Understanding MARTI: A New Metadata Framework for AI 19 Nov 2024, 4:08 pm

At its core, MARTI is a bridge. It harmonizes with existing metadata standards like the Content Authenticity Initiative, Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy, and the W3C’s PROV. It anticipates the needs of future standards, laws and practices, such as those proposed by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, and Making Data FAIR.—Carrie Bickner

As I study Carrie Bickner’s initial posts on the MARTI Framework she’s developing to manage AI metadata across various disciplines, a familiar feeling steals over me.

It’s similar to how I felt during the early days of The Web Standards Project (WaSP), when a handful of us took on the quarreling browser makers in what seemed a Quixotic attempt to bring consistency, predictability, usability, and accessibility to an already Balkanized web.

Fortunately, at that time, we had two aces up our sleeves: 1., the standards already existed, thanks to the W3C, and 2., the EU and Clinton Administration were suing Microsoft, which meant that the tech press was interested in hearing what we had to say—even if evangelizing web standards had little to do with accusations that Microsoft was abusing its monopoly power.

Once more with feeling: standards from the community

Years after The WaSP declared victory, and browser stagnation had begun to set in, I felt that same thrill vicariously when Eric Meyer, Tantek Çelik, and Matt Mullenweg invented XFN (XHTML Friends Network), inverting the standards creation pyramid so that great ideas were empowered to bubble up from small groups to the wider community, Open Source style, rather than always coming from the top (W3C) down.

I’ve no doubt that microformats were the spark that lit the HTML5 fuse, and we all remember how Steve Jobs used the new markup language to power the first iPhone, initiating the mobile era we now live in.

More about microformats history is available, and you can read Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers online for free—or buy the 2nd Edition, coauthored with Rachel Andrew, directly from Jeremy.

And now I feel those same stirrings, that same excitement about possibilities, as I study Carrie’s first posts about MARTI, an emerging object-oriented metadata framework that can be used to articulate rights-permissions, preservation metadata, provenance, relationships between objects, levels of AI involvement, and contextual information such as usage history and ethical considerations. 

Here’s why I’m excited (and you may be, too).

What do you wanna do tonight, MARTI?

For better or worse, our ideas create our reality. For better or worse, we have atomic power, the web, and social media. There’s no putting these genies back into their bottles. And there’s certainly no shutting down AI, however you may feel about it. Nor need we, as long as we have smart guardrails in place. 

I believe that MARTI—particularly as it promotes responsibility, transparency, and integrity in documenting AI’s role in content creation and curation—has the potential to be one of those guardrails.

Drafted by a career digital librarian, this provisional  metadata framework for human/generative AI output won’t stop bad actors from scraping content without permission. But if it is extended by our community and embraced by the companies and organizations building AI businesses, MARTI has the potential to bring rigor, logic, and connectedness to the field. In Carrie’s words:

The emergence of generative AI marks a transformative moment in human creativity, problem-solving, and knowledge-sharing. MARTI (Metadata for AI Responsibility, Transparency, and Integrity) is a provisional metadata framework designed to navigate this new landscape, offering a standardized yet adaptable approach to understanding, describing, and guiding the outputs of human-AI collaboration—and even those generated autonomously by AI.

At the heart of MARTI lies a robust object model—a modular structure that organizes metadata into reusable, interoperable components. This model ensures transparency, traceability, and ethical integrity, making it the cornerstone of the MARTI framework.

MARTI is not just an architecture for describing AI output, but it offers a way of structuring policy and a possible foundation for a new literacy. This is not about teaching every individual to code or engineer prompts. It’s about empowering humanity to collectively understand, describe, and guide everything we make with AI, ensuring accountability, transparency, and ethical integrity at every step.

MARTI is a framework for creating structured, standardized documentation that is attached to or embedded in AI-generated content. This documentation, or metadata, can be created by people collaborating with AI tools to produce content. Additionally, AI processes themselves can generate and embed metadata into their outputs, ensuring transparency, traceability, and accountability at every stage of content creation.

MARTI also offers a variety of potentially transformative business applications.

Disclaimer: the author is a friend of mine. But then again, so is every other thought leader mentioned in this article (with the exception of the late Steve Jobs, although our lives did touch when he fired me from a project—but that’s another story).

For more MARTI magic, check these posts:

• Meet Marti
• Object Model Overview
• Domain-Specific Attributes in MARTI
• MARTI: The Object of Our Affections
• New! Safeguarding Intellectual Property: How Blogging Platforms Can Use MARTI to Protect the Creative Content Ecosystem
• Also new! Help Us Establish a Home for MARTI
• Haikus, Sonnets, and Leaves: The Morphology of Metadata for Intellectual Units
• This Is Your Brain on ChatGPT

And if you’ve a mind to do so, please pitch in!

