Friday reading #30

So who knew that a thing I tried for a couple of weeks as an experiment would end up lasting for thirty weeks non-stop?

Well, here it is — yet another weekly round-up of long(-ish) reads I’ve found lying around the intertubes during the week about the kind of stuff I’m interested in. You can also download the whole bunch in a handy-yet-slightly-copyright-infringing-ad-stripping ebook format via Readlists.

Friday reading

“What is User Experience?” — Stephen P Anderson, Boxes and Arrows
“Regardless of their appointed position, those who care will be found at the center of all that is designed, built, served, or otherwise experienced by people. These people will care about load times in browsers as well as long lines at the grocery store. They care about the details that make or break an experience: remembering a name, when someone on hold is transferred to another representative, or fixing the out of place pixel because, well, it matters.”
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“The responsive web will be 99.9% typography” — James Young, WelcomeBrand
“I’m beginning to feel that while responsive design is a ground breaking and pragmatic solution, there’s a massive Catch 22 that’s lurking around the corner in the not too distant future where we can’t design something beyond applying the most simplistic layout style (ie. A single column) and some well considered typographic treatments because it’s the only thing that will remain reliably device agnostic.” Oh *cough*
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“Time For A New Mobile Ad Format” — Eric Picard, Ad Exchanger
“The biggest problem with mobile advertising today is the ad formats being deployed. The screen is very small, and even a very small ad unit that isn’t well integrated into the screen experience of an app or mobile website causes a dissonance that is simply unacceptable to most users.  And app developers see this clearly – using the presence of ads not really to drive ad revenue, but rather to annoy the crap out of consumers in order to push them to pay for the premium version of an app.  This is a very backwards approach to advertising experience, but one that has been used repeatedly over the course of digital evolution.”[via @karenmcgrane]
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“Facebook opens the door to how it organizes your newsfeed” — Eliza Kern, GigaOm
“Cathcart used the Facebook user Yoda as an example, reacting to a relationship story that Darth Vadar had listed Luke as his son on the network.” …and if that doesn’t make you want to read this, I don’t know what will.
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“Geeks and privilege” — Tom Morris
“Being smart and working hard is part of it, but a lot of it is luck and privilege and getting the opportunities.”
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“Making Cents” — Damon Krukowski, Pitchfork
“The first album I made was originally released on LP only, in 1988-- and my next will likely only be pressed on LP again. But in between, the music industry seems to have done everything it could to screw up that simple model of exchange; today it is no longer possible for most of us to earn even a modest wage through our recordings.”
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“Police Raid 9-Year-Old Pirate Bay Girl, Confiscate Winnie The Pooh Laptop” — enigmax, TorrentFreak
“CIAPC, the company that had The Pirate Bay blocked by ISPs in Finland, tracked an alleged file-sharer and demanded a cash settlement. However, the Internet account holder refused to pay which escalated things to an unprecedented level. In response, this week police raided the home of the 9-year-old suspect and confiscated her Winnie the Pooh laptop.”
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“I Was a Dad Once: An Unearthly Child” — Philip Sandifer, TARDIS Eruditorum
“It is 5:16 PM, November the 23rd, 1963. Gerry and the Pacemakers’ ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ is the number one single. It will go on to become the anthem of Liverpool FC, at the time of writing still narrowly the most successful English football club of all time. Since 6:30 PM the previous day, the BBC has been running news coverage of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy.”
Today is the 49th anniversary of my very favourite thing since I was a child. [via @r4isstatic]
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Things you may have missed

“Platform wars - Charles Arthur at Online Information” — Martin Belam, currybetdotnet
At Online Information this year Charles Arthur was talking about the platform wars that he has recently written a book about, inspired by a call from a publisher’s agent who observed that Apple, Microsoft and Google ‘always seem to be fighting each other.’
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“Making The Times digital - Lucia Adams at Online Information ” — Martin Belam, currybetdotnet
Lucia’s main message though was that the incredible pace of a change was a huge challenge and disruption for publishers. ‘The conversations that we have about new platforms seem to be happening more and more often’ she said, suggesting that making the decisions to invest in publishing on different platforms, and choosing the right moment in a platform life-cycle to enter the market required continuous ‘acts of daring’ from publishers.
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“David Byrne on the perils of ebooks and developing enhanced editions” — Martin Belam, currybetdotnet
Sounds like David Byrne has been having a tough time developing an enhanced ebook version of his ‘How music works’.
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Forthcoming talks and events

I’ll be talking and teaching at the following events over the next couple of months:

• 6 December: “The user experience of news” - news:rewired, London
• 12 December: “So you think you want to be a UXer?” - Guardian Masterclass, London - SOLD OUT
• 17 December: “Putting user experience at the heart of your tablet strategy” - “Les Victoires de la Presse”, Lyon
• 26 January: “Responsive IA” - Guardian Masterclass, London
• 28 January: “Improve your blogging” - evening training course, London
• 11 February: “So you think you want to be a UXer?” - Guardian Masterclass, London