Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have discovered that some of the net’s most popular sites are using a tracking service that can’t be evaded — even when users block cookies, turn off storage in Flash, or use browsers’ “incognito” functions.
This is super sketchy. Spotify and Hulu have both cut their ties with KISSMetrics (the company responsible), but more sites almost certainly use it.
Frederick Kaufman, writing for Wired:
Trujillo, Watts, and 18 other coffee connoisseurs will soon sample the 29 brews that have made it to the semifinals. Ten of these sit in front of each judge, in identical white cups with only a number to identify them, meticulously arranged in 20 straight lines on six broad tables. Each cup holds 11.5 grams of ground beans, measured out to the hundredth of a gram.
According to the Austin Chronicle, Solid Waste Services hoped to re-brand itself by focusing less on wastefulness and more on environmentally-friendly, sustainable practices. In the Austin spirit of innovative thinking, the department opted to crowdsource a new name for the public utility using a web poll. […] The most votes by a wide margin were cast for 24-year-old Kyle Hentges’ submission, “Fred Durst Society of the Humanities and Arts.”
Perfection.
Such a great teardown.
An aside: I initially thought that the then-rumoured MacBook Air would not carry that name to production, as it seemed like a stupid name at the time. It didn’t fit with Apple’s naming philosophy at the time. Now, though, I’ve changed my mind. It’s a great name that really emphasises two aspects of the product: it’s very light and thin, and it gets much of its content over the air, with no ethernet port, nor an optical drive. It also ties into Apple’s AirPort line.
Khoi Vinh, former NYTimes.com lead designer, responds to this unsolicited redesign:
It’s a redesign that contains some genuinely good ideas and is executed professionally. But the argument that the redesign’s author makes is not quite so persuasive, mostly because it makes some rash assumptions, misses some critical realities and, perhaps worse of all, takes a somewhat inflammatory approach in criticizing the many people who work on the original site.
Paul Scrivens responded to news sites in general, with Rutledge’s design in mind:
Seriously though, how often do you go to a news site looking for one particular headline that is crammed 2400px down the page? I know I don’t and I can’t remember finding any hidden gems either. […] Newspapers always have one front page article that receives the giant headline treatment. The rest of the articles the readers have to “scroll” and find. Why can’t their online counterparts work in the exact same way?
Via Daring Fireball.
I hesitated to post this upon reading it because I thought I’d include my own strategy, as a response or continuation. However, I simply cannot find another word to add that Ben Brooks hasn’t already written in a much more elegant way.
James Hoffman:
The next time that you complain about your customers it might be worth checking whether they might just be acting in the exact way you’ve trained them to.
Via Alex Beecher, who added this:
Some people are going to be assholes, because some people are assholes. But no one should feel that they need to be.
Wise words.
Despite every story making it clear high up that the prime and only suspect was Norwegian, both nationally and ethnically, and several eyewitnesses accounts of a blond man speaking Norwegian being the shooter on Utoya, the Post devoted six paragraphs and the Star a whopping nine over the course of their stories to Islam, Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, etc.
Mike Elgan, editor of Windows Magazine:
Even now, well over a year since it shipped, there is still no such thing as a “touch tablet market.” There is only the iPad, and a smattering of irrelevant failures.