23/02/10
Posted in Blogosphere, The real world, free culture | 6 Comments » 
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In my radio column at RAC1 and in many debates and conferences more often than not I’m faced with people that either fear, loathe, ignore (or all of them) internet / the web / mobile phones / social networks / blogs / twitter / wikipedia / open source / free contents / bit torrent / you name it.
This puts me unwillingly on the advocate’s side for the issue at stake. Of course everything is subject to criticism but provided you know what you’re talking about. A blatant example is the many pundits who criticize twitter and have never used it.
These people fall into different categories:
- Newspaper editors and publishers
- So called intellectuals
- Professors (some of them of new media!)
- Musicians and writers
- Talk hosts
Inevitably at some point in the debate they’ll start a sentence like this:
The internet has brought us many good things and changed our lives but…
which coincidently has the same structure as the pitiful:
I’m not a racist but…
14/08/09
Posted in Blogosphere, Internet, Twitter, Web 2.0 | No Comments » Tweet This Post
This post started as a late night tweet summarizing (in less than 140 characters) the story of writing hence the title of the post. Here’s the original tweet.
From 4,000 BC to 1992: Pre-web era. Writing
The representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols is known as a writing system. Around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration outgrew the power of memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording and presenting transactions in a permanent form
From 1992 to 1997: Web 1.0. Online copywriting
Copywriting is the use of words to promote a person, business, opinion or idea. The term may be applied to any content regardless of media (print, radio, television, or online media).
From 1997 to 2004: Web 2.0. Blogging
A blog (a contraction of the term “weblog”) is a type of website with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
From 2004 to 2008: Social web. Posting
Like in Facebook when u post stuff 2 ur friend’s wall such as:
sup? will upload pics from last party… check’em l8er
From 2008 to present time: Live web. RT
RT @my_tweep EPIC WIN ->I haz my pics O_o <-LOL or WTF?! :D
(If you don’t understand this last chapter you can check what people are saying right now at twitter.com)
11/04/09
Posted in Blogosphere, Design, Interface, Typography, Usability, Wordpress | 1 Comment » Tweet This Post
Finally it’s gone live! The fourth design iteration in my blog.
Basically the highlights are:
- Readability: dark text over white background. Graphics and color gone.
- Helvetica, helvetica, helvetica: as much as I love Lucida Grande I found Helvetica to render pages on IE closer to the original than Lucida (blame the usual MSuspects).
- Large fonts: let’s face it, we don’t read blogs. We read feeds and if by chance we land on a blog we skim over the headlines. So I decided to make them really big to make your life easier
- Twitter and Facebook killed the blogging star? No problem. I integrated both of them in the blog. Twitter on the homepage and both in the lifestream section.
- Tweet this: as a Twitter lover (aren’t we all) I usually tweet blog posts I like. Here it can’t get any easier with the Tweet this post link in the header of each post. Look for the birdie.
- My Web 2.0 persona in my blog: Last.fm, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, my shared items on Google and del.icio.us are all shared in the lifestream section.
- Related posts: under each post you’ll find a list of 3 posts related to the one you’re reading. It’s impressive how the automated selection algorithm gets it right (courtesy of Yet Another Related Posts Plugin).
- Categories and tags navigation: at the bottom of each page you’ll find the blog categories. Not 2.0 enough? Click on tags and a nice tagclould will appear to satisfy the folksonomist in you.
Hope you like it.
28/09/08
Posted in Blogosphere, Interface, Usability, Why didn't I think of that?, Wordpress | No Comments » Tweet This Post
When I read the title “How WordPress Has Changed My Life” by Matt Mullenweg in my reader, I thought I was gonna find a marketing talk about how creating the renowned blogging platform WordPress made Matt a better and richer person. Hoping to learn something for myself I bookmarked it for later review.
But the video has little to do with Matt’s wonderful life. It features Glenda Watson Hyatt, the “left thumb blogger” (she can only type with one thumb) telling a lesson on usability and accessibility.
Read the rest of this entry »
02/06/08
Posted in Apple, Blogosphere, Why didn't I think of that? | 1 Comment » Tweet This Post
We’ve all uploaded a test web site for a customer to review in a hidden directory. More so, we’ve all created the infamous index2.html.
But I bet that if you were developing a site for the launching of the iPhone in Spain, a gadget that gets a huge media and hackers attention, you’d be extra cautious about uploading any testing site, especially if they were no official news about the Telefonica-Apple deal.
Well, you probably understand it. Telefonica, the 4th largest telecom in the world, don’t!
ErneX, a colleague of mine at WeAreMortensen.com didn’t even have to use his hacking skills. He just tried a few URLs until iphone.movistar.es/index2.html (not active anymore) hit jackpot. Obviously he twittered it.