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Veterans Day Remembrance 11 Nov 2024, 12:11 pm

Writing on this website on November 11, 2002, one year and two months after 9/11, my late father Maurice had this to say:

My wife Catherine held up an Annenberg report on World War II, written by Donald L. Miller that she had just downloaded from the web. “Murray,” she said, “please read this, because I remember that you said the same thing to me one year ago.” She pointed to a place in the article where I read, “As one GI said: ‘I think it would have been a catastrophe if Hitler would’ve won.’” The article continued, “That expletive had to be stopped,” said another; “that’s why I joined up.”

I joined the Navy to “stop Hitler” when I was seventeen and a half, and had not finished high school. Since I was that young, I needed parental consent to join. My father, a WW I veteran, enlisted when he was fifteen because his father signed for him and said that he was seventeen. My father went through hell in Europe—survived a Mustard Gas attack, had his knee cap blown away, had surgery to get a silver knee cap, took a bayonet wound in the neck, and was shell shocked. He was in a veteran’s home for one year after the war ended and was given a total disability and honorable discharge.

My father and I were never close. I always seemed to be the object of his anger. He battered me frequently when I was a child. Yet, at the enlistment office where he signed for me, I saw tears in his eyes. I never knew if those tears were for him, for me, or for both of us.

One week after I joined, the war in the European theatre ended. After boot camp, I found myself in the Amphibious Corps being trained for the invasion of Japan. The Amphibious Corps predated the Navy Seals. We were the sailors that used amphibious craft to land on the beaches and return for more of the same until the invasion was over or we were blown out of the water.

The training prepared me to drive LCVP’s (Landing Craft Vehicles and Personnel) and LCM’s (Landing Craft Machinery). These diesel landing craft were used to carry troops, vehicles, and machinery to the beaches during an invasion. The life of an amphibious sailor was estimated at three minutes in combat.

After training, we were being made ready for the invasion when Truman approved release of the atomic bombs, thus ending the war. At the time, I didn’t realize that this action saved my life, the lives of many Americans, and countless Japanese who otherwise would have suffered through a lengthy invasion.

The war ended and I was assigned to train Marines in amphibious warfare. From the time that I enlisted ’til my discharge, my Navy career lasted 13 months. I had signed up for the duration plus six months.

Today, people seem to be ready to condemn troops for mistakes made by governments. Most young people who enlist do so for an ideal. After the war, I learned that my grandparents had been incinerated in Treblinka when they were in their eighties. I did not know that they lost their lives that way.

We still have to think about the megalomaniacs who would rule the world if they were given a chance. In WW II, we waited too long to try to stop Hitler. This caused a devastating war that lasted too long, killed too many people, and permitted insane villains to attempt to rule the world.

I love people who want peace, who worry about their children, who respect education, who see the potential for good in most people. But I also realize that there are people who would destroy a democracy, and return the world to an age of ignorance and tyranny. We must be vigilant to only fight when the battle is right, to survive in a chaotic world, and when a situation arises that requires a proper defense, not hope that the villains will go away of their own accord, but to let them know that we will fight for justice. This Veteran’s Day, let’s honor all of the people who have served their country in times of need.

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Web Design Inspiration 5 Nov 2024, 12:47 pm

If you’re finding today a bit stressful for some reason, grab a respite by sinking into any of these web design inspiration websites.

Gathered from conversations on Reddit and elsewhere, each site offers a collection of other sites’ designs, chosen for impact, originality, and innovation. Each collection should offer at least a few designs that will inspire your own ideas and creativity—and most contain more than a few. Lots more.

We make no claims as to usability, accessibility, or appropriateness of design. Which doesn’t mean that the chosen websites are unusable, inaccessible, or inappropriate to the brand, subject matter, or needs of the audience. Indeed, from the care devoted to the graphical interface, we assume that many of these sites are as good under the hood as they are on the surface. But it’s just an assumption; we haven’t tested, and the point of this post is purely to share visual and creative inspiration. Enjoy!

• https://godly.website/ (collection)
• https://www.awwwards.com/ (collection)
• https://www.cssdesignawards.com/ (collection)
• https://land-book.com/  (collection)
• https://httpster.net/  (collection)
• https://goodui.org/  (UI patterns A/B tested, experiments)
• https://saaslandingpage.com/ (SaaS landing page examples)
• https://mobbin.com/browse/ios/apps (collection)

And for dessert…

Enjoy https://betteroff.studio/, an individual studio’s rhythmically organized, sensory-appealing design.

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I Remember, Part 1 22 Oct 2024, 9:36 pm

I was in 3rd Grade. Our teacher went away for a few minutes, then came back, crying. She was a tough public school teacher of the old school, the kind my father’s friends would have called “an old bat.”

