The entertaining rooms meant to make us social actually foster isolation
Over 1 million Webmentions can’t be wrong. Join the next revolution in web communication. Add the Webmentions standard to your website to solve the biggest communications problem on today’s internet and add rich context to your content.
Editor’s note: This is a copy of an article that was originally published on A List Apart.
Over 1 million Webmentions will have been sent across the internet since the specification was made a full Recommendation by the W3C—the standards body that guides the direction of the web—in early January 2017. That number is rising rapidly, and in the last few weeks I’ve seen a growing volume of chatter on social media and the blogosphere about these new “mentions” and the people implementing them.
So what are Webmentions and why should we care?
While the technical specification published by the W3C may seem incomprehensible to most, it’s actually a straightforward and extremely useful concept with a relatively simple implementation. Webmentions help to break down some of the artificial walls being built within the internet and so help create a more open and decentralized web. There is also an expanding list of major web platforms already supporting Webmentions either natively or with easy-to-use plugins (more on this later).
Put simply, Webmention is a (now) standardized protocol that enables one website address (URL) to notify another website address that the former contains a reference to the latter. It also allows the latter to verify the authenticity of the reference and include its own corresponding reference in a reciprocal way. In order to understand what a big step forward this is, a little history is needed.
The rise of @mentions
By now most people are familiar with the ubiquitous use of the “@” symbol in front of a username, which originated on Twitter and became known as @mentions and @replies (read “at mentions” and “at replies”). For the vast majority, this is the way that one user communicates with other users on the platform, and over the past decade these @mentions, with their corresponding notification to the receiver, have become a relatively standard way of communicating on the internet.
I been smashed the idea of that album even existing. I got joints to roll @kanyewest
Many other services also use this type of internal notification to indicate to other users that they have been referenced directly or tagged in a post or photograph. Facebook allows it, so does Instagram. Google+ has a variant that uses + instead of @, and even the long-form article platform Medium, whose founder Ev Williams also co-founded Twitter, quickly joined the @mentions party.
The biggest communications problem on the internet
If you use Twitter, your friend Alice only uses Facebook, your friend Bob only uses his blog on WordPress, and your pal Chuck is over on Medium, it’s impossible for any one of you to @mention another. You’re all on different and competing platforms, none of which interoperate to send these mentions or notifications of them. The only way to communicate in this way is if you all join the same social media platforms, resulting in the average person being signed up to multiple services just to stay in touch with all their friends and acquaintances.
Given the issues of privacy and identity protection, different use cases, the burden of additional usernames and passwords, and the time involved, many people don’t want to do this. Possibly worst of all, your personal identity on the internet can end up fragmented like a Horcrux across multiple websites over which you have little, if any, control.
Imagine if AT&T customers could only speak to other AT&T customers and needed a separate phone, account, and phone number to speak to friends and family on Verizon. And still another to talk to friends on Sprint or T-Mobile. The massive benefit of the telephone system is that if you have a telephone and service (from any one of hundreds or even thousands of providers worldwide), you can potentially reach anyone else using the network. Surely, with a basic architecture based on simple standards, links, and interconnections, the same should apply to the internet?
The solution? Enter Webmentions!
As mentioned earlier, Webmentions allow notifications between web addresses. If both sites are set up to send and receive them, the system works like this:
Alice has a website where she writes an article about her rocket engine hobby.
Bob has his own website where he writes a reply to Alice’s article. Within his reply, Bob includes the permalink URL of Alice’s article.
When Bob publishes his reply, his publishing software automatically notifies Alice’s server that her post has been linked to by the URL of Bob’s reply.
Alice’s publishing software verifies that Bob’s post actually contains a link to her post and then (optionally) includes information about Bob’s post on her site; for example, displaying it as a comment.
A Webmention is simply an @mention that works from one website to another!
If she chooses, Alice can include the full text of Bob’s reply—along with his name, photo, and his article’s URL (presuming he’s made these available)—as a comment on her original post. Any new readers of Alice’s article can then see Bob’s reply underneath it. Each can carry on a full conversation from their own websites and in both cases display (if they wish) the full context and content.
Using Webmentions, both sides can carry on a conversation where each is able to own a copy of the content and provide richer context.
User behaviors with Webmentions are a little different than they are with @mentions on Twitter and the like in that they work between websites in addition to within a particular website. They enable authors (of both the original content and the responses) to own the content, allowing them to keep a record on the web page where it originated, whether that’s a website they own or the third-party platform from which they chose to send it.
