I have noticed lately that Captchas, those ubiquitous letter-images designed to fool computers (but supposedly readable by humans) have been getting absolutely incomprehensible. Take this one from Google. It took me a full five minutes to make sure I got the letters correctly; and this one isn't the worst I've seen lately. Yahoo! delivered a captcha to me that I couldn't get after 3 tries. I realize it's possible I'm just going blind (and yeah, yeah, I should be wearing my glasses, Sean) but the captchas these days do seem to be longer, more compressed, and way harder to read. Am I the only one who's noticed?

Please feel free to mock me, if it really is just me. I can take it.

Amazon is slowly but surely taking over my life. If you look at the pie chart on my online banking, you'll see that the percentage of my income going to Amazon has increased exponentially. What they're doing--with Kindle, MP3 downloads, and TiVo, is absolutely brilliant.

1) My husband bought me a Kindle for my birthday. If you're a reader, particularly a multiple-books-at-one-time reader, particularly the kind of reader who has run out of shelf space, this gadget is for you. You really have to see it to understand why--interact with the super-cool screen and buttons and read on it--and see how badass the Whispernet download system is. (You can get a book anywhere, anytime you have a cellphone signal). So now I download books constantly--no waiting!--and though they're cheaper than the paper versions, they still cost a few bucks. Basically, I have no need to go to Barnes and Noble or Ukazoo anymore--none. Amazon owns this part of my life. (One caveat: the kindle list of books is not extensive, so until they get more content, I probably will still, occaisionally, find myself at the bookstore. But authors, agents and publishers ignore this platform at their peril.)

2) Tivo now offers Amazon Unbox--the ability to download, for a couple of dollars, all the shows you didn't or couldn't record. A full season of MadMen, say, or every episode of the Office I'd never seen. My email box is now full of Amazon confirms from these tiny purchases, including...

3) Portable MP3 downloads. ITunes needs to watch out on this one. I can play my Amazon MP3s ANYWHERE. Anytime. It makes them much, much more appealing than the ITunes store.

There hasn't been a lot of marketing around any of this--I guess amazon is relying on word-of-mouth (and here I am, playing into their strategy). But I suspect that once these three items catch on, Amazon's profits are going to go way, way up. After all, $5 here, $2 there, and 99 cents over here just doesn't seem like too much to spend... until you see that roughly 1/8 of your income is going into Jeff Bezos's pocket.

Even if you are on the far end of regularity when it comes to reading news on the internet, you probably end up visiting the sites of the large news corporations every so often. Recently, the design of the BBC homepage (Link to BBC.co.uk) has been revamped. With this fresh and flauntingly 'web 2.0' update BBC also chose to increase the overall width of their entire site to utilize the current web standards for user resolution.

Their previous site was merely 770 pixels wide, which designers, developers, and probably most people involved in the web in some way or another would agree sounds dated. It's the typewriter of website widths, and crouched in left corner of browser window, anyone without a laptop (and an old one, at that) viewing the old BBC site would see a huge, empty and most importantly, unused space.

What impressed me most about this size increase and it's implementation is the execution of all the pages in their News section. Although the design and layout of the content is almost exactly the same, it has been molded to fit their new grid, sandwiched between their updated header/footer. A seamless update without a full out redesign. (So seamless, actually, that it took months for a homepage-skipper such as myself to notice.)

To drive home the thought and process behind their changes and implementation of this update, there is an available PDF outlining their decisions (Link to Visual Language 1.0 [PDF]). Top-to-bottom it's well written and thorough with a lot of great images showcasing the new grid and it's implementation. I'm impressed with how well the previous content was accounted for, both in planning and execution.

The legnth of the document, the language, the examples, and the justifications for decision are all spot on and clear. It's hard to not blindly trust everything in the document, and even be enticed to skim it rather than dig in and inspect it just out of faith. Anyone involved in our industry should certainly be taking notes.