Great gobs of gigabits! The Internet2 research and education group says it is upgrading its national backbone network with help from broadband stimulus funding, and the end result will be a structure delivering 8.8 terabits per second bandwith.
This super-fast system will connect the
US Unified Community Anchor Network (US UCAN), around 200,000 community "anchor institutions"—K-12 schools, libraries, clinics, hospitals, community colleges, and such. In the winter of 2010, the project received a $62 million broadband stimulus grant from the government to get this project underway.
Blogs have become an integral part of online culture.
Practically everyone reads blogs now, whether they’re “official” news blogs associated with traditional news media, topic-based blogs related to one’s work or hobbies, or blogs purely for entertainment, just about anyone you ask has at least one favorite blog.
But it wasn’t always so. Blogs have a relatively short history, even when compared with the history of the Internet itself.
And it’s only in the past five to ten years that they’ve really taken off and become an important part of the online landscape.
The Early Years
It’s generally recognized that the first blog was Links.net, created by Justin Hall, while he was a Swarthmore College student in 1994. Of course, at that time they weren’t called blogs, and he just referred to it as his personal homepage.
It wasn’t until 1997 that the term “weblog” was coined. The word’s creation has been attributed to Jorn Barger, of the influential early blog Robot Wisdom. The term was created to reflect the process of “logging the web” as he browsed.
1998 marks the first known instance of a blog on a traditional news site, when Jonathan Dube blogged Hurricane Bonnie for The Charlotte Observer.
“Weblog” was shortened to “blog” in 1999 by programmer Peter Merholz. It’s not until five years later that Merriam-Webster declares the word their word of the year.
The original blogs were updated manually, often linked from a central home page or archive. This wasn’t very efficient, but unless you were a programmer who could create your own custom blogging platform, there weren’t any other options to begin with.
During these early years, a few different “blogging” platforms cropped up. LiveJournal is probably the most recognizable of the early sites.
And then, in 1999, the platform that would later become Blogger was started by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan at Pyra Labs. Blogger is largely responsible for bringing blogging to the mainstream.
The Growth Period
The early 2000s were a period of growth for blogs. In 1999, according to a list compiled by Jesse James Garrett, there were 23 blogs on the internet. By the middle of 2006, there were 50 million blogs according to Technorati‘s State of the Blogosphere report. To say that blogs experienced exponential growth is a bit of an understatement.
Political blogs were some of the most popular early blogs. Some political candidates started using blogs during this time period, including Howard Dean and Wesley Clark.
One important event in the rise of blogging was when bloggers focused on the comments U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said regarding U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond in 2002. Lott, while praising Thurmond, stated that the U.S. would have been better off if Thurmond had been elected President in 1948. During that race, Thurmond was a strong supporter of racial segregation (though his position changed later in his political career). The mainstream media didn’t pick up on the comments and their potential implications until after bloggers broke the story.
In-depth topic blogs were also becoming more popular during this time. They often delved much deeper into current news and pop culture than mainstream media sources, in addition to commenting directly on what traditional media was reporting.
By 2001, there was enough interest in blogging that some how-to articles and guides started cropping up. Now, “meta blogs” (blogs about blogging) make up a sizable portion of the most popular and successful blogs out there.
A number of popular blogs got their start in the early 2000s, including Boing Boing, Dooce, Gizmodo, Gawker (the first major gossip blog to launch), Wonkette, and the Huffington Post. Weblogs, Inc. was started by Jason Calacanis in 2003, and was then sold to AOL for $25 million. It was that sale that helped to cement blogs as a force to be reckoned with rather than just a passing fad.
A couple of major blogging platforms got their start in the early 2000s. Version 1.0 of Movable Type was released in September of 2001.
WordPress was started in 2003, though parts of its development date back to 2001. TypePad was also released in 2003, based on Movable Type.
Some peripheral services to the blogosphere also started in the early 2000s. Technorati, the first major blog search engine, was launched in 2002. Audioblogger, the first major podcasting service, was founded in 2003. The first video blogs started in 2004, more than a year before YouTube was founded.
Also launched in 2003 was the AdSense advertising platform, which was the first ad network to match ads to the content on a blog. AdSense also made it possible for bloggers without huge platforms to start making money from when they first started blogging (though payments to low-traffic blogs weren’t very large).
Once bloggers started making money from their blogs, the number of meta blogs skyrocketed. Bloggers like Darren Rowse (of Problogger.net and Digital-Photography-School.net) and John Chow made sizable amounts of money telling other bloggers how they could turn blogging into a full-time career.
One early event that highlighted the rising importance of blogs was the firing of Heather Armstrong, the blogger behind Dooce, for comments posted on her blog regarding her employer. This event happened in 2002, and sparked a debate over privacy issues, that still hasn’t been sufficiently put to rest by 2011.
“Dooced” became a slang term to describe being fired from one’s job for something you’ve written on your blog, and has made appearances in Urban Dictionary, and even on Jeopardy!
