Readability is a useful/controversial bookmarklet that strips away all the crap you find in typical web portals these days:

Even though AdBlock Plus has nigh-magical abilities to make certain websites bearable, the problem has gone beyond paid-placement ads as the site itself is screaming almost as loudly to draw you into another of its corners, like Wikipedia with colors. As the ALA article mentions, what should be an act of “reading” withers to “browsing”, a descriptor that was okay-I-guess in the era of black & white internet (which, ironically, grew out of a no-design, content-heavy, academics-only web.)

I don’t agree that publishers “just need to find something users are willing to pay for” (they won’t, and neither will they.) But I do think that a page could be taken from the attitude some forward-thinking internet music/game vendors have taken, which is to trust your users. While everyone else was DRMing everything up, these guys took a step back and said, “hey, if they’re already trying to pay us, why don’t we not assume they’re trying to steal?” The nuance in publishing is different, but the attitude is the same: goad the user into pursuing topics/authors further, and if you’ve done your job right, they probably will. “People get disinterested halfway through! We need to keep pulling them through to other pages!” Oh, boo hoo. They’ll probably be back tomorrow, and maybe next week. Until they figure out your content sucks and they move on to your competitors. You got the short-term ad bucks, but lost the war.

Adbusting in Berlin: Yet another artist reminds us that models are Photoshopped.

Who are the art directors on these projects, anyway? When I learned retouching, one of the guidelines was to make sure to look away from time to time to “recalibrate” your eyes according to reality. So is everyone involved in these productions working alone in windowless rooms? Christina, for example, hasn’t looked human in print for as long as I can remember; and what does her stylist have to do to maintain the illusion in motion?