A jQuery plugin for crashing IE6. That’ll teach those motherf!%@#s to upgrade their s#%t.
jQuery crash plugin
danah boyd on the participatory divide
From the Frontline roundtable I linked to earlier:
What worries me - and what I feel the need to call out - is not about whether or not everyone in the world will benefit in some ways by information and communication technologies, but whether or not the privileged will benefit more in ways that further magnifies structural inequality. I am certainly seeing this as the US college level, as more privileged US freshman are leaps and bounds ahead of their less privileged peers in terms of technological familiarity, a division that makes educating with technology in the classroom challenging.
MoMA.org is one year old (or fifteen)
Oh man, I can’t believe it’s been a whole year!
It was one year ago tomorrow that we launched the latest redesign of MoMA.org. (March 6 is a day that will be forever ingrained in the Digital Media team’s memory!) But MoMA has had an online presence for fifteen years now, since 1995, when an exhibition site for the design show Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design was developed. The following year, the Museum’s website, MoMA.org, officially launched, and we’ve been doing exhibition feature sites ever since.
One year ago I was working remotely from Groningen, NL where Ellie was doing a study abroad program. The weeks leading up to launch day were pretty brutal, probably my most intense working process since college. It seems so absurd, in retrospect, that most of it went down for me in that sleepy Dutch college town. Happy birthday MoMA.org! It was worth it.
The Ebert Club
I just got my first email from The Ebert Club and realized I forgot to link to it here. Roger Ebert says:
I want to make some money from the web. It may appear that I have an enormously successful web site here. I do. But I’m not making any money. In the years since the site began, my share of the profits has come to a pauper’s penny. The Far-Flung Correspondents aren’t the only ones here working for free. To be sure, the Sun-Times pays me handsomely, although less handsomely since we all went through a “belt-tightening,” so as not to lose our pants.
He goes on to discuss Negroponte’s micropayment future that never came to pass. It’s a simple problem that has evaded that particular simple solution:
The web that we surf every day is not paying for itself, and we sure as hell aren’t paying for it. You read me for free, and I read everybody else for free. This is not news.
If you like Ebert’s writing, or even if you’re not very familiar with it, read more about The Ebert Club and consider sending him five bucks.
MoMA interview with Yugo Nakamura
I was happily surprised to see this interview by Shannon Darrough, who I work with on MoMA.org.
Nakamura’s MONO*crafts 2.0 was also a big inspiration for me when I was first getting into web design. It feels dated now, of course, but I remember feeling thrilled to see this bold assertion in the navigation: interfaces can be impractical, users can be invited to explore and play.
danah boyd on ChatRoulette
It’s about finding joy in randomness.
For most users of all ages – but especially teens – the Internet today is about socializing with people you already know. But I used to love the randomness of the Internet. I can’t tell you how formative it was for me to grow up talking to all sorts of random people online. So I feel pretty depressed every time I watch people flip out about the dangers of talking to strangers. Strangers helped me become who I was. Strangers taught me about a different world than what I knew in my small town. Strangers allowed me to see from a different perspective. Strangers introduced me to academia, gender theory, Ivy League colleges, the politics of war, etc.
I completely agree, ChatRoulette feels like my first experiences meeting random people in AOL chat rooms. But I can also understand why many people would find it too creepy to try out.
There’s an iPhone app called PhotoSwap that operates on a similar principle. It’s also fun, but it’s too bogged down by those who tag their suggestive, but PG-rated, images “NR” for no reporting to the system administrators.
MoMA.org takes top museum website ranking
For the last year and a half I’ve been freelancing at MoMA’s digital media department, helping develop the MoMA.org front-end. In many ways it has been an ideal client for me: dependable pay, flexible terms, interesting work and people I get along with. I think I’ve done my best web development work here. So I’m very proud to see our efforts being recognized by Kunstpedia. Judith Dobrzynski summarizes the results on ArtsJournal:
The Museum of Modern Art takes the blue ribbon, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art not far behind.
Kunstpedia analyzed more than 680 museum websites worldwide, and ranked them thusly: “The scores are determined by comparing ranking data such as those of Google Page Rank, Alexa Ranking and Compete Ranking. Furthermore the number on-line references in the form of incoming links and references in user generated content have been analysed. The end score was determined by the sum of each individual score, given on basis of the position within the different data source which were analysed.”