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Jacques Corby-Tuech - Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data

We’ve got click rates, impressions, conversion rates, open rates, ROAS, pageviews, bounces rates, ROI, CPM, CPC, impression share, average position, sessions, channels, landing pages, KPI after never ending KPI.

That’d be fine if all this shit meant something and we knew how to interpret it. But it doesn’t and we don’t.

The reality is much simpler, and therefore much more complex. Most of us don’t understand how data is collected, how these mechanisms work and most importantly where and how they don’t work.

Making Colophon Cards – Baldur Bjarnason

I think Baldur is onto something here with his categorisation of software. There’s the software based on innovation, something truly novel:

Innovation’s the word. Pushing the boundaries. You know the phrases. Usually spouted by that dude at the party.

Then there’s the software based on itertion, making a better version of a proven tool:

We are now in a place where we have entire genres of software that have decades of history, are backed by stacks of new and old research, have dozens of successful, well-made exemplar apps, and a broad enough conceptual space to allow for new variations on the theme.

In short, we have genre software and we have avant-garde software, and I’ve always been more interested in genre fiction than literary fiction.

Ain’t No Party Like a Third Party - CSS-Tricks

Chris is doing another end-of-year roundup. This time the prompt is “What is one thing people can do to make their website bettter?”

This is my response.

I’d like to tell you something not to do to make your website better. Don’t add any third-party scripts to your site.

Townscaper

Now you can play a demo of Townscaper right in your browser.

There goes your productivity.

Aliendscapes - Alien Planet Generator

Generative landscapes made with 2K of vanilla JavaScript.

Click (or refresh) for a new one.

Best laid plans by Amy Hupe, content designer.

All of Amy’s writing recently has been absolutely wonderful, some of the best I’ve read in a long while, but I particularly needed this one.

I don’t know where we go from here, with this latest pandemic setback, but I do know that things will keep moving.

And if you feel bad today, feel bad. Feel sad or angry or scared or whatever it is you need to feel. Give yourself to yourself as you are.

Things will keep changing. Life will keep unfolding. We will keep going.

Webrise

Prompted by my talk, The State Of The Web, Brian zooms out to get some perspective on how browser power is consolidated.

The web is made of clients and servers. There’s a huge amount of diversity in the server space but there’s very little diversity when it comes to clients because making a browser has become so complex and expensive.

But Brian hopes that this complexity and expense could be distributed amongst a large amount of smaller players.

10 companies agreeing to invest $10k apiece to advance and maintain some area of shared interest is every bit as useful as 1 agreeing to invest $100k generally. In fact, maybe it’s more representative.

We believe that there is a very long tail of increasingly smaller companies who could do something, if only they coordinated to fund it together. The further we stretch this out, the more sources we enable, the more its potential adds up.

Speakers | State of the Browser 2021

All the talks from this year’s State Of The Browser event are online, and they’re all worth watching.

I laughed out loud at multiple points during Heydon’s talk.

Google, Facebook hiding behind skirts of small business

While the dream of “personalized” ads has turned out to be mostly a nightmare, adtech has built some of the wealthiest companies in the world based on tracking us. It’s no surprise to me that as Members of the European Parliament contemplate tackling these many harms, Big Tech is throwing millions of Euros behind a “necessary evil” PR defense for its business model.

But tracking is an unnecessary evil.

Yes! This!

Even in today’s tracking-obsessed digital ecosystem it’s perfectly possible to target ads successfully without placing people under surveillance. In fact right now, some of the most effective and highly valued online advertising is contextual — based on search terms, other non-tracking based data, and the context of websites rather than intrusive, dangerous surveillance.

Let’s be clear. Advertising is essential for small and medium size businesses, but tracking is not.

Rather than creating advertising that is more relevant, more timely and more likable we are creating advertising that is more annoying, more disliked, and more avoided.

I promise you, the minute tracking is outlawed, Facebook, Google and the rest of the adtech giants will claim that their new targeting mechanisms (whatever they turn out to be) are superior to tracking.

UK ICO: surveillance advertising is dead

Behavioral ads are only more profitable than context ads if all the costs of surveillance – the emotional burden of being watched; the risk of breach, identity-theft and fraud; the potential for government seizure of surveillance data – is pushed onto internet users. If companies have to bear those costs, behavioral ads are a total failure, because no one in the history of the human race would actually grant consent to all the things that gets done with our data.

Tracking-industry body IAB Europe told that it has infringed the GDPR, and its “consent” pop-ups used by Google and other tech firms are unlawful. - Irish Council for Civil Liberties

Google and the entire tracking industry relies on IAB Europe’s consent system, which has now been found to be illegal.

Modern CSS in a Nutshell - Cloud Four

I like this high-level view of the state of CSS today. There are two main takeaways:

1. Custom properties, flexbox, and grid are game-changers.
2. Pre- and post-processers are becoming less and less necessary.

This is exactly the direction we should be going in! More and more power from the native web technologies (while still remaining learnable), with less and less reliance on tooling. For CSS, the tools have been like polyfills that we can now start to remove.

Alas, while the same should be true of JavaScript (there’s so much you can do in native JavaScript now), people seem to have tied their entire identities to the tooling they use.

They could learn a thing or two from the trajectory of CSS: treat your frameworks as cattle, not pets.

My Custom CSS Reset

This CSS reset is pleasantly minimalist and a lot of thought has gone into each step. The bit about calculating line height is very intriguing!

A visual introduction to machine learning

I like the split-screen animated format for explaining this topic.

The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger

Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.

This resonates:

I’m not alone in believing in the fundamental technical uselessness of blockchains. There are tens of thousands of other people in the largest tech companies in the world that thanklessly push their organizations away from crypto adoption every day. The crypto asset bubble is perhaps the most divisive topic in tech of our era and possibly ever to exist in our field. It’s a scary but essential truth to realise that normal software engineers like us are an integral part of society’s immune system against the enormous moral hazard of technology-hyped asset bubbles metastasizing into systemic risk.

Paper Website: Create a Website Right From Your Notebook

This is an intriguing idea for a content management system: write words on paper and then take a picture of the page. Artisinal retro vintage blogging.

Email Tracking and Paperless Banking – Dan Q

Even if you can somehow justify using tracking technologies (which don’t work reliably) to make general, statistical decisions (“fewer people open our emails when the subject contains the word ‘overdraft’!”), you can’t make individual decisions based on them. That’s just wrong.

On User Tracking and Industry Standards on Privacy | CSS-Tricks

Prompted by my post on tracking, Chris does some soul searching about his own use of tracking.

I’m interested not just in the ethical concerns and my long-time complacency with industry norms, but also as someone who very literally sells advertising.

He brings up the point that advertisers expect to know how many people opened a particular email and how many people clicked on a particular link. I’m sure that’s right, but it’s also beside the point: what matters is how the receiver of the email feels about having that information tracked. If they haven’t given you permission to do it, you can’t just assume they’re okay with it.

Why I write and why I won’t

This is the best description of what my own website feels like to me:

A search engine for my mind

Design and long-term thinking

I like this mashup of two diagrams: Stewart Brand’s pace layers and Stephanie DiRusso’s typology of design thinking.