“It’s about ideas. Fuck, technique, I can get a monkey to do
this shit for me.” James Victore

There’s been much talk of the death of Flash in the last 2 years. Pundits have been making sweeping, sensationalist statements from both sides of the aisle – fuelled by emotion and agendas – that has made the majority of the discussion read like a particularly partisan tabloid.

I’m not going to rehash those tired old arguments here, but spending the last 3 days at the inimitable Flash on the Beach conference in Brighton, it’s impossible not to consider where it’s all going.

One indicator is that this is very probably the last Flash on the Beach. As you’d expect, the theme and subject matter of a lot of the talks this year reflected the new digital landscape and focussed on HTML5, JavaScript and mobile devices. It was even pointed out on Twitter that in session titles, “HTML” beat “Flash” by 3:2. Not exactly scientific, but even the organiser admitted that next year will probably see a rebrand that I suspect won’t feature the word “Flash”.

6 years ago, John Davey launched FotB as a conference with a difference. Rather than just technical sessions by designers and developers from the Flash community, there’s always been a mix of artists and inspirational figures that are often at best tangentially associated with Adobe Flash, or even web technologies at all. This year was no exception, with the likes of Jon Burgerman, James Victore, Bradley Munkowitz and Cyriak Harris providing inspiration through their passion and creativity.

But while the sessions may have had more JavaScript and less Actionscript than ever before, there was still plenty of amazing stuff being done in Flash by the likes of Eugene Zapetyakin, David Lenaerts and one of the most impressive Elevator Pitch sessions I’ve seen yet. Sure it’s cool that you can now do in HTML5 what only Flash could do a few years ago, but for me it’s always been more impressive seeing something that could never have been done before.

For years the Flash community has driven the growth of the web – pushing the boundaries of what can be done online, creating a template for browser developers to catch up with. When it was first created Flash (or Future Splash as it was originally titled) was simply for animation and gradually interaction and increasingly sophisticated code was introduced. By its very nature, it has grown out of a hybrid of design and code, the visual and the interactive, which has always attracted programmers with a creative streak and designers with a hacker mentality.

And that’s why I’m not worried about the future of the Flash community. Obviously, the type of inquisitive and innovative minds that were drawn to Flash when it was the only game in town, will experiment with new tools like Processing, HTML5, mobile development etc. Many may never use Flash again. We may not all use the same software anymore but it’s the same passion that drives us all, and ultimately is what unites a community.

Davey may need to come up with a new name for next year, but for my money, he’s already nailed it with the new conference he launched in New York this year, “Geeky by Nature”. It’s not the tool we use that defines our work; it’s the passion that drives the craftsman to create in the first place. And that’s something that’s just in our nature.

What, no AdBlock?

On that day, the world found a new way of sharing information and connecting beyond borders and boundaries and with no barrier to entry. In twenty years, it’s grown to be the single most important innovation for civilisation since electricity. So important, Berners-Lee has called for it to be recognised as a fundamental human right: “It’s possible to live without the Web. It’s not possible to live without water. But if you’ve got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger.”

Big talk, but if anybody can claim to have shaped the 21st century, it’s him.

Here’s to the next 20, wherever they take us!

“A game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”

- Bernard Suits

We love to play games. From the day we’re conscious of the world around us to the day we die there’s an innate desire to play. Why? Well, it’s fun, isn’t it?

Gaming has long been one of the most active areas of the internet – growing with and pushing the development of technology. Flash gained widespread penetration through its suitability for web games, and the creativity of the game-developing community has driven advances in underlying technologies that make the web a more fun and engaging place to be.

And, true to form, many of tomorrow’s biggest advances in web technology are being pushed forward by a demand for games. Adobe’s latest Flash Player preview (codenamed “Molehill”) provides hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, meaning web games like MaxRacer and Zombie Tycoon will soon be the norm. 3D performance in a browser like that was unimaginable only a few years ago and the potential applications are endless. (Read more about Molehill on The Lab.)

Other web technologies are also pushing their boundaries through games. Web developers are using HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript to retrace the steps of the pioneering flash games with classics like pool, tower defence games, platformers and even Line Rider. But what we’re also seeing is how this kind of play helps push developing technologies to new levels. They’ve even managed to get a game into the address bar of your browser!

The convergence of Facebook’s social graph and our natural social tendencies has created the perfect breeding ground for game growth. CityVille, for example, currently has over 90 million monthly users, 20 million of whom are active daily! The developer of CityVille, Zynga, has been so successful that recent investments have valued the company at as much as $10 billion dollars. To put that in context, Sainsbury’s is valued at $9.55 billion.

But Facebook isn’t the only place where games are big business. Angry Birds launched in December 2009 and now, less than 18 months later, it has sold over 12 million copies on iOS alone. It’s so popular the developers Rovio claim users play 16 years of Angry Birds every hour. The game has now been ported to Android, Windows, OSX, Playstation and is even coming to Facebook soon. On the surface, there’s nothing to Angry Birds – fling some birds, pop some pigs – but the numbers tell a different story. A simple game mechanic can make users devote countless hours to overcoming those “unnecessary obstacles”. And have fun while they do it.

Fun - in diagram form

Paradoxically, the difficulty of making something fun is defining the simplicity. Game designers speak of what’s called “the flow” (don’t worry, I’m not going to get all Mr Miyagi on you). A game or a task is fun if it can strike a balance between difficulty and the skill required to overcome the obstacles. Players become more skilled at completing tasks with practice, so to keep those endorphins flowing, the difficulty should increase correspondingly. So you could say, learning is fun… your mum was right all along!

The rise of the smartphone means more and more people have a gaming device in their pocket and a recent survey found one in four US and UK adults are “avid mobile gamers”. But as technology advances, we’re continually finding new ways of having fun. Ubiquitous GPS chips and geo-location data have led to innovative new games such as SCVNGR and competitive game mechanics are at the very heart of the success of Foursquare, Gowalla et al.

The application of game design and thinking outside of “gamespace” is gaining wider recognition via the buzzword du jour: gamification. Expect to hear it a lot this year, as marketers fall over themselves to turn every task or consumer interaction into a game, but try not to get too cynical. Games are engaging, rewarding and addictive because of how we naturally respond to them. Understanding what motivates your audience isn’t just a fad.

Shane Casey is Head of Digital Innovation at Mason Zimbler

Just over a year after the launch of the “Like” button, Facebook has announced it’s new “Send” button. “Finally!”, I hear you say. Liking, sharing, buzzing, digging, tweeting and stumbling just isn’t enough these days. Sarcasm aside, the new “Send” functionality may actually be a step in the right direction. Basically, “Send” allows you to share a page/link/whatever with the right group of people instead of all your contacts. (Funnily enough, Google’s Buzz, widely derided as a giant social-networking flop, has had this functionality built in from the start.)

The more interconnected our online behaviours get with our offline lives, the harder it is to do anything online without it potentially being seen by the wrong people. We naturally have separate personas and behaviours in how we interact offline with different groups (for e.g. think how you are with your family, your work colleagues, your gun club), so it’s hardly surprising the model of a single group of contacts or “friends” isn’t a natural fit for all of our online activities.

Likewise, Facebook commenting has tried to tie us all to one online profile that means we lose the freedom to have different personas on different sites.

In its rush to create one social graph to rule them all, Facebook has missed the point of the interest graph. Sure, I’m connected to all these people, but I’m not connected to them in the same way. Hopefully, “Send” marks a return to Facebook getting why 700 million users use their site.

The “Social” aspect of web design isn’t a fad – on the contrary, it’s going to become more and more pervasive in the future – but we need to make sure we add it in the right way. Adding social features to your site has great potential… as long as we bear in mind that the user is connecting your service to their profile for the value they gain from it. There’s no point in gaining a “Like” if it ends up a dislike.

PS: If you have the time, check out this slideshow from a few months back on “The Real Life Social Network” by Paul Adams, it’s excellent.

This is a continuation of Show & Tell #7′s round up. Check part one here.

HTML5 Games

So where are the HTML5 games? I thought the “Flash-killer” had arrived?

Actually, there have been some cool HTML5 based games knocking around recently. These are mostly proof of concept games though, and nowhere near the level of Zombie Tycoon etc. Come back in 10 years for that.

Here are a couple of nice ones though that are worth a look…

One that’s been grabbing headlines this week is URL Hunter. This game is unique in that the whole game takes place in the address bar of the browser. Obviously, it has much more appropriate applications but this is a pretty inventive demo of how HTML5 exposes the browser history via an API. Access to this API should help as we see more complex sites and web-apps that require stateful behaviour without a new page request. 

Hadouken!

