This blog is about web 2.0, traditional media and advertising, how they affect each other and how they affect us (especially me). It is also about stuff I like such as art, design, animation, music and photography. what I feel like writing. Nothing written here should be taken too seriously...
I just found this weird dummy text in the tutorial for the Symphony CMS.
He aquí al Oso Eduardo bajando las escaleras con la cabeza—plom, plom, plom—de la mano de Christopher Robin. Es la única manera que él conoce de bajar las escaleras, aunque a veces piensa que deber haber otra forma mejor que seguramente la descubriría si pudiera dejar de darse golpes en la cabeza y pararse a pensar.
Some questions came to my mind after reading it:
Why is Oso written in capital O?
Why is he walking down the stairs on his head?
Why is he holding hands with Christopher Robin and who is Christopher Robin.
If they’re so close as to hold hands while walking down the stairs why doesn’t Christopher Robin tell Eduardo the Bear the right way to walk?
Who chose this sick example to create a dummy text when there’s clearly better texts such as:
El veloz murciélago hindú comía feliz cardillo y kiwi. La cigüeña tocaba el saxofón detrás del palenque de paja.
(Weirder than the Oso Eduardo story but at least it contains all characters in the Spanish alphabet plus all the accented vowels)
Called Skinput, the system is a marriage of two technologies: the ability to detect the ultralow-frequency sound produced by tapping the skin with a finger, and the microchip-sized “pico” projectors now found in some cellphones.
But how does the system know which icon, button or finger you tapped? Chris Harrison at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, working with Dan Morris and Desney Tan at Microsoft’s research lab in Redmond, Washington, exploit the way our skin, musculature and skeleton combine to make distinctive sounds when we tap on different parts of the arm, palm, fingers and thumb.
We’ve been talking for years about media convergence since first Nicholas Negroponte coined the term and, we’ve grown accustomed to it on the web the hypermedia where all the rest converge.
As I often ask my students, I you didn’t knew the language in a website, would you be able to tell apart a newspaper, a radio station and a TV station only by watching at their websites?
You probably wouldn’t. Each medium trespasses its own traditional boundaries adding content formats from the others:
Radio websites feature of course audio but are mainly made up of text and images
TV station websites feature video but also text and audio
Newspapers website are oftentimes mere translations of the printed medium but they add a layer of rich-media in audio and video
Traditional media on the web become hypermedia and are the medium of choice for the ever growing web generation. I don’t think this generation will settle, either on a desktop or on a mobile device, for a mere digital copy of a physical medium such a newspaper.
The reasoning is quite simple and it goes as follows:
I don’t read newspapers. So, why would I want a digital copy of a newspaper?
But what if I could experience the quality contents of a magazine/radio/TV the way I’m used to, meaning rich-media, interactive, personalized, social and real-time? Would I care if I’m browsing a magazine a radio station or a TV station? Probably not as long as I get what I want, where I want it and the way I want it, which is coincidentally what the iPad promises us.
The forthcoming Apple tablet brings us a little step closer to full media convergence, not that there’s anything especially new you can’t do right now with a browser and decent internet connection, but the new apps (or rather the new content and interaction design), the physical proximity, the multi-touch interface and the position sensor make the sensorial experience somehow different to anything we’ve seen so far.
Check also the Sports Illustrated demo and ask yourself if this is just a magazine or finally a true interactive TV.
The guys over at IA just released a beautiful stencil for OmniGraffle for all your iPad wireframing and prototyping pleasure.
This is the first version of an OmniGraffle template for folks designing iPad apps. It’s not complete; we plan to update it as we’re working on our own designs.
The digitizing of the information changes the rules to everything. Production, storage and distribution costs tend to zero, consumers become also producers and as a result new industries appear that render well established ones obsolete in no time.
One example is the traditional publishing industry with a business model partly based on advertising and partly on subscription, a model that’s sustainable when trucks distribute tons of paper but obsolete when the net distributes terabytes of data.
On such an environment, advertisers flee to a much more interactive and responsive medium, namely the web, and subscriptions are no match for the free high quality content available online.
Who would still post an ad to a local newspaper when you have Craigslist.org or eBay.com? Or, who would pay for gadget reviews on the NYT when you have Engadget.com?
The result: many magazines and newspapers have closed their physical editions and have gone online if not closed at all.
Although Rupert Murdoch is trying to reverse this trend by charging for online access, I think the point is made.
With all this in mind the efforts to bring ebook readers to the market by companies such as Amazon (Kindle), Barnes&Noble (Nook) an Sony (Reader), just to mention a few, make perfect sense in a time of publishing crisis (crisis meaning change, not doom).
Can Apple do the same as they did in the music and the cellphone industries? Via cultofmac.com I stumble on a presentation by Freek Bijl, a Dutch internet strategist, that has put together a simple and yet enlightening presentation about the subject.
Bijl’s states that if Apple is to reinvent the publishing business they need to cover three basic needs:
Distribution of content
Business model where publishers can charge for content
Usability so people can use the reading device as a newspaper or a book
So far, Apple has turned iTunes into an excellent platform for music and application distribution, it has a solid rock business model for both and the iPod and the iPhone have the best interfaces of their kind.
I can’t think of any reason why they wouldn’t want to extend this model to the publishing industry with content distribution via iTunes, micro-payments as in the iPhone App Store and a reading device that matches the iPod and iPhone usability standards.
I’m sure that the whole publishing industry (and that includes Murdoch) are eager to hear Steve Jobs’ next “one more thing”. Even more than the rest of us.
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.
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.
Business Week, with the help of Don Norman, John Maeda, Khoi Vinh and Jeffrey Zeldman among others, just published an excellent article with the 10 commandments of web design.
Most of them will sound too familiar to you (content is king, flash abuse anyone?), but when Norman, Maeda and peers write something you’d better read it. Here are the 10 commandments with more examples and comments of my own.
Join the advanced features on the iPhone, a fair flat rate data plan and the power of open source and you have Wordpress for iPhone, the first open source native app for the iPhone downloadable from the iTunes App store (which means installable with a single tap).
It supports self hosted blogs as well as the free blogs at WordPress.com
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I just found this weird dummy text in the tutorial for the Symphony CMS.