The Google. The phenomenoun.

Its funny. Not funny haha, but funny peculiar, that someone would turn a phenomenal website into a new noun.

The other day a client phoned to ask if they were on the Google.

"Yes, you're rated number one if you do a search for yourself." I said quickly typing the name into Google, just to check. I breathed a little sigh of relief as we made some small talk and then we said our goodbyes.

Now correct me if Im wrong, but my client had unexpectedly turned Google into a phenomenoun. How funny I thought. But maybe, how true. Google is like a knowledge tree, and a tree would of course be a noun.

So it is with some humour and some truth that we studio geeks sometimes like to refer to our favourite websites as, the Facebook, the YouTube, and lets not forget, the Google.

Oh, wait, now this is funny. I just found this while looking for the Google typeface.

A random blog entry by, the sploosh

I just found this gem of George Bush using the same turn of phrase "The Google" in a television interview. Oh yes, he's so on it!

technorati tags:Google, Facebook, YouTube, Nouns, SEO, Funny, Weird

David Blaine Street Magic 2: The Sequel

A little bit of humour from the tubes. Enjoy the weekend.

Space Junk.

Now I don't know about you, but this concerns me, just a little. I'll never forget reading about space junk in the newspaper for the first time in 2000. It felt like watching reality tv for the first time, there was something blatantly wrong with it. Transfixed at first, but then, a nagging feeling that I would see it again.

Space junk is a near orbit phenomenon. Its so real that NASA have entire department dedicated to it, and have to monitor what they call space debris, for successful space launches of the shuttle.

This week Clayton Anderson aboard the International Space Station jettisoned a piece of space junk weighing 635kg's, due to circle the earth for about 300 days and then re-enter the earths atmosphere. NASA took a while to come to this decision and are hopeful that it will all break up on re-entry. Thanks guys.

What's always struck me about space travel, space ownership and commercialisation of it, is that we seem to be making the same mistakes as we have done on earth. Or our methods are the same. Which is to say, problematic. Apparently there is so much space up there that a little junk would not hurt anyone.

Uh, excuse me but, in the year 2000 a 3000 litre Delta II rocket fuel tank hit the ground at 30 000 km/h. No one in the Durbanville area was notified or even knew about it till it happened. To quote Douglas Adams, maybe NASA were thinking: "Don't Panic!" but who can really tell.

We know NASA can track these objects. Maybe its the just our geographics that don't warrant notification in the southern hemisphere.

Here's a snippet below from the tubes. Notice how the anchorman and woman are trying to pass it off as a meteor shower, when the space geek is clearly telling them, its junk. Maybe they are also thinking: Don't panic!

We need to change

Lets consider change, and the affect a small action might have on our environment and eventually the globe.

I'm sure you have read about Blackle.com, the black screen search engine created by Australian company Heap Media. Yes, it was Heap not Google that put this small effort together in an attempt to reduce the amount of megawatts a pc uses from day to day while using Google.

The initial discovery of this site is awesome, but there seems to be a catch. The Blackle site was inspired by Mark Ontkush's hypothesis that if Google used a black background instead of white they could help save 750 megawatts hours of energy over the period of a year. (What is a watt hour exactly, I was wondering.)

Unfortunately, and if you believe the entry about Blackle on Wikipedia, then its a bit of a let down to think that this energy saving will only work if you are using a CRT monitor. And, that if you use an LCD monitor you might as well stay away from the site because you could use even more energy to display a black web page.

So, where does this leave us? Heap Media says that having a black Google as our homepage will at least remind us that we need to be more energy conscience, on a daily basis.

I could not agree more.

Leave the tech spec behind for a moment and forget whether you are using a CRT or an LCD or an LED display, or what ever comes next. What can we change on a daily basis to help conserve energy and the environment, so that or climate and environment stops changing?

World Wildlife (WWF) has a list
Market Watch posted a list
This one is easy to read

In South Africa we have had an electricity crisis because our national supplier did not quite get the forecast for our energy requirements right. With millions and millions of new cellphones, pcs, digital cameras, kettles, geysers, you-name-it, South Africans have put a bigger strain on their national grid than was forecast. And now we suffer irregular blackouts. We need to change. And we need to do it more than once a month or a few times a year.

Blackle is a great idea and wonderful sentiment, but we need more of these daily reminders and carbon zero commitments as individuals and as supporters of big corporates.

What do you do?

hand job

Every now and then something pointless and creative pops into someones head and somehow gets on to the net. Incredible! This is another one of those weird and wonderful videos from the tubes. Aren't hands great, they are so versatile!

Where do your fingers go, when you sleep?

YouNew

see what I mean?

YouWeird

How many of you have actually surfed YouTube? Is it wonderful, or is it just weird?

Space invaders rock on!

In keeping with our theme of spaceships, spacejunk and creative work. Here's a little gem from YouTube, enjoy:

2012 Olympic logo: I bet you'll like it in 5 years time

I wonder if William Hill are placing odds on peoples opinions changing towards the London 2012 Olympic logo. I would place my bets on people loving this logo in future and it being revered and looked back upon as iconic of our era.

