David Emery Online

Seth's Blog: Citizens

Surely the name for someone that doesn’t have a relationship with a marketer yet is just a person?

Links and schedules

As you may have noticed I’ve slowed down posting a bit recently, in most part simply due to the amount of stuff I’m doing at the moment. Obviously this is fundamentally a good thing – it’s all good stuff – but there’s no doubt that my five-days-a-week posting schedule is suffering because of it.

That’s not really a problem I don’t think – 3 posts a week, which I can do without a problem (and have been doing for a while if you exclude Friday Links posts – more on that in a minute) seems like a very reasonable amount of posts to make. I’m not trying to be some pro-blogger journalist type, posting twice a day, garnering huge page-views and adwords-bucks, so the rather ruthless schedule seems a little pointless.

Of course the real reason behind ‘The Schedule’ was not for you lot – it was purely for my benefit. I am, by my very nature, a lazy person; it takes a lot of effort for me to be bothered to actually do stuff. Ideas are no problem – I can come up with them all day long – but actually implementing them is always the tricky part (you wouldn’t believe...

A List Apart: Articles: They Shoot Browsers, Don't They?

More very wise words from Mr Keith – I couldn’t agree more with this.

JeffCroft.com: More details on the redesign

Nice to see that I’m not the only one experimenting with Safari 3-only supported CSS… and orange. Lovely work.

Friday Links L

Hillary Clinton sheds some skin in Aviary
Aviary is a Flash-based image editor that’s looking very impressive.

y! live – the world is watching
Yahoo! Live is Yahoo!’s take on live video broadcasting, and it’s off to a good start.

Polaroid Abandons Instant Photography
Boo hiss! Hopefully someone will pick up the license…

Blog, social network buzz correlates to better album sales
More buzz = more sales (obviously).

Pixish
I’m not really a fan of spec work but this looks interesting.

Ex-CNETer Launches Iminta
More on that life aggregation theme I talked about earlier this week.

Apple Game Developers?
I’m sure we’re going to see games on the iPhone/iPod Touch sooner rather then later.

Digital radio OFFICIALLY coming to the iPhone
This would be pretty cool if true.

MusicStation Max offers unlimited free music downloads to your mobile
DRM’d music is never going to be interesting.

10.5.2: What’s new, pussycat (and what isn’t)
10.5.2 is a major upgrade – in fact, I think it may be the biggest point update Apple have released for Mac OS X.

guardian.co.uk
Don’t know when they launched this, but the Guardian have redesigned. Looking pretty good – love the use of colour, although...

Music in the air

Unsurprisingly, I own an iPhone and even more unsurprisingly I think it’s possibly the best gadget I’ve ever owned. As many, many people have elucidated at length (including me) the iPhone truly is a revolutionary device; the interface is the best interface I have ever used on any device – it’s that simple.

The purported lack of features for me is a complete non-issue. Have I ever sent an MMS? No. Is GPRS quick enough? Yes (it seems just as fast as my previous Nokia 3G phone). Have I ever removed the battery (other then to reboot/change the SIM) from any other phone I’ve ever owned? No. The features that it does have are the right ones, and implemented in a way that really changes the way you use the device – Safari and Mail for me shaking things up the most.

There has – up until now – been one slightly irritating thing that’s been bugging me about my iPhone usage: lack of Last.fm support. I’ll be honest, I’ve always utterly loved the idea of Last.fm but never been able to get it scrobbling my tracks reliably. This is probably because I do the vast majority of my music listening...

Assembly line

Over on news.com there’s an interesting article on MTV’s web stratergy. Interesting I guess because I’ve always thought of MTV’s web presence – up until about a year ago – as pretty poor; scrabbling around, trying to come up with immersive experiences around their content but ending up with flash based junk that no one wants to use.

However, all that changed with the re-launch last year of MTV.com. Gone was the flash monstrosity that came before it – all sizzle, no steak – and in came an HTML-based site packed with easy to access content. As an aside, that MTV blog post linked to above has 8174 comments, which is fairly staggering.

This re-launch seems to have triggered a bit of a sea change at MTV and they’ve really focused themselves on the web, and creating sites for their content properties. However, I’m not sure – for all this focus and good intentions – that they’ve been making anything good. The article mentions that they’ve launched 32 sites in the last year, which seems to sound impressive but I’m not sure if it actually is; MTV have both a) a huge amount of content and b) a large budget...

Trend spotting

There’s an ever increasing trend that I’ve noticed cropping up all over the place which I thought I’d highlight; it doesn’t really have a name – or at least a single one, yet – but can be referred to as Tumbleloging, Microblogging, Activity Feeds and many others.

All of these terms refer to essentially the same activity, namely taking the blogging format and removing the focus on long form posts that the medium normally implies and instead aggregating smaller pieces of content generated on other sites by the author. We’re talking about photos from flickr, links from Delicious, Twitters from twitter, events from Upcoming and more. It’s a very good solution to the problem of ever-more distributed content generation; a lot of people are generating this content as they become more and more active online, so it only makes sense to have some way of collating it together (which would be useful by itself, to be honest) and publishing it.

The distributed nature of this is I think the most important aspect. Flickr, for example, has the best interface for managing and sharing your photos online – there are many third party applications that help you upload pictures, and it has...

Friday Links XLIX

NowPlaying – a visualising radio prototype
Yet more good work from the BBC Radio Labs

Luddite and paranoid – why the big record labels failed at digital
Lots of wise words in this.

Shelf and the Google Social API
Nice use of the new Google Social API.

Justin Kropp
Very nice site design.

Zeroing Out Palm
‘You may need the help of a dextrous friend if you find it too difficult to do by yourself’ – If you need to write this in a consumer electronics manual, you’re doing it wrong.

Buzzword
Very impressive online Word Processor from Adobe.

How Flickr could take advantage of Facebook
It frustrates me massively that I haven’t found a good way of integrating my Flickr with Facebook – all the Facebook apps out there that do it seem to be pretty rubbish. Come on Flickr – write your own one!

Snap
I think adding simple actions to RSS feeds is a very good idea – a comment RSS admin feed, for example, where you good just hit ‘spam’ or ‘approve’ links in-feed would be very handy.

Reuters Wants The World To Be Tagged
This sounds curiously amazing – I loves me a bit...

Itchy

So you now know why I’ve haven’t been posting much; the redesign bug hit (yet) again, and it really took hold this time. This is the 11th iteration of this site, and the second in about 6 months which is a pretty high turnover even for my standards. I really wanted to get this design out there, though – it’s probably the thing I’ve been happiest with for quite a while.

The most obvious feature to highlight are the changing background images. Each post now has two images: the existing wide screen image, and a larger photo background that accompanies it wherever you see it (RSS readers: take a look at the home page and scroll about). This was born out of the realisation that due to project365 I’ve now got loads of photos to choose from on any given day, so I can now quite easily showcase large images. I’ve also elected to cast aside anyone on a slow connection – all the large images are loaded asynchronously via javascript, but its still a big page to load.

The other thing that you may well have not noticed is it’s enhanced for Safari 3 (and 3.1, which I’ll get onto...