Interaction examples with Webmention
Webmentions certainly aren’t limited to creating or displaying “traditional” comments or replies. With the use of simple semantic microformats classes and a variety of parsers written in numerous languages, one can explicitly post bookmarks, likes, favorites, RSVPs, check-ins, listens, follows, reads, reviews, issues, edits, and even purchases. The result? Richer connections and interactions with other content on the web and a genuine two-way conversation instead of a mass of unidirectional links. We’ll take a look at some examples, but you can find more on the IndieWeb wiki page for Webmention alongside some other useful resources.
Marginalia
With Webmention support, one could architect a site to allow inline marginalia and highlighting similar to Medium.com’s relatively well-known functionality. With the clever use of URL fragments, which are well supported in major browsers, there are already examples of people who use Webmentions to display word-, sentence-, or paragraph-level marginalia on their sites. After all, aren’t inline annotations just a more targeted version of comments?
An inline annotation on the text “Hey Ev, what about mentions?” in which Medium began to roll out their @mention functionality.
Reads
As another example, and something that could profoundly impact the online news business, I might post a link on my website indicating I’ve read a particular article on, say, The New York Times. My site sends a “read” Webmention to the article, where a facepile or counter showing the number of read Webmentions received could be implemented. Because of the simplified two-way link between the two web pages, there is now auditable proof of interaction with the content. This could similarly work with microinteractions such as likes, favorites, bookmarks, and reposts, resulting in a clearer representation of the particular types of interaction a piece of content has received. Compared to an array of nebulous social media mini-badges that provide only basic counters, this is a potentially more valuable indicator of a post’s popularity, reach, and ultimate impact.
Listens
Building on the idea of using reads, one could extend Webmentions to the podcasting or online music sectors. Many platforms are reasonably good at providing download numbers for podcasts, but it is far more difficult to track the number of actual listens. This can have a profound effect on the advertising market that supports many podcasts. People can post about what they’re actively listening to (either on their personal websites or via podcast apps that could report the percentage of the episode listened to) and send “listen” Webmentions to pages for podcasts or other audio content. These could then be aggregated for demographics on the back end or even shown on the particular episode’s page as social proof of the podcast’s popularity.
For additional fun, podcasters or musicians might use Webmentions in conjunction with media fragments and audio or video content to add timecode-specific, inline comments to audio/video players to create an open standards version of SoundCloud-like annotations and commenting.
SoundCloud allows users to insert inline comments that dovetail with specific portions of audio.
Reviews
Websites selling products or services could also accept review-based Webmentions that include star-based ratings scales as well as written comments with photos, audio, or even video. Because Webmentions are a two-way protocol, the reverse link to the original provides an auditable path to the reviewer and the opportunity to assess how trustworthy their review may be. Of course, third-party trusted sites might also accept these reviews, so that the receiving sites can’t easily cherry-pick only positive reviews for display. And because the Webmention specification includes the functionality for editing or deletion, the original author has the option to update or remove their reviews at any time.
Getting started with Webmentions
Extant platforms with support
While the specification has only recently become a broad recommendation for use on the internet, there are already an actively growing number of content management systems (CMSs) and platforms that support Webmentions, either natively or with plugins. The simplest option, requiring almost no work, is a relatively new and excellent social media service called Micro.blog, which handles Webmentions out of the box. CMSs like Known and Perch also have Webmention functionality built in. Download and set up the open source software and you’re ready to go.
If you’re working with WordPress, there’s a simple Webmention plugin that will allow you to begin using Webmentions—just download and activate it. (For additional functionality when displaying Webmentions, there’s also the recommended Semantic Linkbacks plugin.) Other CMSs like Drupal, ProcessWire, Elgg, Nucleus CMS, Craft, Django, and Kirby also have plugins that support the standard. A wide variety of static site generators, like Hugo and Jekyll, have solutions for Webmention technology as well. More are certainly coming.
A weak form of Webmention support can be bootstrapped for Tumblr, WordPress.com, Blogger, and Medium with help from the free Bridgy service, but the user interface and display would obviously be better if they were supported fully and natively.
As a last resort, if you’re using Tumblr, WordPress.com, Wix, Squarespace, Ghost, Joomla, Magento, or any of the other systems without Webmention, file tickets asking them to support the standard. It only takes a few days of work for a reasonably experienced developer to build support, and it substantially improves the value of the platform for its users. It also makes them first-class decentralized internet citizens.
Webmentions for developers
If you’re a developer or a company able to hire a developer, it is relatively straightforward to build Webmentions into your CMS or project, even potentially open-sourcing the solution as a plugin for others. For anyone familiar with the old specifications for pingback or trackback, you can think of Webmentions as a major iteration of those systems, but with easier implementation and testing, improved performance and display capabilities, and decreased spam vulnerabilities. Because the specification supports editing and deleting Webmentions, it provides individuals with more direct control of their data, which is important in light of new laws like GDPR.
In addition to reading the specification, as mentioned previously, there are multiple open source implementations already written in a variety of languages that you can use directly, or as examples. There are also a test suite and pre-built services like Webmention.io, Telegraph, mention-tech, and webmention.herokuapp.com that can be quickly leveraged.
Maybe your company allows employees to spend 20% of their time on non-specific projects, as Google does. If so, I’d encourage you to take the opportunity to fbuild Webmentions support for one or more platforms—let’s spread the love and democratize communication on the web as fast as we can!
And if you already have a major social platform but don’t want to completely open up to sending and receiving Webmentions, consider using Webmention functionality as a simple post API. I could easily see services like Twitter, Mastodon, or Google+ supporting the receiving of Webmentions, combined with a simple parsing mechanism to allow Webmention senders to publish syndicated content on their platform. There are already several services like IndieNews, with Hacker News-like functionality, that allow posting to them via Webmention.
If you have problems or questions, I’d recommend joining the IndieWeb chat room online via IRC, web interface, Slack, or Matrix to gain access to further hints, pointers, and resources for implementing a particular Webmention solution.
The expansion of Webmentions
The big question many will now have is Will the traditional social media walled gardens like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the like support the Webmention specification?
At present, they don’t, and many may never do so. After all, locking you into their services is enabling them to leverage your content and your interactions to generate income. However, I suspect that if one of the major social platforms enabled sending/receiving Webmentions, it would dramatically disrupt the entire social space.
In the meantime, if your site already has Webmentions enabled, then congratulations on joining the next revolution in web communication! Just make sure you advertise the fact by using a button or badge. You can download a copy here.
About the Author
Chris Aldrich is developer and researcher who lives in Los Angeles. When not working on the abstract mathematics of digital communication, he tinkers on the web. An active member of the IndieWeb community, he enjoys replacing his dependency on social silos with his website which doubles as his commonplace book.
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Summary: With the GDPR regulations coming into effect in Europe on May 25th, privacy seems to be on everyone’s mind. This week, we tackle what webmentions are, using them for backfeed, and the privacy implications.
I'm the Programme Leader for BA (Hons) Games Design & Art and Senior Teaching Fellow at Winchester School of Art (WSA). I sometimes get the chance to make Apps, Web stuff and work as UX and UI designer, developer and consultant.
I run the research-led teaching programme BA (Hons) Games Design & Art and am responsable for the programme structure, ethos, recruitment and attainment of all students. I teach across a wide range of games subject areas in all years as well but my main teaching revolves around year 3 and the development of final projects which can be viewed here http://winchester.games. I keenly teach both the academic theory and the practical application.
"Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting."
— Ivan Illich
The area I mainly research is connected technology and edutech. I am investigating how to design tools for design education and the digtial medium via connected devices. My focus is on ethical, delightful design practice that embraces the studio culture. I am keen on open education, open practice and co-ops. This research is currently within the structure of a Webscience PhD, you can keep up to date at researchnot.es.
Originally intended to showcase a privacy-centred implementation of emerging social web technologies – with the aim to present a solution not initially motivated by legal requirements, but as an example of privacy-aware interaction design – my “social backfeed” design process unveiled intricate challenges for Indieweb sites, both for privacy in general and legal compliance in particular.
Again Sebastian Greger has written up a well-thought-out and nuanced approach to design. Here he discusses privacy and GDPR with a wealth of research and direct personal experience in these areas. He’s definitely written something interesting which I hope sparks the beginning of a broader conversation and evaluation of our ethics.
There’s so much to think about and process here, that I’ll have to re-read and think more specifically about all the details. I hope to come back to this later to mark it up and annotate it further.