 

Wallaby

Another headline grabber from Adobe this week was the launch of codename ‘Wallaby‘. In a nutshell, Wallaby takes a Flash file (.fla) and converts it to a HTML5 version. It’s not quite a magic bullet yet as there are some pretty major features that aren’t supported yet but it shows some definite promise. I’ll hopefully do some experiments myself and report back.

 

Motion Graphics Design Lecture

We also had a chat about the Motion Graphics Design lecture that I’ve covered in detail already here, check it out.

Molehill

This changes everything. Again.

This week Adobe released their pre-beta (they call it an ‘Incubator’) release of what will eventually be Flash Player 11. Codenamed ‘Molehill’ it caused massive excitement at Adobe Max (see previous Lab post here) and it’s making waves all over again because now we can play with it ourselves. So if you’re feeling adventurous (this is pre-beta software remember, I’m taking no responsibility if your machine melts down), download the Incubator Flash player and join in the fun.

If you’ve already got Flash Player 10.2, you should already be seeing performance boosts on video sites such as YouTube and BrightCove thanks to the new StageVideo API. StageVideo hands off the processing of video to the GPU so there’s less strain on the CPU. Get it? If not, trust me on this, utilising hardware acceleration like this dramatically improves performance. PixelBender was a start, and 10.2 continues this approach.

Molehill is taking the focus on improving performance on to the next logical step, 3D. You can see the performance in this video with some pretty hardcore environment mapping and interactive reflective surfaces.

If you’re playing along at home, you can try out the rippling water and the reflective figure yourself.

One of the areas that I’m expecting to see some really exciting innovation is in web-based gaming. The Max Racer demo that I featured in the previous post looks really incredible and I love this one… Zombie Tycoon.

3D gaming in the browser has come on loads in recent years, the main players being Unity3D and Shockwave (and possibly Virtools) but they’ve all struggled to gain widespread penetration. Others like Quake Live have developed their own bespoke browser plug-ins that have some pretty impressive performance but have stubbornly remained stuck in their niche. Flash has lagged behind with 3D performance but Molehill has changed all that. Combine that with Flash’s 99% penetration and super-fast upgrade adoption and you’ve got a perfect storm for game developers.

If you fancy playing with some more demos, check out Lee Brimelow’s collection of links to lots more cool Molehill demos. Hours of fun!

This is a part one of Show & Tell #7′s round up. Check part two here.

Sell-outs

Today, Skype announced on their blog that they’ll be introducing ads to their software. Thankfully, Skype are savvy enough to know that intrusive ads mid-conversation would cause a lot of people to hang up permanently. In their post, Skype were quick to point out that “The ads won’t interrupt your Skype experience. You won’t suddenly see annoying pop-up ads or flashy banner ads in middle of conversations.”

The ads will initially feature just on the ‘Home’ tab but I’m sure over time we’ll see them introduced elsewhere too. More interestingly though will be what level of targeting they’ll be able to provide. Ads will be location-targeted by country as you’d expect (though you can opt out of this) but what other data can Skype glean from your calls?

Google Voice, only available in the US at the moment, is a free service that routes all your calls through one number, so that all your phones ring at the same time and you have one centralised voice-mail. Oh, and free voice-to-text transcription. Sound confusing? There’s an explanatory video here that shows just how compelling an offering this is.

Google Voice caused a lot of concern about privacy when it launched but it seems to have settled now. The temptation will be huge for Skype to offer an extra level of personalisation to their advertising offering, I’ll be interested to see how this goes for them. Hopefully they won’t go the way The Onion predicted…

Personally, I think W of E Design Forum missed a trick not having at least one of their speakers from the interactive side of motion graphics design. Here’s a snapshot of what they were talking about.

Jack Laurence (Moving Brands)

Jack talked through some of the work that Moving Brands do and mainly focused on the rebrand of Nokia they did that swapped the old “hand-in-hand” schmaltz for the more modern style you’ll recognise from anything post-2007. Still conveying the core message “Connecting People” but giving it a much more up-to-date feel.

Moving Brands created a ‘living identity’ that uses Processing to generate 3d visuals dynamically. This way they created tools that could be given to all the brand managers internationally. Tweaking a few settings they could create animated or static artwork that was unique and fitting for their uses and also stayed consistent with the overall brand identity. Smart stuff.

Processing, if you haven’t come across it before, is an open framework based on Java that allows for some pretty rapid experimentation with generative art, without getting you bogged down in the complexity of Java programming. Check it out here.

Also nice in his talk was a mood video Moving Brands made for Nokia, not for public consumption, but just as their response to the brief and to show their interpretation of the brand. Lovely stuff.

Shane Walter (onedotzero)

Shane is something of a rock-star of the motion graphics world. CEO & Creative Director of onedotzero, he’s a busy guy and it’s not surprising when you see the scale and number of festivals and events that onedotzero run worldwide. Adventures in Motion 2010 was a big success this year and you can check it out here. He was just back from their latest festival in St Petersburg that looked pretty cool. I’ll definitely be marking Adventures in Motion in my calendar for next year!

Charlie Mawer (Red Bee Media)

Charlie gave us a brief intro to what Red Bee Media do, and they do a lot… rebranding BBC1, BBC3, Dave, Virgin1, Disney, Discovery, ESPN, Canal+… pretty much every TV station has had the Red Bee treatment. On the night, Charlie took us through the work they’d done for Belgian children’s broadcaster KetNet. They did a great job of creating reusable and adaptable stings and idents for KetNet that allowed them to keep the visuals fresh and interactive by integrating programme trailers, live action presenters and also user generated content. The case study is on their site here.

A five year old could do this...

"Chair designed by committee" - Hockney

Matthew Rudd (Rudd Studio)

And finally we had Matthew Rudd, of the eponymous Rudd Studios. When he walked out first I thought he was a recent art-school graduate but it became quickly apparent he’s an insanely accomplished and talented visual artist.

Matthew’s session was an inspirational meander through his background as an artist and how he applies that thinking to his work. Along with some of his own photography, Matthew showed how art informs his thought process. For example, the way that Picasso’s cubist paintings and also David Hockney’s photo montages (pictured) capture the same moment from different angles led directly to his recent work for Channel 4.

Given that the existing Channel 4 idents were so still popular, Rudd came up with the elegant solution you can see in the video above. Using this simple device of splitting the screen to show the same animation from different perspectives managed to breathe a whole new life in to their idents without clashing with the existing ones.

The best ideas are often the simplest. Inspirational stuff.

Although we have an increasing amount of variables to consider, such as: quality of data, ever-changing email clients etc, I believe if you follow a simple set of rules you can create a successful email campaign.

Plan your campaign
Identify your target audience but more importantly the objectives you want to achieve.

Be relevant
Use the information you have identified about your audience to send them targeted, relevant messages.

Design a strong campaign creative
Keep your message short, concise and memorable.

Test, test, test
What the email will look like in the most popular email clients (Outlook, Hotmail, Google Mail, Yahoo! Mail etc)

… and finally… measure campaign success
It is incredibly important to track user activity on the email. From this we can learn what works and what doesn’t and, most importantly, make improvements to avoid making the same mistakes twice!

Obey the bird

The age of Web 2.0 has well and truly arrived. The days of the first few pioneers engaging their users through social media have passed and now every brand, advertiser, celebrity and politician has a social media presence. The goldrush is on and everyone knows they should be in the “social space” – they just have no idea what to do once they’re there.

Everyone knows the benefits – multiple platforms and touch-points mean you can find your audience where they already are. If they’re on YouTube, you can get your own channel there; if they’re on Facebook, why not set up a “Fan” page? This direct access means there are fewer barriers between you and them, you can really engage in an actual conversation. Awesome, right?

But hang on – multiple platforms mean more and more places to manage your message. So often we see social outlets that are all but abandoned, and whatever visitors do come across them can sense the virtual cobwebs of a hastily created  and forgotten social media “presence”. What does that say about you/your brand and how is that any different from Web 1.0?

And worse, direct access to your audience means they can talk back to you. How do you control what they do on your page? What if they don’t say nice things? They can rant and bitch and slag you off and everyone can see it and join in. WTF?!? I didn’t sign up for this – it’s out of control! The first problem’s easy to solve – make a commitment to care-taking your social outlets or, even better, don’t just create them for the sake of it: only make the ones you’re going to use.

Managing the conversation is harder. Here are your options:
- Fake it. Why bother with actual consumers when you could just have your agency create fake accounts and drown out the negative with spin? Sony learned the hard way in 2006 with their “All I want for Christmas is a PSP” campaign that did irreparable damage to their brand with the very people they were trying to win over. The public are wise to advertisers and you will be found out. If you’re going to be alternative, you have to be authentic.

