Linknote — — 60 words

Content design — Digital

Language in web teams

Content designer Sarah Richards shares an amusing story of a technique she has used to help people from different disciplines and backgrounds who have been talking at cross-purposes.

We are meant to be content and communication experts. But we often see people putting little effort into how they communicate internally, or even within their own teams.

Linknote — — 131 words

Technology

diamond geezer on why companies are installing badly designed phoneboxes

I can’t say I’ve noticed new phoneboxes popping up, but maybe things are different in Edinburgh. Nevertheless, I found this blog post by diamond geezer fascinating.

BT’s new InLink sounds especially awful:

All the action takes place on the thin side farthest from the road, where no separate receiver is apparent. Instead there’s a socket for a headphone jack, provided by the user to cut costs, and a loudspeaker at waist height which’ll broadcast across the pavement…

Most striking is the big red button which if pressed immediately dials 999, an innovation surely far too tempting for passing fingers, which must have emergency switchboards cursing.

So why in this day and age would new phoneboxes be emerging? The answer is depressingly familiar.

Linknote — — 73 words

Media — Technology — Web

Legends of the ancient web

Maciej Cegłowski considers the parallels between the early decades of radio, and the web. He notes how radio became a crucial propaganda tool for the fascists of the 1930s.

In less than four decades, radio had completed the journey from fledgeling technology, to nerdy hobby, to big business, to potent political weapon.

It’s a great history lesson. Read on to find the silver lining in his talk.

Linknote — — 76 words

Accessibility — Digital — Human-centred approaches — Web

Accessibility according to actual people with disabilities

We often hear about the theory of accessibility in design. But we know that the reality can often be different.

So it’s great to see such a comprehensive run-down of actual digital accessibility complaints from people with disabilities.

The article ends with a sage point:

Basically everything that people with disabilities comment on are things that annoy everyone, so fixing these issues makes your interface better for all users!

Linknote — — 102 words

Technology

Triple Meltdown: How so many researchers found a 20-year-old chip flaw at the same time

In transpires that Meltdown and Spectre, the two major security bugs recently announced in processors, were discovered by several researchers who all had the same idea at a similar time. This is despite the flaws having existed for decades.

Something happens in the community and it leads people to think, let’s look over here. And then they do. And it definitely occurs way more often than chance.

This fascinating article also considers how long intelligence agencies may have known about this and other computer security issues.

Linknote — — 143 words

Human-centred approaches — Technology

Tech has a diversity problem — so this designer went to Kentucky

I am interested in how, despite the (theoretical) potential of technology improvements to make remote working easier, technology jobs still seem to cluster in particular areas.

Design firms and technology firms are heavily concentrated in cities on the west and east coasts, particularly in San Francisco, LA, and New York, limiting job opportunities to those who have the resources to move to, and live in, such expensive metropolises. And with so many designers living in urban centers, few have the perspective that comes from living in rural areas.

This can be viewed as yet another of the tech industry’s diversity problems.

Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, has all of its employees working remotely. Automattic’s John Maeda is trying to engage young people “that fall outside the normal Silicon Valley culture”.

Linknote — — 104 words

Digital

The significance of the Twitter archive at the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has now stopped preserving all public tweets. In the words of Dan Cohen in this article, “The Twitter archive may not be the record of our humanity that we wanted, but it’s the record we have.”

I am amused at the idea of future historians having a highly detailed record of everything on Twitter up to the year Donald Trump got elected, and the year before Brexit is due to happen. What a cliffhanger.

See also: Future historians probably won’t understand our internet, and that’s OK

Linknote — — 109 words

Digital — Media

Predictions for digital and social marketing in 2018

Gary Andrews with some thoughts on what we might see in the coming year in the digital and marketing worlds.

There are lots of astute points here, not least on the hot potato of the moment: relationship between the tech giants and publishers.

One phrase that has been bandied around a lot towards the end of 2017 has been from publishers proclaiming their “pivot to readers”. At a basic level, this is the publisher’s way of saying we’ll no longer be beholden to platforms like Facebook and Google and will concentrate on building our own brand through focusing on our core readership instead.

Linknote — — 80 words

Digital

The great emoji debate

The Economist considers whether the Unicode consortium is wasting its time trying to standardise emoji when it could be focusing on “more scholarly matters” such as adding characters from ancient scripts.

Given the popularity — almost the ubiquity — of emoji in modern-day popular culture, I would argue that standardising this form of communication is much more important than trying to digitise seldom-used or dead scripts. Even if that means standardising a frowning pile of poo.