I’ve read relatively deeply about a variety of privacy issues as well as the weaponization of data and its improper use by governments and businesses to unduly influence people. For those who are unaware of this movement over the recent past, I would highly recommend Cathy O’Neil’s text Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, which provides an excellent overview with a variety of examples about how the misuse of data can be devastating not just to individuals who are broadly unaware of it, but entire segments of society.
There is a lot of publicly available data we reveal via social media and much of it one might flippantly consider “data exhaust” which has little, if any inherent value by itself. Unfortunately when used in aggregate, it can reveal striking things about us which we may either not be aware of ourselves or which we wouldn’t want to be openly known.
My brief thought here is that much like the transition from the use of smaller arms and handguns, which can kill people in relatively small numbers, to weapons like machine guns on up to nuclear weapons, which have the ability to quickly murder hundreds to millions at a time, we will have to modify some of our social norms the way we’ve modified our “war” norms over the past century. We’ll need to modify our personal social contracts so that people can still interact with each other on a direct basis without fear of larger corporations, governments, or institutions aggregating our data, processing it, and then using it against us in ways which unduly benefit them and tremendously disadvantage us as individuals, groups, or even at the level of entire societies.
In my mind, we need to protect the social glue that holds society together and improves our lives while not allowing the mass destruction of the fabric of society by large groups based on their ability to aggregate, process, and use our own data against us.
Thank you Sebastian for kicking off a broader conversation!
Disclaimer: I’m aware that in posting this to my own site that it will trigger a tacit webmention which will ping Sebastian Greger’s website. I give him permission to display any and all data he chooses from the originating web page in perpetuity, or until such time as I send a webmention either modifying or deleting the content of the originating page. I say this all with some jest, while I am really relying on the past twenty years of general social norms built up on the internet and in general society as well as the current practices of the IndieWeb movement to govern what he does with this content.
Snoozing, nudging, hover actions, and a new sidebar — it’s a mobile app on the web!
I’ve been using gmail for about 2 years now and am curious to see what this delivers though I do have to admit I’m itching to going back to my old methods of owning may own email and data.
Adds support for responding to and interacting with other sites using the standards developed by the Indieweb Community
For ease-of-use as well as to help designers, theme builders, and maybe even Gen2 it might be useful to have a “master template” for views which includes all of the output of the data fields within Post Kinds in a single view.
If done in a relatively modular fashion with good commenting, perhaps even Gen2 folks could more easily delete or move pieces within such a master template to mash up various pieces to get what they’d like to display. Including alternate versions for displaying things could be useful as well (eg: raw display of things like start time and end time as well as a separate calculated duration time based on these two.)
But type designers were more like apple growers cultivating unique fruit without protective fences; whenever someone stole them, they could argue that apples were the result of the sun and rain and God’s own fair intervention.
Highlight (yellow) – 16. Pirates and Clones > Page 227
Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 morning
… and font-editing software such as Fontographer.
Highlight (yellow) – 16. Pirates and Clones > Page 228
Might be worth playing around with this program? Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 morning
A recent example concerned Segoe, created by Monotype and licensed to Microsoft, which bears a close relationship to Frutiger. Their common usage is different (Segoe for screen display at small sizes, Frutiger for signage), …
Highlight (yellow) – 16. Pirates and Clones > Page 229
Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 morning
Chapter 17: The Clamour from the Past
There are hundreds of small presses in the Uk, Europe and the United States. One of the newest is White’s Books, which in the spring of 2010 had just eight titles in its list, …
Highlight (yellow) – 17. The Clamour from the Past > Page 246
I’m curious to look at some of these. Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 morning
Your choice may often come down to “Has it got a small caps italic?” So few of them do.
Highlight (yellow) – 17. The Clamour from the Past > Page 250
Ha! I have in fact actually made this very decision before. Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 morning
There is another rare feature that places his [White’s] books among the remnants of a type museum–the setting of a catchword at the bottom of the right-hand page.
Highlight (yellow) – 17. The Clamour from the Past > Page 250
I did always appreciate this vestige of publishing. Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 morning
Sabon
Sabon was developed in the early 1960s for a group of German printers who were grumbling about the lack of a ‘harmonized’ or uniform font that would look the same whether set by hand or on a Monotype or Linotype machine. They were quite specific about the sort of font that might fit the bill, rejecting the modern and fashionable in favour of solid sixteenth-century tradition–something modeled on Garamond and Granjon. They also wanted the new font to be five percent narrower than their existing Monotype Garamond, in order to save space and money.