- Edit it. Sarah Palin and her horde of winged monkeys (or whoever works for her) are the ultimate example of this. Palin’s Facebook page is conspicuous, considering what a polarising figure she is, for the glowing “we love you Sarah” tone of every comment you can find  there. In the wake of the tragic shootings in Arizona this week that have left Palin with a PR disaster on her hands, the editors must be working double-time. A social presence like this is the perfect outlet for people to directly express their outrage and anger but it’s all deleted. Check out Obama London’s report on the methodical removal of any dissenting opinions here. And this raises an even more important point – if you’re obviously moderating content, anything you don’t remove can be assumed to have your approval. Like this comment celebrating the death of a 9 year old.

You stay classy, Sarah.

- Ignore it. Hey, maybe they’ll just go away? While there is some wisdom in not feeding the trolls, pretending it’s not happening just allows any negative commentary to go unchallenged and gives the complainer (another?) valid reason to be angry with you. The longer a grievance goes unrecognised, the larger it becomes.

- Listen. “The fool speaks, the wise man listens”. This is really your only option. Your social media presence is essentially the town square so if someone’s unhappy, deal with it. And deal with it publicly. You can turn a situation around by treating your audience with respect and hearing their issues. Maybe you can fix it and win them back or at least you can show everyone else watching that you care. Starbucks runs MyStarbucksIdea.com to actively invite criticism and then acts on it. Customers have a clear channel for their dissatisfactions and Starbucks take them seriously. Smooth.

Confucius

As Confucius said, “With great power, comes great responsibility”. Social media is an amazing tool for anyone with a message for a wider audience but it can potentially destroy you. Everything you do on the Internet is public so behave like it. If you respect your audience and are transparent and authentic, they’ll appreciate it and repay you in kind. And if you can’t do that, then maybe it’s time you had a think about whether social media is right for you or not.

He's just crazy enough to do it!

It’s been coming for a while but, Internet Explorer has finally been toppled from the number spot in Europe. FireFox has taken the crown with 38.11% share to IE’s 37.52% – even though it’s market share has stayed pretty much static around the 40% mark throughout 2010. (Source: StatCounter)

You can see from the graph, it’s the rise of Chrome (sounds like a Michael Bay movie!) that’s really hurting IE’s market share. Chrome’s share tripled during 2010 from 5% to over 15% today and shows no sign of slowing down.

Sacre bleu!

It’s no coincidence though, that this rapid change has come about since the Microsoft’s antitrust settlement with the EU led to the “browser ballot” being integrated into Windows 7 installs. So in some ways, Microsoft are victims of the success of their own operating system (that, and the fact that IE9 is still not ready for launch!). For 12 months now Microsoft’s headstart with the whole “the internet is the blue E” crowd has been eaten away and people are beginning to realise that a browser is software that can be chosen, not just an invisible portal to the Internet.

And that can only be a good thing for everybody.

Of this 4%, Mobile Safari only commands 23.44% of the market (17.51% on the iPhone, 5.93% on iPod Touch) – not much of a lead on Opera Mobile, Nokia & BlackBerry’s browsers. In fact there are 5 very different mobile browsers within 4% of each other, making a very fractured ecosystem.

With the constant growth in mobile devices, client requirements / briefs for creating mobile friendly services are commonly very vague. Many things need to be considered before building for multiple devices. For example:

• What devices are we building for (desktop/tablet/smart phone/WAP)?
• Defining device groupings based on device capabilities (e.g. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Video, Flash support etc)?
• Create functionality, restraints and support for each device grouping.

This can prove frustrating to clients as sacrificing important functionality for differing devices can be a bitter pill to swallow.

This approach can also be increasingly confusing, frustrating and discouraging for traditional ‘desktop web’ developers and consequently focus on optimising their sites for just one device… the one in their pocket. Ironically, if you suggested to a developer that they only built for one desktop browser they’d look at you like you just insulted their mother.

With the mobile ecosystem being as fragmented as it currently, it is hard to see clients spending the time and money on developing specifically for the 5 big name browsers  individually. So what is the way forward? Do we just develop versions with Safari and Opera in mind and cover as much of the market share as possible? Or will we see a move towards building sites which degrade gracefully throughout the mobile browsing ecosystem?

Google Vs Facebook… again

As Russell pointed out, we spend a huge amount of time at Show & Tell talking about Facebook. The truth is though, with a user-base of 500 million and some of the most aggressively pursued ambitions in the sector, it’s impossible to ignore the moves they make.

In a lot of ways, Facebook is shaping up to be the new Google. Recent statistics have shown people are spending more time accessing the Internet through Facebook than ever before and, as ever, the marketing spend follows the crowd. For advertisers, targeted marketing is where the smart money is and Google and Facebook are natural competitors in this space. Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, put it well when he said “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”. Google has unparalleled information in profiling our behaviour online, but with Facebook becoming more and more people’s portal to the wider web they’re building valuable data to add to their existing knowledge of the Social Graph.

Last week Google announced they were cutting off Facebook’s ability to import Gmail contacts, calling Facebook’s system a one-way street of data – Facebook encourage users to pull contact lists from all the major email providers to find your contacts, yet they don’t allow you to do the reverse and export a list of your Facebook contacts. And Google have a valid point about Facebook’s hypocrisy; we’ve seen the exact same move when Facebook shut down Twitter’s ability to find contacts through your Facebook profile. Not only that, they do allow certain partners to access this data – just not their users.

Facebook messaging

All of this was precursor to Facebook’s big announcement at … that they’re rolling out @facebook.com addresses to their users. However, this isn’t just email – the new Facebook messaging combines email, IM & SMS communication into one conversation. The idea is that we shouldn’t have to try to figure out what communication method to use when there are so many available. Send a message through Facebook and the recipient can set their preferred mode and your message gets automatically routed to mobile phone or inbox for you.

Sound good to you? Me neither. This really feels to me like Facebook are solving a problem that doesn’t exist – except for them. More data = better advertising revenue for Facebook and they know that any communication out of their ecosystem is lost to them.

The blogosphere has been full of the same ‘Gmail killer’ narrative that fits so conveniently with all of the recent clashes between Google & Facebook. Gmail is the most rapidly growing email services, mainly because it’s excellent. Google were the first to set virtually unlimited storage limits and threaded email conversations have spread from Gmail to other email systems the way tabs did to browsers. My problem with the notion that Facebook mail will damage Gmail is that they’re different user-bases – the average Gmail user is the more tech-savvy email user while Facebook’s demographic trends toward students, teens and “soccer moms”. Facebook does infringe on Google’s data monopoly but realistically I expect to see more of an impact on Hotmail and Yahoo!’s numbers than Gmail’s.

It remains to be seen whether Facebook can attract people to their system as their primary email provider but I’d predict the real market is the under-20s. If you haven’t left school or university yet, odds are that most of your communication will fit quite easily to the channels of your existing social graph through Facebook. But the real obstacle is the corporate perception of Facebook as a time-waster, not a productivity tool. Huge numbers of workplaces block Facebook and realistically that will make an @facebook.com email address unworkable for millions of people.

Personally, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I’d have any sensitive information dependent on Facebook. How long will it be until Zuckerberg decides that email privacy is something only old people and squares worry about and exposes everyone’s inboxes to 3rd-party marketing?

iAds

Another regular topic for us is Apple’s iOS platform. This week we had a look at the Apple’s iAds system that allows full-screen, interactive, HTML5 ads right inside an app.

Launched with iOS4, the iAd platform is Apple’s first foray into the advertising market and yet another front in their ongoing war with Google (spotting a trend?). Check out this video to see what they can do…

Essentially you can build an app inside an app. iAds give huge scope to advertisers to do create interesting engaging content, capture data, play video and more, without having to kick the user out of the app to the browser.

So, where’s the catch? Well, first off there’s the 60:40 split with Apple. That’s right, 40% of all advertising revenue through their platform goes to Apple and the remaining 60% to the app developer. And as ever, Apple retain final control over the ads served on their platform and that’s ruffled a few feathers.

Last month Adidas cancelled their $10m campaign, with sources quoted as saying “Apple CEO Steve Jobs was being too much of a control freak.” Earlier in the year, Chanel also pulled a similar sized campaign from the network for similar reasons. Apple claim to have signed up over half of the top 25 of the top advertisers but it remains to be seen whether this the Adidases and Chanels they lose are worth losing to maintain that high-quality ‘Apple experience’.

#IAmSpartacus

“Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”

That was the tweet that (five days later by the way) was picked up by the authorities and led to the eventual arrest and trial of Paul Chambers in what’s become known as the ‘twitter joke trial’. The judge however, didn’t see the funny side and viewing it as “clearly menacing” has resulted in Chambers losing his job, a criminal conviction and fines and legal costs of over £3,000.

