly. There are fewer official reviews of novels lately, but there are infinitely more pithily captioned links on Facebook, reader-response posts on Tumblr, punny jokes on Twitter. How depressing, to have a book you just read and loved feel so suddenly passé, to feel—almost immediately—as though you no longer have any claim to your own ideas about it. I started writing this piece when the book came out at the end of July, and I started unwriting it almost immediately thereafter. Zeno’s Paradox 2.0: delete your sentences as you read their approximations elsewhere. How will future fiction work? Will details coalesce into aphorism?

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

The leak of a Yahoo slide and a bunch of speculation has led to a burst of signups for Pinboard over the last few days. Despite that, I’m sticking with Delicious.

A thief broke into my car. I used Craigslist, a dating site, MySpace and a fast food joint to track him down

Nick Denton ran the company out of his apartment, in SoHo [...] Gawker Media was a deliberately fly-by-night operation: incorporated in Budapest, where a small team of programmers still works, and relying on elegantly jaded bloggers who considered themselves outsiders with nothing to lose. Early contributors tell stories about bounced checks, and receiving payment straight from the A.T.M. The arrangement, many assumed, was a convenient hedge against potential libel claims. (Scarcely a week passes without one or more of Denton’s nine sites receiving a cease-and-desist letter.) It also helped bolster Denton’s image as a kind of digital-sweatshop operator—he initially paid his bloggers twenty-four thousand dollars a year—and cultivated a helpful sense among contributors that they were the crew of a rogue “pirate ship,” as Gawker people sometimes say, initiating stealth attacks on the ocean liners in midtown.

Playdio offers broadcasters and listeners the chance to share podcast-like shows with fully licensed, full-length music and, of course, DJ banter.

This Google cheat sheet [PDF] has a nice overview of all the popular search operators that are supported in Google. Other than this “official” list, Google also supports an undocumented search operator called AROUND(n) that will help you find documents where the distance between two search terms is around ‘n.’

With ge.tt you can share any number of files, no matter how large, within seconds.

To continue from yesterday, part 2 from Haruki Murakami’s 2009 interview with Yomiuri Shimbun regarding his newest novel, 1Q84. Funny, he starts off sounding a lot like Jonathan Franzen. The part about the “Little People” and fundamentalism makes little sense to me; I guess I have to read the novel. Again, please excuse the translation -

This blog post is a starter guide that outlines the steps I personally undertake most commonly when handed the keys to the data for a website. 
I want to share where in your web analytics data you can find valuable starting points, even without any context about the site / business / priorities. Reports to look at, KPIs to evaluate, inferences to make.
I hope you'll benefit from my humble experience. Let's go!

Since 2007, I have taught an undergraduate class on computer hackers at New York University. The class opens a window into the esoteric facets of hacking: its complicated ethical codes and the multifaceted experiences of pleasures and frustrations in making, breaking, and especially dwelling in technology. Hacking, however, is as much a gateway into familiar cultural and political territory. For instance, hacker commitments to freedom, meritocracy, privacy and free speech are not theirs alone, nor are they hitched solely to the contemporary moment. Indeed, hacker ethical principles hearken back to sensibilities and conundrums that precipitated out of the Enlightenment's political ferment; hackers have refashioned many political concerns -- such as a commitments to free speech -- through technological and legal artifacts, thus providing a particularly compelling angle by which to view the continued salience of liberal principles in the context of the digital present.

A tumblelog was a collection of citations, but it engaged directly with its source material; its citations were to primary sources, rather than to secondary sources who in term cited primary sources. Tumblelogs like Anarchaia also lacked ego or personal branding. They weren’t about their authors, they were about their authors’ interests. If your field of interests overlapped sufficiently with a tumblelogger’s, you could expect to find a collection of interesting sources to check out on a regular basis. You did, after some time, feel like you got to know the person behind the blog, but this was a matter of osmosis: their personality seeped through in their choice of sources and the very occasional, pithy comments that were sometimes appended to links.

According to his Facebook profile, Zuckerberg has three sisters (Randi, Donna, and Arielle), all of whom he’s friends with. He’s friends with his parents, Karen and Edward Zuckerberg. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and attended Harvard University. He’s a fan of the comedian Andy Samberg and counts among his favorite musicians Green Day, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, and Shakira. He is twenty-six years old.

For information to have power, it needs to be held asymmetrically. Preferably very very asymmetrically. Someone who knows something that others do not know can do something potentially useful and profitable with that information.

