Creative nerds of the internet have been abuzz for the last few days after the release of The Wilderness Downtown. It’s a half video clip, half HTML5 experiment for Arcade Fire’s song, We Used To Wait (link to bad YouTube bootleg)

It’s gotten an interesting response. Mostly, people that have bought into the hype of HTML5 love it and tout it as another reason why Flash is dying. However, others aren’t as impressed.

I for one, think it’s pretty great, but I don’t think it has anything to do with HTML5 or the lack of flash

It’s just the right amount of “interactive”
Halfway through the piece it asks you to write a letter to your younger self, and the interface is fun and playful and most importantly totally intuitive. This small amount of emotion and playful engagement keeps you hooked and helps you remember the experience

The use of multiple windows
This is an old trick, but still a great one. Since early JavaScript we’ve been able to do this, but the way it’s used here is pitch perfect. This is mostly because the overall experience is passive and you’re just watching. There’s a good reason why we can’t use this in ads, but I think its underused enough that its still memorable for most people when they see it in this kind of movie watching context.

The art direction is great
Not “change the world” great, or even D&AD award winning great, but defiantly “highlighted in a good portfolio” great. The grading on the video combines well with the sketchy style of the illustration. The small amount of 3d is tastefully handled if a little low resolution. Even the slight treatment to the Google maps and street-view images is great.

It makes me think of home
I ran it using my actual childhood home address, and the gimmick totally worked on my. I became that runner. I imagined myself going for a run near my old home and flashing back to my childhood. This may not be as effective for you as it was for me, and I suspect mileage may vary based on how long you lived in one home or how good the Google coverage is in that area.

The song is great
As with all music video clips, the star is the song and this is a damn great song. In fact, I love the album. You should go get it. Go on. I’ll wait.

It’s effective
I’ve been listening to the album all day, and recommending it to people. I even wrote a blog post about it.

Yes, a lot of this could have been done with flash, possibly even better. But as a creative its not the technology that impresses me, it’s the idea. Something we need to remind ourselves of continuously as the HTML5/Flash war continues.

Congratulations to one of our top clients, Luxottica, on the launch of their new concept store OPSM Eye hub this week in Hawthorn Melbourne.

This retail concept takes  optical retailing to the next level. The full story is on their Youtube channel

webqem launched the new LUMIX Life: Focus on Australia website two weeks ago and submissions are already up over 1200 photos with 2 ½ months to go!

The purpose of the competition is to enter photos that have been taken with a LUMIX camera across Australia in the hopes that your photo will be selected to be in a book entitled Focus on Australia alongside other professional Australia photographers. There is also the chance to win one of three LUMIX GF-1 cameras

So pick up your LUMIX and start snapping some shots for your chance to win!

Working in the internet space means sometimes new ideas, technologies, paradigms creep upon us bit by bit and, while we ‘get it’, sometimes it can be helpful to step right back and put things in context.

This talk certainly does that, placing SM within the context of the history of human communication and punching home its significance…

http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html

Dog’s Life magazine in Australia reviewed several online dog community sites in the January/February issue, and gave a glowing review of one particular site.

“… mydogspace.com.au is definitely one of the best dog sites we’ve seen online …” said the article.

MyDogSpace was created at home by webqem employee Chris Raynor, with the first two members her dogs Spike and Harry, and now has over 800 dog members. Based on a PHP community site software package with several extra modifications and customisations, it offers free dog blogs, picture uploads, forum, polls, quizzes, groups, classifieds, articles and games. Video and music are available for upgraded members.

With this situation in mind the Email Standards Project has been launched by a group of people involved in the web industry. The project aims to educate web designers and developers about the importance of web standards for email, and to liaise with email client developers to provide assistance and feedback on standards support within their clients. The aim is to improve standards support within email clients, similar to the goals of the Web Standards Project for browsers.

HTML emails aren’t going away, so anything that can be done to make the experience more consistent for readers will benefit the businesses using email marketing, and make it easier for the web designers and developers to create great looking content.

Check out the Email Standards Project site for more information, and help spread the good word!

iPrime were keen to move away from the traditional portal approach and as such we recommended using the latest technologies including Adobe Flex and Adobe Flash. This allowed us to build a rich, engaging site that users can navigate through seamlessly.

On the day, there were five participants (it would have been six if not for an injury), and we rode in to the office in Neutral Bay from Balmoral, Brookvale, Cremorne, Mosman, and Pyrmont.

The webqem bike rack, one bike short of being full.

Unfortunately we were one bike short of filling up the webqem bike rack in the foyer, however since five of the team are regular cycle commuters it’s not the first time the bike rack has seen five bikes on it – so I am expecting it will be full one of these days!

Entitled “Demo of Adobe Connect” it runs for almost half an hour. It’s a worthwhile view as Scoble’s interview with Peter Ryce is thorough, giving an excellent insight into the product.

Thanks to Juan from scale nine for including our work.

To read more about accessbility and usability on the web follow the links below.

• Sydney Morning Herald article: Behind closed doors
• W3C Web accessibility guidelines
• International Day of People with Disabilities

Google XML sitemaps have been around since June 2005. Yahoo soon followed, allowing submission of sitemaps in various formats. Now the three search engines have come together to agree on a standard XML format for sitemaps. Google will accept sitemaps in a variety of formats, such as txt, xml and rss feeds.

In a December WebProNews interview with Vanessa Fox, Product Manager Google Webmaster Central , Vanessa spoke about Google sitemaps. Sitemaps don’t guarantee your site will be accepted and included onto the search engines. They don’t boost your ranking at a search engine. What they do is make it easier for the search engine robots to crawl pages of your site that may have otherwise been hard to find. A sitemap is of most use to new pages that have not yet been crawled or indexed. Compulsory fields are the URL and location. Optional fields include the relative priority, date of last modification, and frequency of changes to pages. The priority of a page is meant to indicate the importance of a page as compared to others on your site; not the importance as compared to external sites.

Vanessa also spoke about duplicate pages. If a site contains pages that are basically duplicates of others within your site, indexing all of those duplicate pages and returning them on a search results page would not provide a good search experience. Preferably only one of those pages should be indexed. Sitemaps are one way of indicating the page you prefer to be indexed.

webqem can generate sitemaps for new and existing sites, and for newly designed sites, can optionally update the sitemap and notify Google whenever the site changes.

The whole online Bipolar Education program has also been created on CD for distribution to users in the bush and remote areas.

And indeed it is. In fact it’s stunningly simple. The actual heavy lifting has already been done for us by Tinic Uro in his Image Encoding classes. All I had to do was capture the image data, encode it using Tinic’s classes and then send it to a ColdFusion CFC via remoting. I’ve put it up as a demo so you can see it in action.

The flex part is standard Remoting so you can look at the code in the download to see that part but the ColdFusion is shown below.

<cffunction name="upload" access="remote" returntype="string">
	<cfargument name="ext" type="string" required="true">
	<cfargument name="img" type="binary" required="true">

	<cfset var name = "image" & dateFormat(now(), "yyyymmdd") &
		timeFormat(now(), "HHmmss") & "." & arguments.ext>

	<cffile action="write" file="#expandPath("..\images\#name#")#"
		output="#img#" addnewline="false" >

	<cfreturn "/images/#name#">
</cffunction>

As you can see the code required in ColdFusion to do a relatively complex task is minimal, it can all be boiled down to two things:

1. Setting the argument type of the image data to binary (I’m not even sure this is required).
2. Using the cffile tag to save that binary data to a file.

See I told you it was simple. Feel free to download the Image Upload Code and try it out for youself.

Blogging is the tool of the moment because it allows non-technical people to communicate quickly and effectively. It allows interested readers to easily subscribe without clogging up an overloaded email inbox, and bypasses email spam filters that block desired emails and let in yet another ad for member enlargement.

Blogging has SEO benefits because of frequent updates. Search engines like fresh content, so if you blog regularly you can “train” search engines to come back to your site frequently. Plus the numerous blog directories, the tendency of blogs to link to each other, and social networking sites that list popular blogs can generate many incoming links to your site.

Blogging has been adopted by the corporate world, with companies such as GM, Wells Fargo, McDonalds and Google having blogs for employees and often the CEO (Sun). The importance of a corporate blogging policy cannot be understated.

Blogs have their own awards, ranging from Australia’s Bloggies, inclusion in the WebbyAwards.com, and featuring in Time Magazines recent 50 Coolest Websites.

What is a blog?

Blog is short for weblog. It is an online journal, organised into categories, presenting the most recent entry, or post, at the top.

How do you start blogging?

Blogs typically use a database such as MySQL, to store posts. Blog software is typically written in PHP or Perl, and can be installed on your existing web host or as a separate hosted solution. Popular blog software includes WordPress, MovableType and Blogger. Blog software may require ongoing updates and maintenance. Free blog hosting solutions are available, but may be restricted in function and flexibility, and include invasive advertising.

webqem uses WordPress for the company blog. WordPress is open source software, with an active community of developers constantly developing new add-ons, or plug-ins, to extend the functionality. The basic WordPress installation can benefit from plug-ins to enhance search engine performance, by adding keywords, description and tagging.

How do you subscribe to a blog?

Blog software typically generates an RSS Feed for subscribers. RSS stands for either Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. An RSS Feed is a file written in XML, a generic specification for passing data between applications. Google’s Blogger uses an alternate format, called ATOM. An RSS Feed is designed to be read by an RSS Feed Reader.

RSS Feed Readers may be desktop-based (eg: FeedReader, FeedDemon) requiring a download to install software on your desktop; browser-based (eg: FireFox) with your browser detecting and managing subscriptions; or web-based (eg: BlogLines, NewsGator, My Yahoo) where you login to a website account to view your subscribed feeds.

A blog typically includes a small orange icon linking to the raw RSS Feed, allowing people to cut and paste the address into the Feed Reader.

Blogs may also include specific icons for popular web-based Feed Readers, so that with one click you can subscribe to the RSS Feed, assuming you have already logged in to your Feed Reader.

Many blogs also contain a link to FeedBurner, an aggregator of RSS Feeds, providing a dedicated page about RSS Feeds, providing numerous Feed Reader links.