In How the internet is making us poor Christopher Mims asks a chilling question about what he calls the “hollowing out of the middle class” — the phenomenon where knowledge workers are being replaced by computers:

Like farming and factory work before it, the labors of the mind are being colonized by devices and systems. In the early 1800′s, nine out of ten Americans worked in agriculture—now it’s around 2%. At its peak, about a third of the US population was employed in manufacturing—now it’s less than 10%. How many decades until the figures are similar for the information-processing tasks that typify rich countries’ post-industrial economies?

The article also quotes this thought-provoking statement from Marc Andreessen:

The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories: People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

It might seem like the usual doom-and-gloom “technology will kill as all” refrain, but the article reviews some very interesting historical (and current) data, so it’s worth checking out.

Willa Paskin wrote a really interesting article for Wired about the future of television. The most interesting parts of Netflix Resurrected Arrested Development. Next Up: Television Itself are about the rise of “binge-watching” — the behavior of churning through multiple episodes at a time in one sitting. Netflix found that designing shows to allow for binge-watching is good business:

The more that ­people binge-watch, the more attached they become to the show. “Binge-watching is a behavior that really started for us back in the DVD days. The way ­people were returning the discs, they weren’t watching one a night or one a week,” Sarandos says. “As we got into the streaming business, it became more trackable. What we saw was that the ­people who did this were much more attached to the shows. And because they were more attached to the shows, they reported more value in watching them on Netflix.” In other words, the more you binge, the better for Netflix.

This is why Netflix released all 13 episodes of House of Cards at once, and why those who say it was a stupid decision will likely be proven wrong.

I’d like to thank Wufoo for sponsoring the Elezea RSS feed this week. I use Wufoo as the contact form on Elezea, and it works great.

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We host everything. We build the backend. You get an easy, fun and fast way to collect and analyze data, and it even integrates with many payment systems.

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• Over 200 pre-made templates & themes from our form gallery
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• Support for beautiful typography with custom fonts and Typekit integration

Just because you’re working with forms and data doesn’t mean you have to do it without personality or style. Gathering information from your users is exciting, why shouldn’t your tools be exciting too?

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Sponsorship by The Syndicate

I recently wrote about the value of exposing kids to technology, so I really enjoyed reading Hanna Rosin’s The touch-screen generation:

To date, no body of research has definitively proved that the iPad will make your preschooler smarter or teach her to speak Chinese, or alternatively that it will rust her neural circuitry—the device has been out for only three years, not much more than the time it takes some academics to find funding and gather research subjects. So what’s a parent to do?

Articles about how technology affects child development generally tend to take extreme views on the topic — it’s either horrible to let kids use iPads, or it doesn’t matter. In contrast, Hanna has a very thoughtful, measured approach to the topic. She discusses a bunch of research, looks at all the pros and cons, and ends with the conclusion that most parents have already realized: it depends, because no one knows your child as well as you do. It’s a long article, but well worth your time.

(link via Kottke)

Cap Watkins is switching from RSS to Twitter, and so far he is very happy:

Now that I’ve started using Twitter for feeds, I’m unlikely to ever go back. The ease of sharing, Favoriting, Retweeting, sending to Instapaper, etc. not only match, but at times surpass even Reeder in terms of ease and simplicity. One less app to deal with is a win, not to mention that the links are ordered exactly as I like them (and holy crap, Tweetbot iCloud sync. So good).

Cap goes over the pros and cons of his decision, but I think there’s one major con that he left out: Twitter is a river, RSS is a filing cabinet. Ok, I apologize for the mixed metaphor, but hear me out.

Twitter updates flow by you in a never-ending stream of links. This means that if you choose to follow RSS feeds in this way, all the separate article feeds flow into that one river, and there’s no stopping it. If you happen to be offline for a day or two, it’s extremely likely that you’ll miss an update from an infrequently-updated website you love.

With RSS, that problem doesn’t exist. Since article feeds are separate, there isn’t one giant river (you can choose to view “All feeds” in most readers, but that’s optional). So, I just open the filing cabinet whenever I want, and I can immediately see how many updates my favourite sites have received. I can decide to nuke the unread counts on a site with 50 new items. I can seek out the content I really want. I don’t have to worry that the river will keep flowing and I’ll miss the boat completely (ok, now I’ve really killed this metaphor).

So, although I agree with the pros Cap highlights in his post, and I’m glad he found a reading flow that works for him, I’m not ready to give up RSS. It’s still my favorite way to discover good content.

