New and noteworthy for 3/1/09

By Ben Gross
in

White House names Internet team: Stephanie Condon at CNET News covers the recent “new media” appointments from the Obama administration that will handle the White House web presence.

Mobile Web 2009 = Desktop Web 1998: This column from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox discuses current mobile device user experience and includes the following recommendations from extensive user testing. When there is sufficient demand and design complexity, offering two separate mobile implementations—one for high end phones and one for low end phones—is best. If you only offer one implementation then target mid-range to high-end cell phones. A stand-alone native mobile application can offer the very best user experience, but this requires a enough demand to justify the development cost.

Clues to Massive Hacks Hidden in Plain Sight: Kim Zetter writes in Wired’s Threat Level blog about the Open Security Foundation, a watchdog group that tracks consumer data loss such as credit card breaches. The group uses both public and private data sources and produces a website called DataLossDB with their findings.

Published March 1, 2009