Many of the implementations of user content rating seem to assume, or at least gives the impression, that a high user rating equals high-quality content. This is obviously not always true. User content rating is not a measure of quality — it is a measure of popularity.

One pretty obvious example of when this becomes a problem is when you start making content with high user ratings more visible than content with a lower rating. What becomes promoted is content that a certain group of people, powerful in opinion, rates as good content. Content that may appeal to other groups of people — not as active raters and perhaps not as many — becomes less visible. In other words, there will be a bias to some degree in the promoted content.

Another, and in my opinion more serious, example of where this can become a problem is when you’re dealing with people’s opinions. Take a look at the aforementioned digg’s commentary system for example. Users are able to rate other users’ input on any article, and by default, comments that have fallen below a given rating threshold are hidden from view until you say that you want to see them. In other words, other people can easily decide what I will be able to see and not see. I’m sure this is a good way of keeping trolls away (and dealing with visibility in design), but when it at the same time deals with thoughts and opinions, I believe it becomes pretty strange. It’s almost like some sort of anti-democratic censorship (while being kind of disguised as democratic at the same time) that decides what the best opinion to have on a certain issue is. It may sound cliché, but why can’t everyone’s opinion matter?

This may not be a huge problem as of today, but I think it’s worth thinking about — not the least since the concept of user rating is spreading really fast. If we are going to embrace social networking, and want people to be able to express themselves and their opinions and knowledge, we should think of better ways to promote what is being expressed.

It is a world of narcissism, where everyone stands out on their own. At the same time, it is a world of collectivism, where we share what we know and find people like ourselves. This may seem like a strange comparison to make, but the effect is not totally unlike that of a religion.

Religions unite large groups of people, make them socialize in particular ways, and provides a base on which people can live and express themselves. And at the same time, religion can satisfy personal, or narcissistic if you will, needs that people have, and through the social engagement, people can get their individual role through which they can get a sense of self-fulfillment.

So, let us celebrate Deus Connectivus, the Online God.

A creative, decision-making and ruling force

The Online God creates things. Or, people create things. Everything we create stems from an idea of something, and that idea is based on knowledge that we have gathered in the past — we call it inspiration — that we manifest into something new.

The Internet is by far the most important source of knowledge that we know (the exception being maybe life itself). A lot — maybe most — of the new things created today, have in some way or another a connection to the Internet. But it doesn’t stop there. A lot — and again, perhaps most — of the decisions made today, are made with the help of knowledge collected from the Internet. Even hugely important decisions on corporate and governmental levels are made this way. So, the Online God inspires us to create, and guides us in our everyday lives, in the decisions we need to make.

But a decision usually results in an action. There are theories of e-democracies, and how the collective knowledge of the people can guide politicians in decision making, taken in practical use more and more around the world. It seems that the Online God is also a ruling force, that in certain ways makes us do what we do, and makes us live how we live.

The big difference is that it is we who write the bible this time.

Time for a new musical release, though not directly by me. The great Monodrive has once again produced a great, highly danceable and just as listenable progressive house track, and once again, my sister provides some vocals for it. I wrote and produced the vocals for this piece, but that work was nothing compared to what Monodrive and Beca did with the song. There are a couple of great remixes on this digital release as well.

The release is made through Existence Records, and you can read more about it, or buy it on Beatport. We all hope you will enjoy this.

Since then, I’ve seen probably hundreds of discussions about whether XHTML served as text/html is a good idea or not, if using XHTML at all is a good idea, and so on. And I never really cared about those discussions. Probably because the W3C validator never complained, and that it worked fine in all browsers.

But now, I’ve been taking my lessons, so to speak. I’ve been reading a lot about the two markup languages lately, ever since I discovered the WHAT WG and HTML 5, that got me a lot more interested in what the issue really was. And my conclusion is that I will probably use HTML 4.01 Strict from now on, until something happens that will make XHTML, or maybe something else, more interesting and useful.

So, I just though I’d share a couple of links that I learned a lot from when trying to understand this whole issue, and the real differences between HTML and XHTML (other than that XHTML is XML and HTML is not).

• Ian Hickson has written a great little essay about why sending XHTML as text/html is harmful.
• XHTML vs HTML FAQ, a helpful post on the SitePoint forums.
• The Web Applications 1.0 working draft has some great views on HTML as a language, and should be read by any webdesigner interested in semantics and web standards.
• The Wikipedia articles on HTML and XHTML have more helpful resources if you’re interested.

What do you people think about the whole HTML vs XHTML debate? And what do you prefer to use, and why?

See you there, hopefully!

This is my first musical release in a long time, and both me and Stefan are very happy with how it turned out. It’s dark, it’s ambient and it contains vocals. We really hope you’ll like it. Now get your browsers over there and listen! Tracklist is as follows.

• Stranger (Original mix)
• Stranger (Monodrive remix)
• Stranger (Nimrod remix)
• Stranger (Johan Agebjörn remix)

Designers spend hours upon hours focusing on the most trivial of details, because we’re taught that things should look pretty, and things should make it easier for people to achieve something (usually in terms of understanding or using something). This is fine by me. I love details. Heck, I love designing! But aren’t things starting to get just a little bit too much? Let’s go back in time for a moment.

The Old vs. The New

Now, go to your book-shelf and pick up the oldest novel you can find. Open it up, flip through a few pages and take a look. Then, repeat with the most recently released novel you have.

Notice any difference? Sure, the characters are called something else, there’s a different font used on the headers, and the author is clearly using a more updated language. But other than that? No, didn’t think so. The chapters are there, the page numbers, perhaps some sort of table of contents in the beginning. Even the typography is probably roughly the same. That, ladies and gentlemen, is good old simple design, which is so straight forward, beautiful and easy to use, that it has survived for hundreds of years. People don’t even think about it anymore.

But the web is another story. Compare this screenshot with this one. Notice any difference here? That’s the home page of this site, shown with and without the CSS enabled.

The first one is simple, and it’s pretty close to what the web looked like during it’s childhood. Text, black on white. Easy to understand. Just follow the text until it ends, and you’re done. No jumping between different contents. Hey, this is just like the novels I read every day! I get it! And then there’s the second screenshot. The web has changed. A lot.

Back to basics?

The web is such a wonderful medium, and we web designers have so many cool toys to play with. We can do virtually anything (and it’s a great deal of fun doing it). But — comparing those two screenshots, how simple it may be — aren’t we overdoing stuff just a little bit?

I will not be saying that I will live the way I learn here. Designing is great, and I love digging into unnecessary details, just for the fun and good looks of it (let’s just say I’m a big sucker for eye candy). And surely, design is not essentially useless, since it actually helps us all the time, making life a lot easier in many different situations (I even try to make a living out of it). But, if not only to achieve a great deal of usability and accessibility, maybe it’s time to realize that we may tend to over-complicate things a bit on the web. Do users need drop down menus, visual effects, and so on?

And therefore, I think at least web design can be pretty useless. The guys that once discovered the standard layout of the novel all did it! And everybody already know how to use it. Why change it? Yes, the web can be much more complex in it’s information structure than a novel. But still, most of the time the design can be so much more simple.

No, I’m heading back to the sofa and the novel I’m reading. Back to the simple, black and white, follow-the-letters-until-there-are-no-more heaven.

When I saw this (after having seen Inman’s and Hicks’ versions), I just couldn’t help myself anymore. I had to respond (me, me!). In a really silly philosophical way. But isn’t it, as with music, infact true? Design, just as music, really have no other purpose than satisfying a need created by satisfying another need, created by satisfying another, and so on, lining all the way back to the beginning of mankind.

Or maybe not. Enough of the ranting. Enjoy the wallpaper, complete with a hidden Yoda-speech message.

Download wallpaper (2560×1600 pixels)

I also haven’t been able to take on new work for some time, but this will hopefully change in the near future. So if you need some webdesigning done, and think I might be the right guy to do it, now is the right time to send me your requests, and I will check it out as soon as I’m back in business.

So, let’s hit the swedish west coast! Hope you all enjoy the summer.

I’m starting it off pretty small, so if you have questions related to this site and how it works, that are not covered on this page, you can ask them here as a comment to this entry. By doing it that way, we’ll hopefully end up with a more complete FAQ. So, here goes.

What is that cool effect when viewing images in your portfolio?

That effect is achieved using a Javascript library called Lightbox JS, which is free and very easy to use. You can obtain it here.

How does the live preview when writing comments work?

This site uses a WordPress plug-in called Live Comment Preview which enables this. It mainly uses Javascript to extract whatever is written in the comment form, and put it inside a div, and updates it whenever the user strikes a key on the keyboard. You can download the plug-in here. This article by Jon Hicks, though a bit outdated by now, explains how live comment previewing works in more detail.

What WordPress plug-ins do you use?

Apart from Live Comment Preview (see previous question), I use Super Archive by Jonas Rabbe for the live journal archive, and Contact Form II for — you guessed it — the mail form on the contact page.