Here are some web trends for 2020:
Responsive web design in 2020 should be a given because every serious project that you create should look good and be completely usable on all devices. But there’s no need to over-complicate things.
Web Development in 2020: What Coding Tools You Should Learn article gives an overview of recommendations what you learn to become a web developer in 2020.
You might have seen Web 3.0 on some slides. What is the definition of web 3 we are talking about here?
There seems to be many different to choose from… Some claim that you need to blockchain the cloud IOT otherwise you’ll just get a stack overflow in the mainframe but I don’t agree on that.
Information on the web address bar will be reduced on some web browsers. With the release of Chrome 79, Google completes its goal of erasing www from the browser by no longer allowing Chrome users to automatically show the www trivial subdomain in the address bar.
You still should target to build quality web site and avoid the signs of a low-quality web site. Get good inspiration for your web site design.
Still a clear and logical structure is the first thing that needs to be turned over in mind before the work on the website gears up. The website structure for search robots is its internal links. The more links go to a page, the higher its priority within the website, and the more times the search engine crawls it.
You should upgrade your web site, but you need to do it sensibly and well. Remember that a site upgrade can ruin your search engine visibility if you do it badly. The biggest risk to your site getting free search engine visibility is site redesign. Bad technology selection can ruin the visibility of a new site months before launch. Many new sites built on JavaScript application frameworks do not benefit in any way from the new technologies. Before you go into this bandwagon, you should think critically about whether your site will benefit from the dynamic capabilities of these technologies more than they can damage your search engine visibility. Well built redirects can help you keep the most outbound links after site changes.
If you go to the JavaScript framework route on your web site, keep in mind that there are many to choose, and you need to choose carefully to find one that fits for your needs and is actively developed also in the future.
JavaScript survey: Devs love a bit of React, but Angular and Cordova declining. And you’re not alone… a chunk of pros also feel JS is ‘overly complex’
Keep in mind the recent changes on the video players and Google analytics. And for animated content keep in mind that GIF animations exists still as a potential tool to use.
Keep in mind the the security. There is a skill gap in security for many. I’m not going to say anything that anyone who runs a public-facing web server doesn’t already know: the majority of these automated blind requests are for WordPress directories and files. PHP exploits are a distant second. And there are many other things that are automatically attacked. Test your site with security scanners.
APIs now account for 40% of the attack surface for all web-enabled apps. OWASP has identified 10 areas where enterprises can lower that risk. There are many vulnerability scanning tools available. Check also How to prepare and use Docker for web pentest . Mozilla has a nice on-line tool for web site security scanning.
The slow death of Flash continues. If you still use Flash, say goodbye to it. Google says goodbye to Flash, will stop indexing Flash content in search.
Use HTTPS on your site because without it your site rating will drop on search engines visibility. It is nowadays easy to get HTTPS certificates.
Write good content and avoid publishing fake news on your site. Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy,
Think to who you are aiming to your business web site to. Analyze who is your “true visitor” or “power user”. A true visitor is a visitor to a website who shows a genuine interest in the content of the site. True visitors are the people who should get more of your site and have the potential to increase the sales and impact of your business. The content that your business offers is intended to attract visitors who are interested in it. When they show their interest, they are also very likely to be the target group of the company.
Should you think of your content management system (CMS) choice? Flexibility, efficiency, better content creation: these are just some of the promised benefits of a new CMS. Here is How to convince your developers to change CMS.
Here are some fun for the end:
Did you know that if a spider creates a web at a place?
The place is called a website
Confession: How JavaScript was made.
2,361 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Can AI Stop People From Believing Fake News?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/artificial-intelligence/ai-misinformation-fake-news
Machine learning algorithms provide a way to detect misinformation based on writing style and how articles are shared.
On topics as varied as climate change and the safety of vaccines, you will find a wave of misinformation all over social media. Trust in conventional news sources may seem lower than ever, but researchers are working on ways to give people more insight on whether they can believe what they read. Researchers have been testing artificial intelligence (AI) tools that could help filter legitimate news. But how trustworthy is AI when it comes to stopping the spread of misinformation?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rand Fishkin / SparkToro:
SimilarWeb: in 2020, ~65% of Google searches ended without a click, up from ~50% in June ’19; mobile searches are far more likely to end without a click — In August of 2019, I published research from now-defunct clickstream data provider, Jumpshot, showing that 50.33% of all Google searches ended without …
In 2020, Two Thirds of Google Searches Ended Without a Click
https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2020-two-thirds-of-google-searches-ended-without-a-click/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wall Street Journal:
Analysis of 3,100 sites shows that hospitals are using code to hide pages containing pricing data from being crawled by search engines, violating US federal law — Webpages for hundreds of hospitals require users to click through to find prices, undermining federal transparency rule, Journal analysis shows
Hospitals Hide Pricing Data From Search Results
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hospitals-hide-pricing-data-from-search-results-11616405402?mod=djemalertNEWS
Webpages for hundreds of hospitals require users to click through to find prices, undermining federal transparency rule, Journal analysis shows
Hospitals that have published their previously confidential prices to comply with a new federal rule have also blocked that information from web searches with special coding embedded on their websites, according to a Wall Street Journal examination.
The information must be disclosed under a federal rule aimed at making the $1 trillion sector more consumer friendly. But hundreds of hospitals embedded code in their websites that prevented Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG -0.23% Google and other search engines from displaying pages with the price lists, according to the Journal examination of more than 3,100 sites.
The code keeps pages from appearing in searches, such as those related to a hospital’s name and prices, computer-science experts said. The prices are often accessible other ways, such as through links that can require clicking through multiple layers of pages.
“It’s technically there, but good luck finding it,” said Chirag Shah, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies human interactions with computers. “It’s one thing not to optimize your site for searchability, it’s another thing to tag it so it can’t be searched. It’s a clear indication of intentionality.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bloomberg:
In 2020, 60% to 70% of 9-year-old YouTuber Ryan Kaji’s $30M annual revenue came from merchandise licensing deals, passing YouTube ad revenue for the first time — Ryan Kaji is one of the most popular YouTube creators in the world, with a main channel that’s drawn 29 million subscribers interested …
The Preteen’s Guide to Getting Rich Off YouTube
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-22/how-youtube-channel-ryan-s-world-makes-most-of-its-revenue-merchandise-not-ads
Ryan Kaji’s video empire makes most of its revenue from merchandise, not ads.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-chrome-its-time-to-ditch-the-browser/
Tomi Engdahl says:
João Carrasqueira / Neowin:
Microsoft, Google, and others join forces to improve browser compatibility, focusing on five areas, including CSS Flexbox, CSS Grid, and CSS sticky positioning
Microsoft, Google, and others join forces to improve browser compatibility
https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-google-and-others-join-forces-to-improve-browser-compatibility/?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
Google and Microsoft have announced that they’re joining forces with other companies such as Igalia, as well as the “broader web community” to improve compatibility across different web browsers. The movement, called Compat2021, will see the effort focus on five major areas that draw complaints from the developer community.
The effort comes after a period of research, including surveys conducted by the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN). Other sources of information, such as the State of CSS and State of JS surveys, the most searched features on CanIUse, and test results from web-platform-tests all played a role in determining the areas of focus for this effort.
For 2021, the focus will be on these five areas: CSS Flexbox, CSS Grid, CSS sticky positioning, the CSS aspect-ratio property, and CSS Transforms. CSS Flexbox is a very widely used feature, but it can cause images to be stretched incorrectly in different browsers. It was chosen because it’s a top issue in the MDN Browser Compatibility Report for 2020, in addition to being the most widely used and known feature in the State of CSS report. Currently, 85% of browsers pass the test for the feature, and it appears in 75% of page loads on Chrome.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Laura Hazard Owen / Nieman Lab:
Study of subscriber retention techniques at 526 news organizations across the US: just 41% “make it easy” for subscribers to cancel their subscriptions online
Most U.S. news organizations still won’t let most readers cancel their subscriptions online
https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/03/most-u-s-news-organizations-still-wont-let-readers-cancel-their-subscriptions-online/
As a news consumer, you are less likely to be able to cancel online than you are to get a please-stay pitch from a customer service rep on the phone.
Bad news for people who hate using the phone: Just 41% of U.S. news publishers “make it easy” for subscribers to cancel their subscriptions online, according to a new survey from the American Press Institute.
News organizations also vary widely in how and whether they identify or assist subscribers who are at risk of canceling. The blunt, “we’ll-just-make-it-hard-for-you-to-cancel” method remains more common.
Jeff Sonderman and Gwen Vargo set out to see which subscriber retention techniques are, and aren’t, in use at 526 news organizations across the U.S. (“they include publishers big and small, newspapers and digital-only, nonprofit and for-profit”). They found some retention tactics that were extremely common: 90% of publishers surveyed encouraged new subscribers to sign up for their newsletters, 89% use analytics to track what subscribers as a whole are reading, and 86% “track data about which digital content online users engage with.”
When it comes to cancellations, though, trends are less consistent. According to the survey, only 41% of those surveyed “make it easy for people to cancel subscriptions online, so they have an improved customer experience.” (It also helps if you live in California, or, at least, if you temporarily change your billing address to California.)
As a news consumer, you are less likely to be able to cancel online than you are to get a please-stay pitch from a customer service rep on the phone: 60% of news organizations surveyed “customer service reps [who] are trained in tactics for ‘saving’ renewals when customers ask to cancel” (60%).
It’s probably easier to make it hard to cancel than it is to figure out why people want to cancel and what you might have to do to try to get them back. Less than a third (28%) of publishers surveyed “segment [their] subscribers based on their risk of cancellation.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kate Kaye / Digiday:
As publishers adopt single ID systems to replace third-party cookies, they are falling short in asking for users’ consent and transparency about data use
Third-party cookie replacements fall short of consent and transparency promises
https://digiday.com/media/third-party-cookie-replacements-fall-short-of-consent-and-transparency-promises/
Publishers, advertisers and ad tech companies are rallying around identity tech such as Unified ID 2.0, a system developed by several industry groups and companies, as a means to not only replace the third-party cookie but move the programmatic ad industry toward a more transparent, consent-based system. They are being much less forthright, though, when it comes to asking users for their consent and presenting transparent information.
Because many identity technologies, including Unified ID 2.0, use email addresses and other information gathered when people interact directly with a brand or publisher to build encrypted IDs, the companies that make and use them suggest they are created with people’s knowledge and consent. However, although these companies are modernizing their means of tracking people online, they have yet to update their methods of notifying them when these systems capture individuals’ email addresses to transform them into identifiers that can be passed throughout the ad tech ecosystem.
Unified ID 2.0 “improves consumer transparency, privacy and control,” noted a January press release from The Trade Desk, which has played a key role in developing Unified ID 2.0. The announcement stated that one of the core goals of the identity system is “simple and consistent consumer messaging” that explains “the value exchange of relevant advertising for consumers, and providing greater control for publishers.” However, there are no current requirements or even guidance on what explanatory messaging for Unified ID 2.0 (UID) should look like.
There are few if any requirements by other identity tech providers for how publishers and other companies should provide notice when collecting people’s personal information, said Justin Wohl, chief revenue officer at Salon.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.editorx.com/shaping-design/article/web-typography-rules
Tomi Engdahl says:
Listasimme, mitä eri emojit tarkoittavat Z-sukupolven keskuudessa – moni haistattelee pitkät tietämättään https://www.is.fi/menaiset/vapaalla/art-2000007877128.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alex Hern / The Guardian:
Leaked moderator docs say Facebook users may call for death of public figures, so long as the individual is not tagged or “purposefully exposed” to such calls — Exclusive: public figures considered to be permissible targets for otherwise-banned abuse, leaked moderator guidelines show
Facebook guidelines allow users to call for death of public figures
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/23/facebook-guidelines-allow-for-users-to-call-for-death-of-public-figures
Exclusive: public figures considered to be permissible targets for otherwise-banned abuse, leaked moderator guidelines show
Facebook’s bullying and harassment policy explicitly allows for “public figures” to be targeted in ways otherwise banned on the site, including “calls for [their] death”, according to a tranche of internal moderator guidelines leaked to the Guardian.
Public figures are defined by Facebook to include people whose claim to fame may be simply a large social media following or infrequent coverage in local newspapers.
They are considered to be permissible targets for certain types of abuse “because we want to allow discussion, which often includes critical commentary of people who are featured in the news”, Facebook explains to its moderators.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alex Hern / The Guardian:
Facebook docs show how it moderates users in repressive regimes, including a list of “recognized crimes” and allowing praise for mass killers in some contexts
Facebook leak underscores strategy to operate in repressive regimes
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/23/facebook-leak-underscore-strategy-operate-repressive-regimes
Exclusive: users are allowed to praise mass killers and ‘violent non-state actors’ in certain situations
Decoding emojis and defining ‘support’: Facebook’s rules for content revealed
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/23/decoding-emojis-and-defining-support-facebooks-rules-for-content-revealed
The 300-page document for moderators defines which phrases are ethically unacceptable
Tomi Engdahl says:
Edward Ongweso Jr / VICE:
Medium offers buyouts to everyone on its editorial staff, as it shifts focus from its own publications to supporting independent writers on its platform — After what workers describe as a successful union-busting campaign, Ev Williams has announced to journalists who work for him that they should feel free to go.
Medium Tells Journalists to Feel Free to Quit After Busting Union Drive
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp7y3/medium-tells-journalists-to-feel-free-to-quit-after-busting-union-drive
After what workers describe as a successful union-busting campaign, Ev Williams has announced to journalists who work for him that they
Tomi Engdahl says:
Avaaz:
Study of US election misinfo shows Facebook could have prevented 10.1B views from Pages that spread misinfo; these Pages saw interactions rise 3x YoY — How Facebook Failed Voters and Nearly Set Democracy Aflame — Section One – From Election to Insurrection: How Facebook Failed American Voters
Facebook: From Election to Insurrection
How Facebook Failed Voters and Nearly Set Democracy Aflame
https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/facebook_election_insurrection/
Executive Summary
Facebook could have prevented 10.1 billion estimated views for top-performing pages that repeatedly shared misinformation 1 .
An analysis of the steps Facebook took throughout 2020 shows that if the platform had acted earlier, adopting civil society advice and proactively detoxing its algorithm, it could have stopped 10.1 billion estimated views of content from top-performing pages that repeatedly shared misinformation over the eight months before the US elections.
Failure to downgrade the reach of these pages and to limit their ability to advertise in the year before the election meant Facebook allowed them to almost triple their monthly interactions, from 97 million interactions in October 2019 to 277.9 million interactions in October 2020 – catching up with the top 100 US media pages 2 (ex. CNN, MSNBC, Fox News) on Facebook.
Facebook has now rolled back many of the emergency policies it instituted during the elections, returning to the algorithmic status quo that allowed conspiracy movements like QAnon and Stop the Steal to flourish.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jim Salter / Ars Technica:
Firefox 87 launches with Smart Block feature, which improves the rendering of pages when blocking third-party tracking scripts by using local “stand-in” scripts — An improved referrer policy also trims URLs from embedded images and scripts. — Mozilla released Firefox 87 …
Firefox 87 is out today, adds Smart Block for improved private browsing
An improved referrer policy also trims URLs from embedded images and scripts.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/firefox-87-is-out-today-adds-smart-block-for-improved-private-browsing/
Mozilla released Firefox 87.0 this morning, the latest version of its open source web browser. Following on the heels of December’s Firefox 85 and February’s Firefox 86, the new version’s most important features—Smart Block and improved referrer trimming—are privacy related.
Firefox has been blocking third-party tracking scripts by default for quite a while now. For the most part, this works pretty seamlessly—but in some cases, missing tracking scripts can interfere with a page’s rendering, either delaying it (as seen in the animated image above, on the left) or permanently breaking it.
Smart Block takes an additional step to improve the rendering on pages that embed third-party trackers—instead of just pulling the script and leaving a “hole” where it used to be, Smart Block replaces it with what Mozilla describes as “stand-in” scripts. These stand-in scripts function just enough like the original trackers to restore the intended page-rendering sequence and results without actually leaking data to third parties.
Mozilla sources much of its data on what is—or is not—a “common tracking script” which needs a Smart Block stand-in from the Disconnect tracking protection list.
When you embed an image from some other website in your own website, information about your site’s viewers leaks to the other website’s operators.
Traditionally, the entire URL of the referring page is included in that web request… which means information leakage to the operators of sheep-pictures.tld, who would see something like this in their logs:
240.163.255.110 – - [15/Mar/2021:10:28:57 -0400] “GET /sheep1.jpg
HTTP/1.1″ 200 11676 “http://greatsearch.tld/res
ults?really-embarrassing-medical-condition”
Now that we understand the referrer field itself, it’s pretty clear what “referrer trimming” means—and why Mozilla is getting more aggressive about it. If the user above were using Firefox 87 when making the same search, the operators of sheep-pictures.tld would instead see the following log entry:
240.163.255.110 – - [15/Mar/2021:10:28:57 -0400] “GET /sheep1.jpg
HTTP/1.1″ 200 11676 “http://greatsearch.tld/”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Andrew Hutchinson / Social Media Today:
Facebook says people have raised more than $5B through Fundraisers on Facebook and Instagram, $2B of which were raised since February 2020
Facebook Says That People Have Raised Over $5b Through its Donation Tools
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-says-that-people-have-raised-over-5b-through-its-donation-tools/597156/
While questions continue to be raised about the role that Facebook now plays in our daily interactive process, and the negative impacts in regards to fake news, misinformation and facilitating the growth of concerning movements, at the other end of the spectrum, Facebook’s connective efforts are also yielding positive results, in many ways.
One of those is through the promotion of causes, with Facebook’s unmatched scale providing new opportunities for non-profits to raise awareness and funds via the platform’s various tools.
And today, Facebook has announced that it’s reached a new milestone on this front, with over $5 billion now raised, in total, through Facebook’s tools on both its main platform and on Instagram.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Andrew Hutchinson / Social Media Today:
Facebook says people have raised more than $5B through Fundraisers on Facebook and Instagram, $2B of which were raised since February 2020
Facebook Says That People Have Raised Over $5b Through its Donation Tools
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-says-that-people-have-raised-over-5b-through-its-donation-tools/597156/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Interviews with 14 current and former Medium employees portray a dysfunctional company; Medium started 2021 with 700K paid subs, on track for $35M+ in revenue — I. — Last week, a partnerships manager at Medium working with the White House found that there was a strange problem with the platform
The mess at Medium
14 current and former employees explain what went wrong
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/24/22349175/medium-layoffs-union-evan-williams-blogger-twitter-subscription?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
The manager was in a video conference with a White House staffer to discuss how Biden, who had used Medium as a campaign blog in 2020, could begin posting to the official Medium @POTUS account. While sharing his screen with the White House, the staffer logged in to @POTUS and saw the first article recommended to him by Medium: “A is for After,” which a sub-headline described as “a cuckold love story.”
