Over the last eighteen months, the world of web fonts and web typography has absolutely exploded. Modern browsers — on the desktop and on mobile devices — are embracing the WOFF standard, type foundries are adopting web type en masse, and libraries like Google Web Fonts are making it easier for designers and developers of all stripes to use web type in their projects.
The rise of web fonts has coincided with a greater cultural recognition of type in general. The hugely popular documentary Helvetica introduced a brand new audience to the power of type. For users who want to learn more about type and web fonts, the web is full of great resources that offer good examples of typography and explore the history and future of lettering and design.
Here are eight of our favorite sites to help you start or enhance your own education in type.
Fonts In Use is a beautiful site that, in its own words, aims to “catalog and examine real-world typography.”
A collaboration between Sam Berlow, Stephen Coles and Nick Sherman, the site offers insights and deep examinations of typography across various mediums.
This is a great site not just for typography fans, but also for those who want to learn more about what makes for effective typography and effective uses of type.
First launched in 2007, I Love Typography is the brainchild of John Boardley. The blog now has a host of contributors who highlight great fonts and showcase beautiful type, while also offering the reader a basic education in typography.
Through the years ILT has remained accessible to newcomers and that’s why we like it. Be sure to check out Boardley’s next project, Codex Magazine, which launches soon.
Typographica is a site that reviews typefaces and type books. It also offers commentary on fonts and various trends in typographic design.
The site isn’t updated on what we would call a “regular” basis, but the content within the site is timeless, making it a great place for type lovers to visit.
Typophile is a typographic community that has been on the web for nearly a decade. The forums are a fantastic resource for great finds in the world of type, and they’re also a great way to get proper feedback from other type lovers and design professionals.
Think of Typedia as the IMDb of typography — it’s a place where users can learn more about a typeface or font creator. Typedia also functions as a wiki, so anyone can join and add his own images, pages and information to the living, breathing typography tomb.
A must-subscribe-to section of the site is Type News, a weekly overview of the latest type news.
Webfonts.info is one of the best resources on the web for gathering information about web fonts and web font techniques.
Maintained by Ralf Hermann (whose own blog is a must read for type lovers), the site manages to be comprehensive and up-to-date. It’s also a wiki, which means that others can add their own information and updates to the mix.
Tim Brown is the type manager at Typekit. He also is responsible for the fantastic font blog and resource, Nice Web Type.
The main Nice Web Type site offers a great collection of past notes and access to Brown’s blog, however, we encourage users to also visit the Nice Web Type Tumblr.
The FontFeed is FontShop’s daily feed of typographic goodness. The site is chock-full of type recommendations, font news and great examples of digital type in the real world.
One of our favorite sections of the site is Type Tips, which highlights tips and tutorials, while also showcasing interviews with big names in the type world.
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The Future of Search Series is supported by SES New York Conference & Expo, the search and social marketing conference helping brands, agencies, and professionals connect, share and learn what’s next for the interactive industry.
Semantics, the study of meaning, is playing an increasingly important role in the development of knowledge management tools across a variety of industries, and some of the most interesting developments are coming from the media world.
Semantic search is one broad area within the higher realm of semantic technologies, which also includes knowledge storage, information extraction and reasoning, among other topics. The goal of semantic search is to improve search result accuracy by understanding the searcher’s intent and the contextual relationships between the terms used in the search.
We spoke with Evan Sandhaus, lead architect of semantic platforms at The New York Times Company, and Jeff Catlin, CEO of text analytics company Lexalytics, to better understand how semantic search is affecting news and social media.
News Media
The New York Times morgue, a collection of topical and biographical clippings and photographs from The Times and other publications, once existed in the old Times headquarters on West 43rd Street, but has since been relocated.
“All websites are in the business of capturing people’s attention,” said Sandhaus, recalling a recent presentation he had attended. This is especially true for news organizations and blogs, which push out piles upon piles of online articles each day. In the end, the news isn’t exactly useful if no one reads it. So, the goal is to make content as findable as possible.
