Jack the Webber

Google Translate: the remix

2011-05-27T01:14:00.000-07:00

5/17/2011 12:28:00 PM
When we built Google Translate we thought it was a cool tool, but we have to admit we had fairly straightforward ideas about what it would be useful for (lowering language barriers and making more web content available to people around the world). As with many inventions, though, it turns out people have found uses for the tool that we never imagined. Recently, two clever Translate trends caught our eye—perhaps one of them will inspire you to come up with a fun Translate trick of your own.

First, some creative folks translated strings of consonants into German to create a new beatboxing tool. The phrase “pv zk bschk” didn’t initially make much sense to us, but a quick listen got us nodding our heads along to the beat.

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

2011-05-27T00:55:00.000-07:00

It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don't want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

We have a lot of work to do, and we're definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision. We're excited for what's to come and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more updates in the fall and have a great summer.

Holy Moly: how a £4 website became an internet phenomenon

2011-05-26T00:51:00.000-07:00

Holy Moly's straight-talking founder, Jamie East, has sold half of the celebrity gossip website to Big Brother producer Endemol. Now he wants to use the partnership to conquer TV. Andrew McCormick reports.

Jamie East is enjoying the high life. The 37-year-old Holy Moly founder is just back from an all-expenses-paid trip to the US courtesy of Harley Davidson. He is not quite sure why they took him, but not for the first time in his life, an opportunity came up and East took advantage.

It was a similar situation with Endemol in March, when the Big Brother producer made East a considerably rich man by buying a 50 per cent stake in the celebrity gossip website.

"Holymoly.co.uk cost me £4 in 2002; Holymoly.com, in 2008, cost £37,000. I could have bought the dotcom one in 2002 for £30, but I didn't have £30," East reveals. "I had about a tenner and the wife would have asked why I was spending nappy money on a website. I reminded her of that when I had to shell out thirty-seven grand for it. It was a while before I thought I had to make money, though. Sending the newsletter to 50,000 people, rather than 500, is actually quite expensive."

Popbitch had blazed a trail with its gossipy email newsletters and forum, but East, at the time working for BSkyB, thought he could do better. "I thought Popbitch was missing a trick in what a digital brand can become," he says. "Everyone had heard of Popbitch and it frustrated me that the owners weren't doing great things with it."

When Holy Moly launched, the public's obsession with celebrities, spurred on by reality TV shows, was at its peak. It was a captive audience, but East certainly knew how to make his website stand out - he credits 'C**t's Corner' with transforming Holy Moly from a niche site to an internet phenomenon. Times have changed, though, and East recognises that scandalous tittle-tattle is now much harder to come by. "There are fewer gobshites who aren't media-trained and surrounded by PRs, so it's more difficult to find things to write about. And the 'pap' agencies aren't getting the pictures they used to."

East is therefore planning to make Holy Moly less reliant on celebrity gossip by turning to film reviews and more sober entertainment news. This will be reflected in the site's redesign, which is currently being tested. What will the redesign involve? "It's about creating more places on the site to put more stuff," he says matter-of-factly.

East's straight-talking tone is reflected in his website - and it is arguably this, rather than the subject matter, that attracts around one million unique users to Holy Moly every month. "We don't search out scoops, we don't doorstep, we don't go for them because it's expensive and risky. The amount the tabloids must have spent investigating in the last month alone, while not being able to publish a lot of it, is mental. We write about what's popular and topical in a tone that isn't patronising and reads as people really talk," he says.

Lovable rogue

The irreverence is palpable on meeting East, a big Midlands lad with rock hair and tattoos to match. He gets a buzz out of the attention and one feels that the Endemol deal was very much driven by his desire for Holy Moly to eventually reach the TV screens. "There isn't a decent celebrity show on telly any more. It hasn't been done properly since Liquid News," he asserts.

So, what of the entrepreneur's new mothership? East and his head of PR are desperate to get across the message that Holy Moly won't lose its independence following the Endemol deal. Surely, though, this is a given - for the production company has a history of courting controversy, and anyone can see that Holy Moly would be nothing without its rogue element.

Whether or not it will work on TV is a tricky question. Several TV executives have turned it down in the past, but East is still determined to convince them. When I last interviewed him several years ago, when he was the anonymous 'Mr Holy Moly', he said the same of video. But he has since changed his mind. "Video's an interesting one because you can spend a hell of a lot of time, money, effort and thought in creating video and it just doesn't work sometimes. Marketers and agencies scream at me that they want video - 'It's £28 CPA,' they say. But the problem with video is that you need volume. We don't treat YouTube the way we should treat YouTube because it's a job in itself," he argues.

Having worked at Sky and helped Channel 4 and Chelsea FC, among others, with their websites, East is well aware of how essential marketing and the media are to the realisation of his ambitions. International expansion is also on the cards, but East is not looking at the usual path. Germany and India would not be many people's first ports of call, but the obvious candidate market, the US, is saturated with purveyors of celebrity gossip.

East will certainly be relying on advertising to put his plans into action, but he has always had a beneficial relationship with sponsors. Carling, for instance, jumped on board in the early days of the site: "Carling gave me two grand to get pissed with my mates. So of course I spent £500 and pocketed the rest. That was the first time I thought, 'Ah, people are going to pay me money to do stuff and I can get pissed as well'."

Yet this was not always the case, at least with some of the websites and media owners East courted. "Lots of brands didn't want to be associated with Holy Moly, but they were trying to rip us off. So we said to them, 'We'll create content for you if you pay us'," he explains.

Having been anonymous for the best part of a decade, East is enjoying his newfound limelight. His next challenge is to turn Holy Moly into a mainstream media operator, and one that will attract more than just online advertisers. If past performance is anything to go by, this should not present too much of a challenge. "Holy Moly's always gone to plan. Through luck or graft every stepping stone has worked out," East says.

Holy Moly TV is next up. It could be the most treacherous stepping stone yet.

VIRTUAL REALITY
Lives: West London
Family: Wife and four kids
Favourite websites: PopJustice and UltraCulture
Rides: A Ducatti motorbike

REALITY
2011: Sells 50 per cent share of Holy Moly to Endemol UK
2008: Sells stake in Holy Moly to digital media company Perform - later
buys it back
2002: Launches Holy Moly
1999: Joins Sky
1993: Lead singer with the Beekeepers, signed to Beggars Banquet Records
1990: DJ at various venues in Derby

This article was first published on marketingmagazine.co.uk

Three Reasons Why A Good Looking Website Will Increase Traffic

2011-05-25T05:22:00.000-07:00

If you really want to increase traffic on your website, you may want to step back and take a look at the site from a visitors point of view. A good looking website increases its traffic naturally because those who visit it will likely come back and tell their friends about it as well. The presentation of your website says a lot about your business.

If you want to have a highly successful web business then it is necessary to have a nice website. With more than half of the world logging in web time each week, it is important for todays businesses to maintain interesting and effective websites that pertain to their businesses. If you are interested in learning why a good looking website is important when trying to increase traffic, take a look at these three reasons.

Professionalism

The first view of your website by a visitor says a lot about your business as a whole. If your website looks cheap and self-made, then it is likely the visitor will not think your business operates in a professional manner. When it comes to dealing with customers on the web, you certainly want to look professional on all levels. If you are an online retailer, you want customers to feel comfortable ordering from you. If they do not think your website looks professional, they may not feel comfortable doing so. It is not necessary to have your website professionally created in order to appear professional.

All you need to do is play around with different approaches to see which templates work best for your business. The more you read and learn about website creation, the better your site will look. Educating yourself on the issue of website development is important when you are trying to do it on your own. If you find yourself overwhelmed, then you can always turn to a professional for the creation of your site. Therefore, to maintain a high level of professionalism, you need to have a good looking website. In turn, but creating the professional atmosphere, the consumers will likely return and bring their friends as well.

Entertaining

Not only should your website look professional, but it should also have an entertaining value. Entertainment is something that will draw visitors into your site in a deeper way. If they see an interesting link, they will likely examine your site in more detail. By offering things like contests and free giveaways, you can easily draw in more traffic. If your site is boring however, it is unlikely you will be able to keep anyone there for more than two seconds.

Offering games to play on your site that may pertain to your business, you can keep the traffic flowing. You can even offer links to other exciting and informative websites, in order to act as an in-between for the fun. Anyone would rather visit a fun and entertaining site than a boring and plain website. If you offer enough excitement it is likely the regular visitors will advertise your site to everyone they know!

Easy On the Eyes

A good looking website will also increase traffic if it is easy on the eyes. In addition to being professional and fun, your website should be easy on the eyes. This essentially means that it should be attractive as well as easy to function within. Choose colors and an arrangement that will appeal to a wide variety of people. Using really bold colors will possibly hurt the eyes of viewers if they look at them for extended periods of time. You can always add splashes of colors in graphics and borders, but it is best to keep text in dark colors. Create an interesting layout, but not one that is so unique that it is difficult to use. If your website is easy to look at and visitors can navigate easily around it, they will want to come back.

If you focus on these three reasons to create a good looking website, your traffic will surely increase. Having a website that looks professional, entertaining, and is easy on the eyes is the key to inviting and maintaining web traffic for your website. So, if you are creating your site now, or if you want to overhaul your existing site, keep these three tips in mind to get the most traffic to your site as possible.

Jason Cox - About the Author:

For several years now, Jason has been reviewing hundreds of online products and services. Many consider his reviews to be very insightful and reliable. Visit his website creativedigitalmedia.com

Olympic partners face online guerilla marketing blitz

2011-05-25T01:01:00.000-07:00

Olympic sponsors have been warned to brace themselves for a barrage of online guerrilla marketing ahead of the London 2012 Olympics.

LOCOG has grappled with restrictions to protect sponsors, such as limits on outdoor and TV advertising, but experts say the opportunity for brands to hijack the Olympics online remains 'huge'.

With LOCOG facing a challenge to impose restrictions on digital marketing, official sponsors are being warned they can expect 'open season' when it comes to making the most of the Olympics online.

'It is a grey area. The restrictions based on TV and outdoor advertising don't matter any more, especially in the UK with the BBC,' said Steve Martin, chief executive of M&C Saatchi Sports & Entertainment.

'The smart marketers are one step ahead when it comes to social media. It's not as if official sponsors will be taking out superinjunctions to stop brands advertising online,' he added.

While LOCOG argues it will be able to police breaches (see box), Nathan McDonald, managing partner of We Are Social, said the guerrilla social marketing activity will be highly evolved.
'The opportunities are huge. For example, you could check-in near Olympics venues and get targeted local offers,' added McDonald.

Meanwhile, brands such as British Airways are failing to maximise the potential brand-boost of the Olympics by neglecting search strategies, according to new research.

Hannes Ortner, head of linguistics services and analysis at Locaria, which has been auditing the search capabilities of Olympic partners, said BA is letting itself down.

'These brands need to ensure they personalise their strategies for local markets. BA's Chinese websites jump into English and destroy the user journey,' he said.

Statement: LOCOG response

'There are challenges with international enforcement of legal rights where social networking is involved.

'However the principle remains - if a business uses social networking for the clear purposes of ambush marketing in the UK, we can take action for infringement of our legal rights.

'If the ambush activity is outside of the UK, we will work with the IOC and the relevant National Olympic Committee to address the issue - in many countries there are similar laws to those which apply in the UK which prevent ambush marketing of the Olympic Games and these can be used where relevant.'

This article was first published on marketingmagazine.co.uk
Check out www.jackthewebber.com

Let's Get Physical

2011-05-24T01:00:00.000-07:00

First, allow me to state the obvious.