The twitterverse, predictably, has erupted in outrage over the ruling. 1,000s have retweeted and made their own similarly ridiculous threats using the hash-tag #IAmSpartacus in Kubrickian solidarity. Stephen Fry has offered to pay Chambers’ fine and numerous fund-raising efforts.

On a similar note, a Chinese woman who retweeted a satirical call to attack the Japanese Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo was summarily snatched up by the Chinese authorities. She’s been sentenced to a year of ‘Re-education Through Labour’ by the Chinese authorities, which I’m sure is every bit as scary as it sounds. As if being sentenced to a year’s hard-labour without trial wasn’t bad enough, she was arrested on what was supposed to be her wedding day and no-one knew what had happened to her until this week. Let’s see how many tweets this story gets.

Surrendering control

And finally, we watched this TED talk about Mr Splashy Pants the whale.

It’s a great story about the importance of realising you can’t control the Internet. The web is by its very nature distributed, anarchic and organic. Putting your message out online requires a certain amount of faith that your message will survive, no matter what social networks do with it. This is a scary prospect to any brand but it’s a core part of any viral success.

Editor’s note: It was an epic Show & Tell this week. The first part was Marine’s presentation on the use of animation in advertising. Stay tuned for part 2 with all the rest of the headlines and discussion.

I have a certain passion for animation and whilst doing some research on the use of animation in advertising, Here are a few great ads that I thought I would share with you. I was really struck by the fact that animation is actually a very efficient element/tool for brands that wish to communicate. In fact, animation develops consumers’ imagination, it can be adaptable and become top of mind in consumers’ mind and has also a strong capacity to touch an audience by approaching serious matters in a sympathetic way…

Enough about the theory, here are three ads I have chosen to share:

Amnesty International: Signatures

The first one is an ad done by TBWA for Amnesty International called “Signatures” which speaks from itself, which I found stunning and moving just by using a nice stylish illustration. When interviewing the artistic director Stéphane Gaubert he explained that their choice went towards black and white animation because they thought a simple but fresh illustration would have a great impact on people’s mind, reaching their sympathy. In terms of results the charity got great reviews with 600,000 views on YouTube and €1.8 millions of free diffusions and press articles.

AIDS: Zizi graffitis

The next ad is also one from TBWA for AIDS this time called “Zizi graffitis” which is really sweet and funny. When I interviewed Ingrid Varetz, the creative director who worked on the ad, she explained that animation was the base of their concept, she said “it seemed to me appropriate to use sexual graffiti which is usually found in schools in order to talk to the youth and encourage them to wear condoms. The results for this ad were amazing with 1 million views in a week, 8.5 millions in September so for those who will tell me, this ad is so French, I say, ‘well it worked!’”

Now another way of approaching the same subject but in a very different direction and I personally didn’t like it at all but I will let you judge from yourselves. I just thought it’s a bit wrong to associate mass murderers with people who are HIV-positive http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnQLClo9sME&feature=fvw

Facebook: Unfriend Coal

The last one I would like to share is an ad from Greenpeace which came out strategically a few weeks before the film “The Social Network”. Light, funny and entertaining it shows you how Facebook’s creator is not doing the right choice by using coal instead of wind farms.

One recurring theme though, throughout the Flash on the Beach, was that no matter what happens with HTML5, Flash will always be ahead of the curve.

HTML5/CSS3 may be moving in as heir apparent to take over basic video content delivery, prettier fonts, basic animation etc but Flash has always been doing things that couldn’t be done without the use of a plug-in. In many ways, it’s responsible for pushing the boundaries of what people expect from the web and this week they’ve been pushing that even further.

Anyway, back to the cool new stuff…

Real 3D in Flash

Check this out.

Introducing the new Molehill 3D API. Molehill means full-textured 3D models, made of hundreds of thousands of triangles rendered on the fly in Flash with hardware DirectX & OpenGL 3D acceleration. And these capabilities are available to use with existing 3D libraries like Away3D and Alternativa3D.

Not only that, this will be available in the browser too, not just through Air on the desktop. Awesome.

Air 2.5 – Coming to a screen near you

Also revealed at MAX was the new release of the Air run-time. Air 2.5 is really mobile focused, with support for Android 2.2, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry Tablet OS, – and obviously, it’s running on Windows, OSX and Linux – but the new version is also compatible with set-top boxes and works with Google TV.

That’s right, Flash on your TV and the results look pretty impressive so far. Adobe’s aiming to have Flash/Air on every screen and they’ve made lots of enhancements to APIs to help account for the lower-processing power of mobile devices and set-top boxes.

The desktop run-time has also moved on with greater support for CSS in HTML-based Air apps. You can use TypeKit now and newer CSS features like drop-shadow and @font-face.

For further reading, you can check out all the details are in the Air 2.5 release notes.

So, where’s it all going?

All of these are really positive steps for Adobe, in my opinion. They may have been late to the party on mobile but everything we’re seeing here is right on the money. A lot of people have been really quick to write off Adobe but all of this is adding up to:

• a solid offering on mobile/tablet/set-top platforms;
• packaging of ActionScript based apps for iOS devices;
• increased support and integration with HTML5/CSS3;
• hardware acceleration cross-platform;
• and still more features that you just can’t get anywhere else.

Even InDesign is pulling its weight in digital with the Digital Publishing Suite! (Mashable has a good overview here)

I have to say, I’m impressed with what’s coming out of Adobe at the moment. Innovative solutions, in all the right areas. Long may it last.

Postscript: From the Bleeding Edge

Also, you’ve gotta check this out. Adobe have been working on a visual prototyping tool for HTML5/CSS/JavaScript powered animations. Codenamed “Edge” it looks pretty damn handy and Adobe was always the logical place that this kind of a solution would come from. Watch the video from the Adobe DevNet anyway and let me know what you think.

Follow Shane on Twitter:
@shane_casey

Are you human? Have you been paying attention to our ad?

First off was a novel solution to “banner blindness” from the clever folks at Solve Media, called TYPE-IN. Skyscrapers, MPUs, leaderboards – standard banner formats are all so played out at this stage that we don’t even see them when browsing the web. TYPE-IN forces the user to actually process the ad before they continue.

They’ve put together a lovely animation that explains the concept nicely, check it out.

Sure, it’s much more aggressive than a standard banner and places a barrier between the user and the content but we’ve seen time and time again that users are willing to tolerate interruptions as long as they’re getting something in return. Solutions like this could be a step towards solving that pesky paywall problem.

Following on from that we had a brief discussion about the “Captcha” technology that TYPE-IN is based on. ReCAPTCHA is an initiative from Google in their quest to digitise (and index!) the world’s books – one poorly scanned word at a time.

Oh, the irony

What’s cool about it is that of the two words shown to you, one is giving their character recognition software problems and by typing them in you’re helping preserve knowledge. I guess humans still have a purpose after all.

Google Instant

Speaking of Google, the search giant has been making waves again this week with the introduction of their latest feature – Google Instant.

Not content with suggesting what you’re trying to type, Google has taken it a step further and is now performing searches for you as you type. The technology behind indexing all that information and serving it up faster than you can type is impressive, to say the least.

The experience, however, I’ve found to be at best distracting, at worst damn irritating. Charlie Brooker put it better than I ever could:

“It’s the internet on fast-forward, and it’s aggressive – like trying to order from a waiter who keeps finishing your sentences while ramming spoonfuls of what he thinks you want directly into your mouth, so you can’t even enjoy your blancmange without chewing a gobful of black pudding first.”

Whether you find it a time-saver (really? that busy?) or irritating, there are bigger considerations here too. Google’s drive to predict what we’re looking for can have only one outcome. The most popular search results appear more frequently and higher up meaning search results will get ever more homogeneous and dominated by the larger players (read: payers). Even “God” comes second to “Godaddy” now in Google Instant search results.

Praise be to GoDaddy

In other search news – Yahoo! search is now powered by Microsoft’s Bing search engine – putting Bing up to 28% of US market share. Not too shabby.

Once a giant among search engines, Yahoo! have said this move will allow them to focus their efforts more on the direction they want be developing the company in a last-ditch struggle for relevance. If only they could get a bit more crap on their homepage, it might all turn round for them.

Another one that slipped quietly into the ether this week is Cuil. Once heralded as the “Google-killer”, Cuil’s search results were so bizarrely unrelated that the Cuil has now become the Internet’s unit for measuring abstraction from reality. Do yourself a favour and read what I’m talking about here. Hilarious.

Greplin: The missing element in search

So as one star fades, another is rising. As more and more of our information is stored in the cloud, there’s no central point for us to find what we’re looking for. How often have you thought to yourself: “Now, where did I see that? In my email? Or was it on Facebook? Twitter?”

