April 29, 2008

Rapping About Proper HTML

The Poetic Prophet may also be known as The SEO Rapper, but his Design Coding rap contains a lot of good advice for an HTML/CSS designer.

All we have to do now is convince him to rap about RDFa!

...title everything including links and images
don't use italics, use emphasis
don't use bold, please use strong
if you use bold that's old and wrong
when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker
they stuck on your page like you made it with a sticker
and then they convert now that's the real kicker
make you a lil richer, your site a lil slicker
design and code right man I hope you get the picture...

Source: Design Coding

Spotter: ROFLCon Sleeper Hits Session.

April 27, 2008

Looking for the Mouse

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Shirky has me riveted. I've been reading essays about post-television culture since Alvin Toffler keeled me over half-way through my senior year in high school, but Shirky's write-up of his 2008 Web 2.0 Conference speech is among the best.

The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

Source: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

While this hopeful logic echoes the "1% of a billion people" fallacy, the immense amount of work directed at projects such as wikipedia attests to huge reserves of untapped intellectual energy.

We're going to need it.