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An experiment in news aggregation

Sunday, May 6, 2012, 10:34 PM
Other Stuff by John (Article #273)

Over time, one of my goals has been to start doing more content under

introduce Kranky Mind, a site that I hope will branch out and become a bit of an experiment in news aggregation.

What is a news aggregation website? It's a site that provides selected

READ MORE ...

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Government cuts and tech spending

Friday, November 12, 2010, 7:55 AM
Business by John (Article #272)

Cisco crying because governments buy a lot of network technology.

They should look at the bright side. The austerity folks tend to be extremely short-sighted. Odds are, government will also turn off the climate control in their server rooms. Then the Austrian School of economics will kick in.

Austrian economics: stupid leads to self-correcting market because stupid people break shit. In fact, stupid people break a lot of shit.

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What's the deal with Japanese web design?

Monday, August 9, 2010, 1:44 AM
Thoughts by John (Article #271)

One of the odd occasional conversation to be had in the web design community is the great question of why does Japanese web design still seem to be stuck in the mid-1990s. Why does every Japanese website like the 90s version of Yahoo ran sideways into paint truck?

A lot of the misconception about Japanese web design begin with gross and off-target generalizations about Japanese art. One is the tendency to view Japanese art as aesthetically simple and pleasing. That is to say, we tend to conflate Japanese art with minimalism.

Japanese art is not minimalist. Especially not in the sense the art world means about 1950s and 1960s New York art scene minimalism. It's not influenced by minimalism, even though it did exert an influence on minimalism.

The minimalism perceived in Japanese art is more of a traditional Zen Buddhist aesthete. And in fact, this is a case where art clearly arises from a long tradition of religious and philosophical encroachment. In that regard, Japanese Zen art is more akin to Islamic medieval art than to American minimalism. As-is, Japanese art is older, more traditional, and more about aesthetic simplicity than true minimalism.

It should also be offered up that Japanese art was never entirely about Zen simplicity. Western observer heavily over-weighted Japanese watercolors (which are really simplistic naturalism or outright romanticism) and Zen calligraphy. A lot of Japanese art is downright ornate. Of course, western observers view ornate art through the lens of baroque architecture, so they sort of miss that Japanese art is ornate. This happens because asking a westerner to think of Japanese art as noisy requires them to step away from 130-decibel nightmare that is a lot of western art tradition.

Modernism and western web design

But, another factor also plays. Japanese art and design did not evolve parallel to Euro-American design in the 20th Century. Particularly, as pertains to web design, Japaense art and design never went through minimalism and modernism because those trends were stunted in Japan by the run-up to the Second World War.

In the western countries, the unquestioned artistic struggle was between modernism and all comers. Particularly, modernism had to fight off minimalism and postmodernism.

In western design circles, minimalism never figured much. And to the extent that it did, it was much more in the Zen calligraphy sense than in the sense of displaying a small, stray, frayed piece of rope (see the Vogel collection at the U.S. National Gallery to really get what the hell I'm talking about). In western design, especially post-war, the big shift was from cluttered, disorganized corporate art that had no real grounding in any artistic movement toward modernism.

The biggest sign post of modernism in western design was the rapid, wildfire emergence of the Helvetica font face in the 1960s. This is particularly important to modern web design because everything in web design in the year 2010 derives from what Helvetica did to the perception of what any effective piece of corporate communication should be and do. Helvetica is a perfectly neutral, functional font that commands normal and negative space equally well. It is firm and it projects confidence.

Present-day web design emerges in the late 1990s, which is when the movement back to modernism hits hard.

In general art, post-modernism reigned hard from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. Even in corporate art, you see a lot of anti-structural or post-structural designs that have the specific intent of usurping modernist design and the perceived capital enterprises these designs symbolize.

But, the grunge era in the early 1990s represented a point at which art caved in just became plain crap. Early web design (think 1994) arose from this mess. And as the internet became widely adopted over the next five years, the clear consensus bubbled up that someone needed to fix this crap.

