Category — Technology

Web developers and designers, rejoice. Welcome to your new favorite Firefox extension. The Aardvark extension offers, among other things, a new variation of the “View Source” command. It generates Javascript rather than HTML code. The Javascript code will then build the elements using “w3c DOM” techniques…a far, far better way to do things than, say, using inner HTML.
HOW IT WORKS:

After installing the Firefox Extension and restarting, with a quick right click you “Start Ardvark” and you’re off. As you glide the mouse over the page, you will see a red rectangle framing each element under the cursor. You’ll also see a little yellow caption showing the HTML element type and its class or id if they exist - great for figuring out any wordpress CSS style coding.

THINGS YOU CAN DO WITH ARDVARK:

• See (only) what what you want - Clean up unwanted banners and surrounding ads prior to printing a page.
• Learn How Great Design is Done by Reverse Engineering a Page - See how the page is created, block by block. This is by far my favorite feature - especially when I find a really cool piece of java/dhtml that I’ve never seen before and want to know how it’s coded. You can get an exact snap of what the code looks like.
• View the source code of one or more elements

Don’t take my word for it - go and run the demo. If you’re a developer/designer, I promise, it’ll be love at first click.

The best way to measure the influence of any blogger is readership (traffic). Thanks to companies like Feedburner and Alexa, we can measure readership statistics and trends. In fact, displaying RSS and traffic rank stats in a visible place on a blog is one of the best ways to advertise (and measure) the popularity of a site. Some might even argue that it’s a marketing technique that turns a popular blog into a REALLY popular blog overnight, as visitors subscribe in droves just to see what all the fuss is about. I have to admit that I find it totally fascinating in the geekiest possible way that a single person/blogger can develop a readership in the tens of thousands a DAY. Can you imagine 50 to 100 thousand people getting an email or a feed every single time you posted a thought or an idea? It’s difficult, if not impossible, to picture that many people in one physical space paying attention to one person. To put it in perspective, it’s the equivalent of an entire football stadium listening to one person sing the national anthem. Considering that the most popular blogs are posting daily, some of them multiple times a day, the “who’s-paying-attention” figures can be staggering. [Read more →]

For weeks now I’ve been waiting for the price to drop on the Blackberry Curve - I’ve been checking the price two or three times a day on Amazon. Why Amazon? Simple - 100% carrier subsidized BlackBerry Curves. And I’m not talking about just the old 8300 models either - they’ve got FREE T-Mobile Curve 8320 Titanium’s!

[Read more →]

For a weeks now I’ve been exchanging emails back and forth with Alex Iskold at AdaptiveBlue, beta testing and giving feedback on the AdaptiveBlue Feed Publishing Feature for WordPress (for those of you not familiar with the Feed Publishing Feature, check out the book feed in the top right hand corner of this blog). Although the scripts that make AdaptiveBlue’s Feed Publishing platform-agnostic have only just been released, I have no doubt that the Feed Publishing feature is about to take-off running with an adoption rate in the Wordpress community similar to it’s most famous and ubiquitous plug-ins. Not only is it going to change the way bloggers publish, but SmartLinks are going to change the way we consume information and navigate the web. [Read more →]

The Internet Archive (the one that brought us the Wayback Machine) wants to provide free access to a comprehensive selection of books online through a project called the Open Library. Right now the library’s collection is far from extensive, but the idea is promising, and the Internet Archive is a determined archiver, so here’s hoping the project continues to improve (their new demo site looks cool).

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During one of our firm meetings covering how globalization will impact our firm and our jobs over the next decade, this video was presented and it sparked some pretty interesting debate and discussion on how rising countries like China and India could potentially impact the way we do our jobs, how important education is and how everyone is in a race to the top. This video - Shift Happens - is a must see if you’re interested in globalization- it’s had over a million views on YouTube in the last few months, which, in itself, shows you how fast information travels.

