Category: Misc

I am starting to really love +Quartz! Here is a news provider that is reporting on stuff I'm interested in, as a fantastic well-designed (responsive, #html5 ) Web site with innovative features such as infinite scrolling, links to their sources, provides easy to copy short-links to all their articles, comments and annotations on individual paragraphs… They are really pushing the Web platform as a for #journalism in an interesting direction. My wish list includes better support for off-line capabilities, push notifications on platforms that support them, more video, deeper social integration (see what people are saying on Twitter/etc.. right now about this article), better performance on mobile browsers and on the editorial side more in-depth analysis. #blogthis? Quartz is a digitally native news outlet for the new global economy.

I finally managed to put together a blog post on the +Telefonica Digital blog about last month's +Over the Air event.  #blogthis   #ota13 The ‘Over the Air’ event series feels more like a festival than a tech event.

Hello Google+ peeps! It's shameless self-promotion time, I'm afraid. I've put a panel submission into next year's South by Southwest #sxsw  panel picker and I would really appreciate your support in voting it up. Personally I think this panel is going to kick ass – and I don't use language like that lightly. We've got +Dave Shea (of CSS Zen Garden fame), +Andrew Betts (of FT labs) and +Dominique Hazael-Massieux (from W3C) lined up to explore the latest on the Web on mobile – responsive design, APIs, off-line operation and more. How is the Web closing the gap with native apps – what's the state of the art and where is it going? If you have a second, please log into the panel picker at the link below, register if you are not already registered, and vote my panel up. You will be doing me a favor, but more importantly you will be doing a favor for the future of the Web. Thanks! #blogthis   #mobileweb   Putting the Web Back Into the Web. This panel will focus on multi-device, responsive web, web technologies that bridge the divide between apps and web such as device and system APIs, advanced web browsers on devices and techniques that put webapps on a level playing field with native apps.

Another instalment of the video series I recorded with +Christian Heilmann on #FirefoxOS  – this time touching on developer tools, responsive design and some of the elements that developers need to worry about on mobile – e.g. touch events. (Also see +Peter Paul Koch‘s wonderful presentation on touch events from this year’s #Mobilism  conference. In fact, anyone interested in responsive design topics would do well to watch all the presentations from Mobilism – http://mobilism.nl/2013/coverage, especially the “Mobile Web Design Anti-Paterns” talk by +Dave Shea) #blogthis In the third instance of our Firefox OS – the platform HTML5 deserves video series (part one and part two have already been published here) …

Can We Stop the Tracking Already? I cannot believe this nonsense is still going on. I had to check my watch – yes indeed, it's now 2013, and we still don't have a viable do-not-track specification. This should have been one of the simplest pieces of work that W3C has ever engaged in. Instead it has been drawn out into an ever-deepening vortex of conflicting interests, back-stabbing and bad-faith behavior from which there seemingly is no escape. Do-not-track preferences are now built into all major browsers so many consumers might thing this is a solved issue – it's not, because nobody can agree what "do not track means." I say "nobody" but what I mean is that advertisers don't agree. Pretty much everyone else agrees – it means "do not track." Advertisers seem to think it should mean "go ahead and track" but "don't show me targeted ads so I don't feel like I'm being tracked." Some advertisers who have joined W3C and joined the Tracking Protection working group have done so with the explicit, cynical goal of torpedoing do-no-track. The question advertisers need to ask themselves is: what are they so afraid of? Surely, if Web users find advertising-supported sites and targeted context-aware advertising so useful, then they will be happy to have their Web surfing tracked for the purposes of targeting this advertising and providing these services. If users feel they are getting a fair shake for the information they are providing to advertisers, they should not then object to being tracked. Or is …

Wrangling Over ‘Do Not Track’ Read more »

This great article neatly skewers Apple’s claim that iMessages are encrypted “so no one but the sender and receiver can see ore read them.” This was  claim I as immediately sceptical about when it was made so it’s nice to have some expert opinion backing up that scepticism. http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/06/can-apple-read-your-imessages.html #crypto   #blogthis

Overall a very good program of talks this morning at +LeWeb London focusing on the "Sharing Economy." I think the idea of the sharing economy aligns well with the core values of the Web. But one thing no speaker has addressed yet is how to deal with "bad actors" in the context of the sharing economy. How can I participate in this sharing economy and avoid being phished, or spammed, or pwned? How can I participate in the sharing economy and also maintain my privacy? How can we stop airbnb becoming a micro-culture like eBay that is impenetrable and hostile to newcomers? How can we use the transparency of the Web to combat our own darker natures? #LeWeb #SharingEconomy #blogthis

One take-away from last week's Mobilism conference that I did not get to ruminate on during +Jeremy Keith's fine panel was just the bare fact that responsive design has arrived. Last year's Mobilism was full of pitches for responsive design and explanations of why responsive design was a good idea. This year's conference speakers mostly started from a base assumption: we are designing responsively. Now what? How do we do it? What best practices should we use? What anti-paterns exist? How does it apply to images, to animation, to touch, etc…? For those in the Web design community this may be old news, but I think it's notable that we've had that shift, from justification to implementation of responsive, in the last year. I think this is more evidence for what I've been saying for the past few months: the "Mobile Web" is no longer a thing. That might sound strange coming from someone who helped to develop the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices, but where we once said "mobile Web" we now need to be saying "responsive design" and we need to be thinking about a much wider range of devices and input / output modalities than simply mobile phones. (For example, gaming consoles, as +Anna Debenham pointed out in her Mobilism presentation.) Simultaneously we need to realize that the Web is a mobile medium – by some counts, a majority if Web usage is now happening from devices we are counting as "mobile." #blogthis   #mobilism  

I don't get how so many people can be so vehemently opposed to the QR code, and not only that, but that people somehow view the QR code as being a weapon of "marketing." In my mind, the QR code is about openness. You may not like the looks of it, but it is a "democratizing" technology. It's open – anyone can create one – and it can point to a URL, which is itself an open pointer to anywhere on the Web. In contrast, other similar mechanisms (e.g. NFC) are usually closed and proprietary in nature. It actually reminds me of the equally misguided negative reaction to the URL itself in the early days of the Web. Paging +Terence Eden. #blogthis We don’t want to take sides on this one; we want you to decide

Glad to see that this document I had worked on during my elected term on the TAG (with +Jeni Tennison, +Ashok Malhotra and +Larry Masinter) has been published. This document is trying to clarify some issues around Web publishing and linking that seem to keep cropping up in legal and policy discussions. In the process, it offers up some (hopefully) easy-to-understand definitions of pieces of Web technology. Although my proposed language on enshrining a "right to link" doesn't seem to have made it into the final draft, I think it's still a good piece of work. #blogthis Abstract. The Web borrows familiar concepts from physical media (e.g., the notion of a “page”) and overlays them on top of a networked infrastructure (the Internet) and a digital presentation medium (…