The VCSO team did a great interview with designer and illustrator Kyle Steed about his recent trip to Israel. I love Kyle’s view that what makes VSCO Cam great is all the ways it’s decidedly not Instagram:

It’s like this, you can’t just slap a b&w filter on a crappy photograph and suddenly it’s Ansel Adams, that’s foolish thinking. But this is where the majority lives I believe, in this make believe world that if they add enough filters and effects to their photo, then they’ll make the “pop” page. Note: Please don’t get me started on the popular page.

And yet another reason why I love the VSCO Grid, there are no likes, comments or other superfluous information that only adds hot air to a photographers headspace. Jerry Maguire said it best: “Fewer clients. Less money.” which could be translated in this case as: “Fewer followers. Less comments.”

Khoi Vinh wrote a great essay exploring What Streaming Music Can Be. He starts by describing some of the things that made buying CDs and albums a meaningful experience:

This is all trivia, to be sure, but it’s the kind of stuff that used to be such a meaningful part of owning music — and that makes one a fan for life. Having a record in your collection meant that you could spend time poring over its liner notes: familiarizing yourself with the names of musicians, producers, engineers, and managers; memorizing lyrics; and studying photos of musicians’ faces, stances and attire. These were the intangible qualities that made music more than just a service, but something to be collected.

But Khoi doesn’t just want streaming music services like Spotify and Rdio to copy the days of physical liner notes. Instead, he makes some suggestions on how these services can use metadata in fascinating ways to add meaning to digital music.

I’ve been a happy Spotify customer for a few months now, but everything Khoi says in his post makes sense to me. I’ve discovered some great music — and some great albums — but I tend to listen to those albums a lot less than when I used to buy CDs. The turnover is just too fast — there’s always something new to discover. And I’m hungry for it, incapable of resisting the lure of the next great song.

Apart from the missing metadata, there is something else that bugs me about streaming services (and digital music in general). Janko Jovanovic discusses this in the context of eBooks in his post Digital and physical, but it’s just as applicable to digital music:

When I buy a physical book, it starts to live a life of its own. After reading it for days or weeks, the book changes. It’s not brand new anymore. Edges of papers lose their sharpness. The cover becomes slightly bent and you can tell it was read just by looking at it. When I put a book on a shelf it becomes a part of the space I live in and it continues to change over time. This transience and decay of things around me remind me that I should use every moment of my life since I will go through the same lifecycle as that book. […]

All digital goods, be it ebooks, software, documents or images give me a sense of permanency and immutability. They are sterile. And that sterility prevents me from getting in touch with transience and gives me a sense of timelessness. Which is just an illusion.

I’m not going to end my Spotify subscription, but I do miss glancing over my CDs, observing the wear and tear of albums that have gone through so much with me. Those CD covers become more than the music they contain. They become reminders of a life well lived. And I do fear that I’m losing that now that I mainly listen to my (admittedly awesome) Spotify playlists.

Kontra explores a particularly egregious style of “content marketing”-style advertising on CNN’s website in his post “You Might Also Like”. He concludes:

Will these advertorial deceptions and misdirections move from the ad wells around the periphery of the page into the news delivery itself? Will there be product placements within news sentences? What follows that? Is the “mainstream media” management about to capitulate on long-held principles because it’s unable or unwilling to pursue any other strategy but the race to the bottom of the advertising barrel? Is there anything more precious than credibility to a news organization? If not, why is Time Inc. poisoning its own well so nonchalantly?

Contrast CNN’s approach with The Information, an online-only publication that just launched with a price tag of $400/year. Most people believe it won’t work, but I think Hunter Walk makes a good point in $400 for The Information Is About What’s Missing, Not What’s There:

For me the value in The Information is not solely in what they’re providing but what they’re leaving out. The ~two articles a day are both interesting. Because they’re not playing a page views game, they don’t need to overload me with 25+ posts every 24 hrs. The site is spartan because they don’t need to worry about IAB units. A small number of writers building their beats give me the chance to see each journalist’s style distinctly, not settle into some random byline slot machine of varying quality.

It’s sad that we have to pay not just to have a distraction-free reading environment, but also to reduce the amount of information we get to something more manageable (and focused on quality over quantity). But that appears to be the new world of publishing.

Robert McGinley Myers wrote a good post called Misunderstood or Double-edged? about the new Apple holiday ad. He starts off with familiar arguments about faces stuck in phones and blah blah blah — but wait, don’t roll your eyes because of yet another “technology is bad” post. It doesn’t end like you think it will:

That screen is not going away anytime soon, but we don’t have to be passive viewers of it, merely consuming and feeling vaguely guilty about what we consume from it. There’s immense creative power behind the screen. Instead of worrying about it, lamenting it, and disparaging it, we should focus on learning how best to use it — to gather, understand, shape, and share the information around us.

Agreed.

My thanks to Webydo for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week.

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Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

This week we saw quite a few articles on the rapidly changing online publishing scene. In particular, there is a lot of analysis going on about the sudden and unexpected traffic domination by sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy, as readers (or rather, clicks…) move away from more established outfits like the Huffington Post.

