Flickr Is In Desperate Need of a Re-Design

As a photographer, I find Flickr incredibly useful for several functions, the most prominent of which is its ability to easily share an entire large-format slideshow using a single link. But Flickr has a ton of shortcomings on the design side, which Timoni West (via Gruber) is quick to point out:

Flickr can have a serious competitive advantage if they make photo uploads easy to see and navigate: everybody likes photos, and likes seeing themselves in photos, and it’s even nicer to see photos all arranged on a page without visual cruft like status interruptions and article links. It’s also crucial to have different ways of viewing the photos: chronological is important, but so are groupings by date and contact type.

In other words, Flickr still has the ability to kick ass in this arena. They just have to build it.

Flickr has experienced significant failures on the social side of their business. But West’s post is also a good reminder of how social strategy and design must work together, especially in an industry where competition is so fierce (see: Facebook Photos).

The History of the Showrunner

Emily Nussbaum has written a wonderful history of showrunners, and how their status has waxed and waned over time:

[I]t wasn’t until 1990 that TV experienced a truly cataclysmic cultural event: the premiere of Twin Peaks, a series that was described, again and again, as being “like nothing else on TV.” The show stood out not merely for its style but for the way it was made, as the product of one big, weird brain, conceived by the intimidating David Lynch, he who had directed Blue Velvet (middle-aged ­nudity, bug-covered ear). At this point, I’d graduated from college, and my friends and I would gather to watch, thrilling at ­David Duchovny in drag, retro brunettes with bruises, dwarves, cherry pie, and a general air of adult perversion. Within a few episodes, we all agreed the series had gone off the rails (a flash-forward to future TV fanhoods), but it was the first time I’d watched a show while thinking—with worship and anxiety and eventually a twinge of betrayal—about the person who had created it.

Did Google Kill the Witty Headline?

Over at The Atlantic, David Wheeler has written about how difficult is it to write goofy, punny headlines in a time when Google values facts and keywords in headlines more than wit:

In a widely circulated 2010 article criticizing SEO practices, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten made the same point by citing a Post article about Conan O’Brien’s refusal to accept a later time slot on NBC. The print headline: “Better never than late.” Online: “Conan O’Brien won’t give up ‘Tonight Show’ time slot to make room for Jay Leno.”

The dearth of witty headlines on the Web is enough to make a copy editor cry. But rather than settle for a humorless future, some online editors are fighting back by refusing to embrace SEO guidelines for every story. “It’s not about getting the most readers; it’s about getting the ‘most best’ readers,” says David Plotz, editor of the influential online magazine Slate.

But Jake Brooks points out that, on a technological level, Wheeler is just plain wrong:

Since clicks are still every sites’ currency, copywriters online have to write one headline that will sell the story to the search engines and one headline that will sell the story to human beings. Turns out, doing the latter is not so easy. For print people, think about it this way: Every headline on a homepage is a wood headline. Every headline needs to sell. On any given day, a newspaper has to write at most 3 headlines to compel someone to buy the paper at the newsstand. Online, you have to do it FOR EVERY STORY.

Meanwhile, Dominic Litten delves more deeply into the villification of SEO in Wheeler’s article:

For many journalists, SEO = headline + keyword stuffing. It’s all they know. However, if journalists really want to know and understand how SEO can help them and their publications they should worry a lot less about the importance of headlines and focus on their company’s sitemaps, site architecture, endless duplicate content, internal linking and the like. But they won’t. Many journalists opine about headlines and keyword stuffing because that’s all the information their SEO team is giving them. And it’s all most care to know.

Stephen Colbert Uses His Powers for Good

Stephen Hoban describes how Stephen Colbert is using his platform to illustrate the ridiculousness of our political finance system:

This new reality that Stephen Colbert and his lawyer Trevor Potter keep bringing up in Stephen’s run-ins with Viacom is the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision from 2009, because Citizens United allows corporations to make unlimited political donations. Where once we feared that corporate money could be misused to buy elections, now we honor corporate money as free speech. (It’s not hard to predict that the effects of Citizens United could be as destructive as the deregulation of the banking industry in 1999. Many economists believe that deregulation led directly to the “Too Big to Fail” banks, the global financial crisis, and the bailout. Imagine something like that happening in politics.)

The Bloodbath at Fox

Last night, Fox canceled a ton of “bubble” shows (that is, shows whose ratings made their chances of renewal questionable), including The Chicago Code, one of my favorite new shows of the year (see my interview with creator Shawn Ryan). Alan Sepinwall tries to speak out against the Fox hate:

[H]ere is what I’ll say in FOX’s defense, even as I’m sad that my two favorite network pilots of this season – “Lone Star” and “The Chicago Code” – both failed in the same FOX timeslot (again, more on that in a bit): FOX takes chances. FOX tries the kinds of shows the other broadcast networks simply won’t. Because of the institutional legacy of “The X-Files,” for instance, FOX has continually tried to make science-fiction work in primetime to an extent that none of its competitors will try. Though the names of the people in charge of the network change, FOX consistently puts on shows that have more ambitious concepts than anyone else in broadcast. Yes, they canceled “Lone Star,” and “Firefly,” and “Arrested Development” and far too many other great (or potentially great) shows in the last decade alone, but they put those shows on the air in the first place, when NBC, ABC and CBS likely wouldn’t have.