Welcome to the White House—and the 21st Century (updated)

Welcome to the White House—and the 21st Century (updated)
Back in 2002, giving a workshop in Sao Paulo, I showed my students the current White House website. It was pretty dull, but it did offer a page in Spanish. Politically smart, I guess, except that the links on the Spanish page were still in English. Politics on the web was still pretty primitive. Last year I wrote an article about the gorgeous Barack Obama campaign website. Clearly, the upstart...

Back in 2002, giving a workshop in Sao Paulo, I showed my students the current White House website. It was pretty dull, but it did offer a page in Spanish. Politically smart, I guess, except that the links on the Spanish page were still in English. Politics on the web was still pretty primitive.

Last year I wrote an article about the gorgeous Barack Obama campaign website. Clearly, the upstart understood the web far better than any other politician on the planet. 

Now, on the day of his inauguration, we have an invitation: Welcome to the White House.

Webwriters, take notes. Barack Obama has raised the standard. 

I've discussed the site in more detail on The Hook, the politics blog of The Tyee.

Update: Jimmy Orr at the Christian Science Monitor has a good article on the site, written from his perspective as W's original website guy.

Sir Tim on the Web's 20th birthday
Via The Star: Inventor eyes future as the Web turns 20. Excerpt:The inventor of the World Wide Web celebrated its 20th anniversary yesterday by encouraging fellow scientists at his former particle physics laboratory in Switzerland to look to the future. "The rate of development and innovation on the Web is actually getting faster and faster all the time," Tim Berners-Lee told a ceremony at the European Organization for Nuclear Research....

Via The Star: Inventor eyes future as the Web turns 20. Excerpt:

The inventor of the World Wide Web celebrated its 20th anniversary yesterday by encouraging fellow scientists at his former particle physics laboratory in Switzerland to look to the future. 

"The rate of development and innovation on the Web is actually getting faster and faster all the time," Tim Berners-Lee told a ceremony at the European Organization for Nuclear Research. 

"The Web is not all done. It's just the tip of the iceberg." 

Berners-Lee said he wasn't sure when exactly he wrote his first proposal for using the Internet to allow physicists to browse from page to page, share images and click on links to access other sites. 

"The exact date, I'll have to admit, is sort of a created one because I can't remember which day it was I actually wrote the darn thing," Berners-Lee told the celebration at the organization, known as CERN. 

"I probably was thinking of it all through February." 

He said it took a while to get an adequate computer and make the idea work, but that by December 1990 the Web was up and running – even if only between two computers at CERN. 

It expanded rapidly, however, taking advantage of the Internet, which had already been running more than 15 years. 

"It took off because, across the planet, random people got involved," Berners-Lee said. 

He said Web usage grew tenfold every year. 

"You think it's a great change to society that you can look things up on the Web," said Berners-Lee. But changes that are yet to come "are going to rock the boat even more."

Slow blogging
Via The Canadian Journalism Project: Slooowww is a post about "slow blogging," which has been around since at least 2006 but isn't in any hurry to impose itself. Slow blogging has its own Slow Blog and an advocate at Oxford University Press. I sympathize with the concept. Over at H5N1, I may post ten or twelve items in a busy day. Apart from the demands on my time, I wonder...

Via The Canadian Journalism Project: Slooowww is a post about "slow blogging," which has been around since at least 2006 but isn't in any hurry to impose itself.

Slow blogging has its own Slow Blog and an advocate at Oxford University Press.

I sympathize with the concept. Over at H5N1, I may post ten or twelve items in a busy day. Apart from the demands on my time, I wonder how much impact any given post may have.

But it's essentially a clipping service, and seems to be valued as such. Here and on some of my other blogs, the posts come less often. But I hope each has some useful value.

Jakob Nielsen reviews the Kindle 2
For a quarter of a century, almost, Jakob Nielsen has lamented the low resolution of text on the computer screen, and he's been right. Webwriters have created a whole new style of writing to deal with that problem. Now he's written a Kindle 2 Usability Review (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox). The summary: Amazon's new e-book reader offers print-level readability and shines for reading fiction, but it has awkward interaction design and...

For a quarter of a century, almost, Jakob Nielsen has lamented the low resolution of text on the computer screen, and he's been right. Webwriters have created a whole new style of writing to deal with that problem.

Now he's written a Kindle 2 Usability Review (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox). The summary:

Amazon's new e-book reader offers print-level readability and shines for reading fiction, but it has awkward interaction design and poor support for non-linear content.

Quite apart from the excitement of a new toy, the reported sharpness of Kindle 2 text has a portent for webwriters: What happens when the same sharpness is available for ordinary computer monitors and even mobile phones?

For other reasons, Amy Gahran sees great promise in the Kindle 2 for journalists. In another post, she links to a story arguing that the New York Times should give every subscriber a free Kindle, and to a review of the Sony PRS-700—a competitor of the Kindle.

Google Pay-Per-Click DEFCON Alpha!
If you have run, are running or are thinking about running a Google Adwords pay-per-click (PPC) campaign (or any PPC campaign for that matter), pay close attention! This could save you a lot of money... [Author: Meg F - Site Promotion - April 18, 2009]