“Baseball has succeeded in doing what no sport should ever do: taking the fun out of it.” Dave Anderson nails baseball with his sadly accurate column in today’s Times.
Page 120 of 130
Labels to Net radio: die now. Because the truth is that the music industry makes more money off the generic fan than the aficionado.
Wise small- and mid-size labels should independently eschew the new fees, returning them to broadcasters and encouraging their music is played online. One can only hope.
Nice review of the book spotted today. “Reading each chapter,” writes the reviewer, “I felt like a co-worker looking over the shoulder of designers wrestling with classic web interface questions.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: My mother makes the hands-down flat-out no-question best chocolate chip cookies the world has ever known.
I’d offer samples to everyone but I eat them too fast. Trust me on this, though.
I know her secret, too, and I’m not telling.
The Economist writes about weblogs this week. Alas, no mention of their weblogging design director. *clearing throat*
DesignChain magazine: Inside the Apple iPod Design Triumph. Interesting to note that Apple went form-first, figuring out the mechanics after determining the necessary aesthetic.
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.
I tapped into rock critic Robert Christgau’s Web site this morning and promptly immersed myself in a wealth of music opinion.
This site is a discerning music fan’s nirvana: more than 11,000 reviews, all of them short, many of them cranky, some admitting to an artist’s talent and charm, but not without a hint of surprise. Taken as a unit, they expose Christgau in full: this is a man who’s listened to far too much music and become jaded by his own abundance, yet he eagerly awaits the next time the music captivates him. Quietly, I long for his aural excess.
I read a handful of reviews and gleefully propelled myself into his space. Now I am drowning in the delight of my own internal jukebox, replaying my favorite songs in my head, while jumping from artist to artist on Christgau’s site, looking for the moments where his opinions match mine and we have fallen in love with the same album.
I am reminded of the true joy of music criticism: In the past tense, it serves as a stamp of approval, a chance to validate the odd purchases and personal pleasures. I’ve never gotten my friends to bebop along with Taj Mahal’s “Cakewalk into Town,” but when a critic writes exactly what I feel, I can say, Yeah, Christgau, man, you get it. For a music fan’s ultimate, unspoken yearning, beyond the pleasures of the music itself, is the affirmation of smart selection.
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.