Web Stuff – Page 36 – WhiteAfrican

Category: Web Stuff (page 36 of 45)

Leading e-Business Scores Worldwide

May 7, 2006 / HASH / 1 Comment

Here’s an interesting one that I found under the heading, “Goodbye Global Digital Divide?” in the eMarketer Daily. I quote:

When it came to Internet connectivity the world used to be clearly separated into the “haves” and the “have-nots,” but, according to a new study, that may no longer be the case.

I guess Singapore and Germany are developing nations, because we can clearly see how they have closed the gap to be on par with other leading tech countries. < / end sarcasm>

Can they be serious, or are they just that ignorant? I don’t see a single developing country on this list. What doesthis chart/study have to do with the digital divide at all when comparing those countries?

Create a Book out of Your Blog

May 3, 2006 / HASH / 9 Comments

I wrote about Blurb a little while back. It’s a new service that allows you to print a real book out of your blog. You can also print other items besides your blog, they suggest: Baby Book, Dog book, Cat book, Cookbook, Photo book, Poetry book, or your Portfolio.

My guess is that most people will use it to print photo books, blogs and possibly baby books. Just guessing though. Either way, I’ve been following Blurb for a little while and think it’s a great step forward for independant writers, photographers and artists.

Another neat feature is the Blurb Bookstore, where you can choose to publish your book, automatically increasing the exposure to whatever it is that you created.

There is another alternative as well, you might want to take a look at Picaboo who also does photo books.

Note: What they don’t tell you is that you still need an eye for design in order to make them look good. Sure, you can create an awesome cookbook, but don’t expect the cover to look as good as the one above unless you know what you’re doing (or have a friend who does).

4 Bloggers who I think should consider creating a blog book:

Thinker’s Room

Catbird Seat

David Seruyange

African Bullets & Honey

Know a blog or blogger that you think should print their blog? List them in the comments section below.

Beware the Bloggers

May 3, 2006 / HASH / 1 Comment

It seems that ad agency Warren Kremer Paino Advertising (WKPA) has filed suit against a blogger by the name of Lance Dutson, “for copyright infringement, defamation and trade libel and injurious falsehood.” Why? Because the State of Maine hired them to do their tourism advertising and he was outspoken about how they were wasting money doing the wrong things – he critiqued their marketing strategy.

“some big company in New York with no ties to the state, pissing away tax money.” – Lance Dutson

(read the full story here)

So, why is this important? As Steve Rubel points out, the last thing you want to do is sue a blogger if you’re a big company. The negative ramifications so far outweigh the positives that it just doesn’t make sense. WKPA will have to live with their online identity (through search engines) being negative for many years. They didn’t need to let this happen.

Corporate Lesson Learned #1:
Trying to silence blogger’s voices on the web is search engine suicide.

Corporate Lesson Learned #2:
Get your own blog, that way you have a platform to answer back on in the same medium.

New Blog Search Engine: Sphere

May 2, 2006 / HASH / 2 Comments

I’ve been a Beta tester for Sphere for a little while now, and it’s finally gone live. I have to say that I’m really impressed with the final product and I think it will give a lot more relevant results than those currently found on Technorati and IceRocket.

There are three main areas to Sphere:

Blog search results
The results are based off of a number things. They are tying in which blogs link to each other, posting frequency and length, and which bloggers are starting the conversation.
Featured blogs
Supposedly, due to the way the Sphere algorithm is designed, they can tell wich blogs are the most relevant. Again, they pay attention to the posting frequency and link structure to determine this. If you don’t see a blog listed here that you think should be, you can submit it.
Related media
This last area is where Sphere makes a little money off of links to other media like books (Amazon). A feature that I like is how they link you to podcasts about the given search term and show images that are related as well. I’m sure this area will see some changes ahead.

Lastly, there is a downloadable Sphere tool that allows you to do quick searches of a particular website/blog that you are on for relevant results in the blogosphere. You’ll basically get back results from other blogs that have content similar to the one you are currently on.

The Customer Isn’t Always Right

April 28, 2006 / HASH / 1 Comment

How many times have you heard, “The customer is always right.”? Seth Godin, web marketing guru, talks about that in one of his recent posts. His take is that if you just can’t make the customer right, then make sure they’re not your customer anymore.