The digital world is here, and it is here to stay. It will continue to grow and permeate every nook and cranny of our millennia-long analog life. It will force us to reframe our comfort zones, and challenge us with new ways of viewing our world. With that said, I must admit that I am one of those people who is totally fine with technology’s role in this new life. I love the inherent “magic” technology delivers as it instantly converts the invisible ones and zeros into photographs of our loved ones half a world away, or into songs that bring back nostalgic memories. I also love the near obsessive-compulsive organizational abilities technology provides, as it attempts to help us manage our insanely empirical schedules and enable us to poetically update our Facebook status, at any time from almost anywhere.

However. Dramatic pause.

Despite popular belief, we are still, thankfully, human beings—and the delectably beautiful part of being is experiencing life multi-dimensionally. It is this very multidimensionality that gives us the proverbial feeling of being connected with the universe as a whole, the feeling of being a part of a larger system—the feeling of purpose and meaning. As an example, as satisfying it is to listen to our favorite band over and over on our iPods, nothing can replace the experience of seeing a band play live. The live performance allows us to witness, in subconscious awe, several individuals performing seemingly different things while literally creating harmony out of chaos. The experience is near spiritual: the contortions the drummer has to make to hit the right beat, the rapid otherworldly-speed of the guitar player’s fingers plucking the strings, the effortless voice of the lead singer as he or she celestially replicates the song we have heard on repeat so many times before.
The performance is multidimensional because we are there with others, sharing the same experience, breathing the same air, bobbing our heads to the beat of the music, and in some cases singing along in unison. As the music transports us through our individual and personal memories and daydreams, turning eons into nanoseconds, we absorb the energy of the sound and of the environment that encapsulates everything into one multifaceted, multidimensional experience.

So what does any of this have to do with design?

If design wants to change the world as much as it struts around claiming it will, design will have to start becoming more multidimensional and more immersive in the palpable life. As technology enables us to do things better and faster, it is also unintentionally divorcing the designer further and further from the multidimensional world he or she is designing for. What used to be a trip to New York or to a local manufacturer is now only a Google Image Search away. As invaluable, liberating and efficient that can be for inspiration and reference--the systematic problems that face our societies, inside and outside the typical design realms, cannot and will not be solved by designers sitting in cushy offices, clicking away in front of the sterile glow of their computers. Nor will these problems be solved by cookie-cutter research assignments that deliver pretty charts and synthesized analysis.

Designers, as naturally empathic creatures, can only solve these problems by experiencing things firsthand and becoming totally immersed in our physical world. From a gallery opening to a visit to a local shelter, and everything in between, any designer worth his or her salt should continuously and ravenously scavenge the planet, collecting, learning and sharing from their experiences. Seeing images of the polluted basin of the Los Angeles river is one thing, actually helping clean it up, while enduring the putrid smells of the rotting wood, used clothing, rancid decomposing food and human excrement is quite another. Only through such immersive, multidimensional moments can epiphany strike and a realization of “a better way” be revealed. This is the power of design and what a skilled and passionate designer can deliver. By leveraging our intuition, empathy and ability to turn our own ones and zeroes into real-world meaningful solutions we deliver our own magic that, too, can and will change the world in which we live—for the better.

2011-05-20T00:39:00.000-07:00

This is quite a cool website made very nice.

http://www.gavincastleton.com/

Single page website design

2011-05-19T01:04:00.000-07:00

Ok so I am going to be posting a lot of single page website design that I am coming across lately as some of them are really quite good they are simple, easy to use and get the message across very very well.

The first one is http://www.thinkgreenmeeting.com/

Do more than a meeting. Do a world of good.
Sustainability. You know it's the right thing to do. But now it's also the smart thing to do. ThinkGreenMeeting.com gives you the ability to hold a web conference with audio at one low flat rate. Plus there are no contracts or commitments and unlimited usage. Take cars, planes and hotels out of the equation. Save time. Save money. Hold a great meeting. That's good for the planet. And good for business.

One Page Website – Does It Really Fulfill the Need?

2011-05-18T00:56:00.000-07:00

Over the next few posts I want to cover single page websites which is a new trend in web design at the moment, we can only tell if this trend stays around over time but it looks quite nice.

A Website is the new and most common mean of advertising and business promotion. There was a time when businesses used to rely on brochures, flyers, post cards and posters etc. With Internet technology growing day by day, websites are becoming the most efficient and reliable source of business promotion. However, in this article we will particularly discuss one page websites, their usability and advantages in detail.

If you’ve ever signed up for flyer printing to advertise your business, one page websites work in the same manner. You can put enough information there to grab interest. Single page websites have become immensely popular in recent times. Such websites are a great example modern web and advancement in technology. Single page websites are all about explaining things precisely.

However, designing single page websites cannot be an easy task as one has to convey a lot but in little space. If you are a good designer, you will not let your visitor suffer by creating a large document which requires scrolling down again and again.

You can use CSS3 and Ajax because these are the best ways to create a single page website. Flashy websites are also considered to be single page websites but going for flashy websites is not a great idea. You should opt for HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

If we have to compare single page and multiple page websites, both will have their good and bad points. However, single page websites would have a few advantages over multi page websites. Following are a few advantages of having a single page website:

1. No Use of F5

You will not have to use f5 at all. The best thing about single page websites is that you do not have to refresh the page again and again. So, navigating a website without having to refresh is a great thing.

2. Improved User Experience

Instead of having to visit multiple pages to visit, you will have only one page to visit which means you will be able to go through the content in an easier and quicker way. With so many pages, at times it can get hard to even find the relevant material.

3. Easy To Maintain

Websites with so many pages are hard to handle and maintain. If you will have a website of one page, making changes and maintaining it would be really easy.

4. Quality vs. Quantity

Having a single page website gives you an option to focus on quality instead of focusing on quantity. When you have so many pages to design, you might not give every page that special attention it would require. When you will have to design a single page, you can actually make a quality page. Working in quantity can have a lot of distractions hence not bringing the required result.

5. Ranking on Google

The benefit of having only one page website is that the ranking of the Google will be applied to the entire website and not just a single page which is a great thing to improve the rankings of your website on search engines.

6. A Unique New Idea

Since one page websites are not really common, the first impression of website is really good on visitors. This is why mostly designers prefer to make their portfolios on one page websites to give a good first impression.

The 'Science' of Good Design: A Dangerous Idea

2011-05-16T01:18:00.000-07:00

Design, like the world as a whole, is unpredictable and messy. If you think it boils down to "research," you're mistaken.

A job interview can be a pretty dry affair, but a few years ago, I had one that I'll never forget. I was talking to an advertising executive about one of his clients, a major telecommunications company that had recently renamed itself. At the end of the interview, he asked if I had any questions for him. "What do you think about your client's decision to change names?" I asked. It seemed to me that discussing the pros and cons of a decision like this would be one of the more interesting aspects of a job in advertising. But his response didn't inspire much of a dialogue.

"I know it was the right decision," he said. "I've seen the research."

Ah, yes. "The research." That most magical of phrases. Extinguisher of debate. Oracle. Provider of easy answers to the most complex questions. As an undergraduate physics major, I had grown to understand scientific research as a slow process that took place over years or even decades. Research, as I understood it then, was an attempt to deliberately advance knowledge by eliminating false theories. It was a difficult undertaking bolstered by rigorous debate.

This way of thinking may help designers gain acceptance in the short term, but it ultimately cheapens the most important dimension of their work: the human dimension.

In the business world, I later learned, "the research" is quite a different phenomenon. As my interview so nicely illustrated, "the research" is not debatable. Apparently it's capable of predicting people's reactions to decisions that haven't even been made yet. In fact, "the research," seems to be capable of making decisions all on its own.

This simplistic view of research pervades our culture, the business world, and increasingly the world of design. According to this view, "research" is synonymous with science. And since science provides us with hard truths in the physical world, "the research" should do so in the business world. But let the buyer beware of such thinking. The real world is a complex system inhabited by autonomous individuals. It isn't so simple or knowable, which is exactly why design can be so valuable.

The Austrian economist F.A. Hayek called this imitation of science "scientism." Scientism is to science what Stephen Colbert's "truthiness" is to truth. It feels like science, so it carries a certain weight. But upon closer examination, scientism turns out to be a charade. It is often a well-intentioned, earnest charade, but a charade nonetheless. Scientism exploits the extreme reverence accorded to science in our culture, as well as a popular misunderstanding of what actually constitutes science. True science has certainly earned our respect, but as Hayek said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1974, "what looks superficially like the most scientific procedure is often the most unscientific."

So why am I discussing scientism in a blog about design? Because as design has become more accepted in the mainstream business world, it has adopted many of the conventions of business, including scientism. But designers embrace scientism at their own peril. This way of thinking may help designers gain acceptance in the short term, but it ultimately cheapens the most important dimension of their work: the human dimension, including things like judgment, taste, and creativity.

Anyone who has worked in a creative field—or has reflected on his or her own creativity—recognizes that being creative is necessarily chaotic, sometimes arbitrary, and often unpredictable. Why do ideas come easily one day and not the next? Where does inspiration come from? These are mysterious questions. They are also the kinds of questions that would make a paying customer nervous. As designers venture out of their studios and into company boardrooms, they find themselves being asked questions like "How do we know this process will work?" or "How do we know which design is best?" or "How will people react to this?". Clients are right to ask these questions. But designers also have a responsibility to give honest answers—answers that can be difficult to deliver and difficult to hear. The allure of "research" is that it provides a way out of considering hard truths.

That's because scientism offers some convenient fictions. According to one of them, the work of the designer is dictated by a predictable methodology. It is as if anyone could follow the same steps and end up with a great design on the other end. This story satisfies the design customer's desire for predictability and reliability. Unfortunately, it also trivializes the role of the designer. Paula Scher criticizes this mechanical view of design in her book Make it Bigger. "It diminishes the real value a corporation gets from a designer," she writes. "It is the rare combination of the designer's intelligence, intuition, inspiration, and aesthetic sense—dare I say talent?—that makes for successful design."

More recently, and much to my delight, Scher wrote a critique of another symptom of scientism in the design world in vogue at the moment: the infographic. She dubbed it "faux info" and warned of its seductiveness: These graphics are "fed to you in a scientific style that demonstrates authority and infallibility. The information does your thinking for you, and you don't have to think at all." The idea that information speaks for itself—that the numbers don't lie—is a widely held belief. But as anyone who has spent time crunching numbers can attest, data can be bent to the will of the analyst with relatively little effort.

The problem with the real world is that it is fundamentally unpredictable. This makes life challenging for designers and economists alike. But it is better to face uncertainty with what you know to be true rather than with implausibly precise fictions. As Hayek says, "I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false."

It is understandable that design wants a seat at the table in corporate decision-making. But designers need to find ways to provide value to clients without devaluing themselves. If we believe in the value of design for business, we need to be honest about the complexity, creativity, and uncertainty involved in great design. This means not cheapening design by reducing it to a mechanical process. It means casting a critical eye on "the research." It means accepting that the most important information is not always quantifiable.

This article is part of a series exploring the power of design by the editors of design mind in partnership with The Atlantic. This post originally appeared on The Atlantic website.

Facebook Busted in Clumsy Smear on Google

2011-05-12T00:51:00.000-07:00

The social network secretly hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about the search giant, The Daily Beast's Dan Lyons reveals—a caper that is blowing up in their face, and escalating their war.

For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google “on behalf of an unnamed client.”

But who was the mysterious unnamed client? While fingers pointed at Apple and Microsoft, The Daily Beast discovered that it's a company nobody suspected—Facebook.

Confronted with evidence, a Facebook spokesman last night confirmed that Facebook hired Burson, citing two reasons: First, because it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.

Like a Cold War spy case made public, the PR fiasco reveals—and ratchets up—the growing rivalry between Google and Facebook. Google, the search giant, views Facebook as a threat, and has been determined to fight back by launching a social-networking system of its own. So far, however, Google has not had much luck, but Facebook nonetheless felt it necessary to return fire—clandestinely.

Google to launch music streaming service

2011-05-11T00:43:00.000-07:00

Google is expected to launch a music streaming service, Music Beta, later today and has already embedded the software into its latest Android mobile operating system.

It will launch the product at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco.

Invitations will be extended to owners of the Motorola Xoom tablet computer, with others able to join the service by invitation only, initially limited to US customers.

Google Music will work in a similar way to Google Documents - tracks can be uploaded to Google's servers and then be streamed anywhere. Google has not struck any deals with labels or music publishers.

Google may not attempt to complete deals with labels because the service will allow consumers to stream data they already own, but there will be a limit of 20,000 tracks.

The Sabbatical

2011-05-06T00:46:00.000-07:00

Why should you take time off? A surprising amount of creative regeneration can be wrung from a getaway.

sab·bat·i·cal \sə-'ba-ti-kəl\ (n.): In theory, a self-actualizing, regenerative, and employer-supported journey of adventure and reflection that gives workers a respite from work for a month or longer. In practice, very rare.

That’s how the vast majority of us would define sabbatical if pressed. Sabbaticals are typically seen as financially and practically out of reach for all those except the smartest and most fortunate of us. Yet the idea of an extended paid vacation strikes a chord of deep longing in our workaday hearts.
Last year‚ the Society for Human Resource Management conducted a survey of U.S. businesses and found that fewer than half offered paid time off to employees. Of those that did‚ the majority (88 percent) based employees’ paid leave on how long they’d been with the organization. On average, one year of service earns 15 paid days off, whereas ten years of service qualifies workers for 24 paid days off. Sabbaticals are a different beast. In the academic world‚ they are considered yearlong breaks to pursue a course of research, and typically professors are paid half their salaries. In the U.S. corporate world‚ you are fortunate if you get a four-week sabbatical — and even more fortunate to get paid for it. Just 27 percent of companies in the U.S. currently offer sabbaticals and only 6 percent pay for them.
The word sabbatical comes from the shmita or Sabbath year in religious teachings.

The Torah mandates that Jewish farmers work for six years and then take the seventh for rest, literally letting the fields, the beasts of burden, and people recuperate and appreciate the fruits of their labor. The Sabbath day — and secular weekend — continue this tradition of no work. The modern-day sabbatical is an extension of this. I believe that there are three types of sabbaticals: lateral, generative, and recuperative.

The lateral sabbatical follows a rich tradition of learning and exploration. It includes activities such as teaching, volunteering abroad, or working in an industry related to yours in order to gain new skills in a given area of expertise. These sabbaticals are usually financially supported by academic institutions or businesses (for longtime employees).

A generative sabbatical — that year off work to travel, explore, draw, write a book, or otherwise indulge in creative pursuits — is perhaps the most idealized. It is forward-looking and optimistic: Your employer hopes to harness the new ideas and energy it creates upon your return to work.

A recuperative sabbatical is the most needed and the most practical. It is often unplanned and occurs only after the “sabbatee” reaches a breaking point — brought on by a chaotic workplace atmosphere of on-demand innovation, parallel work streams‚ and always-on digital lifestyles. The pressure to constantly over-deliver under budget is causing us to lose our ability to control and channel our energy in positive ways. We’re burned out on work we once loved because we’ve run out of room for randomness, spontaneity, and serendipity — all of which are crucial to creativity and innovation.

Often the only mode of repair is to desperately, suddenly take a week off (instead of quitting or running screaming from the building).

I refer to this kind of recuperative time off as the “go away and try to remember whether you still like yourself” escape. It would be nice if we didn’t need this type of sabbatical, if our society and corporate culture were different, and we managed our time and relationships better. In reality, we not only need but also deserve them.

Fortunately, a surprising amount of creative regeneration can be wrung from the quick getaway. I speak, of course, from experience. After working on a very difficult design project for nine months last year, I found myself desperate for a break. The client’s plans had expanded greatly in size and scope, and my responsibilities had grown exponentially. At the same time, I was juggling the family duties associated with having a toddler at home and a sick parent needing care in another state. It was increasingly hard not to feel that I was doing a lot of work, but none of it well. I had to get away to find my voice again.

After a grueling cross-country trip (to support my ailing father) and before another major client deadline hit, I managed to take a short recuperative sabbatical. I went alone to a friend’s secluded house in the mountains. For four days, I had no schedule. My only goal was to make a list of work-life issues that felt out of balance — and to seek some resolutions.

At first, I did nothing. I ate simple, wholesome foods. I slept in. I sat in the sun. Soon, the quiet and solitude helped me find my equilibrium, psychologically and physically.

On the first day, I was captive to my inner voices of responsibility, blame, dissatisfaction — what author Brennan Manning calls the “I shoulds.” It’s the typical mental chatter that disrupts the first days of any vacation, reminding you what you left undone or where you could have done better. I agree with Cube Grenades cartoonist Hugh MacLeod that “being fucking amazing is job one,” but I also have limits as a human. So, like a newcomer to meditation, I had to find a way to let those thoughts run themselves out.

After reconciling whether I had been doing good work, I asked myself whether I had been doing the right work. Serendipitously, Bud Caddell put his Venn diagram “How to Be Happy in Business” online that same week. In it, Caddell asks us to examine the intersections of what we do well, what we can be paid to do, and what we want to do. The only way for me to do this was to reconnect with my past interests. I had brought with me all my grad school notebooks, thesis work, and journals. I scoured them, rediscovering hidden gems of insight and ideas for projects. I was happy to see how many of them still held up after eight years. It dawned on me that the topic of my thesis was embedded in my current client projects. I’d been doing the right work after all!

It’s amazing how, when you’re alone and things are quiet, hours can seem like days. By the end of day two, I noticed that I was relaxing into the rhythms of my own intellect in relation to the time of day. Without meetings to attend or emails to answer, I discovered that the early hours of the morning were ideal for creating, thinking, and synthesizing. Midday was great for physical exertion and a break from mental tasks. The latter part of my day was best spent seeking inspiration by reading or listening to music. I saw that most of my days at work were scheduled in exactly the wrong way, spending my vital creative hours fighting fires and ignoring the times when I really needed to sit back.

I spent my remaining time off drawing, writing, and thinking; the same way in which I’d hope to spend a generative sabbatical. I slowed down and realized that what I had been working on, although hard, was exactly the right thing. Once I got away from the grind and back in touch with my own voice, I realized that I still liked myself and my job, and that what I needed was just a small note of self-appreciation.

It’s six months later. I’m not on a sabbatical as I write these lines. But I’ve held on to much of the goodness I found back then, such as trying to incorporate my natural rhythm into my work tasks and keeping the passion for the subject matter at the forefront of whatever I do. Yet I long for another sabbatical, a longer one or more frequent short ones. Part of me wonders whether, if I took an extended generative sabbatical, I would discover some other, deeper, better passion … one that I suspect but can’t confirm while embedded in the place I’ve chosen. For all these reasons, I say the purpose of any sabbatical is to press our boundaries, reconnect our inner narratives, and ask ourselves the dangerous questions — all the while adding quality to our lives as creatives.

Denise Gershbein is a creative director at frog design’s San Francisco studio. www.frogdesign.com

Decisions, Decisions

2011-05-04T00:59:00.000-07:00

How and why do we make the choices we do? Sheena Iyengar explains in this excerpt from her new book, The Art of Choosing.

Whenever I mention that my parents met for the first time on their wedding day, people’s most common reaction is shock: “Their families decided on the match? How could your parents let that happen to them?” Simply explaining that this is the way marriages were decided upon in my family—in most Indian families—does not seem to satisfy their curiosity or diminish their incredulity. On the surface, people understand that there are cultural differences in the way marriages come about. But the part that really doesn’t sit well, the part that they simply can’t wrap their heads around, is that my parents allowed such an important choice to be taken out of their hands. How could they do such a thing, and why?

Martin Seligman is an American psychologist who did some unsettling experiments with dogs to test the idea that clinical depression is a result of a perceived lack of control. His compelling studies produced the theory of “learned helplessness,” and they demonstrate just how much we need to feel in control of what happens to us. When we can’t maintain control, we’re left feeling helpless, bereft, unable to function. I first learned about these experiments when taking a course with Seligman as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. The findings from such research made me start to question whether my own Sikh tradition, which rather than empowering or uplifting its followers, could actually engender a sense of helplessness. As a member of the Sikh faith, I was constantly keeping track of so many rules: what to wear, what to eat, forbidden behaviors, and my duties to family. When I added it all up, there wasn’t much left for me to decide—so many of my decisions had been made for me. This was true not only for Sikhism, but also for many other religions. I brought my questions to Seligman, hoping he could help shed some light on whether members of religious faiths were likely to experience greater helplessness in their lives. But he, too, was unsure, as there were no scientific investigations into this subject. So we decided to embark on a study examining the effects of religious adherence on people’s health and happiness.

For the next two years, anyone glancing at my social calendar might have assumed I was trying to atone for a lifetime of sin. Each week my research began at sundown on Friday with a visit to a mosque, immediately followed by a visit to a synagogue. On Saturdays I visited more synagogues and mosques, and on Sundays I went church-hopping. In total, I interviewed more than 600 people from nine different religions. These faiths were categorized as: fundamentalist (Calvinism, Islam, and Orthodox Judaism), which imposed many day-to-day regulations on their followers; conservative (Catholicism, Lutheranism, Methodism, and Conservative Judaism); or liberal (Unitarianism and Reform Judaism), which imposed the fewest restrictions. In fact, some branches of the liberal religions don’t even require their practicing members to believe in God, and the largest percentage of Unitarian Universalists described themselves as secular humanists, followed by those with an earth- or nature-centered spirituality.

The worshippers were asked to fill out three surveys. The first contained questions regarding the impact of religion in their lives, including the extent to which it affected what they ate, drank, with whom they associated, and who they would marry. Members of the fundamentalist faiths indeed scored the highest on these questions and members of the liberal faiths scored the lowest. The survey also asked about religious involvement (how often they attended services or prayed) and religious hope (“Do you believe there is a heaven?” and “Do you believe your suffering will be rewarded?”). The second survey measured each individual’s level of optimism by examining their reactions to a series of hypothetical good and bad life events. When asked how they would react to being fired, optimists gave answers like, “If I was fired from my job, it would be for something specific that would be easy to fix,” while pessimists said things like, “If I was fired from my job, it would be because there’s something wrong with me that I’ll never be able to fix.” In essence, they were describing how much control they believed they had over their lives. The third survey was a common mental health questionnaire to determine whether they had any symptoms of depression, such as weight loss or lack of sleep. To my surprise, it turned out that members of more fundamentalist faiths experienced greater hope, were more optimistic when faced with adversity, and were less likely to be depressed than their counterparts. Indeed, the people most susceptible to pessimism and depression were the Unitarians, especially those who were atheists. The presence of so many rules didn’t debilitate people; instead it seemed to empower them. Many of their choices were taken away, and yet they experienced a sense of control over their lives.

This study was an eye-opener: restrictions do not necessarily diminish a sense of control, and freedom to think and do as you please need not increase it. The resolution of this seeming paradox lies in the different narratives about the nature of the world—and our role within it—that are passed down from generation to generation. We all want and need to be in control of our lives, but how we understand control depends on the stories we are told and the beliefs we come to hold. Some of us come to believe that control stems solely through the exercise of personal choice. We must find our own path to happiness because no one will (or can) find it for us. Others believe that it is God who is in control, and only by understanding His ways and behaving accordingly will we be able to find happiness in our own lives. We are all exposed to different narratives about life and choice as a function of where we’re born, who our parents are, and numerous other factors. In moving from culture to culture and country to country, we encounter remarkable variations in people’s beliefs about who should make choices, what to expect from them, and how to judge the consequences.