She was not like the young pretty teacher on The Little Rascals films that played at 7:00 am on local TV on Saturday mornings. She was like all the other teachers in those Little Rascals films. The mean ones, with arms like rolling pins.

I wish I could remember her name. Miss Ball, let us say.

We feared her. In the classroom, on any normal day, she reigned with an iron will. She could halt our mayhem in three seconds or less, with a blast on the coach’s whistle that hung from her neck. But there was never just one blast. “People!” she would shout when pushed beyond endurance by one of us not knowing the answer to a homework question. “People!”—her face red.

That’s what she did on normal days.

That was her as we had known her.

We had never seen her show any feeling besides anger, impatience with our shortcomings, or a withering disdain for the entire Cosmos, whose failures I am sure she catalogued daily.

Yet here she stood, shoulders drooping, fists clenched pointlessly, raccoon rings forming where her mascara, her single concession to the strict appearance standards of the time, had begun to run.

Her voice, when she spoke to us from the doorway, was strange:

“Oh, you poor children,” she said. “President Kennedy has been shot.”

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I stayed. 4 Oct 2024, 1:32 pm

My insight into corporate legal disputes is as meaningful as my opinion on Quantum Mechanics. What I do know is that, when given the chance this week to leave my job with half a year’s salary paid in advance, I chose to stay at Automattic.

Listen, I’m struggling with medical debts and financial obligations incurred by the closing of my conference and publishing businesses. Six months’ salary in advance would have wiped the slate clean. From a fiduciary point of view, if nothing else, I had to at least consider my CEO’s offer to walk out the door with a big bag of dollars.

But even as I made myself think about what six months’ salary in a lump sum could do to help my family and calm my creditors, I knew in my soul there was no way I’d leave this company. Not by my own choice, anyway.

I respect the courage and conviction of my departed colleagues. I already miss them, and most only quit yesterday. I feel their departure as a personal loss, and my grief is real. The sadness is like a cold fog on a dark, wet night.

The next weeks will be challenging. My remaining coworkers and I will work twice as hard to cover temporary employee shortfalls and recruit new teammates, while also navigating the complex personal feelings these two weeks of sudden, surprising change have brought on. Who needs the aggravation, right? But I stayed.

I stayed because I believe in the work we do. I believe in the open web and owning your own content. I’ve devoted nearly three decades of work to this cause, and when I chose to move in-house, I knew there was only one house that would suit me. In nearly six years at Automattic, I’ve been able to do work that mattered to me and helped others, and I know that the best is yet to come. 

I also know that the Maker-Taker problem is an issue in open source, just as I know that a friend you buy lunch for every day, and who earns as much money as you do, is supposed to return the favor now and then. If a friend takes advantage, you’re supposed to say or do something about it. Addressing these imbalances is rarely pretty. Doing it in public takes its own kind of courage. Now it’s for the lawyers to sort out. 

On May 1, 1992, a man who’d been horribly beaten by the L.A. police called for calm in five heartfelt, memorable words: “Can’t we all get along?” We couldn’t then, and we aren’t, now, but my job at Automattic is about helping people, and that remains my focus at the conclusion of this strange and stressful week. I’m grateful that making the tough business decisions isn’t my responsibility. In that light, my decision to stay at Automattic was easy.

P.S. We’re hiring.

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9/13/01 11 Sep 2024, 11:37 pm

Reprinted from my original post of 9/13/01. You can still visit the original, if you wish, but the stylesheet disappeared during a server migration, so it’s plain text only.

11 September

My part of New York City is not burning.

An hour has passed since the Twin Towers evaporated with 20,000 souls inside them. Up here, a few miles north of the hit, a surreal calm prevails.

My part of New York City is unhurt, but changed. The Mayor moves fast. Third Avenue has been blockaded. On Lexington, teenagers with machine guns guard the 25th Street Armory.

On 27th Street, a couple is passionately kissing. Behind them, the sky is filled with white smoke.

Everyone has left work. It’s like the Fourth of July. And then again it’s nothing like the Fourth of July.

At 33rd & Lex, a woman in an electric green dress squats down to take a snapshot of the Chrysler Building, standing tall and unaffected to the north. I catch myself thinking they haven’t bombed that one yet.

It takes twice as long as it should to reach my destination. In my hand is an envelope filled with cash for a friend. It is one small, achievable mission on a day of fear and uncertainty. I leave the envelope with the doorman. Then I hug him. Then I go.

Multiply my story by nine million. All over New York, people are fulfilling small tasks, then returning home — if they have homes to go to. Battery Park has been evacuated. The entire downtown area is being blockaded.

As I pass a bodega, a radio perched among the fruits and flowers announces that 200 firemen are dead.

