links for 2011-07-20

Daniel Finkelstein with a rather more cogent argument about the role of the BBC in the media landscape than Melanie's "Shriek! Horror! It is full of lefties and homos!" the other day. I think a point he misses perhaps though is how much of the TV and internet news agenda is still driven by the news rhythm and interests of our national newspapers.

"This morning, James Breckenridge discovered a loophole within Google’s Webmaster Tools that allowed anyone to remove any site from Google." - ouch!

"In the world of social media, it can feel bizarre that potent evidence of grieving from one friend is followed so quickly by pictures of oven-fresh cookies from another. But Facebook is generated by algorithms without feelings. It's not a narrative: The breast cancer went into remission, but the stories of the radiation treatment continue; the lost children remain as photos, woven into the threads of hundreds of lives. The details of everyday life begin to fill in around those threads. The tide brings in status updates; the tide takes them out."

"Over the past couple of days, I have been working on an initial concept/prototype for a new, interesting website. As I normally like to do whenever I am tackling a new project, I started by opening up a notebook and making a few really simple layout sketches for how I initially thought the page should be laid out (at this stage, I am just working the layout for a single type of page, with others following later). After discussing these initial concepts with members of the team I am working with, I very logically moved on to the creating more fully realized wireframes. For me, this meant printing of some grids and using a pen to draw and label content boxes."

"Recently, I have been in a few meetings where we are working on developing a web site. In these meetings, it has been suggested that we skip the wireframe stage and roll right into what the site is going to look like, the design. This kind of thinking stemmed from the notion that the client would not understand what wireframes are and that jumping into design would get us one step closer to launch. This suggestion is a bad one." *shudders*

Matthew Ingram on the Aaron Swartz allegations

Design, typography and space adventure all in one neat little package [via Johanna Kollmann]