The result? After one hour more than 24.000 people registered in the microsite and the news got featured in es.appleblog.com from there to engadget.es then engadget.com and from there to all weblogs and newspapers.
How many web publishing courses can you attend for Telefonica’s last year 8.906 Milion € benefits?
15/01/08
Posted in Apple, Blogosphere | 4 Comments » Tweet This Post
People are more than excited about today Steve Jobs’ keynote and the term MacBookAir is blogged about everywhere.
I’ll be following the event via Engadget.com life blogging as I did last year (this year they even have Spanish).
If you want to follow it here’s the schedule:
07:00AM – Hawaii
09:00AM – Pacific
10:00AM – Mountain
11:00AM – Central
12:00PM – Eastern
05:00PM – GMT / London
06:00PM – Paris
08:00PM – Moscow
02:00AM – Tokyo (January 16th)
But as much as I enjoy the keynote with Jobs’ “booms” and “one more things” I enjoy the rumors prior to it. Here’s a compilation of predictions taken from the comments at Engadget.com.
- Steve is going to wear a black turtleneck w/ jeans tucked into jeans sans belt.
- Not only that, I bet Steve’s first words will be, “Good Morning”
- People are going to applaud when no applause is necessary
- Yellow Submarine iPod, Beatles music
- 1 more thing = iSoap. Cleans all mac touch-based products
- one more thing announcement: “I’m retiring”
- Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr on stage to announce the Beatles on iTunes
- iPhone SDK will be Android
- He will announce that those who take his apple-flavored serum will be invited into Promise City, and the rest will remain at the Gates.
They’re all funny but somehow they make you think.
And one more thing: the macbookair.com domain registration and the redirection to http://www.apple.com/?Will+We+see+a+MacBookAir+on+Tuesday is a fake.
Try http://www.apple.com/?ganyet.com+featured+best+blog+by+Apple and you’ll land on the same page with the image avobe.
16/11/07
Posted in .in-catalan, Blogosphere, Web 2.0 | 8 Comments » Tweet This Post
“Nosaltres som els mitjans”. Presentació sobre l’evolució dels mitjans des de la tele en blanc i negre fins a la web actual i el nostre rol central en ella. El canvi de paradigma de consumidors d’informació a productors/consumidors.
Us podeu baixar el PDF aquà (23 Mb).
Conferència i taula rodona enel marc del X Fòrum d’estudis sobre la Joventut de la Generalitat de Catalunya.
12/11/07
Posted in Blogosphere, Design | 1 Comment » Tweet This Post
You thought you’d seen everything on retro kitsch watches from the seventies. See it for yourself at The Watchismo Times. Don’t miss the prototype for an early calculator wristwatch.
11/11/07
Posted in Blogosphere, Quotations, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment » Tweet This Post
Reading Technology Review magazine (yes paper edition and not web!) about Web 3.0 and semantic web, I came accross a quotationn by Mark Greaves, former IEO of DARPA, now Sr. Research Program Manager of Vulcan that goes:
What we’re trying to do with the Semantic Web is build a digital Aristotle.
Not to mention that the article is worth reading. Here’s the link to part I of the article: Technology Review: Part I: A Smarter Web
06/11/07
Posted in Blogosphere, Design, Wordpress | 5 Comments » Tweet This Post
As usual I got fed up with my blog design and functionalities and as usual I can’t do anything else until I completely redesign it. It’s quite absorbing to the point that I can barely blog on the old one when I’m working in the new design.
This time I’ve gone for a much simpler design sticking to one column layout ditching the side navigation bar.
Another new concept on the blog is the aggregation of some of the many platforms where I publish contents: twitter, del.icio.us and the public part of my Google news reader.
Whether it’s a post written specifically for the blog, a bookmark on del.icio.us, a tweet or a shared article in Google reader, they all are treated equal: the latest one becomes the latest post and takes the place at the top of the page (even a small tweet). Sources outside Wordpress are syndicated automagically using the Feed Wordpress plugin (not perfect though as it produces more often than not duplicate entries).
A lot of time has been invested in Information Architecture and graphic design. At a latter stage I also integrated some of the jQuery framework capabilities. I’m afrait that I just scratched the surface but it’s clear to me that jQuery is really powerful and well architectured framework. In future projects I’ll keep it in mind as early as design time as it can really influence the interface and thus the Information Architecture.
As we all know we don’t live in a perfect world. If we did we’d all be using Firefox (or any W3C compliant web browser). The last days have been invested wasted in tweaking and hacking the CSS for Internet Explorer 6 and trying to work some magic out of the hideous browser. All credit goes to Rudewoikz.
All in all a very happy new start for an ordinary blogger.
Final note: Please make life easier by using Firefox!
