May 13, 2014
by Björn Jeffery
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Why the preference for digits over letters? It mostly has to do with ease of memorization. To a native English-speaker, remembering a long string of digits might seem harder than memorizing a word. But that’s if you understand the word. For many Chinese, numbers are easier to remember than Latin characters. Sure, Chinese children learn the pinyin system that uses the Roman alphabet to spell out Mandarin words (for example, the word for “Internet,” 网络, is spelled wangluo in pinyin). And yes, Arabic numerals (1-2-3) are technically just as much a foreign import as the Roman alphabet (A-B-C). But most Chinese are more familiar with numbers than letters, especially those who didn’t go to college. To many, “Hotmail.com” might as well be Cyrillic.

Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs | New Republic

15 years and counting

May 6, 2014
by Björn Jeffery
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For over 15 years the newspaper industry has been looking for “the right business model” for digital.

Think about how many hours have been spent by bright people at New York Times and all the other fancy places. The smartest people in the industry have been thinking about this for over one and a half decade. And yet they have not found anything that works well enough to even be able to keep their colleagues employed. Real growth was a long time ago.

What if there isn’t a business model for news? Think about it. Because it is not the same thing as saying that news has no value, which is the knee jerk reaction. What would it mean? Perhaps it is time to start thinking about that scenario at least.