“What am I passionate about?” This is the essential starting point for any discussion of what the Web is, what it is becoming, and how it should be presented. The individual, with their needs, their passions, their opinions, their desires and their goals is always paramount. We tend to forget this, or overlook it, or just plain ignore it. We design from a point of view which is about what we have to say, what we want to present, what we expect to communicate. It’s not that that we should ignore these considerations, but they are always secondary. The Web is a ground for being. Individuals do not present themselves as receptacles to be filled. They are souls looking to be fulfilled. This is as true for children as for adults – perhaps more so – and for this reason the educational Web has to be about space and place for being, not merely the presentation of a good-looking set of data.

Small Change
Why the revolution will not be tweeted.
by Malcolm Gladwell

RT @longreads: On the new longreads.com and the future of online publishing: http://bit.ly/anW7UT #longreads

Nice review of my current read. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains http://bit.ly/ceVf98

Gifs—"graphics interchange formats"—are unique to the internet, in that they utilize a short loop of soundless video-like motion to convey thoughts, feelings, memes, or retorts. While a picture says a thousand words, a gif gets the point across much more succinctly.

The complete interview with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the D5 Conference.

You're about to watch a future history of the media by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, with music by Aaron McLeran.

RT @tomcoates: Slides (no notes I'm afraid) from my dconstruct talk in Brighton: http://bit.ly/cgc8jk (PDF / 50Mb)

We consistently hear from the Argo-bloggers that the most difficult part of blogging is the visual component – telling your stories in pictures as well as words. It’s hard even before we get to the many legal and ethical pitfalls that most folks haven’t been trained on how to avoid. But we also know how incredibly valuable images are for storytelling, comprehension, punctuation, humor, delight and many, many other things. So each blogger has to figure out a strategy for acquiring and using images.

"We're experiencing a moment in which the humans are regaining some control over what gets filtered around the web," says Armstrong. "Twitter and Facebook are critical to driving traffic for publishers, and people like to share stories that are thoughtful or unique. These stories are a bit more evergreen than breaking news – they live longer lives and get passed around."

Best-selling author, designer, and web standards godfather Jeffrey Zeldman has once again updated his classic, industry-shaking guidebook. Substantially revised in collaboration with Ethan Marcotte, this third edition to the foundational web standards text covers improvements and challenges in the changing environment of standards-based design.

Welcome to HTML Dog, the web designer's resource for everything HTML and CSS, the most common technologies used in making web pages.

The Sixteenth Edition of “The Chicago Manual of Style” is here, and it's hard for some of us to contain our excitement. What should we read first? The new section on parallel structure, or the expanded guide for achieving bias-free language? And did you see that sleek, new, toothpaste-blue jacket? Farewell, older orange editions: this is a style guide for a new era!

How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all? Do they have some secret? Perhaps. We are asking various friends and colleagues who seem well-informed to describe their media diets. This is from an interview with Jay Rosen, press critic, writer, and professor of journalism at New York University.

One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . ” Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be called, who dwell there.

Coping with the troubling tradeoff between depth of what we know and how fast we retrieve it may require something like peripheral intellectual vision

Meanwhile, Clay Shirky reads a LOT online, but like Carr's picture of a book reader: deep concentration, few distractions http://j.mp/9NxsU5
– Tim Carmody (tcarmody) http://twitter.com/tcarmody/statuses/20252287158

A few years back, my friend Steve Gillmor, the long-time technology writer and blogger, went on a crusade against the hyperlink. He stopped putting links into his posts and other online writings. I could never quite understand his motivation, and the whole effort struck me as quixotic and silly. I mean, wasn't the hyperlink the formative technology of the entire World Wide Web? Wasn't the Web a hypermedia system, for crying out loud?

Times piece on students & plagiarism: http://nyti.ms/cFxs0C / My guess? Plagiarism as common as ever, just now much easier to catch
– Karl Steel (KarlSteel) http://twitter.com/KarlSteel/statuses/20135080442

RT @SeamusCondron: Media orgs, don't read this article & think you need a Tumblr. You need to develop relationships with your audience h ...

To most people, typefaces are pretty insignificant. Yet to their devotees, they are the most important feature of text, giving subliminal messages that can either entice or revolt readers, says Tom de Castella.

Zoe Fraade-Blanar presented a wonderful piece of work as her MFA thesis project for NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. “Current” is a Java application designed to sit on the desktop of a journalist and monitor trending topics on Google and the appearance of those topics within Google News. The application looks for stories that have widespread reader interest (i.e., they are trending on Google Trends) and little press coverage – these, Zoe theorizes, are the stories most profitable for news organizations to cover.

