You're browsing the “Info Mgmt” category.

Over lunch today I was catching up on my reading. I was drawn in by one of their headlines (which I saw on TechMeme.com). My interest quickly turned to disappointment because the article was poorly researched, exhibited nearly zero analysis, and sat under a sensationalist traffic-grabbing headline that it failed to back up. I expect more from TechCrunch, and I think they owe their 598k subscribers - me included — better reporting. The #1 blog should lead us to quality and respect by example, not through sensationalism and hollow reporting.

This was going to be a comment on TechCrunch’s site, but I agree with many recent commentators that posting on ones own blog and letting Trackbacks make the connection is the more respectful, responsible, and effective way. I’m not exactly sure why I needed to get this off my chest today, but here goes:

Mr. Schonfel, in my opinion your article and its headline are bad journalism. I believe the data reported by AddThis is insignificant and an insufficient basis for your broad headline. You provided no context or substantiation. I feel that you’ve done your readers a disservice by publishing this article. You report that AddThis is used “nearly 2 million times per month.” Does that seem like a lot to you? Significant? Does their data correlate or challenge other available data or trends? What, exactly, gives you the confidence to warrant such a far-reaching headline? I believe you would have done well to report on the overall market size that they are a niche within. Technorati’s About Us page reports, for example, that there are 1.6mm new blog posts PER DAY (sounds like “nearly 2mm” to me); over 5mm new blogs each month; over 100mm blogs total. In addition to questions of reach, I have to question the use-case and user profile that AddThis.com enjoys. I know you have the button on your site, but can you report what % of your visitors interact with it? Have you cross-checked your total del.icio.us saves witt the numbers AddThis reports? You have both those pieces of data - so that should be reportable. I’m given additional pause when I notice that approximately 1 in 6 AddThis users us it save to their native Favorites folder! Really? Why would anybody do that? You don’t need a special tool to bookmark a site in your browser, in fact it’s much slower than any of the other available mechanisms (native menus, keyboard-shortcuts, dragging-and-dropping). There’s nothing wrong with people doing that, but it doesn’t make then seem like trendsetters. In total, I don’t see any reason to think that this article is insightful or relevant. I’m worried about TechCrunch’s integrity when such poor data and analysis leads to such a presumptuous headline. I’ve taken the time to write this comment because I expect more from TechCruch. You’re earned my attention in the past, and I won’t let my silence help you short change yourself. I’m a big TechCrunch fan, like most of your (alleged) 598k readers, but I expect you to do much better reporting than this sensationalist rubbish. I’ll be back for your next post, and hope it’s much better. I have two hopes. First, I hope I’ve misread or misunderstood something, and that I’ll have an opportunity to retract this entire objection. If not, but second hope is that this call-to-action encourages greater journalistic integrity, whether new or old media. Respectfully, Nate Koechley @Dom Vonarburg, comment #25 on TechCrunch and a representative of AddThis, please feel free to provide the answers my comment is hunting for.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means (and takes) to build a high-quality, professional web site or application. I consider the whole spectrum, from macro concepts like Graded Browser Support, Separation of Concerns, and Progressive Enhancement to micro rules like never employ href="#" and always use the label element to bind text to form controls.

It’s difficult to compose a prescriptive list of all the issues a "perfect site" must satisfy. So, lately I’ve been think from a different perspective. Instead of "what it takes to be great," I’ve been asking myself "what does a great site NOT do? More specifically, I’ve been assuming a perfect site gets 100 points initially and then loses points for shortcomings.

Here are a few examples that I could use to measure a site:

• -1 point for each instance of href="#", (max of -5).
• -5 points for redirecting old browsers to a "you must upgrade" page instead of letting them see the plain linear content at least.
• -2 points for design degradation at +/-1 font-zoom level; -1 for degradation at +/-2 zooms.
• -1 for each form element missing an associated label element.
• -2 for a missing (or malformed) doctype

It’s too early to debate the mechanics (should it be -1 or -2 points), but I like the approach in general and am going to keep playing with it this week. One good way I’ve found to discover the list of things is to find a nice modern page, hit view-source, and start giving it a code review. Each thing that catches my eye probably belongs on the list, somewhere at least.

I’m quickly building a longish list — and will publish it before too long — but right now I want to ask: What would you put on the list?

Watch the video demo of photosynth from microsoft’s labs to see what’s possible when the world has zillions of photos of everything. (Hint: you can go inside them in 3D.)

…then you definitely want to install this Firefox extension that seamlessly integrates del.icio.us with Firefox’s internal bookmarking system: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3615/.

Really, it just feels right. It works just how it would if you designed it yourself. Seamless. Flawless. I’ve been bookmarking about 20x more links since I started using this tool. Love it. Install it now.

Notes

• During the installation process be sure to click “sync” to avoid losing your current Firefox bookmarks and links-bar bookmarklets.
• Don’t worry, you can still save private bookmarks by clicking “Do Not Share” during the normal bookmarking process.
• You can still use “keyword search” and navigation keywords, but it’s a bit non-obvious. To create a keyword, save your link, then save it again to see the keywords field show up.

Enjoy!

Divitis refers to the misuse of the DIV element in markup. Too often, sites are converted to tableless by blindly substituting a <div> for each <td> and <tr>. Related afflictions are widespread: one prominent news site wraps each “paragraph” of content in a <div class="p"> element. This pointless mess isn’t an improvement, and tastes as bad as yesterday’s tag soup.

Markup’s job is to generously impart meaning. This principle of “meaningful markup” is core to Web Standards’ ethos. Divitis misses it completely.

But not all DIVs metastasize into divitis.

According to the authoritative W3C spec, DIVs are specifically designed “for adding structure to documents.” Reasonable examples include encapsulating distinct modules (e.g., this is the weather module; this is the module’s footer region) and grouping together modules that live in the same structure (e.g., these modules belong to the secondary group/column). This is the appropriate use of the DIV element.

If one pillar of the Web Standards pantheon says markup should exclusively describe content, the other pillar says presentation instructions belong to CSS exclusively: Markup denotes structure, while CSS renders it. Sometimes structure and page layout feel more like presentation than content, but in truth it is equal parts both. Structure communicated in markup - even when the structure is ultimately expressed visually - is the appropriate use of a DIV.

Heather Champ announced yesterday on the Flickr Blog good news for Flickr users Past, Present, and Future. If you’re an existing regular user, your upload quote rose from 20mb to 100mb. If you’re an existing Pro user, your upload quote rose from 2GB to Infinity. If you’re not a current Flickr user, it just got easier for people to gift accounts to you - and no longer just upgrades to pro.

Thank you Flickr!