Since beginning my formal study of choice as an undergraduate, I have interviewed, surveyed, and run experiments with people from all walks of life: old and young, secular and religiously observant, members of Asian cultures, veterans of the Communist system, and people whose families have been in the United States for generations. During this time I, along with a growing number of researchers, have been looking at the ways in which geography, religion, political systems, and demographics can fundamentally shape how people perceive themselves and their roles. The stories of our lives, told differently in every culture and every home, have profound implications for what and why we choose, and it is only by learning how to understand these stories that we can begin to account for the wonderful and baffling differences among us.

Our cultural backgrounds influence not only how we marry but how we make choices in nearly every area of our lives. From early on, members of individualist societies are taught the special importance of personal choice. Even a walk through the local grocery store becomes an opportunity to teach lessons about choosing, particularly in the United States, where stores routinely offer hundreds of options. As soon as children can talk, or perhaps as soon as they can accurately point, they are asked, “Which one of these would you like?” A parent would probably narrow down the number of choices and explain the differences between this cereal and that one, or that toy and this one, but the child would be encouraged to express a preference. After a while, the child would graduate to making tougher choices, and by the ripe old age of four, they may well be expected to both understand and respond to the daunting question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” From this, children learn that they should be able to figure out what they like and dislike, and what will make them happy and what won’t. Because their happiness is on the line, their own opinions truly matter, and they must figure out how to judge the outcomes of their choices.

By contrast, members of collectivist societies place greater emphasis on duty. Children are often told, “If you’re a good child, you’ll do what your parents tell you,” and the parents need not explain themselves. From what you eat to what you wear, the toys you play with to what you study, it is what you’re supposed to do that’s most important. As you grow older, instead of being asked what you want, you may be asked, “How will you take care of your parents’ needs and wants? How will you make them proud?” The assumption is that your parents, and elders in general, will show you the right way to live your life so that you will be protected from making a costly mistake. There are “right” choices and “wrong” ones, and by following your elders, you will learn to choose correctly, even relinquish choice when appropriate.

“Choice” can mean so many different things, and its study can be approached in so many different ways. In my book I explore those aspects of it that I have found to be most thought-provoking and most relevant to how we live. I also look at choice from a variety of vantage points and tackle various questions about the way choice affects our lives. Why is choice powerful, and where does its power come from? What is the relationship between how we choose and who we are? Why are we so often disappointed by our choices, and how do we make the most effective use of the tool of choice? How much control do we have over our everyday choices? How do we choose when our options are practically unlimited? Should we ever let others choose for us, and if yes, who and why? Whether or not you agree with my opinions, suggestions, and conclusions—and I’m sure we won’t always see eye to eye—just the process of exploring these questions can help us make more informed decisions. Choice, ranging from the trivial to the life-altering, in both its presence and its absence, is an inextricable part of our life stories.

Sheena Iyengar is a professor at Columbia Business School, and is the author of The Art of Choosing. She was a TEDGlobal speaker. www.columbia.edu/~ss957

2011-05-04T00:55:00.000-07:00

As designers, we often engage in many of what we call "future of..." programs, for both clients as well as for ourselves. These projects often remove some of the constraints that exist in our current product developments cycle to focus on larger macro trends in human behavior and technology to try to look forward into the future. Cynically this is sometimes called crystal ball gazing, but it often it can reveal insights that can help us to course correct more production oriented programs. Hollywood has picked up on how amazing these kinds of future explorations can be in many movies over the past 50 years, such as the way HMI is portrayed in Minority Report (UI which is already looking old) and Iron Man (CAD interface).

These types of explorations have been going on for a long time in R&D departments, the pages of magazines, and as part of promotions. Sometimes they were amazingly close, and sometimes they are hilariously off. They are our best educated guess of what comes next after next.

In these kinds of projects we often abstract existing behaviors to manifest a vision of where we think technology can take us. I LOVE this new Dodge commercial shows how that abstraction can quickly become irrelevance, annoyance, and even cause an outright backlash.

There are a lot of things that technology could do for us, but the question is, what do we WANT it to do for us and HOW. As software becomes ever more advanced, will it manifest itself in ways that feel genuinely mechanical? A nice example of this are the fly-by-wire systems in commercial aircraft that work hard to reproduce the feedback of mechanical linkages to pilots. Another example are tunnel mounted stick shifts in automatic cars. The gear selection in an automatic car could be a dial, a switch, or a touch screen, but we seem to prefer the large mechanical lever that emulates the mechanical shifter on a sports car. Is this longing for the more understandable what is behind retro styling and Steam Punk? Is the embrace of mechanical interfaces merely a transitional affordance or is it how human's prefer to interface?

Guinness to run first Apple iAd

2011-05-03T01:20:00.000-07:00

Diageo GB's first iAd, launching tomorrow (3 May), will promote the Guinness 'More Life in the Dark' campaign, with resources to help people enjoy a good night out.

The iAd, created by TMW and Apple, equips consumers with tools and inspiration to help them enjoy a night out. It begins with the narrator promising to show the user where the best nights out are.

The interactive ad is then split into four sections - pubs, gigs, comedy, and sports - providing users with nearby events and venues based on their location.

It allows users to overcome the problem of ordering a drink in a noisy bar by selecting an image of how many pints of Guinness they want to show to the bar staff.
The ad also invites users to sign up to Guinness communications to keep up to date with brand promotions.

Guinness will be rolling out a promotional video, created by TMW, to demonstrate how to engage with the iAd, which will be hosted on YouTube tomorrow.

Paul Cornell, marketing manager for Guinness at Diageo GB, said: "We want consumers to believe you have a better time with a Guinness, and the new iAd helps them do that in a really engaging way.

"The iAd is great for raising brand awareness and engagement while consumers are on the move, on a platform that has become part of everyday life."

In December last year, Renault became the first brand in the UK to run an iAd.

However, Apple is believed to be struggling to convince brands of the value of advertising on its platform. It has also slashed the price of running UK campaigns by 50% to £325,000, according to media agency sources.

HTML5 versus Flash: Why Flash Will Endure

2011-04-28T09:17:00.000-07:00

These days, even a slight comparison between HTML5 and Flash gets designers excited. There is always someone who joins in with the question: “Will Flash survive?” I’ve heard this being asked so many times now that I prefer to remain silent. “Let them argue,” I think to myself as my friends – web developers by trade – start one of their heated debates that invariably end with “We’ll see who’s right in a few years.” Quite so.
Flash is in good health

I don’t really see any reason why Flash won’t endure. It has been around for quite some time during which it has shown how powerful it is. Many love it, some hate it, but nobody is really indifferent about it. And this I believe says a lot. It will take something truly special to topple it over and I have my doubts about HTML5 being that “truly special” something.. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not at all against it, but I get the impression that some people are a bit too excited about it. So, as Flash has its flaws and HTML5 has its strong points it seems reasonable to assume that HTML5 will take Flash’s place in those areas where the latter has been used simply because there wasn’t anything else available.

HTML5 and video

Flash has done a good job with video, but many think that it’s about time that something takes its place. I fully agree. HTML5 is still not there yet, but it’s going to be. And when it will be fully capable of handling video at the same standard as Flash does now, then it will certainty take over. But, Flash is more than video and all web developers know this.

Surely Flash will become redundant at one point?

At some point, HTML is eventually going to have all or at least the core features that Flash boasts today. There is not much arguing about it. The question then is, when will this happen? Will Flash still be useful or will it become superfluous? And then, if it will still have some value, how will it be used? In the same way as today? Only time can tell.

Flash is likely to continue to evolve itself, pushing new boundaries. Making predictions about its evolution is not something I feel comfortable with, and honestly I think only a few would venture to. I would say though that Flash will continue to bring better and better games to us all. “Games? Bah!” you may say. There are millions of people playing Flash games, so be careful with your judgment.

How Web Design Trends Change With the Advent Of iPad?

2011-04-28T09:13:00.000-07:00

The iPad has recently gained tremendous fame worldwide. A huge mass of people are getting attracted to this newly emerging device. We can already see people using an iPad whether they are in a bus or a coffee shop.Why it has become so popular in such a short time? The answer is, it’s such a computer that you can simply hold in your hand and read like a book. It’s a more intimate way to interact as now you can lounge with the computer rather than having the difficulty to sit on it.

This technology change has turned the world of website designers upside down. It has led the web designers to rethink about the design tactics. The designers have started designing specifically for the iPad because it seems undeniable that the device will hold strong position in the future. To give a more positive user experience web designs and layouts must be more compatible to the iPad.
iPad features: what web designers should consider?

Let’s consider what actually iPad comprises that’s forcing the designers to change the way they design.

iPad modes:

The iPad has two kinds of modes
• Landscape
• Portrait

By mode it means the way you can view your website using the iPad. So either you can view it in landscape or portrait mode.

Primary iPad navigation tool:

The device is perfectly simple. It has no keyboard, no mouse. So how are the users going to interact? Yes, the primary tool here to interact with is your fingers. The users will use their fingers to navigate on the iPad.

The question here is: Why are these features bothering the designers so much?

With iPad users do not need to follow the standardized and defined ways of viewing and interacting with websites. They can zoom in and out the website pages as it suits them and can view the websites in any of the above mentioned two modes. Here comes the fact, why the designers need to bother? In order to make your website accessible as well as usable on the iPad (having two different viewing modes) a designer needs to create two different layouts for the website. This requires a website to be developed in smart fluid width design.

iPad has killed flash:

The iPad does not support flash. If you want your website to contain animations and videos it has to be designed in HTML5 because websites designed in this language are easily viewed in iPad. HTML5 has all the elements that were previously found only in Adobe Flash.

iPad has killed hover effects:

As users will use their fingers to navigate the website so the hover effects that are only suited to pointer based devices are useless for iPads. For a smooth user experience with iPads the hover effects must be removed. The links in a website can also no longer be concealed in text and need to be re sized.

Colour contrast:

The iPad can be used in different locations. You can use it anywhere indoors or outdoors according to your choice. This brings some disadvantages like the ipad’s screen is glossy and it reflects light. This hinders user’s interaction with the content that is displayed on the website.

It's the future of the Web, but what's it all about?

2011-04-28T00:56:00.000-07:00

Apple and Google love it. Adobe allegedly fears it (although it probably shouldn't). Microsoft is sort of squinting at it. It's HTML5, the future of the Web. So, er, what is it?

HTML is the language that tells your browser what to do, whether that's showing a LOLcat or running a browser-based application, and HTML5 is its latest incarnation. It's designed to handle the way the Web works now and in the future, which means support for Web applications and multimedia, and your browser already supports some of its key features.

Still none the wiser? Don't worry: here's your quick guide to what it is, why it matters and why people are getting excited about it.

1. It could replace Flash and Silverlight in a lot of sites…

Lots of websites use Flash or Silverlight technology to deliver video, and that's something HTML5 is perfectly capable of doing - without requiring the installation of a plugin. Other sites use Flash or Silverlight to deliver animation. HTML5 can do that too - without requiring the installation of a plugin.

2. …but it won't kill Flash or Silverlight

There's a lot more to Flash and Silverlight than mere video playback. Replicating some of the more interesting games, interfaces and Rich Internet Applications is a whole different ballgame. Remember, too, that Flash and Silverlight aren't carved in stone or dependent on browser support: if Adobe or Microsoft dream up a cool new feature they can build it, stick it in their plugin and update all their users almost immediately.

There's also the issue of hardware video acceleration, which the latest Flash Player - on Windows - takes advantage of: in tests by Jan Ozer Flash was less of a hardware hog than HTML5.

There's another very good reason why the Web won't entirely switch to HTML 5 audio and video: DRM.

3. It doesn't do DRM

Publishing content in unprotected, easily duplicated formats won't appeal to some of the bigger media firms, so they'll stick with what they're currently using.

