Metaphors We Web By: Paper and Place
Out of all of these metaphors, the two most enduring are paper and physical space.
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Linking Manifesto – Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking
We invite software developers to do their part, by
- ensuring their users can conveniently obtain a link to the currently open or selected resource via a user interface; and
- providing an application programming interface (API) to obtain or construct a link to that resource (i.e., to get its address and name).
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.
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.
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!
Who is web3 for? • Robin Rendle
Thoughts from Robin, prompted by the Web History podcast I’m narrating and the other Robin’s notes on web3 that I linked to:
Who is the web for? Everyone, everywhere, and not only the few with a financial stake in it. It’s still this enormously beautiful thing that has so much potential.
But web3? That’s just not it, man.
Exactly! The blinkered web3 viewpoint is a classic example of this fallacious logic (also, as Robin points out, exemplified by AMP):
- Something must be done!
- This (terrible idea) is something.
- Something has been done.
1990: Programming the World Wide Web – Web Development History
Ah, this brings back memories of hacking on the WorldWideWeb project at CERN!
(Not the original one. I’m not that old. I mean the recreation.)
Get Lost on the Web – Dan Q
Internet users use fewer different websites today than they did 20 years ago, and spend most of their “Web” time in app versions of websites (which often provide a better experience only because site owners strategically make it so to increase their lock-in and data harvesting potential). Truly exploring the Web now requires extra effort, like exercising an underused muscle. And if you begin and end your Web experience on just one to three services, that just feels kind of… sad, to me. Wasted potential.
Notes on synthetic speech - Tink - Léonie Watson
This is a fascinating deep dive by Léonie on the inner workings of speech synthesis. She has quite a conundrum: she wants fast playback, but she also wants a voice that doesn’t sound robotic. Unfortunately it’s the robotic-sounding voices that work best at speed.
If you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend listening to (or reading) the accessibility episode of the Clearleft podcast which featured Léonie as a guest giving demos and explanations.
Why are hyperlinks blue?
A wonderful bit of spelunking into the annals of software interfaces by Elise Blanchard.
The Linear Oppression of Note-taking Apps
I think this explains why Kinopio resonates with me.
things are a little crazy rn
Adversarial chatbots engaged in an endless back-and-forth:
This piece simulates scheduling hell by generating infinite & unique combinations of meeting conflicts between two friends.
PlymouthPress – A Letterpress Image Font
An experimental image font made using the University of Plymouth’s unique letterpress workshop.
Grungy!
The font is intended for display purposes only, and not is suitable for body text.
A Short History of Bi-Directional Links
A wonderful look at the kind of links we didn’t get on the World Wide Web.
From the memex and Xanadu right up to web mentions, this ticks all my boxes!
(And can I just say, it’s so much fun to explore all of Maggie Appleton’s site …or should I say web garden.)
Yax.com · Blog · Out of the Matrix: Early Days of the Web (1991)
Thirty years later, it is easy to overlook the web’s origins as a tool for sharing knowledge. Key to Tim Berners-Lee’s vision were open standards that reflected his belief in the Rule of Least Power, a principle that choosing the simplest and least powerful language for a given purpose allows you to do more with the data stored in that language (thus, HTML is easier for humans or machines to interpret and analyze than PostScript). Along with open standards and the Rule of Least Power, Tim Berners-Lee wanted to make it easy for anyone to publish information in the form of web pages. His first web browser, named Nexus, was both a browser and editor.
A History of the Web in 100 Pages - Web Directions
I’m excited by this documentary project from John! The first video installment features three historic “pages”:
- As We May Think,
- Information Management: A Proposal, and
- the first web page.
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.
Hyperland, Intermedia, and the Web That Never Was — Are.na
In 1990, the science fiction writer Douglas Adams produced a “fantasy documentary” for the BBC called Hyperland. It’s a magnificent paleo-futuristic artifact, rich in sideways predictions about the technologies of tomorrow.
I remember coming across a repeating loop of this documentary playing in a dusty corner of a Smithsonian museum in Washington DC. Douglas Adams wasn’t credited but I recognised his voice.
Hyperland aired on the BBC a full year before the World Wide Web. It is a prophecy waylaid in time: the technology it predicts is not the Web. It’s what William Gibson might call a “stub,” evidence of a dead node in the timeline, a three-point turn where history took a pause and backed out before heading elsewhere.
Here, Claire L. Evans uses Adams’s documentary as an opening to dive into the history of hypertext starting with Bush’s Memex, Nelson’s Xanadu and Engelbart’s oNLine System. But then she describes some lesser-known hypertext systems…
In 1985, the students at Brown who encountered Intermedia had never seen anything like it before in their lives. The system laid a world of information at their fingertips, saved them hours at the library, and helped them work through tangles of thought.