bookaman's posterous

Safari 5’s seemingly innocuous new Reader feature, which isolates the text on a webpage making it easier to read, has sparked a surprising amount of outrage from web publishers who think Apple is trying to squash online advertisements and attack their livelihood.

But there’s been an equally distinctive and vocal reaction from readers, one that can be summed up quite simply: “Thank you.”

Similar tools have been around for eons, starting with the “Print this page” link of the last century, all the way up to tools like Readability, whose code Apple borrowed for its browser. But the advent of Safari Reader seems to have galvanized a point of view that’s been brewing for a while: Webpages are too cluttered and difficult to read.

So publishers, listen up. Your readers, the people you depend on to reach your bottom line, have something to say. It’s a pretty simple message: Your webpages are hostile to reading. It’s time to start paying much closer attention to the design of your pages — not just to reduce clutter and make everything easier to read, but to make sure your text maintains that readability across the broad range of screen sizes, devices and browser configurations people are using today.

It’s telling that Apple, a company with a history of only adding the most-needed features to its products, decided its browser would benefit from a tool that strips away the clutter on a page. Of course, one could make the argument that Reader is simply a subtle attempt to drive publishers toward Apple’s iOS platform, where you can create apps filled with iAds that can’t be removed. However, it would be a shame if that’s the only message publishers took from Safari’s Reader. After all, Reader is not an ad blocker, and given that there are ad blockers available for every browser, Reader is hardly a new threat. Reader is only presented as an option after the page has loaded, the ads have been displayed and impressions (i.e., the money part) have been registered.

The message of Reader (and tools of its ilk) isn’t that the online publishing model is doomed, but that it desperately needs a reboot to get rid of all the junk that’s clogging up the whole point of the system: connecting readers with the information they want.

Savvy publishers have an inkling that something is wrong. The popular British news site The Guardian, for one. The Guardian notes in its review of Safari 5’s Reader feature, “technologies like Safari Reader sound a salutary warning to media companies and advertisers…. From now on, we must love our readers or die.”

But The Guardian is putting its money where it’s mouth is. The site recently launched its Open Content Platform, complete with a Content API which allows anyone to grab an article from The Guardian and use it how they see fit — within the guidelines of The Guardian’s terms of service.

One of the best creations to come out of The Guardian’s new API is Phil Gyford’s Today’s Guardian.

The primary purpose of Today’s Guardian is to make reading news articles easier. For Gyford, that means eliminating distractions — sidebars are gone, comments zapped, menus pared down and page navigation radically simplified. We take issue with the removal of comments, but in short, it’s The Guardian redesigned with ease of reading as the primary goal.

As Gyford notes in his overview, it’s “a shame that such tools are even necessary … if you were creating a site whose purpose is to provide articles to read, wouldn’t you want to make it perform that task really well?”

If you’re wondering what makes a more readable design, read through Gyford’s post first. Also check out Mandy Brown’s In Defense of Readers on A List Apart. It’s filled with excellent advice on what to think about when designing a reader-friendly layout. (She’s the creative director at Etsy.)

“Limit distractions to the full extent possible,” Brown writes. Pull quotes are great, she says, as long as they’re near the top of an article where they can draw a reader in. But they become distracting farther down. She also advises on white space, typographic treatments, and where best to place your visual distractions so you don’t foul up the reading experience (the top and the bottom).

Brown’s own site, A Working Library is an exemplar of usability. Load it in Safari Reader and the only things that are removed are the header and footer.

A clean page layout falls apart when the proper attention isn’t paid to typography, and in that department, Blaine Cook has some homework for you. He gives you a way to calculate the proper text size mathematically by sizing all of your text in ems. This makes it much easier to find the proper pairing of column width and text size, giving your readers an easier time no matter what resolution, browser, or device they’re using.

He points to two useful tools: his own RePublish, which helps solve font-size issues across multiple screen resolutions, and Mathias Nater’s Hyphenator.js, a JavaScript library that intelligently reflows your text with clean hyphenation so you can run justified columns.

Cook’s methods will “make your site look amazing on the shiny new devices,” he says, but they will also improve readability in a good old-fashioned desktop web browser. On that note, he warns against the common practice of designing different layouts and serving different stylesheets for different-size screens.

