Interesting elsewhere – 5 July 2011 » Community

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

Adrian Short » Blog Archive » Designing with the Delete key Getting rid of all the clutter on your website doesn’t require a great deal of design insight or technical skill. But it needs a lot of discipline. So once a day just delete something that you can live without and you’ll be working towards a faster, cheaper, simpler website with much happier users.
One Hundred & Forty Characters « Chris Floyd: Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances. Whereas Facebook seems to allow the user to construct a perceived or projected existence for themselves through the deployment of various convenient aids, Twitter just strips it all away and leaves the user with nothing but the utilitarian tool of 140 characters and the imagination of language. Over a sustained period of time or patch of ground you are always going to betray yourself. By that I mean that you will, layer by layer, reveal who you are and this will continue to be an ongoing and ever revelatory process. Other users will continue to be attracted to that or not, and vice versa. It’s really quite binary, whilst being relentlessly deep and wide, which I like. A lot.
On the shifting of control of personal data – honestlyreal My point is that strange things will start to happen in terms of operational continuity and completeness. There will be “gaps” in databases, where the personal data holders used to be. Instead of their information, there will be links and interfaces to the data they control for themselves. Will this create all sorts of headaches and risks just by itself? Enough to seriously dampen any service provider’s enthusiasm for adopting volunteered personal information?
BBC – About the BBC: BBC Online – Putting Quality First First I want to explain what we consider to be a “product”. It’s a self-contained entity within BBC Online, which unites technology and editorial to meet a clearly defined audience need. Each product has a simple and concise proposition that’s easily understood by the audience, is kept up to date, fits the overall strategy for BBC Online and has clear editorial leadership.
designing online social security for the future | New Technology Observations from a UK perspective (NTOUK) I’ve long believed, based on experience, that if you’re going to get current and future plans to work, you need to understand the past and what has worked previously –and what has failed. And why. Much has been learned over the past 15 years. In looking at where social security is heading over the next few years with the major DWP Universal Credit programme, I first took a brief look back over the past 15 years of trying to use online services to modernise and improve the design and operation of key public services.
Schneier on Security: Yet Another “People Plug in Strange USB Sticks” Story People get USB sticks all thetime. Theproblem isn’t that people are idiots, that they should know that a USB stick found on the street is automatically bad and a USB stick given away at a trade show is automatically good. The problem is that the OS trusts random USB sticks. The problem is that the OS will automatically run a program that can install malware from a USB stick. The problem is that it isn’t safe to plug a USB stick into a computer. Quit blaming the victim. They’re just trying to get by.