What you see from 1999 to 2004 is the green sprouts of a 21st Century Modernist art movement. In web design, this is particularly pushed by web standards and CSS. You also see a rapid conversion from the dominance of Times fonts to ans-serif fonts.

Helvetica never quite made it to this side of the mountain. It's now been replaced in popularity in design circles by Verdana. And that's a very valid decision, because Helvetica is a font face that presents a lot of spacing challenges that the average web designer simply cannot be bothered with while trying to make his websites standards compliant.

The aesthetic choice of this age in western design is no question on the side of modernism and the post-Helvetica sans serif fonts.

What about Japan?

Well, the thing with Japanese art and design is that it never went through these periods.

When early modernist architecture was popping up all over Los Angeles in the 1920s and the Bauhaus school was emerging in Germany, the grand debate in Japanese design was between European traditional designs and Japanese traditional designs. The National Diet is a structure built in pure imitation of European capitol buildings. In Japanese architecture, you don't see a real wave of a hardcore American-style modernist structure hit until after 2000.

What this means to web design is that the Japanese never really had those public debates about things like "Is Helvetica evil?" and "Does grunge art do anything besides allow the untalented to hide in plain sight?"

These conversations, which were largely had at US advertising firms and European print houses, strongly shaped what we would now call Web 2.0. In the 1950s, the conversation was "Oh my gawd, makes these cluttered hideous pages go away!" In the 1970s, the conversation was "Anything but Helvetica." By the 1990s the conversation surrounding grunge and postmodernism had degenerated to the point that one can rightly say design, in general was broken.

Web design in the mid-1990s was also thoroughly broken. Or, more accurately, had not yet been assembled. Web design was trying to define itself away from the undefined, busted mess that was the 90s. This was aided because other types of graphic design were similarly broken and in need of repair. In Europe and America, the fix applied was to throw out the broken mess that led from Lou Reed album covers through Geocities and on to MySpace.

The most visible sign of the complete return and recoronation of modernism in the west is Facebook. The emergence of Facebook from 2007 to 2010 was largely an outright rejection, by mass society, of the entire goddamned mess. Facebook was the consequence of western civilization desperately needing to reboot design across the board.

If you ponder it for a second, Facebook vs MySpace was the final battle pitting postmodernism and poststructuralism (MySpace) against modernism and minimalism (Facebook). And at the end of the day, people don't care about personalization half as much as they care about just being able to read and interact with the interface. Facebook won on the long timeline (remember, Facebook was the presumed loser in 2007) because Modernism has an enduring capacity to win all these fights.

So, why not in Japan?

Japanese corporate design is largely stuck about where American corporate design was in the 1950s. Typefaces aren't legible and are prone to being highly variable on a single package. Color choices are gaudy. Clutter is everywhere. Social norms depicted on the packages range from traditional to downright mysogynistic.

You still see a lot more anime style and just plain 50s (US) style garbage in Japanese design than anything else. And like European and American graphic design going into the 1950s, very little of it is rooted in a strong philosophical basis.

If you look at Japanese architecture from the last ten years, modernism is clearly breaking on their shores. Architecture is where modernism really first went mainstream in the U.S. Thirty years later you see it blast its way through all of corporate art.

It's hard to see where that places the arrival of modernism in Japanese corporate art (and thereby, Japanese web design). It's out there. The real question is, how much will the average Japanese corporation look at its packaging and its website and say, "Wow, that's really disorganized and hideous. Let's straighten that up, now."

But, the thing that always seems weird about Japan is its capacity to export more than it imports.

It's easy to look at Japanese architecture and say, "Well, modernism is arriving." The problem is that modernism in Japanese architecture is a natural fit. A lot of modernists borrowed so heavily from traditional Japan that when they looked at early 20th Century Japanese buildings (of the non-pseudo-European variety), they didn't see anything that needed introduced. In fact, they largely saw something to be aspired to.

The consequence of this has been that Japanese design has integrated few of the great debates of western design circles from the 20th Century. And almost none of it has seeped out into Japanese corporate culture. Which means almost none of it has seeped into Japanese web design.

