The timing on my post yesterday (More Frivolous Patents) was pretty good. The patent trolling issues have been getting some coverage lately in more mainstream press (not just in legal or industry press) which has the potential to actually get noticed by someone (or someones) who can make a change.Unfortunately,…
The patent trolling continues, which should really be no surprise. Consider that Nortel put its portfolio of 6,000 patents on the auction block, with Google starting bidding at $900 million dollars only to be beat out by a consortium of Apple, Microsoft, Research in Motion, EMC, Ericsson and Sony for…
This photo represents some of the technologies (pint glasses) that HTML5 (t-shirt) is thought to encompass (drink). The horror of that concept is represented by the hands (defensive wounds coming).I had the pleasure of sharing some pints with Bruce Lawson and Chris Mills last week in London. While discussing what…
The local AAF chapter here in Buffalo, Advertising Club of Buffalo, presented a primer on social media in its monthly AdLab event a couple nights ago. At the request of members, QR codes made an appearance on the topic list at the end of the presentation. While I could discuss…
The graphic above shows my Klout score as of today. Not only did my number jump dramatically, I also shifted from being an Explorer to being a Specialist. That corresponds to a two column jump in the Klout 4×4 graph of social influence. I don’t know how that is measured,…
This past week I have encountered people asking about testing for Internet Explorer browser versions in real life, on Twitter, via email, and spray-painted under a bridge (along with the phrase I don’t want the world, I just want your half). I have seen response after response directing web developers…
I spent about a thousand words explaining RSS before I realized that, for the most part, if you are reading this blog I have to guess you have some familiarity with it (at least by just having heard of it). If you need some background, Wikipedia has a pretty good…
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…
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…
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…