By the time I get home, I feel as if I have swum a great distance.

I can’t reach my brother or my father to tell them I’m alive. All long distance circuits are busy. All cell phones are dead.

Among other things, the air attack has taken out the antennae used by area broadcasters. The local TV news is only available on cable.

The news is running loops of the impact, loops of the implosions. Like everyone else, I watch, hoping to see or hear something that makes sense. But all I learn is that thousands of New Yorkers can die in an instant.

In the late afternoon, a third building collapses, taking out part of the power grid. My ISP stops authenticating. I lose Internet access.

At night we venture out again.

Third Avenue by Cabrini Hospital is still heavily guarded. We wait for permission to cross the street.

At the hospital, where we intended to donate blood, we are turned away. They’ve run out of blood bags.

We wander up to my partner’s apartment. She asks about my trip to San Francisco. I find I have little to say. Last week was last week. Last week we lived in an entirely different world.

The night sky is filled with smoke as fire continues to consume the financial capital of the world. There’s a hole in the cityscape. There’s a hole in the earth where the twin towers stood. There are living people trapped in the hole, beneath 110 floors worth of rubble and metal.

I lie awake all night.

12 September

The streets of lower Midtown are movie-set empty. I still can’t call London or Pittsburgh. I still have no Internet access.

They’re not letting anyone below 14th Street who isn’t supposed to be there.

I’m supposed to be a mile below 14th Street tonight to get a lease approved. I’ve been waiting for this meeting for four weeks.

I’m told to bring my lease and passport if I hope to make it past security – and to allow two hours for the short trip downtown.

I wonder if this is what life will be like now. Not only in New York, but all over America.

The TV news says the cloud that’s been floating over the city for 30 hours is filled with asbestos. The TV news says stay home and shut your windows.

I feel sick after crossing the street with a bag of laundry. The laundry man covers his mouth with his hand. The laundry man tells me go home, go home.

I cancel the lease approval meeting. I feel wrung out. I wonder if the source of my exhaustion is asbestos or grief.

Around 8 p.m., my building and dozens of others are evacuated in response to a bomb threat at the Empire State Building. The bomb threat proves false. Someone’s idea of a joke.

13 September

Strong winds are expected to push the asbestos cloud north over the entire East Side this afternoon, causing ocular and respiratory problems in much of Manhattan.

For the third day straight, when I try to reach my father in Pittsburgh I get a busy signal.

No one is permitted below 14th Street without picture I.D. and proof of residency. People cannot return to their homes.

Businesses below 14th Street have been shut down, including my ISP. Dial-up access is down because no one can get in to turn on the servers. DSL is down because two Verizon facilities were destroyed in the fire.

My damage is infinitesimal compared to the horrors of this week, but I find myself calculating it anyway: I can’t work, I can’t contact my people, and I can’t move.

I can’t just sit here, either, so I head out for a long walk through my city before the big winds kick up and make breathing hazardous.

We’ve all seen children on playgrounds glance up to reassure themselves that Mommy or Daddy is still close by. If you asked, I’d tell you I’m running errands and meeting with my business partner. But inside I’m really doing what any three-year-old would do. I’m reassuring myself that New York City is still here.

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Broken Blossoms 8 Sep 2024, 1:18 pm

Children with abusive family members cannot protect themselves. It’s awful when the whole family witnesses their pain and humiliation, and worse when the abuse goes on in secret. During and after each crime against them, the children blame themselves. Their genes scream to trust and forgive what their minds know is wrong. 

When they should be learning how the world works, instead they craft intricate and absurd explanations for what is happening to them, or else escape into comforting creative play. The lucky know that their creative escape worlds aren’t real. The unlucky can’t always tell. 

As these children go out into the world, other children, sensing their damage, shun, mock, and bully them. Instead of comfort and growth, the world outside the home reinforces the message that they are hated, inferior, and deserve nothing but violence. If they belong to a despised minority, their genetic identity can become part of their explanation for why these things keep happening to them.

Years pass. Their minds and bodies mature, but their spirits never catch up. No matter how deeply they bury their shame, their damage makes them meat for future predators. If they’re lucky, they find partners who secretly understand and want to help them heal. But cunning predators often pretend to be healing helpers, and some wounded spend their lives mistaking one punishing narcissist after another for their love savior.

Should the walking wounded find true love with an equal partner, they will almost certainly lose it. Therapy can help them understand why they keep making the same mistakes, but only rarely will it lead to true change or the possibility of lasting happiness.

Some wounded eventually choose to live alone. The luckiest start families and treat their children as they themselves should have been treated. Raising loved children is the only consistent and lasting healing some will know. For me, it has been enough.

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Strange Beliefs of Childhood № 99 21 Aug 2024, 11:24 am

Between 6th and 7th grade, my friends turned against me. It was as if everyone else had turned cool and teenaged over the summer, while I remained a child.

