Wat is een web browser?

Naar aanleiding van een filmpje gemaakt door Google waarbij mensen op straat werd gevraagd uit te leggen wat een web browser is, hebben studenten van het Rotterdamse instituut Communicatie, Media en Informatietechnologie (CMI) hetzelfde gedaan in Rotterdam. Intrigerend, soms verbazingwekkend en alom een goed filmpje voor mijzelf en mijn concullega’s om eens te bekijken.

Who are the webworkers?

Nice initiative to gather some data about webworkers (= all the workers doing work directly related to the web, such as design, development, accessability etc) from the people behind A List Apart. I took the survey and it took me less than 10 minutes. It’s a good idea to get more data about who we – webworkers – actually are. So if you’re a webworker take the survey.

Rosalind Gill also did some research on webworkers and recently her work got published by the Institute of Network Cultures.

Her Creative Commons licensed (CC-BY-NC-ND) paper called ‘Technobohemians or the new Cybertariat”(pdf) can be downloaded for free or you can order the dead-tree version from the Institute of Network Cultures.

It’s an easy to read paper of forty plus pages on new media work in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The format is really nice to read as it consists mostly of stories from webworkers in Amsterdam entwined with comments, observations and thoughts of the author. Even if you don’t have the time to read all of it I would strongly recommend reading the summary especially if you are a webworker or if you need to work with a webworker on a regular basis. It contains nice recognizable anecdotes, some surprising data and offers an interesting look into the kitchen of the people creating the web.

Ps: there is also a video (direct link to the 275MB mp4 file) available of Rosalind Gill speaking (transcript) at a Decade of Webdesign conference 2005 on this topic. It takes some time to download and is older than the report itself, but it will give you the information straight from the horse’s mouth.

Using your mac in the sun?

Then use this ‘magic’ key combination to change the whole interface into a high contrast black and white version. Press these keys together (note the dash is only there to make this combination more readable):

CTRL-ALT-COMMAND -8

Very useful if you happen to sit in a train and need to do some work while the sun is shining.
If you want to change it back just use the same combination. I wonder if Ubuntu has something similar?