Articles related to Communication
Why is Facebook not Paying the Apple Tax?
Why should Facebook—the biggest beneficiary of the iPhone, its tools, and its infrastructure—pay nothing, when small developers have to pay tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars?
Computer Poetry
Every time we read a computer-generated text, part of our life gets sucked into a little black electric hole.
Make Bots Identifiable
Everybody that has an interest in influencing public opinion will happily pay a handful of Dollars to amplify their voices. Governments, political groups, corporations, traders, and just simple plain trolls will continue to shout through bot armies—as long as it is so cheap.
On Icons
Icons save space. Icons look crisp. Icons give quick answers to hard questions: How do we make it nicer? How can we brand it? How do we make it more fun? We ♥ icons. Until they start messing with our minds.
Putting Thought Into Things
To get a good perspective, we start our projects with research. We go mobile first for prioritization, and we want all the content first so we can design in the browser… Unfortunately, the reality of web design follows a different stereotype.
Twitterror
How do you deal with erroneous tweets? Not any erroneous tweets, your erroneous tweets. The tweets that you misspelled or, worse, that contain information you later discover is false, or a late night knee-jerk response you regret in the morning.
Follow-up to “Sweep the Sleaze”
Our call to question the common practice of blindly adding social media buttons to every page got a lot of attention, and found many friends across the board. This proves we are onto something. Let’s look at some of the more critical reactions.
Sweep the Sleaze
Promising to make you look wired and magically promote your content in social networks, the Like, Retweet, and +1 buttons occupy a good spot on pretty much every page of the World Wide Web. Because of this, almost every major site and brand is providing free advertising for Twitter and Facebook. But do these buttons work?
iABC
The idea: Look at the history, shape and sound pattern of each letter, sum it up in 140 characters, and collect a beautiful specimen for each letter.
Business Class: Freemium for News?
I had a perspective-changing talk on the subject of pay walls with the chief executive of a big publishing company (no, I can't tell you who). He asked me what I think about pay walls.
iPad: Scroll or Card?
How do you navigate content on the iPad? Scroll or flip? In 1987, the biggest neck beards in tech held a conference on the Future of Hypertext and there were two camps, “Card Sharks” and “Holy Scrollers”. They had an epic battle over this question: Should you scroll or flip pages on the screen? Who won the fight?
Meet C140, Our Next Trend Map
It’s one year since our last Web Trend Map. A lot has happened, but there are not enough changes in the landscape of domains in the last 12 months to create another domain-based Web Trend Map. The big changes happened one level higher, on the social layer, that is: On Twitter and Facebook.
Kill Blog Comments?
Blog comments have an innate communication problem: You can't discuss and moderate the discussion at the same time.
New and Dirty: Tweet Blogging
We all waste too much time reading (and writing!) boring text. Here is one solution to the problem.
The Age of Digital Baroque
After all, blogging is over now, isn't it? Very probably so.
Elvis and the Opposite
A 14-year old video blogger named Fred somehow managed to get a fan base of almost 45 Million users. Now instead of asking how that's possible, Seth Godin and Robert Scoble trivialize his success. Did they forget what Elvis said?
Data Gourmet
The IT-Revolution promised to free and enrich us. To free us from propaganda, to free us from mindless TV, to free us from advertisement torture, and to enrich us by letting machines do all the boring work so we'd have more free time. So, how did it go?
Use Your Real Name When You Comment
Dear anonymous reader, if you intend to be critical: Be our guest. But if you're our guest, act like a guest.
Understanding New Media
You often hear people saying that other people understand or don't understand the media. Funny enough that the appreciative "he/she understands the media" is applied to success in old media, while "he/she does not understand the media" is applied to old media people fumbling with the Internet.
Pushers and Spammers Should Pay
The amount of spam and flooding blogs and mailboxes is getting worse and worse and worse. How should we stop it?
Technorati: Big Business with Bogus Data
Since the PR giant Edelman and Technorati are working together they are both trying to become an industry reference for statistics on the blogosphere. The question is how reliable is Technorati’s data?
Partner in Astroturfing: Boycott Technorati?
We all had a bad feeling about this right from the start. Why is the blog watch-and-search engine Technorati bonding with the No.1 PR giant Edelman? Can we trust them?
Good Books Want to be Re-read
Good books are good people: Books are people speaking with signs. Meeting cool people several times is nice.
Build a Plane and Fly to Sicily
Since Mondays are typically low energy days, I’d like to share this story with, to reassure you: If you have a strong vision—no one can stop you.
The Electronic Gentleman
If you have a website that is not user friendly, you have an unfriendly website which basically means that you lack manners. The specialists use that word (“user friendly”) so often that they forget that “friendly” actually is an ethical term.
Read Different: Apple Ads in Japan
Last Sunday, they started airing the "Hello, I'm a Mac… and I'm a PC" ads here in Japan. And here's a surprise: they're different. The Mac guy isn't particularly cool and the PC guy is a real "salary man" type. The ads aren't as obvious as the Western originals.
New Athens
When people ask me about my background, they're confused. I studied philosophy. How come I do web design? In short: The old Greeks brought me here. What can Internet workers learn from the old Greeks?
Web Design is 95% Typography
95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.
CI and CSS
Corporate design manuals, CSS, information architecture and object oriented programming follow the same principle. They are modular.
Internet Consulting?
The Internet business took a hard hit around 2000 after the tech bubble burst. To call yourself an “Internet agency” or even an “Internet startup” was considered nothing less than masochistic. That is when most Internet companies started to get into “consulting“ and “branding” and “marketing”.
Startup in Japan (2): Find an Accountant
I needed an accountant for my new company and so I checked out a couple of websites and made a couple of appointments. And if you think accountants are boring, you are so very wrong.
What is an Idea, and How Much is it Worth?
An idea is not some pink cloud that looks like a bunny. The Greek word "Eidos" originally meant "form, shape", and that is what a real idea is.
