David Strom reports that an increasing percentage of email is being filtered—often without the recipient’s knowledge. More and more frequently, harmless email is being branded as spam due to the inclusion of words that the filters brand as inappropriate. Quoted in the article: “In short, we’re starting to see signs that email, often hailed as the Internet’s ‘killer app,’ is in danger of becoming an unreliable, arbitrarily censored medium – and there’s very little we can do about it.”
Category: Internet (Page 38 of 40)
Yahoo’s new home page design represents a fundamental shift in focus: The Web directory is no longer the main reason to visit. And this is troublesome.
To me, the most striking component of Yahoo’s new home page design is the relegation of the Web Site Directory to the lower left-hand quadrant of the page.
The change is a logical progression, but the home page is clearly restating Yahoo’s purpose. Now it’s somewhere to “shop, find, connect, organize, [and have] fun.” Note that “find” is second in this subtle mission statement, and Find’s options are all sales-oriented: careers, maps, people, personals, yellow pages.
Yahoo came to prominence as the pre-eminent Web directory. You wanted to find something, you found its link through Yahoo. The site then began to grow horizontally: You wanted to find something, you began to find it on Yahoo. As of today, the directory that defined the site is a secondary consideration.
I have used Yahoo since 1994 and I remain a fan of its services. As a long-time visitor, I can only wonder: How far can Yahoo stray from its initial mission before it begins to lose its usefulness? After all, I got to Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Weather because I used Yahoo’s listings.
I hope CEO Terry Semel’s long-term plan includes maintaining and updating the seminal Web directory. Without it, Yahoo may turn itself into just another bloated portal. And we know how the rest of the “portals” have fared.
The Daily Oliver. For those of us who can’t get enough adorable puppy pictures.
The New Scientist’s The Last Word is The Straight Dope without any cheekiness. The subjects they cover are fascinating: How does ironing work? Are busy restaurants so loud that they’re bad for your health? Why is yawning contagious?
What’s scary is how many of the topics are already familiar to me. My taste for minutiae will never cease.
There’s a professional hockey team for sale. On eBay.
Been meaning to do this for a while: Here’s a list of all the weblogs I frequent. It covers every site in my trio of blog favorites folders, which I recently revised. I try and visit each site on this list at least once a week, and they all get my recommendation.
And by weblogs, I mean weblogs. This list excludes all commercial (e.g. news.com), metadata (Evolt, Metafilter) and semi-professional (The Morning News) Web sites—many of which I visit, but that’s a list for another day.
This list is gently categorized, and in no particular order within each category (it was supposed to be, but IE’s export feature didn’t cooperate).
- General weblogs
- 37signals: Signal vs. Noise
- Anil Dash
- Boing Boing
- CamWorld
- kottke.org
- MrBarrett.com
- shellen.com
- evhead
- Noise Between Stations Blog
- sippey.com-2002
- Blogroots
- maybe i still am!
- LouisRosenfeld.com
- february 7
- brushstroke.tv
- evanrose
- onfocus
- caterina.net
- Off On A Tangent
- rc3.org Daily
- _usr_bin_girl
- what’s in rebecca’s pocket?
- tins Rick Klau’s weblog
- misterpants
- Molly.com – Welcome
- Nick Finck
- Nick Denton
- blogaritaville@scriban.com
- Q Daily News
- ToT
- ODonnellWeb
- Acts of Volition
- Living Can Kill You
- Jerry Kindall
- The Study of Design
- Not updated regularly
- Exposition
- powazek productions personal log
- Mighty Girl
- davezilla.com
- elan.org
- Wrap Me Up in It
- whatever, whenever
- nothing, and lots of it
- Textism
- bazima
- Andre Torrez
- In Spite of Years of Silence
- b-may
- mecawilson
- 0(zero)format
- Ftrain
- LILEKS (James) The Bleat
- a jaundiced eye – the weblog
- eatonweb blog
- bradlands
- benbrown.com daily text
- Tomato Nation
- not.so.soft
- The War Against Silence
- sylloge
- Monstro!
- Design and usability
Ben Silverman’s latest Dotcom Scoop neatly skewers the Jupiter Media Metrix wind-down (similar to my note from Friday, but more thorough and much more relentless).
Someday, when I have more time (read if maybe perhaps eventually), I’m going to take the Cooper Interaction Designer Test and see what I can devise.
Projects like these are good for the mind; witness 37signals’ projects, like 37BetterBank and 37BetterFedex, which force the team to think along lines other than the ones they’re assigned. I do this on a micro scale with NetWert, which is still evolving (I’m currently digesting user feedback over whether it’s necessary to have Getting It Right separate from the Ideapad). Ideas evolve from practice that can then be applied in elsewhere.
And I can’t stand Microsoft’s table builders, either. (Cooper link via WebWord)
June 27, 2000: Media Metrix, Jupiter merge in $414 million deal. “Media Metrix today said it will acquire Jupiter Communications for $414 million in stock. The merged company will be called Jupiter Media Metrix and will have a combined market value of $1 billion, the companies said.”
June 21, 2002: Jupiter Sells Research, Events Business to INT. “Jupiter Media Metrix Inc. said on Friday it would sell its research and events business, essentially the last of its operations, to Internet media company INT Media Group Inc. for $250,000. Earlier this month, the company sold its Media Metrix Internet audience measurement service to ComScore Networks Inc. for $1.5 million. Last month it sold its European measurement service to rival NetRatings Inc. for $2 million.”
I will be sitting on a panel on information architecture Tuesday night (June 18) at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan. It’s a special interest group meeting held by the World Wide Web Artists’ Consortium. If you’re in New York and curious about the role of IA at Economist.com—or you just want to say hi—do stop by.
The SIG is free but you have to RSVP to attend.