Propaganda is most well known in the form of war posters. But at its core, it is a mode of communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Although propaganda is often used to manipulate human emotions by displaying facts selectively, it can also be very effective at conveying messages and hence can be used in web design, too.

via 100 Years Of Propaganda: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – Smashing Magazine.

At @clearleft we’ve recently been working with Channel 4, and their 3-dimensional segmented logo got me thinking; was there something I could do with a bi-directional browser-resizing parallax to recreate some of their iconic channel idents in an interactive form on the web?

So one lunchtime, that’s exactly what I did. The result is very playful, and once you get going it’s hard to stop resizing the browser and zooming those blocks around! Give it a go:

View demo (then resize the browser window)

CSS trickery with the Channel 4 logo // nicepaul.com.

[via @holtaway]

…but I couldn’t miss the login and registration form on the bottom of the page. Seems so human-centric and inviting.

Now – the question is – would it work? Are you feeling this form would work better on you?

Beautiful CSS3 Search Form

While some publishers have concerns over Apple’s business model regarding print media on the iPad, one magazine that’s embracing the future with open arms is Wired.

Recently, Wired Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson called the iPad a “game changer”, and the folks there have been working hard to develop a more interactive version of the magazine that will hopefully be ready to go in time for the iPad launch.

(via Edible Apple)

First time I see ‘License Photo’ option on Flickr, licensing by Getty Images. Now – is it published by Flickr user and “bought” by Getty, or is it published by Getty in another way to reach buyers?

(image by virginiaz)

“In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.”

- The Google Apps Team (via hannahkc)

Without being cheesy, this is one amazing collaboration tool that may change everything between email and chat.

It is still in early stages and the more I use it, the more I’ll find uses for it, the more it’ll change the way we interact. More to come.

Here is a public wave I started, using  Wavr, a usable plugin I found on the WordPress galaxy:

[wave id="googlewave.com!w+MOY0hOzkB"]

You are free to join the conversation. I hope more users will join the gWave soon.

Developed and researched by Forrester on what they call – Social Technographics – the tool can help identify the level of technological involvement by different groups of users across an identified 6 levels of participation: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives. A brief explanation on the different types can be found here.

Why don’t the social networks and communication tools you use work well together?

John McCrea [Plaxo], Joseph Smarr [Plaxo], and David Recordon [SixApart] in the pilot show of TheSocialWeb.TV

[Via Niv Calderon (Hebrew)]

That’s one of the best virals I have seen.

More than 2,000,000 downloads and still about 20 hours to go.

Get involved and download Firefox by 8pm GMT today [Wednesday, 18 June].

I wonder if there is already a world record, and if there is who’s done it last time…

People are not working — they are emailing, twittering, facebooking, and googling, while at work — and the big information conglomerates are in need to do something about it.

Now these companies that created the big information beast will find ways to sell their solutions to other companies. Smart asses.

Link: NY Times

Yahoo and arch rival Google said on Thursday they had entered a non-exclusive partnership on search advertising expected to add as much as $800 million in annual revenue.

This deal will give Yahoo! some money to breathe and will take Microsoft off their back. The real reason behind it is to give Yahoo! a bit more time to find a better partner and learn about my idea. 

In short: Adobe and Yahoo! should strike a winning deal. 

[I probably need to write a better proposal... now that time is on our side]

** Update **

Incremental Blogger suggests that “Yahoo should acquire AllTop.com along with Guy Kawasaki“. 

This is not a bad idea in its own right - directories are part of the DNA of Yahoo and Kawasaki does twits everyone with his AllTop evangelism. Advertising is maybe an answer, but its not the future. It could help Yahoo momentarily [like the Google donation], but it wouldn’t make it different and kicking.

We need something bigger here, something futuristic, something that will take Yahoo out of the miseries of Web 2.0 and into Web 3.0 [I'm afraid that Web 3.0 is going to be like World War III, but that's a different post].

Adobe, with their technological control over the future of the market, and with their stronghold of holding creative people in the balls, can trigger that move, and hey – every company in the world uses Adobe products. It  will give Yahoo the leverage they need, and a lot of it.

To my original post - Adobe + Yahoo = Web 3.0

Israel is not one of these countries, and I’m quite annoyed at this.

The most annoying thing is that Israel’s neighbours – Jordan and Egypt will get the iPhone. How ruthless can Apple be? People will stand on the other side of the border with their 3G iPhones laughing at the Palestinians and Israelis, who will fight each other just to get a glimpse…

Countries like Liechtenstein [pop. 35,365], Macau [pop. 520,400] and Guinea-Bissau [pop. 1,586,000] are going to get the iPhone.