Blogs Reach the Mainstream
By the mid-2000s, blogs were reaching the mainstream. In January of 2005, a study was released saying that 32 million Americans read blogs. At the time, it’s more than ten percent of the entire population. The same year, Garrett M. Graff was granted White House press credentials, the first blogger ever to do so.
A number of mainstream media sites started their own blogs during the mid to late 2000s, or teamed up with existing blogs to provide additional coverage and commentary. By 2004, political consultants, candidates, and mainstream news organizations all began using blogs more prominently. They provided the perfect vehicle for broadcasting editorial opinion and reaching out to readers and viewers.
Mainstream media sources are also teaming up with existing blogs and bloggers, rather than just setting out on their own. Take, for example, the regular posts on CNN.com from Mashable editors and writers. Another good example is the purchase of TechCrunch and associated blogs by AOL, which, while not a traditional media source, is one of the oldest internet companies still in existence.
During this time, the number of blogs grew even more, with more than 152 million blogs active by the end of 2010. Virtually every mainstream news source now has at least one blog, as do many corporations and individuals.
The Rise of Microblogs and Tumblogs
A lot of people only think of Twitter when they think of microblogging, but there are other microblog (also called tumblog) platforms that allow for a more traditional type of blogging experience, while also allowing for the social networking features of Twitter (like following other bloggers).
Tumblr was the first major site to offer this kind of service, starting in 2007. They allow for a variety of different post types, unlike traditional blogging services, which have a one-size-fits-all post format (that allows users to format their posts however they want, including adding multimedia objects).
It also makes it easier for users to reblog the content of others, or to like individual posts (sort of like Facebook’s “like” feature).
Posterous is another, similar service. Launched in 2008, Posterous allows bloggers to set up a simple blog via email, and then submit content either via their online editor or by email.
Posterous is sometimes considered more of a lifestreaming app than a blogging platform, thought it’s technically both.
The Future of Blogging
Eight to ten years ago, blogs were becoming the primary point of communication for individuals online. But with the advent of social media and social networking in the past five years, blogs have become only one portion of an individual’s online persona.
Vlogs and podcasts have also taken on a bigger role in the blogosphere, with a lot of bloggers opting to use primarily multimedia content. Services that cater to these kinds of posts (like Tumblr and Posterous) are likely to keep growing in popularity.
With new services like Quora coming onto the market, there’s the possibility that the blogosphere will shrink, and more people will turn to sites like these to get information. But services like Quora also provide valuable tools for bloggers, as they give insight into what people really want to know about a topic.
Blogs are unlikely to go anywhere in the foreseeable future. But there’s a lot of room for growth and innovation in method in which their content is found, delivered, and accessed.
Responsive web design is undoubtedly a hot topic in web design right now. To some degree, the popularity of the concept of responsive web design is well deserved because site users are increasingly diversifying their methods of accessing a website. iPad, iPhone, Android mobile devices, desktops, netbooks — we’re in a time where our web designs must function in a multitude number of ways.
Let us explore the meaning and principles behind responsive web design.
Key Features of a Responsive Web Design
In order for a web design to be considered "responsive," it needs to have three key features. Web designer/developer Ethan Marcotte — the author who conceptualized responsive web design — describes these features as:
The site must be built with a flexible grid foundation.
Images that are incorporated into the design must be flexible themselves.
Different views must be enabled in different contexts via media queries.
CSS-Tricks changes its web layout depending on the size of the browser’s viewport.
It is important to note that all three features need to be implemented in order for a truly responsive web design to take place.
Any design that lacks these features is simply not a responsive web design. It is that cut and dry.
Next, let’s dive deeper into these three features in order to better understand how they work together to bring us a completely responsive web design.
Flexible Grid
The term grid as it pertains to web design is getting murkier. Saying that your site must consist of a flexible grid does not mean that you are restricted to choosing from one of the dozen or so great grid systems out there.
Defining your own parameters for columns, spacing and containers is often the best solution for a web design and can be just as flexible as any existing system out there.
In fact, most existing grid systems restrictively use CSS classes to define size, space and alignment. Trying to superimpose these limits onto a responsive web design can be tricky and more time-consuming compared to coding your own grid.
Whether you’re using a premade grid system or creating a custom solution, the truly important aspect of a flexible grid system is in the mechanics of your layout sizes and spacing.
For web designers, this means abandoning our beloved pixels and replacing them with web layouts that use percentages and em’s, which are relative units of measurement.
Of course, this doesn’t mean we stop working with pixels in our image-editing software (i.e. Photoshop, Fireworks, etc.). Instead, an added step that involves a little bit of (totally basic) math becomes a part of the web design process as we convert our pixels into web layouts that use a relative unit of measurement.
St Paul’s School website is on a flexible grid that changes the layout depending on the size of the browser’s viewport. A change in the layout is indicated by slick, smooth animation.
Flexible Images
Images that move and scale with our flexible grid is another key feature of a responsive web design. Flexible images often give web designers a bit of a headache. Loading in huge, oversized images that we scale down using width and height HTML attributes when we want more space for text content on smaller browsing devices is not a good practice for faster web page load times.