It’s unclear if the White House saw the story. But after the meeting, the Medium staffer tried to improve Biden’s recommendations.
The employee previously found that Medium had somehow added Biden as a writer on 10 “garbage publications,” as well as at least one software development blog. “President Joe Biden is Being Served Erotica on Medium.com,” the staffer complained in an internal post.
The episode captured Medium in all its complexity: a publishing platform used by the most powerful people in the world; an experiment in mixing highbrow and lowbrow in hopes a sustainable business would emerge; and a devotion to algorithmic recommendations over editorial curation that routinely caused the company confusion and embarrassment.
“We have published many stellar stories that found a wide audience and more than paid for themselves,” Williams wrote. “But our hit rate has been low, and we’re not near where we need to be to make it work economically.”
Medium entered the year with more than 700,000 paid subscriptions, putting it on track for more than $35 million in revenue, according to two people familiar with the matter. That’s a healthy sum for a media company. But it represents a weak outcome for Williams, who previously sold Blogger to Google and co-founded Twitter, which eventually went public and today has a market capitalization of more than $50 billion.
Medium has raised $132 million in venture capital, but its last funding came in 2016. Williams has been funding the company out of his own pocket since then, sources said.
Medium’s original journalism was meant to give shape and prestige to an essentially random collection of writing, gated behind a soft paywall that costs readers $5 a month or $50 a year. Eleven owned publications covered food, design, business, politics, and other subjects.
But in the end, frustrated that Medium staff journalists’ stories weren’t converting more free readers to paid ones, Williams moved to wind down the experiment — throwing dozens of journalists’ livelihoods into question, just as he had in 2015, when he laid off 50 people amid a pivot away from advertising on the site.
The push into original reporting was rewarded with strong growth in paid subscriptions
Publication budgets were cut — and then cut again, and again
Tomi Engdahl says:
Washington Post:
Analysis of content moderation at the entire stack of internet infrastructure companies, from platforms to CDNs to ISPs, and how they see their responsibilities — Moderating content isn’t just something Facebook and Twitter do. There’s a ‘stack’ of companies that run the Internet — and they are under pressure to act.
Gatekeepers: These tech firms control what’s allowed online
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/24/online-moderation-tech-stack/
Moderating content isn’t just something Facebook and Twitter do. There’s a ‘stack’ of companies that run the Internet — and they are under pressure to act.
Who really runs the Internet? A lot of companies you rarely hear about.
Sure, Facebook, Google and Twitter made headlines for shutting down Donald Trump’s accounts after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. But the Silicon Valley giants that have been called to testify before Congress on Thursday about misinformation and hate on social media are not the only — and hardly the first — tech companies to decide what kinds of online speech are acceptable.
A bunch of other companies, stacked on top of each other like layers in a cake, operate the pipes and services that keep the Internet running.
Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, proposed this view of the Internet’s gatekeepers after deadly shootings in 2019 that germinated on a message board called 8chan. Online hate and disinformation spread because an entire ecosystem supports them, she said, and the rest of the stack has to step up to break the circuit.
Typically unseen parts of the stack flexed their power after the Capitol riot. Amazon Web Services — which provides the cloud-computing power that keeps many apps and websites running — ended its contract with social network Parler for having too many violent posts and insufficient moderation. App stores run by Apple and Google kicked out Parler, too, effectively kneecapping the platform. Parler, supported financially by major Trump backer Rebekah Mercer, called the moves part of a “coordinated effort” to silence Trump and his supporters. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
It’s a lot of power to put into the hands of tech executives who aren’t elected or don’t necessarily have experience weighing what’s right for society.
In some slices of the stack, a small number of companies have inordinate influence. Apple’s App Store, for example, is the only way you can buy apps for iPhones and iPads.
When platforms such as Facebook at the top of the stack were slow to act, pressure shifted down to critical service companies such as GoDaddy and WordPress to shut white supremacist websites, fundraising systems and chat forums. No longer just conduits for data, many of these companies became reluctant police officers.
“There’s no way for major consumer brands like PayPal to stay fully out of the culture wars,”
Do companies have a responsibility to moderate content because they have the technical ability? Or does the fact that they could make the wrong calls mean they should hold back?
The conversation about keeping society safe online only gets more complicated from here — up and down the stack.
What they do: A platform is an online forum. That might not sound important, but it’s the type of business fueling many of the most prominent Internet companies. They’re websites and apps that make money by running ads around what other people post or taking a cut from selling other people’s stuff.
Who they are: Platforms are social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, YouTube and Twitch; marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon, Craigslist and GoFundMe; and app stores like the ones run by Apple, Google and Amazon. Even rental service Airbnb and ride-hailing service Uber are platforms.
Why they have power: When you make the platform, you get to decide who and what stands on it. Those standards can shift, and don’t necessarily have to be evenly enforced. When you’re cut off from a really big platform — like a social network or an app store with billions of users — it can be difficult to find the same audience elsewhere.
When they’ve taken action: Moves like Twitter banning Trump permanently from its platform in January often are framed by politicians as partisan decisions. Platforms have made these sorts of daily content calls around the world for years. In 2014, Twitter took down video of the beheading of American journalist James Foley. In 2018, Twitter said it had suspended 1.2 million accounts linked to the terrorist group ISIS. In 2019, Facebook banned conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Black nationalist minister Louis Farrakhan.
Amazon has removed many products from its store, dating back at least to a self-published book on pedophilia in 2010. Even Airbnb, the home rental company, has, since 2017, researched suspected members of hate groups to prevent them from renting on the service.
Platforms also exert power through the design of software that chooses what information gets amplified — and what gets buried.
Who they are: Website-building and -hosting companies including Squarespace, Wix, WordPress and Shopify, as well as cloud-computing providers AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Joyent and Zoho.
Why they have power: Cut off a site’s hosting and it disappears — at least until it can find another provider. Moreover, switching to a different cloud provider can sometimes take a lot of technical and financial effort: Parler was offline for weeks because it didn’t have a Plan B. (It eventually came back via cloud service SkySilk.)
What they do: These companies are hidden but critical traffic controllers of the Internet. They help websites and apps stream video, keep hackers at bay, and deliver money rather than speech. These services require technical expertise, a global network or connections to the banking industry few companies can provide on their own.
Who they are: Cloudflare, Akamai, Peer5 and Amazon Cloudfront, PayPal, Stripe and Apple Pay.