“You shouldn’t be optimizing for iPads,” Cook writes. “Or iPhones. Or iPhone 4Gs. Or Nexus Ones. Or 30-inch 90ppi screens, or 30-inch 300ppi screens. You should be optimizing for reading experience, and you should be using the best techniques available to do so.”

The Kentucky Department of Education announced last week that it has implemented Microsoft Live@edu to provide its cloud-based communications and collaboration tools to students, staff, and faculty statewide. The service will be available to more than 700,000 people, and the state predicts it will save $6.3 million in costs over the next four years by using the Live@edu service.

Live@edu offers educational institutions free hosted, co-branded tools, including 10 GB of email storage, 25 GB of file storage, and access to calendars, document sharing, and instant-messaging.

Kentucky and Microsoft boast that the migration from the stage's old onsite Exchange service to the cloud-based one has been one of the quickest deployments - done over the course of one weekend, with over half a million people already accessing Live@Edu in the state.

According to Microsoft, Live@edu is now available in more than 10,000 schools in over 130 countries and serves 11 million people worldwide.

Microsoft's Live@edu versus Google's Apps for Education

The news from Microsoft and the Kentucky Department of Education follows on the heels of several recent announcements from Google in regards to their cloud-based educational offerings, including the Oregon Department of Education's announcement last month that Google Apps for Education would be offered to schools statewide.

According to their website, Google claims 8 millions students worldwide are using their Apps for Education, far fewer than the number served by Microsoft's Live@edu. Despite the demand for better collaborative tools in multiple enterprise and education markets, Google has experienced a number of setbacks with its push into the education realm recently, most notably with universities like Yale and < ahref="http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224700847">UC Davis scrapping their plans to adopt the service.

Nevertheless, some educators are pleased to see the battle for cloud-based communication and collaboration tools between these two tech giants, hoping that it will improve the product offerings made available for schools.

At WWDC in San Francisco, Apple has erected a video wall containing 30 synchronized 24-inch LED screens that display the top 50,000 apps as they are being downloaded. In just a few minutes, the entire walls gets filled up with with 10,800 downloaded apps from around the world.

You don’t have to spend any amount of time driving to see people doing really stupid things behind the wheel, but we’re surprised by how many people are having sex while driving.

According to Jabra, which makes phone headsets, 15 percent of people surveyed said they “have performed sex or other sexual acts” while driving. There’s always the possibility people are claiming they’re getting freaky in traffic to sound cool, but the survey found many drivers are doing more than driving while commuting.

Jabra surveyed 1,800 people in six countries and says the study has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.1 percent. People might have monkey-wrenched the online survey, but the findings are in line with some we’ve heard. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood calls distracted driving “a deadly epidemic” and says seven out 10 people use cellphones and other gadgets while driving. He’s working with automakers to address the issue.

As you’d expect, most of those surveyed — 72 percent — confessed to gobbling McFood or slurping a Frothed Milk Sugar-Laced Coffee-Flavored Beverage while driving. That’s to be expected when you realize most cars come with more cupholders than seats these days.

Another 35 percent said they’ve changed their clothes while driving, a feat we’d find exceedingly difficult because we drive a compact. Nearly one in four people admitted doing their hair and 13 percent said they apply makeup. It never ceases to amaze us when women apply mascara in traffic — putting a sharp object next to your eye while driving is just plain stupid.

Five percent of respondents said they shave behind the wheel. We’re assuming most of those are men, but we know of at least one case where a woman crashed while shaving her bikini line.

In this connected age, 28 percent of people say they text while driving (which is illegal in 26 states) and 12 percent say they read or send e-mail behind the wheel. Of course, just one-third of respondents are using headsets or other hands-free devices while yakking on their cellphones.

Another 10 percent said they read the paper while driving and 5 percent say they’ve played videogames.

“It is truly unbelievable what people are doing while driving,” said Jonas Forsberg of GN Netcom, which owns Jabra. “The results of our survey show that so many people are distracted and doing other things while on the road — even though they know the consequences that can occur. We hope that people will soon understand the implications of these bad behaviors and will change their own behavior accordingly.”

Yeah. Good luck with that.