The fundamentally challenging structure of the web, Sandhaus says, isn’t exactly helping the cause, though. The web is predominantly written in HTML, a markup language that focuses on expressing how information on a webpage should look, not what it means. As a result, important pieces of information within webpages, such as headlines, bylines and publish dates in news articles, are formatted within HTML, but aren’t explicitly labeled as “headline, “byline” and “publish date.” “As a consequence,” Sandhaus explains, “it makes it difficult for a wider web ecosystem to have an idea of the structured nature of content.” That is, while webpages are formatted for humans to easily read them, machines can’t easily determine the underlying meaning of content on a page if it doesn’t follow a consistent structure. Thus, devaluing the utility of data.
So, what is being done to combat web content from falling into the great abyss that is the web? Many communities are working on this problem, with the concept Linked Data being a central part of the conversation. Linked Data is a best practice for exposing, sharing and connecting pieces of data, information and knowledge on the Semantic Web.
Since its inception, The New York Times has set itself up nicely to participate in the Semantic Web. Since the late 1800s, it has maintained an authoritative and controlled news vocabulary to archive clippings from its and others’ publications, which were then stored in “the morgue” at its old New York City headquarters on 43rd Street. These archives were originally created so that reporters could easily research historical documentation on a certain topic in the reporting process. Little did anyone know, this organized structure would set The Times up for having an amazing amount of useful data once semantic technologies would evolve more than a century later.
In 2009, The Times began publishing its indexing vocabulary, which includes people, organizations, locations and descriptors, as linked open data, enabling other datasets to interact with it, opening up a world of possibilities for useful applications, based on Times data. As of September 2010, there are 203 datasets — including data from The Times — published in Linked Data format. These datasets combined are more powerful together than any one dataset could ever be alone.
Creating standards is the next step in the process towards building a more connected web. Working to further connect information on the web, The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), among other communities, continues to develop standards for the Semantic Web, explained Sandhaus, including RDFa, which enables users to embed rich metadata, such as title, author and date information, within web documents. This allows users to call out meanings for specific portions of a webpage, making the information more usable on the greater web.
The problem with RDFa, though, is that different organizations can use it to develop different naming systems for the same pieces of data, says Sandhaus. In the media world, for example, a “headline” could also be called a “title,” or even “Schlagzeile” (in German) or “intestazione” (in Italian).
The New York Times is hoping to alleviate this problem. As of October 2010, The Times, in collaboration with the International Press Telecommunications Council, is working on creating a standard within the publishing industry to express structural metadata within HTML — this framework is called rNews. With this standard, search engines, aggregators and social sites, for example, will have access to the data, making it more useful to the web at large. The project has only just begun, but Sandhaus expects to have more details about its direction in coming months.
Leading innovation in the publishing industry, The New York Times continues to reimagine what is possible within the world of semantic technologies, making its data (and the data that interacts with it), more useful as more technological developments surface.
As users continue to spend more time on social networks, brands are finding it more important to maintain presences on social platforms. Analytics haven’t been a huge focus for early adopter brands, but as companies try to measure the ROI of being active on social networks, analytic tools are taking a prominent position in the discussion.
Over the course of the past year, brands have begun to add sentiment analysis to the list of must-have features in their social media monitoring tools, says Lexalytics CEO Jeff Catlin.
There are two sides to brand-oriented communication on social platforms — while brands are sending out marketing messages via their social channels, consumers are chatting about brands and products. As a result, there are two main ways that brands are currently using semantics:
Consumer sentiment analysis: Brands want to know what consumers are saying about them. Using text analytics, an increasing number of services are able to analyze a user’s grammar usage and determine the meaning behind his or her mention of a brand or product. In some cases, this may simply mean determining if a user is using a positive or negative tone when discussing a product or service. In other more advanced cases, this could mean determining a user’s specific intent behind a statement. Viralheat, for example, aims to pinpoint social media users on the cusp of making purchasing decisions. This type of service enables brands to weed out irrelevant social updates and access those with the most potential return.
Messaging consistency: Monitoring customer sentiment is a bit obvious, but another use for text analytics in the social realm is for monitoring a brand’s messaging consistency. Catlin notes that it’s important for a brand to “sound like it has a common voice and a consensus of opinion in how it communicates to the world.” Historically, it’s always been a priority for brands to make sure their messaging was consistent and clean — social media is another channel where this is important. Using semantic technologies, brands are now able to analyze what they’ve said and whether those messages were consistent. That information can then be used to determine future messaging strategies.
While semantics is having a clear affect on social media monitoring, Catlin feels that it will also soon play a role in social search from a user’s perspective. Search engines and search features within social sites will have to integrate semantic technologies to stay relevant, says Catlin.