In my line of work, web strategy, the real reason that companies (my customers) need my help is that they’re wrong. Many don’t know what they’re doing and almost everything they think they know about the web is probably wrong. Most successful companies are good at certain things, that’s what got them where they are, many times it’s not their web marketing. If they were good at it, they probably wouldn’t need me coming in to fix things.

So, is the customer always right? Maybe in retail environment. Is the customer always right when you’re a consultant? Probably not.

Does that mean you offensively slam their problems in their face? No, there’s still alot to be said for tact and civility. You just need to be conscious of the fact that YOU are the expert and should know what’s right or wrong in your field, not them.

Hotmail Rant

April 20, 2006 / HASH / 17 Comments

I don’t rant that often, but this time I have a bone to pick with Microsoft and plan to use my little “soap box on the web” to do it. If you don’t like listening to people whine, please disregard this post.

Honestly, I don’t use Hotmail that often. I’ve had it for a long time, so I check it about once every month or so to make sure I haven’t missed a random email from some long-lost friend. I catch one about every 6 months and tell them about my new email address.

What I have more of a beef about is the fact that they just deleted everything without any warning. 30 days of inactivity is NOT long. People are often inactive for longer amounts of time than that using web applications (email or otherwise).

The following email I sent to the Hotmail staff says it all. It probably won’t be read by that faceless organization, but at least I get to pretend that it might.

Dear Faceless Hotmail Staff,

I really cannot believe that because I didn’t log into my account for 30 days that you just up and deleted every last message in my email account. What if I was in the hospital for 30 days, maybe out of the country and not able to get online?

My account has been active with you for over 10 years now, archived messages and all are now gone. Thank you for deleting my digital email history with no warning. This policy is absolutely the worst one I have seen in years.

Do you ever stop to think why people hate Microsoft? It stems from the arrogance you carry to make arbitrary decisions that end up affecting millions of people’s lives – not even stopping to think of the ramifications. I’ve never been one of those Microsoft-haters, thank you for giving me a kick in the nuts down that road.

There’s a reason why people are flocking to Google and Yahoo, they know they won’t get treated like trash.

I’m flabbergasted by your arrogance and amazed at your stupidity.

So, not only does Hotmail offer a shoddier service than almost every other email provider on the web, they also treat you like crap. Save yourself the headaches and use Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

< /end rant>

Web Calendars Galore

April 13, 2006 / HASH / Comments Off

There are a lot of smaller companies who have been developing web-based calendars over the last year, but yesterday one of the “big boys” launched their version: Google. Web-based calendars really are useful, making the ability to keep track of your busy life possible no matter where you are, and no matter if you have your personal computer with you or not. Here are a couple worth looking at:

Google has launched its calendar service at calendar.google.com today, which is big news in the web application world. Techcrunch has a great writeup on it. I like what they have to offer, it really does look like a good service. If you already have a Gmail account, or use a personalized Google start page, it only make sense to start integrating into their calendar.

A calendar service that I’ve been using for the past couple of months, that I really like, goes by the name 30Boxes. I wrote about it a little while back. I would definately suggest trying it out, it is very simple and easy to use.

Others worthy of a mention:

Pixoh: Image Editing Made Easy!

April 11, 2006 / HASH / 2 Comments

Do you ever find yourself wishing you could resize a picture, crop, or rotate it – and you just don’t have the software to do that with easily? I do all the time. I’ll be on a computer and not have access to photoshop and want to mess with an image, maybe just to throw it up on my blog here.

Enter Pixoh. Pixoh is a web-based image editor that allows you to do all that easily. Basically, they took all the most common things you might use in a computer-based image editor, stripped out all the complicated parts, and put it on the web for anyone to use for free.

You can easily grab an image from a website, by using the bookmarklet or by entering the link address of the image. Alternatively you can just upload one from your computer. You can see a video of how it works here.

It’s simple. It’s easy. It wins.

Key features:

Edit big imagesâ€”up to 10 MB, or 5000×5000 pixels
Import pictures from any web site (including Flickr) with our bookmarklet
Flickr export, or save as GIF, JPG, PDF, PNG, or TIF
Basic editing tools like crop, rotate, resizeâ€”many more are in the works
Unlimited undo and redo (Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y, or âŒ˜Z and âŒ˜Y on your Mac)
Nondestructive scaling, rotating, and croppingâ€”we always work from the original

Where Africa and Technology Collide!

Category: Web Stuff (page 36 of 45)