4. It's good news for Web app users

Some of the most important bits of HTML5 are under the hood where they make coding Web applications simpler and the apps themselves more stable - which means better performance and fewer crashes. It also provides a mechanism for offline data storage, blurring the boundaries between web apps and desktop ones.

5. It's killed Google Gears…

Gears was Google's technology for making its web applications work offline, but the search giant has decided that HTML5 is a better solution to the same issue. As a result, it's stopped developing Google Gears (although it's still supporting the technology until HTML5 can do every single thing Gears does).

6. …but it won't kill Photoshop

HTML5 is great for browser-based applications, but trying to replicate something as complicated - and as performance-dependent - as Photoshop would be madness. Madness!

7. It knows where you live

One of the most interesting bits in HTML5 is its support for Geolocation, which works out where you are (based on your IP address, or GPS if your hardware has a GPS chip) provided you give it the go-ahead. That opens up some interesting possibilities such as location-aware search results, or Big Brother-style monitoring by the boss.

8. You can use it right now…

All the major browser makers are baking HTML5 into their browsers like chocolate chips in a cookie, so for example the welcome screen in Apple's Safari is an HTML5 effort. You'll find lots of HTML5 demos at the cunningly named HTML5 Demos website.

9. …but it's all over the place

As you probably noticed on HTML5 Demos, many of the demos only work on a few browsers. That's because different browsers have different levels of support, and differing approaches to common elements - so for example while Safari, Chrome and Firefox all support HTML5 video, Firefox only works with the Ogg Theora codec while the others prefer H.264. Internet Explorer doesn't support either.

10. It's evolution, not revolution

Introducing HTML5 to the Internet isn't a big, dramatic event where some Web guru flicks a giant lever and we all switch over to a new technology. It's much more subtle than that. With each new browser version more of HTML5 becomes supported, and as that support improves websites will start to take advantage of more HTML5 features.

Mobile Sites

2011-04-28T00:50:00.000-07:00

Sites have been being designed for mobile scenarios since the inception of mobile devices… but 2010 has seen a huge push towards entire sub-sites that are designed specifically to be viewed on small, handheld screens. You can thank the iPhone for starting this trend, but the wave of “mobified” sites is spreading like wildfire…. and come this same time next year, I’m sure you’ll be hard-pressed to find a major publishing site without a mobile companion site.

What’s neat about mobile screens is that it forces designers to get creative with a relatively small amount of real estate. Succeeding in the mobile environment isn’t tough if you keep a few rules in mind: Messages need to be conveyed quicker and with more efficiency; Links have to be designed for a touchscreen environment; and text needs to become legible (or at least effectively zoomable)

Jack The Webber has been testing out the sites created and they all work on mobile, also it is quite easy to make your website target mobile devices contact to find out more visit my website www.jackthewebber.com

Google PageRank Defined

2011-04-27T00:44:00.000-07:00

PageRank is Google’s primary method of ranking web pages in their index. PageRank refers to a hidden value (presumably between 1 and 10) that ranks a page based on importance.

Web pages with higher PageRank (PR for short) are thought (by Google) to be more important, and thus get ranked higher than pages with lower PR.

When one web page links to another web page, they give that page some of their PageRank. This concept is what gives PageRank its power. The theory behind it is this: Let’s say a large, popular website (let’s say CNN.com) links to your web page. The page on their site would likely have a high PR. Google looks at this link to you and gives you a higher PR because they trust CNN.com.

When Google indexes your website, they search for links to your pages, which are called backlinks. The number and quality of backlinks to your website’s pages have a major impact on your PageRank.

Simply put, the more quality links you can get to your website, the higher your website will rank in Google Search.

According to Google, PageRank is:

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

How to make sure your logo will sing on key and not fall flat

2011-04-27T00:32:00.000-07:00

Make sure that the three pieces of art are all singing the same basic song. Figure out the basic message your brand needs to sing—and then create an icon, choose a font, and apply a color palette that all reinforce that message.

Consider giving the three elements different notes to sing. Even if the three elements in your logo are singing the same song, they can sing different notes, like a chord. In other words, they can all communicate your message in a slightly different way.

One element may stand out and take a solo with the other elements singing backup. One element may even be singing a different part of your message—another melody—which can make your logo more subtle and complex. Whether the elements in your logo have a solo or sing backup, your message will be determined by the complexity of your brand's story.

None of these elements is meant to carry the entire song by itself. All the elements in your logo are meant to appear together. The logo icon won't appear by itself without the font or color, and the color palette won't stand on its own. So, keep in mind that they're all telling parts of your business's story, but none of them has to tell the entire story alone. Design your logo with the notes these three elements are singing in mind and what those notes mean. If you make them work together and sing in harmony, your logo will have more depth and sophistication than if they sing off-key.

Jack the Webber offers a logo design service

Is Web Design Dying Out?

2011-04-26T00:49:00.000-07:00

Web design nowadays is getting more involved than ever before. Gone are the days when a web designer could create a beautiful looking design in Photoshop, and then just slice it into html. Nowadays this is only the start of the story.

Usability is one of the buzz words going around in the web design world. As are worlds like RSS Feed, Twitter and Call to Action. A website is so much more about connectivity today than it’s ever been, and a good web designer needs to take all of these things on board when creating a design.
Another huge diversion that web design has taken is in to the world of Flash and video. Web video is becoming ever more popular as bandwidths have increased and video capability now needs to be thought about and implemented in to our web designs.

With search engines like Google now gaining the ability to read information contained within Flash movies, and even having the ability to decipher human speech, web video is gaining momentum at an incredible pace. It won’t be long until a standard static website looks as old fashioned as a bowler hat and a dickie bird tie.

Designing a successful website is now demanding a multitude of skills, and the emphasis on teamwork is stronger now than ever. Ideally before the web designer is even involved a website project should be shown to a search engine marketing specialist. They will know what social networking widgets will be needed to be worked in to the design, and they should be well versed in search engine optimization, so as to know what will work for the search engines.

Then maybe a graphic designer would be more of a benefit than an actual web designer, to design the back drop and scenery that will contain any ,web presenters or Flash movies. After this an expert in Flash Actionscript may be required to make any Flash animations, menus or movies interactive and usable.

Finally then a web designer may be able to take all the pieces and put them together to create the website. It is getting much more difficult now to be a web design one man band, and maybe as the Internet progresses the web designer will play an even lesser role. We can see a point in the future where websites will be fully animated mini TV shows. The entire website may then be filmed in a studio, and built in Flash, with a graphic designer designing the peripherals and effects.

It’s all great news for web users, but not so great for web designers. My advice to any web designers out there both new and experienced it to either learn some new skills (most specifically J query), or starting building a team to manage to coming onslaught of new website marketing media.

2011 the year of the Android

2011-04-21T00:50:00.000-07:00

CNN’s tech site has a great, and lengthy, article about why they believe this upcoming year will be the year that Android-powered smartphones REALLY take off. Android — and really, smartphones in general — have seen remarkable growth in the last 12 months, but CNN says “Baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

What is driving this huge explosion? A one/two punch that is made up of improving wireless infrastructure and falling hardware prices. We’ve seen the improvement of wireless carriers’ data networks as every carrier has either launched, expanded, or is planning the launch of a 4G network in the near future. As these networks continue to improve, they pave the way for the more advanced phones to do more and more with the hardware that the manufacturers are providing us.
And that is the second big factor in the upcoming explosion: cheaper hardware. At the beginning of 2010, a middle-road smartphone of the Android variety was running just under $200. But as we recently reported, several chip manufacturers are aiming for lower prices on better chips, and we’re hearing now that mid-range Android smartphones within the next 3-6 months will be dropping with suggested retail prices of $75-100, and high-end phones hitting that price point around a year from that.

CNN goes on to say that at those prices, people may opt more and more for unsubsidized phones instead of signing the two-year contracts. They theorize that this will take some of the power from the carriers, forcing them to fight for their customers. It’s a sound theory, but whether or not that pans out, lower prices on Android smartphones and more powerful networks will lead to nothing but good things for consumers. It’ll be interesting to see how things play out in the upcoming year, which is likely to be huge for Android.

2011-04-20T06:02:00.000-07:00

http://www.adobemuseum.com/

Cool website from Adobe.

The Adobe Museum of Digital Media provides a venue to showcase groundbreaking digital work, and create conversation around the digital innovation of our time. The building was designed by Italian architect Filippo Innocente to exist only in the virtual space. The inaugural exhibition by Tony Oursler, entitled "Valley", is the first in a series of works curated exclusively for the AMDM by Tom Eccles, Director of Curatorial Studies at Bard College. Upcoming exhibits include works by Japanese artist Mariko Mori, and a virtual seminar by RISD president Jon Maeda. The AMDM is not a one-time event, but an institution designed to grow over time and across platforms, taking cues from real-world museums.

Facebook launches advertising creativity showcase

2011-04-20T01:10:00.000-07:00

Facebook Studio includes work for Wrigley's Skittles 'Mob the Rainbow' campaign created by Evolution Bureau, San Francisco, and 'Heineken Trophy Hunt', by LBi Lost Boys, Amsterdam.

It is an open platform, allowing agencies and brands to submit their work and to comment on and discuss peers' campaigns.

The campaigns will be sorted into galleries based on most-recently uploaded campaigns, most-shared campaigns, region and language, and what friends are saying.

A selection of the best work will be displayed in the Spotlight section.

UK agencies involved so far are MEC, Maxus and LBi.

Facebook will also provide agencies and brands with information on how to strengthen their Facebook strategies through its learning tab.

Awards will also be spun out of this initiative, although Facebook is still working on the details.

The idea is part of Facebook’s initiative to "inspire, educate and empower" the marketing and advertising community, and will 'highlight what’s great' on the social networking site, according to Stephen Haines, commercial director of Facebook UK.

Chris Clarke, chief creative officer at LBi, said: "It makes sound business sense to showcase the good stuff and it's a fantastic resource for the industry, as we all try to figure out how to get the most from what is a unique global asset."

Earlier this year, Facebook hosted its first Influencer Summit at its offices in Palo Alto, California, inviting top UK agency creatives and executives to meet Facebook senior executives to "advance their businesses together".

9 Things to Look for When Choosing a Theme for Your Blog

2011-04-19T02:04:00.000-07:00

Good article from
http://www.onextrapixel.com about blogging and 9 things to think about when making your own blog. Jackthewebber can help you make a blog site and I often create blogs which use word press or blogger.

Blogging is amongst the most interesting and advantageous activities being done over the Internet nowadays. It gives you a good source of social networking, personal and commercial marketing and promotion, a platform to showcase your talents and most often, a real good source of earning a pocket full of money.

Owing to this, the popularity of blogging is growing day by day and more and more professionals are turning towards having a blog. Although there are many benefits of a blog over a usual website like its regular updating and ease of use, however, one of the greatest advantages of a blog is that you can easily change its look or theme without having it designed all the time.

After content, a theme is the most important element of a blog. That is why it is advised that whether you are starting a new blog or re-designing an existing one, pay special attention to the theme you want to incorporate. The most important attribute of a good theme is that it should fulfill your requirements as well as your readers’. This post is a guideline for blog newbies and a gauge for the existing blogger to assess the usefulness of their blog theme.

The First Impression

'The first impression is the last impression’ is although quite a cliché statement, however it will never lose its value in terms of a blog theme. The first impression of your blog is highly dependent on the theme as a basic visitor is attracted by a design before getting into reading the content. From ‘first impression’ it is meant that the theme should be so strong that it should quickly help the new visitor get an idea of what the blog is all about. Don’t leave it to your visitors to explore the site and find out what it is all about, as very few will be willing to do so.

SEO Friendliness

Like petrol runs a vehicle, Search Engine Optimization runs a blog. A general misconception about SEO is that it relates to the content of the blog only. However, in reality your blog’s theme has a major impact on SEO. The theme should be SEO-friendly in terms of its structure and coding. A weakly coded theme can severely limit your reach to search engine visitors and will ultimately affect the popularity of your blog. So the first thing to look for in a theme for your blog is the aspect of search engine friendliness in its coding and basic structure.