Hello!!! The glorious people of Israel have already jailbreaked more than 25,000 iPhones. Bought in American and European Apple Stores and brought to Israel in deep pockets, or bought in one of the dozens private importers of the iPhone to Israel, without the consent of the valid distributor iDigital.

Israeli entrepreneur Ouriel Ohayon says: Who cares? 

But I do. I care!

Yesterday the news brought back the soap story of Yahoo vs “Big Company”, and I’ve had an idea.

I like Yahoo!  I like Adobe!

I think it’ll be a good idea if they’ll join hands and merge (or whatever companies do).

Two days ago Adobe released their news Media Player. Few weeks ago they’ve released Adobe Photoshop Express.

Wouldn’t it be just great if Flickr and Photoshop would live together?

It’ll be a lot better then Flickr and Microsoft Expression…

“I didn’t grow up buying every book I read,” said the English born Mr. [Nick] Gaiman, 47. “I read books at libraries, I read books at friend’s houses, I read books that I found on people’s window sills.”Eventually, he said, he bought his own books and he believes other readers will, too.

Neil Gaiman decided to give away one of his books free online (initially for a month), as a “celebratory birthday thing” for his blog’s 7th birthday.

You can vote and help him choose which one its going to be on his site.

At the same time, NYT publishes an article on how HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site.

About a month ago Lawrence Lessig announced that the last of his books is now free to download (and remix).

After a productive and valuable conversation with my publisher, Random House, they’ve agreed to permit The Future of Ideas to be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

On January 1st, Charles Sheehan-Miles decided to give the electronic version of his book, Republic, for free.

No more sample chapters, partial books that end in the middle, none of that. You can download and read the complete book. Share it with your friends, email it, do anything you want with it except sell it.

Here’s why: the biggest challenge most authors face isn’t online piracy. It’s not people out there diabolically copying their works and distributing them for free. In fact most authors (including yours truly) suffer from a different problem entirely — no one has ever heard of them. After all, literally hundreds of thousands of new titles come out every year, and only a few hundred writers in the entire United States (if that many) actually live off their books full time. So, by giving away the book, I hope more people actually read it.

Chris Anderson wrote about it at the time:

For the vast majority of authors, being read is actually reward enough. How to turn that recognition into a living is a whole other process, and not necessarily one that depends on the traditional book industry to deliver. Good thing, too, since it so rarely does.

I think 2008 is a good year for electronic book publishing. Let’s see what it’ll do for other media publishing..

BTW, a nice feature is that you can search in most of these books (and many more) in Google Book Search.

Facebook is giving users some control over whether to share information on their buying habits and other online activities with friends.

For the program announced Tuesday to work, enough users must actually say “yes” so advertisers can show users their pitches in the guise of friends’ endorsements.

It seems that Facebook is trying to make money out of its sudden success, but not exactly know how. It feels that its creators are shooting to all the directions, without success…

To tell the truth, web-advertising is a just another form of spam. If my Firefox plugin would have been only slightly better, I wouldn’t have any adverts on at all when browsing. Its a great spam filter.

But like with spam mails, I learned to ignore the adverts, and just mark them as spam, without even readin the content. I hardly ever go to advertised links, and it only happens by mistake, or because Google placed them in a strategic location at the top of my search results.

The major problem with spamdvertising is when heavy, loud, video adverts are appearing on certain news sites, jamming my bandwidth and crashing my browser. But I’m not sure that Google Adwords are doing any better.

I think web based companies should find other ways to make money than spam their users with advertising. Of course they might make good money of adverts, but the users don’t appreciate it a s good-will gesture, will not press on the proposed link (or doing it unknowingly), and will not remember the name of the brand. Slowly, we will just learn to ignore it.

Companies need to find a better way to advertise their products (examples 1 and 2). An simple ideas is that a marketing person will post the link on his (Facebook) page and will share it with his friends. If its good, his friends will share it with their friends and so on. This is lovable unspammed advertising (unless if its done excessively)

But how will the site (Facebook) will generate money of it?

Maybe the advertised company should donate money to the site after a succesful campaign? Maybe the site should create a pro version for their site (works for Flickr)? And maybe the site should sell T shirts and other products…

I know its difficult to generate money online, but can you please move on from web spamdverising and leave our reading space alone?

For me, it is just another point to prove how ridiculous the world, and more accurately, the capitalist world, has become.

Slashdot reported that US Patent and Trademark Office issued a really broad patent for a “mobile entertainment and communication device“.

