Well, i've been busy trying to set up my own special effects studeo using a nifty green screen, Adobe Premier and a few other assorted software suites i've managed to acquire over the past couple of weeks. It is proving quite a substantial learning curve, but i hope to start posting my first efforts over the next couple of weeks.
If things go according to plan i hope to be able to present regular blog posts from literally anywhere and everywhere...
I love this tune from Coppola's movie Lost in Translation. You can pretty much instantly tell its by Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine). Seems to fit the visuals and ethos of the movie perfectly.
Ever seen the film "V for Vendetta", starring Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving?
Great film. One of the best infact.
The whole concept of the film is so apt... so realistic it actually becomes almost a monicker for the incumbant Brown government. Rule based on propaganda, manipulation and falsehoods.
But what of the opposition parties? -Well i should state that whilst i am a member of the Conservative Party i do believe that we need something slightly more radical. You can only vote for what you are given. We are currently being given three mainstream options... all of which are pretty much the same.
We need a cultural and political revolution.
When does the government stop working for you... and you start working for your government?
I have a simple metric that i believe works as a decent measure of true, rather than percieved freedom. The metric converts into something like the following:
When a person pays the government more of their hard-earned money than they get to keep for themselves then freedom is lost.
Here in the UK the tax burden on the population is high. At last calculation the government weasel between 64p and 67p out of every £1.00 earned.
So, just how free do you feel now?
Wow, this video of the much maligned Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer speaking/shreeking at a company conference a few moons ago is fantastic/funny/amazing/astonishing.
I still cant quite make my mind up whether he is:
(1) Just really pumped up
(2) Had too much orange juice
(3) A clone of Champ Kind (think Anchorman movie)
(4) Trying to be Mr Motivator (reference to early 90's British breakfast tv personality)
(5) All of the above
Whatever, the guy is definately value for money at this type of conference.
l
P.S. HyperV is soon to be one of Champ's new products. Wonder if it is as exciting as seeing a middle-aged man dancing around excitely on stage? -No? Shame :-)
Ultra quick entry... and its late so please excuse any typo's.
Google today passed the 600 mark on the stock market. Over-priced?
Personally, i think not. Why? -Well 'advertising' is projected to be worth £300 Billion before long. Google is moving and diversifying its offerings away from the standard model. Its move into agencies, its move into the desktop, its move into documents all to support a freemium model. Great products, free supported by relevant advertising.
Its just a hope i have that we see Yahoo! boom again. I think the industry needs a stronger Yahoo! to give the consumer an alternative. I would hate to see the one dominant company in the internet economy. We can do without another Microsoft.
Whilst doing my daily sojourn around the tech news web sites i, for the first time in a long time took a look at Red Herring. The site, which has just been relaunched (for the fourth and hopefully last time) really does look rather good. The concept seems sound. The integration of television makes it more relevant ot the internet economy of today... and it has, for want of a better expression moved on from the self-obsessed world of web publishing in the late 90's.
Taking a look around the site i noticed that it seems to be powered by an enterprise-class blogging service called Blogtronix. This interests me even more as (again) the underlining concept behind this seems sound to my mind. Collaborate, communicate and guide your audience. For me, in 2007 thats the direction all publications need to go in.
I'm not going to waffle on about quality... not going to waffle on about content creation costs... all i am going to say is that it seems pretty straight-forward that all ad revenue-based publishers need to be looking in the direction of guiding and encouraging their audience to produce their own content.
Over the past year and a bit i have personally experimented with a competitor to Blogtronix that goes by the name Webligo. I'm not going to mention the sites i have implimented the software on, but i have been impressed by the functionality of that software. The sinlge worry i had when bringing it into the corp space for any product/offering i thought up would always be (medium-term onwards) just how scaleable is that particular solution.
-At about this time i should stress that i have never run into issues of scaleability with the Webligo product.
So, its great to now see a dedicated and feature rich enterprise blogging system with the type of networking functionality needed to support a decent site enter the marketplace.
Its also great to see Red Herring making a good move.
I came across an interesting article on the Associated Press news wire service today. Apparently, North Korea's despot leader Kim Jong Il has declared himself an "Internet expert".
Yahoo has over the past few days been displaying some new (and pretty damn cool) functionality on its homepage and search results pages. Amongst my favourite new functions is the innovative suggestion tool. This really helps simpletons like myself find and indeed understand popular search terms. Terms we would otherwise spend hours trying to think of replicating in our long-tail trawl around the web. As an experienced user i have a specific way of searching the web for information. This simple feature lets me see which words are popular amongst users for those terms.
Also spotting a simplified branding on the search engine. Could it be that Yahoo is gradually dropping the shadow effect? -I do hope so. That black shadow is very web1.5 and makes the otherwise excellent user interface on the homepage look dated. Hehe, i love calling things web1.5 ;-)
Microsoft has also been changing its search. It claims near revolution. This is the 3rd "revolution" in search announced by the evil empire over the past few years. I, like most other people i know simply ignore the Live.com site. To me, i just dont finf Microsoft relevant in the online environment.
Sorry Microsoft.
Looking at website usage amongst content (and advertising) driven sites it has always astonished me that beauty and/or function list is always placed above a key fundamental. The design of the "user interface".
I got my dirty mitts on an exothermic heatmap 6-7 years back and always wondered if they would still hold true today. Are users any more perceptive and adaptive towards navigation in the web savvy world?
Looking at the heatmaps generated from numerous different web properties and Email broadcasts over the last 6-months its a quick and easy answer. No!
That makes me happy... as i've never been one to go for pretty images over useful navigation.
So, going back to the headline question its shocking to see the same old mistakes being made today on major websites that were being made in the late 90's.