Why they have power: Losing a CDN can leave a site open to denial-of-service attacks.
What they do: Companies that run the domain name system, or DNS, are the telephone books of the Internet. They allow a site to register the name you type into a browser, then make sure Web traffic gets directed to the right place.
Who they are: GoDaddy, Google, Tucows, DreamHost and Epik.
Why they have power: Domain registrations are a choke point that can quickly shut down a website. A site would remain offline until it finds a new domain registrar.
What they do: Bring websites and apps to smartphones and homes.
Who they are: Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Charter, Cox and hundreds of other regional and local providers.
Why they have power: Your broadband or cellular data service provider is the last layer between you and the Internet. Governments can use ISPs as their most direct means of control over Internet. In China, the government forces ISPs to block connections to certain Internet addresses, including foreign services such as Facebook. In the United States, there have been years of vigorous debate about whether ISPs should be required to carry all websites equally, a concept known as net neutrality.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dina Bass / Bloomberg:
Satya Nadella predicts the next decade will be defined by people sharing their own content in groups, as Microsoft reportedly considers acquiring Discord
Microsoft CEO Hunts Anew for Creator Hub After TikTok Bid Fails
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-24/microsoft-ceo-hunts-anew-for-creator-hub-in-discord-after-tiktok-bid-fails
Talks with Discord, Pinterest line up with Nadella’s strategy of adding engaged communities
Microsoft Corp.’s latest takeover targets have baffled some analysts and investors who are well aware of the company’s spotty track record in consumer businesses and social media. What’s the appeal, they wonder, in digital properties such as TikTok, Pinterest Inc. or now Discord Inc., a chat app that’s popular with gamers?
The answer in Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella’s mind is clear. “Creation, creation, creation—the next 10 years is going to be as much about creation as it is about consumption and about the community around it, so it’s not creating alone,” Nadella said in an interview last month. “If the last 10 years has been about consumption—we’re shopping more, we’re browsing more, we’re binge watching more—there is creation behind every one of those. But I see that phenomenon being much more democratized.”
For Nadella, the next decade of growth in cloud computing and internet use will be defined not by people watching and buying, but by those who are generating and exchanging their own content in different, thriving groups. Though he wasn’t referring specifically to acquisition strategy, his past purchases and current wish list illustrate that Nadella is eager to control some of the means of production.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What is neumorphism and is it here to stay?
https://www.editorx.com/shaping-design/article/neumorphism-ui
Profile picture of coren feldman
Coren Feldman
UX/UI
28.10.2020
#design
Image by Eli Zapa
A mix of skeuomorphism and flat design, neumorphism has made waves in the design community. But will the trend catch on?
Digital design began with skeuomorphism, a design trend that relied on real-world parallels to convey digital ideas to first-time computer users. Designers achieved this by creating three-dimensional, realistic-looking elements. For example, skeuomorphic buttons would appear raised, and pressing them would sink them down, just as buttons behave in reality.
Flat design changed the way we look at digital products when it gained mainstream popularity in 2013. By disconnecting digital elements from real-world items, it allowed for design to become simpler and – true to its name – flat, by moving from three-dimensional to two-dimensional elements. Flat design is still used for the vast majority of digital products today.
Neumorphism is a new design trend believed to have been started in late 2019 by Dribbble user Alexander Plyuto, which has since inspired thousands of designs on the platform and other design communities. It borrows the real-world, three-dimensional elements of skeuomorphism while drawing on the simplicity of flat design. The result is a minimalistic-looking interface that feels almost tactile.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Coordinated disinformation campaigns are more likely to thrive when they go unnoticed and unchecked. This interactive visualizer breaks down the methods, targets, and origins of select coordinated disinformation campaigns throughout the world.
https://jigsaw.google.com/the-current/disinformation/dataviz/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Makena Kelly / The Verge:
House tech hearing revealed unorganized lawmakers who conflated issues of competition, privacy, and moderation, and were unable to move past personal grievances — It’s time to move past listening and into legislating — This story is part of a group of stories called
Yes or no: Are these tech hearings doing anything?
It’s time to move past listening and into legislating
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/25/22351192/tech-ceo-hearing-mark-zuckerberg-jack-dorsey-sundar-pichai-facebook-google-twitter?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
In the middle of Congress’ first hearing of the year with the chief executives of Facebook, Google, and Twitter on Thursday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted out a poll. It was just a question mark with two answers: yes and no.
It was an obvious troll directed at the lawmakers questioning Dorsey, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai over the roles their platforms have played in spreading misinformation and inciting a violent insurrection at the US Capitol earlier this year. With limited time for questioning, the members would interrupt the CEOs’ responses, asking for “yes” or “no” answers or nothing at all.
But while the hearing was focused on finding solutions for some of the most serious free speech conflicts in history, Dorsey’s tweet symbolized just how seriously everyone was taking it — not very seriously at al
It’s not the first time Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and Pichai have testified before Congress. But it was the first time they were hauled in after a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol on January 6th, killing multiple people. QAnon followers and right-wing online influencers were just some of the individuals who participated in the attack which was largely organized and live-streamed on social media.
Ahead of the hearing, Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) told Politico, “This is not a hearing just to hear the same old thing.” He continued, “We want to know what we can do legislatively. We want to pass laws.”
In the past, bills have prompted tech companies to take action themselves.
“In an area where technology is moving fairly quickly, sometimes oversight hearings, letters [and] conversations with the leaders of major social media companies can result in those companies demonstrably changing their practices faster than we can legislate,” Coons told Politico.
But when do hearings fail to force the change Congress says it wants? On Thursday, it seemed like we were quickly approaching that threshold. From Zuckerberg and Pichai, little new information was uncovered. Dorsey favorited tweets and sent out silly polls.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brian Fung / CNN:
In the hearing, lawmakers accused CEOs of being smug, evasive, and condescending; CEOs appeared barely to restrain their own exasperation with yes/no questions — Washington (CNN Business)The chief executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter faced withering criticism from members of Congress
Facebook, Twitter and Google CEOs grilled by Congress on misinformation
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/25/tech/tech-ceos-hearing/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Axios:
Ahead of House hearing, Mark Zuckerberg calls for Section 230 reform that makes protections conditional on platforms’ ability to identify and remove content
Zuckerberg suggests how to tweak tech’s liability shield
https://www.axios.com/zuckerberg-facebook-section-230-shield-liability-ac9cfb3d-c98d-473b-b80a-722c79e68568.html
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will tell lawmakers his plan for “thoughtful reform” of a key tech liability shield rests on requiring best practices for treating illegal content online.
Why it matters: Tech giants are starting to embrace changes to the foundational law that shields platforms from liability from content users post as lawmakers from both parties threaten it.
Driving the news: In written testimony ahead of the House hearing Thursday with Google, Twitter and Facebook CEOs, Zuckerberg suggested making Section 230 protections for certain types of unlawful content conditional on platforms’ ability to meet best practices to fight the spread of the content.
What he’s saying: “Instead of being granted immunity, platforms should be required to demonstrate that they have systems in place for identifying unlawful content and removing it,” Zuckerberg wrote in the testimony.
The other side: Smaller tech companies and online sites will balk at any Section 230 changes, even if considered narrow. The biggest companies have the greatest ability to respond and adapt to legislation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The $1.6 billion lawsuit follows other litigation against Trump allies who have spread the claims.
Fox News Sued By Dominion Voting For Defamation Over Election Conspiracy
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/03/26/fox-news-sued-by-dominion-voting-for-defamation-over-election-conspiracy/?utm_campaign=forbes&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_term=Gordie
Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit Friday against Fox News taking aim at the network for spreading false claims about its voting machines to improve its ratings, marking the fourth lawsuit the voting company has filed over a false election fraud conspiracy theory involving the machines that has gained traction on the far right.
Dominion’s voting machines are at the heart of a right-wing conspiracy theory alleging they fraudulently flipped votes from then-President Donald Trump to Joe Biden, which there is no credible evidence to support but has been pushed by Trump allies, including on Fox News.
“Fox set out to lure viewers back—including President Trump himself—by intentionally and falsely blaming Dominion for President Trump’s loss by rigging the election,” the lawsuit, filed in state court in Delaware, alleges.
Dominion alleges the false election fraud narrative was beneficial to Fox’s ratings and bottom line, noting Fox Corporation’s stock had “rebounded to its pre-election value” after a month of promoting the voting machine claims.
“The truth matters. Lies have consequences. Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process,” the lawsuit alleges. “If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.”
“FOX News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court,” the company said in a statement to Forbes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Websites of EU Mobile Providers Fail to Properly Secure User Data: Report
https://www.securityweek.com/websites-eu-mobile-providers-fail-properly-secure-user-data-report
Sensitive data pertaining to the customers of top mobile services providers in the European Union is at risk of compromise due to improperly secured websites, data security and privacy firm Tala reveals.
An analysis of the websites of 13 of the top mobile telecom companies in the EU has revealed that none of them has in place even the minimum necessary protections to be considered secure.
“With over 235 million customers between them, none of the mobile providers scored a passing grade for website security. Where a score of 80+ is considered reasonable and 50 is barely a passing grade, none of the mobile providers analyzed comes close,” Tala says in a new report.
Despite the lack of proper website protections, however, during online sign-up, the telcos collect a significant amount of sensitive data from their customers, including names, emails, addresses, dates of birth, passport numbers, payslips, and even banking details in some cases.
All of the gathered data, Tala claims, might be at risk of compromise through vulnerabilities and the use of third-party code: the average number of JavaScript integrations was found to be 162, while forms were found exposed to an average of 19 third parties.
All of the websites, the report reveals, use dangerous JavaScript functions that open the door to cross-site scripting (XSS), the most common type of website vulnerability. The highest number of JavaScript integrations on a single site was 735.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nick Clegg / Medium:
Nick Clegg defends Facebook, saying it is not in the company’s interest, financially or reputationally, to continually push users toward more extreme content — In — a recent article for The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance compared Facebook to a Doomsday Machine: “a device built with the sole purpose of destroying all human life.”
You and the Algorithm: It Takes Two to Tango
https://nickclegg.medium.com/you-and-the-algorithm-it-takes-two-to-tango-7722b19aa1c2
In a recent article for The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance compared Facebook to a Doomsday Machine: “a device built with the sole purpose of destroying all human life.” In the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, the filmmakers imagine a digital control room where engineers press buttons and turn dials to manipulate a teenage boy through his smartphone. In her book Surveillance Capitalism, the Harvard social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff paints a picture of a world in which tech companies have constructed a massive system of surveillance that allows them to manipulate people’s attitudes, opinions and desires.
In each of these dystopian depictions, people are portrayed as powerless victims, robbed of their free will. Humans have become the playthings of manipulative algorithmic systems. But is this really true? Have the machines really taken over?
It is alleged that social media fuels polarization, exploits human weaknesses and insecurities, and creates echo chambers where everyone gets their own slice of reality, eroding the public sphere and the understanding of common facts. And, worse still, this is all done intentionally in a relentless pursuit of profit.
At the heart of many of the concerns is an assumption that in the relationship between human beings and complex automated systems, we are not the ones in control. Human agency has been eroded. Or, as Joanna Stern declared in the Wall Street Journal in January, we’ve “lost control of what we see, read — and even think — to the biggest social-media companies.”
Defenders of social media have often ignored or belittled these criticisms — hoping that the march of technology would sweep them aside, or viewing the criticisms as misguided. This is a mistake: Technology must serve society, not the other way around. Faced with opaque systems operated by wealthy global companies, it is hardly surprising that many assume the lack of transparency exists to serve the interests of technology elites and not users. In the long run, people are only going to feel comfortable with these algorithmic systems if they have more visibility into how they work and then have the ability to exercise more informed control over them.
Companies like Facebook need to be frank about how the relationship between you and their major algorithms really works. And they need to give you more control.
Some critics seem to think social media is a temporary mistake in the evolution of technology — and that once we’ve come to our collective senses, Facebook and other platforms will collapse and we’ll all revert to previous modes of communication. This is a profound misreading of the situation — as inaccurate as the December 2000 Daily Mail headline declaring the internet “may just be a passing fad.” Even if Facebook ceased to exist, social media won’t be — can’t be — uninvented. The human impulse to use the internet for social connection is profound.
Data-driven personalized services like social media have empowered people with the means to express themselves and to communicate with others on an unprecedented scale. And they have put tools into the hands of millions of small businesses around the world which were previously available only to the largest corporations. Personalized digital advertising not only allows billions of people to use social media for free, it is also more useful to consumers than untargeted, low-relevance advertising. Turning the clock back to some false sepia-tinted yesteryear — before personalized advertising, before algorithmic content ranking, before the grassroots freedoms of the internet challenged the powers that be — would forfeit so many benefits to society.
