howard | 
08 13th, 2008| 
impressive technology
horrible puke inducing corporate style video
Jul
2
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Could be big news for those of us who love the power of flash as a rich media and animation tool, but have to keep in mind accessibility and search results when building sites.
Jul
1
one guy shows that we really are all the same no matter where you are on the planet.
14 months and 42 countries later.
Jun
25
Poke launched their much publicised Orange Balloonacy campaign yesterday.
Today it looks like their servers have crashed with the site simply reporting a bad gateway error or, as is now happening, a very nasty looking PHP report.
Sometimes, too much is a bad thing. I have to say though, they must have done a cracking job of getting the word out there if it’s hammering their systems so much. That’s a positive right?
Am sure it’ll be back up soon. Stick some more RAM in - that always seems to work.
H
Jun
24
Just found this nice little site whilst reading some RSS feeds this morning. Wordle.net can take a list of words you input manually, or alternatively can take your Del.icio.us tags and turn them into really nice looking word art. Well worth a five mins some time during your day today.
Howard
Jun
10
Osmo Wiio is a Finnish researcher of human communication. His laws of communication, Wiio’s laws, are funny and insightful.
- If communication can fail, it will.
- If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.
- There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message.
- The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.
And I particularly like his observation that any time there are two people conversing, there are actually six people in the conversation:
- Who you think you are
- Who you think the other person is
- Who you think the other person thinks you are
- Who the other person thinks he/she is
- Who the other person thinks you are
- Who the other person thinks you think he/she is
If you find this interesting, you can read more about Osmo and his theories on communication.
Wiios 7 laws of communication:
1 Communication usually fails, except by accident.
1.1 If communication can fail, it will
1.2 If communication cannot fail, it still most usually fails
1.3 If communication seems to succeed in the intended way, there’s a misunderstanding
1.4 If you are content with your message, communication certainly fails
2 If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage
3 There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message
4 The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds
4.1 The more we communicate, the faster misunderstandings propagate
5 In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be
6 The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance
7 The more important the situation is, the more probably you forget an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago
Korpela’s First Corollary: If nobody barks at you, your message did not get through
Korpela’s Second Corollary: Search for information fails, except by accident
The Pedagogic Corollary: Give the student a chance to realize he misunderstood it all
Professor Osmo A. Wiio (born 1928) is a famous Finnish researcher of human communication. He has studied, among other things, readability of texts, organizations and communication within them, and the general theory of communication. In addition to his academic career, he has authored books, articles, and radio and TV programs on technology, the future, society, and politics. He formulated “Wiio’s laws” when he was a member of parliament (1975–79) and published them in Wiion lait - ja vähän muidenkin (Wiio’s laws - and some others’; in Finnish). (Weilin+Göös, 1978, Espoo; ISBN 951-35-1657-1).
Jonathan
May
29
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the blog of Charlene Li, as well as a blog for her book Groundswell,
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Uses a lot of words to basically highlight that a lot of offline people seem to think digital isn’t all we crack it up to be. No surprises there then! What he should really be saying is that advertising is broken - not digital advertising
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The excellent online promotion Spot The Bull is back for a second year. I loved this last year, and I love it again now. Excellent work.
May
27
Über High Street retailer of CDs, Kid’s clothing and the mighty pick-n-mix, Woolworths, have launched a new website to sell downloads and the like to those people who used to buy 7″ singles before CD singles and now only buy downloads - although presumably some of them are a lot older now so it’s not the same people we’re talking about - but you never know!
Anyway, the new site is live now it would seem, but there’s one problem…
Are you a Mac user? (Yes!) Are you on Safari? (Never!) well, if you are, you’re out of luck because they don’t like those platforms.
They also seem to want Windows Media Player - which again could be a problem.
Presumably this is all DRM based in some way.
Whatever, if you’ve got a hankering for the latest Girls Aloud best try elsewhere if you’re an Apple Fan Boy
May
23
I’m doing some snooping into games consoles at the moment - I just got a PS3 the other month and I was wondering how many of the others, XBOX360 and Wii I guess in the “next gen” category, were out there to see how it compared. I know PS3 lags behind them all, but by how much? Because didn’t Sony get a real boost when they won the BlueRay vs. HD-DVD war? Oh, and dropped the price - that always works!
Anyway, I was looking, and it turns out there are about half as many PS3 in the world as there are XBox360s. And there are about 80% the XBox360s as there are Nintendo Wii.
This didn’t shock me - what I was expecting.
But what did shock me was this.
There are more Wii in the world than there are Apple Macs running OSX.
from what I read there are about 22,000,000 macs
and there are about 25,000,000 Wii
Now - that is impressive! No wonder there’s never any Nintendo consoles in my local Game shop.
Well done Nintendo. You may get knocked back a lot for being a gimmick, and not a “serious” games platform, but hell! You’d made good at it.