The logo has been fraught with controversy. Its been called a pigs ear, a wooden spoon, that it resembles a swastika, and just plain horrible. I was pretty surprised when I first saw it and its £400,000.00 (or £800,000.00 depending on what you read) price tag in newsprint. But in black and white newsprint it made no sense. In full colour it slowly made more sense. The magenta is surprising but it makes an impact. Then someone chirps, "oh right, it says 2012 somewhere in there". Can you see it?

Personally, and this is a blog of sweeping opinions of course, I love it. I think its going to be very well received in future, and I take my hat off to Wolff Olins and the committee for choosing something new. The young sports stars and kids of 2012 will probably love it, and by then, you might too. I don’t think this logo was designed with the old and wise in mind, I think it was designed with wild imagination and youthful abandon. Consider the brief the designers might have received a year ago in their job bag: Design us a logo that we can use 6 years in the future. A challenging brief by anyones standards.

I also found the Olympics archive. The archive is a great resource of historical information, including all the logos. And the 2012 logo is definitely breaking the mould. But by then maybe all logos will look like this and not like this. In reaction to all the negative opinions to the logo Michael Wolff says, "Prejudice is comfortable and lazy."

I hope they don’t bend to public pressure and change it.

This is quite entertaining: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/6726301.stm
and this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/6727723.stm

Offline and naked

I would like to elaborate on my post from last month Enter Web 3.0 by using a real-world scenario of identity revealed.

Imagine that you had fought to keep your identity secret for years. That your livelihood depended upon it. That your work's popularity was fueled, partly, by the fact that you did great things under peoples noses and got away with it. Scott free.

We run a small design studio and love original work. When I was in London about two years ago I stumbled upon an original Banksy. Here's a graffiti artist who is an artist, a real 21st century guerrilla artist that works hard and has amazing insight and humour. Yet he is anonymous. Or so you thought. When I find my London pictures I took I will post it here, but until then, let me just post this, a link to the artist himself. The man who recently sold some of his work for a pretty packet after a few modest, brilliant and entertaining publications of thought provoking brilliance. Personally I'm a bit disappointed if it is him, because I kind of expected him to be holding a banana.

It makes me wonder if there are any real graffiti artists using facebook, at all.

technorati tags:banksy, grafitti, identity

The new new thing

You may recognise this title, you may not. Either way you should realise that its a hint at what's going on behind the scenes at sploosh.

We're rebuilding: If you were getting a little bored of the sploosh website take heart in the fact that it is changing. Sometimes the only way to speed up change is to take a small step, and then let the trickle turn into a raging torrent. Well, the trickle is here, let the torrent begin.

We're also recruiting: Sploosh is currently looking for a junior or middle weight designer. Take a look at the job description on biz-community if you're interested, or tell someone about us.

Not impressed by this post? Read a friends blog then.

Is Apple the new Microsoft?

Apple breathed some new fire into the browser wars last week by announcing that they have ported Safari for XP and Vista.

It's our business to know about internet browsers and all their versions so that our clients websites are tested and perform properly on popular versions, so naturally we downloaded Safari immediately.

Our version is unusable on XP and we quickly closed it. Our illusion that Apple releases bug free software not dented, but almost entirely shattered. The browser behaves erratically, and even sports a bug button. Ew. Ironically just clicking the button causes the browser to crash. On our testing computer none of the menu's items are visible.

Apple has claimed that there were 1 million downloads of Safari in two days. What a disappointment and bad introduction for the company that's going to be.

So Apple launched a browser for the PC, but at this point, does anyone care?

The response has been quick and slating.

Hidden treasure

In this post I plan to break every unwritten law of blogging. I acknowledge David Bullard's post and revel in my sweeping statements and lack of point.

As always, I will point you to a link. This is pure gold. I mean who hasn't been swept away by the story's of Treasure Island, or more recently by the Pirates of the Caribbean?

Similar things are true of Google. They found gold, and are defending its location. We all know they are a great source of information, but we don't really know how they find it, we only care where it is. As developers we have recently been major advocates of Google products that we feel more like Google consultants than developers. The rise of web 2.0 website features gives users more power and control over publishing their content. Our only advantage is that we know a fair bit more than our customers. But this wont always be the case.

What has this got to do with hidden treasure? Well, read this. Scobleizer explores the reason for Google's strategy in this particular area of hidden treasure and defence of it. Today I was visiting a friends house who is an architect, who not only uses Sketchup (a Google acquisition) but also trains students in it. I explained how it took me a while to realise that Sketchup was the perfect complementary product to Google Earth. Whereby you could add your house or any other new project in 3d to their predominantly pseudo 2d environment. Brilliant. Just imagine the 3d treasures one will soon be able to find on Google Earth?

So what has this to do with hidden treasure? Nothing, really, its a just a ramble in the blogosphere. And I can do it without conscience or consequence. David Bullard, eat your heart out.

Enter web 3.0

So just as web two point oh is gaining momentum, web three point oh starts to pop into the news and cruely becomes the insiders upper hand in a tech savy conversation.

