Author: fioritto

RSS Enclosure fun from Andrew Grumet

I’m doing a little experiment with audioblogging, partly to try it out and partly to test a new helper script for setting up rss enclosures. The big idea is this. You have a Web-visible area to which you add files from time to time. You’d like to be able to publish an enclosure feed so that your friends/customers/audience can see…

Do-It-Yourself Image Retrieval: Swiss Online Agency Imagepoint Adds Self-Developed Feature “Search For Colours”

It is amazing if a photo agency develops a sophisticated keyword-related image retrieval system (including the feature “show me similiar pictures”) without the apparent help of specialists from outside (like Idee Inc., LTU Technologies, piXlogic, VIMA Technologies, to name only four prominent companies) and then claims that this technology and implementation was an inhouse “self-development”. Questions arise… . The swiss…

Worlds of Difference: Local culture in a global age

Independent radio projects like Worlds of Difference would benefit from RSS feeds and enclosures. I found one of their productions at Transom.org, but I don’t visit that site very often. I always regret it when I don’t because I find audio treasures like these. I would love to discover great documentary work in my iTunes playlist when I log in…

Happy Cog Studios Redesigns Amnesty International USA website

Happy Cog Studios recently redesigned the Amnesty International USA site. They detail the problems they discovered and their solutions in this one-page writeup. A couple on interesting points: * The main navigation is based on the user’s level of commitment: Learn, Join and Act. * They offer RSS feeds with a nice explanation of RSS and links to popular newsreaders.…

Eyetrack III: Online News Consumer Behavior In Age Of Multimedia

p. A very interesting research released by Poynter Institute…using eye-tracking techniques, the study attempts to answer the enternal questions: Is homepage layout effective? … What effect do blurbs on the homepage have compared to headlines? … When is multimedia appropriate? … Are ads placed where they will be seen by the audience? p. From a direct revenue perspective, you might…

MP3 sound bites

In the inaugural column of this series on hypermedia, I mentioned an MP3 clipping service I wrote to enable quotation of sound bites. Before I explain how it works, let’s review why it exists. Audio content — and of particular interest to me, spoken-word audio content — is flourishing. In the tech world, Doug Kaye’s ITConversations web site is a…

Jeffery Veen: Newspapers don’t have to suck

Newspapers Don’t Have To Suck The San Francisco Examiner has redesigned its Web site and has done something no other newspaper has been able to accomplish: They’ve launched an attractive, readable, standards-compliant design. The front page is almost blog-like in it’s simplicity and usability. It validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. And even the archives are great — browse month-by-month with…