Headlines and non-news

For as long as editors have had newspapers to fill, there have been news stories that aren't really news stories, and stories that get more attention than they deserve because of the editorial slant of the newspaper. Most people will have noticed a leading story in a newspaper about a nearby tragedy where one or two lives were lost which, when juxtaposed with a smaller article further back in the paper of hundreds of people being killed on the other side of the world, paints an ugly picture of the priorities of the editorial team and by extension, the readers. (The website mailwatch.co.uk collects and comments on some of the more notorious British tabloid front page headlines.)

The art of writing online headlines is slightly different to print, because you tend to be writing for a completely different audience. In print, you need to stand out more than the other newspapers in the newsagent and be the one that your target audience reaches for and buys- because that's where the money is. Online, you don't need to attract the attention of potential readers- you need to attract the attention of search engines, so that you're higher up the search list when someone's looking for a story about your subject.

"This site is best viewed in YOUR favourite web browser."

Back in the early days of the World Wide Web were the "Browser Wars." The Web was just taking off, and the vast majority of the browser market used the Netscape Navigator browser. One of Netscape's goals was to "level the playing field" among operating systems- in line with the ideals behind the World Wide Web project, to create a browser platform that was consistent across operating systems. Microsoft saw this as a threat, and released Internet Explorer as competition.I don't want to go into the details of the browser wars themselves- suffice to say that Netscape went out of business and subsequently Microsoft stopped developing Internet Explorer for about 7 years- but one consequence was that for some time, the browser market was split between Netscape and Microsoft.

The Paper Paradigm

There are aspects to the way we use computers which have become so ubiquitous that they are taken for granted. Twenty years ago or so, there was nothing unusual about using a computer without a graphical user interface. This is about how the elements of a computer desktop- including the desktop itself- have come to be the way they are.

Charles Babbage is famous for being the father of computers- he was the first to design a fully programmable computer, the Analytical Engine, which was the first programmable computer. Although it was never actually built, the Analytical Engine would have processed numbers via a system of gears, been powered by a steam engine and programmed using punch cards. It had nothing of the familiar shape of today's computer- the tv-like screen, keyboard and mouse. (Usually, there's a box of circuitry and disk drives too- whether this is sitting out of the way under a desk, out in full display, built into the screen or integrated with everything else in one portable box depends on the individual computer.) I've already talked a bit about how the keyboard and mouse came to be the typical setup- the hardware that you actually get your hands on. This is about the next "layer" of the user interface- how the computer actually deals with your keypresses and mouse movements, and communicates with the user.

The Human-Machine interface: The Keyboard and Mouse

A major factor in designing a website is the user interface; the user needs to be able to tell what they need to do to get to what they are loking for. Whether this is done by giving written instructions, graphic icons or established convention (such as underlined, blue text representing a link), the goal is to make it as intuitive as possible.

Before looking at what considerations need to be made in web design user interfaces, I want to take a step back and look at the broader picture; what we're dealing with before we even get to the website- the keyboard and the mouse, and where the vision of todays computers has come from.

The invention of the typewriter was a solution to a problem; contrary to what you might assume, the problem was that it was very difficult for blind people to write, so the first typewriter (as we know it) was patented in 1868 to give them a way to put words to paper.

Freedom of Information vs. Protection of Intellectual Property

This week, EMI announced that in May, they are to start selling their entire catalogue of music downloads without DRM copy protection, and with better audio quality. They will be available first through iTunes.

There's a quiet battle going on between proponents of freedom of information and protectors of intellectual property. I'm going to try to talk about the history and the principles of this conflict, rather than the politics surrounding it.