Monday Links: August 11th, 2008

My links are a bit late today because, well, it’s hard to find time for blogging when you’re in the grips of Olympic fever.  Now that gymnastics are dominating the coverage, I can afford to divert my attention…until Michael Phelps’ next race, anyway.

• This tool has been making the rounds lately: using your search history, it determines whether you are male or female.  Some parts of the algorithm seem a bit weird…but maybe I’m just looking for flaws since my results came back >60% female.  (My excuse is that my fiancee has used my computer quite a bit recently…what else would explain such a high rank for theknot.com on my browser history).  I will say that this test is much less accurate than the gender tests taking place for the Olympics.

• I’ve been thinking about the profitability of online journalism, and I found this news about Politico a bit distressing; as Ezra Klein writes:

Here you have this forward-thinking, primarily virtual venture to create a political news organization that marries old-school reporting values to the speed and the immediacy of the web and it actually works. A year-and-a-half after launch, it’s getting 3.5 million unique visitors per month and 25 million page views. And yet not only is it unprofitable, but 60 percent of its revenues come from advertising in the 27,000 circulation print version. In other words: Politico got the online readership it dreamed of, but it hasn’t come even close to figuring out how to monetize it. [...] Were they actually web only, they’d be losing catastrophic amounts of money.

• I just may lead a collective “amen” from my fellow self-checkout grocery shoppers if this intelligent scale that can automatically detect different produce items ever makes it to the US.

• As someone who has never studied the technical aspects of web design, I found these 4 Handy Hints for Fixing Your Confusing Web Design intriguing.  I think the biggest (and most natural) mistake we–architects of websites, if not technical folks–often make is assuming that visitors will navigate through our site as we would.  I’m a fan of what I would call “useful redundancy” for that very issue: creating many logical paths to the same important destination.  Regardless, I feel like great websites continually improve their navigation to make it intuitive for all audiences.

• Al Franken, running for U.S. Senate in Minnesota, demonstrates a keen sense of geography and a clever fundraising trick: