With UbiKann, I Can Be Everywhere
Take a look at the recent advert for Apple’s iTunes & iPod, featuring Bob Dylan. The advert plays with the well known shadows concept commonly used in both iPod and iTunes ads, however each person in the ad like Dylan is recognisable regardless of the shadow effect…
Enjoy 
Taking a look at the online photo industry may well give you the answer…
If you look at the new battle between Flickr (Yahoo) and Picasa (Google) then you could be faced with what will be happening soon in blogging.
Google is putting the heat on Flickr with its Picasa 2 beta that I have recently been testing. This is a trend setter in online photo sites…
Picasa 2 is not on their web site ! It is Windows based application/software we are talking about (also available for Mac OS X 10.4 or later). You download it and install it on your PC. The current stable version allows you to organise, edit, share your pictures (using extra software called hello) via email, instant messaging etc. It is extremely easy to use. If someone told me it was Apple software ported to PC I would understand better why it was so user friendly. It has been available since mid-summer so Picasa 2 beta is not the news here.
The version 2 beta of Picasa lets you upload pictures from your PC to your Picasa web album.
So you’re thinking that sounds cool and all, but what does this have to do with blogging ? Well everything. As I’ll explain now the ease of use and simplicity readily available on your computer is a real winner…
I realised when I opened an account at Flickr for my Dad that it was far too much for him. He looked on, wide-eyed, trying to follow the steps I indicated to him about uploading pictures and then organising them in sets. I knew he used the current stable version of Picasa and loves it. I understood I was faced with a dilemma.
Do I create a Picasa web account and show him how to use it and drop the advantages of Flickr ?
Or do I continue with Flickr, knowing that my Dad will probably not feel courageous enough to use it ! Hint to Picasa here about changing this maybe so that I will have no reason not to use Picasa ?
As you can see below I have the set of photos I selected in Picasa on my PC, and in less than a minute my pictures are up on the Picasa web site !
This is the initial Picasa page with my set of travel images, I click on “Web Album” :
Then I log into my account (you can ask Picasa to remember this) :
Next, Picasa starts uploading all the selected photos (you can choose what size to upload) :
And here are the uploaded photos on Picasa.
This is where the comparison hit me !
Blogging is the same. Until there is an application to create blogs which is as easy to use as Picasa, people will shy away from great systems like WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger etc. Note I said “as easy to use”. You need to have used Picasa and see how easy other people find it to use.
I’m not talking about changing the look of your blog, nor about the Tiger Admin from orderedlist.com which does wonders for the WordPress admin panel. I’m talking about a piece of software that you can download and runs on your PC, allowing you to create your post, preview it and then upload everything to your blog.
What is needed is a piece of software like Picasa 2, very stylish and trendy, but most of all, simple to use and understand. My Dad took to it and likes using it, he was really enthusiastic about it, so it is something worth writing home about !
Making blogging easy will be a winner. People like me, who design sites, code new stuff into their blogs and use beta versions of skins/presentations for blogs like K2 are a small percentage of the population.
A successful system will need to think about the majority of the population that will find the WP admin panel or any other web based panel system currently available so daunting they’ll rarely use it so they’ll rarely blog.
So I’d like to call on Google, Yahoo or Apple to create a piece of software for blogging (for PC, Unix & Mac) as described above, with maybe a spell checker, saving draft versions and uploading everything automatically to the blog of your choice. You’ll find people will not only blog but they’ll blog about your cool software and tell all their friends about it. We’ll have a blogging star system. For the VC lot among you, yes this means either a star or maybe even a cash cow !
The Economist is carbon-neutralized. The magazine decided that for its 16 page ‘Green’ section it would make a difference, not just in words, but in actions.
The idea sprang to life in the latest edition of The Economist, with a special environment section called “A survey of climate change”. The latest issue of the magazine has been carbon-neutralized. The Economist calculated the impact on the environment that the process of publishing this month’s issue would have, “so Carbon Neutral could trap the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide (118 tons) in a U.S. mine as a way of neutralizing the emissions created by producing the magazine — cost about $1,200.” (Ad Age)
When interviewed, Emma Duncan, Deputy Editor of The Economist, explained that advertisers were quick to jump on the idea of participating in this month’s issue, especially companies that are keen on getting an environmentally friendly message across. They even got ads from companies that rarely advertise !
However the Economist not only took a bold step on this issue, the whole section was nearly all produced by Ms Duncan. Her work spanned over a four month period, travelling around the world to write the various stories that appear in this special section. The Economist found a novel and highly appropriate way of getting the message across. Savvy to on-line trends, they have a podcast interview of Emma Duncan that you can download or play directly from the site.
