“Clinically proven logo enhancing formula!” Great spoof on popular customer demands. I liked the whitespace eliminator.

Impressive! Made me dizzy after a while though… but definitely worth a try. TiltViewer allows you to browse Flickr’s most interesting images in a 3D space. Images are pulled from Flickr’s Interestingness list. By Airtight Interactive, the same people that brought the Autoviewer.

The other day I came across an interesting bit of information in Yahoo’s privacy-statement of the mobile version of Flickr:

Physical Location
Some mobile phone service providers in the US are required to operate a system that will pinpoint the physical location of devices that use their service. Depending on the provider, Yahoo! may automatically receive this information. In the future, if Yahoo! begins to offer services that use pinpointing technology, we will ensure that we have your consent (an opt-in) before using the information.
Yahoo! may use and store this information to provide enhanced location-based services as well as to serve location-targeted advertising.

So you would be passing by a shop and get advertising about their promotions on your pda, mobile phone or iPhone? Or be in a book shop, look up something on yahoo.com and end up with publicity for the bookshop next door?

Fontastica offers a few free font sets with pixel patterns for download. (Via Netdiver)

For all you people who are in charge of sending out html newsletters and desperately try to have them look the same in Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, Thunderbird, Eudora…: looks like it won’t be getting any easier with Outlook 2007. Campaign Monitor reports: “Microsoft takes email design back 5 years“.

Google Co-op lets you create a search engine for your website only (or for all your favorite websites). Google gives you a personal search and results page, which can be customised to a certain extent.

I tried it for Rouge and the installation and refinement process works really easy (you do need a Google account). The only downside is that it takes a while for new content to be indexed.

The “Page Strength SEO Tool” at seomoz.org lets you test a site/page’s importance and visibility on the web:

SEOmoz’s Page Strength tool is intended to serve as an alternative to Google’s PageRank score in the toolbar, offering insight into how valuable, important and popular a site or page is as compared to others on the web.

How is the score calculated?

The tool estimates using criteria from humans (del.icio.us tags, Alexa Rank, mentions at Wikipedia, etc.) and machine-assembled data (like pages indexed, internal link percent and even PageRank itself). It is by no means perfect or entirely accurate, but it is a significant upgrade from Google’s often inaccurate and infrequently updated PageRank score

Will the increased use of folksonomy lead to messy, irrelevant and possible inaccurate cataloging of information on the web? Used to file content easy and fast, will it in the end make it more and more difficult to find the right information? Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy offers an interesting view on some of the problems with folksonomy.

(note: this post dates from when Rouge was still on Blogger)

These widget thingies in the new Blogger Beta make the template source code a little more complex to read than it used to be. I found my inspiration to add digg and del.icio.us links to my posts here. The example puts the links after your labels, but I preferred to put them next to the “comment” link. Here’s how:

1. Click on the “Template” tab and choose “edit html”,
2. Check “Expand widget templates”,
3. In the code of the template, look for the section “post-icons”,
4. Copy & paste the red part to the exact same location in your template code:

   <span class=’post-icons’>
   <!– email post links –>
   <b:if cond=’data:post.emailPostUrl’>
   <span class=’item-action’>
   <a expr:href=’data:post.emailPostUrl’ expr:title=’data:top.emailPostMsg’>
   <span class=’email-post-icon’>&#160;</span>
   </a>
   </span>
   </b:if>
   <!– quickedit pencil –>
   <b:include data=’post’ name=’postQuickEdit’/>
   | <a expr:href=’”http://digg.com/submit?phase=3&amp;url=” + data:post.url’ target=’_blank’>DiggIt!</a> |
   <a expr:href=’”http://del.icio.us/post?url=” + data:post.url + “&amp;title=” + data:post.title’ target=’_blank’>Del.icio.us</a>
   </span>

5. Click “preview” to make sure you did everything right. If it’s ok, save your template.

I picked up an interesting thread about the speed at which your site loads. Speed used to be a critical issue in the days we surfed with a 56kbps modem and a normal telephone line. Over the years, when adsl lines got popular, I guess we all seemed to be a bit less preoccupied with finetuning and downsizing our files, coding, scripts, images etc…But nowadays speed is back on the table.

That is at least the main conclusion after a speech Google’s Marissa Mayer made at the Web 2.0 conference. Speed is still one of the hit or miss elements of a website. I made this remark myself quite recently. Most of the state of the art web applications I’ve been using (Flickr, the new Microsoft Live Mail or Amazon.com to name a few), seem to have one thing in common: they’re a bit slow. And it is the “bit” that seems to bother me.

Marissa Mayer’s findings in this matter offer an interesting read and seem to confirm what I feel. While testing out some new features Google found out that half a second more or less made a world of difference. Or to be more precise: it meant a drop of 20% in traffic. Tech Trader Daily explains:

Mayer described an interesting experiment Google performed a few years ago. The idea was to figure out the ideal number of results to display in response to a search query. When Google asked users if they wanted 10, 20 or 30 results on the first page, the winner was 30. More is better, was the apparent thinking. But consumer behavior told a different story: the more responses Google displayed, the fewer searches each user performed. It was, she said, an indication of “extreme unhappiness.” But it was the opposite of what people said they wanted.

The question was why that was happening? In essense, Google figured out that the answer was speed: it simplying took a lot longer - too long - to display the screen with more results.

Mayer said she looked for an uncontrolled variable - and it turned out to be speed. Load times increased from 0.4 seconds for 10 results, to 0.9 seconds for 30 results.

A question of milliseconds made a difference.

More facts and figures here and here.