It’s been over 2 years now since my masters thesis was published in the Georgetown Library, but I’m finding that it’s relevance is only increasing. When I was doing my research back in 2004-2005, Massively Multi-player Online Gaming Communities were a very new phenomenon - even online social networking giants like Facebook and MySpace were just starting to establish their base communities. Virtual gaming communities like Blizzard’s World Of War Craft and SecondLife since have seen an exponential leap in their popularity and online social significance. Both of these communities, along with several others, have recently been the subject of scrutiny by popular publishers like The New York Times, Business 2.0, Wired and MSNBC. And, as the focus on the social and commercial significance of online communities intensifies with large publishers and businesses, I’ve been receiving more and more emails from online-goers and researchers requesting copies of my thesis, so I’ve included a link to it below. Thanks, by the way, to those of you who have shown an on-going support for my work - I’ve enjoyed talking to each and every one of you. I wish you all luck in your academic endeavors. And, please, stop by this site frequently for updates - I’ll be posting more articles on Gaming In Cyberspace in the future!

You can download a copy of my thesis here - Gaming In Cyberspace: How Interactive Entertainment Is Changing Communication & Identity On The Net. Happy Reading!

Abstract of Gaming In Cyberspace: How Interactive Entertainment Is Changing Communication & Identity On The Net:

Currently, several million people around the globe have accounts in the virtual worlds of massively multiplayer online video games. The overall population of these virtual worlds has grown rapidly since 1996. This thesis offers an insight into interaction forms available in massively multiplayer online games by analyzing their communicative and social aspects.

The thesis aims to provide a deeper understanding of how virtual environments may be used in the future to overcome the limitations of current text-based communication, which are classified by a reduced set of intuitive non-verbal cues. The work is conducted using conceptual analysis, by applying a theoretical model that translates the perceivable interaction forms that human beings use in face-to-face interaction in the real world to virtual worlds.

This thesis will argue that that the richness of interaction within computer-mediated environments (CMEs) varies depending on the available medium, and that CMEs structure the processes of identity presentation and communication in significant ways. Additionally, it argues that the number of channels (e.g. speech, gesture or posture) and their dynamics (e.g. the simultaneous use of multiple channels) affect the overall level of richness of communication that takes place between users within computer-mediated environments that support communication. Finally, it will argue that the increased range of communicative channels that support interaction within massively multiplayer online video games can be used to overcome the limitations of current text-based communication in cyberspace, and that, as virtual worlds become an increasingly common phenomenon, they will influence the processes by which internet users communicate and present their identities online in the future.

Although Brad Feld doesnt know me, he’s had a significant impact on my life (and free time) these past few weeks. As with all 6-degrees-of-separation stories, Brad came into my life through someone else - In this case, my fiance, Julie. Jules’ daily life is consumed in Venture Capital and I’ll be the first to admit that she has a much cooler job than I do. Her job makes for great after-work conversation, and a fantastic residual benefit I get from her day-to-day is that I get to hear out about a ton of exciting new startups and pre-funded technologies months before they ever hit the public’s radar. Every now and again, she’ll come home after a long day of meetings and presentations super-excited about a new technology or product that her firm’s considering funding, itching to share her news about the next-greatest medical breakthrough or internet startup. A little over a month ago she had one of those days - she had just met Brad Feld. Ever since that night I’ve been a Feld fan, and I read his blogs, Feld Thoughts and AskTheVC , regularly. Brad’s the Managing Director at the Foundry Group, and currently serves on the board of directors of a number of private companies, including ePartners, Gold Systems, Judy’s Book, NewsGator, Rally Software, and StillSecure. One of his group’s most recent successes is Feedburner, which was recently acquired by Google.

One of Brad’s newest projects is a company called Lijit, which is still gathering momentum. Last week Lijit announced that they had raised a $3.3 million financing. If you aren’t familiar with Lijit, it’s the search box widget in the far right column of my site with the “My Content” icons. The Lijit widget is free to publishers, and cake to install - just a cut and paste of couple of lines of java. I found that it had one very minor bug when it comes to WordPress 2.2.1, which is my platform of choice, but the formatting problem I was having was fixed almost immediately thanks to Lijit’s customer service, which is literally the best of any company I’ve ever experienced on or off the web — I’d also like to clarify that I’m not prone to sweeping statements like that - I have been emailing back and forth with Tara Anderson at Lijit weekly and her friendly replies hit my inbox before I close my browser every single time. Just to show you how awesome she is, here’s an excerpt from one of her rapid responses yesterday when I had a minor formatting issue

Hi Steffan,

I agree that this is a very weird problem. When did you first notice it?” Our developers are in a meeting right now but as soon as they’re out, I’m grabbing one of them (forcefully) and making them investigate this issue. I will get back to you as soon as I have an answer for you. Things are really good here and thanks for asking. Hope to have this issue of yours resolved quickly and easily….

Tara

And this was a formatting issue — That’s customer service. There must be something magic in the water up in Boulder. In any case, what excites me about Lijit is that it gives publishers and bloggers the ability to customize searches on their sites to include all the content that they publish - that’s including your bookmarking services like del.icio.us, digg, and reddit; your YouTube and Flickr accounts as well as your social networks like MySpace, Linkedin, Twitter and MyBlogLog. Especially for bloggers, who publish across multiple blogs and who are active taggers and social networkers, this means a much richer, customizable search that they can provide on their sites - which translates into increased value for readers. The ability to build customized searches based on a network of content represents a significant improvement on traditional site search. Not only does it give publishers an easier way to cross-promote mulitple sites, but it allows for a much richer interaction between publishers and readers in real time. I’ll be following my experiences with Lijit closely in this blog, but, for now, if you’d like to read more on about it, a great starting place is Brad’s recent post I’m Feeling Lijit.

I stumbled NutritionData.com this morning and thought it was definitely worth sharing. The site’s main selling point is that it allows you to get the nutritional facts and analysis for any food. Along with the universal food-info search, the site offers hardcore health nuts and weight-watchers several useful tools for tracking and monitoring every aspect of their intake such as the “Daily Needs Calculator” which allows you to track your total consumption of calories, vitamins, nutrients, and more. Other tools include:

• The Nutrient Search Tool - Allows users to find foods that match specific criteria of any vitamin, mineral or nutrient — A good resource to be able reference if you’re physician has recently told you that you are running low on one of mother nature’s nutritional building blocks.
• The Food Category Explorer - Allows user to search for the best foods for weight loss, nutrition, blood sugar control, and more.
• Standard Browser Plugins - A few garden variety search bars like Google’s that allow you to search the ND site for nutritional info whenever you’re suddenly stricken with an insatiable desire to know for sure what’s in that ColdStone “Gotta-Have-It” Portion of Cookie Dough Delerium.

Along with the powerful search functions, the quality of advice the site offers makes it a site to be on the look out for in the like-WebMD.com niche.
Although I’m not the type of person who spends time obsessively counting calories and wondering how much zinc is in a slab of brie, sites like this, in my estimation, represent a major leap forward for humanity when it comes to the vast number of populations that would benefit greatly from instant-access to this particular type of free information. To be clear, I’m not just talking about 3rd world countries and the digital divide - I’m talking about people in developed nations who, for one reason or another, have never read anything about, or had access to information spelling out the fundamentals of nutrition and physical health. We’re so bombarded by information here in the States that we fail to realize the global significance of everyone having access to vast libraries of scientific, health-related information. — and, let’s be honest, most of us wouldn’t really pay attention anyway. But the truth is, when a site like this goes up it means that there’s one more place that anyone, anywhere, can find information that can impact the way they live their daily life — and that means that we’re one step closer to closing the knowledge gap between the world’s informational haves and have-nots.

One last thing…for those of you curious to see what the actual nutritional value of one of Cold Stone’s Cookie Dough Delerium Creations — here it is: