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differences in screen size, device resolution or text rendering don’t matter in and of themselves, but only because they influence how someone will read our content.

Typography carries the literal message, and its legibility and readability impacts not just the audience’s understanding of the content but how easy it is for them to hear the brand’s personality.

Typography’s role in imparting the implied message is just as profound, and we can see its impact most clearly on mobile devices. Here, the design is often stripped back to its simplest form. Gone are the graphics, gradients and pixel-perfect details. It is the aesthetic personality of the type and the colour palette that influences our emotional response as readers and defines the experience.

comScore reported earlier this year that there are more than 100 million smartphone users in the United States alone and mobiThinking reports there are now more than 1.2 billion mobile web users worldwide, accounting for more than eight percent of total web traffic.

Gartner predicts mobile will be the number one Internet access device as early as next year.

Curation is the act of individuals with a passion for a content area to find, contextualize, and organize information. Curators provide a consistent update regarding what's interesting, happening, and cool in their focus. Curators tend to have a unique and consistent point of view--providing a reliable context for the content that they discover and organize

Sites like BoingBoing and Brain Pickings are great content curators. And now brands are getting into the act. Harley Davidson's site Ridebook features content in culture, style, music, and travel. And increasingly, curators are emerging as a critical filter that helps niche content consumers find "signal" in noise

anyone who steps up and volunteers to curate in their area of knowledge and passion is taking on a Herculean task. They're going to stand between the web and their readers, using all of the tools at their disposal to "listen" to the web, and then pull out of the data stream nuggets of wisdom, breaking news, important new voices, and other salient details. It's real work, and requires a tireless commitment to being engaged and ready to rebroadcast timely material. While there may be an economic benefit for being a "thought leader" and "trusted curator," it's not going to happen overnight. Which is to say, being a superhero is often a thankless job.

While the online ad industry falls deeper in love with native ads that fade into the background of Web pages, consumers prefer ads that get in their face by taking over their computer screens. At least, that’s according to a new study on high-impact ads conducted by Ipsos ASI on behalf of Undertone.

It’s perhaps not surprising that Undertone and Ipsos found bigger ads drove more brand recall, since consumers are likely to remember big ads that interrupt their Web surfing. But it is surprising that respondents said they liked full-screen takeovers the best. These ads received likability scores that were 30 to 49 percent higher than standard display units, according to Undertone

One word of caution: This study primarily focuses on display ads—that is, it compared high-impact display ads with standard banners. Native was not part of the research. It would be interesting to see what consumers thought of native ads vs. full-screen takeovers, if given the choice.

The median page load time  for desktop websites, as measured by Google Analytics, is about 2.45 seconds. That means that half the pages measured were faster than this, while the other half were slower. The mean page load is about 6.4 seconds.

On mobile, things are significantly slower, the median page load is about 4.4 seconds, while the mean is above 10 seconds.

today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.

This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components: Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F's top bar. Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F's lower bar. Finally, users scan the content's left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F's stem.

The F viewing pattern is a rough, general shape rather than a uniform, pixel-perfect behavior.

Users won't read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won't. The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There's some hope that users will actually read this material, though they'll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second. Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They'll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

Authorship photos might cause people to assume that the page is an article or a blog post rather than a product page.

most pages can be optimized by including images that serve as visual cues for where visitors should look next.

Relying on the screen above “the fold” to do all of the heavy lifting is one of the biggest usability mistakes you can make. The idea that it is the only place web users will browse is a complete myth.

Couldn’t the NYT just know what I’d want to read and serve that up to me via algorithm? “Hell, yeah!” Adelman responds to that last question. “The fact that we continue to reflect that organization structure is not a statement about how we think things should be consumed. It is a statement about, there are some very natural ways for people to look for things.” Those “natural” ways of looking at things really come down to, again, user expectation. While the redesign does incorporate some algorithmically suggested sections within navigation, Adelman stresses that the NYT simply can’t remove the option to predictably click on particular topics, lest their audience question the publication’s transparency.

“There’s an element of trust that’s important in any relationship, whether it’s with the NYT or another publication, or a tool or experience you’re accustomed to,” Adelman says. “You don’t want to feel like things are moving under your feet." They also can’t merely fill the NYT homepage with articles they think someone might like to read, because then they cease to be what they are--the world’s news, presented without assumptions or bias. “I don’t think people want a customized version of the NYT homepage. They might benefit from some amount of material focused on their interests, but people come to the NYT because they want the NYT’s take on things.”

I’m not saying that going down the responsive road is all peaches and cream, but the idea is that once the foundation is set, the ongoing maintenance costs decrease over time, while dedicated sites have several additional reoccurring costs.

Project planners are typically used to chunking things out into “streams”, and I’ve seen several project plans that launch a desktop version, then subsequently mobile and eventually tablet versions. That’s not really how responsive design works. The team need to address all channels up front as one “stream” influences the rest of the design. This is important even if you are making a dedicated mobile site that utilizes responsive techniques.

What matters is that they are even capable of viewing and collecting our personal, private data in this way. Why is it even possible that Verizon has this level of data to disclose? Why is it even possible that Apple can infer and cache our locations based on metadata? Why is it even possible that our emails can be skimmed for advertising opportunities? If we did not explicitly permit these things, then we have implicitly done so by choosing to go ahead and use the Internet this way either because the pros outweighed the cons. But now the cons are starting to add up.

we use the Internet as a sort of phantom extension of our own computers, putting things where they are accessible to us but we are not responsible for them. This was the so-called web 2.0: every personal computer and device, vastly more powerful and connected than ever before, yet acting as a thin client. Clearly, this is where we began to lose touch with reality.

How did we decide we were in control of the data we sent Google or Facebook? Why would we submit to such an obvious delusion? Does anyone really believe that these companies have our best interests in mind to any greater a degree than a dairy farmer and his cows? We submitted because they were the only option

Some cultures are High Context. This means most communication is simply understood rather than explicitly stated. These cultures have a much higher tolerance for ambiguity and understatement. You could say that, in a High Context culture, the responsibility for understanding rests with the listener and it’s left to them to divine deeper meaning from the conversation or statements coming at them.

Low Context cultures, on the other hand, are much more explicit and often rely on directness and true feelings to communicate.

In these types of cultures, the responsibility for understanding is on the speaker to convey their ideas clearly and without ambiguity.

With contextual search, it's no longer enough to get your business or product listed on the first Web page of results. On a mobile device, as well as in push situations, SEO is really effective only if you can push your results into the top position, or at least into the first few lines.

Wearable devices like Google Glass and the rumored iWatch could put even more pressure on search results. We don't yet know what their interfaces will look like, but it seems safe to assume that there may be even less real estate available to display search results.

This is one reason why the search engines are working so hard to deliver knowledge rather than just Web page links in their results. Google and Bing both now feature "knowledge boxes" that try to encapsulate the pertinent information about a topic in one glance. This "knowledgization" of search results is conducive to mobile search because it parses data into easily displayed and digestible chunks - essential for the smaller screen.

Pela primeira vez, o investimento publicitário em Internet no Brasil ultrapassou o montante destinado a revistas. Assim indicam os dados do Projeto Inter-Meios relativos aos primeiros dois meses do ano. No período em análise, a web recebeu 189,7 milhões de reais (cerca de 72,4 milhões de euros), sem contar com as redes sociais e os motores de busca. Superando, assim, os 188,42 milhões de reais (cerca de 72 milhões de euros) investidos em revistas.