Highlight (yellow) – Sabon > Page 251
Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 morning
Chapter 18: Breaking the Rules
Here are the rules as [Paul] Felton considers God intended them:
Thou shalt not apply more than three typefaces in a document.
Thou shalt lay headlines large and at the top of the page.
Thou shalt employ no other type size than 8pt to 10pt for body copy.
Remember that a typeface that is not legible is not truly a typeface.
Honour thy kerning, so that white space becomes visually equalized between characters.
Thou shalt lay stress discreetly upon elements within text.
Thou shalt not use only capitals when setting vast body copy.
Thou shalt always align letters and words on a baseline.
Thou shalt use flush-left, ragged-right type alignment.
Thou shalt not make lines too short or too long.
Highlight (yellow) – 18. Breaking the Rules > Page 255-256
Quick synopsis of Felton’s book The Ten Commandments of Typography / Type Heresy Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 morning
Or this observation on digital type from the design critic Paul Hayden Duensing: ‘Digitizing [the seventeenth-century typeface] Janson is like playing Bach on synthesizer.’
Highlight (yellow) – 18. Breaking the Rules > Page 258
Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 morning
… type was like painting and architecture: an elitism prevailed, and what you produced was only half the story, and what you said about it counted just as much.
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Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 morning
But he [Sebastian Carter] also championed the not-such-a-great-job, the pieces of design and printing that didn’t turn out to be beautiful or clear, merely interesting. He illustrated his talk with some items that were ‘pretty cruddy’, and suggested that these too had a place in our world. ‘I would not want to live in a world of exclusively good design at the bus-ticket level,’ he said.
Highlight (yellow) – 18. Breaking the Rules > Page 261
delivered mid-October 2004 Beatrice Warde Memorial Lecture at the St. Bride Institute Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 morning
Thus armed, ‘the designers of tomorrow will not look back; we give them the chance to fail abjectly and completely; they’re all in the typographic gutter and some of them are looking at their scars.’ The result, of course, would bring forth more failure, but also types of originality and brilliance.
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This sounds to me like statistical mechanics at work in design. Many will be in the median, some will be three signma out and either be truly great or out of the game altogether. The question is how to encourage more at the higher end, knowing that evolution is a very strong selector. In fact what does the distribution over a few generations look like with evolution in play? How strong is it? Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 morning
Peace
Highlight (gray) – 18. Breaking the Rules > Page 265
Why wasn’t this used in it’s actual face like the other examples? Was it not available? Or too expensive for one word? Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 morning
‘Where is the language of protest now?’ he asks. ‘We have been led to believe that culture was only there as a financial opportunity.’
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Quote from Neville Brody Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 morning
The key, Brody said, in a strange echo of Morison, was ‘to change a newspaper entirely, but to make sure no one noticed. […] When we first showed it to focus groups they didn’t notice it had changed, but when we told them it had changed, they hated it.’
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Sounds like America’s racial culture in the last 60 years. The question is did they hate it because they’d been lied to and it was a psychological effect after-the-fact when they obviously otherwise didn’t know? Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 morning
Buffalo and Popaganda
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again, no exemplars of these faces Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 morning
The Interrobang
the @ […] may be almost as old as the ampersand. It had been associated with trade for many centuries, known as amphora or jar, a unit of measurement. Most countries have their own term for it, often linked to food (in Hebrew it is shtrudl, meaning strudel, in Czech it is zavinac or rollmop herring) or to cute animals (Affenschwanz or monkey’s tail in German, snabel-a, meaning “the letter a, with a trunk,” in Danish, sobaka or dog in Russian), or to both (escargot in French).
Highlight (yellow) – Interrobang > Page 269
Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 evening
Chapter 19: The Serif of Liverpool
… and we were sucha funny family, a little bit Alan Bennett.
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Who is Bennett? Curious cultural reference that doesn’t play in the US… Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 evening
Chapter 20: Fox, Gloves
Rather than ten letters of each new typeface showing in Handgloves and the rest of the alphabet shown beneath it, each font now comes with words unique to its character, style and possible use.
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Kind of similar to the quirkiness of paint chip color names, somewhat useful, but meant to help sales too… Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 evening
Coles introduced me to Chris Hamamoto, who had a long list of Handgloves alternatives on his computer. Anyone in the office could add to it,
butthere were certain guidelines:
The key letters, in order of importance, are: g, a, s, e. Then there is: l, o, I. And of lesser importance but still helpful: d (or b), h, m (or n), u, v.