He posed an example: if a user is searching for “Indian food,” a keyword search isn’t as useful as a semantics-driven search could be. “Let’s say you have an interest in Indian food,” explained Catlin. “Imagine that a tweet came out that happened to say, ‘This was the best chicken tikka I’ve ever had.’ [The search tool] would in fact lump that into your interest in Indian food. Even though the tweet never mentioned the term ‘Indian food’ anywhere, it can semantically understand that ‘chicken tikka’ belongs in ‘Indian food.’”
Lexalytics is developing semantic technologies that do just that, and Catlin expects to unleash them later this year. “Imagine digesting all of Wikipedia, if you will,” Catlin supposed, explaining the technology, “If you digested all of the knowledge out there, you would start to see relationships. You would start to see things like ‘chicken tikka’ referenced in things about ‘Indian food.’ We hold onto that knowledge historically, so that we can use it later on.”
Conclusion
As semantic technologies continue to evolve, data on the web will become more meaningful and useful. Traditional media outlets, like The New York Times, are already seeing the benefits of participating in the Semantic Web, as they are able to use other people’s data to reason about their own archives. Likewise, social search stands to gain much from incorporating semantic understanding in order to create better user experiences and enhance analytics for brands.
Which industries are you most interested in seeing adopt semantic technologies? Let us know in the comments below.
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The Future of Search Series is supported by SES New York Conference & Expo, the search and social marketing conference helping brands, agencies, and professionals connect, share and learn what’s next for the interactive industry. Learn why more than 5,000 brands and agencies from the enterprise level to brick and motor businesses choose SES for their online marketing education.
Tommy Swanson is the Social Media Specialist at KMA (A Pursuant Company), a full-service fundraising company. Swanson is in charge of SEO and social media for numerous nationally recognized non-profit organizations. He is also a serial online entrepreneur who has built and sold several large businesses since his early teens.
Type a query into Google and, nine times out of ten, you’ll find a result that does not seem right. It’s not a bug or a website getting a lucky break from the Google gods — it’s the result of savvy manipulation by a group of Internet hustlers known as search engine optimizers (SEOs).
I know because I am one. For the last few years, I’ve been pushing websites to the top of search engine results — websites that don’t necessarily belong there in the eyes of Google. SEOs like to call their tactics making a site “search engine friendly,” but what we’re really doing is gaming the system and getting inside the algorithm that powers Google. It’s what we are paid to do.
As of recently, Google’s algorithms are on the move. While there’s no doubt that some of the current manipulation tactics will still play a role in shaping search results, the newest component of search comes from a new (but important) source: You.
A Brief History
Over the last decade, search engines have evolved at a rapid pace for two reasons: To provide higher quality results to a given search query, and to keep SEO spammers from manipulating search results. But despite all attempts, the basic concepts behind search have remained consistent, and good SEOs have always come out on top regardless of minor algorithmic tweaks.
In the early days, Google would scrape a webpage looking for keywords on the actual site to determine its ranking. Search marketers came up with the clever idea of stuffing their page full of the keywords they wanted to rank for. After some time, Google caught up with the clever tactics and brought out the ban hammer.
Not all marketers are able to keep up with the rapidly changing algorithm. They continue to suggest that clients adopt mundane optimization techniques such as meta tags, keyword density, and directory submissions that, at the end of the day, won’t get you anywhere near the top of a search engine ranking page.
A New Model
More recently, the search engine’s algorithm has put most of its weight towards links around the web. To the search engines, a link is a vote of confidence. But not all links are created equal. A vote of confidence from someone influential in society is much more powerful than that of an Average Joe. A link from NYTimes.com is much more powerful than one from “JoesHardwareShopInNYC.com.”
SEOs figured this out too. It’s called “link building.” We either create high quality content (which is what Google likes) and hand it off to websites in return for a link (white hat SEO) or pay for a link without providing any content (black hat SEO).
With the proper techniques, good SEOs can take a website and, with good link building techniques, put them in the top 10 to 20 results for a term that gets millions of searches a month. And as of right now, it still works.
But as SEOs look around the field, it’s obvious that the engines are changing. Their most recent update, focused on killing content farms, saw had a nearly 12% change in their algorithm.
