design

Juan Antonio Giner, friend from SND days, says the newspaper industry spends too much time "doing the same and expecting miracles."

True. His advice:

"The publisher of a $5 billion European newspaper group called me yesterday asking me about innovative U.S. newspapers to visit.

'Sorry, but no one does things different or better that you,' I said.

'Go to Google.

Go to Pixar.

Go to Facebook.

Go to Apple.

Go to Microsoft.

A Slashdot post points to an online discussion with Khoi Vinh, design guru at NYTimes.com, in which Vinh is asked how the team there maintains visual consistency. His answer, in part:

Advocates of Web standards now warn that a heavily used technique for switching between standards-based browser rendering and, well, everything else -- called the DOCTYPE switch -- is broken.

OK, so that last sentence is meaningless to you if you don't work often in Web design or development. Even more meaningless would be any attempt I make to explain it for general audiences.

So, my advice:

Links in search of someone in a quippier mood than me, all the better to say quippy things at a rapid quip (enough already, Small!):

Am I the only one creeped out by how easy it is to invite acquaintances en masse to new social networks such as Spock and Plaxo Pulse?

Both these nets use the program interfaces of existing services such as Facebook and LinkedIn to let a new user log into those sites and pull their entire "friend" rosters into new accounts.

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox article, Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous, reminds us that fancy trick plays in site development don't always bring the same great benefits as good old blocking and tackling.

Nielsen calls out Ajax, rich interfaces, mashups, so-called "user generated content" and online communities -- noting they can be valuable in proper context, but can also distract Web teams from more important user experience objectives. One example: