After receiving many, mostly encouraging, remarks on its “public beta” of the new Brown website via the University Web Developers list serve, several Brown x-staffers and alums have stepped in and gave them a round thrashing over it.

It seems that Brown has made some web design faux pas over the years. One of the more visible critics has been webpagesthatsuck.com (apparently the x-staffer). I have two things to say in response to this:

1) It takes people willing to stick their neck out or take a fall for innovation to happen. I applaud Brown for that.

2) I have never really much respected webpagesthatsuck.com because, rather consistently over the years, their website has sucked.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 28th, 2006 at 10:31 am and is filed under Design, Higher Education. It has been viewed 1185 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

From ‘A Softer World’

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

I HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT!!1!