“It’s a patent for a mobile phone with removable storage, an internet connection, a camera and the ability to download audio or video files. The patent holding firm who has the rights to this patent wasted no time at all. At 12:01am Tuesday morning, it filed three separate lawsuits against just about everyone you can think of, including Apple, Nokia, RIM, Sprint, ATT, HP, Motorola, Helio, HTC, Sony Ericsson, UTStarcomm, Samsung and a bunch of others. Amusingly, the company actually first filed the lawsuits on Monday, but realized it was jumping the gun and pulled them, only to refile just past the stroke of midnight. “

Did anyone ever patented the wheel? I need to check that. Could be a good way to pay my student debt.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4wh_mc8hRE

On watching movies on your iPhone:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0

[Via Blogus]

I recently purchased a new HD monitor, but when I installed it, I lost the streaming capabilities on Netflix’s website. When I tried to troubleshoot the issue, I had to agree to let Netflix “reset my DRM” by destroying my Amazon.com files. After talking with Netflix’s technical support, I learned that the real issue had to do with the HD capabilities of my PC setup. Because Hollywood wants to punish people for using technology that is outside of their protocol, they are denying me access to low resolution internet videos until I downgrade my monitor to standard definition.

As if DRM isn’t evil enough already, I now have to give up access to files I’ve already bought and even then might not be allowed access unless I have specific approved HD equipment that allows Hollywood to control how I consume my media content. I understand that content owners want to be able to charge for their content, but something is wrong when their DRM won’t even allow you to pay to use their product.

I don’t have another word to say except for: Arrrrrrrgh!!!!

[Via BoingBoing]

I have only one problem – I’m working on a PC again.
I didn’t miss it.

For instance, the simplest thing: adding another keyboard language to the OS.
I have the permissions to do it, but Hebrew doesn’t exist on that system, I probably need the special Middle Eastern version.
On Apple’s OS X, it comes as standard. I can be anywhere in the world and I’ll be able to write in Hebrew.

Ridiculous.

With IE 7.0 out, it is going to be harder to make people appreciate the other browsers.

Within the last week, two new browsers have been released. The good news is that both browsers have seen some significant enhancements in three key areas: user experience, security and web standards. The bad news is that one browser still has better features and standards support than the other.

(Wired News: A Tale of Two Web Browsers)

It is so hard to transform a netuser who just surfs. Most people just use the software that comes with their PC/Mac. For Mac its OK. Safari is a great companion.

But IE… I just hate Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. For web-designer it’s the worst thing that could ever happened. Nothing works correctly with it while with all the other browsers the design will work just fine. Most people don’t know the behind the scenes of creating web pages. It’s a big headache – esspecially when you need to twick the design to fit the different browsers.

“Every other browser renders correctly”

(Stopdesign | The IE Factor)

So true. This is a detailed story from a designer’s perspective.

With my website, for the moment, I don’t care about Microsoft, IE, or their users. I will recommend to Transform! My website will look nicer on Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. and your satisfaction will be priceless…

Later I received my own first computer with the 1st generation Power PC (PPC 7200 with system 7.0). At that point I started learning about modding my Mac. SuperClock! was the first addition (back then the OS didn’t come with a built in clock). Kaleidoscope was the second, a utility panel to change the looks of the Finder.

I don’t remember the rest of the stuff that I installed (it was more then 10 years ago), but even now, when I’m working on PowerBook With OS X Tiger on it, I still like to mod my mac.

For the benefit of other Mac users, I’m writing about the plugins I likes the most, and of which, I think most of the users should look at.

First, we’ll look at the Menu Extras and some other Finder helpers.

Objectpark’s MenuCalendarClock is a replacement for the clock originally resides in the Finder. It adds a date and a pop-up calendar and is compatible with your iCal or Entourage. It makes life a lot easier, and checking the date doesn’t involve pressing on the clock and there are a lot more features to it. (Advanced features $18.95, basic features for free).

MenuMeters, created by Alex Harper, is a control panel for those of you who like to be in control of what your Mac is up to. It adds a CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools to the menu. It helps to see if your network is online or if you are using all of your memory. (Free / Donation).

Colin Henein’s SlimBatteryMonitor is a replacement menu item for the normal Apple laptops battery menu. It gives the option to control the look and color of the different symbol (charged, charging, battery power, etc.) and can take less space on the menu. It is great for those who have too many items in the menu. (Free / Donation).

Ejector is a small menu item that adds an ejector button to the menu bar. You can eject any disk (e.g. iPod, external hard drive, .dmg or CDs/DVDs). (Free / Donation).

Quicksilver is an amazing application and you can do a lot with it. You can call any application with just a press on a key, or control iTunes with the keyboard from any application. You can check for a contact’s phone number, search the web, you can trigger any application to do anything. It is the best companion for the Finder and the Dock, and it can even replace them altogether. (Free / Donation).

