Author: vdebolt

Location based music performance

No, I’m not talking about a live band. I’m talking about an app that plays music – but only in certain locations.

Is that brilliant, creative thinking, or what?

Right now, there’s an app for music you can hear in Washington DC on The National Mall. The music you hear depends on your path through the area. The band is called Bluebrain and they are planning more location based musical journeys.

The National Mall by BLUEBRAIN. The First Location-Aware Album from BLUEBRAIN on Vimeo.

This is like installation art. It’s installation music.

Useful Links: Games for Change, Jet Blue, HTML5 Template, Urban Outfitters

Find out about the Games for Change event this June.

Getting the jetBlues. Derek Featherstone explains why Jet Blue is being sued for having an inaccessible web site.

A basic HTML5 Template shows you the skeleton of an HTML5  page.

Re the Urban Outfitters copying designs and the power of social media:

I’m talking about categories and focus, people

I was cleaning up categories today, deleting a few that didn’t have many posts associated with them. I figure if I’ve only used a category a few times, I don’t really need it and would be better off with an appropriate tag every now and then.

I noticed that web-education is the category I’ve used most, with 315 posts associated with that category.

This post will be post number 1700 on this blog. That means that over 18% of my posts are on the topic web-education. Add in the 111 posts that are in the category webdesignbookreview – about 7%. Then there’s another 7% that are categorized webteachertips. Adding in the usefullinks posts bumps it up another 18%. Which means that at least 50% of the time I’m fulfilling the promise in my tagline: Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.

That’s a lot of staying focused on one subject for a lot of years.

That focus doesn’t bring in huge traffic numbers, but it did result in book deals, several paying gigs on the Internet and other jobs, plus speaking opportunities. Never underestimate the power of an individual voice from an individual blog, even a small niche blog.

Useful Links: Look and learn, connect, tech entrpreneurs

How Lady Gaga Created a Web Marketing Spectacle for Born This Way. I’ve mentioned before how brilliant Sara McLachlan and Justin Bieber were about marketing with new media, but Gaga takes it to the max.

HBO is trying to take advantage of the new options in connecting with fans, too. Check out the interesting things they are doing with HBO Connect. Universities could learn from both Gaga and HBO in terms of connecting with students.

Women 2.0 is featuring a new series of videos on the InConversation part of the site. The videos are interviews with women who have founded tech companies.

WebP

Google is promoting a new image format called WebP – pronounced weppy. They announced it last September. At that time, they said,

Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution. As part of this effort, we are releasing a developer preview of a new image format, WebP, that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before.

It’s supported in Chrome and Opera at this time. Just this week, the Chromium Blog announced WebP in Chrome, Picasa, Gmail With a Slew of New Features and Improvements with even more support for the format. This post also details recent quality improvements in the way WebP images are created.

Use either Chrome or Opera to look at this gallery. You can see the bandwidth savings WebP offers.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can start producing WebP images right now, see the Chromium blog and the WebP Home page. There are available Photoshop plug-ins, open source tools, and other tools for working with WebP images.

You might also be interested in reading this critical article by Jeff Muizelaar.

Useful Links: media queries, search tips, colors

Media Queries: a collection of responsive web designs is a new site with selection of sites to study. (Also, see my post on Media Queries 101.)

If you’re teaching one of those introduction to the Internet classes where you show students how to search effectively, here’s a helpful post. How to search & do more with Google.

Named, HSL and RGB colors is another brilliant resource table from Standardista. It deserves a bookmark.