I’m going to be doing a bunch of maintenance and revisions to these web log pages over the next week or so… Bear with me if things look a little bit strange for a while.
Trade-in at GAME
I was very pleasantly surprised the other day when I used my copy of the PS2 game Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance as a trade-in at GAME. They sell this game on their pre-owned shelves for £29.99, and I’d thought that to make their margins, they wouldn’t give me much more than £10-12 for it. In fact, I got £17. This was nice, because I was buying a pre-owned copy of Gran Turismo 3 at £14.99, which meant that this month’s Edge magazine weighed in at a mere £2. Bonus.
Usability in print media
In the article Why Usability Matters, Monica Moses looks at how usability (and info architecture) principles can be applied to print journalism.
“Text is the hardest format we give readers. It is potentially the most precise — and perhaps even the most satisfying. But reading text is essentially unnatural. Nobody is born knowing how. Even when we get good at it, reading text requires letter-by-letter, word-by-word translation by the brain. It’s work.”
It’s all pretty obvious stuff, like splitting up text into easily scannable lists, but I couldn’t help but wonder where this might lead if taken to extremes…. The latest Stephen King 600-pager reduced to a 4-page summary of bullet points and plot graphs? 😉
The regulated European Web
In a fascinating essay (titled “I’m So Bored with the USA” on his own site, but “Damn the Constitution: Europe must take back the Web” at The Register, Bill Thompson paints an attractive picture of how a regulated web could be a really good thing.
“The first [belief] is the idea that the Internet is somehow outside or above the real world and its national boundaries. If I phone someone in Nigeria and suggest a money-laundering fraud then it is obvious to all that I am breaking the law in two countries, not in ‘phonespace’. Nobody has ever suggested that the content of the telephone network -all those voice calls -should be somehow privileged and treated as outside the normal world.”
Once you legally establish that “cyberspace” is actually firmly rooted in the physical world, and can be mapped within conventional national boundaries, all sorts of things become possible. Not least of which is the application of European social democratic laws instead of American free-trade (so long as we control it) libertarianism.
(I’ve been reading Will Hutton’s book The Stakeholding Society lately, and his ideas fit nicely alongside Thompson’s thesis. I’ve never really read much politics or economic before, but this book is making me regret that gap in my knowledge. I’ll have to write more about this some other time…)
5K Competition
The winners of the 5K web competition are out. Cool stuff.
W3C standards
This site currently validates to no known W3C standard!
