Threshold thinking

I consider our industry’s current approach to ads to be wildly inefficient. Very “good” click-through rates are in the single-digit percentages, and more likely one or two orders of magnitude below that. ..

The trouble with interfaces in Go

I am working on a tool for generics-like functionality in Go. Despite what you may have heard, Go does have generic functionality, in that you can create (e.g.) methods which operate on any type, by using interface{} — the interface that all types implement. For example, you can do something like: ..

New release of gen

I’ve a new release of gen, the generics-like tool for Go. It includes API changes so I suggest reading the changelog. Highlights: ..

Another reason publishers should adopt SSL: referrers

I previously mentioned that advertising-based publishers should embrace SSL as a product upgrade, a service to their customer. Here’s a more self-interested take. ..

Publishers and SSL

Here’s a good article about why news sites on the web are slow to embrace SSL. The short answer is, the advertising services they use are not prepared to support it. ..

Multi-credentialing

John Maeda of RISD has a riff about the future of college credentials, including the notion of an automated ‘degree’, which is generated by a machine based on the sum your achievements. He makes an analogy to Coinstar: pour in a bunch of individually valuable stuff, get out some paper which aggregates its value. ..

Progress bars cannot be accurate

We all see progress bars and some of us even implement them. And we’ve all seen how hilariously wrong they can be. There’s a reason for that. ..

Your site doesn’t need a novel progress indicator

There’s been healthy talk about progress indicators in the age of ajax. In our will-to-design I think some things are being missed. ..

Language and social signaling

I like language. I came to it causally at first, and more formally of late. ..

1.6% of what?

The NSA has published a paper claiming that it “touches” only 1.6% of Internet traffic. Now, 1.6% of something the size of the Internet is already enormous, but let’s demonstrate that the number represents are much larger share of human communications than one might intuit. ..