But that does not mean the concerns about how humans and algorithmic systems interact should be dismissed. There are clearly issues to be resolved and questions to be answered. The internet needs new rules — designed and agreed by democratically elected institutions — and technology companies need to make sure their products and practices are designed in a responsible way that takes into account their potential impact on society. That starts — but by no means ends — with putting people, not machines, more firmly in charge.
Tomi Engdahl says:
From https://www.facebook.com/groups/majordomo/permalink/10161685203224522/
You can do LaTex in a WordPress article.
Aaron Hale don’t know here’s a page where I used TeX
https://wb8nbs.wordpress.com/2020/04/16/analyzing-a-sector/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://arxiv.org/help/submit
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ministeriö haluaa kitkeä vihapuhetta – raportti suosittaa: some-agentteja, antitrollien armeija ja ilmianto-organisaatio
sunnuntai 28.03.2021 klo 21:06
Kuntaministeri Sirpa Paateron nimittämä työryhmä käynnistää valmistelun kansalaispaneelin raportin suositusten toimeenpanemiseksi.
https://www.iltalehti.fi/kotimaa/a/3d8baa91-4666-4878-a727-c68519231cbc
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chrome can now caption audio and video
https://blog.google/products/chrome/live-caption-chrome/
Captions make online content more accessible. If you’re in a noisy environment, trying to keep the volume down, or are part of the 466 million people in the world who are deaf or hard of hearing, having captions lets you follow along to whatever content you are watching — whether it’s viral feta pasta videos, breaking news or a scientist discussing their latest research.
Unfortunately, captions aren’t always available for every piece of content. Now with Live Caption on Chrome, you can automatically generate real-time captions for media with audio on your browser. It works across social and video sites, podcasts and radio content, personal video libraries (such as Google Photos), embedded video players, and most web-based video or audio chat services.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://gizmodo.com/why-you-should-ditch-google-chrome-for-microsoft-edge-1846567979
Tomi Engdahl says:
New poll shows Facebook’s severe trust problem
https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-poll-shows-facebooks-severe-trust-problem/
A recent informal poll of tech community sentiment showed a shocking level of distrust for Facebook — way more than other tech companies.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How QAnon Is Tearing Families Apart
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy8ayx/how-qanon-is-tearing-families-apart
VICE News talked to dozens of people whose lives have been affected by QAnon and found that there is no such thing as a typical Q follower.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microcopy: How to boost conversion with words
https://www.editorx.com/shaping-design/article/microcopy-boost-conversion-ux-writing
As well as informing the user and improving user experience, interface copy can also be a powerful asset for boosting conversion.
We’re dealing with increasingly larger amounts of content. The attention spans of our users are becoming more and more scarce.
Should we really care about written content if people don’t read it?
Well, this isn’t exactly how it works.
What is microcopy?
The term microcopy was first coined in 2009 by Joshua Porter, an acclaimed interface designer and the former UX Director at Hubspot.
According to Porter, microcopy is “small yet powerful. [...] It’s the small copy that has the biggest impact.” He refers to short phrases and single words that are a part of the interface.
He realized the importance of those when working on an eCommerce project. Once the checkout form was released, Porter found out that many transactions couldn’t be finalized.
The reason? People weren’t entering their correct billing address.
The solution? A single sentence:
After Porter added a note to specify that the billing address has to be associated with the card, the number of errors decreased. This small yet effective touch significantly improved conversion rates.
This is a great classic example, yet there is much more to microcopy than just that. The author of the book Microcopy, Kinneret Yifrah, defines it as “the words or phrases in the user interface [...] the motivation before the action, instructions that accompany the action, and the feedback after the user has taken the action”.
It’s not just about the technical guidelines.
They could have left the field empty, or used something rather usual, like “Your status…” Instead, they decided to go with a more conversational tone. “What’s on your mind?” doesn’t just tell us what the field does – it also starts a dialogue. The copy asks the user to write something. It makes them feel that someone truly cares about their thoughts.
This single powerful sentence continues to encourage millions of people to share what’s on their mind and keep Facebook running.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Check you own the website before you send out the press release
https://grahamcluley.com/check-you-own-the-website-before-you-send-out-the-press-release/
The end of last month saw the official launch of the UK Cyber Security
Council, a government-backed consortium with a mandate to boost career
opportunities and professional standards in the cybersecurity sector,
attract more talent, and increase diversity in the industry. To the
casual reader that looks fine. And maybe some journalists will have
emailed [email protected] or even tried to visit the UK
Cyber Security Council’s website at ukcybersecurity.org.uk. Not only
did the email address not work but actually no-one had registered the
ukcybersecurity.org.uk domain at all.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Joshua Benton / Nieman Lab:
English is the most spoken language in the EU, so UK-centric outlets dominate how the EU is represented; more English-language analysis by EU writers is needed
https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/04/why-does-so-much-news-about-the-european-union-still-come-out-of-london-even-post-brexit/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
YouTube says that 18 out of every 10K views in Q4 2020 were of videos that violate its policies, down from 72 out of every 10K views in Q4 2017 — ‘Violative View Rate’ fell steeply after 2017 — YouTube wants the world to know that it’s doing a better job than ever of enforcing its own moderation rules.
YouTube claims it’s getting better at enforcing its own moderation rules
‘Violative View Rate’ fell steeply after 2017
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/6/22368505/youtube-violative-view-rate-transparency-stat?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Markup:
Investigation finds Google uses a secret blocklist to stop advertisers from making YouTube ad campaigns for hate terms; it worked less than a third of the time — Many well-known White supremacist and White nationalist terms and slogans were not blocked — First of two parts.
Google Has a Secret Blocklist that Hides YouTube Hate Videos from Advertisers—But It’s Full of Holes
https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2021/04/08/google-youtube-hate-videos-ad-keywords-blocklist-failures
Many well-known White supremacist and White nationalist terms and slogans were not blocked
Tomi Engdahl says:
Luke Plunkett / Kotaku:
Intel details Bleep, which uses AI to redact audio when it detects “hate speech” and lets users toggle how much they want to hear — Intel gave a presentation at GDC a few weeks back, but I’m guessing nobody actually watched it because it took until this week for anyone to notice …
Intel, A ‘White Nationalism’ Slider Ain’t It
https://kotaku.com/intel-a-white-nationalism-slider-aint-it-1846639935?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
Tomi Engdahl says:
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Amid a mental health crisis because of COVID-19, Stanford researchers found that most tech platforms have no policies related to discussions of self-harm — Exclusive: Amid a rising mental health crisis, Stanford researchers find many companies ignoring posts about self-harm
The case of the missing platform policies
https://www.platformer.news/p/the-case-of-the-missing-platform
Exclusive: Amid a rising mental health crisis, Stanford researchers find many companies ignoring posts about self-harm
smith Johnes says:
Thanks for sharing this article on Web development trends, these trends are going to help a lot.