Growl is becoming a standard notification system for the OS X. With Growl you don’t have to go to the Mail app in order to see the new mail. Growl will notify from whom the new mail has arrived with a short description. It also works with Quicksilver, Skype, Adium and iChat (with Chax). (Free / Donation).

More apps and handy plugins, later this week.

On my menu bar I have (from left to right): Quicksilver, Ejector, Amua, Menuet, ShuttleXpress, Salling Clicker, SlimBatteryMonitor, MenuMeters (Network, Disk, Memory, CPU), Airport, Bluetooth, Langauge, MenuCalendarClock, Spotlight.

Not flying cars like in Back to the Future (maybe that’s the future of the future), but hovering cars: without any wheels or friction.

It could be a nice start. We can later think on the flying-hover cars and Mr Fusion.

10 years ago John Perry Barlow wrote a manifesto that, in my opinion, all the internet users should read.

The manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” is posted here. Barlow also co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organization that defends freedom in the digital world, and takes active role is spreading its goals.These days there are a lot of stories coming up about internet censorship and privacy issues.

There is a constant gathering of information on each one of us, while we are not always aware to it. Companies like Google, Yahoo and AT&T are collecting all types of data on their users, which they might pass one day to the government.

Google Desktop search application, has a feature that copies information from the clients computer to their servers.
AT&T is being accused of “violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications.”

Reporters Without Bordes, a human rights movement, found out that Yahoo keeps reporting to the chineese government over “dissident expressions” that Chinese citizens have made in Yahoo’s forums. During the last 3 years more than 80 Chinese citizens have been jailed due to these reports.

Its not yet happening in any country in the world, or at least, we’re not sure, but – governments like to copy each other’s laws and regulations.

Today, more then ever, it is easy to store data on us and to keep track of our movement. These events and many others should remind us how important it is to put an emphasis on securing our privacy and protecting our freedom in a digital world .

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow (barlow [at] eff.org)

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996

(Original link)

Some of the EFF current campaigns:

Online Free Speech Campaign
The world’s largest Internet grassroots movement

The Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression
Free speech & open access in new media

Privacy Now!
The campaign for online privacy

As I said in the Previous post I started making a searchable database of logos. I’m adding the different logos, and also trying to do it by groups.

While researching on the Intel Corporation I found that there are a lot of logos for their brands which have big similarities with small changes. So the decision (with the help of my girlfriend) came to make a small poster with all of Intel’s logos.

The poster consists of Intel’s branded logos from the 286 processor appeared in 1982 up to the latest rebranding of their corporate logotype and processors marks. The new logotype mashes Intel’s’ name with the much known “Intel Inside” mark. The rebranding occurred as Intel released Viiv (for entertainment and media PCs) and Core Duo (which is now inside Apple’s new MacBook Pro).

—

News: Soon I’ll need to move Logophile Compendium from Flickr.

I thought it will be easier with them but YAHOO! Are making it hard. Today Flickr introduced something called Community Guidelines and they have a list of DOs and DON’Ts…
So – Pages that have not enough pictures are not aloud (meaning: no diagrams, no paintings or illustrations) and because Logophile consists of uploaded images which are not mine, they banned my site from their Search section.

It is still possible to get there in a direct link, but it won’t be shown for people from the main page.

So now, for this reason and others, I’m scouting for another system to hold my database.

It is said that Leopard will make extensive use of Spotlight, which was introduced in OS X Tiger (10.4). Apple is said to redesign the whole Finder and bring it much closer to the iTunes and iPhoto interfaces.

The large hard drives that most of us have, and the amount of files that we carry on them, make the task of finding files more and more difficult. On the other hand, Spotlight, a searching tool with journaling method and fast searching ability, provides an easier way to find lost files. The idea behind the redesign of the Finder is to make file searching faster than it is today, when one has to go through all the folders in order to find a specific file.

On the interface design, Leopard will probably incorporate the look of the new iLife ‘06 and iTunes 6, with their smooth merge of Aqua and Brushed Metal. It is possible that Apple will come back to unified menus, as was in the Classic systems.

Leopard is scheduled for end of 2006 or early 2007, but Tiger, and its current version, 10.4.4, is a great in between and a vast improvement to 10.3 Jaguar, if only due to the use of Spotlight.

It is true that Tiger had some problems, and few of Jaguar users decided to stick with it for that reason, but since its recent updates, Tiger’s overall operation runs smooth and fast.
I believe that in order to get used to the changes which are about to occur to the Finder in the next big release, an upgrade to the Tiger environment is needed.