It is strange living and working in Cape Town asking clients if they have heard of YouTube, and it definitely makes one feel isolated or disoriented when they haven’t. But that's not what this is about.

I am now a new member of Facebook. What a thing. Forget SA Reunited, or Friends Reunited or wherever it was that allowed you to get in touch with others online. Facebook is it. This is just one of the new things that is the start of web 3.0: A consistent online identity.

Since 1996, when I was first requested to register at a website, I have had an "online identity" of some kind. But this information was not always close to the truth. Something that was maybe a mixture of my Mother's maiden name and my first dogs first name. But never my real name. Today, its actually quite tiring filling in forms for web features, but its what we do. The problem is that I've never really lost that paranoia about hitting the signup button without really reading the terms and conditions page. And afterall, what choice do you really have?

Maybe it was the fact that I watched "meeting people is easy" at a young age and heard Thom Yorke say: "You are on at least 300 databases that you don't know about" that made me a little skittish .

Hey, I’m on at least 300 that I do know about. So what's with this constant requirement for my personal data and my relunctancy to hand it over?

I don’t know. But one thing is for sure, your data is already out there, stored and cataloged in some places you know about, and others you don’t. How you manage it is up to you.

This is a question that we will have to answer sooner or later: How much are we willing to give up to the network? Because eventually it will be everyware.

(Log Out)

technorati tags:Paraniod, Andriod, Facebook, Web3, Radiohead, identity, databases

Blogger, Typepad, VOX, LiveJournal, Soul Cast, and now Terapad

Woah, stop the bus. Another free do-it-all-tool for net heads? You don't need a web development agency anymore, because now you have Terapad!

Visit this http://studio37.terapad.com

Internet in outer space by 2009

It seems strange that consumer technology is often advanced by the military products first. It was true of cellular phones and the internet, among other things. So this is the obvious next step, to advance the internet into outer space. Will someone please radio the ISS and let the first nerd in space know about this please, I think he is still in orbit, and we know he'll be excited. Thank you.

The original Hotmail logo

Im going to go out on a limb here and call this Hotmail logo by a title which it truly deserves: The greatest animated logo ever.

Look at it. See the little "H" swooping off to the side? See the animated globe, and the postage stamp? It really does give off a certain promise of something bold, and something new.

Lets put it into context. On the 4th July 1996, when hotmail was launched, both Internet Explorer and Netscape were only on version 2.0, with little to no support for CSS and HTML was still in its infancy. Sites were generally pretty ugly. There was no such thing as Flash, and using animated gif's was the only way one would be able to accomplish something new.

The logo it full of design clichés, allow me to point them out:

1. The globe. Remember the Netscape N on top of the earth with the asteroids shooting down in the background? Or, Internet Explorer with its animated world changing into an "e"? The globe was the obvious design cliché for the idea of international communication, and the information super highway as a concept.
   
   
2. The postage stamp. What else would you use to explain something that had moved from the physical world, into the digital realm, other than the fray of a postage stamp.
   
   
3. Lowercase lettering. I noticed this trend in 1996 while in my first job as a junior designer. The choice of all lower case letters seemed to be a silicon valley thing. Almost as though the designer and company were saying, we're a new start up, and haven't rolled out our first version yet.
   

Other interesting facts: The company wrote its name as HoTMaiL, in an attempt to communicate their HTML roots. The company was reportedly sold for $400 million in 1997, bought by none other than Microsoft. MSN still use the same typeface.

Unidentified Flying Objects archive opened

I stumbled upon this link today. Still haven't been able to reach the website to which it is referring.

It seems that this website and the ufo's have something in common. Has anyone really seen them?

You Train

I had a conversation with a client yesterday who said that most South African's hadn't even heard of MySpace. Say it isn't so! I feel as though this client, who had spent the last year in the USA might be more in touch as to what Web 2.0 is, what blogging has become, and most certainly has heard of MySpace and YouTube. So, when I found this article on the BBC website, I am hope that you, my small and attentive audience, will find it interesting.

My point: The YouTube ship sailed a while ago. What train are you on?

Customer's want more choice

Someone once told me that an opinion is like a belly button; everybody has one. But when you meet a fanatic, they might also start to point out how much bigger their naval is.

The debate in question was the colour of the Shova ST.

The other week I met with a rather enthusiastic Warthog who was riding a pink Morewood Shova ST signed by Patrick Morewood. The Warthog, who shall remain nameless, was very vocal about the standard colour option, karoo sand. So much so that he emailed me about it later in the week saying that he had tripped over one due to its virtually invisible shade of colour. Well, you can't please everyone, but you can give your customers a choice. And in 2008 that is what we intend to give those fanatical mountain bikers the world over, choice.

We have been working with Patrick Morewood and Richard Carter at Morewood bikes for about five years now, and it is amazing to see how much the company has grown in that time.

The Shova ST is also being raced for the first time in the 2007 Cape Epic by Rob Peters and Stuart Davies, two desk jockeys from iafrica.com. But it also is one of Morewood's most popular selling bikes in Europe to date, behind the Shova LT.

Picture by Gary Perkin. Taken at Paarl Monument of Gary's new bike.
More pictures by Gary on Flickr