Ed Felten plays Paul Revere as states fall to the MPAA's troops

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?

MediaSavvy's a tiny bit faster, thanks to the Web Page Analyzer

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.

Holovaty's review of NCAA bracket implementations

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.

Everybody! Everybody!

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.

Recommended Reading

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.

It's an honor just to be nominated, or not

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.