This is a story about whether traditional media has more pull or more trust (more readership?) than blogs, or vice versa. Kottke takes a stab at pre-judging a long bet between Martin Niseholtz of the NY Times and Dave Winer of Scripting News, on whether Google will rank stories higher for NYT (traditional media venues) or for blogs (new, social generation media)

Care to guess the winner?

Karl Pearson-Cater over at the CityPages has a mighty funny new post all about iTunes and smart playlists. Go ahead, add your own in the comments.

In FastCompany’s Nov 2005 issue, Linda Tischler wrote an article on simplicity and the drive to make all kinds of products — from magazines (Real Simple) and web interfaces (Google) to tech gadgets (iPod) — simpler and more user friendly. I love this trend.

The article posits this equation, waiting to be proven:
T (technology) + E (ease of use) = $

Google’s research shows that users remember just 7 to 10 services on rival sites. So Google offers a miserly six services on its home page. By contrast, MSN promotes more than 50, and Yahoo, over 60. And both sell advertising off their home pages; Google’s is a commercial-free zone.

This is great advice. And Linda also quotes Joe Duffy quoting Milton Glaser, “Less isn’t more; just enough is more.” Just enough is very hard to do, but it defines good design and differentiates a poor user experience from a great user experience.

You’ve got to check this out. A new study out of Canada that says users can judge the aesthetics of a web site in the first 50 milliseconds.

Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.

Wow, that’s fast. And no, this isn’t about comprehension, but rather about the first flash judgements and prejudging that your mind makes.