dinsdag, juli 31, 2007
Magazine 2.0
Bernard, a colleague from work sent me a link to one of the latest editions of the french speaking magazine 'Le Vif' in Belgium. Two weeks ago they experimented with a completely online 'Le Vif 2.0' issue. It shows some of the stuff a '2.0' media publication might look like in the future: interactive advertisement, links in pages, video 'images' in the articles, and advanced navigation.You can find the issue at the Vif website.
Labels: magazine
maandag, juli 30, 2007
The cult of the amateur
The general mood, most Internet articles and even this blog are overall positive on the new 2.0 trends and the 'democratisation' of content. Heck, 'YOU' even made it to Man of the Year 2006 according to Times Magazine. So as an antidote in the debate I give you Andrew Keen. This man has written a book 'The cult of the amateur' with the tag line 'how today's Internet is killing our culture'. On his web site and blog you can find a free excerpt from his book. It describes the turning event that switched him from believer to sceptic, an event "where everyone was simultaneously broadcasting themselves, but nobody was listing."
A few quotes from the excerpt:
A few quotes from the excerpt:
The law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest.
Amateur hour has arrived, and the audience is now running the show.
zondag, juli 29, 2007
The potential of Jing
Jing is a free beta product that allows you to easily share screenshots or screencasts of your desktop and save them or share them. The makers call it 'visual conversations'. Jing is a project of TechSmith, the makers of the popular commercial snapshot product 'SnagIt', screen video product 'Camtasia' and associated hosting site 'screencast.com'. I don't expect Jing to end up as a free product, but as long as they are in beta you get a pretty good, simplified and easy tool with free hosting on screencast.com. I recommend you give it a shot.
I've tried it out to make a few previews of the about2findout.com project so far.
Jing is available for Windows and Mac and installs pretty easy. You need the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 installed for it to work on Windows, so you better install that and reboot before you install Jing. Once installed Jing lives as a little sun at the top of your screen. First select to capture, then select the area or window to capture, and whether you want to take an annotated screenshot (image) or a video. For more information, troubleshooting and tips, visit the Jing blog.
You can add pointers, text boxes, markers and frames to your screenshot. In the example on the left I added some of each. Of course you can save the screenshot (as .png file), but the real power of this '2.0' application is the ability to automatically upload and share. Click the share button and Jing will upload your masterpiece to a free account on screencast.com and copy the URL of the image to your clipboard. Just paste in the link to your messenger, chat, e-mail or web page and you're done! All images and video's also end up in a local history archive so you can find them back later.
My second try was a video of the form edit page on about2findout.com. You can speak any comments as you record the video, and save it as a flash (.swf) file or share it via screencast.com. Video has a limit of 5 minutes. The aim of the project is not to make professional screencast but rather to quickly show. So I did not prepare and just dived in :-). It shows.
The link on the left will take you to the recorded video of the form edit page.
My final try was a video of the wysiwyg edit page. The video was longer and for some reason I'm unable to upload it to the site. So I saved the .swf file, embedded it in a HTML page and you can open it here.
I see a lot of potential for Jing, not at least in the field of learning. It lowers the centre of gravity for expertise because anyone can easily, just-in-time make a small tutorial on how to us a certain feature of an application or where to click, and share it. Help desk people will find this a useful tool. Coaches and remote trainers will love this. And if the makers add tags to it and a home page you get an instant YouTube for 'how-do-I-do-this' screencasts. Very cool indeed.
I've tried it out to make a few previews of the about2findout.com project so far.
Jing is available for Windows and Mac and installs pretty easy. You need the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 installed for it to work on Windows, so you better install that and reboot before you install Jing. Once installed Jing lives as a little sun at the top of your screen. First select to capture, then select the area or window to capture, and whether you want to take an annotated screenshot (image) or a video. For more information, troubleshooting and tips, visit the Jing blog.
You can add pointers, text boxes, markers and frames to your screenshot. In the example on the left I added some of each. Of course you can save the screenshot (as .png file), but the real power of this '2.0' application is the ability to automatically upload and share. Click the share button and Jing will upload your masterpiece to a free account on screencast.com and copy the URL of the image to your clipboard. Just paste in the link to your messenger, chat, e-mail or web page and you're done! All images and video's also end up in a local history archive so you can find them back later.
