Who is? Go http://www.vervemusicgroup.com/elviscostello/bio/

The idea is, multiple cameras (in or on your TV) track your face and, even as you move around and eat popcorn, present a 3D image – unique to you! There are limitations, due to a restriction on the number of cameras, only four people can watch any given TV at the same time.  Okay, this might restrict how many kids you have or who you invite to movie night but at least you can watch the movie in all three known dimensions without Elvis Costello glasses! The question is now, who is watching you – in the privacy of your home?

From the same article it seems the future in touch screen technology is no longer in touch.  Hmmm. Apparently, cameras can now track all your movements and actions allowing you to stand up to 2 meters from the screen and still interact with the application.  This has plenty of positive implications, including extending office and shop hours by allowing customers to browse, select and buy products and services, all while standing outside the window of a locked shop.  Back home again, imagine flipping through TV and web channels without getting off your couch or wrestling the remote away from your rotweiller.  Given some thought, the opportunities begin to unfold.

However, what about the down side?  How about who’s watching you?  That wonderful thing we call the internet has allowed us to connect almost any device, from your phone to your fridge to your TV.  Enter my friends, not the one’s who cracked the nod for movie night but rather the bunch of theorists speculating who’s on the other side of all those cameras pointing at my ugly face so I can see Southpark 3D!  Are we finally adding to Orwell’s Big Brother or Ben Elton’s Blind Faith, or were they true visionaries? I’m not sure but I think I will cling to my ‘old’ 42 inch HD LCD television for a while longer, thanks.  Rather the nerd glasses for me, methinks.  At least I can go as Elvis Costello to my next fancy dress party!

There, I’ve said it! And I’m not a particularly faithful one either, although iGoogle has been my most favourite of late. As the popularity of RSS feeds have grown so have the number of sites aggregating RSS feeds. My new fave is Alltop, a self-described online magazine rack of popular topics. I found this while browsing spotcoolstuff.com, another aggregator of (cool) content.  This is what they had to say about Alltop:-

Alltop, content aggregation goes large

“What makes Alltop so useful is that the site has some editorial standards for the feeds it accepts. So instead of a million RSS feeds from everyone blogging about what they had for breakfast this morning Alltop has a few hundred feeds from blogs you may actually, you know, care about.

Alltop is also the best designed RSS aggregator. It has enough topics to be useful, not so many that you can’t find what you are looking for. The site “remembers” topics you recently visited, making it easy for you to return. Put your mouse over an article title on Alltop and you’ll see an instant preview.

The problem is that Alltop has become almost too popular. Some topics now have so many RSS feeds that the choice is overwhelming. And the best feeds are not always at the top of Alltop’s topic pages. Now there’s a solution to that problem: MyAlltop. Now you can create an account with Alltop, select whichever feeds you want from however many topics you want and the latest five headlines from all of your chosen feeds will appear on a single page. It’s a very cool way to quickly find and navigate to new content of interest to you.”

So, if like me you are a content aggregator junkie then check them out.  Until ‘they’ find a way of pumping content directly into your brain it should meet any content addict’s needs.

Who are these Beautiful People, now? “An exclusively beautiful community, founded for the purpose of creating personal and professional relationships… an elite online club, where every member works the door.”

How it works is that you have to upload a complimentary profile of yourself to the website to apply to join. Your photo will then be rated based on whether people think you’re beautiful or not over a period of 48 hours by existing members of the opposite sex. Should applicants secure enough positive votes from members, they will be granted a full membership to the BeautifulPeople Network.

Seriously though, why on earth would anyone (a) stoop to such levels and vanity and (b) submit themselves to that kind of possible rejection, and we’re talking rejection on a world wide scale here? Apparently lots of people do though, ‘coz at last count BeautifulPeople, called ‘The sexiest website in the world today’ by CNN was working like a charm in 16 countries.

Try it out if you dare. The answers may not always be pretty but at least they’ll be honest.

For something in a similar vein… but slightly less vain, check out Juggle. It’s a site that allows you to figure out how popular something, or someone, is by providing “factual information on hundreds of thousands of the web’s most popular topics and products. By using basic semantic technology, Juggle assesses and combines facts and information from the most trusted sources on the web to create a complete information set on each product and topic in our database.”

There is no foolproof recipe for creating great, believable, attention-grabbing creative. Until now. Great and believable you’ll still have to come up with yourself, but for ‘attention-grabbing’ you can try Feng-GUI (www.feng-gui.com), a website that “generates a visual heatmap” for your creative.

In their own words, “Feng-GUI empowers designers, advertisers and photographers to effectively analyze Attention and Attraction in visuals.” They do this by simulating human vision during the first five seconds of exposure to visuals, then creating heatmaps based on an algorithm that predicts what a real human would be most likely to look at. “This offers designers, advertisers and creatives a Pre-testing technology that predicts performance of an image, by analyzing levels of attention, brand effectiveness and placement, as well as breaking down the Flow of Attention.”

Which is all really just a way of saying ‘Hey, test your image on us before you use it to see if it’s going to sell a damn thing.’

