links for 2010-08-09

"During the course of today I've spoken to 15 journalists, mostly working for radio and TV news stations, and 13 of which have been male. Through these conversations I discovered none of the journalists knew hormonal contraception had medical uses. All of them assumed hormonal contraception was simply used to prevent pregnancy. And because of this assumption it hadn't occurred to them to find out what else hormonal contraceptives might be used for."

"TNTJ or Tomorrow's News, Tomorrow's Journalists was set up to provide an informal blogging network for young journalists to share their experiences of the industry and debate, discuss and dissect the issues affecting their fledgling careers. We're relaunching the blog network under the same criteria, but with some new features planned."

"During the coming weeks, aspiring journalist Nikki Osman is going to write about her attempts to find work. In her first entry, Nikki explains why a tough job market isn't putting her off a job in the media".

"The Plymouth Hearld website is carrying Roy of the Rovers style illustrations of the Plymouth Argyle match away against Southampton on Saturday to show how it countered a ban on its photographers covering the game. The drawings, by city historian and Herald contributor Chris Robinson, were commissioned in response to Southampton Football Club's controversial decision to attempt to force newspapers to buy photos from a single accredited agency". Absolute genius.

"As part of our Edinburgh festival coverage this year, guardian.co.uk has teamed up with Ed Twinge, a "realtime fringe review service", which rates festival acts according to the reviews you give them on Twitter."

"The readers' editor on... the moral and legal implications of publishing the war logs"

"The classic usability complaint is that projects just tack a usability test on at the end of development when it is too late to make any changes. Which leaves the usability consultant in the uneviable position of having to tell the project team that their product doesn't work, when they can't do anything about it. It can feel like a waste of time and money. In reality these sessions are rarely entirely useless and I'd prefer to run them rather than having nothing at all."

"Prototyping is key to any successful design. Paper prototyping is usually the first step, but does it fit into a world where mobile devices are king? Yes, but not using the conventional method. Combine the physicality of the device and the power of paper prototyping and you have a solution that's fit for the new era of computing". Interesting process to convert paper prototyping work onto the iPhone - but I failed to grasp how this would allow you to prototype anything with much of an 'If...Else...' statement involved?

Sometimes stuff shows up in my referrers and I have no idea WTF is going on. This is one such page. It appears to be a showcase of what can be done with the <canvas> tag in HTML5. Click the dots, and tweets that mention HTML5 appear - hence the link to currybetdotnet buried in there somewhere. Astonishing animation.

"Web design has evolved greatly since the early days. CSS has enhanced our ability to create functional and beautiful websites. Select a trend below to see my take on the history of web design". Inspired use of CSS to make an entirely different kind of storytelling timeline.

I was puzzled by the fact that despite attracting lots of traffic with recent posts about the racism of the Daily Express, the BBC iPhone app and HTML5 for journalists, I wasn't picking up any new RSS subscribers. Maybe RSS is dead I thought. Then I realised I'd just configured the new templates wrong. If your RSS subscription to this blog has been acting funny, try resubscribing here - http://feeds.feedburner.com/currybet