My second try was a video of the form edit page on about2findout.com. You can speak any comments as you record the video, and save it as a flash (.swf) file or share it via screencast.com. Video has a limit of 5 minutes. The aim of the project is not to make professional screencast but rather to quickly show. So I did not prepare and just dived in :-). It shows.The link on the left will take you to the recorded video of the form edit page.
My final try was a video of the wysiwyg edit page. The video was longer and for some reason I'm unable to upload it to the site. So I saved the .swf file, embedded it in a HTML page and you can open it here.
I see a lot of potential for Jing, not at least in the field of learning. It lowers the centre of gravity for expertise because anyone can easily, just-in-time make a small tutorial on how to us a certain feature of an application or where to click, and share it. Help desk people will find this a useful tool. Coaches and remote trainers will love this. And if the makers add tags to it and a home page you get an instant YouTube for 'how-do-I-do-this' screencasts. Very cool indeed.
Labels: Jing
woensdag, juli 25, 2007
Flickr-like greeting
Flickr shows a greeting in a random language anytime you go to its home page. I think this is kinda cool, so I wanted it for my site too. I just finished programming a module to take a random greeting from the database. I got the list of 'hello' messages from planetpals.com . Only good ideas are worth duplicating :-) .zondag, juli 22, 2007
The trouble with Anthem.NET editlabel
Today's programming struggle was all about getting the Anthem.NET editlabel component to work properly in my site. The idea of an 'edit in place' text on a site is just great. Image: instead of seeing an error in your question, going back to the form and changing it, you can now just click on the text and it changes in a textbox field that you can edit. How cool is that? The free Anthem.NET toolkit of Ajax controls for .NET provides the EditLabel control for this purpose.
Unfortunately it did not quite work out the way I wanted to. I have several of these controls on the same page, but only the last update would stick, the others would not get communicated to the server on a postback. So I started troubleshooting and looking for alternatives. (Problems can either be solved or avoided, both are valid options IMHO.) Nikhel.Net's blog has a similar script for download, but it was written on a beta version before the go-live of the AJAX.NET toolkit, so I did not trust it to run. I stumbled on the DTAjax project on Codeplex that has taken the previous script, updated it and included it in its tools. This control worked fine (almost hurray!), but only in IE and not in Firefox, so I decided not to use it either.
Finally I changed the code of the Anthem.NET EditLabel. By default it uses a proprietary feature of IE to support inline editing when it detects IE and supports a real textbox for other browsers. I disabled the IE detection in the source code and on my test page everything worked out fine. But ... not on the intended page. Now you can change sometimes one, sometimes a few, sometimes all... Before I go completely mad, I just leave it a 'documented bug for IE' of my site and move on...
Unfortunately it did not quite work out the way I wanted to. I have several of these controls on the same page, but only the last update would stick, the others would not get communicated to the server on a postback. So I started troubleshooting and looking for alternatives. (Problems can either be solved or avoided, both are valid options IMHO.) Nikhel.Net's blog has a similar script for download, but it was written on a beta version before the go-live of the AJAX.NET toolkit, so I did not trust it to run. I stumbled on the DTAjax project on Codeplex that has taken the previous script, updated it and included it in its tools. This control worked fine (almost hurray!), but only in IE and not in Firefox, so I decided not to use it either.
Finally I changed the code of the Anthem.NET EditLabel. By default it uses a proprietary feature of IE to support inline editing when it detects IE and supports a real textbox for other browsers. I disabled the IE detection in the source code and on my test page everything worked out fine. But ... not on the intended page. Now you can change sometimes one, sometimes a few, sometimes all... Before I go completely mad, I just leave it a 'documented bug for IE' of my site and move on...
Labels: ajax, anthem.net
zaterdag, juli 21, 2007
New CAPTCHA control
I started to work on the site again. I keep running into problems related to the CAPTCHA control that I'm using. It's the free one from the Codeproject site that I modified. Today I got InvalidCastException errors for the Anthem.NET Editlabel component due to this CaptchaWebControl control. So I finally gave up on it and started for a replacement.