I’d like to thank Xero for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week.

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For your free trial or to find out more, visit xero.com/creatives.

Sign up to Xero before June 30, 2013 and get 60 days free.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

About a year ago I wrote an article for Smashing Magazine called A Dad’s Plea To Developers Of iPad Apps For Children. It was generally well received, but some of the comments were inevitably judgemental about parents who let their kids use iPads.

With that as backdrop, I really enjoyed Gary Marshall’s post Don’t fear your kids’ tech tantrums. He starts by making this point:

Let’s start by separating the “lazy parent” argument from the “kids shouldn’t have devices” argument. You can be a good parent and let your kids play on the iPad, and you can be a bad parent with a house full of encyclopaedias.

Gary’s main point is that giving kids appropriate exposure to technology — as part of a wider mix of non-tech activities — is essential to help prepare them for the digitally-focused world they are growing up in:

These are all valuable skills, critical skills, and the older she gets and the more tech-saturated the world becomes the more important digital literacy will become. I want my daughter to be ready for that world, not to be afraid of it or to be manipulated by it.

So thank you, Gary. I feel a little bit better about those comments now.

I was going to write about the Google Reader shutdown but Brent Simmons beat me to the argument I was going to make. In Why I love RSS and You Do Too he sums up why we should all care about Google Reader’s demise:

Even if you don’t use an RSS reader, you still use RSS. If you subscribe to any podcasts, you use RSS. Flipboard and Twitter are RSS readers, even if it’s not obvious and they do other things besides. Lots of apps on the various app stores use RSS in at least some way. […] And those people you follow on Twitter who post interesting links? They often get those links from their RSS reader. One way or another, directly or indirectly, you use RSS. Without RSS all we’d have is pictures of cats and breakfast.

Killing Google Reader doesn’t kill RSS, for sure, but it’s such a big part of the ecosystem that we should be concerned about the health of the platform. From the perspective of a guy with a blog this is pretty depressing news. RSS subscribers are extremely difficult to grow, but they are, by far, the best kind of readers. I’ve written about this before, but to reiterate: they’re loyal, they read almost everything, and they share your stuff. It’s the best way to build an audience. Hunter Walk makes this point succinctly:

Google Reader impact also undercounted if you strictly look at # users bec many power-curators/sharers use it as a discovery system

— Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) March 14, 2013

But Scott Stein has perhaps the best TL;DR version of the whole debacle:

Google Reader is to Twitter as a well-labeled filing cabinet is to a bag of insane cats.

— Scott Stein (@jetscott) March 14, 2013

So, what now? For a bit of nostalgia, Buzzfeed has a great history of Google Reader. It’s a fascinating story, worth reading. And then, Om Malik has an interview with the original creator of Google Reader. Once you’re done grieving and ready to move on, Lifehacker has a very comprehensive post on the alternatives.

Frank Chimero has a great follow-up to Tino Arnall’s excellent post No to NoUI. In The Cloud is Heavy and Design Isn’t Invisible Frank explores what’s appropriate (and what’s not) about using “The Cloud” as a metaphor, and then he makes a great point about the Invisible Design trend:

Sometimes I wonder if the desire to obfuscate production and make the resulting design invisible or seamless to users diminishes their appreciation for the craft of building systems. I think there’s a strong likelihood that metaphors like “The Cloud” and sayings like “It Just Works™” reduce a user’s appreciation of the software/hardware they are using. “Magic” is a great word for selling product, but it also can cheapen all the sweat it takes to get there. If the seams have been covered, you can’t admire how things connect.

I completely agree with Frank on this. As I’ve mentioned before, I think our goal shouldn’t be NoUI (or YesUI or AlwaysUI or whatever we want to label the other extreme). Our goal should be appropriate visibility.

In The Guardian Tom Meltzer asks, Are our household appliances getting too complicated? Despite violating Betteridge’s law of headlines he makes some good points:

“The innovation is obviously being driven by manufacturers’ desire to add value and to differentiate themselves,” says analyst Neil Mason, head of retail research at market research company Mintel. “But from a consumer’s point of view, what they want is convenience and simplicity. When you run into trouble is when you add all these extra functions and consumers just get perplexed as to how to actually use them.”

He cites some classic examples of technology-driven innovation — asking “What more can we do with this technology?” as opposed to “What goals do our customers want to accomplish with our product?”