strategy

Charles Apple, one of the primo bloggers at Visual Editors, picked up the discussion about the future of design at newspapers and the troubled Society for News Design, in particular. In Apple's post, he channels Dean Lockwood of the San Antonio Express-News:

While I joined my son yesterday on a college campus visit (yes, he's that old, meaning yes, I'm that old), our gang at Scripps Interactive Newspapers Group rolled out the second site in our latest cycle of user experience upgrades: redding.com, site of the Redding Record-Searchlight in northern California.

As with Site 1, courierpress.com of Evansville, Ind., redding.com demonstrates Scripps' latest thinking about news Web sites, in form and function:

• Flexibility to showcase news of the day.

(Update [1:25 p.m. EDT, June 26, 2009]: Clear customer service just sent a note to members answering my questions and more. I added it in full at the bottom of this post.)

Greg Sterling noted the end of Clear, the program that let travelers pay to register with biometrics in exchange for swifter passage through security at several major airports.

As a Clear card carrier for roughly two years now, I got word of the shutdown last night. My first concerns, as I posted to Greg in comments on his post, are:

1. Do I have any prayer of a refund for unused months on my membership?

Bloglines beta site remains down this morning, victim of an expired and apparently neglected security certificate. Meanwhile, "classic" Bloglines still exhibits the classic problems that led me to try the beta months ago:

• Item refresh counts out of whack
• Showing thousands of old items as new
• Too many visits by the "Bloglines plumber" (outages)

Jeff Jarvis discusses the notion of advertising as failure:

"The ideal relationship a company should have with its customer is that it produces a great product the customer loves and talks about and thus sells; there is no need for advertising there. It’s only in the case of failing at that idea that one needs to advertise."

Go check out his post because he expands significantly on this idea in three video segments.

I see the logic, at least in cases with these characteristics:

• A given company and its given product have existed long enough to develop any reputation, good or bad.

Links with enough dust on them to prove how far behind I became in reading and blogging:

Design and UX stuff

• Introducing Typekit: Taking advantage of emerging markup/style practices that allow fonts other than the overexposed "Web-safe" selections, this service appears to be the most meaningful development for better Web typography in a long time. (Here's hoping widespread adoption of new font capabilities will make my ancient Text Style Sampler finally obsolete.)