Link tags: business

Splitting the Web

This rings true to me.

Google’s AI Hype Circle

Google has a serious AI problem. That problem isn’t “how to integrate AI into Google products?” That problem is “how to exclude AI-generated nonsense from Google products?”

The Intelligence Illusion

Baldur has new book coming out:

The Intelligence Illusion is an exhaustively researched guide to the business risks of Generative AI.

On Design Thinking

Design Thinking didn’t change business at all, rather it changed Design into business, adopting its language, priorities and techniques. It sold out Design in an attempt to impress those in power, and in so doing lost its heart.

The web is a miracle

I wonder what kinds of conditions would need to be true for another platform to be built in a similar way? Lots of people have tried, but none of them have the purity of participation for the love of it that the web has.

Crypto: the good, the bad and the ugly | Seldo.com

A very even-handed and level-headed assessment by Laurie, who has far more patience than me when it comes to this shit.

Kagi Search

A new search engine (and browser!) that will have a paid business model.

Between this and Duck Duck Go, there’s evidence of an increasing appetite for alternatives to Google’s increasingly-more-rubbish search engine.

The impoverished language of business | Clearleft

A good post by Andy on “the language of business,” which is most cases turns out to be numbers, numbers, numbers.

While it seems reasonable and fair to expect a modicum of self-awareness of why you’re employed and what business value you drive in the the context of the work you do, sometimes the incessant self-flagellation required to justify and explain this to those who hired you may be a clue to a much deeper and more troubling question at the heart of the organisation you work for.

This pairs nicely with the Clearleft podcast episode on measuring design.

Browsers and Representation - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

It feels like the web we’re making now is a web designed for commercial interests.

If the web is “for everyone”, how and where are “everyone’s” interested being represented?

Browsers are not an enterprise of the people. We do not elect our browser representatives who decide what a browser is and is not.

The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation” – Chelsea Troy

Businesses focus on efficiencies—doing the things that net them the most money for the least effort. By contrast, taxpayer-funded public programs are designed and expected to cover everyone—including, and especially, the most marginalized. That’s why they’re taxpayer-funded; so they don’t face existential risk be eschewing profit-driven decision-making. Does this work perfectly? No. But I think about it a lot when people shit on the bigness and slowness of government. That bigness & slowness is supposed to create space and resources to account for the communities, that a “lean,” fast approach deliberately ignores.

Bringing Dark Patterns to Light. Transcript of the speech I gave at the… | by Harry Brignull | Jun, 2021 | Medium

Harry gave a speech at the Federal Trade Commission’s Dark Patterns workshop in April. Here’s the transcript, posted to Ev’s blog.

When I first worked on Dark Patterns in 2010, I was quite naive. I thought that they could be eradicated by shaming the companies that used them, and by encouraging designers to use a code of ethics.

The fact that we’re here today means that approach didn’t work.

I helped pioneer UX design. What I see today horrifies me

Jesse has his Oppenheimer moment, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

What got lost along the way was a view of UX as something deeper and more significant than a step in the software delivery pipeline: an approach that grounds product design in a broad contextual understanding of the problem and goes beyond the line-item requirements of individual components. Also lost along the way were many of the more holistic and exploratory practices that enabled UX to deliver that kind of foundational value.

Remote to who? A working letter

The idea that your job should be the primary source of meaning in your life is an elaborately made trap, propped up across industries, designed to make you a loyal worker who uses the bulk of their intellectual and creative capacity to further their own career.

Contextual ads | Dave Smyth

If behavioural ads aren’t more effective than contextual ads, what is all of that data collected for?

If websites opted for a context ads and privacy-focused analytics approach, cookie banners could become obsolete…

Facebook’s Attempt to Vilify Apple — Pixel Envy

See, that’s what I’m talking about;

Levy deftly conflates “advertising” and “personalized advertising”, as if there are no ways to target people planning a wedding without surveilling their web browsing behaviour. Facebook’s campaign casually ignores decades of advertising targeted based on the current webpage or video instead of who those people are because it would impact Facebook’s primary business. Most people who are reading an article about great wedding venues are probably planning a wedding, but you don’t need quite as much of the ad tech stack to make that work.

Merch Table

Feel bad because your favourite artists aren’t getting any income from Spotify? Here’s a handy tool from Hype Machine that allows you to import Sportify playlists and see where you can support those artists on Bandcamp.

As Antitrust Pressure Mounts, Google to Pull Back Benefit to News Sites That Adopted Its Preferred Mobile Technology – The Markup

More great reporting from Adrianne Jeffries at The Markup.

An engineer at a major news publication who asked not to be named because the publisher had not authorized an interview said Google’s size is what led publishers to use AMP.

Presentable #96: The Employee-Owned Design Agency - Relay FM

If you want to know more about Clearleft’s new employee-ownserhip model, Andy tells Jeff all about it in this huffduffable hour of audio.

Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing - The Correspondent

A devastating deep dive into the hype of blockchain, written by Jesse Frederik and translated by Hannah Kousbroek:

I’ve never seen so much incomprehensible jargon to describe so little. I’ve never seen so much bloated bombast fall so flat on closer inspection. And I’ve never seen so many people searching so hard for a problem to go with their solution.

What is the Web? - Web Directions

To be blunt, I feel we, the folks who have been involved with designing and developing for the web for a significant period of time–including me as I feel a strong sense of personal responsibility here–are in no small part responsible for it falling far short of its promise.