Tomi Engdahl says:
James Vincent / The Verge:
Facebook says it is adding contextual labels like “satire page” and “public official” to some posts in News Feeds, to reduce confusion about their origin — Facebook is adding labels to satire pages in the News Feed — Facebook is adding additional labels to posts
Facebook hopes tiny labels on posts will stop users confusing satire with reality
Facebook is adding labels to satire pages in the News Feed
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/8/22373291/facebook-label-news-feed-page-posts-fan-satire-public-official?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
Facebook is adding additional labels to posts from Pages that appear in users’ News Feeds in a bid to reduce confusion about their origin. These labels will include “public official,” “fan page,” and “satire page.” The company says it’s already started testing the deployment of these labels in the US, and will gradually add them to more posts.
Facebook hasn’t offered any explanation as to why it’s adding these labels, but identifying satire seems particularly important. Take a look at the social shares for any news articles written by well-known satirical sites like The Onion or The Babylon Bee and you’ll find plenty of people taking these stories at face value. In such a context these posts are essentially a type of misinformation, even if their creators did not intend this. Even high profile figures like former president Donald Trump have mistaken these stories for real reports.
This isn’t the first time the social network giant has tried to make the context of posts in the News Feed clearer. In June last year it began labeling media outlets which are “wholly or partially under the editorial control of their government.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Matt Mullenweg:
Matt Mullenweg denounces Wix’s bizarre marketing campaign against WordPress and says Wix’s business model “is getting customers to pay more and more every year” — Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it …
Wix and Their Dirty Tricks
https://ma.tt/2021/04/wix-dirty-tricks/
Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it, has now decided the best way to gain relevance is attacking the open source WordPress community in a bizarre set of ads. They can’t even come up with original concepts for attack ads, and have tried to rip-off of Apple’s Mac vs PC ads, but tastelessly personify the WordPress community as an absent, drunken father in a therapy session.
Wix is a for-profit company with a valuation that peaked at around 20 billion dollars, and whose business model is getting customers to pay more and more every year and making it difficult to leave or get a refund. (Don’t take my word for it, look at their investor presentations.) They are so insecure that they are also the only website creator I’m aware of that doesn’t allow you to export your content, so they’re like a roach motel where you can check in but never check out. Once you buy into their proprietary stack you’re locked in, which even their support documentation admits:
So if we’re comparing website builders to abusive relationships, Wix is one that locks you in the basement and doesn’t let you leave. I’m surprised consumer protection agencies haven’t gone after them.
Philosophically, I believe in open source, and if WordPress isn’t a good fit for you there are other great open source communities like Drupal, Joomla, Jekyll, and Typo3.
I have to believe that users will care about that in the long run, and maybe that’s why Squarespace just passed up Wix in market share. They natively support exporting into WordPress’ format and don’t have to resort to dirty tricks to be successful. I expect Squarespace’s upcoming IPO will be a great one.
https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206566687-Exporting-your-site
Tomi Engdahl says:
Compare The Top 10 Website Builders
Find The Best Website Builder To Create Your Own Site! – April 2021
https://www.webcreate.io/website-builders-comparison/?edgetrackerid=100491305726733_kwd-37652728184&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIz7Xg1ODw7wIV1PhRCh1AQQOpEAAYAiAAEgKlF_D_BwE
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wix vs Squarespace comparison
https://www.websitebuildertips.com/comparison/wix-vs-squarespace/?utm_campaign=ma_websitebuildertips_bi_wix_eng_1^95842367671&experiment_id=9179539874^^415230585490^squarespace%20pricing^e&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIz7Xg1ODw7wIV1PhRCh1AQQOpEAAYAyAAEgImLfD_BwE
Platforms Overview
Wix’s website building platform has attracted 160 million users since launching in 2006. A drag and drop page-builder makes design easy and fun, and a powerful set of features and apps make it a good choice for small business owners, entrepreneurs and design professionals.
Wix and Squarespace websites are built by adding content blocks to pages, in a visual WYSIWYG (drag and drop) editor. Everyday objects such as text, photo galleries contact forms and more are available to add to to pre designed templates.You can then customize to suit your needs, using settings panels that are similar to editing Powerpoint templates.
Squarespace has been around since 2003, and has a loyal following of users. Get started using a professionally designed template, and add extra functionality to suit your needs. Squarespace sites have a heavy emphasis on looks, mobile responsiveness and speed. Templates have less customization options than Wix, but the curated styles look nice.
Squarespace supports both third party, and native integrations, which covers many common website use cases, but these are limited in number compared to Wix.
Getting started with Wix is free, and you can use most apps with limited functionality without ever paying a penny. Use their free domain name while you explore the platform, until you are ready to launch.
Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial, before shutting down access to your site.
Both platforms handle hosting and you can buy or connect domains, as long as you take a premium plan.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Google tracks with the ping-attribute
https://dev.to/madsstoumann/google-tracking-and-the-ping-attribute-41d5
Have you heard about the ping-attribute?
It’s an attribute on the nchor-tag, that most people haven’t heard about.
Websites can use the ping-attribute to track clicks on hyperlinks.
You provide a space-separated list of URI’s
Each URI will receive a POST with the request payload ‘PING’.
Google use this feature on their search-result-page.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Am I FLoCed?
https://amifloced.org/
Google is testing FLoC on Chrome users worldwide. Find out if you’re one of them.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Miksi jokaisen yrityksen pitäisi tehdä blogitekstejä?
https://www.innoclub.fi/miksi-jokaisen-yrityksen-pitaisi-tehda-blogiteksteja/
Meiltä kysytään lähes jokaisessa markkinointiin ja mainontaan liittyvässä palaverissa, että ”onko meidän ihan pakko tehdä blogitekstejä?” Vastaus on: välttämättä juuri blogitekstejä ei ole pakko tehdä, mutta asiakkaillesi sopivaa sisältöä sinun on lähes välttämätöntä tuottaa.