Back in a Bit

Nearly half of Facebook users never click ads

Back in a Bit — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:09:40 +0000

A study suggests that nearly half of Facebook users will never click on ads, making things less than favorable for those looking buy a piece of the site today. With Facebook as one of the biggest tools for brands to …

Mapping Wikipedia

Back in a Bit — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 22:11:10 +0000

Mapping Wikipedia is a groundbreaking visualisation of the world mapped according to articles in 7 different languages. The map displays both the global patterns and the vast number of geo-located items. The dataset was produced by the Oxford Internet Institute …

Death to Word

Back in a Bit — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 17:20:26 +0000

Desktop publishing has given way to laptop or smartphone publishing. And Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing. Its document-formatting mission means that every piece of text it creates is thickly wrapped in metadata, layer on layer of …

Pentametron

Back in a Bit — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 20:45:14 +0000

Pentametron, my twitter poetry engine, is now online! An experiment in finding inadvertent art in the internet’s endless outpouring of language, pentametron automatically collects twitter posts that happen to be in iambic pentameter. It processes about five million tweets per …

Jeremy Deller: Joy in People

Back in a Bit — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:28:00 +0000

Jeremy Deller does art outside galleries. It thrives in ‘low culture’ and it is usually ambitious, socially-engaged and unexpected. Indeed, most of his career is built on looking for art in the most unpredictable places, working with the public or …

Starbucks embark on store refresh ahead of the Olympics

Back in a Bit — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 21:20:41 +0000

Prolific coffee chain Starbucks has announced it intends to revamp its network of cafes to coincide with the Olympics and Queen’s Jubilee this summer, commencing with the chain’s 70 London outlets. This will attempt to move away from the standardised …

Type Connection

Back in a Bit — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 21:02:24 +0000

Type Connection is a game that helps you learn how to pair typefaces. Start by choosing a typeface to pair. Like a conventional dating website, Type Connection presents you with potential “dates” for each main character—without the misleading profile photos …

If it’s walking like a duck, it should quack

Back in a Bit — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 19:35:17 +0000

Skeuomorphism is often rejected on the grounds of taste (“it looks tacky”) or generates despondence from its shackling of digital interfaces to old metaphors. The latter offends for two reasons: the resulting interfaces are limited by their chains, and the …