Moral compass of the internet

Wired bio of Sergey Brin, founder of Google and its head policymaker. Brin tackles issues such as the Church of Scientology's position on criticism, China's recent Google lock-out, racist or inflammatory websites, and companies' attempts to optimise their ranking. In steering the wired world's zeitgeist he could be regarded as one of the most powerful non-governmental influences on world culture and politics. Interesting to hear that his favoured value term is "useful".
(From Wired)

Apple drop X-only January plan

Apple have abandoned their plan to sell only Macs that boot in OS X from January. Report has the usual Quark waffle.
(From CNET News.Com)

IBM chip suits Apple

IBM have confirmed that their new 64-bit PowerPC 970 chip is AltiVec-compatible, which, I'm told, is good news for those who reckon Apple will start using it.
(From MacNN)

Service providers: 1 in 10 jobs now from InDesign

A pretty extensive voxpop survey by Jim Dalrymple on what people think of the QuarkXPress/AdobeInDesign battle. Adobe has made significant gains since InDesign 2.0 (up 188% year on year), and service providers say the number of jobs they receive from InDesign files has gone from 1 in 100 to 1 in 10. But he reckons this success will slow considerably when XPress for OS X finally ships. Quark's Glen Turpin is still sticking to the "we're going to make it solid, not sexy" line. What would be really interesting would be to see how fast XPress will be.
(From MacCentral)

IT projects usually fail -- KPMG

Gulp. A KPMG survey of 134 companies worldwide found that 56 per cent have had to write off as a failure at least one IT project in the past year. The average loss incurreed: 12.5 million euros. Sixty-seven per cent reckoned that their project management function was in need of improvement. A principal reason for failure: poor communication.
(From The Register)

BBC still by far the most popular UK news website

Latest Nielsen NetRatings stats for online news sites here. In October the BBC copped 2.8 million unique viewers; the Guardian 1.3 million, CNN 0.65 million; Ananova 0.5 million; the Telegraph 0.48 million; the FT 0.47 million, and the Sun 0.46 million. The BBC has by far the longest average time per month at 55 minutes.

El Pais now a paid site

El Pais began charging for most of its content Monday November 19. There are two payment options: an annual fee of €80 or a biannual fee of €50. There is also a micropayment option of 0.5 euros for a PDF or 0.2 euros for an html article.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Clarín produces electronic edition

The Argentinian daily Clarín is running a free digital edition using the facsimile page pane, HTML-optimised story pane model. It's pretty impressive, and includes an "other stories" list at the end of each story, No PDFs so far as I can see. See also discussion on Metafilter.
(From Metafilter)

FT, Slate doing trials with tablet PC

The Financial Times, Forbes, the New Yorker, Slate, Les Echoes and Wirtschafts Woche have signed deals with Microsoft to develop tools to publish trial tablet PC magazines. They are hoping to have something usable some time in 2003. Despite the limited take-up of ebooks, the publishers hope to appeal to advertisers for similar reasons: the familiarity and acceptance of print display ads plus the interactivity and personalisation opportunities of electronic publishing. Meanwhile digital edition software company has announced a reader application for tablet PC.
(From CNet News.Com)

When good interfaces go crufty

Interesting essay on "cruft" -- interface conventions that harken back to redundant necessities -- by one Matthew Thomas on his weblog, plus some discussion on Slashdot. Lots of nods to Isys Information Architect's Interface Hall of Shame, home of our favourite Lotus Notes review.
(From Slashdot)

Link farm front pages need to consider Google page design

I've got to agree with Steve Outing on this. News websites just haven't learnt enough from print or TV as regards what to do with their front pages. The headlines before a news programme, or the items on a broadsheet newspaper front page, will rarely stretch beyond 10 items (generic indexes excluded). Even with all the other furniture counted on a newspaper front page, you'll never be taken in more than about 20 different directions. Same goes for Google. Compare that to the Washington Post: 217 links on its front page. Does anyone really scroll down on front pages? I'm not against bundling stories in drop-down menus and leaving the very best editorial picks on the front. Show the quality -- everyone knows there's quantity online.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Reuters sued for publishing public URL

Here's an odd one. Swedish tech firm Intentia International has filed a suit against Reuters for obtaining an earnings report for the company from a web page that Intentia considered private on the grounds that no public navigation directed vistors to the page. The URL, however, was completely open to the world inasmuch as no registration is required to access it -- simply knowledge of the URL. Intentia reckon this means hacking and argue that a ruling against them would set the precedent that anything on an open web server is public information. Tautology?
(From Salon)

Pfeiffer on EidosMedia

Industry pundit Andreas Pfeiffer considers Xsmile, the XML-based pagination component of EidosMedia's Méthode publishing system, and reckons that such systems "could prefigure what standards driven workflow solutions of the future could look like". I did a review of Méthode for GNL IT - colleagues can read this in the "IT Library" or whatever it's called. The main problem with the ideal of a natively XML based solution is that in a medium as mature as print, in many design-driven workflows it is simply unrealistic to draw a line between form and content. The fact that XML and even SVG isn't really rich enough to describe a multi-layered InDesign page using sophisticated transparency isn't a failing -- it's to be expected.
(From Pfeiffer Report)

"91% of XPress users unhappy" -- Macworld

Macworld UK asked 1,268 readers if they were considering an alternative to QuarkXPress or have already switched. Niney-one percent of them said they were unhappy with Quark. Fifty-one percent said they were sick of waiting for a OS X version of the software, and 40 per cent said they had already switched to Adobe InDesign. Nine per cent declared that they would rather use XPress under any circumstances.
(From Macworld UK)

Washington Post 'was forced to sell IHT stake to NYT'

Washington Post CEO told Post editors that the New York Times threatened to drive the International Herald Tribune to ruin unless the Post sold its stake to the Times, according to Editor & Publisher. Apparently the Times threatened to start its own international edition and to block investment into the IHT. The Times has not commented.
(From Editor & Publisher)