Time for a little roundup of some loose ends rattling around my brain these days. But first I wanted to let you know that I’m going to be taking Sundays off from posting starting yesterday. I’m getting some more freelance work, and I’m going to dedicate most of my weekends to that for the near future. Now, on to a Monday Night Grab Bag!
1. Joost
Last week I got my beta invitation for Joost, and I’ve been playing around with it some. For those who don’t know, Joost is a new Web 2.0 company that has created an application for streaming television on your computer. As opposed to the majority of Web 2.0 apps, which use your Web browser to push their user interface, Joost is a program you have to download and run locally. Another innovation of Joost is their adoption of a peer to peer back end for distributing the server load of their streaming content.
So far, it’s worked really well for me. I think I was one of the first couple of rounds of the OS X beta testers, and the program is a little buggy. Also, besides MTV, BET, and Comedy Central, there aren’t many channels of recognizable programming. I know that CBS just signed a contract to supply content, and I’m sure other networks will follow suit. But for now, there isn’t a lot on that struck my fancy.
If Joost takes off, I think we’ll start to see a lot more of these hybrid client apps that run on your desktop with Web 2.0 functionality. And on a related topic…
2. Adobe Apollo
Adobe has released a new runtime environment and SDK for developing applications that could run a lot like Joost using traditionally Web-only programming languages (HTML, Javascript, Flash, etc.). I haven’t downloaded it to check it out yet, but Apollo and Microsoft’s Silverlight could set the stage for the next Web revolution. Or they could fizzle. Time will tell.
And speaking of fizzling…
3. The Web 2.0 Bubble
I subscribe to Mashable, a blog that covers news and trends in social networking sites. It’s an excellent blog, but every day I’m amazed by stories they cover of some new Web 2.0 startup getting funding for letting users share pictures of their cats or some such thing. It reminds me a lot of the last days of the Web 1.0 boom during which investors were throwing money at any- and everything that had .com at the end of it. The recent buzz around twitter, a fairly useless one-trick pony with a funny name and some shiny graphics, has me worried. Could twitter be the death knell of Web 2.0? I can only hope investors and entrepreneurs are wiser this go around.
So there you have a few things I’ve been thinking about recently. Looks like I’ve got some waiting and seeing to do. I’ll keep you posted down the road.
I was perusing digg this evening, and I came across this article about color choice and on screen readability. According to the study, Times Roman italic in green on a light yellow background (sound familiar?) is the optimal combination from a readability standpoint. Choosing a good color scheme for your site isn’t just necessary to facilitate reading; it’s also important to pick colors that reflect the meaning and intention of your site.
If you’re bringing a pre-existing brand to your Web site, you should chose colors consistent with your logo, signage, letter head, business cards, etc. Your purpose for creating your Web site is to extend your brand, and if you go off on a color tangent on your Web site, it will be harder to maintain your brand identity from the real world to the virtual one.
If you are creating a brand from scratch on your site, choosing color goes hand in hand with establishing a brand identity. You’ll have to consider which colors best reflect your brand, if you want your color palette to be muted or bold, how many colors to use (too few is boring, too many is confusing), and how to combine those colors to best express your message.
Selecting your color scheme is an extremely subjective task, and it’s different for every business. So, rather than a step-by-step tutorial about color picking, I’ve put together a list of online resources that can guide you through the process.
Complete Color Matching Guide
This site is about as comprehensive a list of color resources as I’ve ever seen. Of particular interest are the links to articles about the meanings, symbolism, and psychology of colors. For instance, did you know that yellow can represent intelligence or that different shades of green can mean anything from peace to jealousy. It’s fascinating.
COLOURLovers
I haven’t even scratched the surface of exploring this site yet. From their About page: “COLOURlovers is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.” The article that brought me to this site is an excellent analysis of the color palettes of Grammy-winning album covers. COLOURLovers looks like an incredible resource for designers of all kinds.
ColorZilla
ColorZilla is a Firefox plugin that lets you pull colors from any Web page you’re visiting. I certainly wouldn’t advocate lifting entire color schemes from other people’s sites, but if you come across a shade of blue that you really like, this tool makes it easy to grab it. In the past if I wanted to do that, I’d take a screen shot of the browser and use the dropper tool in Photoshop or GIMP to get the color. This plugin is much easier.
Hex Hub HTML Color Codes
I’ve posted this link before, but it is my go-to resource for picking colors. As much as I love the widgets that let you slide a bar or scroll around a color wheel to pick a scheme, there’s something about being able to see every color available on one page that is easier for me. A lot of times, I’ll find a shade of the color that I like on the Hex Hub, and I’ll take it to one of those automatic color schemers to flesh out the palette. Nonetheless, I use this site all the time.
Choosing colors is such a fundamental part of creating any sort of design project that a lot of folks, I think, take for granted how important it is. I hope these resources point you in the right direction when it’s time to develop your site’s color palette.
As I’m sure you’ve heard, Kurt Vonnegut died a couple of days ago. If you grew up a white male in America in the last 40 years, chances are pretty high you went through a “Vonnegut phase,” and I’m no exception.
I read Slaughterhouse-Five in AP English, and after that it was all over: I was a fan. Cat’s Cradle, Mother Night, Welcome to the Monkey House, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Breakfast of Champions, and on down the line his books combined historical fiction with humor with science fiction in ways I had never seen before (and haven’t seen done well since). Vonnegut was one of the iconic pillars of my adolescence, and I’m putting together a little musical elegy of sorts to pay my respects. Hi ho, Mr. Trout.
