Posts Tagged ‘web2.0’

In this fortnight’s edition of Online Insights we listen in to the audio tour for the Great Pandas at Adelaide Zoo (yes, I made them which means one of my online ventures finally qualifies for Online Insights), look at a strange but intriguing clock, learn the truth about restaurants and what your waiter really thinks of you, and have some fun venting about a web2.0 removal tool called the suicide machine. Remember, your suggestions are always welcome via sd@steveedavis.com.au.

Giant panda audio tour

Well, after months of development and scriptwriting, we can finally share with you the audio tour for your visit to the pandas at Adelaide Zoo. Here is the introduction (you can download the full audio tour on the giant panda website)

In the process of developing and voicing these scripts, I gained a deep insight into the amazing work done by the Interpretation Unit at Zoos SA. These people have deep love for their work and the animals and have to tread a difficult line between honouring the zoological integrity of the work of the keepers and the latest scientific understandings of animals and conservation with our needs as ordinary visitors who don’t want the mumbo jumbo of latin names and fussy detail. Read the rest of this entry »

Australian Nudist Federation website
Australian nudists have finally entered the 21^st century with an official website coinciding with the release of new guidelines for naturists. Unfortunately, the site is one of the clunkiest I have seen for a while with bandwidth-heavy technology. This site certainly won’t be the model for modern websites. Not only is the design dated, the technical aspects suggest it has either been created by a “friend of a friend of a friend” or by a web designer who has not kept up to date with the importance of fast-loading sites and eradication of annoying, animated gifs bouncing around on the page like a parent trying to be cool at a teenager’s birthday party.

Be that as it may, if you are happy to wait for the Read the rest of this entry »

Good ideas for websites
Sean and I have had some good ideas for businesses and websites during our radio show, so it is only fitting that we share a source for similarly stellar ideas from online – Good website ideas by Simon the Web Genius.

Simon is the alter-ego of David Thorne, the man we talked about in 2008 for trying to pay a bill with a picture of a spider.

I have had a number of his other online pranks float through my inbox in recent weeks, so he is clearly tickling the funny bones of people in my friends network.

David’s site is 27bslash6.com, and it is not for the kiddies. It is for people wanting some silliness and amusement.

You can find the spider story there along with Simon’s web ideas. Here are a few:

• everything.com – This would be a website where instead of having to look all over the internet for what you want, it would all be in the one place. This would effectively end the need for search engines so I would have to be careful that google representatives do not kill me in my sleep.
• whereaboutsami.com – This would be a website where users can write the name of the city and street they are on and I would tell them where they are.
• whatkindofcoughisthat.com – A website that contains sound files of different coughs. Each cough would have a description to allow the user to sound match and determine the kind of cough they have before going to the chemist and buying either dry or wet cough medicine.
• screensavingpage.com – A website that is a black page so that people can go there instead of buying a screensaver.
• amihavingaheartattack.com – A website for people having a heart attack.

For more site ideas, some laughs and a healthy dash of black humour, visit Good Ideas for Websites.

Adelaide Fringe
It is Fringe time in Adelaide again, so it is worth checking out the Fringe website. Lots of information is available about every show and my favourite part is the part that lets you see YouTube clips of the shows and performers who will be appearing. Follow this link to watch Fringe 2009 YouTube Clips – click on the show of iterest and then, in the show’s profile page, click on the television icon and the video clip will pop up. 

Passport Photos for Free
I needed to attach two passport-sized photos to some papers through the week and my Google search brought me to ePassportPhoto.com. It describes itself as “the Internet passport photo booth, empowering people around the world to make free and valid passport photos.” The site claims to, “put an end to the passport photo rip-off,” and I must say I have always thought the passport shoot was a money-for-jam job for photo labs and photographers. My Fringe media pass photo was snapped by a friend on a cheap digital camera, trimmed to size in photo editing software and emailed in. However, this website makes it even easier – as long as you have photo paper and a colour printer. You simply choose your country and the service sets the size your picture needs to be, upload your picture, you move your picture around so your forehead and chin are in the right place, choose how many images you want printed per sheet, then hit print.

The site is free but move through it carefully – it is set up to make it easy for you to simply send your image to Snapfish for printing for money (which is the site owner’s right, of course).

You can create images for your fake Ids, whoops, no, I didn’t say that, I meant, for a range of legitimate reasons at ePassport Photo.

Sweet Cron
There are many social networking sites out there today and many of us find we have our virtual selves spread across numerous sites. There are some aggregation solutions available – places or tools for tying your many profiles into one place – and FriendFeed springs to mind as a popular option in this category. However, some programmers led by Yong Fook in Tokyo have come up with a free, open source tool that you load onto your own website to gather your various manifestations into one place. If you comment on Facebook, upload a picture to Flickr, or do many other similar things, those fragments will all be displayed and archived on your own site in what the makers call a Lifestream.

