史蒂文 :: Release 2.0

I was a judge in the first round of the Codie Awards 2006 and today the finalists will be announced at a Gala in San Francisco (how i wish i could have had time to go!).

Companies such as Amazon, Ebay, SalesForce.com and more at all going to be there.

I see quite a few of the companies i judged in there, so it should be very interesting to see who wins. Best of luck to all!!

 read 0 comments | 

This is a great insight over at FamilyMediaGuide into why kids watch programmes over and over by Joanne Cantor, Ph.D., Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Interesting points I got from it :

• it may take many, many viewings to pick up the essential elements of even a simple program
• children can discover more and more details as they watch again and again.
• enjoy the empowering feeling of being able to predict what happens next
• They are usually overwhelmed by the visual image and can’t follow the underlying story
• children can overcome this inability with repeated viewing and increase their understanding substantially
• Viewing TV with a child is a very good way to engage her in a productive conversation.

 read 0 comments | 

I've been speaking with Nathan over at VodeoBlog the last few days - i originally had trouble getting my username/password working and now i'm no longer sure if it is really my fault. I hope not.

However, the interesting question i was asking was why i choose the completely free option over the temporarily free option (one month). Here was my reasoning.

OK, here's the reason I chose the text only option. I had two options - one is free and the other is conditionally free. I'm quite wary of things being conditionally free, mainly coz I do a bunch of things and then my times runs out, I decide I want to stick with the free option but I lose stuff from my other blog titles and vaults.

Personally (and this is just my thoughts, you guys have done the research on it!) I'd rather see the free options combined and some way of knowing that when I am creating something that I can optionally choose to use the premium service *if I want to*. I know this is just User Interface and Semantic issues, but it's how I call it. I think it's nice to have the "main" option, with an extended set of options (so not to confuse me!). In other words most times I am pointed at the (free) default blog, but there are options allowing me to use the premium service in one click (with something telling me what will happen it I do so). The reason is that I will only KNOW if I want extra space once I am hooked - same with blogs. I only started seeing a use for multiple blogs on blogger once I started using the default one. Sure you'll have some people who do this a lot and will know what they want right away, but newbies will want to play a bit without consequence.

Can I give you a good example of what I mean. Try out http://jot.com It just says "get started" and then worries about convincing me to pay once I've become hooked. I don't yet pay, but I would. What I happening is that with a few colleagues we are in early stages of working on something and the Jot services will become useful and I will already have used them, so it will be an easy step!

Interestingly VeoTag came up too - a service that allows you to add comment to video. Nathan mettions being able to define areas on top of the video (like an imagemap for video - i.e. a videomap) which you can add comments to. This really got me thinking...

In fact, imagine being able to identify people via a videomap (an imagemap for video) in the videos. So you already have the IMDB movie database - you link this into the moving video. You can then say "show me the exact locations in videos where Person X is involved" across thousands of videos. Would sure make it easy to find Salma Hayek ;)

Anything that can help me find Salma Hayek can only be good.
 read 0 comments |