SOME RANDOM DUDE

I have been quite vocal on my lack of regard for online advertising and have even spent some time writing about how I think it could be improved. While it may not be in the online world, it is good to see some companies trying to improve the advertising we are exposed to. Our good friends at Google are interested in making TV advertising “useful” for its viewers. I assume this model will be loosely based on their highly successful Adsense program. After spending my youth watching TV and subsequently ridding my life of TV after living on my own, I can understand how some people think TV advertising could get a little smarter…

According to this article, Google is planning on making $11 billion in ad sales - not too shabby. It is not a secret that Adsense is a success from many different standpoints. I would definitely like to see online advertising go even further in its usefulness and site-by-site basis, but I recognize how large of a leap Adsense made to online advertising. Old media advertising could definitely use a shot in the arm at this point - and who better to go it than one of the best success-stories in new media. Still, it will be interesting if new media ideas still work in a different medium. Old media definitely will be eventually making the slow transition to new media - perhaps that evolution will take care of the problem on its own.

del.icio.us linkad revenue, adsense, advertising, daily, delicious, google, link, marketing, new media, npr, old media, smart advertising, television tv

If you have not been to the Big Spaceship Blog yet, you should. They have all sorts of great tips and thoughts ripe for the taking. Their most recent article is the second post in a series of Flash performance tips. I was aware of a few, but others were completely new to me. Performance optimization may seem like a nerdy thing to some, but the process allow things to be done in Flash that otherwise would be too costly to the average processor or be a memory hog.

One of the pieces I especially enjoyed were links to resources on advanced collision detection. There has been some really good work in this area and I found is really helpful as my experience in that subject is extremely low. Really though, all the tips are very helpful and any Actionscripter should take a few minutes out of the day to read this article.

del.icio.us linkactionscript, best practices, big spaceship, collision detection, daily, delicious, flash, flash performance, link, memory usage, optimization programming

Through a fairly heated debate on standards I ran across a very nice write-up on how to integrate Flash elements in a site with maximum accessibility, backward compatibility and standards in mind. Called FAUST (Flash Augmenting Standards), this method ensures media/data will be accessible no matter how far down the technology chain you go. The example on the site shows how absolutely beautiful this is for the end-user. Flash developers and front-end developers should sit down together and read this side-by-side.

I have made very clear my opinion on anti-flash standardistas. That being said, I have a deep respect for web accessibility/standards and feel it is a high priority to make Flash as web-friendly as possible. A lot of work has been done towards this end and FAUST seems to be an attempt to put all the fragmented pieces together in one cohesive package. I really applaud this sort of work as it is all too infrequent but highly important. With media consumption on the web growing, Flash is almost assuredly going to become even more integral a part of the web. These sorts of methods are going to make the process just that much nicer for the end user. Major kudos.

del.icio.us linkaccessibility, daily, delicious, faust, flash, html, link, media, standardistas, standards, web web development

Microformats are becoming hotter topic with each passing day. With Firefox 3 supporting microformats, web designers/developers are suddenly going to have many more tools hanging from their belt. I understood the gist of microformats, but it was not until I read a great brief on microformats that I understood the depth and power of what they make possible.

Semantic code now has a whole new layer of meaning and functionality with microformats that we currently have only scratched the surface of. In addition, those features will theoretically be easier to implement. The elemental microformats are where things get very interesting for me. Social features such as voting, personal connection and tags can be published and parsed through simple semantics. These features give the potential for any site to participate and contribute to socialized information. The next-generation social bookmarking/aggregator sites could be merely a centralized hub of otherwise decentralized information. This theoretically lessens the the need for behemoth all-in-one social sites such as Digg. This gives web publishers another tool to both contribute and tap into a stream of information to make data more rich and connected. Very exciting.

del.icio.us linkdaily, data, delicious, information, information exchange, link, microformats, semantics, tagging voting

I have many different interests so it is rare when a site hits on every major one of them. The Stunning Nikon site is well designed, has some very interesting interface treatments, covers some absolutely great photography, takes advantage of Web 2.0, and is user-generated through the Flickr API. Sure, pulling in photos through Flickr is not difficult to accomplish, but the execution of this site in particular really excited me. I may be wrong, but I am almost certain Stamen had something to do this with. If the name sounds familiar, that is because they are also responsible for the Digg Visualizations, most recently the BigSpy project.

With so many great photographers out there, it only makes sense to pick from such a large and talented pool. Sites like these engage not only a company’s current user base, but it also acts as a great bridge to relations for new users. If companies actually care about their customers and wish to aid them (in this case, promotion), people are obviously going to respond in a positive way. I truly am surprised that this is not happening more often. Hopefully sites like these will help change that.

del.icio.us linkcompanies, daily, delicious, flickr, link, Nikon, Photography, public relations, user generated content web 2dot0