There is no doubt that the keywords on your pages and the inbound links to your site will still play a major role in rankings, but the next big change is the”you” factor.
The “You” Factor
In 2009, Rand Fishkin wrote a blog post titled “Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines.” I think if he wrote the post today, he might reconsider that first adjective.
As recent changes to Google have illustrated, search engines are moving towards a more user-focused algorithm. Most Internet marketers would agree that humans are much harder to manipulate than a computer-based algorithm. While there are certain aspects of life that are consistent for all people — eating, sleeping, and so on — everyone has their own unique set of preferences that define them as an individual.
So why hasn’t Google been taking these unique preferences into account in its search rankings? Well, it has, but not to the same extent that it has been changing its algorithm. In the past, links (which were often created by humans) were the most natural way to determine relevancy and popularity. As the Internet has evolved over the last decade, links aren’t controlled by human placement to the extent they were years ago. But, as the Internet has evolved, so has the way humans can express themselves. Online behavior isn’t limited to e-mail and stand-alone blogs anymore.
Social Media
According to a 2011 Marketing SherpaReport, 64% of marketers have begun integrating social media into their search marketing efforts. And there is reason to do so.
In December of 2010, both Google and Bing confirmed that links shared through Facebook or Twitter have a direct effect on search engine rankings. But one word that was continually brought up through the entire interview with Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land was “Author/Social Authority,” suggesting that it’s not the quantity, but rather the quality of a tweet or share that has an impact on SEO rankings.
In another recent post by Jen Lopez at SEOmoz, she presents an accidental case study that proves the correlation between a powerful Twitter account and search rankings. After being tweeted out by @smashingmag, SEOmoz’s “Beginner’s Guide to SEO” ranked number four for “Beginner’s Guide” on Google.
But if you’re one of “those” Twitter users — one who follows all of the other marketers who follow you, who also follow your other account, which follows them — don’t expect to get anywhere. Initial results indicate that the engines can easily weed out the Internet marketers and see true influencers in social media.
Despite the fact that Google can filter out Internet marketers and spammers, there are still problems. What prevents me from buying a tweet from an influential person in the social space?
Google’s New “Personal Blocklist” Chrome Extension
If there was ever an incredible opportunity for Google to really crack down on spam without having to manually intervene, their new Chrome extension for search is the answer.
The extension allows users to block websites within results — which is a good indication of content that doesn’t deserve to be there.
Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, explained the extension in greater detail on the Google Blog, saying it aimed to weed out shallow or low-quality content from suspected content farms. To do so, it allowed users to report or block sites from their web results. Those choices were then sent back to Google for analysis.
Links are easy to manipulate. Social media will most likely be easy to manipulate, unless quantity becomes a larger factor. But if tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people using the extension? That won’t be so easy to game.
Mahmoud Khasawneh is the founder and CEO of Quirkat, a games development company based in the UAE with studios in Jordan. He is also the IGDA Middle East Chapter Leader.
As the games industry in the Middle East has grown and evolved over the past decade, video game development and game localization aimed at the Middle Eastern market remains a tremendous opportunity. At first glance, the complexities of language, values, social fabric and an entirely foreign pop culture can, understandably, seem daunting to developers and publishers, particularly from a Western perspective.
However, publishing video games for a Middle Eastern audience can yield positive results despite its challenges. Reliable statistics for the region are few and far between, but the Middle Eastern gaming industry is likely worth somewhere between $1 billion and $2.6 billion in terms of revenue across software and hardware. Western developers and publishers have the chance to successfully enter and influence a very green and receptive market, ready to be engaged and monetized.
The “Global Audience”
Many publishers and game developers claim to target “global audiences,” but the reality is that this target often doesn’t extend to the Arab world and rather focuses on North American, European and South East Asian markets. There is virtually no presence of big publishers in the Middle East and North Africa.
There doesn’t seem to be a clear reason for this, as numbers show that the market is rife with opportunity. For starters, simple demographics indicate these regions have a population of more than 400 million people who speak a single language — Arabic. And many Arabic-speaking countries have young populations, some with more than 50% who are under 25 years old. The demographics also show more than 200 million mobile phones and a strong Facebook presence.
