Linknote — — 81 words

Culture — Digital

I made my shed the top rated restaurant on TripAdvisor

Brilliantly entertaining article by someone who managed to game TripAdvisor into ranking his fake establishment as the number one restaurant in London.

When he staged a deliberately-awful opening night, some of the patrons asked to come again.

The Shed at Dulwich has suddenly become appealing. How?

I realise what it is: the appointments, lack of address and general exclusivity of this place is so alluring that people can’t see sense.

Linknote — — 88 words

Digital — Human-centred approaches

Designers, it’s time to move slowly and fix things

Another reflection on how the culture of tech and design probably needs to change, this time from Basecamp product designer Jonas Downey.

Designers and programmers are great at inventing software… Unfortunately we’re not nearly as obsessed with what happens after that, when people integrate our products into the real world. They use our stuff and it takes on a life of its own. Then we move on to making the next thing. We’re builders, not sociologists.

Linknote — — 109 words

Digital — Web

RSS: there’s nothing better

This article summarises why social media services like Facebook and Twitter are a totally inadequate way of receiving updates from blogs and other websites. We had the perfect system all along: RSS.

Yes, the technology is dated, but it remains the best at what it does and isn’t closed source or tied to some Silicon Valley company. It still works, is widely supported and does what it does better than any alternative that’s come out since. Sometimes, newer isn’t better. Sometimes the problem has already been solved. No blog or news website should be too new or too minimal to support RSS.

Linknote — — 74 words

Digital

Fashion, Maslow and Facebook’s control of social — Benedict Evans

An interesting look at the parallels between the fashion industry and modern day digital trendsetters.

The fashion industry does not set fashion – it proposes them. It tries to work out the mood and the zeitgeist and looks for ideas that might express that. The same, increasingly, for Facebook – it cannot really decide how people use its products or what they see, only propose.