Davos Newbies

Counting the cost 

“Maybe we should shunt employees off the balance sheet into Enron-esque special purpose entities and pretend that recessions never happen.” John Plender has some interesting reflections on the consequences of what he terms “just-in-time chief executive officers”.

Deep linking

Jakob Nielsen writes his usual good sense on the importance of so-called deep linking. I’m only surprised he doesn’t mention another bad design mistake that I encounter all too frequently: frames-based sites that don’t easily provide the URL to enable deep linking. I often engage in convoluted work arounds to ensure my Davos Newbies entries have useful links, rather than mere links to the homepage that odd webmasters seem to prefer.

Look on my works ye mighty and despair

In 1986, someone at the BBC had the clever idea of creating a modern Domesday Book, the eleventh century record of settlements in England. One problem: they put the information on 12-inch video disks, that could only play on special BBC Micro computers. Few of these computers were bought at the time (what a surprise), and now the information is well-nigh unretrievable.

A newly established Digital Preservation Coalition is tackling the problem. Needless to say, the eleventh century original is still eminently readable.