The city of Washington, D.C., already known as an innovative government user of technology when federal CIO Vivek Kundra was CTO there before he moved to the White House -- is now building a private cloud infrastructure, launching a startup incubation effort, and pushing new community involvement in developing applications and leveraging government data.

The new private cloud is the closest to being launched, Brian Sivak, the city's CTO, said Thursday at the Gov 2.0 Expo. The infrastructure includes automatic replication and failover, incorporates flexible resource allocation, runs both Windows and Linux, and will be available for city agencies within "the next month or so," Sivak said. Agencies will be able to order a server in a shopping cart, click okay, and automatically have a server spooled up.

"While that's not revolutionary for the world, it's pretty big for cities and government agencies," Sivak said. "Here, it takes a long time to procure hardware, but now, a guy wants to go buy a server, it's click-click-click and then it's done."

In addition to building a private cloud, Sivak has embarked on the journey toward creating what he calls the "GIS model city" of Washington, D.C. The city is already a heavy supplier of mapping applications, having 26 apps that mash maps up with data on crimes, evacuation routes, school data, emergency facilities, addresses of notaries public, leaf collection, and much more.

However, Sivak wants to go further. He's now working to develop a series of usable templates and best practices in order to spark even more development of mapping applications, such as city service and polling place locators. He's also looking to add a way for citizens to update or augment maps with their own geo-tagged information on the location of things in the city such as park benches and traffic lights. Further down the road, he would also like to enable the city and others to release geo-tagged press releases of goings on in the city.

Washington, D.C., has also launched an effort to incubate local startups. Sivak is looking for outside investors who will fund the effort -- and the startups. The city would seek out early-stage startups who have built a prototype that's interesting or beneficial to city government. Then, during an incubation period, the startups would work hand-in-hand with the city agencies for which they would develop applications or services.

Sivak said that such an effort could have numerous benefits for multiple parties, including a higher chance of startup success since their initial product was built to customer specifications, and lower cost for the government as the startup's launch customer.

Finally, Washington, D.C., is working on an effort called "Decode DC," which is a take-off on and quasi-successor to earlier Washington, D.C., application development contests. The problem with those earlier contests was that after the awards were handed out, too often the applications stopped being maintained. The city wants to reverse that by providing the public with certain business processes and related data, asking how to make the business processes better, and allowing the city to take the next steps.

For example, Sivak said, Washington, D.C., has a process to register landlords with the city in order to collect tax revenue, but the current process isn't able to determine who is skirting their duty to register. As an improvement, Sivak posited, the city could match rental property information on Craigslist and the Washington Post's classifieds against the rental registrations.

There is a long tradition in journalism when your hometown team is playing for a championship: You good-naturedly trash everything about the other city.

According to that playbook, with the Blackhawks about to face off against the Philadelphia Flyers for the Stanley Cup, I should be proclaiming Chicago's superiority in architecture. And frankly, that would not be difficult, given the city's long record of leadership in everything from skyscrapers to urban planning. When BusinessWeek rated America's top design cities in 2008, Chicago ranked first, Philly ninth.

But I'm not going down that road, and there are two big reasons.

First, the Blackhawks' home arena, the United Center, is nothing to brag about. It's just another corporate sports palace, a pale echo of the stirring art deco classicism at the legendary but long-gone Chicago Stadium. The Flyers' Wachovia Center at least makes a stab at bracing, contemporary design. It's also easily reached by public transit, and some fans claim it's a more intimate place to take in the action.

Second, as I discovered during a recent visit to Philadelphia, many of that city's iconic metropolitan images have a distinctly familiar feel: They were created, it turns out, in the drafting rooms of Chicago.

When the television cameras pan the Philadelphia skyline before the series' first game there Wednesday night, they will invariably settle on One and Two Liberty Place, Helmut Jahn's Chrysler Building-inspired exercises in postmodernism, with their bright blue glass, sculpted tops and an exultant spire crowning One Liberty Place.

Finished in 1987, the taller One Liberty Place shattered the anachronistic gentlemen's agreement that for decades ensured that no building in the city would rise higher than the statue of William Penn atop the ornate tower of Philadelphia's Victorian-era City Hall.

Philadelphians continue to appreciate the Liberty Place duo, even though postmodernism — po-mo for short — fell out of fashion years ago.

"Philly is so retrograde that people still like po-mo," e-mailed my colleague at The Philadelphia Inquirer, architecture critic Inga Saffron.

Liberty Place is simply the most obvious example of Chicago's imprint on the city of Ben Franklin and Rocky Balboa.

D.H. Burnham & Co., the firm led by Chicago's Daniel Burnham, designed Philadelphia's great John Wanamaker's department store (1911), an East Coast sibling of the former Marshall Field's on State Street. As at Field's, an austere classical exterior gives way to inner glory, a five-story atrium topped by a vaulted mosaic ceiling. Like Field's, Wanamaker's is now part of the Macy's empire.

The Burnham firm also designed Philly's handsome Land Title buildings (1897 and 1902), two muscular Chicago-style skyscrapers that rise side by side on Philadelphia's main drag.

It's "as though a bit of Chicago's South Michigan Avenue was transplanted to Broad Street," Francis Morrone wrote in his 1999 guidebook to Philadelphia architecture.

Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, the firm that succeeded D.H. Burnham & Co., turned out Philadelphia's two main train stations: Suburban Station (1929), which is stuck in the basement of an otherwise handsome office building, and 30th Street Station (1934), which shelters an art deco main concourse that ranks with New York's Grand Central Terminal as a magnificent urban gateway.

In recent years, Chicago's Solomon Cordwell Buenz has made a lively departure from Philly's stodgy reliance on brick for domestic architecture, bringing glassy modernism to the city with such praiseworthy condo towers as the blue-and-white, curving-walled Murano.

And what, one might ask, has Philly contributed to Chicago's architecture?

Not much in actual construction, but something quite significant nonetheless.

In the summer of 1873, while still learning his craft, Louis Sullivan, that future hero of Chicago architecture, worked in the office of Philadelphia's Frank Furness, the red-bearded, sharp-tongued genius who designed such idiosyncratic Victorian-era masterworks as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

It was in Furness' office, according to Sullivan biographer Robert Twombly, that key aspects of Sullivan's mature style had their origins: a preference for bold building forms, colorful "polychromatic" decoration and nature-inspired ornament.

So the next time you walk by Sullivan's masterful former Carson, Pirie, Scott & Co. store at State and Madison streets — with its structurally expressive, white cellular walls and its forest-green cast-iron ornament sweeping around the corner — give Philly a well-deserved tip of the hat.

via chicagotribune.com

Newspapers may be dying, but the news business is not. The paper part of the business—the physical newspaper itself—is doomed. It no longer makes any sense to print and distribute the printed packets of articles we call "newspapers" to individuals. Not when you can transmit electronic copies of every article on demand virtually anywhere in the world cheaply and instantaneously. But as long as people are still interested in the news—and they will always be interested in the news—there will be money in journalism.

Google has been accused—and with some justification—of killing the news business. Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation properties include Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and the London Times, has in particular accused Google of stealing his company's content. But the truth is that while Google does make money directing people to News content, the limited previews of articles Google offers hardly constitute stealing. And while Murdoch has threatened to block Google from indexing his content—something Google has made very easy to do—he has yet to go through with his threats. After all, as Google often points out, its search engine and news aggregators drive traffic to news sites that might otherwise have gone elsewhere. Nevertheless, as I wrote when Murdoch made those threats, he does have a point. Readers who navigate to a website from a search engine spend less time there than regular readers and therefore generate less ad revenue. And the truth is that any way you look at it, search engines like Google are capturing a large share of the revenue that once went to newspaper publishers.

It's not actually Google's fault. It's certainly not as if Google isn't providing an incredibly valuable service by making it possible people to find content on the Internet. The problem is that precisely the things that make the Internet itself so valuable also make the news industry's traditional business model obsolete. And the Internet is just part of a larger, longer-term trend. The rise of radio, broadcast and cable television, and cell phones has marginalized newspapers, so that they are no longer the central clearinghouses of information they once were. In a recent cover piece in The Atlantic on Google—which is well worth reading in its entirety—James Fallows writes that

"The company’s chief economist, Hal Varian, likes to point out that perhaps the most important measure of the newspaper industry’s viability—the number of subscriptions per household—has headed straight down, not just since Google’s founding in the late 1990s but ever since World War II. In 1947, each 100 U.S. households bought an average of about 140 newspapers daily. Now they buy fewer than 50, and the number has fallen nonstop through those years. If Google had never been invented, changes in commuting patterns, the coming of 24-hour TV news and online information sites that make a newspaper’s information stale before it appears, the general busyness of life, and many other factors would have created major problems for newspapers. Moreover, “Google” is shorthand for an array of other Internet-based pressures on the news business, notably the draining of classified ads to the likes of Craigslist and eBay."

Where once we had to get most of our information from a couple of local papers, we now have an incredible variety of sources to choose from. Newspapers have been squeezed by the the proliferation of media to the point where they can no longer survive in their old form. The Internet is actually still accounts for just a fraction of the drop in newspaper revenue. But that fraction is only going to grow now that the Internet itself has become the global clearinghouse of information that local newspapers once were on a local scale.

If the bundle of printed features that has been sold on newsstands or delivered to your door is increasingly obsolete, the basic demand for what goes into newspapers hasn't changed. The demand for news itself certainly hasn't changed, even though the market has become more competitive. The problem is that in their effort to cling to their traditional business model, newspaper publishers are finding it increasingly difficult to make money off the news. But as they struggle to find a new model, news publishers may find they have an unlikely ally. That's because, as I'll explain in another post, the same thing that makes Google such a threat to newspapers also makes it uniquely positioned to create a new and ultimately better marketplace for the news.

Nicholas Negroponte is at it again with the development of the XO-3 tablet computer and will have a working prototype by December 2010, two years ahead of projections. Negroponte said the final product would cost US$75.

Paper books are a joy to hold and read, but in a hyperlinked world they can feel a little limited. Dr. Sorin A. Matei of Purdue University is making paper books writable and multi-layered with 2D barcodes (QR codes) through a system he's built called Ubimark. Imagine having a cloud of user-contributed commentary, maps, photos, audio and video annotating the paper books you hold in your hand.

As horror-flick titles go, Night of the Living Chaos and Rosemary’s Nonlinearity aren’t the catchiest. But filmmakers know that chaos — the mathematical kind — is scary. Now scientists know it too.

Filmmakers use chaotic, unpredictable sounds to evoke particular emotions, say researchers who have assessed screams and other outbursts from more than 100 movies. The new findings, reported May 25 in Biology Letters, come as no surprise, but they do highlight an emerging if little-known area of study, says cognitive biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch of the University of Vienna in Austria, who was not involved in the study.

“The classic example would be a screaming baby on an airplane,” says Fitch, “the kind you can’t ignore and makes your life hell.”

Cries are harder to ignore when they become irregular and chaotic, recent research suggests. Scientists think that these noises, uttered or roared when an animal is really worked up, have a crucial role in communication: They frantically demand attention.

By exploring the use of such dissonant, harsh sounds in film, scientists hope to get a better understanding of how fear is expressed, says study co-author Daniel Blumstein of the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Potentially, there are universal rules of arousal and ways to communicate fear,” says Blumstein, who typically studies screams in marmots, not starlets.

Blumstein and his co-authors acoustically analyzed 30-second cuts from more than 100 movies representing a broad array of genres. The movies included titles such as Aliens, Goldfinger, Annie Hall, The Green Mile, Slumdog Millionaire, Titanic, Carrie, The Shining and Black Hawk Down.

Not unexpectedly, the horror films had a lot of harsh and atonal screams. Dramatic films had sound tracks with fewer screams but a lot of abrupt changes in frequency. And adventure films, it turns out, had a surprising number of harsh male screams.

“Screams are basically chaos,” Fitch says.

Filmmakers have long been deliberately distorting sounds for dramatic effect, says musicologist James Wierzbicki of the University of Sydney. In Hitchcock’s classic The Birds, the only true avian sounds are heard near the beginning of the movie, in a pet shop. The calls of the demented, attacking birds were all electronically generated.

A true, harsh scream “is not a trivial thing to do,” Fitch says. In fact, capturing a realistic, blood-curdling cry is so difficult that filmmakers have used the very same one, now found on many websites, in more than 200 movies. Known as the Wilhelm scream, it is named for the character who first unleashed it in the 1953 western The Charge at Feather River.