To use Feng-GUI, you simply browse for an image using their browsing tool at the top of the home page, then press ‘heatmap’. The image should be less than1MB and either in jpg. or png. format. The site will then bring up the same image you uploaded, just with various colours and numbers on it. The numbers show the order in which a person’s eyes move, while the colours show the quantity of interest – bright blue means minimal interest, aka lose it; and bright red means it’s a main focal point.

Quite nifty really. Especially for those of us who use words like ‘nifty’ when trying to produce world-changing creative.

Call to action in web design is a term used for elements in a web page that produce an action from the user. The most popular example of call to action in web is in the form of clickable buttons- when clicked, they perform an action. Think of it like this,  your CTA(call to action) is the banana and your users are the monkeys. The objective is for the monkey to find the banana in less than 3 seconds (before they give up and leave).

How can we create effective call to action buttons that grab the user’s attention and entice them to click?

1. Colour, 2. Location, 3. Language, 4. Size matters, 5. Room to breathe, 6. Secondary alternative actions eg: “Sign Up Now” or “Take a tour”, 7. Convey a sense of urgency, 8. Tell users that taking action is easy, 9. Tell users what to expect

Read more here

I search a lot and therefore made Google my home page. And if over 70% of the worlds internet traffic is going via Google, why not make it a destination rather than a launch platform?  Maybe it’s just my natural curiosity to click on links and maybe the general internet user has been spammed and virus’ed to death and that’s why they don’t explore more.  I also was quite tired of bouncing between all my favourite sites getting my daily dose of news, weather, fun and more. So one day I clicked on iGoogle and my life was changed forever.

You too can have a home page like this

I now choose Themes to suit my mood, I choose content from all my favourite sites to satisfy all my daily requirements, including Facebook and direct access to my Gmail account. I even have a virtual Koi pond filled with fish (that I feed when I remember).  It’s easy, it’s fun, it’s iGoogle.  Go do it now and impress your friends.

People start to visit your blog for example on an almost daily basis, then they comment, you respond, they give advice or request specific articles and you respond and soon a strong community starts to determine in what direction a blog expands and therefore is established as a true community tool.

There are only a few sites that have been around for long enough, and have been focused on the concept of community building for long enough. Rob from Fuel Your Creativity has written a very cool post on 5 Design specific websites that he feels are building communities in the right way. Cool post and some very useful links to some design collectives you may not have heard of.

It’s just such a great name. It’s the type of name that lends itself to being very, very rude without ever using the F-word. It’s the type of name you want to give your neighbours’ kids (okay, sometimes your own kids), or that useless SARS official at the other end of your telephone line. Or that stupid website that won’t let you use it unless you register and give all sorts of personal details, right down to when last you went for a colon irrigation (which gives you the same sort of pain as the pain you get for having to fill out the annoying registration form in the first place). Which, as fate would have it, is exactly what BugMeNot.com can help you with.

To explain, in the web equivalent of a can of Doom’s own words: “You’re browsing the web and you click a link to an article on a site (let’s say nytimes.com) but instead of getting the article you get a screen asking you to login or register. Infuriated at the idea of pointlessly registering for yet another site you turn to your good buddy bugmenot.com…”

BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times). In an effort to “take back the web”, BugMeNot and users have so far created fake logins and passwords for more than 300 000 websites, saving you time, hassle and web-rage.

The long way round to use BugMeNot goes something like this…

STEP 1: Make a note of the website address you’re trying to access.

STEP 2: Visit www.bugmenot.com.

STEP 3: Enter the address from step 1 into the box and press the “Get Logins” button

STEP 4: You should now be presented with at least one username and password, but probably a lot more. Make a note of them.

STEP 5: Go back to the site you were originally trying to access in step 1 and proceed to login with the username and password you noted in the previous step.

Of course, BugMeNot are all about saving you time and hassle, so you can always just drag and drop the bookmarklet provided by them to your Bookmarks toolbar and then just click on that every time you need a login.

You can also help others give the finger by creating fake usernames and passwords for websites you come across that don’t yet have BugMeNots, and submitting them to BugMeNot at http://www.bugmenot.com/submit.php  It’s kind of like giving a bug-spray protected finger to the man.

It is a small PHP and JavaScript web app that tracks where visitors click on your website. ClickHeat heat visions a page, separating cold and hot click zones. Then allows the collected stats to be shown as a heatmap. a heatmap is a map that shows areas based on activity using colors based on heat.

The more click an area gets, the brighter ClickHeat visualizes the area.

Using the tool, you can get a general image of which section of your site is interesting and invites clicks, and which needs some improvement.

For example, webmasters also find that visitors usually associate a picture with a link. Therefore, visitors tend to click a picture without knowing that it’s just a static picture instead of a linked image. Using this observation, you can increase your click through by embedding links to places people often click.

Go on try the demo!

The fate of the bear, whose bound and gagged image forms the background of the site, rests on enough people signing the petition, and Valentines Day being returned to what mysinglefriend.com believes to be its rightful owners; single people.

The site also provides a forum to expose over-sentimental Valentine’s paraphernalia, entitled the “cemetery of schmaltz”, as well as a voting poll on “the most offensively schmaltzy film”.

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