Of course, how big of an issue this is also depends on how image-heavy your site is. As web design evolves, we are constantly seeing sites that incorporate fewer and fewer unnecessary images and stock photos. Perhaps this is a good time to evaluate whether your web design needs to be as image-heavy as it currently is.
An alternative to scaling images is cropping them with CSS. The CSS overflow property (e.g. overflow: hidden) gives us the ability to crop images dynamically as the containers around them shift to fit new display environments.
We can also have multiple versions of the image on the server, and then dynamically serve the appropriately sized version depending on the user agent using server-side or client-side feature detection in tandem with DOM manipulation.
Finally we have the option to hide images altogether if we really want to put focus on the non-image content, using media queries that serve a stylesheet which sets the display: none property for images (or a subset of images by assigning optional images a class like optional-img to allow for greater CSS selector specificity in your stylesheet).
Image elements on Think Vitamin are flexible; they scale depending on the browser viewport’s size.
Media Queries
Media queries are arguably the most exciting (and most intimidating to web designers unfamiliar with them) feature of a responsive web design.
Oftentimes, people get carried away with media queries, thinking of them as the core component of a responsive design and leaving flexible page components optional. The reality of the situation is that media queries are hardly useful without the existing implementation of a rock-solid HTML and CSS foundation that includes not only a flexible grid, but flexible images as well.
Media queries allow designers to build multiple layouts using the same HTML documents by selectively serving stylesheets based on the user agent’s features, such as the browser window’s size. Other parameters are orientation (landscape or portrait), screen resolution, color (i.e. how much color the screen can render), and so on.
Here is an example of media queries that serve a stylesheet depending on the width of the viewport:
Media queries are not specifically a mobile solution or a tablet solution (thought they’re often associated with them as such). Instead, media queries and responsive design allow us to think outside of the constraints of a screen size or resolution and start building websites that flexibly adapts to (theoretically) all the different mediums.
UX London uses meta viewport to set the scale and layout width.
What Responsive Web Design Really Is
As we look over the three features of responsive web designs, there really should be very little to be excited about. The truth is that 90% of what makes up a responsive web design is simply good web design to begin with. Well-formed HTML and a flexible layout should be a part of the daily digest for the modern web designer. What Marcotte has done by advocating responsive web design is simply to show us a new way to implement the good design practices we should already be doing anyway. In a modern context, given that the need for flexible layouts is even more imperative now so that we can better accommodate the wider array of browsing situations currently in existence, we need designs that are fluid and flexible.
Responsive web design forces us to take the time to do things right, not just in how we code, but how we conceive new ideas and execute fresh designs.
Anyone who has put some time into working with flexible content and media queries will have realized that this is still not the end-all, be-all solution to building websites that cater to every single user agent. Users who browse to the web through different devices often have different wants and needs depending on the device they’re using.
A user on a mobile web browser will most likely be interested in accessing core information as quickly as possible. For restaurants, this could mean menus, phone numbers to make a reservation, physical address, and so forth. For situations like this, loading up an entire site and then hiding 90% of it clearly doesn’t present an ideal solution.
The Right Direction
What responsive web design becomes, then, is a step in the right direction. A lot of sites stand to gain a lot from a responsive design, and every designer should certainly be capable of executing this solution and searching for ways to optimize their designs.
While designers continue to make headway on solutions that allow our designs to be experienced as intended on every device and situation, the devices, in turn, should strive to display the Web in the most ideal and intuitive way possible.
As both sides steer toward each other, we will inevitably have more and more of an opportunity to build a Web that is more dynamic, more engaging, and more beautiful.
Jason Gross is a freelance web designer focused on creating clean and user friendly websites. Jason currently lives in Indiana and can be found on Twitter as @JasonAGross or on the web at his personal blog and portfolio.
Since becoming CEO nearly a year ago, Jeff Jaffe has raised the World Wide Web Consortium’s profile. Next challenge: build a universal operating system.
Facebook is to unveil a new daily discount deals service, similar to Groupon, that will provide its 500 million members with the opportunity to purchase products or services at significantly reduced prices.
Bloomberg reports that Facebook will initially offer deals in San Francisco, San Diego, Dallas, Atlanta, and Austin, Texas, working with local businesses to highlight deals to users in specific areas and allow them to share them with their friends.
Facebook has confirmed reports, noting that the new deal service will launch in within weeks:
Local businesses will be able to sign up to use this feature soon, and people will be able to find Deals in the coming weeks.
By entering the daily deals space, Facebook will be able to leverage its massive userbase to provide very real competition to Groupon and other rival services that have had to build their communities from scratch. With Facebook Places Deals already live in North America and selected countries across Europe, users will already be familiar with location-based promotions and coupons.
Facebook has also partnered with third-party services, providing users with discount offers from companies including ReachLocal, Gilt City, Tippr, HomeRun.com, PopSugar City, KGB Deals, Plum District and Zozi.Image Credit
Jason Gross is a freelance web designer focused on creating clean and user friendly websites. Jason currently lives in Indiana and can be found on Twitter as @
