Showing all posts about trends
The 2025 Banished Words List has recently dropped
16 January 2025
Lake Superior State University’s annual list of words and phrases we should cease using, was published recently. Among inclusions are game changer, era (you know why…), IYKYK (If You Know, You Know), and sorry, not sorry, which I can’t stand. Another term is dropped, but I don’t really take any notice off it, though maybe I should.
Once edgy and cool, “dropped” has become more of a letdown. Whether it is an album, a trend, or a product, this term has fallen flat. “Books, music, and all kinds of unnecessary things are currently being ‘dropped’ rather than introduced, released, or offered for sale. Banished for overuse, misuse, abuse, and hurting my head when all that “dropping” stuff lands on me!,” laments Susan of Littleton, CO.
Swedish House Mafia have dropped a new album. I’ve dropped a new blog post. But the image that usually forms in my mind is the item in question has ended up on the floor, rather than landing in a bookshop shelf, or a play-list, or whatever.
Also, reach-out is absent from the list. Or did the term feature in a previous year? Please feel free to contact, or message me, if you know.
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Prolonged use of social media may make you short tempered
13 January 2025
Research from Massachusetts General Hospital, I believe, in the United States, possibly underscores what many of us already suspect: that prolonged use of social media may not be the best:
This kind of study cannot prove that your hours of doomscrolling is directly making you Tik’d off, but in light of known associations of irritability and mental health issues, maybe we should put down our phones just a little more.
While I have a few social media accounts, I’m no power user, as some of you may know. Does that not make me short tempered? Maybe that’s not for me to say…
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psychology, social media, social networks, trends
IndieWeb makes all of us property owners online
6 January 2025
American engineer and product manager Den Delimarsky offers another way of looking at the core IndieWeb tenets of owning your own website domain, and owning your own content. See yourself as a property owner, rather than a renter.
If any of your online presence is on social media channels, you’re leasing the space, you don’t own it. The property owner could give you your marching orders at any time.
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The web today is not necessarily worse than the early web
27 December 2024
Xavier H.M., writing on his Mastodon page:
Your neocities blog is cute but I can’t read the 5pt font and your cursor is the size of a bread crumb. The web page is loading so many gifs my computer sounds like a boeing 747.
disassociated once, in a way, looked like a Neocities website. Or, more the point, way back in the day: GeoCities-esque. My websites of twenty-five years ago may have seemed like the work of a web designer trying to be artistic, but the way they were built presented problems to some visitors, particularly those with low vision. For example, much text on my early sites was rendered as images.
The facility to use alternative text, or alt-text, was always there, as far as I remember, but like a lot of visual web designers of the time, I did not make effective use of the facility. For example, if say I was posting a photo of a tree, the alt text would literally read “a tree”. I’d say nothing about where the tree stood. Along a road? In a park? Near a body of water? Nor anything else that would help describe the image more fully to people who had trouble seeing it.
As for blocks of text rendered as images — this to maintain complete design control across different browsers and operating systems — I probably supplied no alt-text, even though it would not have been difficult to do so. In other words, much of the content was invisible to some visitors.
And then we get around to font and cursor sizes that would suit an ant. For sure, it’s all fun, but doesn’t work for everyone. Those early days were more about aesthetics rather than accessibility. Today’s websites and blogs might look bland, might look all the same, but they are easier for a greater number of people to use, and, as a bonus, aren’t too demanding on our devices.
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design, history, technology, trends
Pack plenty of books and take yourself into internal exile in 2025
27 December 2024
The introverts among us live almost permanently in a sort of internal exile, or a rich inner life, as Waleed Aly referred to it during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
But the idea of getting away from it all, without actually going anywhere, is gaining traction more widely, writes Jacqueline Maley, for The Sydney Morning Herald. This as 2025, and the greater uncertainty that many people are anticipating, looms:
In recent months, I have been reading about the concept of “internal exile” or “internal emigration’. The term comes from the Russian, “vnutrennaya emigratsia” and means a sort of travelling into oneself, to take comfort in small pleasures – often solitary pleasures of the mind, like reading, or listening to music, or gardening or making a pleasant home.
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books, current affairs, introversion, psychology, reading, trends
W3C ethical web principles: web standards for a mature web
19 December 2024
A statement of twelve guiding principles for an ethical web, recently published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The web is a fundamental part of our lives, shaping how we work, connect, and learn. We understand that with this profound impact comes the responsibility to ensure that the web serves as a platform that benefits people and delivers positive social outcomes. As we continue to advance the web platform, we must therefore consider the consequences of our work.
