Author: Tom Coates

Presenting for your delectation, The Saint of Webloggers.

Stephen Van Doren said something really nice to me in an e-mail so I decide to link to his site. This is not a request for more e-mail. I get too much as it is.

“Leading scientists proclaim migraines c*nty.“

Do you want to get the latest Barbelith articles syndicated to your website? Would you like always to be aware what new hip and happening writing is being writ? And would you like to help me publicise new articles? Well now you can. All you have to do is add this little piece of code to your site:

<script src="http://www.barbelith.com/syndication/barbelith.js" language="JavaScript"></script>

Thanks to Eduardo Arcos for inventing this little piece of code. You can find out more about it here.

A while back I did a post about the history of Yahoo! that Jason Kottke picked up on [my original post]. Someone e-mailed me a classic interview with the founders and in ploughing through a file full of notes, I found the link once more: Interview with Yahoo! founders.

Hey hey – it’s a picture of that cute guy from that site that I linked to that time. You know… The one with the stuff on it.

Today on Barbelith: The Uniform of Uniqueness – “Lunchroom culture has bred a generation of pseudo-marginalised play-acting rich kids, whose teenage ‘rebellion’ trivialises the oppression of genuine subcultural groups. Devondra McMillan reports.”

I’m a little weirded out by the publicity surrounding Blogdex – particularly as it’s a basic retread of Beebo’s Metalog which is a long-standing favourite of plasticbag.org. Now there’s an article on it at Wired: Tracking Bloggers With Blogdex which makes an astonishing range of weird claims. There’s this one quote that I’m particularly weirded out by: “Marlow hopes Blogdex will give voice to individual webloggers by aggregating the interests of the community as a whole.” Seems to me that rather than giving a voice to individual webloggers, the site is actually taking traffic away from them by highlighting the most popular links. It’s not a celebration of weblogging, it’s a way of getting interesting links without actually reading them. And I still find it unlikely that out of 9,000 sites being tracked through it, the most popular link is only mentioned four times. The additional functionality that is supposed to be being built into it, of course, might prove me completely wrong. We might actually have a useful central place for webloggers to track what’s going on in the community. This could be tremendously cool. It will also, I fear, be hideously impractical and outside the remit of even MIT’s MediaLab. I mean – everyone has been hoping for a return of Blogger’s search facility for ages. That actually allowed the weblogger to see where they were being talked about and to respond to comments and criticisms. Build that into Blogdex and you might actually have something worth looking at…

Infographic: The following Canadian fag-packet includes a glorious infographic on the precise effects of cigarettes on people’s lives. And, as such, is immensely amusing. It’s just a shame that you can’t choose precisely which small town gets decimated each year. Tactical smoking would then become a mighty weapon amongst left-wing intelligensia and media-types.

I think there are several stages of web design. The first one is the text and pictures, slap it all up, doesn’t matter what it’s there for school. I did this stage on NCSA Mosiac back in 1993 / 1994. The second stage is very very pretty, but kind of pointless – it’s pure fluff with little sense of information structure. The third stage is very dry and professional but works effectively and clearly. I think I’m just at the third stage now – I think barbelith is my example of clean, clear and slightly dull design. The next stage, I think, is the combination of good structure and clarity with beautiful design – and I think that (although I don’t really approve of the heavy download times) halfproject may be the place to go… Particularly check out the ‘projects’ section.