These numbers highlight a wide spectrum of gamers that aren’t being addressed at core or casual levels, nor on the web, via smartphones or through traditional retail channels. There is still no player in the multi-platform, core game development space. By some estimates, there’s an install base of about 8.5 million consoles in the Middle East (excluding gray imports). Sony has long been the dominant player in the Middle Eastern market, but recently, other hardware makers — notably Microsoft — have begun making moves in the region. But given these numbers, there can and should be many more players in this market.
Development History
The games industry in the Middle East has evolved over the past decade. Initially, the few developers who attempted to create original content for the Middle Eastern gamer faced an uphill battle in establishing a foothold in their home markets. High rates of piracy and a disconnected retail landscape fostered a difficult path to market. The few local games in the industry’s early days had gained notoriety for having political agendas, and the typical gamer was looking to the likes of EA and Ubisoft for his or her gaming fix, due to the initial perception of inferior quality associated with locally developed games. Eventually, through partnerships with ISPs and mobile network operators, that perception was gradually shattered and local developers started seeing success. Further partnerships with Western studios and publishers yielded bigger, more impressive projects and higher quality games.
Local developers also turned their eye to outside markets, one example being Egypt-based Timeline Interactive, developers of CellFactor: Psychokinetic Wars. Today, a more structured retail environment, higher bandwidth, online payment channels and investor interest in the game development space have all lead to greater opportunity in the market.
The Challenges of Localizaion
The groundwork that was laid by the early pioneers in Middle East game development has paved the way for current Western developers and publishers to successfully enter the space today, and they are more cognizant of the challenges and specifics of this market. One of the greatest challenges along the way included attempts at pure language localization that weren’t met with much success. THQ was one of the first western publishers to enter the Arabic speaking market and quickly learned the necessity of cultural relevancy: Ifirst localized title, Wall-E, was unsuccessful, as it was marketed to Saudi Arabia, a country with no cinemas.
Yet another important localization lesson was learned when Arabized MMO games first started showing up in the Middle East. The purely Google-translated text made no sense, and a lot of technical flaws were exploited, like the lack of standard Unicode text, RTL (right-to-left) support in the marketing assets, and lack of support websites. With heavy ad spending, however, the developers saw traffic pick up from the region and the more far-sighted ones forged local partnerships for better localization and on-the-ground CRM. This resulted in the tremendous success of games such as Travian.
Content relevance and adherence to familiar themes is crucial in developing and publishing games aimed at Arab markets. Sony understood this as far back as 2004 when it introduced This Is Football in Arabic for the PS2, given that football (soccer) is the region’s biggest sport. Sony continues to cater to the market today, being the only console producer with Arabic content for its motion control platform with the release of Start the Party! in Arabic. The publishers that take the time to go beyond pure language localization and understand the gamer demographic and culture can reap the benefits of this wide open market.
Cultural Sensitivity
In addition to language localization and content relevance, cultural sensitivity is another important element that must be considered. On the surface, the guidelines might seem straightforward: Sex, gambling, alcohol and nudity are obvious subjects to avoid. The reality is slightly more complex, as approaches to topics such as family, workplace ethics, politics and war are all areas that could easily be misrepresented in a game environment. Additionally, the social and cultural guidelines are not consistent across the many countries that comprise the Arab world. A deeper understanding of these variations and how product positioning varies from North Africa all the way to the more affluent Gulf market is a sure way of guaranteeing stronger returns on any game investments made in the region.
Ultimately, once the barriers of language and culture have been successfully understood and penetrated, the Middle Eastern gamer is no different than any gamer anywhere else in the world. The interactive experience sought and enjoyed in the Middle East is no different than the typical fun, entertaining game developed for the U.S. markets. It is my strong belief that partnerships between Western and Middle Eastern developers are the key to success; with new marketplaces, stores and digital distribution channels, there is no reason why a successful game cannot — with a little bit of effort and insight — bridge the cultural divide for a truly global game experience.
Not long ago, I wrote about how to calculate the ROI of your social media campaign, which generated a lot of interest from the social media community. The article outlined how businesses can use Customer Lifetime Value to calculate the return on their social media investment.
After writing the article, I started analyzing how businesses go about setting up, launching and running their social media campaigns. My conclusion is that there are three distinct stages to this process, which I’m calling the Social Media ROI Cycle. My rough estimate is that about 50% of the business community is still in the Launch stage, about 40% is in the Management stage and about 10% is in the Optimization stage.