Comparable, to a degree, to the IndieWeb community’s core tenets. To me, the W3C’s ethical web principles seem like web standards for a more mature, established web, of the third decade of the twenty-first century. One objective of web standards was to build a web (specifically websites), that everyone could view and use uniformly, regardless of their browser, or platform (operating system). We have the technical side of the web down pat, hopefully, now it’s time to focus on ethics.
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Coffee prices push toward fifty-year high
17 December 2024
The last few years have been bad for both producers and consumers of coffee. Extremes of weather in growing regions has resulted in diminishing coffee bean harvests, which has in turn pushed up prices. This is a topic I’ve been covering for a while here now, but it seems coffee is only going to get more expensive going forward:
On Wednesday, the price for Arabica coffee, the world’s most popular variety, hit its highest level in nearly 50 years, with a pound of beans (453.6 grams) listed in New York for US$3.20 ($5.02). The all-time high was US$3.38 ($5.30) for a pound of Arabica beans in 1977 due to snow destroying swathes of Brazil’s plantations.
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coffee, current affairs, economics, trends
Mocha Mousse 17-1230 selected as the PANTONE colour of year 2025
13 December 2024
We’re twelve days out from the big one, and high in the silly season, as the brevity of recent posts here may allude to. Otherwise, the major highlight has to be the annual announcement of the PANTONE colour of the year. As I wrote two years ago, this was a big deal during my web design days. Well, a somewhat big deal, as we were always on the lookout for new colour inspiration.
Anyway, the PANTONE colour for 2025 is Mocha Mousse 17-1230. Mocha Mousse. I can’t decide if that’s a dessert, or a hair product. Whatever, I’m liking it. Here’s how PANTONE describe the hue:
Simple and Comforting: A Soft, Warming Brown. With its sophisticated, earthy elegance, PANTONE 17-1230 Mocha Mousse can stand alone or serve as a versatile foundation, enhancing a wide range of palettes and applications—from minimalist to richly detailed designs—across all color-focused industries.
To whip up some designs featuring Mocha Mousse in your favourite graphics editor, here are some common colour generating codes. The HEX code is #9e7a68. If Red, Green, and Blue is your thing, use these values: R = 158, G = 122 B = 104. On the CMYK colour model, go C = 31%, M = 47%. Y = 49%, K = 18%. For the HSB colour system, go H = 20°, S = 34%, B = 62%.
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There is more to podcasts than YouTube video interviews
5 December 2024
The Australian Podcast Awards were held a few weeks ago in Sydney, on Thursday, 21 November 2024. The finalists and winners, with productions spanning thirty categories, can be see here.
Podcasting is to broadcasting, what blogging is to publishing. It allows an individual, or a small group of people, to create their own radio-style show, independent of regular broadcast channels. Like blogging, anyone can jump in and give it a try. To start a basic podcast show, all that’s needed is a small amount of equipment and software, and a whole heap of determination to build up profile.
Though you wouldn’t think it from looking at the numerous finalists and winners in this year’s Australian Podcast Awards, podcasting is under threat. The medium itself isn’t in strife however, as Dave Winer writes, it’s more about what the word podcasting seems to have come to mean:
We’re losing the word “podcast” very quickly. It’s coming to mean video interviews on YouTube mostly. Our only hope is upgrading the open platform in a way that stimulates the imagination of creators, and there’s no time to waste.
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2024 word the year: enshitiffication. I nominate IndieWeb for 2025
2 December 2024
The neologism, devised by blogger and author Cory Doctorow, just over two years ago, has been named the 2024 word of the year by Australian English wordbook, Macquarie Dictionary.
This must be some sort of record, between the time a new word is coined, comes into popular usage, and then named as a dictionary’s word of the year. Enshitiffication was among sixteen other candidate new words (PDF) shortlisted by Macquarie, and also won as the People’s Choice word.
It seems apt enshitiffication is selected as word of the year, given the rise in prominence IndieWeb/SmallWeb has experienced during 2024. If there’s any sort of counterpoint to the declining integrity of many of the social media platforms, IndieWeb/SmallWeb is it.
Macquarie accepts suggestions for their word of the year, and this might be an opportunity to bring the community/movement/concept/notion, however you like to describe IndieWeb/SmallWeb, to the notice of more people.
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