Enter Greplin. Greplin fills a gap in the search space that amazingly no-one has previously addressed: personal search. Create an account on Greplin and you can add all your favourite services for it to index. Gmail, Google Docs and Calendar, Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook, EverNote, BaseCamp and more are supported already and I’m sure more services will be added.

One handy search bar will let you find what you’re looking for, quickly and easily.

Your passwords stay secure, as the site uses OAuth, the open authentication protocol, to allow access to your data but not your log-in details. OAuth is going from strength to strength (all Twitter applications, for example, now have to use OAuth and Google are looking at adopting the protocol across their services) but to index your data, Greplin still has access to your data. Not sure how the security and privacy issues here will pan out yet but they seem to be approaching it the right way.

Developed by an 18 year-old, Greplin is already looking good to make a huge impact on the web – having already secured $700,000 in venture capital. It’s in private beta at the moment but create an account and they’ll notify you when they let you in.

Twitter virus

Other big news this week was the world’s shortest ever virus, spreading itself like wildfire across Twitter. On twitter.com a vulnerability was reintroduced that allowed users to post Javascript to their Twitter feed which would activate when one of their followers rolled over the malicious tweet.

Thankfully, Twitter’s tech team closed the hole within a few hours but even the White House’s Twitter feed fell prey to it. Most abuses of the vulnerability were pretty harmless but it was an embarrassing lesson for Twitter to learn.

Adobe built apps on iPhone

And finally, Apple announced a dramatic relaxation of their app approval terms, allowing apps developed on non-Apple software to be approved.

“We have listened to our developers and taken much of their feedback to heart. Based on their input, today we are making some important changes to our iOS Developer Program license in sections 3.3.1, 3.3.2 and 3.3.9 to relax some restrictions we put in place earlier this year.” (Full statement here)

Apple famously pulled the rug out from under Adobe, 3 days before their launch of CS5, including the Packager for iPhone feature of Flash CS5. We wrote about it here back in April and I’m glad to see this unexpected reversal from Apple. It’s still not Flash on the iPhone but giving developers the freedom to use their tools of choice and utilise their existing expertise can only be a good thing.

Russell and I are off to Flash on the Beach next week and I’m sure we’ll see lots of happy faces there after this announcement! We’ll definitely have lots of cool stuff to report from there too, so watch this space.

See you at the next Show & Tell!

Follow Shane on Twitter:
@shane_casey

This HTML5 selling point is illustrated by: Never Mind the Bullets an example of an interactive ‘comic strip’ style narrative (A HTML5 parallax powered story). The HTML features it includes are:

Where we're going... we don't need roads!

• Font face loading
• SVG background
• Header & Section layout
• JavaScript acceleration
• CSS3 Multi-background
• Editable content

Another example of Microsoft pushing the new functionality of IE9 can be seen here: http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/

IE9′s adoption of newer technologies such as HTML5  makes it look like it is trying to catch up and even overtake a lot of the other rival browsers such as Firefox and Safari. However, even though IE9 is finally embracing ‘aspects’ of HTML5 it still needs to include more features in order to keep up with rival browsers, as you can see here: http://html5readiness.com/

However, Microsoft’s approach to integrating HTML5 with IE is worth mentioning. Whereas established, approved, stable HTML5 features such as video, audio and canvas have been fully adopted by IE9, Microsoft are less keen to include newer features such as geolocation and animations.

But, the signs are good! More compliance than ever before, improved performance and a cleaner look makes IE9′s release in 2011 something to look forward to rather than fear.

I'm afraid I just blue myself

The run is on! Forget Halo: Reach, Bluey’s Mouse Run is the game of 2010.

As mentioned in our last post, we’ve been hard at work on a game for Microsoft Hardware for the last little while. Well, today it’s live.

Get on over to http://www.blueysmouserun.com/ and get involved! We’ve implemented some nice Facebook stylee social-goodness to get your friends involved and it’s just addictive enough to ensure you’ll be back for more.

Play the game and you’ll get a voucher code too for Microsoft’s sweet new BlueTrack mice at the Microsoft Store. Let us know how you get on in the comments.

But I have literally been around long enough to remember when <table> tags were a novelty. Literally.

And that means there have been a few occasions when I felt the times, they were a-changin’, web-wise.

I'm not a fan. I JUST DON'T GET HIM.

CSS layout. YouTube. jQuery. The death of IE6. (er, hang on a sec…)

Enter Typekit, stage left

That’s what Typekit feels like to me right now. (I should mention Font-Squirrel exists as well, but Typekit does it for me).

Sure, @font-face has been around for ages, but the refusal of the browsers to play nicely meant we relied on the same five web-safe fonts, or used an image/Flash-based hack that killed usability, SEO and accessibility.

Well, I reckon that time is over and the future of web typography looks bright, and possibly cursive.

What is Typekit I hear you say? It’s real fonts, in your browser tubes, with all the benefits of selectabilty, flexibility, usability and the many other ilities they bring to the party.

Have a look at the Typekit gallery to get the full flavour.

Not possible just yet, but here's hoping

One small step for @font-face, one giant leap for web typography

This feels like one of those big steps forward to me. Typography is a huge part of design (especially on the text-based web), and in our advermarketing world can really bring a brand’s personality to the fore.

Hello Typekit. Come on in.

Seriously, braces are cool now.

Show & Tell number 2 last night and once again there was lots to talk about. Things move fast out here on the bleeding edge.

Here’s a quick recap of the main talking points…

The Wilderness Downtown

First off was a more detailed look at Arcade Fire’s HTML5 experiment that’s sweeping the web like wildfire: The Wilderness Downtown. Rob’s already discussed it here but we had another look at all of the cool features that are going on under the hood.

Very cool stuff and an impressive demonstration of just some of the things we can expect from HTML5. It’s particularly interesting too in how the associated indie cool of Arcade Fire has managed to punch through to people not even remotely in the technology behind it and engage them.

Typekit

Next up, and following on from the HTML5 discussion, we had a look at Typekit. Typekit, in a nutshell, is an easy, cheap and reliable way of using any of a huge selection of fonts in the browser in a semantically correct, machine-readable, cross-browser compatible way. Whew!

Adobe have recently joined the list of type foundries already serving their fonts through Typekit and the addition of popular Adobe fonts such as Myriad Pro, Minion, Garamond Pro and more is big news for the future of web typography. We’re already using Typekit on the game we’re about to go live with for Microsoft (watch this space…) and on other projects currently in development. So far, it’s been a treat to work with and it’d be fair to say this will be an increasingly frequently used tool for us.

Hack is Wack

Also in the news this week was Symantec’s Hack is Wack Asking users to upload their videos on the topic of cyber-crime may as well be a gilt-edged invitation for some Rick-rolling. Et voilá!

It’s all fixed now but it does pay to be wary when trying to harness the wild beast that is user-generated content.

:)

Mappiness

Nick’s app du jour is a nice little experiment from LSE that helps chart where and when in your day you’re at your happiest. Over time this builds a picture of your moods and also feeds into open-data for others to use in their own mash-ups.

Not an obvious fit for economists you might think, but maybe focusing on quality of life, rather than just material wealth, will help increase our Gross National Happiness.

Google’s balls

Google decided to mix it up a little that day too with some fancy-pants Javascript to turn their logo into an interactive, mouse-avoiding animation. Check it out in action here.

Opinion seems pretty divided on what the point was… celebrating their birthday, showing you if your browser is out-of-date, a subtle dig at Flash or just those crazy Googlers being wacky.

Next one in a couple of weeks so let us know if you see anything cool and noteworthy.

Personally, I couldn’t be more delighted the wait is over. This bleeding edge mash-up of HTML5, Google Maps and music gives wider audiences a glimpse of just what is possible using the latest web technologies.

Now let’s not split hairs here, yes it does take a little while to load and it only fully works in Google Chrome and Safari. But as this is one of the first attempts at mainstream promotion using advanced technologies specific to HTML5, I think we can forgive them.

For those of us who have been keeping a close eye on the advancements and inclusions of HTML5, The Wilderness Downtown is a welcome demonstration of the possibilities opened up by this emerging web standard. The audio, video and canvas tags are synchronised brilliantly. The HTML5 Canvas 3D engine renders flocks of birds that react to the music, and the new HTML5 audio tag manages the track and keeps record of key points to synchronise both canvas effects and HTML5 video windows. This, combined with the Google Maps API used for generating different street view perspectives, creates a truly immersive and memorable user experience.

