I just read the brief article by Paul Ginsparg about 20 years of the ArXiV. I think the article is a must read for anyone who is thinking about scientific communication. It’s short, and very readable. The things that stand out for me from this article are the following: There are real costs associated with running services on the web. Ginsparg originally imagined that the service that he created could run automatically and that he would be able to get back to his research projects very quickly. ... (more)

Measuring the User Experience on a Large Scale: User-Centered Metrics for Web Applications by Kerry Rodden, Hilary Hutchinson, and Xin Fu Rodden, Hutchinson and Fu describe a framework for measuring the user experience of web apps through mining server logs. Since they are based at Google one assumes that the framework that they are describing has been battle tested. They focus on metrics that measure user centric aspects of the online experience, in contrast to business centric (such as PULSE metrics: Page-views, Uptime, Latency, Seven day actives, Earnings). ... (more)