Verbs or generic nouns are preferable because they don’t describe the font (like adjectives) or confuse the sample word with a font name (like proper nouns).
Avoid tandem repeating letters unless showing off alternatives.
Use one word, as spaces can get too large and distracting at display sizes.
Highlight (yellow) – 19. The Serif of Liverpool > Page 293
This could actually be a rather interesting information theory problem. Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 evening
Chapter 21: The Worst Fonts in the World
‘Real men don’t set Souvenir,’ wrote the type scholar Frank Romano in the early 1990’s, […] ‘Souvenir is a font fatale … We could send Souvenir to Mars, but there are international treaties on pollution in outer space … remember, friends don’t let friends set Souvenir,’
Highlight (yellow) – 21. The Worst Fonts in the World > Page 301-302
Souvenir bold evokes 1970’s porn and Souvenir Light evokes the Love Story movie poster, romance novels, and maybe the poster for Flowers in the Attic for me. Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 evening
Chapter 22: Just My Type
… you can fire up one of a number of software programs — TypeTool, FontLab Studio and Fontographer are the most popular — and begin your quest.
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I want to look at how these work. Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 evening
He [Mathew Carter] replied, ‘Some aspects get easier. But if you’re doing a good job you should feel that it gets harder. If you think it’s getting easier, you ought to look out. I think it means you’re getting lazy.’
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Carter on whether computers have made the life of a type designer any easier. Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 evening
In 1968 the influential graphic design review The Penrose Annual asked exactly the same things: ‘Aren’t we done yet? Why do we need all these new fonts such as … Helvetica?’
The answer, than and now, is the same. Because the world and its contents are continually changing. We need to express ourselves in new ways.
Highlight (yellow) – 22. Just My Type > Page 322
Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 evening
‘There are only thirty-two notes on a tenor saxophone, and surely to god they’ve all been played by now.’
Highlight (yellow) – 22. Just My Type > Page 322-323
Matthew Carter on Why New Typefaces? Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 evening
… there is a lavish app called TypeDrawing, which takes even the plainest fonts to exciting new heights; it may be the tool that teaches children about type–the modern version of the John Bull printing kit.
Highlight (yellow) – 22. Just My Type > Page 323-324
Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 evening
…a set of Type Trumps–the designer’s version of the kids’ card game, with each font card rated for legibility, weight and special power.
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an interesting set of “trading cards” Added on Sunday, December 31, 2017 evening
Guide to highlight colors
Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word Green–Reference to read Blue–Interesting Quote Gray–Typography Problem Red–Example to work through
"We wanted you to be able to take the bike and go with how the city moves."
Teague was enlisted to design a new kind of bike by Oregon Manifest, a non-profit dedicated to making the world think differently about bikes. Its Bike Design Project gave firms in five cities the opportunity to build a bike made with their city in mind; the public then voted on the winner, which will enter a limited production run from Fuji Bikes. The New York City bike had a USB phone charger built in; The Evo, from San Francisco, was all about modular storage. Chicago's Blackline bike was a rugged pothole-conquerer of a bike, and Portland's PDX came with an app to personalize the ride just for you. For every different city, a different bike.
But the voters picked Seattle. They picked Denny, the bike Jackson and the team at Teague designed with Sizemore Bicycles, a custom-bike maker in the city.
A really interesting and well-executed portfolio site, utterly let down by the tone of this demeaning and insulting piece of copy:
WARNING: Do not proceed if you suffer from vertigo or if you find experimental interfaces offensive.
(Pssst: copy is also interface.)
In September, the first reports of Samsung Galaxy Note 7 batteries
exploding hit social media. At first, Samsung identified the issue as one
relating to the lithium polymer battery manufacturing process by Samsung
SDI, where too much tension was used in manufacturing, and offered to
repair affected phones. But several weeks later, some of the batteries in
those replacement units also exploded once they were in the hands of
customers -- causing Samsung to make the bold decision to not only recall
everything, but to cancel the entire product line.
This is every battery engineer’s nightmare. As hardware engineers
ourselves, Sam and I followed the story closely. If it was only a battery
part issue and could have been salvaged by a re-spin of the battery, why
cancel the product line and cede several quarters of revenue to
competitors? We believe that there was more in play: that there was a
fundamental problem with the design of the phone itself.
Devon Zuegel (Twitter)
Huffduff this Episode
Sebastian Greger (sebastiangreger.net)
