Most of them will sound too familiar to you (content is king, flash abuse anyone?), but when Norman, Maeda and peers write something you’d better read it. Here are the 10 commandments with more examples and comments of my own.

1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash
   Actually thou shalt not use Flash at all as an information container or as an interface replacement. Your users have already learnt how to use HTML interaction conventions. Don’t make them learn again something they’ll use only in your site.
   Hall of shame: Camper shoes
2. Thou shalt not hide content
   Readers come to your web for your content or for your ads? Do not hide contents behind ads. Google got to the top with AdWords and not with banners.
   Hall of shame: La Vanguardia online
3. Thou shalt not clutter
   The web is enough complex as it is. The huge load of information is difficult to structure and you should help your users once they land on your site. Unnecessary graphical artifacts, excess of information, poor website structure, lack of visual hierarchy, ad abuse, and misuse of the HTML conventions won’t make your user happy.
   Hall of shame: Catalunya Ràdio, RENFE
4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections
   Apple’s website looks cool with all reflections on their products and we all love it (There’s even a reflection in the header of this site!). But this is Apple. Don’t think that you’ll turn your company in a 2.0 project by just adding a reflection to your logo.
   Hall of shame: Apple’s Mobile Me logo
5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels
   Web 2.0 is full of unique funny names with half of the vowels missing. If your company has not embraced the 2.0 philosophy getting rid of some vowels won’t help, and neither will adding an i at the beginning.Here’s a Web 2.0 company name generator to get your own.
   Hall of shame: iStalkr.com (not active anymore after a year. Bad naming for an RSS aggregator?)
6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography
   95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.
   Read all about it in the seminal article Web Design is 95% Typography
   Hall of shame: YouTube.com
7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences
   What else can you say? You’t better give your audience some good experience, content and functionality wise. After all they’re giving you their most valuable asset: time.
   Hall of shame: Second Life (funny that one of the worst immersive experience is a 3D immersive website)
8. Thou shalt be social
   Online success stories share the “social” tag. In fact marketers are working hard to find some business model around them. MySpace, Facebook, Last.fm, Flickr, Bebo or YouTube are the names of the game.
   Hall of shame: Second Life
9. Thou shalt embrace proven technologies
   Simple good. Complex bad. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Craigslist or Wikipedia have all something in common: plain old XHTML and a simple CSS. Simplicity goes a long way.
   Hall of shame: Second Life
10. Thou shalt make content king
    People are not interested in your abilities as interface designer or information architect. People want to get to the contents they’re looking for. The interface is just the means to them and not the end. A good interface will go unnoticed and so will the work of its designer. The better the designer the less you’ll notice her work. A nice paradox.
    Hall of shame: Any web with a Skip Intro link. Here’s Google’s Skip Intro new feature.

Original article: 10 Commandments of Web Design
Businessweek’s poll The Best and Worst of web design

The film deals with copyrights, copylefts, intellectual property and how the net is changing well established business models while allowing for reach and creativity for the rest of us.

In the documentary you’ll find:

• Danger Mouse talking about his highly successful The Grey Album where he mashed Jay-Z Black Album with Beatles White Album (thus The Grey Album). It violated all kinds of copyrights but it’s a masterpiece. Obviously it was downloaded by millions, earning Danger Mouse just credibility and respect. Fancy a torrent?

Here’s the video with John Lennon breakdancing to Ringo Star’s DJing.

• Musician Girl Talk. He performs live with a laptop mixing and mashing every conceivable sample creating new real time songs. He would be willing to pay the billions he should, according to current copyright laws, for using the original songs, but even if he had the money it would take him no less than 50 years to get all the permissions from the owners.
• The Brazilian DJs from the Techno Brega scene in the north of Brazil (a kind of Techno Kitsch, don’t try at home). They mix and remix whatever they listen on the radio and download from the net, Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy this time. After that they distrubute their CDs for free expecting to attract fans to their live acts, a business model that is catching up in the traditional music industry.
• Larry Lessig, author of Free Culture and creator of the Creative Commons licensing model, talking about the need to protect intellectual property but also on how too restrictive copyright laws hinder creativity and access to culture by everybody.
• The guys from Pirate Bay in Sweden. Well you know them.

Funny at the end when Girl Talk remixes Gnarls Barkley’s (Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse) remix of Crazy done by the Brazilian Techno Brega DJ, and turns it into something completely new. You could see him rocking the house with this small sample and his laptop.

Check the trailer at the Creative Commons website
Watch the movie online
Download Good Copy Bad Copy from The Pirate Bay

He expects to save the world with this song and he will no doubt be the next viral video. I wish he would only save us from spam and links to virtual casinos as he says. Don’t miss the end part when he sings about “lots of videos of people lip synching to we are the world”.

Kudos to Tom Willett for this great country ballad!

The data web, like the document web involves standards as HTML, Cascading Style Sheets and so on, all this things were enabled by royalty free standards. The same on the data web.

What if you wanted to meet a friend for coffee at the best café next to her house?

Well, even if you had your friend’s address on Gmail, tagged the best cafés in the City in del.icio.us and made your GPS position available to an online web service, there’s no way you could get the right café straight away as technology stands right now.

All the information needed to find the perfect coffee is available online and available but not very usable. You could still pull it off after a few clicks and searches on your internet enabled mobile device but this is not the point.

The cool thing would be that some algorithm (AI?) cross-referenced the data and produced the right answer at the right moment and this is where the Semantic Web or Intelligent Web comes to rescue.

Think of what you could achieve by cross-referencing air-traffic information and nutrition patterns when triying to stop the spreading of a disease.

Learn all about it in this excellent Tim Berners-Lee video.

All about the Semantic Web in this 2006 article by Nigel Shadbolt and Tim Berners-Lee (PDF)