Archive: July, 2011

As ever, I had a lot of fun moderating the hot topics panel at this year’s Web Directions @media in London. Thanks to all of you who left questions on my blog post.

I had a great line-up of panelists:

• Relly,
• Brian,
• Bruce and
• Doug.

We discussed publishing, mobile, browsers, clients and much much more. The audio is available for your huffduffing pleasure and I’ve had it transcribed. I’ve published the transcription over in the articles section of this site, so if you prefer reading to listening, I direct your attention to:

Web Directions @media 2011 Hot Topics Panel

When the always-excellent Radiolab podcast turned its attention to the subject of creativity and motivation in an episode called ‘Help?’, they spoke to Elizabeth Gilbert who reminisced about interviewing Tom Waits on this topic:

He was talking about how every song has a distinctive identity that it comes into the world with, and it needs to be taken in different ways. He said there are songs that you have to sneak up on like you’re hunting for a rare bird, and there are songs that come fully intact like a dream taken through a straw. There are songs that you find little bits of like pieces of gum you find underneath the desk, and you scrape them off and you put them together and you make something out of it.

And there are songs, he said, that need to be bullied. He said he’s been in the studio working on a song and the whole album is done and this one song won’t give itself over and — everyone’s gotten used to seeing him do things like this — he’ll march up and down the studio talking to the song, saying “The rest of the family is in the car! We’re all going on vacation! You coming along or not? You’ve got 10 minutes or else you’re getting left behind!”

Last year the New York Times ran a profile of The National, written while they were still recording the wonderful High Violet—my favourite album of last year. The piece circles around the ongoing problems the band were having trying to tame the song Lemonworld:

Since January they’d done it bright, done it drowsy, done it with violin parts overnighted from Australia by Padma Newsome, done it so many ways Bryce despaired, “It’s a riddle we can’t solve.”

This is exactly what we’ve been going through with Salter Cane. For about a year we had a song that had been defying us, stubbornly refusing to reach that breakthrough moment where it all seems to come together. We took a break from the song for a while and when we came back to it, we tried approaching it as a new piece. That seems to be working. It’s finally coming together.

In the end we realised that we trying to make the song into something bigger than it needed to be. Sometimes it’s okay for a song to be small and simple. That seems to be the case with Lemonworld:

Matt said afterward, “we tried so hard and it always seemed to fail as a rock song. It lost the charm of the ugly little demo. Now it’s the ugliest, worst-mixed, least-polished song on the record, and it took the longest to get there.”

I think that Lemonworld is a strong song. It even stands up to be being butchered by me on the bouzouki.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been half a decade since The Show from Ze Frank graced our tubes with its daily updates. Five years ago to the day, he recorded the greatest three minutes of speech ever committed to video.

In the midst of his challenge to find the ugliest MySpace page ever, he received this comment:

Having an ugly Myspace contest is like having a contest to see who can eat the most cheeseburgers in 24 hours… You’re mocking people who, for the most part, have no taste or artistic training.

Ze’s response is a manifesto to the democratic transformative disruptive power of the web. It is magnificent.

In Myspace, millions of people have opted out of pre-made templates that “work” in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.

Regardless of what you might think, the actions you take to make your Myspace page ugly are pretty sophisticated. Over time as consumer-created media engulfs the other kind, it’s possible that completely new norms develop around the notions of talent and artistic ability.

Spot on.

That’s one of the reasons why I dread the inevitable GeoCities-style shutdown of MySpace. Let’s face it, it’s only a matter of time. And when it does get shut down, we will forever lose a treasure trove of self-expression on a scale never seen before in the history of the planet. That’s so much more important than whether it’s ugly or not. As Phil wrote about the ugly and neglected fragments of Geocities:

GeoCities is an awful, ugly, decrepit mess. And this is why it will be sorely missed. It’s not only a fine example of the amateur web vernacular but much of it is an increasingly rare example of a period web vernacular. GeoCities sites show what normal, non-designer, people will create if given the tools available around the turn of the millennium.

Substitute MySpace for GeoCities and you get an idea of the loss we are facing.

Let’s not make the same mistake twice.

The Deatchwatch page on the Archive Team website makes for depressing reading, filled as it is with an ongoing list of sites that are going to be—or have already been—shut down. There are a number of corporations that are clearly repeat offenders: Yahoo!, AOL, Microsoft. As Aaron said last year when speaking of Museums and the Web:

Whether or not they asked to be, entire communities are now assuming that those companies will not only preserve and protect the works they’ve entrusted or the comments and other metadata they’ve contributed, but also foster their growth and provide tools for connecting the threads.

