I like this chap..

” The internet is only that wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press in a single connection. It’s only vital to the livelihood, social lives, health, civic engagement, education and leisure of hundreds of millions of people (and growing every day).

This trivial bit of kit is so unimportant that it’s only natural that we equip the companies that brought us Police Academy 11, Windows Vista, Milli Vanilli and Celebrity Dancing With the Stars with wire-cutters that allow them to disconnect anyone in the country on their own say-so, without proving a solitary act of wrongdoing. “

by Cory Doctorow, Tuesday 1 July 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/01/internet.copyright

Google stuff

Lots of new Google news  at Search Engine Land. And interesting stuff as RDF and micro formats start to get a look in with enhanced listings. There is also some interesting stuff on Google sitelinks that I’ve missed.

Read this

Just read it. A fantastic little item, written from the heart.

Accessibility to the Face

“Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.” -Jack Handey

http://www.northtemple.com/2009/03/24/accessibility-to-the-face

Useful tools

Our friends at PushOn, try their SEO tools: http://www.pushon.co.uk/seo-tools/.

And take a look at http://userfly.com/ for a free browser based usability testing tool, neat stuff. See a video http://vimeo.com/2451370.

Alkaline – 17 Windows browsers on your Mac.

Another great tool from our friends (ex-MMU) at Litmus. Besides their excellent online browser checking service they now offer Alkaline for us Mac users at http://litmusapp.com/alkaline/

Common Craft – Explanations In Plain English

These guys are great. Lots of short videos explaining things like RSS and wikis in plain english. See their site at http://www.commoncraft.com/

Pause for thought

Some summer reading as I re-evaluate the content of the web design units. Leslie Jensen-Inman is Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where she teaches a mix of art, design, business, and technology. For her Masters she has produced an interesting read called Perspectives on web education: What to teach the next generation of web professionals. It has the thoughts of many web professionals and makes a series of recommendations. Take a look at: http://teachtheweb.com/monograph.php.

It will be interesting to see how much matches up with our own thoughts and methods. When we have guest speakers from the ‘real world’ we always like to tick off anything that we cover, that the professinals are emphasising in their presentation. We are also keen to pick up on new ideas and directions. This document may help in the same way. Thank you Leslie.

Pitching for business

We had Jenni Allen in from The Reading Room to talk about pitching to clients prior to final year students pitching for business as their last assignment, grouped as fictitious web design companies. It just happens that .Net has published an article on the same this month: http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/latest-issue/issue-187.

Andy Clarke

Early this year I was lucky enough to spend the day at an Andy Clarke  (http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/) seminar – see http://forabeautifulweb.com/classes. Andy told us about some great colour and typography sites:

These two are wonderful starting places for discovering a colour palette.

http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/

http://www.colorhunter.com/

These three are typography crazy.

http://ilovetypography.com/ – a blog

http://www.webtypography.net/ – a book

http://www.typechart.com/ – a tool

Guest speaker

We had the excellent Karen Loasby (http://www.iaplay.com/) ex- BBC IA, currently RNIB IA as a guest speaker last week. Karen did a fantastic talk about the role of the IA and the last BBC re-design regarding the information architecture. Great stuff. Two bloggs Karen mentioned were:

http://blockslabpillar.com/

http://www.currybet.net/

A positive point (after the very negative one that most students of the unit, and those invited did not attend) was some third year students said it helped pull into focus what they had been studying with us over the past three years.