The name, SweetCron, is, I imagine, a play on the word “sweetcorn” because a cob of corn holds many kernels into one place and a “cron” is a “time-based scheduling service in Unix-like computer operating systems”. At least, that is my guess and I might be reading too much into it!

As of February 2009, you can join the public beta by registering your email address at Sweetcron.

No Clean Feed
Australia’s federal Labour government, championed through Senator Stephen Conroy, is hellbent on one of the most stupid, cynical exercises known to humankind. Under that vote-winning and indisputable catchcry of “stamping out child pornography” (which every sane human would support), Conroy and his cronies are marching ahead with plans to force mandatory filtering of Australia’s internet feed. In the short term, this will choke the speed of internet connections in Australia, it will still let through some material meant to be banned, and it will block material that does not need to be banned. In the long term it means governments will have all the tools they need to stamp out voices of dissent. Thankfully, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, speaks Mandarin, because it means that in fluent dialect, he will be able to swap notes with his Chinese counterparts on how the censorship of Australia’s internet compares to China’s censorship of its. Machiavelli and Goebbels would be very proud of the way Conroy’s cronies are exploiting the child pornography hot button to set up the systems for later governments to take censorship further to block anything deemed “offensive”. Yes, they have missed 1984 by a couple of decades, but they are about to catch up with aplomb.

Please visit the No Clean Feed website – http://nocleanfeed.com/action.html – to get contact details for Stephen Conroy to let him know you are not happy. The website has been created by Electronic Frontiers Australia. The EFA has found that recent tests of six filtering systems by ACMA achieved:

• One filter caused a 22% drop in speed even when it was *not* performing filtering;
• Only one of the six filters had an acceptable level of performance (a drop of 2% in a laboratory trial), the others causing drops in speed of between 21% and 86%;
• The most accurate filters were often the slowest;
• All filters tested had problems with under-blocking, allowing access to between 2% and 13% of material that they should have blocked; and
• All filters tested had serious problems with over-blocking, wrongly blocking access to between 1.3% and 7.8% of the websites tested.

Despite this report highlighting the inaccuracy of these filters and the loss of performance caused by their use, Senator Conroy announced the government will press ahead with a real-world pilot program in furtherance of Labor’s pre-election commitment to force all Australian ISP’s to filter their customers’ Internet access.

This whole development is made doubly disappointing by the fact that the Rudd government happily used social media channels like MySpace to garner public support to get into government, and now that they are in, they are going to sabotage the social side of the net (remember, everything is going to get caught up in this deceitful move) to ensure nobody else can do what they did with the same ease and freedom of speech!

To borrow from a catchcry once used by the Liberal party against the great Labour stalwart, Gough Whitlam, “Shame Conroy, Shame!”

Television Themes and Intros
On the Box Office Mojo website, there has been a competition running to vote for the best television theme song or opening sequence of all time. Admittedly, this is not a conclusive contest but it is a good excuse to relive some memories. The bonus is that the show names in the list of tv shows are all hyperlinks across to each show’s opening sequence on YouTube. (Some have been removed but most I looked at were there). So, forgetting the competition, use this as an excuse for reminiscing with show openings for:

• The Dick Van Dyke Show
• Star Trek: The Original Series
• The Addams Family
• Twilight Zone
• The Beverly Hillbillies
• The Flintstones
• Happy Days
• M*A*S*H
• Hawaii Five-O
• The Sopranos
• Gilligan’s Island
• Green Acres
• The Brady Bunch
• Popeye
• WKRP in Cincinnati

The full list is at Box Office Mojo.

How do different wines taste?
Carl Tashian has created a novel website as part of doing a course, Visualising the Five Senses, at NYU. This website gives you the flavours of wines as a visual representation. Through it, we get to see which flavours are most dominant in the major wine varieties. I can imagine this tool will help people who want some help figuring out the wine styles they are most likely to enjoy.

What Carl has done is collectdescriptive flavour words from over 5,000 published wine tasting notes written between 1995-2000 in a major Australian wine magazine. This makes this tool especially useful for Australian wine lovers because it means taste references aren’t skewed towards Zinfandel!

There are terms like oak, sweet, berry, rich, acid, tannin, strawberry, cherry, plum, spicy, citrus, chocolate, rockmelon, etc, all spread evenly around a circle. Then you can work down a list of wine styles and see which elements are more common in each style – the more dominant, the thicker the line that arches to the element in question.

The catch all findings for “all reds” show oak, tannin and berry as the dominant features, while for whites  we see oak, acid, complex and rich.

To compare reds, shiraz is more oak, pepper, berry and sweet, while cabernet sauvignon is oak, tannin, berry, and rich.

To compare whites, chardonnay features peach, melon and butter, while sauvignon blanc features acid, herb and crisp.

It makes for some fascinating reading, all the better while sipping at the same time! You can find the graph at http://tashian.com/wine-flavors/.

Print What You Like
I met a guy, Richard Pascoe, at an event recently and he told me about a helpful site that helps make printing web pages easier and more environmentally friendly. It is called, Print What You Like.

The website says it will:

• Format any web page for printing in seconds – no more pasting into Word
• Save money and the environment by reducing your paper and ink usage
• Make printed web pages more readable by removing ads, widgets and other distractions
• Fix broken pages that don’t print correctly

I have had a little play with it and believe that once you get used to it, it will become a very handy tool to have around. I think it is worth bookmarking printwhatyoulike.com for further reference.

Road Kill Cook Book
I was in the Riverland at Berri, South Australia, this past week, running workshops on online marketing, eBay and the various web2.0 technologies applicable to small business, and met Cathy from Emaroo Cottages. They run some holiday accommodation in Broken Hill and Mildura. She mentioned that their website boasted a Road Kill Cook Book, so I had to find out more. Sure enough, this free eBook is available from the website and contains these highlights:

Tender Pot Roast Rump of Emu: This recipe includes an interesting fact that an emu’s eyeball is bigger than its brain, making them high speed, clueless feather dusters on legs. It also includes such immortal recipe directions as – Take the selected rump of emu, remove imbedded bitumen, feathers, and any unwanted additives. Allow to stand for a few days while you search for a pot large enough to cater for the rump. And, rounds off with the unusual, serves 50-60.

Ribbon of Rabbit: The recipe notes that most large truck tyres will have already pulverized the piece into a nice flat ribbon. Soak rabbit overnight to help remove fur, tyre tread patterns and remnants of rubber. Moisten rabbit with garlic, olive oil and oregano and place over hot coals.

Silver City Snake Slithers in Batter: Great advice in this recipe – Ensure the creature is actually deceased, there’s no greater surprise than delivering this little trophy to She of the Kitchen than finding it mostly alive and more than a little grumpy with its ill treatment.

Goat au Gratin: Simply can’t go past this advice – clip its horns and wipe its ass, goat is best served rare.

You can find this book at http://www.emaroocottages.com.au/.

Zamzar
I cannot speak more highly of any online tool available. Zamzar is an absolute godsend. This handy utitlity can convert files from one format to another, and even grab YouTube videos for you to download and watch later.

I find it particularly handy for converting Microsoft’s ridiculous .***x extensions to .***. Of particular note, is the ability to convert these new extensions not only into the old Microsoft extension format but also into the Open Office format.

A variety of other formats are also supported, enabling you to convert your pptx files into whatever format is most useful for the program that you happen to be working in. The full list of supported formats is below:

• html – Hypertext Markup Language
• odp – OpenDocument presentation
• pdf – Portable Document Format
• png – Portable Network Graphic
• ppt – Microsoft Powerpoint Presentation
• ps – Postscript document
• swf – Macromedia Flash Format File

One of my favourite aspects is the saving of YouTube videos. I often find material I want to share with others when we are not online. So saving videos to share offline is a great advantage of this tool.

The whole service is free for basic conversions, with a variable turnaround time. If you want faster conversions and online storage, then you can pay between US$7 and US$49 per month. Visit www.zamzar.com.

Sendables – JibJab
This is an hilarious site from the US, where you can access sendable ecards and fun clips.

There is a focus on the upcoming US election with a fun rendition of The Times They Are A-Changin’, morphed into Time For Some Campaignin’. There are some classic lines that pull no punches in satirising all the main players, eg, Hilary Clinton sings about failing to quell Obama’s rising star, to which Bill Clinton says, alas you got close, but no cigar. You can see the video here: http://sendables.jibjab.com/sendables/1191/time_for_some_campaignin.

However, one of my favourite videos on the site (by the way, you find the videos under the JibJab Originals tab/button) is What We Call The News. This is biting satire on the state of mass media news coverage. It highlights the shift from real news coverage to the crap news channels need to concoct or scrape out of the barrel to fill their voracious content demands and maintain titillation for extended periods. You can see this video here: http://www.jibjab.com/originals/what_we_call_the_news.

Kids Around Town
Found an interesting website about a book that is being launched this month (September 2008) called Kids Around Town. It is for parents in Adelaide and unlike other voucher books, is totally family-friendly.

The book will have around 230 vouchers offering freebies, 2 for 1 offers, and 10%-25% off offers. They add up to about $5,000 in savings and there are some competitions in the book too.

Interestingly, the book is not just vouchers. It also contains articles from Mem Fox and Dorinda Haffner, along with listings of favourite playgrounds, markets, parenting rooms and local libraries.

The lady behind this is Sheree Hyde, who created the business so she can work from home, and also so she could raise money for her daughter’s school.

Kids Around Town has been divided into seven sections including BUMPS & BUBS; HEALTHY & HAPPY; EATS & TREATS; WATCH, LEARN & PLAY; GIFTS, TOYS & MORE; LET’S PARTY!; and GETAWAYS.

From mid to late September 2008, the book can be purchased online and at selected retailers for only $28. It will also be available through many schools. Visit http://www.kidsaroundtown.com.au.