Oh sweet, the Fantagraphics blog says the new Penguin Classics Deluxe line of paperbacks features covers by famous cartoonists. I’m pretty excited about the version of Candide with Chris Ware’s artwork. I realize that it’s not really illustrated by Ware – he just did the cover art. (My mom has a sweet illustrated edition of Candide that she read while pregnant with me.) I’m a little intrigued by the edition of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy with a cover by Art Spiegelman and Luc Sante. It seems a little redundant since David Mazzuchelli did a wonderful comic verion of City of Glass. But I suppose that was in a series that Spiegelman edited.
In the past year or so, I’ve all but quit reading newspapers on- and off-line. Nearly all of my online reading comes from blogs or relates to my research. While I watch Keith Olbermann for a little variety in my media diet, I’ll clearly see articles on a relatively bounded range of topics. Because of this, my drawers were really showing in a meeting with my chair this morning. We were talking about copyright and digital music, and I wondered out loud what had happened with Apple Computer’s agreement with Apple Records that it would not go into the music business. She told me, “That trial is starting right now. It’s been in the news.” Wow, I’m surprised I missed it, considering all of the technology blogs I read.
Steev has a post titled, “Is Your Child a Tagger?” I was disappointed to learn it wasn’t about parental fears over folksonomy but instead about graffiti. He points to this amusing graphic taken from a California newspaper and comments about the hysteria the media often create over youth culture.
Maybe this Robert Scoble post titled “the Role of Anti-Marketing Design” explains why so many people can tolerate the profound ugliness of MySpace. He thinks that sites that are too slick alienate users. Unlike Scoble, I would argue that Google and Craigslist aren’t ugly, they’re just minimal. MySpace is in a whole different category. It’s weird to think anyone would think MySpace is less corporate when it’s riddled with ads, even if they don’t know that it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
However, this post at a design blog called Whitespace argues that ugly design gets too much credit. (Both of these links come from Lost Remote.) The author doesn’t really address the issue that most internet users don’t go to Web sites for the design – they go there for the information or the experience. Google and del.icio.us give users the information they’re looking for with minimal effort, while MySpace users presumably visit the site to connect with friends and acquaintances. While it makes for a funky experience, MySpace’s promiscuity in allowing users to embed their own stylesheets, scripts, and media also probably give it an edge over other YASNS like Friendster. If any design facet matters to most users, it’s the information architecture. If they can’t find what they’re looking for they’ll go away, but ugly color composition clearly doesn’t turn away the millions of users on MySpace.
I’ve been getting laughs lately referring to the internet as “teh Internets” in PowerPoint slides and the like. Of course, it’s a common typographical error, combined with President Bush’s assertion that “There are rumors on the Internets.” I just shot off an email, and I was tempted to end it with the common typo “-Chirs.” I got a little too excited, thinking “Chirs” would be my new online identity, and I started to change the “from” field in mail.app. I realized that I send enough email to people who don’t know me or my sense of humor that this would be a dumb idea.
Newsweek’s current cover story is a trend piece on Web 2.0 technologies. Unsurprisingly, “The New Wisdom of the Web” emphasizes personalities behind the companies over the technologies that fall under the rubric of “Web 2.0.” It emphasizes Flickr and MySpace, while mentioning del.icio.us, YouTube, and Google Maps mashups.
I’m not sure I would classify MySpace as a Web 2.0 project – it seemed behind the curve two years ago, and it’s most salient characteristics are its hideous design and kitchen-sink approach to features. It’s true that it attracts a ponderous number of users, but the only thing two-dot-oh about it is its emphasis on social networking. It doesn’t add any value to information or combine different services in an interesting way. Most of all, MySpace emphasizes linking to content on its own site. It encourages bands to upload their music to the site (under iffy copyright license) or users to create blogs mostly invisible to the rest of the Web. To contrast it with del.icio.us, which is a useful tool for finding information online, MySpace is a data cul-de-sac. I do wonder if this ability to corral audiences is what attracted News Corp. to MySpace.
In general the article does a good job of explaining how Web 2.0 enables end users to share and filter information
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