Finally Some Critical Writing About the Web

October 30th • 1 Comment • Under: Web Critique • Tags: critique, Journalism, web, writing

After writing the previous article ‘What is Wrong with the Tech Journalism’ and thinking more about the portrayal of the Web by off/online journalists, I have finally found a few great articles that try to critically assess the otherwise hyped “user–generated content” and “social networking”:

• The User-Generated Content Myth by Scott Karp where he perfectly explains that an average creator of a useful web content is not an average citizen.
• The Fakebook Generation by Alice Mathias who excellently describes the reasons for the popularity of social networking sites and what they actually mean to people using them.
• Facebook Is NOT For Business also by Scott Karp where he explains why the popular view of Facebook (or any other website of kind) being useful for business and during the business is false.

More Views About the Web and Journalism

Continuing the debate over the importance of professional journalism and the rising popularity of individual publishing, there are number of different viewpoints presented in the following blog posts:

• Let’s have a real debate about Web 2.0 by Suw Charman and Kevin Anderson,
• Still going: more of the NUJ debate by Shane Richmond,
• Is the Web as weak as its weakest link? by David Weinberger,
• The NUJ and me: a considered response by Roy Greenslade,
• Hands up those who think Web 2.0 is rubbish! by Sian Claire Owen.

While I may disagree to some of the views expressed in the above articles, I still think that most of the authors would be better of without using the term Web 2.0, to make their point clearer.

Now It’s Your Turn Journalist

October 28th • No Comments • Under: Journalism, Understanding Web • Tags: critique, Journalism, media, web

This article was inspired by an email conversation with Donnacha DeLong, and is a reply to the following articles:

• Shane Richmond, The NUJ’s blinkered approach to online
• Jeff Jarvis, The new collective
• Roy Greenslade, Why I’m saying farewell to the NUJ

I disagree with the idea that personal publishing on the web is a threat to journalism, and I also don’t think the increasing popularity of individual publishing could undermine the professional standards of journalism (in its broadest sense). However, the idea of personal publishing replacing the concept of media is totally absurd, indeed. Read more »

What is Wrong with the Tech Journalism

October 26th • 1 Comment • Under: Journalism, Understanding Web • Tags: critique, Journalism, media, web

The problem is with the journalists who write about the web, with their understanding of the subject and literacy of the web in general. The final drop of encouragement for writing this essay was an article by Jonathan Richards in Times Online titled Web 3.0 and beyond: the next 20 years of the internet.

Web is not a software that is developed and released in versions. Actually, the “versioning” of the web is the worst thing that could happen to the hype of the internet. In the particular article, the author was informed by “Mr Spivack, the founder of Radar Networks, a leading Web 3.0 company” that the cycle of the web development is ten years.

Think of “Mr Einstein, the founder of General theory of relativity, a leading Physics 2.0 theory” saying that the cycle of physics development is 30 (or any other number) years until the Physics 3.0 which concentrates on strings and membranes in an eleven dimension environments. Can you see the absurdity of such statements? Read more »

Good and Bad CSS Identifiers

October 17th • 4 Comments • Under: Design Suggetions • Tags: analysis, css, web design

Seeing a <div class="left green">...</div> block in HTML code might hurt the eyes of a lot of web designers. To identify good and bad id and class names, it is important to understand the idea of the CSS.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines CSS2 as:

a style sheet language that allows authors and users to attach style (e.g., fonts, spacing, and aural cues) to structured documents (e.g., HTML documents and XML applications). By separating the presentation style of documents from the content of documents, CSS2 simplifies Web authoring and site maintenance.

Therefore class names left, green or largetext are theoretically good according to the first part of the CSS definition, but very very bad according to the second part, which can be illustrated with the following example. Read more »

Optimize for search engines or users?

September 20th • 2 Comments • Under: Understanding Web • Tags: semantics, seo, web design

Search engine optimization companies are spreading all over the web. They claim to optimize your website so that it comes first in the search results for whatever the people might be looking for. Well, not everything really, but for whatever you make, produce, sell or do.

Who uses their services? Those who initially hired a bad web design company to build their website. You may wonder which are those bad agencies, that make bad websites and don’t know how to put your site high in the search results. But you may also wonder, why not a single agency advertises itself as we don’t know how to design proper websites but can do one for you company. Read more »