After years of close friendship and admiration, my pals’ cruel jokes and new meanness not only hurt, they were weird and baffling. To make sense of it all, I concocted the fantasy explanation that my parents must have secretly been paying my friends to be nice to me during the previous years …

… and that they must have somehow run out of cash as I entered seventh grade, causing the other kids, who were no longer on the payroll, to show their true feelings toward me.

What strange things did you believe?

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What happened to the Share button in Zoom? 15 Jul 2024, 5:08 pm

Zoom has always included a clickable button/badge at the top left of its primary meeting interface window. Click the badge to copy the URL of that meeting. You can then, with just one more click in any messaging system, send that URL to the other meeting participants. Fast. Simple. Drop-dead easy. Elegant.

It comes in especially handy when people didn’t get (or didn’t see or for some reason can’t click on) the meeting link in their invite. Or when the meeting link is hidden behind a tab behind a tab behind a tab in their browser. Or for any of a dozen other reasons you might want to grab the URL of a meeting you’re in, and zap it to a colleague.

How wise are the designers of Zoom to have solved this problem!

And talk about usable! The button’s placement at the top left of the meeting window, with plenty of free open space around it, means that any user (regardless of software experience level) can quickly find the button when they needed it. It’s placed right where your eyes know to look for it.

Good design! Smartly focused on what’s most important to the user.

So, anyway, Zoom seems to have removed the button.

—As I discovered during a Zoom meeting with a colleague 30 minutes ago. (Or, more accurately, a Zoom meeting without that colleague.)

—Who texted me to request the Zoom URL. But I couldn’t send it to them. I couldn’t send it, because I couldn’t see it, because the interface was hiding it.

—Because Zoom has decided to remove that affordance, replacing it with… well, nothing, actually.

It is possible that the affordance still exists somewhere within the Zoom interface, in some gloomily cobwebbed, rarely visited subscreen or other. Possibly with a rewritten label, so that any Zoom customers lucky enough to find it will fail to recognize it, even if staring directly at it with the fixed gaze of an astronomer.

I don’t say Zoom has definitely removed one of the nicest (and possibly, in its humble way, most important) tools their product offered. I don’t say that because I can’t be sure. I merely say, if they haven’t removed this function, they might as well go ahead and do so, for all the good its hidden presence does for Zoom’s millions of users. If the tool is hidden somewhere in the deep background layers of Zoom, I sure couldn’t find it.

So, after wasting time hunting for and texting about the missing Zoom link affordance (here comes the punchline), my colleague and I ended up holding our Zoom call…

… in Google Meet.

If I were a Zoom executive or investor, this might worry me.

Offered with love, UX is hard, and not all decisions are in our hands.

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One weird trick 9 Jul 2024, 5:11 pm

They say you should manage down. You’re supposed to manage the people who work for you. For many people who become leads, it’s the toughest and least satisfying part of the job. This is especially true for people who become leads primarily because they’ve been on the job longer than the people around them—not because they had a management jones to satisfy.

They also say you should manage up—subtly assert control of the people you work for. Help them stop short of a bad idea and find their way to a better one. If you can manage up without being obvious about it, you just might save your job, your boss’s job, and your team’s work. 

And yet—

Management goes only so far.

The pains of managing up and down are better than the pains of not being able to manage at all. Further, if you swear by managing up or down, I’m not here to discredit you, nor would I dream of doing so, nor would I have cause.

But I am here today to ask you to also try thinking a different way.

Do keep helping people, whether you work for them, work with them, or they work for you.

But don’t think of it as managing them.

Think of it as helping a colleague, just as you’d help a friend, a family member, or (when you’re at your best, and when it’s safe) a stranger.

Help to help, because we’re built to help. We feel better when we do it.

Life is not a contest. At least, it doesn’t need to be chiefly or primarily a contest. If you request feedback and I provide it, what counts is that it helps you. Same when I ask for your help. My position versus yours within this particular hierarchy doesn’t matter. The ideas matter. And the best idea can come from anyone.

Hierarchy matters at times, sure. But not most of the time. Most of the time what matters is showing up, doing your work, and helping others do theirs. 

Have a better day!

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Designer Jonathan Lee 20 Jun 2024, 1:32 pm

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The gift of a three-month sabbatical 28 May 2024, 8:22 pm

It was late winter when my sabbatical began, and it’s late spring as it comes to an end. Next week I return to my post after three months’ paid leave, courtesy of Automattic’s sabbatical benefit. Three months. A season. With full pay, and zero work responsibilities. In a job full of rewards, this is perhaps the greatest perk. Here’s why:

You work for so much of your life that your time passes in a blur. You don’t even notice it hastening by until someone or something calls your attention to a past milestone. 