Arcade Fire are not exactly new to using the latest web technologies for self-promotion, on August 3rd 2010, the band teamed up with YouTube to put on a live-streamed show at Madison Square Garden, the stream was watch by 3.7 million users and included loads of cutting-edge interactive features including ‘Choose your Cam’ and fan-provided photos. In support of this, Amazon advertised the band’s album The Suburbs at the discounted price of $3.99 during the week of release. A week later, it held the number one spot on Billboard’s album chart.

From a marketing perspective, are these bleeding-edge technologies a good way to draw attention? Clearly, it’s an effective tactic to attract word-of-mouth promotion. And even though HTML5 is not yet universally supported by all browsers, the chatter around The Wilderness Downtown is largely pro-HTML5 rather than “Why isn’t this working in IE???”

"...and then I put it in the bin"

Had our first digital Show & Tell last night and it went down a storm. Thanks to everyone that made it along – hopefully you all found something interesting in the mix to take from it.

For those that missed it, here’s a quick list of a few of the topics of discussion that we went through and associated links.

Facebook Places vs Foursquare

Facebook launched their new geo-social networking features that will eat Foursquare & Gowalla. Mainly because of their pre-existing 500 million users. Some frightening (and unsurprising at this stage) further erosion of privacy boundaries by Zuckerberg & co on this one. Watch this space.

(US only at the moment but see it in action here )

Facebook & Coke IRL

Nick showed us video of the real-life social networking by Coca-Cola & Facebook.

The future? Really?

Diaspora

http://www.joindiaspora.com/
If you missed this one a while back, four students announced their plans to build an open alternative to Facebook, one where you retained control over all your data. Facebook but with privacy – imagine that. They advertised for $10,000 in start-up capital and so far have raised over $200,000 in crowd-sourced funding. Latest news is that they’re 3 weeks from launch…

The Fridge

On the anti-Facebook kick, I stumbled across The Fridge recently. A social network with no profiles and total privacy. The whole thing works on the premise of groups that are invitation only and content is only visible to group members. So, as Julian put it, you can interact with your church bell-ringing group and your BDSM group and neither will know about your involvement with the other group.

123people

Check out http://www.123people.co.uk and see how effective it is at building a picture based on what’s out there on the web. This is why Google CEO Eric Schmidt reckons we’ll be changing our names in the future as the only way to escape your online history.

Arc Touch mouse

Oooh.... curvy

(See here and here)
We also saw some pretty cool new hardware from Redmond that has the tech gadget blogs abuzz… check the snazzy pics above. Dave C & Nick got to play with the only 2 in the UK the other day.

Next Show & Tell in about 2 weeks or so, so keep an eye out for any interesting stuff…

Sign-up... or I shall taunt you for a second time!

This week, I’m guest-blogging on the mother-ship’s blog at http://www.mzl.com/our-blog/2010/07/scaling-the-paywall/ about The Times’s new paywall.

Check it out, post a comment or whatever and get involved.

Firstly as a developer, yes, there are HTML5 features that you can use today, but it would be wrong to say than you can use all of them. As the HTML5 info-graphic above shows there are features of HTML5 that are compatible among all browsers (e.g. Cross-document messaging & WYSIWYG editable elements) however most features work in some browsers but not others.

It will be no surprise to many of you that older versions of IE (8 and older) only support 26% of HTML5 features and is the main reason why HTML5 development isn’t more prominent now (although IE9 will be far more accommodating). However, I don’t think this should put us off altogether, new HTML5 features are generally designed in such a way that they degrade gracefully in legacy browsers. For example, new HTML5 controls such as video allow you to fall back on object or embed in browsers that don’t support video.

Full browser support for HTML5 will take a while, so I can’t realistically see myself using HTML5 consistently anytime soon. However, this will not stop me using it where I can (compatible & degradable features) in order to future-proof my work.

The only real protection

So how often do you reckon you’re updating Google about your online movements?

As part of Free Art & Technology’s FUCKGOOGLE week, Jamie Wilkinson has created a Firefox plug-in to alert you every time you do. And let me tell you, it’s an eye-opener.

There’s a whole host of anti-Google activity buzzing over there this week but this one really caugh my eye as a quick illustration of how much is going on beneath the surface these days. When every click is tracked and now even the “how-long-you-hover-over-a-link-even-though-you-don’t-click” is a measurable index, it’s hardly surprising there are backlashes like this.

Grab the plug-in here http://jamiedubs.com/googlealarm/ or there’s also a Chrome plug-in (oh, the irony), although that’s still in beta.

Transcript

“The Semantic Web”. What is it? And why do we need it?

This presentation will hopefully clear up some of the confusion around what it really means for the future of the internet and how emergence can help us understand how the web is developing.

In recent years we’ve seen an explosion of web-based services that have brought about a paradigm shift in how we consume and interact with data. Content creation is no longer the preserve of the technical elite – the hackers and the geeks.

It’s never been easier to create and publish content. In just a few clicks anyone can have a blog or website live.

The old model of the few content creators broadcasting to the masses is over. The democratisation of the web means everyone can have a voice.

But how do we make sense of all that data? The problem is that our ability to create information has long exceeded our ability to manage it. Unfortunately, when everyone has a voice, we can’t identify the signal in all the noise.

This isn’t an information overload problem, it’s an information processing failure.

The amount of information that exists is growing at an exponential rate. For example, in an average minute this week, 24 hours of video content was uploaded to YouTube, and Twitter processed over 50,000 tweets.

To put that in real terms, the latest estimates of the amount of the data currently on the internet is almost 1700 times the size of the world’s largest library. With so much data available, we can be pretty sure that what we want to know is out there; it’s just a question of finding it.

But information that can’t be found might as well not exist. We need a smarter way to index data.

So, how do we search?

The predominant form of search today is the keyword search. This gives a “best guess” dump of possible matches, often running to millions of results.

And that’s just not good enough.

Google’s PageRank algorithm is the best out there and yet it only scales to billions of pages, not the trillions of pages that now exist.

Keyword search has peaked and it’s only going to get less useable from here.

An alternative approach data-tagging. Authors add key terms as metadata to describe the subject but studies have repeatedly shown that given the same item on different days, people will tag data inconsistently.

Tagging is too subjective and too labour intensive to give real intelligence or to produce properly usable results.

Natural Language Search (NLS) attempts to codify the vocabulary and  grammatical structure of language as humans speak it and understand it. This is extremely difficult to achieve when you take into account the many dialects and regional variations of a language, not to mention the fact that it doesn’t scale across languages at all. Even if we could perfect this for English, say, we’d essentially have to start from scratch for every other language in the world.

With today’s technology, NLS makes too many mistakes and poses so many problems as to make it unworkable.

If we could perfect NLS, it would be a huge step towards real Artificial Intelligence (AI). Someday in the future, we’ll have real AI where software will be capable of reasoning and learning. Maybe then computers will be able to search for us. But to get there we need to bridge that gap between how a computer processes input and how the human mind works.

This is where semantics comes into play.

But what is the meaning of semantics anyway? At its most basic “semantics” means “meaning”.

Take this example. Even though we change how the sentence is structured, the semantic meaning of the sentence remains intact. The difference between “semantics” and “syntax” is the difference between “the what” and “the how”; the meaning and the structure.

Semantics is about defining relationships between things. Relationships create context, and context gives us meaning.

Unfortunately, the web as it exists today doesn’t provide any framework for defining those relationships.

Essentially, the web allows for computer-to-computer communication and transfer of files but without understanding. There are a limited number of commands that instruct computers what to do, GET, PUT, POST etc but on a semantic level, they have no understanding of the data.

To structure data in such a way that computers can understand them, we need to do something like this. Data are structured in clear relationships that are unambiguous and uniform.

The semantic web gives us this structure that allows computers to understand data.

We can create meaningful links and that means if computers understand, they can actually help.

The current web connects documents but the semantic web aims to connect everything. By defining unique entities it can help us to bridge the divide between the digital and the real and allow us to move from a web of documents to a web of things.

So how does it do this? Well the basic unit is the triple. Every relationship is organised into an ‘object’, subject’ and ‘predicate’. And each of those three has an unique URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). This allows for self-describing data as every item contains a reference to its own definition.

At its most basic we have data, unconnected and inert.

By adding links between data we have information that tells us things about the data.

But if we have meaningful links between data we have knowledge or understanding. This is where the real power lies. Information that can’t be found is worthless and information that can’t be understood is equally useless.

With this simple approach we can structure it in a way that has the potential to improve massively how we treat and access data in every way.

Let’s take a simple example: say you want to go for dinner and a movie. Using a semantic search agent, you could quickly get a list of cinemas showing the movie you want to see at the right times with available seats.

It could also find restaurants near the cinema or en route, giving preference to ones recommended by your friends or maybe highlighting ones that have an early evening special.

This is what we mean when we talk about high-quality search results – a focussed list of solutions to your query, not millions of possibly relevant links.

So can it actually happen?

The first hurdle is the sheer scale of the pre-existing set-up. The internet has been online for about 40 years so it’s not as if it can be switched off for an upgrade. With all that pre-existing data, the idea of bottom-up recoding is totally unfeasible.

We’ll need to develop a software solution to automate the creation of ontologies and tools to improve the semantic quality of new content.

There’s also the more philosophical question: does the world make sense? Or do we make sense of the world?

Clay Shirky has said “We can’t unambiguously describe the world”. If this is true, a truly semantic web is an impossibility.

Does this approach force us back to the old days of trying to decide the best way to index data ahead of time? With digital information we’ve become used to being able to sort information by any criteria we like.

These arguments are missing the point though. Life isn’t black and white, but the underlying structure of the semantic web allows for multiple definitions of the relationships between objects.

There’s also an argument that the Semantic Web represents giving up trying to make computers think like humans. Is it simply transferring the burden to us and changing how humans think to be more in line with how computers work?

So, with all these criticisms, is it really going to happen?

I don’t think we can answer that question without first answering this one: what is the web?

Is it just a collection of protocols, technologies and hardware that allow us to transmit data between connected devices?

Or is it more that that? Is it what we do? We buy, we sell, we interact, we flirt, we learn, we work, we entertain ourselves.

It’s increasingly pervasive, not just in our devices, but in every aspect of life, worldwide.

The web is an extension of our global society now. It’s more than a series of tubes, it’s everyone and every thing that’s connected by it, and it’s constantly evolving with us.

So if we want to understand how the web is developing, we’ll never draw a complete picture by looking at the constituent parts. For analysing complex systems,  reductionism is not always the best approach.

Emergence is based on the idea that complex systems have qualities not directly traceable to the system’s components, but rather to how those components interact.

At each level of complexity, entirely new properties appear. In the same way that psychology is not simply applied biology and biology is not simply applied chemistry; we can see that the whole becomes not just more, but very different from the sum of its parts.

In 1776, the writer Adam Smith came up with a theory: when lots of buyers and lots of sellers get together, the resulting “market price” that emerges is in fact the work of an “invisible hand”. Today, we call that “the wisdom of crowds”.

This principle is often demonstrated in psychology classes with this classic experiment. Averaging all the guesses consistently gives a surprisingly accurate figure for the number of sweets in the jar.

In fact, it was the application of this principle back in 1999/2000 that set Google apart from its competitors. At the time all the popular search engines – Alta-Vista, Lycos, InfoSeek, etc. – worked by trawling webpages for keywords and then matching search terms to pages. Like a huge keyword phone-book.

Google was the first to crowd-source this intelligence by trusting what the users of a page clicked on over the content published by the author.

This emergent “wisdom of crowds” is what powers the PageRank algorithm that is still in use today and why Google has been the dominant search engine for the last 10 years.

What appears dumb can create complex systems. Take, for example, the ant or termite. These are creatures that individually have negligible intelligence and no command structure. Yet as a colony, they build elaborate structures, wage wars on other colonies and survive in some of the most hostile environments in the world. Each individual, carrying out its own seemingly mindless and insignificant tasks, when viewed as a whole creates greater things.

Similarly, as we go about our own (sometimes mindless!) tasks online – searching, clicking links – that to us seem only related to our own lives, what’s actually emerging is an intricate web of connections. We create patterns of behaviour and relationships, that if we could only step back to see those patterns emerge, give us a powerful insight into what the web, as a system, is doing. A web of intelligent data is emerging as we draw more connections between previously unconnected data.

This is where we can see the emergence of a semantic layer. Take Twitter for example, arguably the most mindless service out there. Even though the actual functionality is extremely simple, it can be used extremely effectively for monitoring trends because of the semantic notation that is in widespread use.

Even though most Twitterers will have no idea, the hash-tags and @-tags they use work just like URIs in semantic notation, giving a unique identifier to people, topics, companies etc. If a tweet mentions ‘#apple’, we know it’s about the tech company, if it mentions ‘@apple’, it’s referring to a specific Twitter user and any other use of the word ‘apple’ could mean the fruit, the record label or any of the above.

Just a small amount of semantic structure can be a powerful thing.

This is just one example of the many developments that I think are the first signs of an emerging semantic layer to the web.

Others include the new HTML5 specification, that provides the new ‘rel’ attribute for indicating the semantic relationship between linked webpages. And the Open Graph Protocol that started at Facebook has now grown to allow any webpage to integrate into the social graph. On top of that there’s a growing movement towards accessible linked data, spearheaded by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web and who first envisioned the Semantic Web, and every day there are new APIs released to allow “mash-ups” and integration of services.

And this is not even mentioning all the existing ontologies that are already in use and being developed such as the SIOC initiative (for social networking and forums), the SIMILE project at MIT, the CIA World Fact Book (for geopolitical data), Geonames (for geographical data) and many, many more.

And now Google’s in on the game too, having recently announced their acquisition of Freebase, the open-source entity graph created by MetaWeb. And where Google goes, the web follows.

These are the first steps toward the next stage of the web’s evolution.

You're welcome.

1. Press and hold the image above
2. Select ‘Save Image’
3. Go to ‘Settings > Wallpaper > Camera Roll’
4. Select & set as your home screen
5. Breathe a deep sigh of relief

Tim Kukulski’s classes do an amazing job of providing proper multi-touch support by accessing the raw touch events instead of those reported by the OS, allowing for more responsive events and smoother control – which let’s face it, is key to any touch gesture controlled interface. It also gets round the biggest weakness in Windows 7′s implementation of touch support: only handling one gesture at a time.

This, to me, is exactly why Flash isn’t going anywhere any time soon. The Flash developer community routinely release open-source, innovative solutions like this… blowing native functionality out of the water. It’s why developers have always been able to do more – better and easier – with Flash.

Sequence 01 from Lee Brimelow on Vimeo.

Needless to say there was a stunned silence, until gradually the crowd built to a tumultuous applause. Flowers were thrown and a chant of “MORE! MORE! MORE!” echoed through MZ as they carried me from the room on their shoulders.

That’s how I remember it anyway.

Here’s the Prezi if you fancy a look… although it won’t make much sense without me babbling over it. My first experiment with Prezi too, thumbs-up from me. It’s pretty big though so let it load before clicking through.

Getting connected is a piece of piss

If you’re one for falling for April Fool’s Day pranks, you might have gotten excited about Google’s latest innovation, Toilet ISP, back on April 1st, 2007. Those crazy Google guys may have been having a laugh but this week has seen the first fiber optic network installed via the sewer system in Ireland making quite a splash.

Fiber optics can provide a future proof data transfer method that can give lightning fast speeds but the prospect of installing another network of cables is a frighteningly expensive prospect. The “last mile” has always been a problem in rolling out infrastructural upgrades but I couldn’t help but appreciate the lateral thinking that resulted in this solution.

Every design job has its own challenges and quirks but when you get specs like 1280×40 pixels it can really limit what you can do. We were pretty happy with the results though.

Anfield never looked so good.

England expects...

... these guys to try a bit harder. Come on lads, get into it!

Trapped in a glass box?

No, I am not saying that Tom Cruise and his Minority Report glove thingy is the next step in the evolution of ‘buttonless‘ devices… however it maybe closer than you think!

Cast your minds all the way back to 2008 when it was announced that Microsoft Surface units would be in plce in hospitality businesses, such as restaurants, hotels, retail, public entertainment venues and used by the military for tactical overviews.

“Microsoft Surface is a multi-touch product from Microsoft which is developed as a software and hardware combination technology that allows a user, or multiple users, to manipulate digital content by the use of gesture recognition. This could involve the motion of hands or physical objects.” - Wikipedia

Now, I for one have never seen a Microsoft Surface unit in the public domain. In fact it’s only visibility to Joe Public is being used by MSNBC during its coverage of the 2008 US presidential election and also being featured in the CBS series CSI: Miami. So from a public usage point of view… it’s a flop so far but the potential is massive.

On the surface however, this looks awesome and I would love to see it being used in the public domain. I am wondering whether the popularity of the larger touch screen Apple iPad will have any affect on similar devices to Microsoft Surface.

Can you tell the difference?

Upset that your iPad has been delayed? More of a Windows guy anyway? Wish that your shiny new tablet had USB ports when it did arrive?

China has the answer. Reuters are reporting that only 3 weeks after the much anticipated launch of Apple’s shiniest new iSomething, pirates have already reverse-engineered, rebuilt and released a knock-off that sports 3 USB ports, squarer design (possibly more like the iPhone 4G) and Windows support.

