Posts Tagged ‘writing’

In Case of Design — Inject Critical Thinking

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Frida Jeppsson has just released her curated collection on critical discourse, In Case of Design—Inject Critical Thinking, featuring essay contributions by Max Bruinsma, Gareth Williams, Donna Loveday, Rory Dodd, Steven Heller, Rick Poynor, Michael Rock, Anna Gerber and Teal Triggs, Kate Andrews, and myself.

In Case of Design--Inject Critical Thinking

I just received my advance copy yesterday (took a while to go from Sweden to Texas), but the book is now available from Frida’s website.

The essays in the book examine critical discourse from several vantage points and in different contexts. As the editor, design critic and curator Frida Jeppsson puts it, “The book is as much an experiment as an excursion aiming to investigate what scenarios, results, and opportunities a new language and an illuminated and extended critical discourse can produce.” Having just received my copy, I have yet to consume the entire contents, but the parts I’ve read have been wonderful and, given the other contributors, the rest promises to be excellent.

Hats off to Frida for collecting thoughts on this important topic and presenting them so nicely. And thanks so much for including me among the contributors.

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Same Content, More Eyeballs

Monday, December 15th, 2008

Pitchforkmedia.com is beginning to publish their annual “The Year in Music”, best-of lists. Most years, this is a signal for me to blow my Christmas cash on another stack of CDs (nope, not all digital yet), but this year, I was also caught by a savvy bit of marketing that Pitchfork is playing out.

On their index page, they are heavily promoting lists like “The Best 100 Tracks of 2008”, but releasing each list in chunks of 50, with a new part being published each day this week. Instead of blowing all the knowledge in one go, Pitchfork opts for the slow reveal, creating more fervor from their readers, and simultaneously building a more profitable experience for themselves, as the repeat visits mean more eyeballs their ad space (which seems to be part of their profit model).

Something to think about for my “Top 100 Ways to Welcome Your New Insect Overloads” list.

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Fake Web Content

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

Do you know how to tell useless, fake articles (sorry, “posts”) on the Web from the actually substantive ones? I do; it’s easy. If the title starts with a number?i.e. “7 Ways to Improve Your Blog” or “20 of the Best Design Practices,” etc??it’s junk 999 times out of 1000.

Clear evidence aside, lately I’ve seen a few articles or posts that advise blog authors?and I use the term “authors” very loosely?that the way to get their post on Digg or some other fustercluck is to use numbers in their titles. So aside from the fact that nearly all of these posts have no valuable content, you may know that the author has no purpose in sharing it except to try and get search engine or aggregator visibility. All such “authors” are defining themselves according to a very low and regrettable standard.

The net result of all of this is that the Web is being choked by trashy, attention-gaming junk that is being offered for reasons other than informing one’s fellow enthusiasts and colleagues of anything notable or useful. What’s more, news/article aggregators have become time-wasting caricatures of what they’re supposed to be, and are now all but worthless.

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