These are not mandates that most businesses take up willingly, but many now find themselves being forced to embrace them because to do otherwise would be to invite a betrayal of the trust of their users, from which they might never recover.

But occasionally there is a glimmer of hope buried in the constant avalanche of shit from these deletionist third-party custodians of our collective culture. Take Google Video, for example.

Earlier this year, Google sent out emails to Google Video users telling them the service was going to be shut down and their videos deleted as of April 29th. There was an outcry from people who rightly felt that Google were betraying their stated goal to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google backtracked:

Google Video users can rest assured that they won’t be losing any of their content and we are eliminating the April 29 deadline. We will be working to automatically migrate your Google Videos to YouTube. In the meantime, your videos hosted on Google Video will remain accessible on the web and existing links to Google Videos will remain accessible.

This gives me hope. If the BBC wish to remain true to their mission to enrich people’s lives with programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain, then they will have to abandon their plan to destroy 172 websites.

There has been a stony silence from the BBC on this issue for months now. Ian Hunter—who so proudly boasted of the planned destruction—hasn’t posted to the BBC blog since writing a follow-up “clarification” that did nothing to reassure any of us.

It could be that they’re just waiting for a nice quiet moment to carry out the demolition. Or maybe they’ve quietly decided to drop their plans. I sincerely hope that it’s the second scenario. But, just in case, I’ve begun to create my own archive of just some of the sites that are on the BBC’s death list.

By the way, if you’re interested in hearing more about the story of Archive Team, I recommend checking out these interviews and talks from Jason Scott that I’ve huffduffed.

Tickets for dConstruct 2011 went on sale last Tuesday. Tickets for dConstruct 2011 also sold out last Tuesday.

That’s kinda crazy: a conference for almost 800 people selling out in one day! I think it’s partly down to the great reputation that dConstruct has established for itself over the years as the thinking geek’s gathering. But I think it must mostly be down to the fantastic line-up of speakers: Don Norman, Frank Chimero, Kevin Slavin …it’s going to be quite a day!

If you didn’t manage to get a ticket, don’t despair. Technically, there are still some tickets available. If you book a place on one of the workshops taking place in the run-up to the conference day itself, you’ll get a complementary ticket to the main event. Also, if you book a workshop place before August 2nd, you can get the early-bird rate of £395+VAT rather than the full price of £445.

You might choose to attend Dan Lockton’s workshop on influencing behaviour, Josh Clark’s tapworthy mobile design or Scott Jehl’s jQuery mobile workshop but I’m going to humbly suggest that you might also be interested in the day-long course I’m putting together on responsive enhancement.

As the title suggests, this is going to be all about the intersection of responsive design and progressive enhancement: a content first approach. Because of that, the workshop won’t just be dealing in the technologies involved. It will also spend plenty of time tackling the planning and process. So while there are obvious benefits for front-end developers, it’s also going to be a valuable day for UX designers, project managers and just about anybody involved in building websites today.

Oh, and the workshop will feature a special guest appearance by Scott who will give a peak behind the scenes of the forthcoming Boston Globe responsive site.

I’m going to be spending a lot of time preparing the materials for this workshop. In fact, it’s going to be occupying most of my time between now and August 31st. If you want to be there for the final result, go ahead and book your place.

Over on the HTML5 Doctor site, Oli has written a great article called Quoting and citing with <blockquote>, <q>, <cite>, and the cite attribute.

Now, I still stand by my criticism of the way the cite element has been restrictively redefined in HTML5 such that it’s not supposed to be used for marking up a resource if that resource is a person. But I think that Oli has done a great job in setting out the counter-argument:

By better defining <cite>, we increase the odds of getting usable data from it, though we now need different methods to cover these other uses.

Oli’s article also delves into the blockquote element, which is defined in HTML5 as a sectioning root.

Don’t be fooled by the name: sectioning roots are very different to sectioning content in a fundamental way. Whereas sectioning content elements—section, article, nav and aside—are all about creating an explicit outline for the document from the headings contained within the sectioning content (using the new outline algorithm), the headings within sectioning roots (blockquote, td, fieldset, figure, etc.) don’t contribute to the document outline at all! But what sectioning roots and sectioning content have in common is that they both define the scope of the header and footer elements contained within them.

The footer element is defined as containing information about its section such as who wrote it, links to related documents, copyright data, and the like.

This gives a rise to rather lovely markup pattern that’s used on HTML5 Doctor: why not use the footer element within a blockquote to explicitly declare its provenance:

<blockquote>
<p>The people that designed .mobi were smoking crack.</p>
<footer>&mdash;<cite class="vcard">
<a class="fn url" href="http://tantek.com/">Tantek Çelik</a>
</cite></footer>
</blockquote>

(and yes, I am using the cite element to mark up a person’s name there).