Sure it’s not the real-deal – and for only $100 in the difference I personally would be holding out for the original, were I in the market for an iPhone I couldn’t fit in my pocket or make calls on – but it does highlight how fast technology moves today. The iPad has been lauded as the game-changer in portable computing but even that can be challenged within weeks of coming to market.

I do find it amusing that even pirate technologists can’t bring themselves to release a tablet without USB ports. Maybe we’ll have the 3D-printer replaced by a 3D-photocopier sooner than we expect.

Introducing... the jPad?

These buttons are created without the use of any images. The buttons are scalable based on the font-size. The button size can be easily adjusted by changing the padding and font-size values. The best part about this method is it can be applied to any HTML element such as div, span, p, a, button, input, etc. See a demo here.

Although CSS3 gradient buttons are not supported by all browsers (Firefox 3.6, Chrome, and Safari are all compatable). This technique does degrade gracefully:

The discussion point for the increased use of CSS3 is that it is not compatible with older browsers. However, I am a firm believer that as a young aspiring web developer / designer you should be utilising the best and most up-to-date techniques available to you! The argument should not be that: ‘my site doesn’t look correct in IE6 whereas it does in Chrome’, it should be that it looks ‘amazing’ in Chrome and ‘degrades gracefully’ in IE6.

We can utilise the latest CSS3 techniques as well as ensuring the site looks good in older browsers. Here is a quick look at the CSS used for that specific to the Gradient buttons:

To view the full ‘how-to’ article on on to achieve CSS3 gradient buttons click here: http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/css3-gradient-buttons/

"No Mr Adobe, I expect you to die"

An eloquent stand-down in the ongoing Flash-on-the-iPhone war was posted by Mike Chambers, Adobe’s Principal Product Manager for the Flash, today. Read it here

Finally, Adobe have conceded the battle and accepted Flash will not be playing in Apple’s walled garden anytime soon. So much so that they are actively discontinuing development in what was once the key selling-point for Flash CS5.

“We will still be shipping the ability to target the iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5. However, we are not currently planning any additional investments in that feature.”

In my opinion, Apple’s actions in this whole battle have been embarassingly cynical, protectionist and self-serving.

1. Jobs: Flash just doesn’t run well enough on the iPhone – Adobe have pretty comprehensively proven isn’t true. Check out some of the Flash-based iPhone games already built.
2. Apple claims that Flash apps will be unstable and crash lots – This is arguably the most transparent attempt to rationalise their actions. I’ve lost count of the amount of times Objective C based apps have crashed on me. People right crappy code, the App store approval process doesn’t prevent that. Language is irrelevant.
3. It’s in the customers’ interest – Users don’t care what technology has been used. They want rich, engaging content. The kind that the Flash community have pioneered online for 11 years now and continue to do so. Locking out a huge creative online community is short-sighted in the extreme.
4. iAds – Apple continue their “it’s my ball, it’s my game” mentality with their latest announcement about ads served via their platform. Their terms now state that 3rd party ads can be served – but only if there’s no analytics taking place. This means anything other than their own iAds platform can only blindly broadcast ads. Ads with no analytics or targeting is like a time-machine back to Don Draper’s world of advertising.
5. Objective C is the best language – Game Haxe’s post “Bravo, Apple” drips with sarcasm and eviscerates this argument in a way I couldn’t hope to match.

From what I can see, Apple are intent on ruling their platform with an iron fist. I don’t begrudge them their success, (let’s be clear – I love my iPhone), I just wish they didn’t feel they had to crush any other innovators in the field.

Adobe may have conceded this battle for the mobile space but the resistance is strong. And just to be clear, this isn’t just me backing Flash, I love Flash true, but these developments kill Haxe, Unity, Titanium, Java and so many other advances that really could enrich the iPhone environment. Apple would do well to remember it was their creativity that rocketed the iPhone into it’s dominant position – stifling innovation is only helping Android, Windows 7 mobile, and co. to draw the disaffected developers to their platform. And make no mistake, the users will follow when the best experience is elsewhere.

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

- GK Chesterton

While we do a lot of straight down-the-line marketing for them, the UK division is always prepared to push their brand in the name of a good campaign.

And this campaign’s a winner in my mind – get a free laptop or high def TV if England win the World Cup in SA this year. Heckins, if I was in the market I’d consider this offer very strongly.

Anyways, the brief for the UK website was to be a little bit out there, so we came up with the concept of a dressing room team talk, to complement the England Expects promotional messaging.

This went down well with the client, who, having visited personally before, wanted the site to look like the inside of the Wembley dressing room (the initial designs looked like an amateur dressing room, with lots of mud and half-time oranges).

The campaign went live last week, and looks like this:

Wow - Fabio could walk in at any minute!

The miracle of inheritance

To complement the campaign, a large number of banners were commissioned to be completed in a short amount of time.

Having had a few campaigns lately using the Eyeblaster system, we now have a simple, robust and reusable set of AS3 classes geared for rapid turnaround and flexibility when creating standard and rich banners within Eyeblaster.

These were invaluable for delivering to the brief, and confirm the team’s philosophy here – invest in a reusable, flexible code base, and reap the rewards later in speed and stability.

Come on England!

Businesses are using numerous techniques and programs in order to harness the power of Social Media to help them understand their user base better and how their users interact with their website / service / products.

From collating comments from individual Tweets to data-mining Tweet traffic & usage ( helpful in identifying power users and determining how they use the website / service ) companies are now able to use what was previously seen as “something cool” and “I don’t know what it does but seeing as everyone is using Twitter & Facebook we should too” in order to make serious strategic decisions that can help them to unlock new business potential.

OneForty have compiled a nice list of Social Media Toolkits that may be of use to companies looking to turn that “i’m gonna Poke your FaceWall” into serious strategic advantage and more importantly cold-hard cash!

Take a look at OneForty’s Social Media Toolkit

Oooh, light trails

After months of hard work and (a few!) late nights, our Captiva site for EMC is live. It was a huge team effort so massive thanks to Claire, Tyrone, Chris, Dave, the White Balance crew and especially Russell for getting me through.

For those interested in the behind-the-scenes – the site’s built on our evolving AS3 development framework that Russ and I have been fine-tuning. At this stage it’s got the PureMVC framework at its core, with SWFAddress, LongTail Video Player, Google Analytics tracking, XML-based localisation and sequential background asset-loading as optional components that do most of the heavy lifting. We’re expecting it to be sentient by 2012.

Check it out at http://uk.emc.com/campaign/global/captiva/

Here are a couple of examples:

Having a Twitter feed on my site will increase the number of visitors I get

No, grow-up Peter Pan! Constantly updating your twitter feed with your sites latest news is great for sharing content with your followers… but if you only have 26 followers this isn’t exactly reaching a wide audience! Showing this feed on your site and displaying snippets of content that is already available on the site is a waste of page space. However, if you have built up a large following of like minded followers, that are interested in what you have to say / tweet, twitter accounts can be used effectively!

Meta tags will boost your rankings

Spending too much time optimizing your meta keywords is a complete waste of time. They have been so abused by spammers that the search engines haven’t put any stock in them for years. Meta data has been the subject of abuse by spammers ever since they were considered to influence a pages ranking. I have found that specifying a clear and consise meta description can be helpful, other than this, don’t spend too much time worrying about Meta data.

I lol'd

Holy crappy website Batman! Seems like there’s a resurgence of old-skool sites on the web, harking back to a pre-Web 2.0 (hell, pre-Web 1.0) era of animated gifs, eye-watering backgrounds and tables within tables within tables.

Leading the charge is the modestly titled  http://themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com/ with a decidedly tongue-in-cheek approach and an impressive assortment of <blink> tags and comments like
<!--SIGN MY GUESTBOOK. OK I DIDNT MAKE THIS I FOUND IT BUT IT WAS STILL HARD TO COPY AND PASTE!! AND MAKE IT WORK WAS HARD!!!-->

Spend some time browsing the hall-of-shame over at Command-Shift-3 and you’ll see there’s some pretty stiff competition. That said, most of these are better than the average MySpace page.

Our fave at MZ though has to be FabricLand, purveyors of the finest fabrics and worst websites on the whole interwebs. There’s something genuinely innocent about their approach. (In particular their use of frames!) If it is intentional, then you have to admire their commitment to crafting such an authentic 90s site. How did they do it? Maybe there’s a clue here…

<html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">

Update:

So, I was trying to find this link when I originally wrote this post but Google let me down (seriously, I blame this on Google’s search algorithm, not my shoddy memory). If you’re feeling like a nostalgic trip back to those heady days check out the GeoCities-izer. You can convert any website to a gif-tastic Web 1.0 version…  check out how amazing The Lab would look if this was 1998.