Color is the newest social media application on the block, launched just after SxSW and relying on proximity-based media sharing instead of a friend model. Founded by names from other successful ventures along with $41 million in funding, Color seemed poised to storm the social media market. One day after…
A recurring problem I find is when web developers, their support teams and their managers try to evaluate who is using their site(s) by reviewing their web logs (or Google Analytics) in a vacuum. It is far too easy to simply look at statistics reporting what browsers use a site…
That map above shows, as of February 28, 2011, the level of Internet Explorer 6 usage around the world. What’s interesting is that this map was produced by Microsoft. This map is also (stolen by me) from a Microsoft site that is trying to move people off Internet Explorer 6,…
I have written many times here about SEO/SEM and how so much of it is sold to organizations by scam artists (though I recoil at the thought of calling them “artists”). Too often it includes demonstrably false claims, like how meta keywords and descriptions will help your site and that…
Developers are starting to lean on the features of Facebook outside of the walled garden of Facebook itself, and there are implications for us as users that we might not be considering. The current trends of web design include giant footers, social media icons, extensive background images, and the omnipresent…
When Adobe released InDesign it included a novel feature that was otherwise unheard of to the average agency — the ability to import content into its page templates from XML data. Having developed a web content management system (QuantumCMS for those of you interested in hiring us), we had selected…
The W3C has taken a step toward gathering all the information relevant to the mobile web, as authored by its disparate working groups, under one umbrella as a singular (recurring) reference source: Standards for Web Applications on Mobile: February 2011 current state and roadmap (read the accompanying W3C blog post).…
On February 2, Microsoft released a plug-in for Chrome on Windows 7 to allow users to play H.264 video directly in Chrome. In addition, Microsoft has said that it will support WebM (VP8) when a user has the codec installed. And so began the fragmentation of the HTML video model,…
In November I wrote up a post (How Many Users Support JavaScript?) outlining the process and results from Yahoo’s study about how many users have JavaScript disabled (How many users have JavaScript disabled? and Followup: How many users have JavaScript disabled?). The Numbers In those articles, Yahoo stated that even…
Forrester Research is an oft-cited source by businesses when making decisions or declarations about trends and technologies. In many circles Forrester is something of a de facto standard for analysis. As such I fully expect to start dealing with a recent statement from its CEO claiming that the web is…
URL shorteners are in your web logs, stealing your clicks. Ok, maybe not in all your logs, but certainly they can show up in reports, tricking you to click on them, potentially exposing you to spam or viruses. If you aren’t familiar with URL shorteners, they evolved as a method…
Apple has released a revamped version of its web site today, ostensibly in HTML5. Except it doesn’t use anything from HTML5. That Apple wants to move to the platform that it touts as the Flash-killer is not surprising. Apple refuses to allow Adobe Flash on its mobile devices and claims…