Readability of Content

A blog is meant to be read (except for a photo blog), readability is the key element that makes or breaks your visitors. Moreover, in this fast paced world, Internet users are always on the go and the reading is more or less replaced by scanning the content of blogs. Hence, while opting out a theme for your blog, keep its readability factor in mind in order for it to be successful. Usually, dark text on a light background has the best readability. Using whitespace, headers, sub headers, bold text, bulleted lists, and short paragraphs also help a lot. The theme should effectively use CSS to deal with headers and line spacing, and of course the text and background colors.

Easier Navigation Options

Importance of navigation for a reader is equal to the importance of road signs for a citizen. A blog’s basic strength lies in its content and content is the vital element that attracts a new reader and retains the interest of the old one. Navigation is the key that leads the eager reader to the desired content destination. So a blog theme should be best at its navigation options. These options may include main categories, pages, side panels, recent post, popular posts section, related posts links, archives and blogroll etc.

For instance, both old and new visitors to a blog are most interested in reading the Popular Posts or want to visit the Related Posts of a certain article. In such a case, only a theme that will offer easier navigation options to its reader will help to retain the visitor’s interest in your blog. Although there are a number of plugins available on the Internet that can help you make the navigation of your blog easier, however, it is advised to choose a theme which is already equipped with maximum navigation options.
Usability of Sidebars

Although Sidebars are a part of navigation options, however, the point of making a separate heading for it is to highlight their inevitable importance for your blog theme. After the main page, sidebar is the second most prominent thing which the reader notices as he visits the blog. Thus, whichever theme you choose for your blog should necessarily have visible sidebar options. Put some extra effort in improving the appearance of your sidebar and think about what would be the most helpful content to include that would instantly get noticed. Unattractive sidebars are often neglected, and as a result they become stale and boring for your blog theme.

Color Combinations

Blog, being a virtual medium of communication, depends a lot on colors and color combinations in order for it to be attractive. Therefore the design and color scheme of a theme matters a lot and determines the effectiveness of your blog. It is good to experiment the effectiveness and attractiveness of your blog with different color schemes. In today’s world of Internet convenience, a theme comes with several color combinations by default which makes it even easier to experiment upon.

Use colors, depending upon the nature of your blog. For instance, use vibrant and bright colors for an art, music or design blog, use a wooden or green background for a nature-oriented blog and use minimal and subtle colors for a personal blog. Also, when your blog represents a certain company or organization, try to use the corporate colors of that company and not just any color.
Uniqueness of Theme

As mentioned earlier, technological advancement has made it super easy for just anyone to start a blog and manage it well. The ease of acquiring a domain name, blog hosting and a pre-designed and coded theme, prompted many of us to have our own blog. However, with more and more people entering the blogging zone, it has become quite a challenge to stand-out from the rest in terms of design and content of your blog. Therefore, when you choose a theme for your blog, gauge its uniqueness, especially within your market niche. You don’t necessarily need to have a theme that will wow your visitors, however, your theme should have something so rare and memorable that will help for branding purposes.

Basic Load Time

Imagine when you find a blog interesting and want to visit it, however, as soon as you click to open it, it takes ages to load, element after element, till you get annoyed and your interest in visiting this blog takes a detour. Visitors are always short of time and for them load time of your blog matters much. Although the richer the design, the longer will be the load time, however, try to find a blog theme that has either a shorter load time or strive to create lighter pages yourself, without affecting the attractiveness of your blog.

Advertisement Space

Blogging is serious business, and from business, it is meant as a source of earning a few bucks. Blogging has become a common source of income among professionals around the world. People use the knowledge in their respective fields to produce good content that attract visitors as well as advertisers. Hence, your blog theme should have proper space for advertisements, without mingling with the basic content. Although, advertisements have virtually no impact on the usability of your blog, however, this a little favor you might want to do for yourself. After all, when you work so hard on a thing, you deserve to reap your share of success from it!

Blogging is the most interesting source of social interaction, personal and commercial promotion and money-making. Blogging comes with an ease of user-friendliness and the liberty of choosing the theme of your choice from the Internet without getting into its designing process. However, the convenience of choosing a theme often lands a blogger into trouble re getting the right theme for his blog.

The aforementioned tips will enable you to ‘best out of the rest’ from a large pool of blog themes available on the Internet. So whether you are planning to get a new blog made or re-designing an existing one, pay special attention to the theme and go for the one that allows you to stand out from those using the popular free themes from the Internet.

The Android Explosion: How Google’s Freewheeling Ecosytem Threatens the iPhone

2011-04-18T01:02:00.000-07:00

Andy Rubin needed a hit. It was January 2009, three years since Google had bought the company he
cofounded, a little startup called Android.

Rubin had created a slick operating system for mobile phones that allowed customers to surf the web, send email, play music, and install apps. He had hoped that Google’s money and power would help turn Android into a major force in the burgeoning smartphone industry. Instead, Android had been a disappointment. Despite months of press buildup, the first phone to run the system, HTC’s T-Mobile G1, was greeted with tepid reviews and lackluster sales. Rubin had tried to find a bigger wireless carrier that would agree to partner with Android—he and his team, including Android cofounders Rich Miner and Nick Sears, had lobbied Verizon for the better part of a year—but without success. And then there was Android’s biggest competitor, the iPhone. Introduced in 2007, it had become an instant commercial and cultural phenomenon. Unless Rubin could come up with a breakthrough Android phone, and quick, he might have to concede the entire business to Steve Jobs.

Fortunately for Rubin, Sanjay Jha was in just as dire a position. Jha, the new co-CEO of Motorola, had been talking to Rubin for months, hoping to persuade him to let Motorola build the next Android phone. Once the dominant mobile device maker in the world, Motorola hadn’t had a major success since the Razr—in 2004. Jha had been hired in August 2008 to resurrect Motorola’s handset business, and he had pursued an all-or-nothing strategy, laying off thousands and betting Motorola’s future on his ability to build a hit Android phone.

Now Jha had come to Google headquarters to unveil his design—and it was impressive. Jha promised a device that would be far faster than any other smartphone. He said its touchscreen would have a higher resolution than the iPhone. He said it would come with a full keyboard, for customers who didn’t like the iPhone’s virtual keys. He promised a phone that was thin and sleek, one that could compete with the iPhone on pure aesthetics. And, thanks to his longstanding relationship with Verizon, he offered the potential of a partnership with the country’s then second-largest wireless carrier; in fact, Motorola and Verizon had already discussed building a smartphone together. “We were all kind of jazzed,” says Hiroshi Lockheimer, one of Rubin’s chief lieutenants, who was at the meeting. “I think we said OK on the spot.”

But that optimism faded a few months later, in the spring of 2009, when the first prototype arrived in the Android offices. To Rubin’s eyes, they looked nothing like the designs Jha had presented. Indeed, they were hideous. Yes, there is always a gap between a manufacturer’s sketches and the eventual prototype, but Rubin and his team had so much faith in Jha that they expected him to deliver a phone much closer to the one he had pitched. Despair set in. “It looked like a weapon. It was so sharp and jagged and full of hard lines. It looked like you could cut yourself on the edges,” says someone who saw the prototype. “We were really concerned. There were a lot of conversations where we asked, ‘Is this really the device we want to do? Should we try to talk Motorola out of it?’”

The implications of canceling the project were huge. Another dud, right on the heels of the disappointing G1, might cement the public’s perception of Android as a flop. Executives at Verizon, who had agreed to serve as the phone’s exclusive carrier, would look inept. They were still taking heat for passing on the iPhone. Apple had gone to AT&T instead, signing an exclusive deal and bringing the carrier millions of new customers. And a failure would likely mean the end of Motorola, the company that invented the cell phone. “There was a lot riding on it,” Rubin says. “I was betting my career on it.”

A sense of doom pervaded the whole summer. Google engineers worried the phone wouldn’t sell but still found themselves working weekends and holidays to develop the software. Jha spoke almost every day with John Stratton, Verizon Communications’ chief marketing officer at the time, trying to figure out a way to tweak the design without having to reengineer all the electronic components. Meanwhile, they were facing a November deadline.

And the phone still didn’t have a name. McCann, Verizon’s longtime ad agency, had come up with a list of possibilities—including Dynamite—that few liked. As late as Labor Day, the phone still went by its codename, Shoals. Feeling cornered, Stratton reached out to McGarry Bowen, a young ad agency known for its unconventional approach. “We told them they had a week,” said someone who was involved in the discussions. “A few days later, cofounder Gordon Bowen comes back and says, ‘What do you think when I say Droid?”

In retrospect, what the agency had done was simple: It turned the phone’s menacing looks into its biggest asset by marketing it as an anti-iPhone. The iPhone was smooth and refined, so they would pitch the Droid as rough and ready for work. The iPhone’s electronics and software were inaccessible, so they’d market the phone’s hackability. “If there had been a phone in the movie Black Hawk Down, it would have looked like the Droid,” Bowen told the executives.

A few weeks later, in early October 2009, Verizon and its new agency presented the Droid campaign to a group of 200 Android staffers. One ad featured stealth bombers dropping phones on a farm, in the woods, and by the side of a road. Another attacked the iPhone as a “digitally clueless beauty pageant queen.” A third listed all the things the Droid could do that the iPhone couldn’t. When they were over, the room erupted in applause. The Android team had been demoralized, but “when they decided they were going to do this full-on attack on the iPhone—that we were going to war—we got really excited,” says an Android employee.

Apparently you didn’t have to work at Google to love the campaign. When the Droid launched, on schedule, it was a tremendous hit, outpacing sales of the original iPhone in its first three months. Motorola started to make an amazing turnaround; today, thanks to the Droid, it is profitable again. Verizon started winning more new subscribers. It also improved its bargaining position with Apple. Less than two years later, when the two companies introduced the Verizon iPhone, the carrier managed to get a better deal from Apple than AT&T had.

Most important, the Droid halted Apple’s march toward smartphone dominance. In fact, it is by some measures outpacing its rival, powering 23 percent of all smartphones worldwide in 2010—more recent estimates are even higher—compared with the iPhone’s 16 percent. (Symbian still accounted for 38 percent of smartphones, on average, in 2010, while the BlackBerry OS accounted for 16 percent, but both were trending sharply downward.) Users activate more than 300,000 new Android devices every day; by comparison, as of October, combined iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch sales accounted for about 275,000 daily activations. Even Steve Jobs seems rattled; last October, he dropped in on an investors’ phone call to deliver a rant on what he sees as Android’s flaws.

The competition is only going to grow more heated. Android doesn’t just use different carriers, different manufacturers, and different software than the iPhone; it represents a different vision for the entire mobile industry. Apple exerts complete control over the iPhone. It builds the hardware. It designs the operating system. It runs the marketing campaigns. And it curates and polices its App Store, refusing programs it deems potentially offensive or a threat to its own business. (A quick sampling of apps that Apple has rejected, at least temporarily: Google Voice, iBoobs, and a political cartoon app from Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Fiore.)

Android, by contrast, prides itself on its lack of control. It gives away its operating system for free to anyone who wants it—though manufacturers must submit their phones for testing if they want to access its app market or run optimized versions of Google apps. Android doesn’t review apps before they’re added to its marketplace, pulling them only if users complain, and manufacturers can and do modify the look and feel of the OS on their phones.

This is not just about phones. Mobile devices are quickly becoming our primary computers. In the fourth quarter of last year, sales of smartphones topped sales of PCs and laptops. And tablets—such as the iPad and new Android devices like the Motorola Xoom—are widely seen as potentially replacing the personal computer. The split is reminiscent of the PC platform wars back in the 1980s and ’90s, only now Apple is competing with Google instead of with Microsoft. Customers are squaring off into separate camps, identifying themselves as iPhone or Android users much as desktop users declare themselves Mac or PC people. And just as in the formative days of the PC industry, the result of this showdown will ultimately shape the future of computing.