Each one of the three stages has its own nuances, so let’s take a look at what happens during each. The percentages referenced in each stage are estimates based on my own experience.
Stage 1: Launch
During the Launch stage, 100% of a company’s focus is on setting up the big four: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Some companies focus on the big four plus more such as Flickr, e-newsletters, blogs, SlideShare and other social media platforms. But most companies kick things off by quickly getting into the big four networks simply as a way to have a social media presence.
The approach during this Launch stage is very executional with very little long-term planning. The primary objective is simply to get started. After all, those in charge want to ensure the brand is utilizing cutting-edge techniques, so the marketing department typically responds by jumping in without much plan for the long haul.
Unfortunately, the results of the Stage 1 process are negligible. Sure, you’ll be able to claim that you’ve “got a social media campaign,” but you won’t really see much traction unless you move on to Stage 2.
Stage 2: Management
During this stage, roughly 60% of a company’s efforts are focused on the big four (or the big four plus more). About 10% of the focus is on creative and offer development, 20% on tracking quantitative metrics such as traffic, inbound links, Facebook “Likes,” etc., and about 10% on qualitative metrics such as brand sentiment, survey results and customer polls.
The approach during the Management stage is still very tactical, but the focus is on mid-term instead of short-term results, which is an improvement over Stage 1. The corporate objective at this stage is to engage prospects and customers in some way that gets them to connect with the brand. Ideally, this would mean buying something, but it can also mean downloading a white paper, liking a Facebook Page, responding to a survey, or any other measurable evidence that they’re connecting with your brand.
Stage 2 is where many of the more sophisticated companies find themselves right now. They’re managing their social presence, testing creative ideas, tracking quantitative metrics and analyzing qualitative data.
Most companies today are still at either Stage 1 or Stage 2. But many of the companies I work with have started to reach the Stage 3.
Stage 3: Optimization
About 25% of the focus at this stage is on the “big four plus more,” and about 30% is evenly split among creative and offer development, quantitative metrics and qualitative metrics.
Another 25% of a company’s focus is on improving conversion and optimization of campaigns. What do I mean by that? It’s all about tracking inbound leads and traffic across social media platforms, using tools such as Atlas and DART, and watching those leads turn into customers, either on e-commerce landing pages or through B2B lead generation programs.
It also means testing your way to success with social media campaigns. This can be as simple as trying two different landing pages to see which one drives more clicks. Or, it can be as complex as multivariate testing that analyzes more than one component at a time.
The final 20% of a company’s efforts in Stage 3 include measuring the success of the campaign on an ROI basis. And yes, you can measure a social media campaign on an ROI basis, despite what some social media “experts” will tell you.
The process involves understanding your Customer Lifetime Value (the total revenue the average customer generates for your business during the lifetime of their engagement with you) and comparing it to the results generated by your social media campaign.
For example, if you know the typical customer spends $10 per month with your company and stays loyal to your brand for an average of three years, your Customer Lifetime Value is $360.
Many companies are comfortable spending 10% of their CLV to acquire a new customer. So, in other words, they’ll spend $36 to acquire a new customer who will spend $360 during his or her engagement with the brand.
If your social media campaign costs, say, $36,000 a year to run, and it generates 1,000 new customers each year, you’ve got a winner on your hands. (For a more detailed explanation of this process, please see my previous post, HOW TO: Calculate the ROI of Your Social Media Campaign.)
The Bottom Line
In the end, all roads should lead to social media ROI. After all, businesses don’t do social media to be social, they do social media to grow sales and revenues.
If you carefully navigate your way through Stage 1, Stage 2 and Stage 3, you’ll eventually be able to go up to your CFO and say, “Hey, Chief Financial Dude, remember when you told me we wouldn’t be able to measure the ROI of our social media campaigns? Well, we’re already doing it, and we’re making a profit, you knucklehead. So there!”
Of course, you don’t have to use those exact words, but you get my point.
Over the last eighteen months, the world of web fonts and web typography has absolutely exploded. Modern browsers — on the desktop and on mobile devices — are embracing the WOFF standard, type foundries are adopting web type en masse, and libraries like Google Web Fonts are making it easier for designers and developers of all stripes to use web type in their projects.
Semantics, the study of meaning, is playing an increasingly important role in the development of knowledge management tools across a variety of industries, and some of the most interesting developments are coming from the media world.