1. So It Goes - Tom Waits
This is an early song by Waits, and I think it sets an appropriate tone for the mix. The title is a reference to a refrain in Slaughterhouse-Five, “So it goes.” In the novel Vonnegut uses the phrase as a transition and as comic effect, usually immediately following some tragedy. The flippant tone of the phrase disperses the weight of the events and gives the narrator an emotional distance from the horrors he’s witnessed.
In the song, “so it goes” seems to be a resignation that what will be will be, and any wish the speaker tries to make are grounded by a harsh reality. In the song it’s used to distance the speaker from his emotions, as well. If he’s resigned to failure, he will never succeed.
2. Man Out of Time - Elvis Costello
I’ll admit to doing a little research for this post, and one of the songs I found to be a direct reference to a Vonnegut work is this one. In Slaughterhouse-Five, the main character, Billy Pilgrim, claims to have become “unstuck in time,” and in this song, the main character seems to be in the same predicament. I’ll be honest: I don’t really remember specific events in the novel that well (it’s been 12 years since I read it!). So I’m trusting the Web on this one, but if nothing else, the two characters’ circumstances are the same.
All that said, the song is fantastic. It’s one of my favorite Elvis Costello tracks because it combines an edginess (the screeching intro and outro) with a fantastic melody. He’s an amazing songwriter and a beautiful singer. Man Out of Time showcases both. (This song isn’t on iTunes! Sorry!)
3. Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)
Now I know that Vonnegut’s involvement with this song was an urban legend, but I think the events surrounding the song are enough to warrant its inclusion in this list.
If you’ll remember way back to 1997, an email started to circulate with the text of a speech supposedly given by Vonnegut at the commencement ceremony at MIT. Turns out, some clever or inept soul had mis-attributed the speech to Vonnegut: it was actually a newspaper column by Mary Schmich. Well, the speech took on a life of its own, and in 1999, it came to the attention of Baz Luhrmann, director of Moulin Rouge!, who decided to set the piece to music. And the rest is history.
Even though Vonnegut didn’t write the speech, his name became tied to it, and I don’t think it would have become the phenomenon it did without his name attached. Plus there’s some pretty good advice in there.
4. Sam Stone - John Prine
I selected this song because I was trying to find a singer whose voice was similar to Vonnegut’s. Little did I know, that would be a much taller order than I initially thought. To me the Vonnegut voice includes humor, history, gravity, and a matter of fact delivery. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you John Prine.
Sam Stone is the story of a Vietnam veteran dealing with the ravages of war and a heroin addiction that’s killing him. It’s fitting that the song deals with war, because many of Vonnegut’s novels dealt with WWII. And Prine has written the lyrics in such a matter of fact tone, peppered with humor that it might as well be a Vonnegut short story.
5. Cross Road Blues - Robert Johnson
There’s nothing I can say about this song. It speaks for itself, completely. I’ll just say that I’m closing out this week’s tribute to Kurt Vonnegut with a song from his favorite genre, the blues.
Caught this video on the YouTube front page the other day, and I thought it was really well done. The song fits the images very well. I can’t tell if they took a ton of still shots and edited them together or if they took small video clips and removed frames to get the herky-jerky feel. But whatever they did, I like it.
Excuse my absence yesterday. I was under the weather with some sort of pollen-related cold. But now I’m feeling better, and I want to talk about the notion of bias in the blogosphere. I read an interesting post by Matt Coddington, a fellow South Carolinian, over on his Net Business Blog talking about how subjectivity and bias are (or should be) natural aspects of the blogging medium. And I tend to agree. But if blogs are biased, can they be a form of journalism, too?
As long as there have been newspapers, there have been writers using the medium as their platform to advance personal agendas. One of the first concepts I learned when I took an Intro to Journalism class in college was “agenda setting,” the theory that popular media can influence the masses by what stories they cover and how much coverage they give them. So, even if the writers try to be as objective as possible in their stories, their editors’ bias shows in the length and placement of their stories. Subjectivity is part of being human, and I think traditional media does itself a disservice by trying to hide it.
There have been those throughout the history of journalism who have embraced their subjectivity: satirists, political cartoonists, columnists, and now bloggers. And that is the beauty of blogging. Not that bloggers are subjective — everyone is subjective — but that they embrace their bias to provide their readers with content no one else can give them. Through the filter of the blogger’s bias, readers get a wholly unique perspective on words that would otherwise just lay on the page. Instead of “just the facts,” bloggers make the news more accessible by giving a face and a personality to what they report.
But do they get the facts right? Skewing the facts to suit your agenda can be a dangerous thing (Iraq war, anyone), but that’s why, if it’s important to you, you should get more than one opinion about a story. And goodness knows there are enough bloggers out there happy to oblige. On this recent fracas between Don Imus and the Rutgers women’s basketball team, I must have read at least 15 stories from all sorts of points of view before I formed my opinion.
In this growing world of subjective media, the onus is on the reader to sort it all out. And, while some folks don’t like to do their due diligence on any one story (the big reason why traditional media isn’t going anywhere, by the way), I’m of the opinion that the more points of view I read, the easier it is to make up my mind.
So, are bloggers biased? Sure. Is that wrong? I don’t think so.
I was perusing 
in AP English, and after that it was all over: I was a fan. 