The future for blogs may be special-interest publishing. Mr Kelly’s research shows that blogs tend to be linked within languages and countries, with each language-group in turn containing smaller pockets of densely linked sites. These pockets form around public subjects: politics, law, economics and knowledge professions. Even narrower specialisations emerge around more personal topics that benefit from public advice. Germany has a cluster for children’s crafts; France, for food; Sweden, for painting your house.

Unfollowing and blocking people on social sites isn't a bad thing.

This cluttered, ad-heavy, paginated article is exactly why we need Safari Reader, Readability, Instapaper et al: http://j.mp/bmKhDE

"THE FIRST SURPRISING thing about the worm that landed in Philip Porras’s digital petri dish 18 months ago was how fast it grew."

RT @flimgoblin: RT @Michael_French: RT @daggle How The Mainstream Media Stole Our News Story Without Credit. http://bit.ly/9Ok7mr (via @ ...

"A 2007 scholarly review of hypertext experiments concluded that jumping between digital documents impedes understanding. And if links are bad for concentration and comprehension, it shouldn’t be surprising that more recent research suggests that links surrounded by images, videos, and advertisements could be even worse."

“The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.” http://bit.ly/9I3Hy5

Google faces challenges from the likes of Facebook and Twitter for getting quick, accurate, relevant answers to questions. Yet it is streets ahead of other search engines in understanding the requirements behind what can be quite ambiguous search queries. How does it do it? An constant schedule of over 500 improvements to its algorithm each year.

A refreshingly honest and detailed post on the BBC internet blog about the development of their visual identity. Like it or not, the new design and the principles behind it are well explained and thought-out.

I've never (knowingly) read anything by Neil Gaiman, and was mostly unaware of his level of fame until I read this and did some subsequent Googling. It's not such a shock these days to hear of an author connecting with his/her audience via the internet; but to see Gaiman do it with no small amount of honesty and integrity is pleasing.

"China often views the ideas of foreigners, from missionaries in the 17th century to 21st-century Internet entrepreneurs, as subversive imports. The tumultuous history behind the clash with Google."

"Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you're reading."

"On a hot afternoon in August, a mother, father, and son climbed into their car and set out for the Qihang Salvation Training Camp in rural China. The facility was only a half hour from their hotel in Nanning, but the drive felt much longer to Deng Fei and Zhou Juan. In the backseat, their son, Deng Senshan, said almost nothing the entire way. He wore a sickish look as he gazed at the whizzing tableau of warehouses, unfinished buildings, and open fields of southern China’s Guangxi province. He didn’t want to go to the camp — who would? — but his parents felt they had no choice."

Fantastic all-purpose bookmarklet. "Like a command line for your browser!"

"At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. Many companies will claim roughly the same thing since they know that declaring themselves to be open is both good for their brand and completely without risk. After all, in our industry there is no clear definition of what open really means. It is a Rashomon-like term: highly subjective and vitally important."

"Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It's fact-encirclingly huge, and it's idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it's free, and it's fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, "Diogenes of Sinope," or "turnip," or "Crazy Eddie," or "Bagoas," or "quadratic formula," or "Bristol Beaufighter," or "squeegee," or "Sanford B. Dole," and you'll have knowledge you didn't have before. It's like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks."

"On October 9, 2000, AmIHotOrNot went live. Hong emailed 42 friends: "Here's a website that Jim and I made - be nice," he wrote, and inserted a link to their own pictures. The visitors pinging the site quickly grew well beyond Hong's 42 friends. It didn't take an epidemiologist to recognise a viral spread. By the end of the first day, 37,000 visitors had found the site; by its eighth day the site had 1.8 million daily page views. Hong, who had slept only eight hours in those eight days, was shaking."

"For the past month, I've been away from the computer screen. Now I'm back reading on it many hours a day. Which got me thinking: How do we read online?"

"The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from."

"In 1999, when I left a staff job at a newspaper to start my own copywriting business, I never even thought about writing for the web. A decade later, most of my work consists of web projects. It struck me recently that this medium has led me to develop a different way of writing—tighter, simpler, more transparent. The results, I believe, are greater clarity and persuasiveness, and a speedier, more user-friendly read."

"Being able to express yourself, clearly and forcefully, in less than the 140 characters allowed by Twitter (and SMS) is no small thing!"

"It's 1996, and you're bored. What do you do? If you're one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you'd do in 2009: Go online."