Technology Burner Technology Burner

Today I had lunch with our team at work and talked through widget technologies. I’m not a fan of widgets to be honest. I believe they often break up the continuity of the graphics of a blog, clutter some of the blogs, and are often built to bring attention to themselves and not the website.

It doesn’t get easier than this! Get out your Flip cameras and show your talents off on YouTube. The Consumer Electronics Association is having a judged contest for their Digital TV: Convert Now! Contest, giving away a 50″ HDTV, Sony Blu-Ray player and Pioneer Surround Sound system.

Stanford University has released Zunavision, an interesting technology that allows the advertiser to dynamically add embed pictures or video into another video - even when the camera is in motion. Fascinating technology but I’m not sure it will be widely accepted given its intrusive nature. Perhaps if they don’t make the ads too blatant.

One promise of this type of technology may be for the movie industry to execute product placement in post production. That could provide a huge savings to the movie industry by not having to and film advertising opportunities ahead of time. As well, it would not require physical advertising material.

Americans hate to lose a war, period. In one view, the dying automotive industry is a war that we think we’re losing. I don’t believe we’re losing anything, I believe we’re progressing. Jobs moving overseas always sounds ominous, but people always ignore that we’re creating new jobs right here in this nation that have never been heard before.

This week I just finished reading Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling by David Wolman.

Having worked in Software as a Service over the last decade, much of its popularity comes from a company not having to work through its IT department. “As long as you don’t have to talk to our IT guys!“, is a mantra that I hear often, “They’re busy!“.

Each request is made through the internal process and subsequently met with 482 reasons why it can’t be done. Ironically, these are the same guys that really get annoyed when you look external for the solution!

Good friend and Indianapolis Marketing and PR professional, Lorraine Ball, was speaking to me about Adobe Contribute, a low-cost web publishing alternative to other platforms such as Adobe’s Dreamweaver.

It’s the night before election day and I’m still not enthusiastic about tomorrow’s election. I can’t help but wondering if Barack Obama is simply a redo of Vista:

• Huge marketing budget.
• Hyped for change.
• Promises of greater stability.
• Improved security.
• Complete compatibility.
• A little more expensive.

The media and pundits are calling it a win for Obama already. In a few months, I wonder if America will be wishing for a downgrade, or even the opportunity to switch to a Mac. (McCain, that is).

If there’s one thing that’s changed the landscape of the 2008 elections, it’s the use of the Internet. I was speaking to a local Republican leader here in Indiana a couple weeks ago and he fully admitted that the party needed to do some catching up.

SpyFu is a fantastic service for researching search engine statistics, both paid and organic. This week they launched SpyFu Kombat. The interface allows you to compare two competing sites and review where their overlapping keywords are as well as their distinct.

From the team at SpyFu:

This book is a daring challenge to the business community. Gone are the top-down, command and control messages that held sway through the 20th Century. In are a raft of new techniques that start with listening, responding and action that set the scene for a continuing and evolving dialog about brands, experience, business and community.

NFPSynergy, the only specialist research consultantcy for nonprofit organizations in the UK, wants to hear from your organization for the next Virtual Promise report.  Over the last seven years, Virtual Promise has provided a unique insight into the use of the internet by charities in the UK.

With growing numbers of participants every year and readers from around the globe, we're told it's the only way charity professionals can compare and benchmark their new media activity, priorities and investment.

Source: NetSquared, a project of TechSoup.org blogs

My good friend, Patric… aka Mr. Noobie, is giving away a Nintendo Wii! Patric has been a great friend of my blog over the last year and we’ve had many a cup of coffee with our friends at The Bean Cup.

This may seem trivial, but every time that I reach a beautiful site and there’s no associated favorite icon displayed in the browser, I wonder why the job wasn’t finished. Granted, my favicon isn’t that spectacular… I just wanted to get something up that differentiated my site from others:

Great interview and simple description of cloud computing on WishTV with my friend, Brian Wolff, at BlueLock.

It’s a fascinating technology that, I believe, will eventually encompass all of the Internet. If you’d like to read a great book on the future of cloud computing, I’d recommend Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch.

An Electronic Arts “Spore” forum moderator threatens to disable the entire game for a user’s simply having asked about SecuROM in EA’s forums. This would seem to confirm that Spore does in fact have a kill switch built in, which is something that the EA apologists have continually dismissed.
“SecuROM as [sic] been discussed and discussed [...]