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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.

world smallest office suite

I like this idea for a minimum viable note-taking app:

data:text/html,<body contenteditable style="line-height:1.5;font-size:20px;">

I have added this to bookmarks and now my zero-weight text editor is one keypress away from me. You might also use it as a temporary clipboard to paste text or even pictures.

See also: a minimum viable code editor.

The Thing With Leading in CSS · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

An excellent explanation of the new leading-trim and text-edge properties in CSS, complete with an in-depth history of leading in typography.

(I’m very happy to finally have a permanent link to point to about this, rather than a post on Ev’s blog.)

Chapter 1: Birth | CSS-Tricks

This is wonderful! A whole series on the history of the web from Jay Hoffman, the creator of the similarly-themed newsletter and timeline.

This first chapter is right up my alley, looking at the origins of hypertext, the internet, and the World Wide Web.

Quotebacks and hypertexts (Interconnected)

What I love about the web is that it’s a hypertext. (Though in recent years it has mostly been used as a janky app delivery platform.)

I am very much enjoying Matt’s thoughts on linking, quoting, transclusion, and associative trails.

My blog is my laboratory workbench where I go through the ideas and paragraphs I’ve picked up along my way, and I twist them and turn them and I see if they fit together. I do that by narrating my way between them. And if they do fit, I try to add another piece, and then another. Writing a post is a process of experimental construction.

And then I follow the trail, and see where it takes me.

Designing for Progressive Disclosure by Steven Hoober

Progressive disclosure interface patterns categorised and evaluated:

  • popups,
  • drawers,
  • mouseover popups (just say no!),
  • accordions,
  • tabs,
  • new pages,
  • scrolling,
  • scrolling sideways.

I really like the hypertext history invoked in this article.

The piece finishes with a great note on the MacNamara fallacy:

Everyone thinks metrics let us measure results. But, actually, they don’t. They measure only what they are measuring. Engagement, for example, is not something that can be measured, so we use an analogue for it. Time on page. Or clicks.

We often end up measuring what is quick, cheap, and easy to measure. Therefore, few organizations regularly conduct usability testing or customer-satisfaction surveys, but lots use analytics.

Even today, organizations often use clicks as a measure of engagement. So, all too often, they design user interfaces to generate clicks, so the system can measure them.

Networked information services: The world-wide web [PDF]

A 1992 paper by Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, and Jean-Françoise Groff.

The W3 project is not a research project, but a practical plan to implement a global information system.

Roam Research – A note taking tool for networked thought.

This looks like an interesting hypertexty tool.

The Map of Mathematics | Quanta Magazine

An absolutely gorgeous piece of hypermedia!

Data visualisations and interactive widgets enliven this maze of mathematics. Dig deep—you may just uncover the secret passages that join these concepts together.

Y2K @ 20 - The New York Times

This is quite remarkable. On the surface, it’s a short article about the Y2K bug, but the hypertextual footnotes go deeper and deeper into memory, loss, grief …I’m very moved by the rawness and honesty nested within.

“Link In Bio” is a slow knife

For a closed system, those kinds of open connections are deeply dangerous. If anyone on Instagram can just link to any old store on the web, how can Instagram — meaning Facebook, Instagram’s increasingly-overbearing owner — tightly control commerce on its platform? If Instagram users could post links willy-nilly, they might even be able to connect directly to their users, getting their email addresses or finding other ways to communicate with them. Links represent a threat to closed systems.

Anil Dash on the war on hyperlinks.

It may be presented as a cost-saving measure, or as a way of reducing the sharing of untrusted links. But it is a strategy, designed to keep people from the open web, the place where they can control how, and whether, someone makes money off of an audience. The web is where we can make sites that don’t abuse data in the ways that Facebook properties do.

AI Weirdness • Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a dragon. Eat the moon.

After reading this account of a wonderfully surreal text adventure game, you’ll probably want to play AI Dungeon 2:

A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling games, and playing it is strangely surreal, repetitive, and mesmerizing, like dreaming about playing one of the games it was trained on.

Jeremy Keith & Remy Sharp - How We Built the World Wide Web in Five Days on Vimeo

Here’s the talk that Remy and I gave at Fronteers in Amsterdam, all about our hack week at CERN. We’re both really pleased with how this turned out and we’d love to give it again!

A Love Letter to Net.Art - The History of the Web

Click around the site a bit and you’ll find yourself tied to an endless string of hyperlinks, hopping from one page to the next, with no real rhyme or reason to tie them altogether. It is almost pure web id, unleashed structurally to engage your curiosity and make use of the web’s most primal feature: the link.

WICG/ScrollToTextFragment: Proposal to allow specifying a text snippet in a URL fragment

It looks (a more complex version of) fragmention might be coming to Chrome.

8 DOM features you didn’t know existed - LogRocket Blog

If you ignore the slightly insulting and condescending clickbaity title, this is a handy run-down of eight browser features with good support:

  1. extra arguments in addEventListener(),
  2. scrollTo(),
  3. extra arguments in setTimeout() and setInterval(),
  4. the defaultChecked property for checkboxes,
  5. normalize() and wholeText for strings of text,
  6. insertAdjacentElement() and insertAdjacentText(),
  7. event.detail, and
  8. scrollHeight and scrollWidth.

Plain Text vs. HTML Emails: Which Is Better? [New Data]

Spoiler: it’s plain text. Every time.

Nothing boosts opens and clicks as well as an old school, plain-text email.

I feel vindicated.

People say they prefer HTML emails ..but they actually prefer plain-text.

This seems like a plausable explanation:

Think about how you email colleagues and friends: Do you usually add images or use well-designed templates? Probably not, and neither does your audience. They’re used to using email to communicate in a personal way, so emails from companies that look more personal will resonate more.

Now get off my lawn, you pesky HTML-email lovin’ kids.

How Google warped the hyperlink | WIRED UK

Ignore the ludicrously clickbaity title. This is a well-considered look at thirty years of linking on the World Wide Web.