And then suddenly, into this rushing blur, comes an uncanny gift: back-to-back days that are yours, to do with as you choose. For a long enough period of time that your work brain quiets. For the first time in years, you have a chance to reflect on who you are, and where you are right now. To see where you’re going, and consider whether it’s still the right destination for the person you’re becoming. To think about who’s traveling with you.

During my sabbatical, I was able to renovate my apartment and rid it of books, furniture, and clothing I no longer need. Without three months to call my own, I would never have had the insight to seek these changes, let alone the time and energy to implement them correctly. 

And because I had time, loads of it, three big swollen months of it, I was able to make these moves calmly and judiciously, instead of rushing anxiously, bungling things because I had to make snap decisions, and regretting the mistakes for years. 

The gift of time also let me and the people I care most about look at ourselves, rejoice in all the good, and sand down a few rough edges.

Thanks to the sabbatical, I also tripled my daily steps. Admittedly, I started from a low step count because I am still recovering from Long COVID, and because I am slightly arthritic (age, old injuries), and because I tend to sit in my chair for huge swaths of physically inert hours, speed typing and mousing and forgetting to get up and get out. My father was always working, and so have I been. And I’ve let my anxiety (always a problem, but worse after COVID) turn me into a chair-bound workaholic, even though I know better. 

I do not blame my job for the way I’d let myself run down. The job encourages us to have balance in our lives. I ignored that advice. But when I return to work, I will follow it. Because of this time in which I have luxuriated as if it were a warm bath, I have built new health habits that I will carry forward into my return to work.

I’ve even made some mature (and long overdue) decisions about what and how much I share online. Again, it’s all thanks to the amazing gift of this sabbatical. (Forgive me if following some of the older links here or on my disparate social feeds leads you to dead ends.)

I plan to use my next sabbatical for traveling, but I’m thrilled with how I spent this one, and I will always be grateful for this wonderful gift of time.

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Ah yes, the famous “intern did it” syndrome 22 May 2024, 1:40 pm

Soon after we launched A List Apart Magazine, we began to notice other websites reusing our content (including illustrations) without permission, and often without so much as a credit. As that violated our author’s copyrights and ours, we’d invariably reach out to the makers of those websites with brief, politely worded takedown requests. 

Not every content poacher was contactable, but those we did reach almost always quickly complied with our requests. They also nearly always claimed that an “intern” or “freelancer” had grabbed the content without their knowledge or permission. Some, perhaps fearing that we might be litigious, even went so far as to tell us that they’d “fired” the imaginary intern/freelancer the instant we informed them of the issue.

We always pretended to believe them.

Why? Because letting embarrassed people save face is kind. It also helps the whole interaction go more smoothly. Besides, the amateur pillager claiming “the intern did it” today may be your colleague or friend tomorrow.

I recalled this common awkwardness yesterday after a former US president who’s running for reelection blamed Nazi language in his social media post on a “staffer.” It would seem the buck stops anywhere but here.

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Indigenous 7 May 2024, 1:27 pm

The definition of “Zionist” that I’ve always used is a person who believes the Jews deserve a state where they can be safe. That is something I believe. I also believe the Palestinians deserve a state where they can be safe, the Israeli occupation has been a disaster and Benjamin Netanyahu needs to be replaced.

As for the suggestion that Jews, or more precisely Ashkenazi Jewish Israelis — those of European heritage — should book a one-way ticket to Warsaw, I realize it’s not a point of view representative of the whole of the protesters on U.S. campuses. Yet it is undeniably a reflection of the “settler colonialist” position on Israel, a narrative that has gained traction despite more than half of Israeli Jews being Mizrahi — that is, from the Middle East. Palestinians and Israelis are two Indigenous peoples occupying the land that is being fought over.

—Have we learned nothing? by Seth Greenland, Los Angeles Times

Also available from Apple News

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Suckage begins here: why search engines now prioritize advertising over good UX 24 Apr 2024, 12:30 pm

This kind of virtuous rising tide rent, which benefits everyone, doesn’t last. Once the growth of the new market slows, the now-powerful innovators can no longer rely on new user adoption and collective innovation from a vibrant ecosystem to maintain their extraordinary level of profit. In the dying stages of the old cycle, the companies on top of the heap turn to extractive techniques, using their market power to try to maintain their now-customary level of profits in the face of macroeconomic factors and competition that ought to be eating them away. They start to collect robber baron rents. That’s exactly what Google, Amazon, and Meta are doing today.

— Tim O’Reilly, Rising Tide Rents and Robber Baron Rents: The Replacement of Organic Search with Advertising by Google and Amazon and What That Might Mean for the Future of AI

See also:

The Man Who Killed Google Search by EDWARD ZITRON:  This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it. (Hat tip: mORA.)