In a conference room down the hall from his office in Building 44 on the Google campus, Andy Rubin flips open his laptop and punches a few keys. The monitor fills with a map of the world—gray oceans and black continents. He’s about to run a time-lapse movie of Android activations, from its 2008 launch to the present. Every time an Android phone is activated, a light blue pixel will appear.
For the first 25 seconds—which correspond to the launch of T-Mobile’s G1—so few dots light up that they barely register. “Europe is looking pretty good, probably better than the US,” Rubin says. A few more seconds tick past. “And then here is the Droid,” he says, starting to smile. Instantly, the US part of the map goes from dark to a pulsating blue. Fifteen seconds later, courtesy of another hit phone—the Samsung Galaxy S—South Korea, Japan, and Europe light up the same way.

Rubin, like most engineers, is usually soft-spoken. But this seems to make him giddy. As he narrates, he speaks faster and his voice grows louder. He points out South Korea and Japan going “apeshit” for the Galaxy.

You can’t blame him for gloating, especially considering all the obstacles he’s overcome—many of them created by his own bosses. While Rubin and his team were trying to form a partnership with Verizon, senior Google executives seemed to be going out of their way to antagonize the carrier. Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt talked about the need to overturn the carriers’ business model. Verizon and the other telcos traditionally exercised complete control over every phone they supported, dictating the features and software that manufacturers could install so as to hamstring the phones and curtail bandwidth demand on their networks. To Google, a company that touted its commitment to the open exchange of information, the wireless companies were innovation-squelching corporatists.

The carriers, for their part, saw Google as an unruly upstart and a threat. The animosity reacandroid_hed its apogee in 2007, when Google joined an auction for spectrum that Verizon wanted to purchase. Google executives never intended to buy the spectrum; they just wanted to push the bidding high enough to trigger some FCC requirements for the eventual buyer. Thanks to Google’s actions, Verizon, one of the eventual victors, had to allow other devices to operate on its spectrum. Around the time of the auction, Verizon chair and CEO Ivan Seidenberg told author Ken Auletta that Google was in danger of “waking up the bears”—powerful mobile phone carriers—who would “come out of the woods and start beating the shit out of” the company.

Google's algorithm change creates brand winners and losers

2011-04-14T01:07:00.000-07:00

Good artile from the brand republic
http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/1065487/googles-algorithm-change-creates-brand-winners-losers/

ITV, Nationwide and eBay are among brands which are benefiting from their sites receiving greater visibility in Google search due to the change to Google's algorithm, which was rolled out globally yesterday, according to analysis from SearchMetrics.

The change, dubbed "Panda Update", means that Google search promotes premium over "farm" content, incorporates user feedback and penalises sites blocked by users across all English language websites.
Searchmetrics defined visibility according to its own Organic Performance Index (OPI), which is calculated according to a keyword’s search volume, position and the statistical value of traffic distribution.

It compared where the sites appeared in searches for millions of keywords before and after the Google Panda update, with the data collated between 5 April and 12 April.

The visibility of Time has increased the most, by 55.2%, followed by Nationwide at 49.4% and eBay by 42%. Other brands for which visibility has increased following the changes in the algorithm include the National Lottery, Virgin Media, and ITV.

The visibility of Dailymail.co.uk, which has the biggest audience of any online newspaper, has increased by 12.7%.

Mirror.co.uk, Metro.co.uk and Independent.co.uk have all experienced uplifts of more than 20%. Timesonline.co.uk (which redirects to the new Times website) is 8.8% more visible, just behind Guardian.co.uk.

Google-owned YouTube is 18.9% more visible and Microsoft's MSN.co.uk is 8% more visible.

Discount and coupon sites were among the biggest losers after the change. Voucherstar lost 99.7% visibility, Netvouchercodes.co.uk lost 98.7% and Voucherhub lost 88.5%.
A number of comparison and product review sites appeared lower in search rankings, including Microsoft’s Ciao, for which visibility dropped 93.8%. Ciao recently complained to the EU that Google abuses its dominance in online search.

Other sites to suffer lower visibility following the change include Yahoo! content offering AssociatedContent.com, Qype, Shopzilla, Play.com and eHow.co.uk.

Winners in Google visibility, selected sites
Domain	Visibility (OPI) new	Visibility (OPI) old	Difference	Won in percent
time.com	97382	62731	34651	55.24%
nationwide.co.uk	113277	75780	37497	49.48%
ebay.co.uk	1469346	1034302	435044	42.06%
national-lottery.co.uk	292053	209357	82696	39.50%
virginmedia.com	108782	80824	27958	34.59%
thisismoney.co.uk	234717	180377	54340	30.13%
clubpenguin.com	102137	78788	23349	29.64%
mirror.co.uk	275876	220937	54939	24.87%
itv.com	345470	282300	63170	22.38%
metro.co.uk	181507	149271	32236	21.60%
independent.co.uk	471896	388280	83616	21.53%
youtube.com	8856696	7446902	1409794	18.93%
laterooms.com	150533	127297	23236	18.25%
telegraph.co.uk	1774662	1517129	257533	16.98%
ft.com	604065	519984	84081	16.17%
dailymail.co.uk	1322226	1172989	149237	12.72%
guardian.co.uk	2844816	2592446	252370	9.73%
yahoo.com	2245690	2051506	194184	9.47%
twitter.com	1491839	1364221	127618	9.35%
facebook.com	1771169	1622827	148342	9.14%
thisislondon.co.uk	254934	233926	21008	8.98%
timesonline.co.uk	584810	537730	47080	8.76%
msn.com	640304	592144	48160	8.13%
tripadvisor.co.uk	330724	306770	23954	7.81%
thesun.co.uk	406077	380218	25859	6.80%
google.com	1156976	1090034	66942	6.14%
bbc.co.uk	4407215	4179082	228133	5.46%
argos.co.uk	460117	440485	19632	4.46%
vouchercodes.co.uk	530905	510303	20602	4.04%
google.co.uk	757100	728028	29072	3.99%
amazon.co.uk	2236029	2183036	52993	2.43%

Losers in Google visibility, selected sites
Domain	Visibility (OPI) new	Visibility (OPI) old	Difference	Loss in percent
voucherstar.co.uk	126	38748	-38622	-99.67%
osoyou.com	96	26668	-26572	-99.64%
discountshoppinguk.co.uk	491	66270	-65779	-99.26%
netvouchercodes.co.uk	1935	152376	-150441	-98.73%
qype.co.uk	5307	126801	-121494	-95.81%
associatedcontent.com	2239	44158	-41919	-94.93%
ciao.co.uk	20723	335697	-314974	-93.83%
wikio.co.uk	10627	114833	-104206	-90.75%
reviewcentre.com	68096	648704	-580608	-89.50%
voucherhub.com	9756	84783	-75027	-88.49%
promotionalcodes.org.uk	31992	262717	-230725	-87.82%
worldtravelguide.net	6245	47922	-41677	-86.97%
voucherseeker.co.uk	9086	62342	-53256	-85.43%
ehow.co.uk	33402	120596	-87194	-72.30%
discountvouchers.co.uk	65751	178428	-112677	-63.15%
myvouchercodes.co.uk	289948	661560	-371612	-56.17%
shopzilla.co.uk	40470	86937	-46467	-53.45%
mydeco.com	34252	63063	-28811	-45.69%
play.com	305883	336067	-30184	-8.98%

Wednesday messing around at lunch

2011-04-13T06:04:00.000-07:00

Messing around at lunch for a project that maybe possible for my old class using type and image. Have not quite got it yet not sure if it would be best to use image and font or just font.

Facebook Killed Your Brand’s Personality?

2011-04-13T05:22:00.000-07:00

Good article from

http://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-making-brands-look-same-2011-3

I’m as big an advocate as anyone when it comes to marketers using social media to engage their customers. In fact, I’d challenge you to point to a major brand that hasn’t jumped on the bandwagon.
I can tell you that my own agency built social media strategies into nearly every communications plan we developed for our clients in 2010. Yet, despite all of the momentum in the space, one thing has been gnawing at me—regardless of the platform, brands are all starting to look the same.

The proliferation of Facebook combined with the continued integration of other ubiquitous social media platforms, including Flickr, Twitter, Youtube as well as common promotional platforms such as Wildfire, ShareThis and Shoutlet, are making brands virtually indistinguishable.

I ask you to show me a real difference between the Morton’s Steak House and Outback Steakhouse fan pages. These are two very different steakhouse brands, but you wouldn’t know it by interacting with them on Facebook. I’m not picking on those brands specifically. I just think they’ve fallen prey to an unfortunate trend. The platforms seem to be overshadowing the message, but should we be surprised?

If you look at advertising and marketing trends through the years, we should have expected that the approach to social media would become formulaic. Think about the first television commercials (circa 1950) that were very Dragnet-like —“Just the facts, ma’am.” They tended to take the form of a talking head holding a box of something. Then came the age of jingles, which for awhile were featured at the end of the “talking head” spots. Remember, “You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent?”

Who can forget the 70s when talking heads where replaced by the Trix bunny, the Green Giant, Charley the Tuna and a whole host of other “critters” as they were called in the advertising industry. (Personally, my favorites were the critters who sang the jingles.)

Critter advertising then gave way to celebrity spokespeople and expert testimonials (again some even singing the jingles,) which gave way to product demos until the federal government instituted the “truth in advertising” code in the 90s, which put an end to a lot of product demos.

Today, we have a wealth of commercials featuring fabricated characters, such as the popular Apple ads with actors playing “PC” and “MAC,” the Progressive Insurance, “Flo” character, Old Spice’s, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” and the Dos Equis, “Most Interesting Man in the World.” I’m sure I’ve made my point by now.

Formulaic, but at least all of these examples were CREATIVE! Unfortunately the self-service platforms of today are allowing virtually anyone to execute a campaign with little or no experience. My fear is that creative has rapidly evaporated from the equation.

Considering that the rate consumers are adopting social media continues to soar, it is unlikely marketers will abandon it any time soon and nor should they. I know the pressure to get into the game quickly was great, and no marketer wants to be left behind, but we need to make sure we’re not falling into a formula that leaves our brands swimming in a sea of sameness.

So, what are marketers to do as they try to differentiate their brands in the social media space? I’d start with these three simple standards:
Find your own voice. Remember what makes you different than the competition in the minds of your target consumers and figure out how to creatively bring that to life in social media. The Old Spice, “Man your man can smell like,” real-time twitter effort was a perfect example of a brand that has found its voice and is executing well across all channels.

Don’t be afraid to try something new for your category. Don’t wait for the competition to take the lead. Keep evolving your social media presence, because if what you’re doing is working for you, then someone is sure to copy it.

Find ways to use social media to provide value to your target audience. Best Buy's Twelpforce, the company's Twitter handle where tech pros offer technology advice, provides truly valuable information to their loyal fans.

Social media allows brands to push the limits far faster than any other medium, but engaging consumers in a creative and meaningful way has never been more important, or more difficult.

As self-service social platforms become more ubiquitous, marketers need to ask themselves what they can do to make consumers want to connect with their brands – if they don’t, they’ll likely end up looking, and sounding, exactly like their competitors.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-making-brands-look-same-2011-3#ixzz1JPBYgjCN

Charlie Sheen Quotes

2011-04-12T06:24:00.000-07:00

“I am on a drug – it’s called Charlie Sheen. It’s not available because if you try it, you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.”

“I’m different. I have a different constitution, I have a different brain, I have a different heart. I got tiger blood, man.”

“If you borrowed my brain for five seconds, you’d be like, ‘Dude! Can’t handle it, unplug this bastard!’ It fires in a way that’s maybe not from, uh… this terrestrial realm.”

