Archive for Internet
Virgin and Google to lead charge to Mars
April 1st, 2008 • Internet
Shurely shome mishtake…
Virgle’s goal is simple: the establishment of a permanent human settlement on Mars. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and I feel strongly that contemporary technology is sufficiently advanced to make such an effort both successful and economical, and that it’s high time that humanity moved beyond Earth and began our great, long journey to explore the stars and establish our first lasting foothold on another world.
Oh yeah… and what date is it today?
BBC News refresh: air’s in
March 31st, 2008 • Design, Internet
Tags: Design, Web
Open Firefox this morning, and an old friend shows a new face. The Beeb revamp sparked a fair flurry of debate among colleagues: one camp decided that it was too conservative, while the other concluded that Aunty had shown the maturity you’d expect.
I sit in the latter camp. The design has shifted to the centre of your browser, and also widened to a 1024 width from its long-established 800. But to my eyes, those apparently major moves are invisible. The real beauty is in the care shown around the text: while the old BBC News home was a masterpiece of efficiency, the newcomer is the work of someone who respects words.
Every line has exactly the right amount of space to put the emphasis on the story instead of the design. You simply absorb the news, without fussy artifacts throwing up noise. The only flaw I could find was below the fold: the centre column’s ‘Around the World’ group of links badly needs someone to put more definition to those crossheads. Other than that, she’s a beaut.
Woopra: the live stats addicition starts here
March 31st, 2008 • Business, Internet
Tags: Business, Web
GBTV #337 | Introducing Woopra from Neal Campbell on Vimeo.
Now this I want. I’ve long been a fan of Google Analytics - it’s simple enough to scan-read in seconds, yet clever enough to provide the kind of insights that change the way you work.
But Woopra takes the whole game to a strange new level by going… live. That’s right - unlike Google, Woopra presents a real-time dashboard, showing numbers of users, even incoming search terms from Google.
For a self-confessed stat addict such as myself, Woopra’s as good as handing a vampire an all-night pass to the blood bank. I’m putting the order in for the bank of screens tomorrow morning, one for each site in our portfolio.
The thing’s in private beta right now, but grab your camp bed and join the orderly queue.
What’s at the end of the browser rainbow?
March 28th, 2008 • Internet
I spent half an hour yesterday getting lost in Adobe’s new PhotoShop Express, undoubtedly the nicest surprise the company has handed to us mortals in many years.
The thing’s more than polished - it’s telepathic. It knows. You go looking for a trick, and it’s already there under your cursor. Someone spent a long time refining the thing, until there was nothing left to refine. Flickr, Picasa, look and learn.
Even better, it’s the right product at the right time. Today, I came across a little crystal ball-gazing from the Mozilla team, describing what Firefox 4 may have in store (Firefox 3 comes out of beta in June, for the record).
The biggest leap will come when on- and offline no longer matter - when you can work using an application within your web browser, regardless of network availability. Go sign up for the Adobe Express beta, then imagine being able to use with no signal - it simply synced to a server when a pipe became available.
That’s no big news, I realise - Google Gears is already laying that road, and Mozilla is doing its part with Prism. But nothing is quite seamless as of yet: you either need to install an extension, or run a separate application, or discover that the site you want doesn’t support Gears. The concept of the ‘web app’ is still largely that: a concept.
The web’s most valuable blogs
March 26th, 2008 • Internet
The big hitters, along with the cash you’d need to buy them out.
How long is your digital shadow?
March 24th, 2008 • Internet, Strange
Just tried a fascinating test launched by EMC that attempts to quantify my ‘digital footprint’. You can download the test here (thanks to Read/Write Web for the pointer).
According to a recent EMC-sponsored white paper (The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe), we’re leaving a vapor trail of 1s and 0s behind us every day, either in the form of stuff we volunteer (uploaded pictures, videos, emails etc), or - perhaps more interestingly - stuff that we’re not so aware of (telephone records, records of web searches, flight tickets etc).
I ran the test before writing this. My daily footprint is a little over 6300MB. I can’t say I’m surprised: by any standards, I’m a heavy user of gadgets and the web. But the real shock came when I launched EMC’s ‘ticker’, which tries to put a figure on the total amount of hard drive space I’ve swallowed in my lifetime. If it’s anywhere near the truth, I’ve chomped through 524GB of storage, all of which is presumably out there… somewhere.
Which I guess is EMC’s point: I don’t think twice about signing up to offers from airlines and online stores, then happily forget about it. Why do I think I’m going to regret that some time soon?
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the white paper suggests that the human race ‘created and replicated 281 exabytes of data in 2007′ (before you start counting on your toes, an exabyte is one billion gigabytes).
Intelligent speech makes YouTube history
March 21st, 2008 • Internet
Radio 4’s The Now Show has tainted my view of Obama, identifying that ‘Yes We Can’ is closer as a catchphrase to one Bob The Builder than anything uttered by MLK or Malcolm X.
But the ‘More Perfect Union’ speech is making YouTube history, collecting views at an unprecendented rate. More remarkable, the speech is novelty free… there is no snacky, sensational YouTube moment. Instead, it’s an eloquent, well-reasoned, intelligent argument. You could almost begin believing that your fellow human beings had some value after all.
YahSoft: Google Removes Gloves
February 3rd, 2008 • Internet
Tags: Google, microsoft, yahoo
An otherwise quiet Sunday, then Google slides the blog post equivalent of a B52 laden with armed nuclear warheads out of the hanger.
The post on its official blog, penned by their senior VP of Corporate Development, shows a forthright side to The Big G that we, the average consumers, never get to see. It asks many questions, perhaps the prime one being:
Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft — despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses — to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet?
So for Google, the issue is the ‘preservation of the underlying principles of the internet: openess and innovation.
‘Completely open social networks do not work’
January 24th, 2008 • Internet, Social
Tags: Social, web
Human beings collaborate. They also deviate, plan and plot. On a good day, they’ll create intricate towers. On average days, they’ll saw half way through your chair leg while you’re out at lunch. This seems to be the basis of a piece over at Publishing 2.0, which argues that Digg - the original open social voting system - has all but forgotten its open origins as it attempts to prevent ‘gaming’ of its voting system. Read more »
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