Well, apparently that blockquote pattern is not allowed according to the spec:

Content inside a blockquote must be quoted from another source.

Because the content within the blockquote’s footer isn’t part of the quoted content, it shouldn’t be contained within the blockquote.

I think that’s a shame. So does Oli. He filed a bug. The bug was rejected with this comment:

If you want the spec to be changed, please provide rationale and reopen.

That’s exactly what Oli is doing. He has created a comprehensive document of block quote metadata from other resources: books, plays, style guides and so on.

Excellent work! That’s how you go about working towards a change in the spec—not with rhetoric, but with data.

That’s why my article complaining about the restrictions on the cite element is fairly pointless, but the wiki page that Tantek set up to document existing use cases is far more useful.

June was a busy month.

• I went to Newcastle for the DIBI conference, which was quite excellent. I was very pleased with the talk I gave—called “One Web”. I think the talks were recorded on video so I hope they’ll be showing up on a video-sharing site before too long.
• I spoke on the Using Blue podcast about all sorts of design- and development-related topics.
• I went to An Event Apart Atlanta which was, as always, excellent. As usual, it was the people that really made the event so special.
• I made it back to Brighton just in time for Ampersand, which was genuinely wonderful …just ask anyone who was there.
• There was an excellent Skillswap featuring Ben Terrett and Ben Bashford that finished up with a lively discussion moderated by yours truly. You had to be there for the discussion, but you can listen to the two talks.
• Then I hopped back across the Atlantic for Indie Web Camp in Portland, which was inspiring and invigorating.

July is looking a lot calmer. I’m going to be in Brighton for the whole month. I will, however, be using the time to prepare for the onslaught of events in the coming months. In September alone, Brighton will play host to a whole slew of events falling under the banner of the Brighton Digital Festival:

• dConstruct,
• Maker Faire,
• Update,
• BarCamp and
• Flash On The Beach.

I’m going to be spending my non-travelling time this month preparing a workshop to precede dConstruct. Keep an eye on the site for more details very soon.

Oh, and remember: tickets for dConstruct go on sale this Tuesday, July 5th.

Remember that mobile browser panel I moderated at the Mobilism conference in Amsterdam earlier this year? Well, I’ve had the whole thing transcribed. You can now:

• read the transcription,
• watch the video or
• listen to the audio.

Enjoy!

It seems like just a fortnight ago that I was in the States for An Event Apart Atlanta. Wait a minute …it was just a fortnight ago! It would be utter madness, then, for me to willingly make another trip across the Atlantic so soon after that. And yet, that’s exactly what I did for Indie Web Camp.

Now, admittedly, the fact that the event was taking place in Portland may have swayed my decision; it’s a place I’m very fond of, filled as it is with good coffee, a giant bookshop, food carts and excellent geeks most dear to my heart. But the premise of Indie Web Camp also tugged heavily at my heartstrings: the desire to have control over my my own data—living at my own URL—syndicated out to third-party sites …the Pembertonisation of personal publishing. I knew that if I didn’t attend this event, I would just be miserable watching Twitter posts from a timezone eight hours away. So I made the trip from England to the Pacific Northwest to spend two days in the company of some very, very smart people.

I wasn’t sure whether it was going to be like a Barcamp or more like a hack day. In the end, it was the perfect mixture of both. The first day was spent brainstorming ideas. The second day was spent coding.

I feel bad that I didn’t contribute more to the coding side of things (especially after travelling so far to be there) but I did at least take some notes on the demos presented at the end of the event.

There were some fascinating themes throughout. Chris spoke about the possibilities of distributed web intents and the possibility of hijacking proprietary actions—such as Facebook’s “like” and Google’s “+1”—through a browser plug-in. On the subject of browser plug-ins, Glenn blew everyone’s minds with a demo of the latest Firefox extension he’s been working on. It more or less turns the browser into an artificially intelligent user agent. I hope there’ll be some documentation forthcoming soon.

Ward Cunningham—yes, that Ward Cunningham—spearheaded an initiative for creating a distributed wiki. Meanwhile, a whole bunch of us were concerned about how much pictorial data we are entrusting to Flickr, a service owned by Yahoo; a company with a dreadful track record for preserving personal publishing (Geocities—never forget, never forgive). There was much brainstorming and coding around backing up Flickr photos as well as figuring out ways to post to Flickr from your own website.

I should have been contributing to that but instead I was getting some valuable Github advice from Shane on how to contribute to No More Sharecropping. Check out the README file if you’d also like to contribute.

All in all, it was a great gathering, ably organised by Tantek, Amber, Aaron and Crystal …well worth the trip.