Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Rick Falkvinge to launch image-based news service (falkvinge.net)
3 points by imartin2k on June 15, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments


For context: Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, which has representation in the European parliament and has spawned Pirate Parties in more than 60 other countries. Here, Falkvinge & Co. comment on information policy and civil liberties in Europe and elsewhere in the world.

https://falkvinge.net/about/


Quite the fascinating concept, though I don't know that I'd buy it. A few thoughts:

⚫ I share the concerns over usability, sharability, and length, generall.

⚫ Twitter's going to be lifting its 140 character limit, by all signs. It's also been rather less than useful as a popular medium. It's fascination has largley rested with the news media, marketers, and advertisers.

⚫ Images do grab eyeballs, and many of us have noted that (including the #waronwords folks here at G+). But ...

⚫ There's only so much you can say in an image, and the format's not readily fungible.

⚫ This particular 3,000 word essay was kicked off by an idiotic image meme: http://redd.it/39w8u4 https://plus.google.com/u/0/104047951999948186971/posts/j8Kc... Mind, I had to go looking for the original text first.

⚫ Some sort of system that's similar to meme-generator, in which there is a full-text story, but a pull-quote is generated and attached to a suitable image (appropriate and/or interest-grabbing), but has links back to more substantive text-based content, and generates accessible text and/or translations, might be a worthwhile hack off of this.

⚫ There's already enough frustration with pixel-obsessed site layouts. Presenting content-as-text where display size is an unknown strikes me as a fools errand, but...

⚫ SVG suggests some interesting ways around some or all of this. In particular you can incorporate SVG and raster images, text is independent, scalable via CSS, selectable, and can include hyperlinks, and the whole result can be formatted and presented across a tremendous range of display sizes, even incorporating different elements as viewport size varies. The resulting images can also be rasterized as bitmaps if preferred. Device and browser support is still lacking but is in process.

Discussion on Rick's G+ profile:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/110980345342028402481/posts/Ux4e...




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: