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Round up of the week
2008-04-18 23:59:00
I've not really found time to write anything this week so here's a summary of what I've been doing and looking at. Social Media Releases I'm working on an application for creating and publishing these things. On the surface the idea seems simple enough but the feature list calls for a huge heap of external services. I'm building an impressive collection of API keys for this project. Digsby this social network / IM / email aggregator is my killer app of the year so far, the IM widget embedded in the site has proved to be a real help in opening lines of communication. I've had several conversations with people dropping by the blog and asking questions rather than posting comments. The IM format is private and more informal requiring less thought (and time) than constructing a comment. Mippin I've taken a look at this tool to convert your RSS or Atom feed into a mobile enabled website, there are options for adding mobile advertising into the pages too. I have to give props to Da...
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Culture shock
2008-04-12 01:36:00
I solemnly declare that this post is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I've just completed a spell of jury service, all in all it was an interesting experience. The legal processes in the crown court are all performed very carefully and slowly - understandably so, It's made me realise just how much a mistake could cost somebody, not just financially but in all aspects of their life. I would certainly never want to be the person in the dock having to sit a listen to everything with limited opportunity to have my own input. I think the thing which I noticed most was that with the wigs, gowns and everything written down and recorded for a permanent record, it seemed strangely anachronistic and at odds with the fast-paced, super-connected world in which we spend the majority of our time. Especially for somebody like myself for whom the likes of twitter, facebook and google are part and parcel of my everyday work environment as well as at home. Back to the digital g...
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"Now is gone" is a great resource for PR, Marketing & some Web Developers
2008-04-02 01:41:00
I've finally found the time to finish reading "Now is Gone", and I'm impressed. The book is aimed at traditional Marketing and PR executives with an important message about how the communications paradigms have changed and they are now faced with an "evolve or die" situation. The seven social media principles as outlined in the book are: Relinquish message control Honesty, ethics and transparencies are musts Participation within the community is marketing Communication to audiences is an outdated, 20th century concept Build value for the community Inspire your community with real, exciting information Intelligently manage the media form to build a stronger, more loyal community The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. - Jay Rosen I'm not going to go into any depth on what each of these mean (buy the book to find out) but the one point that was really drummed home is that effective marke...
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Question everything, including the questions
2008-03-28 01:27:00
In my recent posts concerning the development of my new blog markup, I've deliberately tried to document my thought processes and the decisions I made along the way. It was a conscious decision not to write up the work in the style of "this is how it should be done", partly because I'm certain that there are improvements which could be made and I'm sure that in a few months time, I'll look at the code and think "why on earth did I do that?". In web design, it doesn't take a huge amount of time or effort to try things out. We are blessed with an infinite playground in which to let our imaginations run riot, and yet there are still those who would rather crank out the same work time and time again. It seems to me that doing something in a particular way just because somebody else did it that way is lazy. We can only progress if we question ourselves at every step and then ask ourselves if the question is the right one. At least if we look for alternatives, or at least try and fai...
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Experiment #2 - Semantic Blog Template - Part 2
2008-03-22 03:11:00
In part 1 of this experiment I tried to define the semantic structure of the page and incorporate some of the available microformats, the major one being the hAtom format for blog posts. In this part I'm filling in more content to get a more realistic view of the markup required and choosing appropriate tags rather than relying on div tags with ids and class names applied to them. I'll work my way down the page from top to bottom, starting with... Header Not much to change here, I considered losing the header div because by using a h1 tag inside a div tag, I'm nesting two block-level elements. I decided to leave it because I fully expect to add some other header content at some point. Navigation I did the usual thing of adding an unordered list of links for the navigation. I've used the class name "active" to denote the current active link in order to highlight it when I come to build the style sheet. I also used "first" and "last" to denote the first and last items in the list,...
More About: Blog , Experiment , Template , Part

now is gone
2008-03-20 12:27:00
Yesterday I received a copy of "now is gone" by Geoff Livingston with Brian Solis, courtesy of Social Media Today (thanks Lauren). I've only just begun to read it but it's already proving very interesting. The aim of the book is to introduce the benefits of social media sharing on the Internet to Marketing and PR people. As a tech-savvy web person, I'm already aware of the capabilities of the web but it's interesting to see it from the perspective of Marketing and PR people. One of my current projects involves building a some online tools to assist in online PR and marketing so it's a great resource for me too. Perhaps there's an additional audience for this book that wasn't originally intended; web-heads who want to learn about PR. Technorati Tags: Marketing,PR,Book,now is gone

I'm on a roll this week
2008-03-13 23:27:00
Seems like my timing is good this week, just a couple of days ago I was discussing the potential of a YouTube upload API with a colleague, then, as if by magic, that very thing came into existence. I also started an earnest attempt to promote semantic web standards and microformats and this announcement arrives from Yahoo: The Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem A few weeks ago, we began talking about the new Yahoo! Search open platform. Today, we're releasing more details about two important components of the initiative -- the developer platform as well as our support of a number of semantic web standards. The Data Web in Action While there has been remarkable progress made toward understanding the semantics of web content, the benefits of a data web have not reached the mainstream consumer. Without a killer semantic web app for consumers, site owners have been reluctant to support standards like RDF, or even microformats. We believe that app can be web search. Yahoo! Search Blog: The ...
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Questions about semantic HTML
2008-03-12 00:57:00
My current project to re-template this blog using semantic markup and microformats has raised some interesting questions. Why use semantic markup? There are plenty of good reasons to use semantic markup, the main one being that the markup gives context to the content elements. One of the goals of semantic markup is that the content can be understood by a computer in the same way as it is by a human. A simple example is that as a human reading a page, we can easily distinguish larger text on it's own line as a heading. A computer, however will only recognise the fact that the text is larger and on it's own line, it sees the text as no more important that the copy which precedes or follows it. For example; Is this a heading? This is a heading. <p><b>Is this a heading?</b></p> <h4>This is a heading.</h4> As you can see in the source code, the first line uses the <b> tag to make the text bold, the second line uses the <h4> tag signif...
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Experiment #2 - Semantic Blog Template - Part 1
2008-03-10 23:51:00
I made the decision some time back to overhaul my site templates based on best practice principles of web design. Part ly inspired by the classic CSS Zen Garden I wanted to be able to switch stylesheets without needing to change the underlying markup. I also wanted to try and avoid making any conceit to design issues, focusing mainly on the semantic structure of the markup. CSS Zen Garden uses additional "utility" markup in order to aid designers in applying images and other styles. I have no problem with that as CSS Zen Garden was built with the express purpose of demonstrating what could be achieved design-wise using CSS so providing addition markup to use as "hooks" for design elements makes perfect sense. For this first part I'm going to concentrate on the overall structure of the site pages, in the second part I'll look at the content in more detail and how I can optimise that markup further and finally I'll look at the options available for applying styles to the markup. Def...
More About: Blog , Experiment , Template

Is it 2008 already?
2008-03-05 00:58:00
I've been very bad for keeping up with posting to this blog for the past few months, various reasons have contributed to this: New addition to the family Heavy Work commitments A long stint of redecoration which left my home PC without a home for a while So anyway, what have I been up to? I've been working on a large project at work to re-brand and re-engineer some of our aging online marketing tools ready for a launch in the coming months. We've set out a punishing schedule of releases to continually improve both the usability and the functionality of these products - more closer to the time. I've got a roadmap set out for the launch featureset of bcToolkit - a management reporting tool for companies using Basecamp from 37signals. I was also asked to give the keynote presentation for KMP's Web Content Strategy Seminars in Manchester and London. These were well received by all accounts, my co-presenters Simon Bartolo (Sitecore), Chris Ezekiel (Creative Virtual) and Chris R...
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The Year in Web Video
2007-12-19 17:10:00
Yahoo's People of the Web News points out that 2007 has been huge for online video. It seems odd to think that not too long ago, embedding video in a website was technically challenging and expensive, now we only have to decide which video sharing platform we want to use and we can have a video online in a matter of minutes.Here's a nice round-up of some of the most popular videos of the year.Read the full article here.
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Genius!
2007-11-30 12:44:00
Given my tendency to ramble on and ignore some of the niceties of grammar and punctuation, I'm not convinced about the accuracy of this blog reading level calculator. It is however nice to be given the "Genius " rating, especially after finding it on my friend Gerry's blog where he complains about only getting the "High School" rating. Oddly enough, I get "Genius" for http://webdevelopr2.com/blog but only "College" for http://webdeveloper2.com - I suppose that there's less textual content on the homepage with it being mainly aggregated links. For all I know, the selection is derived from the URL rather than any sort of textual analysis - this is after all simple linkbait to promote a cash advance  service but It's still nice to be a genius. Technorati Tags: linkbait,reading level,genius

Content optimisation rant
2007-11-26 17:51:00
I'm writing this post whilst waiting for a 63 Mb image embedded into a webpage to be displayed - so that I can replace it with a smaller version. I find it hard to believe that these sort of fundamental mistakes are still being made. Is this one of those things that we used to learn the hard way but now gets skipped over as "web publishing basics"?. Is it assumed that anybody who can update their Myspace profile knows the technicalities and pitfalls of linked media? - It certainly looks that way to me. In short, one of the most effective techniques for optimising your website is the rarely used and often overlooked method known as: "Having a clue what you're doing".
More About: Rant , Content , Misa

Deconstructing page design
2007-11-26 12:51:00
Amy Hoy thunders through the user experience design methodolgy that she uses giving some excellent insights - especially for the type of designer who fires up Photoshop as the first step in every design task. My favourite part of the article comes later where she deconstructs some product landing pages using green and red pens to indicate good and bad page elements respectively. This is a really effective method of critiquing designs something that could be done collaboratively using a tool such as ConceptShare. Vitamin Features » Product pages: so much suck, so easy to fix
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Practicing what I preach
2007-11-25 03:39:00
I spend much of my working day looking at web sites and web applications with a view to optimising the important elements and removing or hiding the ones which add no value or take value away from more important elements. It's surprising then, how easily I overlooked these disciplines when dealing with my own website. I realised that this blog had become infested by widgets which for the most part were distractions from the main content. I have only myself to blame for this - the temptation of adding new and exciting functionality with a simple cut & paste embed code can be hard to resist, and once embedded, there's little motivation to remove the code again. In order to resolve this problem, I have cleaned out most of the widgets and ads. From now on if I want to try out a widget, I'll embed it in a post rather than the blog template before making the decision to keep it as part of the template. For now the most important things that I'll be keeping are the Blogroll and the...

Live Writer is outstanding
2007-11-23 01:55:00
When my colleague Paul rushed into my office today ranting about how good Live Writer is, I was skeptical to say the least - Microsoft have a checkered history in the field of web authoring software (I've still not forgiven them for FrontPage and the havoc it wreaked on a carefully designed intranet security setup). I went to see what was so exciting and was pleasantly surprised to see a blog editor which didn't seem to be overloaded with complex features. The Web Layout and Web Preview views were the first major benefit that I could see. It's nice to be able to see the final formatting as you write and preview the post in the live layout HTML . Paul had already hooked up his WordPress blog and we soon managed to set up the company TypePad Blog too. So I decided to take the plunge and install it myself. The first thing which impressed me was the ease with which I was able to set up Live Writer to edit this blog. I'm using Blogger but publishing static HTML via FTP to the server,...
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An 'Xmas' appeal from GrammarBlog
2007-11-22 14:22:00
GrammarBlog is looking for contributors to a Christmas special editions of their recurring post "Grammar abuse in signage". Grammar pedants from all over the Internet are asked to get involved by submitting photographs of Christmas signs and banners that contain spelling, punctuation and grammar mistakes.read more | digg story
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The Facebook Debate
2007-11-02 11:14:00
My colleague Paul attended the Facebook Debate and wrote up this great report.The following list is my favourite part:There are a vast amount of people out there who have no idea what Facebook is.There are almost as many people out there who want to do something with Facebook but don't know why.There are quite a lot of people out there who understand Facebook and want to do something with it, but don't know what.There are loads of people people out there who are already doing something with Facebook and don't know why.There are a few people out there who are already doing something with Facebook and don't know what to do now they have started.There are a tiny amount of people out there who are already doing something on Facebook and actually understand why and what to do with it all.Paul is one of the few people around who actuially landed a job through Facebook so is eminently qualified to be commenting on the social networking scene. (some link love to help the old PR there Paul)

Widget Marketing is officially cool
2007-10-25 14:50:00
Daft Punk are promoting their new album "Alive" primarily via a widget rather than a full blown site. This is a smart move in my opinion, effectively they will have a small promotional website embedded all over the internet via their technologically savvy fans. This combined with the Facebook Group, Myspace Page and YouTube channel allows them to utilise all of the additional sharing and tools provided by these services. They are creating an extremely effective marketing campaign by concentrating on providing content and then letting the social networks and blogosphere spread the message.
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Elegant UI idea to beat comment spam
2007-10-24 19:25:00
I spotted this today on ajaxian, it a nice idea for beating spambots without resorting to captcha.The idea is to use jQuery's drag and drop functionality based on the assuption that spambots can't interact with the page in this way. I could see an elegant UI solution which spawned the comment form on demand (e.g. click on a comment icon).Whether this would beat a spambot is debateable, the function call sending the comment post would need to be well protected to avoid the drag and drop part being skipped entirely.see it in action at http://www.strezlab.com/dropcomment.html
More About: Spam , Idea , Comment , Beat , Elegant

Facebook Application Smashing
2007-09-14 10:36:00
A blog chronicling the field of exploiting third party Facebook applications' security vulnerabilities.Facebook Application Smash ingTo quote the site: "Why are we letting amateurs write code for a social networking site of this stature?"This is indicative of the speed with which Facebook has grown in popularity and the goldrush mentality of those wanting to get in on the act. These sort of fundamental errors remind me of the problems faced by many companies during the e-commerce boom of the late nineties. Online shops were being built by developers straight out of school and college with little or no commercial experience behind them. The main aim was to get the thing working, security and scalability were concepts that hadn't really been invented yet as far as web development was concerned.Some of the exploits listed in this blog show that - despite Facebook being more privacy aware than other networks, the API could be tighter and privacy is not completely assured. Personally I ...
More About: Mash

Building Facebook Apps
2007-08-30 10:53:00
Having taken a summer break - I'm back at work and armed with some new ideas to start working on.I've begun to play around with developing Facebook applications, there's a few tricky things to work out, such as the anatomy of the application - profile boxes, canvas pages etc. but there are ways to make shortcuts such as using an iFrame to host an external application page. So far it's going alright, my main worry is how to make the back-end scalable enough that it doesn't fall over too quickly.
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Cambrian House - Crowdsourcing Community
2007-08-03 12:36:00
I'm enjoying the exchange of ideas going on at Cambria n House . I recall reading about this somewhere a while ago but since I saw it mentioned on the Web 2.0 (Entrepreneurs) Group on Facebook, I thought I'd sign up and give it a go.First impressions are that there's a lot of creativity there and a mixture of experience levels. It will be interesting to see what sort of work comes out of this, I'm already offering opinions on a few ideas and have one of my own to promote:Banking MicroformatVote:1 2 3 4 5
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This week, I 'ave mostly been...
2007-08-02 11:36:00
... designing ways to manage an application.It's a subject that I've broached before, but I still get uncomprehending looks from developers when I explain that an application management interface should be as simple as (if not simpler than) the user facing interface.Many developers have a blind spot when it comes to this, let's take the example of updating details in a user account -Some developers seem to think that it's simple enough to query the database to get the unique identifier for the user account and then construct an update query - or in really advanced cases paste it into an update form.What is rarely considered is that constructing database queries IS a simple task for a technically adept developer. However updating user account details is NOT a technical job and SHOULD NOT require a developer's time to achieve.An application manager shouldn't need to have technical skills, if they need to pass on simple tasks to a developer then there is a bottleneck in the workf...
More About: Week , Been

Web Trendmap
2007-07-27 14:59:00
This was just too good not to post. Information Architects Japan have created this Web Trendmap. It's a pretty chaotic overview of the top site on the internet in various categories - no surprise really. What's interesting is the amount of data that they've manged to include in the map.Categorisation is achieved using "lines" e.g. Craigslist has the "Main Sites", "Sharing" and "Tools" lines running through it.Each site includes a weather forecast icon - presumably denoting the an opinion of the site's prospective success. There is also a web x.x score which - while completely abstract - does give an idea of the technologies, design ethics and features of each site.I have to wonder how the information for this map was compiled. I would have thought that there was a good few round-table discussions before the designer could be presented with all of the information that needed to be included here. Perhaps a collaborative tool to gather votes could end up as the wisdom of crowds or ...

bcToolkit Beta launch
2007-07-24 13:21:00
Finally got to the closed beta launch of bcToolkit yesterday. It's been delayed several time due to work on other projects but I found the last week or so gave me enough time to tidy up the bits of interface that weren't finished or hide the ones that I couldn't get semi-working. I also built a nice system for inviting the beta applicants and then tracking who had signed up.Now that we're underway, I'm already noticing things that don't work quite right but that's inevitable really. Thankfully I've already had some feedback from testers whic is just what I was hoping. bcToolkit was built for the way we use Basecamp at KMP. We need to learn about the other ways that people are using Basecamp in order to build value for them into our application.I'm using the things that I've built for bcToolkit to create a Framework for future applications. It will be nice to be able to get on with developing an idea knowing that I'll have a ready-made framework for account registration, b...
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Viral Sunglasses
2007-07-19 12:43:00
We just finished and uploaded a new marketing video for KMP.Enjoy.
More About: Viral , Sunglasses , Glasses

The Facebook Generation
2007-07-18 00:17:00
I saw a report on the news this evening about people getting caught out after publishing embarrassing photos and videos on the web. I've looked at this phenomenon before and one expert had a nice piece of advice - "you shouldn't publish anything online that you wouldn't be happy for your Mum to see" - wise words indeed.The most interesting part of the report for me was that teens and students were referred to as "the Facebook generation" rather than "the MySpace generation". Is this a sign that MySpace is on course to lose the top spot in the social network wars? If the mainstream media have spotted which way the wind is blowing then surely it's a sign that things are changing.Alternately - it could be someone at ITN who fancied having a pop at Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
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Webcomics
2007-07-13 17:21:00
My company has an old comic creator website - Patent Place. I'm looking at re-building something along the same lines and so I was researching online webcomic creation tools and community sites. The best I've found (so far) in terms of full service creation tools and hosting arrangments is StripGenerator.com I was able to signup, create and publish the above comic in about 5 minutes.The whole webcomics thing is similar to the blogging scene in that there is a vast range in the quality of the comics around. Like the blogging scene, providing tools to make webcomics creation easier, i.e. lowering the bar to entry - should result in an increase of the number of comics created. Hopefully there would be a corresponding rise in the quality of material created as people whose creative ability outweighs their technical ability will be able to join the party.
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Viral Video Chart
2007-07-13 10:45:00
Viral Video Char t is, I assume, an aggregation of various video sites' popular videos. It's nicely done and very clean. I'm thinking about building something to analyse the feeds from aggregator sites and their sources to work out if there's any discrepancies. In the meantime here's a nice widget:Source: Viral Video Chart
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