I’ve been trying to get my head around the different kinds of connections that people establish with other people and things on the Web. I need a framework, so I thought I’d try to classify some of the most popular mechanisms according to the criteria that set them apart. Step one was to identify the […]

Google’s announcement about Chrome dropping H.264 support for the HTML5 video element caused an explosion on the Web. I must admit that I initially fell in line with the “See! Google is Evil” narrative. Many parts of the announcement just didn’t seem to make sense. Google was dropping H.264 in the name of openness, but was […]

There has been a lot of recent talk about Google’s search results becoming more polluted with spam over time. Matthew Ingram’s article on GigaOm did a decent job summarizing it all. Also worth reading (and not linked directly in Matthew’s post) is Jeff Attwood’s post on the way this impacts StackOverflow, a popular programming Q&A site. Most […]

[This post is a transplant from another blog that I have since shut down. I occasionally need to point people to a primer like this one, so I’m reposting it here.] Even as a technical person who has spent most of their career programming or managing programmers, I was pretty confused when I first dipped my toes […]