So, where will the cure for Japanese web design come from? If ever?

If Japanese web design ever finds a way to change, it will most likely be native. That is to say, rather than an emergence of modernism and the arrival of a Japanese version of Helvetica, you'll see something emerge out of Zen calligraphy with a bit of influence from European modernist architectural. Since the Japanese have never fought the modernism-grunge battle back and forth and back again, like Americans did from 1950 to 2010, they will need their own point of inception for their own movement. At this time, that just doesn't look like it's on the horizon.

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Did the July PageRank update come early?

Wednesday, June 30, 2010, 10:50 AM
Business by John (Article #270)

It sure looks like Google started updating PageRank Toolbar numbers around midnight last night. The update appears to be ongoing at the present time (10:44 am US Eastern time).

UPDATE

It's increasingly looking like this was a partial flush oft he PageRank Toolbar numbers caused by a change in the index upstream. Something related to all the tinkering coming from the Google Caffeine project.

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Servers handling "Pending Delete" .COM domains failing

Sunday, June 27, 2010, 3:55 PM
Business by John (Article #269)

Something is up with the servers handling the "Pending Delete" .COM domain names today. Whatever the cause is, the pending deletes didn't become available for purchase at their normal time, bwtween 11pm and 1:15pm U.S. Pacific time.

Even now, approaching 2pm Pacific, responses on domains made available are sporadic at best.

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Photoshop CS5, first impressions

Saturday, May 15, 2010, 10:31 PM
Graphic Design by John (Article #268)

I'm not the king of the earlier adopters. But, I fell head over heels for Adobe's lavish tech demo of Photoshop CS5 and made the leap.

Was it worth it? Overall, yeah.

But, the first day I was really pissed. Let's just be clear upfront about the #1 thing that's making people adopt CS5 so quickly: it's the beneficiary of a very good tech demo.

CS5, simply put, isn't as magical as the tech demo makes it look.

Take the content-aware fill, the part that still pisses me off. The tech demos for CS5 make the content-aware fill look like you can completely remove anything. And that Photoshop will figure it out by pure voodoo. In effect, the content-aware fill is supposed to be a near 100% replacement for the clone tool.

Not even close. after using CS5 for a week, my verdict on the content-aware fill is that it's a nice tool that will amazingly . . . when CS7 hits the market in 2014.

The content-aware fill takes way too many tries to get it right. And often the results, even when decent, look more like a poorly done clone tool effort. It's simply should not have been included in a finished product.

The magic selection tool is another tech demo meant to inspire awe. The first day I dealt with it, it was a bit disappointing. Again, the Adobe tech demos make this function look like pure voodoo. Instead, it tends to go off selecting half the damned image when all you want is to select the subject's arm.

The second day with the magic select tool was a lot better. I learned quickly that it needs to be trained a bit. Frankly, Adobe would do themselves a favor to buy out a machine learning company so I'm not retraining the damned tool every time I make a selection.

What I found is that you use the additive selection tool first. If it overshoots your target, shrug it off. Come back through with the subtractive selection tool, and fix it quickly. Keep adjusting the hits and misses until your selection is right.

There's a tweak tool that was heavily demoed. In theory, it's supposed to handle things like backgrounds showing through semi-transparent thing like hair. In practice, it's a complete waste. I saw better results from third-party plug-ins for PS6! And embarrassingly bad addition to an otherwise worthwhile tool. Another part of CS5 that had no business being shipped with a commercial product.

The pseudo-HDR tool was less pimped. Too bad. It's the one that works 100% as advertised. While not a 100% replacement for doing HDR the right way, it's good. It's about a 95% replacement for real HDR. Which, if you only have one image you want to HDR, is pretty handy.

The ringing from the pseudo HDR is obnoxious, but in truth the ringing from real HDR is obnoxious, too. The different with CS5 is you can turn the ringing off.

