Puzzlepieces – January, 2009

WhiteHouse.gov’s New Robots.txt - geeky, but this perfectly symbolizes the differences between the two administrations

Welcome to the Washington State Department of Transportation - so just about all public institutions are far removed from those they serve. The WSDOT is a rare exception, and they do an excellent job. I read their blog, which is written as a real blog, not just PR. They talk about how they care about the issues. Last week when their was flooding I could immediately see photos of that online. Today I’m looking at a series of slides they just posted assessing the current state of Washington’s transportation, given several recent problems. These guys are with it.

in response to those who thing I only (and always) critisize the design of everything, I present an example of something extremely well designed: the lids of liquid laundry detergent jugs. I would link to something, but I can’t seem to find a good link for this…

…was the creation of the internet. The web’s been around well over a decade and practically every newspaper seems to still think it was the worst thing that could have happened to them. The important thing about newspapers - as I naively thought - was reporting on the news, not the physical manifestation of that on dead trees. Newspapers would have to be pretty silly to let non-news organizations usurp them completely on news, right?