Accidently I also found out what CAPTCHA stands for : Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Take that for an acronym :-) . It is an established way to protect web forms against robots and usually involves people filling in a code from an image.
First replacement control I tried was the one created by Peter Kellner. This Microsoft MVP did a nice job of a highly customizable component, but I did not run into the same errors. But the looks were a bit not-done and especially the component only works with events. There is no method to call for verification. As my CAPTCHA is at the bottom of every beta page to allow people to post comments on how to improve my site, I wanted to call verification only when the button was pressed. So I decided against this component.
So as a first for the about2findout.com project, I'm going to use a cheap commercial component. The LanapSoft BotDetect control is available from 59$ onwards and has some excellent features. Not only can I now choose between 50 different CAPTCHA rendering styles, it is also solving a major issue with CAPTCHA. Up till now every website using CAPTCHA was not compliant with section 508 and other accessibility standards because blind people cannot see the code and are thus unable to use the site. This component adds a button that reads out the code as well. Very cool indeed. So with a little investment I get a code that (so far) does not generate more trouble than it's worth and makes my site better adhere to accessibility standards.
Accidently I also found out what CAPTCHA stands for : Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Take that for an acronym :-) . It is an established way to protect web forms against robots and usually involves people filling in a code from an image.
First replacement control I tried was the one created by Peter Kellner. This Microsoft MVP did a nice job of a highly customizable component, but I did not run into the same errors. But the looks were a bit not-done and especially the component only works with events. There is no method to call for verification. As my CAPTCHA is at the bottom of every beta page to allow people to post comments on how to improve my site, I wanted to call verification only when the button was pressed. So I decided against this component.
So as a first for the about2findout.com project, I'm going to use a cheap commercial component. The LanapSoft BotDetect control is available from 59$ onwards and has some excellent features. Not only can I now choose between 50 different CAPTCHA rendering styles, it is also solving a major issue with CAPTCHA. Up till now every website using CAPTCHA was not compliant with section 508 and other accessibility standards because blind people cannot see the code and are thus unable to use the site. This component adds a button that reads out the code as well. Very cool indeed. So with a little investment I get a code that (so far) does not generate more trouble than it's worth and makes my site better adhere to accessibility standards.
donderdag, juli 19, 2007
Web site popularity 2.0
Web 2.0 technology also has its impact on the measurement of web site popularity. According to an article in Computerworld, one of the leading market research firms Nielsen has changed its criteria to determine a site's success rate and hence advertising potential.
The main criteria used to be web page hits. But in an Ajax world where pages get partially reloaded all the time (which does not qualify for a 'hit'), that makes less and less sense. So now Nielsen is changing to the total time spent on a site. Personally, I think it makes more sense.
The change will of course affect existing sites. Google for example might fall a bit because although heavily used, users spend only a minimum of time on the search results page.
The main criteria used to be web page hits. But in an Ajax world where pages get partially reloaded all the time (which does not qualify for a 'hit'), that makes less and less sense. So now Nielsen is changing to the total time spent on a site. Personally, I think it makes more sense.
The change will of course affect existing sites. Google for example might fall a bit because although heavily used, users spend only a minimum of time on the search results page.
Labels: measurement, nielsen
woensdag, juli 18, 2007
Google maplets
Google is stepping up on its extremely popular Google Maps service. In true web2.0 style developers can now make extensions called Google maplets that can clearly have commercial purposes. Users can make customised maps by integrating these maplets to their own maps which they can share or keep private.
From the Google site: "Google Mapplets are mini-applications that you can embed within the Google Maps site. Examples include real estate search, current weather conditions, and distance measurement. Mapplets are Google Gadgets that can manipulate the map using Javascript calls that are derived from the Google Maps API . Mapplets are currently only available in the preview version of Google maps."
I had to try creating my own custom map, so this is a simple map with the location of my house.
Click here.
It was very fast and easy to do this. Sign on with your Google account, go to Google Maps and click on 'my maps' section. Create a new one and give it a name. New tools such as a location pin, area or line tools appear. That's it. Via the 'add content' link you can make use of Google or third party services. The Dutch newspaper 'The Volkskrant' for example has a mapplet that shows where the news is happening. And webcam mapplets list the cammers in your neighbourhood.
Source: Infoworld
