The elements of (infographic) style

Today, under the title of "TIL:The Small blue ball is all the earth's Salt water & the even smaller blue ball is all the earth's fresh water", a Redditor linked to a graphic showing the total volume of water on Earth, relative to volume of everything else on the planet.

This is a great infographic in its sheer illustrative simplicity. But, were they to receive the image file with no accompanying context, most viewers could only guess what they're looking at.

Metatags, linkbacks and similar web devices exist to describe and provide provenance for digital images. When images get republished, however, there's no guarantee that such appended information will follow. By downloading and pasting the image into this post, I've in effect broken the chain.

So, what to do to make sure the graphic's meaning, and therefore its value, will survive its voyage through the information universe? I haven't the expertise in computer and library science to suggest curatorial best practices. But from a composition/design standpoint, I'd advise the graphic's creator, or its original publisher, to compress a title and label into graphic. A simple failsafe if a blow to artistic minimalism. 

Why advertising is failing on the Internet

On TechCrunch today, Eric Clemons casts doubt on the viability of advertising to profit online. An interesting thesis to consider now that major daily papers have begun to fold and the move to web-only for traditional journalism has begun in earnest.

clipped from www.techcrunch.com My basic premise is that the internet is not replacing advertising but shattering it, and all the king’s horses, all the king’s men, and all the creative talent of Madison Avenue cannot put it together again. To analyze this statement we need a working definition of advertising, and I proposed the following, which is as general as I could make it: Advertising is using sponsored commercial messages to build a brand and paying to locate these messages where they will be observed by potential customers performing other activities; these messages describe a product or service, its price or fundamental attributes, where it can be found, its explicit advantages, or the implicit benefits from its use.