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. 

Linknote — — 110 words

Technology

One person’s history of Twitter, from beginning to end — Mike Monteiro

Ten years ago, a group of white dudes baked the DNA of the platform without thought to harassment or abuse. They built the platform with the best of intentions. I still believe this. But they were ignorant to their own blind spots. As we all are. This is the value of diverse teams by the way. When you’re building a tool with a global reach (and who isn’t these days) your team needs to look like the world it’s trying to reach. And ten years later, the abuse has proven too much to fix.

Article — — 1,640 words

Digital — User experience — Web

Work:

Adapted from a post originally published on the University of St Andrews Digital Communications team blog. The University of St Andrews prototype homepage aimed at external audiences has been unveiled this week. It is the outcome of over a year of work. It has been an eventful year for the digital communications team. One year […]

Article — — 3,731 words

Business — Digital — Web

Work:

Adapted from posts originally published on the University of St Andrews Digital Communications team blog. This month I attended the Institutional Web Management Workshop at Northumbria University. The conference, aimed mainly at university web managers, has been running for 18 years. The theme of this year was rebooting the web, after a participant at last […]