Twitter Vote Report
Take a look at this great Twitter-based website that lets people report problems and issues with voting in the US today.
The US Presidential Election: Goodbye to all that
After a couple of years of being heavily addicted to the US presidential campaign, I’m already beginning to feel a little nostalgic for the time spent endlessly flicking through the websites that helped feed my habit. While none of these will be particularly new to many people/addicts, here is a little list of some of my favourite websites I’ve been heavily using:
- Memeorandum has been the main supplier of my needs – a constant river of the most read news and opinion from the makers of Techmeme, from the rabid right all the way through to the paranoid left.
- 538 has been a fantastic new site that parsed the various polls, and made projections of its own. Created by baseball statistic geeks, it has been widely quoted and used everywhere in the media and even had its creator on the Colbert Report.
- Andrew Sullivan, a US-based British conservative who supported John Kerry and now Barack Obama has long been an invigorating thinker on issues of what it means to be of the Right.
- Twitter’s US Election page has been an amusing, if not actually very useful insight into the endless gibberish that spouts from the minds of the Twitterverse.
- The Corner is a great insight into the primarily hardcore neo-conservative mind.
- The Huffington Post has been a great resource of mainly Democratic points-of-view.
There have been endless others, but these have been my main sources. And to think… just another couple of years and I’ll be interminably flicking through these yet again.
4 November, 2008
It’s your fault that Obama didn’t win
A nice viral video to encourage your friends to get out and vote (if they were American, that is). Who knew it was all Christian’s fault?
31 October, 2008
The problem with virus detection…
Mike Davidson from Newsvine talks about how anti-virus software regularly can create more problems than they solve. We have even had issues when users simply click on a regular drop-down menu – and then nothing happens.
Finding this week too depressing?
Depressed by the credit crunch? Find Facebook too intrusive? Bored of iTunes? Like being lost without Google Maps? Drop back in time to 2001 with Google and remember the good old days of the internet (before it became really really useful).
The browser wars: part 57 or so
Yet another opening has occurred in the long running war of the browsers… admittedly a war not many people are that interested in anymore – instead ‘web standards’ won. But back to the war.
The most interesting news is that Google have announced a new web browser called Chrome. My favourite feature is that it has been launched via a gorgeous and quirky comic by Scott McCloud (creator of the fantastic Understanding Comics). As for persuading a significant number of regular people to actually use it, I feel it will be a hard sell. There are features that developers and geeks will appreciate (we do!), but it has been hard enough to persuade people they should move from Internet Explorer 6, which is dangerous, let alone to think about moving to yet another browser after they may have made the effort to move to Firefox or Internet Explorer 7. It is also (arguably) quite ugly, which won’t help. That said, many of the ideas behind it are very interesting from a developers point-of-view and it may well become a very interesting browser in the future.
The other news, less interesting or fun, but news that will probably have more impact on the world in a practical way, is that Internet Explorer 8 has reached the next stage of development. When it actually comes out is anyone’s guess, but it will probably be much more important to web developers in an everyday sense than Chrome will be – at least for the foreseeable future.
2 September, 2008
Sexism and blogging
“Women get dismissed in ways that men don’t” – is there a ‘glass ceiling’ to be overcome for women bloggers? More at the New York Times on the BlogHer conference.
Flash increases its visibility
One of our major issues with Adobe’s Flash, and one of the main reasons we use it sparingly and rarely recommend it to our clients, is that it struggles to be understood by Google and other search engines. This situation has now changed with an initiative by Adobe: they have released code that makes it easier for search engines to read Flash content. This goes some way of removing our concerns.
A key problem remains though: it is still extremely hard to create ‘deep links’ into the content. For example, if this journal post was instead text inside a Flash file, Google would not be able to link to it directly. Therefore even if the text was found, Google would send you to the ‘start’ of the Flash file, forcing the user to then hunt for it. This would be annoying not only for the user, but for us as well. The key way that Google ranks content is to measure the amount of links to it, but as websites can still not link directly to it, Flash remains problematic.
1 July, 2008
The web vs. newspapers
A good case study from Publishing 2.0 on how ‘old publishing’ concepts are still struggling with the new forms the web are forcing upon it.
Hugg, the enviro-Digg clone
Talking of Digg, take a look at this slightly clunky clone called Hugg, from Treehugger, the environmental issues blog.
Digg and brands that are loved
People moshing at a ‘chatshow’? That’s Digg. For a website that essentially makes it easy to share web articles with other people and see what is the most popular, Digg has certainly created an incredible brand that people really love. Zoe Margolis of The Guardian talks to Kevin Rose, one of the founders of Digg.
We Want Tap: Quench Thyself, Save Thy Planet
“Were it not a multi billion dollar international business, you’d think bottled water was a corporate prank, after all, one quarter of it is simply filtered tap water. Take a tour into the swilling fields.”
Our friends and neighbours Provokateur have just introduced to the world their new project: Tap. Tap is taking on the bottled water industry and asking people to enjoy tap water instead — ask for it by name.
17 May, 2008
Observations on how to grow a community
George Oates from Flickr talks about what they learnt building and working with their community. Very relevant for us right now…
Search engines over web domains
More and more people just use Google to get to websites rather than bother typing in a hard to remember web address. Read more on Search Engine Journal.
Outsourcing your organisation
Jeffrey Zeldman talks about the demise of the personal website:
In the past 5 years or so we have witnessed a change in how people manage their personal websites. 10 years ago people tried hard to show-off with self-consciously cool websites, or odd little pages with hard to read text about their cat on garish backgrounds. Then came blogging were people wrote about their cats every day, but it was still on ‘their site’. Now we’re seeing people feel much less importance in the ownership of their space. MySpace was possibly the start of this trend, but now with Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, YouTube, etc., keeping your own personal space online just seems like too much hassle now.
What Zeldman does not discuss is that this is happening increasingly with companies and organisations too. Whether they have a Facebook page, a corporate Twitter account, video on YouTube, an eBay account for ecommerce, Amazon S3 for storage or tools like Basecamp, Salesforce and Google Documents for their intranets, the de-centralisation of organisations is happening, and we regularly recommend this for clients.
1 May, 2008