To set the stage, Alexis Madrigal wonders if 2013 will be The Year ‘the Stream’ Crested. He refers to the endless updates on social networks, which are always presented in reverse chronological order — a design that inherently implies that new=good and old=bad:

When the half-life of a post is half a day or less, how much time can media makers put into something? When the time a reader spends on a story is (on the high end) two minutes, how much time should media makers put into something?

The necessity of nowness plus the professionalization of content production for the stream means that there are thousands and thousands of people churning out more crap than can possibly be imagined. 

In a story that proves Madrigal’s point about an inevitable, exasperated move away from this “nowness”, Robinson Meyer asks Why Are Upworthy Headlines Suddenly Everywhere? He explains that beyond the obvious reason — clickbait headlines work because, well, people click on them — lies a change in Facebook’s algorithm that rewards “viral” stories more than recent stories. In Facebook’s words, “stories that people did not scroll down far enough to see can reappear near the top […] if the stories are still getting lots of likes and comments.” Meyer continues:

Simultaneous to this traffic upheaval, an entire vocabulary and syntax for headlines that people click and share — and oh, boy, do they click and share — had presented itself on the social web. For publishers trying to grab more traffic from Facebook, the path became clear. Borrow, adapt, employ the Upworthy style post haste. Assure readers your content was nothing but wondtacular. And so began the wondtacularization.

So “nowness” is replaced by whatever can get the most clicks, regardless of its age. On the surface this move away from “the stream” sounds like a good thing, but we need to dig a little deeper. Another interesting tie-in to these stories is Farhad Manjoo’s Why Everyone Will Totally Read This Column. It’s a profile on Neetzan Zimmerman, who is in charge of posting “viral” content on Gawker (with remarkable success):

He posts only about a dozen items a day. Almost every one becomes a big traffic hit — an astonishing rate of success. I’ve worked on the Web for years, and I still have trouble predicting which of my stories will be hits and which will appeal only to my mom. Mr. Zimmerman has somehow cracked the code.

His secret, he says, is a deep connection to his audience’s evolving, irreducibly human, primal sensibilities. Usually within a few seconds of seeing an item, Mr. Zimmerman can sense whether it’s destined to become a viral story. “I guess you could call it intuition,” he says.

And now we get to the crux of it. What happens to the truth when all focus shifts to a story’s ability to go viral? That’s what Ravi Somaiya and Leslie Kaufman explore in their NYT piece If a Story Is Viral, Truth May Be Taking a Beating. They explain how this never-ending hunt for more clicks means that it doesn’t even matter if a story is true or not:

When the tales turned out to be phony, the modest hand-wringing that ensued was accompanied by an admission that viral trumps verified — and that little will be done about it as long as the clicks keep coming. “You are seeing news organizations say, ‘If it is happening on the Internet that’s our beat,’” said Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. “The next step of figuring out whether it happened in real life is up to someone else.”

So this is the environment we find ourselves in right now:

Start with an entire industry built on the sandy foundation of ad revenue. Throw in a particular style of headline that feeds off people’s “primal sensibilities”. Add a Facebook traffic machine that is continuously tweaked to pick up these stories and recycle them endlessly on people’s news feeds. And what do you get? A race to the bottom where viral trumps verified, lowbrow beats intellectual, and cheap clicks beat in-depth reporting and considered opinion. Suddenly the Postliterate society doesn’t sound like such a crazy prediction any more.

Alex Maughan gives some great front-end design and development tips in his article Mobile-first, semantic, and modular front-end design. If any part of your work touches front-end development, I highly recommend this piece. In addition to walking through the tools he uses (and his reasoning), Alex also makes a strong case for progressive enhancement:

Designs should be approached with a content-first and mobile-first mindset. Following this, CSS breakpoints should always be mobile-first. All JavaScript should be progressively enhanced and should be used at a conscientious minimum where possible. Therefore, the concept of progressive enhancement happens from all aspects, from design to development and back again.

All of this translates into websites that are much more future-friendly within a disruptive device and browser marketplace. It also has the added benefit of improving performance and guarding against fatal runtime errors that stop pages from working.

I haven’t yet linked to many pieces on progressive enhancement. As I went through my Pinboard links just now I realized that 2013 has been a big year for this topic. These are all the articles I know about that came out this year in strong defense of progressive enhancement:

• Progressive enhancement is still important
• Progressive Enhancement: Still Not Dead
• Progressive Enhancement. Still Alive & Kickin’
• Progressive enhancement is faster
• A plea for progressive enhancement
• Progressive Enhancement: It’s About the Content

I don’t know, it sounds like it’s not dead yet…

My fascination with how internet memes change language gets another healthy boost with Annalee Newitz’s excellent article We who spoke LOLcat now speak Doge:

In the internet meme war between cats and dogs, the dogs are currently winning. The “doge” meme features an image (often of an adorable shiba dog), annotated with distinctive phrases representing the thoughts of the dog — or the dragon, or whatever is being depicted. What has the internet gained in its move from LOLcats to doges?

I can’t decide which part to quote, so I just went for the opening paragraph and hope it will entice you to read the whole thing. Has there ever been a time like this, where language is changing so quickly and so completely?

Also, grammatical humor rocks.

Also, I love the internet.