“We need to think about climate change maybe as individuals think about insuring their houses: you spend maybe 1% of your annual income insuring your house not because you think it’s going to burn down, but because if by any chance it did burn down, the consequences for you would be disastrous.â€
Emma Duncan, Deputy Editor of The Economist
So it’s an all round thumbs up for this prestigious magazine that will hopefully provide full access to their content soon.
Have you taken a look at the new and very pretty web site at IE7.com ?
No, oh well please do it’s really worth the trip from here to there, it’s a great advert
Link from the man in blue.
Je viens de terminer la traduction de l’article ‘Web 3.0′ de Jeffrey Zeldman publié en janvier sur ‘A List Apart’. Il n’existait pas encore de traduction de cet article fort intéressant pour les francophones, voilà chose faite. Je voudrai remercier Jean Tournier pour sa relecture et ses remarques précieuses. Je souhaite aussi remercier Erin Kissane, éditrice du magazine ‘A List Apart’ pour son aide pendant la traduction.
J’ai connu les premières périodes de l’Internet et les regards perplexes à la fin des années 90 lorsqu’on expliquait “un travail dans le Web”. Le paragraphe “Bulle, bulle” de cet article a fait resurgir ces souvenirs. Je dois avouer qu’étant un passionné d’Internet depuis le début, j’ai été motivé par l’idée de traduire ces souvenirs…
The BBC has compiled a very interesting set of statistical charts combined with key event dates, giving a better idea of their impact on the statistics.
It is nicely presented and works well with the key dates, accompanied each time with an image and brief description. An interesting choice of statistics indicating which areas have dramatically changed due to 9/11.
Part of my family live near Leeds, while my close family live in France. I was looking to compare prices for flights from Paris to Leeds and a little green thing caught my eye next to the results on Google.
My mum’s flight from Leeds to France a few weeks ago was just after the foiled terrorist attacks story and she complained how little passenger alert information she had found on the Jet2 site. So I thought I check their site to see if they had added anything…
First of all I thought Google had started putting company logos on ads but then I realised, it was an icon not a logo. So I hovered over it first but no title info appeared, then I clicked on it (PS: I added the red arrow to indicate what I’m talking about) :
When you click on the arrow a mini form appears where you can add your telephone number and Google (out of the kindness of their hearts) offer to put you in contact with Jet2 via telephone “for free” !
Wow, if it wasn’t past 12 o’clock at night I’d take them up on the offer just to give it a try !
Note also the fact that they suggest remembering your telephone number so that you don’t even have to type you number in next time they offer the same call-back service
This is certainly a post I’ll be tagging with the word ‘Trend’.
I just came across a very interesting Google Video from Google. Luis von Ahn, a Carnegie Mellon professor, discusses the Captcha concept used to stop automatic systems from filling in forms and how currently Spam companies are trying to get around it.
Captcha is used to describe a system that allows a computer to automatically generate random numbers and or letters and then obfuscate them in order to render reading them by a computer highly unlikely or impossible.
This was interesting for me since I had worked on a similar concept for stopping people from requesting lost passwords on Significant-Media.
The video below then goes on to explain how human computation i.e. people solving problems rather than computers can be useful. With the Captcha system for example, computers are not capable of providing correct answers.
Then the ESP Game is explained and the process for it is pretty amazing from a thought process point of view. Anyone who has to come up with new ideas in their company should find this part truly fascinating :
The part I found really impressive, in view of a successive set of procedures, was when von Ahn explains the different combinations of possible player modes, as well as anti-cheating mechanisms…
The guy seems like a great teacher as well, if the seminar is anything to go by !
Placed in context this image tagging system is what early users of flickr were used to when they add tags to their own photos and is now pretty common procedure. Flickr was bought by Yahoo and Google well may have found a novel way of catching up here, if you read between the lines…
Update : interesting article over at the washingtonpost.com concerning a way to ‘turn the tables’ on the phishing techniques using images from the banks
Google, via it’s evangelist Adam Lasnik is starting to provide SEO classes. As you can see here the seminars are cheap and open to all.
It begs the question about Google asking people to create web sites for people and not for their robots. However, it is true that the best idea is to build your web sites for your target population while respecting W3C standards, and then optimise your code for search engines.
Once you have read a fair amount about Search Engine Optimization, you realise that most people are just guessing what is working and then try to make you think they have the real deal when it’s likely that they only have half the story. Optimising pages is partly logical on the basics and then guess work on what may be used by Google to define the order of their results. I personally think they should spend more time dealing with the weeds like domain name parking with pages full of adverts/links…
I just came across this photo set of the same view using a time lapse intervelometer device. I was lead to it from a remixed version over on flickr : by ‘narphorium‘ (he explains how he did it in the comments with Photoshop)
Do check the original and the remix, both are really good pieces of work.
On the original page if you go down to the second picture, you’ll see that you get all 6 pictures used in both cases by hovering over the image either from right to left or left to right !
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