Search Party (2009): Triple Issue No. 292 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, is all about search. By JOHN FERRARA, AVINASH KAUSHIK, and LOU ROSENFELD.

Illustration: Kevin Cornell

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This Web of Ours, Revisited 19 Apr 2024, 4:57 pm

ONE MONTH and 24 years ago, in “Where Have All the Designers Gone?” (my HTMHell design column for Adobe of March 20, 2000), I discussed the deepening rift between aesthetically focused web designers and those primarily concerned with creating good experiences online:

More and more web designers seem less and less interested in web design.

Over the past 18 months or so, many of the best practitioners in the industry seem to have given up on the notion that a low-bandwidth, less than cutting-edge site is worth making. Much of the stuff they’ve been making instead has been beautiful and inspiring. But if top designers wash their hands of the rest of the Web, whose hands will build it, and whose minds will guide it? The possibilities are frightening.

An Imperfect Medium for Perfectionists

Why were many of the leading graphic designers and studios at the time uninterested in web design? For one thing, designers trained to strive for visual perfection found the web’s unpredictability depressing. The article provided clues to the frustrations of the time:

Good designers spend hours tweaking typography in Illustrator and Photoshop. Then visitors with slow connections turn off images.

Of course, where professionals trained in graphic design saw a distressing lack of control, others glimpsed in the infant technology a tremendous potential to help people, pixel-perfection be damned. To reduce the conflict to a cartoon, you might characterize it as David Carson versus Jakob Nielsen—though doing so would trivialize the concerns of both men. Designers already charged with creating websites found themselves somewhere in the middle—barking themselves hoarse reminding clients and managers that pixel-perfect rendering was not a thing on the web, while arguing with developers who told designers the exact same thing.

Visually inspiring websites like K10k showed that the web could, if approached carefully and joyfully, provide aesthetic delight. But many designers (along with organizations like AIGA) were unaware of those sites at the time.

Us and Them

Another source of tension in the medium in 2000 sprang from the discrepancy between the privileged access designers enjoyed—fast connections, up-to-date browsers and operating systems, high-res monitors (at least for the time) offering thousands of colors—versus the slow modems, aging and underpowered computers, outdated browsers, and limited-color monitors through which most people at the time experienced the web.

Which was the real design? The widescreen, multicolor, grid-based experience? Or the 216-color job with pixelated Windows type, a shallow “fold,” and pictures of headline text that took forever to be seen?

To view your masterpiece the way most users experienced it, and at the syrup-slow speed with which they experienced it, was to have an awakening or a nightmare—depending on your empathy quotient. Some designers began to take usability, accessibility, and performance seriously as part of their jobs; others fled for the predictability of more settled media (such as print).

A New (Old) Hope

My March, 2000 article ended on an upbeat note—and a gentle call to action:

For content sites to attain the credibility and usefulness of print magazines; for entertainment sites to truly entertain; for commerce sites and Web-based applications to function aesthetically as well as technically, the gifts of talented people are needed. We hope to see you among them.

That was my hope in 2000, and, all these years later, it remains my vision for this web of ours. For though the browsers, connections, and hardware have changed substantially over the past 24 years, and though the medium and its practitioners have, to a significant extent, grown the Hell up, beneath the surface, in 2024, many of these same attitudes and conflicts persist. We can do better.

Minus the framesets that formerly contained it, you may read the original text (complete with archaic instructions about 4.0 browsers and JavaScript that broke my heart, but which Adobe’s editors and producers insisted on posting) courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

☞  Hat tip to Andrey Taritsyn for digging up the article, which I had long forgotten.

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Don’t bring venture capital to a knife fight 18 Apr 2024, 12:34 pm

Contrary to what Imran, Ken, and I’m sure many others at Humane believe, the iPhone didn’t begin with their work in the 2000’s on Project Purple. It began in 1976 with the Apple computer, and the decades of goodwill it built up in consumers. The project was spearheaded by a guy ready to waste billions in iPod revenue if it helped achieve his vision, and he answered to nobody. It came together at the perfect point in time, when everyone knew the power of the Internet, but there wasn’t a way to carry the whole experience in your pocket. You can’t replicate all these factors in a few years, no matter how much money a VC throws at you.

Benjamin Sandofsky, Oh, the Humanity: Why You Can’t Build Apple With Venture Capital

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Both Sides, No 17 Apr 2024, 9:44 pm

There’s no situation so awful our news media can’t make it worse. In a cowardly, doomed, and deeply misguided effort to appear “balanced” during an emergency that requires plain speaking, our news editors tie headlines into fantastic pretzels of spurious equivalence. In today’s edition of her subscriber-only newsletter, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin tears into an especially egregious atrocity by the copy wizards of The New York Times:

Journalism 101

People on social media and other critics justifiably mocked, derided and denounced the New York Times for the headline, “Two Imperfect Messengers Take On Abortion.” The sub-headline was nearly as bad: “Neither side of the abortion divide would probably design the exact candidate they have in 2024.” This could be the crown jewel of “both-sidesism,” accomplishing that feat in multiple ways.