The 3-D effects tools were also heavily touted. Here I have to hedge my response a bit. I'm used to using 3D Studio Max and Brazil render engine. Nothing CS5 was going to deliver was going to impress me.

That said, I've seen better results from pre-alpha releases of open source projects with little participation. The 3-D tools suck. Plain and simple. For real 3-D, they're worthless. They have some value insofar as they provide the means to quickly deploy 3-D into Photoshop and work it. So, if you're doing text effects, the 3-D tools are serviceable. Probably worth shipping, but not worth getting excited about unless you're trying to avoid using a serious 3-D rendering package.

For as hard as all that sounds, I think CS5 was worth acquiring. Not big time worth it, but worth it.

Mind you, for most trades Photoshop hasn't added anything of real value since Photoshop 6. If your version of PS is getting everything done for you, CS5 is hardly a must buy. But, if you're laying out the cash to buy PS anyhow, CS5 won't leave you in that downgrade from Vista-to-XP type of bad spot.

Overall, the tools have the potential. As I said: I suspect a lot of this will look mind-bendingly awesome when CS7 debuts in the middle of the decade.

Recommendation? A soft buy.

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Google PageRank toolbar updates coming today

Saturday, April 3, 2010, 10:58 AM
Website Design by John (Article #267)

I was scanning the PageRanks of sites I own or admin, and I noticed a lot of new PR improvements and a couple dips. Most of the surprises were upside one or two points. Real big pops across a lot of sites.

Not sure what all went into it, but it's a pleasant surprise for an already gorgeous day.

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To Microsoft's credit

Tuesday, March 9, 2010, 12:26 AM
Thoughts by John (Article #266)

I was discussing a problem in Windows with someone online, and the conversation turned to the fact that the type of problem -- though not this particular manifestation -- stretched all the way back to Windows 3.0, the first usable desktop computer with multitasking.

So, for grins I looked on MS's support website for the fix. And sure enough, right there was an EXE waiting to be downloaded for Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11 for Workgroups.

Now, I understand that this is no longer an officially supported fix. But, it's still exceedingly hip of MS to have it out there. Especially for an OS that hasn't been since 1995. Last updates were issued in 2003.

Just so the Macophiles don't feel picked, you can find Apple updates on their site going back to to Mac OS 8. Last updates were issued in 1998.

I throw that out there as a weird observation, since I think folks don't take enough time to appreciate what a good job some of these companies do.

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Tracking expiring and dropping domain names

Monday, February 15, 2010, 1:29 PM
Website Design by John (Article #265)

This is my most recent big project: DropCatchSell.com, a site for tracking expired and dropped domain names with value.

This is the culmination of much of my recent research into PR, SERP and other ranking systems. The idea is pretty straight forward if you understand the domain name acquisition process.

The big problem with what is known in domaining as "drop catching" is the majority of expiring and dropping websites aren't worth the cost of registering them. The thing is, on any given day, between 250,000 and 400,000 domain names drop. And that's only counting the major US TLDs, such as .com, .net, .org, .info, etc.

The goal with DropCatchSell is to build a website that does a respectable of filtering out the garbage domains and leaving behind those with real value. Short domains (4 letters or less), two syllable medium domains, dictionary names, ones with established traffic, etc.

It's still very, very beta. I hope to keep it free, but a big part of the beta is deciding whether free is a workable business model.

Check it out. Use the contact form to let me know what you think.

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GoDaddy finally cleans up its checkout process

Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 5:20 PM
Business by John (Article #264)

GoDaddy has finally gone and done it. At long last, they've fixed a lot of what is wrong with their checkout process.

The #1 thing I now love is there is the option to permanently point all your future registrations toward your name servers -- long overdue, and good riddance to GoDaddy's fugly parking pages.

Overall, the process is quicker, with fewer nags. The last remaining nag, to renew your upcoming domains, can be seen as a feature. It doesn't bother me enough to be a black mark.

The only downside is that some checkouts with certain coupon codes seem to prohibit using PayPal. Sucks. But, again not bad enough to be a black mark.

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