Summer-izing Websites

For our company newsletter that we just sent out last week, I wrote a little thing about websites and the utility/importance/howto of adding seasonal touches to websites.

My article is was on our website.

Update: after selling the company, the website is different.

Sometimes you just want to smack your computer.

Now you can.

The program that makes this happen is supposed to be “useful.” I like the idea: another (more intuitive?) way of switching applications, etc. While this is using (abusing? I certainly wouldn't recommend doing this regularly) an internal protection mechanism (to stop hard drives and other things in case you drop the laptop [probably similar to IBM {now Lenovo} ThinkPad’s system]) to do something that it was never intended to, it seems that we’re entering into an age when computers are expected to respond to things outside the computer environment and interaction devices (keyboards, mice).

I’m thinking of the new video game consoles from Sony and Nintendo that use motion sensors to interact with them. I remember seeing all sorts of computer-extended-into-real-world examples of things that R&D teams are working on (I’m thinking of a now-defunct AT&T lab in the UK). This is part of the future of computing. I’m interested to see how the video game consoles fare, as they are mass-market, and whether anything similar continues to develop on this front.

ps. I’m still quite liking this Word 2007 Blog post thing. I can’t upload images automatically (that’s coming in the “final” version) and that video above. It’s still a lot quicker than using blogger. And nicer too (styles, fonts, etc. in Word are much nicer [and prettier to boot!]).

Links:
Original post by the guy(s) who made the “utility”

Office 2007

I downloaded the Beta 2 of Microsoft Office 2007 (it became publicly available yesterday). Not only do I love it for the most part (particularly Outlook as I basically “live” in Outlook during the work week), but I couldn’t resist trying out the new feature in Microsoft Word for blogging. I am typing this in Word after choosing “New Blog Post.” And that’s it. So easy (he says before actually get it online).

Joga Bonito

I've been enjoying this Nike Football ad on TV for awhile now. When I finally stumbled over to the website, I found a bunch more content and an example of a company really using the web well.

I'm not talking about the catchy Ads, the well-designed-ness of the website or any of that (that is, if you have a computer that can handle it; I suspect older computers wouldn't show the page poorly or possibly not at all). No, the stuff I really like are the links to RSS feeds, blog, and linkage for the videos. And I just love both the idea and the current "chain video."

Interesting content, focused on a specific target group, well executed and utilizing the tools for web-sharing. They also have spent the effort (and money) to create a pallette of websites that all work together (blogging, social networking, and the nike football main site).

Surf Music

Is it just because I'm a wanna-be surfer (though I've never tried) but for a minute, reading the a description of Tristan Prettyman on Amazon I was surprised. I thought maybe someone had copied Jack Johnson's bio in accidentally.

Jack Johnson is another fav of mine (recently discovered by me and more recently exploded everywhere [Curious George Soundtrack]).

Both he and Tristan were previously competitive surfers. (I think that Johnson actual won some title [at least state-wide, Hawaii, possibly US, maybe bigger].)

Image: Jon, localsurfer on flickr, Creative Commons license.

Blogging and Discussions

I was thinking recently about blogging and online discussions. Many, many blogs have comments available to add on blog posts. Sounds like a good idea in principle, though I think “trackbacks” are a better way of doing it (levels the playing field between the author and any commentators; and is more spread out “cyper-geographically”), but that’s a side issue.

I read a lot of blogs. Many of them, probably most, have comments and/or trackbacks available.

I don’t usually read the comments.

This is my tendency, whether I view the post on day 1 (where there are no comments yet) or day 365 (once comments have had time to accumulate).

I don’t because, generally, I don’t care. There is the odd time when I do care about the discussion, or I wonder how this post will be perceived by others. But, most of the time, I’m reading that author/thinker/blogger/whatever because I think that they are informative/clever/entertaining people. I didn’t “sign up” because I thought the readers would be interesting. Now, that just me, I’m not going to try to argue that this is good or bad.

What may be good or bad, is whether blog comments are a good forum for such discussions. That is, aside from constructed social gatherings or events or lectures, or ad hoc sessions on university campuses, where, online, does our collective [human] intellect progress?

I don’t think that blog posts are a great place for that, for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is that either the author has too much sway (they reply to every comment made, which can be useful, or they censor some) or they don’t participate (they never comment, update, etc.). Either way is certainly the author’s prerogative, but if the author never posts or joins in the comment, the comment roll can begin to take on a life of its own and often, IMO, get to a point that is less than informed and not particularly useful. In case I haven’t qualified my every statement so far sufficiently, let me say that this state depends on the readers and some blog readers and topics generally attract better/worse comments. That is, it depends, and I’m generalizing I know.

I ran across a good example today.

A post by Malcom Gladwell on his blog concerning plagiarism. (If the name rings a bell, and you’re not sure why.) I think it’s interesting and, for a change, was reading through the comments. Alas, no response from the author to “rein in” or “inform” the discussion occurring in the comments.

BTW, I loved this line parphrasing/explaining Lawrence Lessig (Free Culture) from a plagiarism article he wrote for the New Yorker, in itself a good read:

“Creative property… has many lives—the newspaper arrives at our door, it becomes part of the archive of human knowledge, then it wraps fish.”