For starters, it blurs the distinction between Biden’s clear and unwavering position (to write Roe v. Wade into a federal statute) with Trump’s well-documented inconsistencies, deflections and contradictions. These two men simply are not equally deficient communicators. That imbalance in clarity and sincerity actually might determine the campaign’s outcome.

In addition to mischaracterizing the candidates’ relative abilities, this quintessential “process story” diminishes the issue’s moral gravity. You could not imagine a 1942 headline: “Two imperfect messengers take on world war.” Awarding style points, as the story does, trivializes the abortion issue.

Finally, the Times headline amounts to a self-parody of gamified political coverage: “Neither side of the abortion divide would probably design the exact candidate they have in 2024.” (Well, neither team in the World Series would design the exact lineup they have.) In essence, the Times tells us, “No one’s perfect!” — an empty platitude. Journalists owe readers an accurate depiction of the candidates’ vast differences in consistency, clarity and moral seriousness on abortion. Alas, such precision would demand truth-telling in lieu of feigned “balance.”

Washington Post subscribers can view the complete text of today’s newsletter on the paper’s website. You may also sign up to get it in your inbox free of charge.

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For love of pixels 13 Apr 2024, 2:19 pm

Sure, watches that tell you when you’re walking unsteadily and pocket computer phones that show you the closest pizzeria are swell, but were you around for ResEdit? That humble yet supremely capable Macintosh resource editing tool is what we used to design pixel art back in the day. (And what day was that? Come August, it will be 30 years since the final release of ResEdit 2.1.3.) Stroll with us down memory lane as we celebrate the pearl anniversary of pixel art creation’s primary progenitor, and some of the many artists and design languages it inspired. Extra credit: When you finish your stroll, consider posting a Comment sharing your appreciation for this nearly forgotten art form and/or sharing links to additional pixel art icon treasures missing from our list below.

• Susan Kare website (kare.com) | Susan Kare Apple Macintosh icons (kare.com) | Susan Kare bio (Wikipedia)
• Iconfactory Freeware icons feat. decades-old works of genius such as this Copland-inspired Apple desktop collection
• The Dead Pixel Society (2014) and founders: “We honor the humble pixel with icon creations designed under 90’s era MacOS constraints: 256 colors, pixel-by-pixel, on a 32 x 32 canvas.”
• K10k in 2003 (℅ Web Design Museum); mini-bonus: K10k tag on Dribbble
• MOZCO !GARASH! via Wayback Machine ℅ Flickr post by John Rainsford
• Introducing Candybar by Panic and Iconfactory ℅ Wayback Machine
• Dead Pixel Society interview post (zeldman.com) and podcast (Episode № 121 of The Big Web Show featuring Justin Dauer AKA @pseudoroom, creator of the Baby Yoda icon adorning this post).
• Still online, albeit with missing files after many server migrations: this very website’s 1995 “Pardon My Icons” collection.
• Semi-related and interesting: “A Pixel Identity Crisis” by Scott Kellum in A List Apart Issue № 342, January 17, 2012

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Akismet means never having to say you’re sorry 9 Apr 2024, 2:11 pm

The wizards behind AI have been busy lately providing meaningful employment for digital nonpersons.

One of the hottest jobs for non-humans is crafting and deploying website guestbook spam. This market’s on fire!

If you thought the guestbook spam of yore was impressive, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The new, AI-assisted comment spam has improved keyword stuffing, fewer grammatical mistakes, and, best of all, there’s tons more of it. Your Comment section was never so useless!

And we’re not just talking quantity, here; we’re talking quality.

Compared to the spammers of yore, the new signal depressors have a bold confidence that proclaims, “Hello, world! I’m here to waste your time and extinguish what’s left of your hard-won reader community. Watch me work!”

Yes, the bots who shit in your sandbox are bigger, brassier, and better than ever at wasting your readers’ time and abusing your content to score points on the Google big board.

What’s that you say? You’re not a comment spam enthusiast?

In that case, do as I do: use Akismet to keep cruft where it belongs: off your website. Akismet was strong enough for the comment, form, and text spam of the past, and it’s strong enough for the new junk, too.

(Full disclosure: I work at Automattic, makers of Akismet, but I penned this post this morning purely as an Akismet customer, after happily reviewing the blocked comment spam on this here WordPress site of mine. Thanks, Akismet!)

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