— In Graphic Designers Are Ruining The Web, Observer writer John Naughton outlines his dismay that so many webpages have turned into so much bloat (over the last decade, the size of web pages has more than septupled.) He has a point, and designers and developers certainly need to work together to create streamlined pages that work whether you have broadband or dial-up. But don’t you find the quote above peculiar? It’s like he has no idea that minimalism is itself a design choice. The pages he professes to adore all accord with a set of design principles, even if those principles are to include a whole boatload of information (and, as it happens, have nothing whatsoever to do with minimalism.) Craigslist may be designed according to “un-design” principles, but it’s designed nonetheless. It’s a shame that more people don’t understand this, and it’s somewhat infuriating to hear designers equated, as here, with dumb maniacs who gleefully refuse to understand how the web works. Some of them are, of course. But it’s an unhelpful generalization, and makes for an irritating read. Don’t know about you, but I value content and I value aesthetics, and I firmly believe that the two can co-exist. </rant>
— Love this piece by David Carr: At Sundance, Kickstarter Resembled a Movie Studio, But Without The Egos. Carr looks at the success of the crowdfunding site, Kickstarter, which helped finance 17 films on view at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival—a whopping ten percent of the entire festival’s slate. He has some good comments from Kickstarter co-founder, Yancey Strickler, who describes the “agnostic” platform he and his team have created: “The people are the curators — they decide what is going to get made.” And that is exactly what has Hollywood executives quaking in their boots.
“Innovation is a pretty regular process.” This is a great example of the iteration that’s so vital to the discipline. Burt Herman explains the process that led to the birth of Storify, a site designed to “create engaging social stories.”
[Video via Julia Kirby.]
We pay some people to be Big Thinkers for us, but mostly they just say things that please people with money. It pleases the money folk to think that the wild and crazy and unregulated world of the web is no longer threatening them. That users are happy to live in a highly regulated, Disneyfied app space, without all that messy freedom.
I’ll stay with the web.
"—
Tech world evangelist, Dave Winer writes a smart post about Why Apps Are Not The Future. Publishers are gaga about the potential of apps to control their users, and as Winer writes, that’s fine, only:
The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don’t need oceans because you have a bathtub. How nice your bathtub is. Try building a continent around it if you want to get my point.
Winer certainly strikes a chord, and the question for me is: who is really being served here? With apps, the publishers get to control the experience and make some money. Neither of these are inherently evil, but if the app ends up being more focused on serving the publisher’s needs than on providing an enjoyable experience for readers/users/viewers, they will simply tune out. A lose-lose.
Meanwhile, Winer’s cynicism about “big thinkers” in the quote at top is alarming. It’d be great to write this off as overblown but, given how many stories we’ve read recently about the corruption at the heart of our culture, it would be naive to dismiss him out of hand. Sigh. Read, too, his more detailed follow-up post on this topic: Enough With the Apps Already.
![Lots of breathless excitement and hoopla around Amazon’s introduction of a new series of Kindles. Here’s an interesting take that gets past the fact that there’s a new competitor to the iPad in town. Longtime Apple employee, Chris Espinosa, writes:
In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.
Eat your hearts out, Facebook and Google.
Espinosa also has warnings for the giant search engine, on whom he says Amazon is performing “astonishing jujitsu”:
Fire isn’t a noun, it’s a verb, and it’s what Amazon has done in the targeted direction of Google. This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a privatized merchant data-aggregation network.
Is that a phrase to bring a tear to the eye of Tim Berners-Lee, or what?
[Story via Nilofer Merchant. Image c/o Amazon.]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ls91atQj6D1qikpxao1_1280.jpg)
Lots of breathless excitement and hoopla around Amazon’s introduction of a new series of Kindles. Here’s an interesting take that gets past the fact that there’s a new competitor to the iPad in town. Longtime Apple employee, Chris Espinosa, writes:
In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.
Eat your hearts out, Facebook and Google.
Espinosa also has warnings for the giant search engine, on whom he says Amazon is performing “astonishing jujitsu”:
Fire isn’t a noun, it’s a verb, and it’s what Amazon has done in the targeted direction of Google. This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a privatized merchant data-aggregation network.
Is that a phrase to bring a tear to the eye of Tim Berners-Lee, or what?
[Story via Nilofer Merchant. Image c/o Amazon.]
At the PSFK conference in New York, Allison Mooney of Google came out with a peculiar comment:
Curation will be prized a lot more over creation in the future.
You get where she’s coming from, of course. Google is curation. And Google loves to demonstrate its prowess at surfacing needles of meaning from the haystack of imbecility that now comprises so much of the web. But let’s not forget one important point: there can be no curation without creation. The former cannot exist without the latter. So while curation is a skilled and important task, the suggestion we should elevate its value over the act of creating something in the first place is a fallacy.
Noted urbanist and author Richard Florida agreed, commenting via Twitter:
Not to worry. Quality curation requires creation… In the future, most trusted curators will be creators in their own right. Creativity is prerequisite.
