I’d like to persuade you otherwise.

As usability expert Oliver Reichenstein says in “The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard”:

[16 pixels] is not big. It’s the text size browsers display by default. It’s the text size browsers were intended to display… It looks big at first, but once you use it you quickly realize why all browser makers chose this as the default text size.

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By B Nonn for Smashing Magazine, 07 Oct 2011.

His primary message: Google+ is not a platform like Facebook. It’s trying to dictate the direction of Google+ instead of opening up to developers and letting them show Google what makes sense and what doesn’t.

He posted the rant on Google+, but forgot to turn off the “Public” sharing option. It was only meant to be shared internally at Google.

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By Ellis Hamburger for Business Insider, 12 Oct 2011.

It cracks me up whenever I see a PowerPoint presentation that uses social media quotes as support points. The quotes are intended to demonstrate that there’s a whole movement of consumers that agree with the argument in the presentation.

Skimming social media is DIY market research. Marketers can do it themselves without requiring agencies, budget, or very much time. It can be tempting to use social media quotes in lieu of traditional market research.

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By Tom Fishburne for Marketoonist, 25 Sept 2011.

For a long time now I’ve had a goal to raise children that are creative problem solvers – the kind of people that encounter a problem and say “I have an idea!” instead of “What am I going to do?”

This post I wanted to share some of the things we do together in hopes of inspiring creativity and problem solving. Hopefully it give other geek dads parents some ideas they can do with their kids.

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By Hugo Ware for hugoware, 25 Sept 2011.

It’d been pinned to a cork board in our kitchen for years; I’d seen it most every day. Then, yesterday, I saw it again, for the first time:

Write to be understood,

Speak to be heard,

Read to grow…

It’s really a simple mantra that covers, well, everything.

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By Jerry Colonna for The Monster in Your Head, 19 Sept 2011.

Tumblr is the little engine that could. Despite getting much less media attention than juggernauts like Twitter which got started around the same time, despite a very painful growing period (which seems largely over) where the site experienced serious downtime because of scaling, Tumblr is talking about raising money at a $800 million valuation, as we reported.

That’s actually very cheap.

But it also shows that in the web economy, design matters a lot. As we’ve been arguing for over a year now, Tumblr’s edge is that it is such a design-centric product. Tumblr is a blogging platform, in a world where there have been blogging platforms for well over ten years now, and yet it is still growing like gangbusters and turning into a huge social platform that will one day be as big as Twitter, and maybe even Facebook. What explains that isn’t superior technology, or hype, or anything else–just an excellently designed product.

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By x k c d.

I now have six months of data, and I’ve run some statistical analysis on it in order to share some interesting stats with you. (If I were more creative, I would make an infographic out of this information.)Note that this data does not include bookmarked links or links that users click on in websites. It is strictly domains that have been typed directly into the address bar.

After web site accessibility, “user experience” (abbreviated as UX) is probably the phrase that most people tend to confuse usability with. Whilst this topic has been discussed by various experts in the respective fields, I feel the need to write about it for two main reasons. The first reason is that several posts I have encountered emphasize the distinction between these two terms, yet they fail to highlight the relationship that exists between usability and user experience. The second reason is that whilst most of the posts are similar in nature, I have found some minor, albeit very valid points scattered in various posts I have read. Therefore, the objective of this post is to discuss these two terms, whilst highlighting their differences and more importantly the relationship that exists between them in a clear, concise way.

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By Justin Mifsud for Usability Geek, 11 July 2011.

Why is blogging so important to your search engine visibility? Because search engines serve up web pages—not websites—when people ask a question. And here’s the important part:

Every blog post is a new web page and every web page is another opportunity to rank well for another search term.

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By Rich Brooks for Social Media Examiner, 08 June 2011.