“The run I was on made Sinatra, Flynn, Jagger, Richards, all of them look like droopy-eyed, armless children.”

“I probably took more than anybody could survive. I was banging seven-gram rocks. Because that’s how I roll. I have one speed. I have one gear: Go.”

“I’m not bi-polar, I’m bi-winning. I win here and I win there.”

“It’s been a tsunami of media and I’ve been riding it on a mercury surfboard.”

“The only thing I’m addicted to right now is winning.”

“I’m tired of pretending I’m not special. I’m tired of pretending I’m not a total bitchin’ rock star from Mars.”

“People can’t figure me out, they can’t process me, I don’t expect them to. You can’t process me with the normal brain.”

“I’m an F-18, bro, and I will destroy you in the air and deploy my ordnance to the ground.”

“Dying is for fools, amateurs.”

“I’m not fair game. I’m not a soft target. It’s over. There’s a new sheriff in town. And he has an army of assassins.”

“I wish him nothing but pain in his silly travels especially if they wind up in my octagon. Clearly I have defeated this earthworm with my words — imagine what I would have done with my fire breathing fists.”

“If you’re a part of my family, I will love you violently.”

“I’m not Thomas Jefferson, he was a pussy!”

“(CBS) picked a fight with a warlock.”

“[A.A.] was written for normal people, people that aren’t special. People that don’t have tiger blood, you know, Adonis DNA.”

“I’ve got a 10,000 year old brain and the boogers of a 7 year old.”

“I’m shakin’ a tree. I’m shakin’ all the trees. ”

[On why he's so quotable] “I’m grandiose. Because I live a grandiose life. I’m not aw shucks… because I’m gnarly.”

[On past prostitutes who've gone public with their Charlie Sheen stories] “Yeah, where is she now? She’s under a bridge.”

“What is so bad about being under bridges, anyway? Bridges should sue Anthony Keidis for defamation.”

[On being asked, 'Are you worth a hundred million dollars?'] “I think I’m worth over a 100 BILLION dollars, but that’s just on a cellular level.”

“I am battle tested bayonets”

“Resentments are the rocket fuel that lives in the tip of my saber.”

“Marry a tree. My other marriages didnt work out so I’m going to marry a tree.”

“We need to hack up the person responsible for this bad connection. Hack him up into pieces in front of his children. We need to cut off his face and wear it and go on a very tightly budgeted shopping spree in stores that don’t exist yet!”

Twitter

2011-04-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

Just started a twitter page to see what its like trying out most social networks now they always change and it seams like you need to have about five or six Different accounts with different sites would be great if we could have one site to login that updates them all.... Google

http://twitter.com/jackthewebber

Chrome Experiments could this be the end of flash?

2011-04-01T09:06:00.000-07:00

We think JavaScript is awesome. We also think browsers are awesome. Together, they can do some beautiful, magical, crazy things. And that’s why we created this website.

Chrome Experiments is a showcase for creative web experiments, the vast majority of which are built with the latest open technologies, including HTML5, Canvas, SVG, and WebGL. All of them were made and submitted by talented artists and programmers from around the world.

We hope the projects on this site provide inspiration for anyone interested in experimenting creatively with the web. And we hope they show how the web has become faster, more fun, and more open – the same spirit in which we built Google Chrome.

All of the work here is user-submitted, so naturally we’re looking for more. If you've made something fun and fast in JavaScript, please send it in. We can't post everything, but we'd love to see it.

Thanks for visiting, and happy experimenting.

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/

England

2011-03-25T03:40:00.000-07:00

So we have arrived in England and I am currently working for QVC television http://www.qvcuk.com. As an interactive designer I am still doing freelance work and I am going to pick up some good contact links over here.

Poster Whore

2011-02-09T18:04:00.000-08:00

Poster artwork has been around for ages communicating products, events, social issues, propaganda and more. From the beginning until now they have been one of the strongest forms of communication. There's no doubt they will continue to be far into the future.

Posterwhore.com was created to showcase the artists and designers, from around the world, who spend countless hours creating the stunning artwork that makes up this form of communication.

It is my hope that this website will give these artists an additional platform through which to inspire others artists and put their individual work in front of art buyers, creative directors, collectors and the like. The ultimate goal; be a catalyst for greater sales of their artwork and talent. This in turn, I believe, allows artists to continue to create their art for years and years to come.

Check it out

www.postersterwhore.com

2011 More CSS3 + HTML5

2011-02-08T10:10:00.000-08:00

What a gratifying sigh of relief! CSS3 and HTML5 have been on the distant horizon of web design for the past couple of years, but now, in 2011, we see an explosion of it. Designers are finally starting to let go of Flash. However you may feel about Flash, you do know that it does not play well with some of the hot, new technology available to your current and potential visitors. In 2011, you will slowly step away from Flash and embrace the magic known as HTML5. Look at the amazingly similar comparison:

Now that’s shown, please understand that Flash and HTML5 are not equal opponents. There is plenty of room for both in 2011. The problem is that designers in 2010 (and before) misused Flash. Case in point, very rarely should your entire site be made of Flash, especially these days. HTML5 alleviates some of the burden we have placed on Flash. However, HTML5 cannot (yet) replace the extraordinary design elements we can achieve through Flash.

Perhaps even more exciting is the fact that CSS3 is available to us in a real way this year. Move over Photoshop (wow, Adobe just cannot rest), because CSS3 is making short work of text shadow, border radius and image transparency. If you have not already begun, now is the time to really delve into understanding CSS3 and HTML5.

Street Fighter

2011-02-07T18:15:00.000-08:00

10 things to think about with SEO

2011-02-07T14:42:00.000-08:00

1. SEO is not a onetime process.
Like your conventional marketing (Eg. Paper ad), you cannot stop SEO by paying onetime. Remember you have your online competitors working with another SEO team like what you do.

2. You need to allow your SEO person to optimize content.
The content and the keyword should be maintained proportionately. Your SEO team should know how to manage that. Help them to do what they are supposed to do with the content.

3. SEO is online marketing, not a replacement of offline marketing.If you are already doing offline marketing (Eg. Paper advertisements), you need not stop it. You may still need to continue, till you get enough visitors and business through SEO.

4.Consider recommendations from your SEO team.
Listen to what your SEO team asks for, trust them They may suggest content changes, keyword changes, design changes, layout changes etc – they are certainly doing good to your business

5. Discuss and finalize the right keywords with your SEO consultant.
You might be getting great traffic from wrong audience with wrong keywords. So decide the right keywords first. Your SEO team will guide you to choose them and let you know about the keywords and its popularity.

6. Show interest towards and trust on SEO.Watch your site visitor analysis, spend time in understanding that along with your SEO team. Enjoy the improvements which will keep you move forward and help you to see great results. You must see the SEO reports regularly, if not at least once in a month.

7. Keep adding content.
Find the right content, one way is sharing your experience to your site visitors and feed them with free resources. Think about it, every business has something to make their customers learning.

8. More the link building more the ROI You need link from other sites, if possible with sites which has better ranking than you. One way to bring links to your site is discusses in the last point.

9. No hurry! SEO is a long term process
Do not chase your SEO team immediately after you pay them – You need to be patient enough to see great things happening.

10. Do not change the site without discussing with your SEO team.
This is a big mistake which will spoil what was done so far, and will bring great loss.

New Website

2011-02-07T13:51:00.001-08:00

New website design for 2011 www.jackthewebber.com take a look and let me know what you think

Stock Vault

2010-11-04T00:03:00.000-07:00

http://www.stockvault.net/

Stock Vault is a great site to get stock images from for non commercial projects, great for doing your own art work with. I will keep posting links to sites that I find useful on the internet.

Cool Iris Embed

2010-11-03T01:26:00.000-07:00

There are loads and loads of options out there on the internet if you have time to look for them quite a neat function I have discovered is the Cool Iris picture gallery it picks up files and images from Flickr and other places and puts them on your website. Contact jack the Webber to get this function on your website or go to http://www.cooliris.com and check it out

Photo Editing

2010-11-03T01:14:00.000-07:00

So just finished some more photo edits have taken my time on this job but you can see the results. Contact me if you have any images you need to edit or any questions about how to go about doing this kind of thing your self.

HTML 5 the New

2010-11-03T01:09:00.000-07:00

If you are not learning HTML5 at the moment then you are not really up with the play
http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-html5-diff-20101019/

HTML5 defines the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. "HTML5 differences from HTML4" describes the differences between HTML4 and HTML5 and provides some of the rationale for the changes. This document may not provide accurate information as the HTML5 specification is still actively in development. When in doubt, always check the HTML5 specification itself. [

This guy has got guts

2010-11-03T01:05:00.001-07:00

The Wiki Leaks guy has got more guts then me that't for sure
http://wikileaks.org/

At 5pm EST Friday 22nd October 2010 WikiLeaks released the largest classified military leak in history. The 391,832 reports ('The Iraq War Logs'), document the war and occupation in Iraq, from 1st January 2004 to 31st December 2009 (except for the months of May 2004 and March 2009) as told by soldiers in the United States Army. Each is a 'SIGACT' or Significant Action in the war. They detail events as seen and heard by the US military troops on the ground in Iraq and are the first real glimpse into the secret history of the war that the United States government has been privy to throughout.

The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq, comprised of 66,081 'civilians'; 23,984 'enemy' (those labeled as insurgents); 15,196 'host nation' (Iraqi government forces) and 3,771 'friendly' (coalition forces). The majority of the deaths (66,000, over 60%) of these are civilian deaths.That is 31 civilians dying every day during the six year period. For comparison, the 'Afghan War Diaries', previously released by WikiLeaks, covering the same period, detail the deaths of some 20,000 people. Iraq during the same period, was five times as lethal with equivallent population size.

Kingpin

2010-11-03T01:04:00.000-07:00

Jack the Webber Just launched

Check it out

Established in 2001 by Ben Harris & Deb Walsh, Kingpin's sole purpose is to enhance society by creating,collecting & distributing high quality fashion, news & entertainment throughout the Eastcoast. Located in Gisborne & Napier we stock only the freshest styles in footwear, skateboarding, clothing & accessories.

http://www.kingpinonline.co.nz/

Bad BUZZ

2010-11-03T00:53:00.001-07:00

Google rarely contacts Gmail users via email, but we are making an exception to let you know that we've reached a settlement in a lawsuit regarding Google Buzz (http://buzz.google.com), a service we launched within Gmail in February of this year.

Shortly after its launch, we heard from a number of people who were concerned about privacy. In addition, we were sued by a group of Buzz users and recently reached a settlement in this case.

The settlement acknowledges that we quickly changed the service to address users' concerns. In addition, Google has committed $8.5 million to an independent fund, most of which will support organizations promoting privacy education and policy on the web. We will also do more to educate people about privacy controls specific to Buzz. The more people know about privacy online, the better their online experience will be.

Just to be clear, this is not a settlement in which people who use Gmail can file to receive compensation. Everyone in the U.S. who uses Gmail is included in the settlement, unless you personally decide to opt out before December 6, 2010. The Court will consider final approval of the agreement on January 31, 2011. This email is a summary of the settlement, and more detailed information and instructions approved by the court, including instructions about how to opt out, object, or comment, are available at http://www.BuzzClassAction.com.

2010-03-28T15:45:00.000-07:00

This is a website design jack the webber has just completed for a client its a single page layout, very simple and easy to use. It is also copyright to Jack the webber contact us if you would like your own site design created. The best way to contact us is through james@jackthewebber.com

Website Design 2010

2010-03-28T15:33:00.000-07:00

With all the latest information out there on how facebook twitter and other web based mediums can help your website reach more people, its still important to remember that, these need to be used in collaboration with your own personal website. Jack the Webber can help you achieve this so contact us today for a free quote.