Salon, which host weblogs using Radio Userland has some interesting survey results on how users would like to see Radio's blogging environment improved. I found the results tracked pretty closely with my own experience. It's required reading for anyone evaluating blog software.
Ed Felten's ongoing chronicle of the state DMCA scandal is an extraordinary service to the Web community, and three weeks ahead of the EFF, which has just take a position.
No one is doing as much as Ed to monitor and publicize the fact that the Motion Picture Association of America is rewriting state laws to limit our fair-use rights even further than the federal DMCA laws. That this is being done in states with virtually no interest in helping the MPAA and every interest in preserving their citizens' rights is a national scandal.
Where are the national media on this issue? Where is Congress?
The Web Page Analyzer at WebsiteOptimization.com is really useful for understanding what might be holding your page performance down. [Thanks, WebWord]
I'm pretty obsessive about things like graphics size and quantity, and page size, but it made me realize that I was running too many items on my home page. This was a relic of my last vacation, when posting was very sporadic. It's mercifully shorter now. Of course, it doesn't matter unless you believe the myth that readers care about page load times.
The Buzzwordometer is very cool [thanks, WebWord], but I wish I knew what words that were in the list.
I'm stinging a little bit because of the relatively high (658) "suit" buzzword count for Mediasavvy. I'd like to believe that all those buzzwords are in the blockquotes and my sarcastic asides.
Adrian's Holovaty's review of Web NCAA bracket interfaces is great. He discusses both the technology used and how well it works.
Adrian's winner is Flash, so this may be a case where Flash is the best tool for the job. It's by far the best-looking. But Yahoo's HTML (and JavaScript-less!) application does very well indeed. And Adrian himself chose HTML with a JavaScript-free option for his own implementation.
OK, I've hammered Flash and the whole concept of Internet entertainment pretty savagely in recent weeks. Right after my last screed about Flash, I happened on Homestar Runner, the most entertaining site I've seen on the Net and a single-handed mitigation of Flash on the Web. (I wish I could remember where I found the link).
It's so delightful that it's easy to forgive its use of a Flash splash screen, and Flash for navigation.
I'm still fascinated by applications that pull useful information out of link patterns.
The latest is Mark Pilgrim's Recommended Reading, which suggests sites you should read, based on the links on a page you're interested in.
It's the best application I've seen so far for finding interesting blogs. The only disadvantage is that it (understandably) favors popular sites.
The excellent site on designing for usability could be more usable. It really needs a navigation bar, for example. But it's really worth keeping handy for when you need research to back up detail of usability. [via PHP Everywhere]
Dave Winer was the first to report that Yahoo Finance is beta testing an RSS feed for ticker symbols. To get the latest news on a company, just replace the YHOO at the end of the following url with a ticker symbol.
http://rss.finance.yahoo.com/rss/get?ticker=YHOO
I subscribed to a couple of these URL's inside of NetNewswire Lite and the result is great.
The Online News Association has announced the finalists for the 2002 Online Journalism Awards.
I went to the awards last year and was impressed by the nominees, but events like this always leave me feeling there are lots of remarkable sites that will never win an award.
Last night, I cruised recently-updated sites as they were listed on the Moveable Type home page and was stunned by the quality and creativity that has been unleashed now that real people have access to real publishing tools. Most of these people will never win anything for their work.
I love The Dead Media Project. It's a shrine to scores of proprietary formats that have passed on to their reward.
It's also a warning to us all. Today's proprietary media with very near-universal adoption (e.g. Flash; Microsoft audio, web, and document formats; Real Audio; PDF) may be useful in specific applications, but information encoded in them may not be readable in the future. And you have no control over what it may cost to read them in the future.
It's a powerful argument for using text; separating content from format; and keeping your markup as simple, structured, and standard as possible.
Of course you still have to worry about the life span of your content management system, database files, physical media, and backups.
