253 million at the latest count, according to the government agency China Internet Network Information Centre. Impressively, 214 million of those are broadband users – but the biggest growth is mobile phone access. Apparently, the “Great Firewall of China” is still blocking or rendering unusable large numbers of sites, so any strategy looking to address China needs to have local hosting!
I’ve said on here before that not enough visualisation is being used, so it’s great to find new ideas – even if they’re not totally useable/useful. DoodleBuzz is one such example, you could call it the Zen of news exploration. Even after 5 minutes of doodling, I have relatively little idea of what’s going on. But I do feel a lot calmer.
Given that I use this as a demonstration of an effective, viral-style ad quite a bit, I thought it was about time I posted it here. At 2.2m views, and 2,500 comments (as well as a bunch of either copy, copycat or homage videos with strong incremental viewing) it’s a resounding example of YouTube appeal, and all upside for Budweiser (who manfully held back from using many branded bottles in the commercial, adding to its appeal probably). More than that, hundreds (if not thousands) of blogs have done what I’m doing – giving it even more exposure.
I just went to an event with Dick Powell from product design agency Seymour Powell talking about all aspects of design and creativity as part of DesignLondon. It was good material about some of their now iconic designs for kettles, toasters, toilets and the like.
The fact that he could have given (and probably did give) the same presentation 10 years ago sums up the bascis that are true of the design process - just the products change a bit. To demonstrate that, he ended his talk with this video for Virgin’s upcoming space travel programme (Seymour Powell designed the interior of the space craft). Yes, that’s space craft – launching in 2010, at Virgin Galactic, bookable right now. Get a taste of what your $200,000 dollars will buy you :
… is how much video is uploaded to Google’s Youtube, according to their official blog post today. And that’s an “exponentially growing” statistic they believe. That’s 18720 hours a day, or 780 days every day. Still with me? It’s a lot.
Of course, there will be a long tail of this stuff which is never seen by more than the person who created it, and at the top end there will be a small percentage that are viewed a lot. Sure enough, a wildcard type search (searching for “*”, if that’s valid) turns up the top video with 101 million views (a music video, like a lot in the top results of that list)… Wikipedia’s got some notes on the “heavy tail” distribution, which I’m guessing is what this is.
The important take out is that very quickly (by which I mean already) there’s too much content on Youtube for one person to make sense of. And therefore ways of pre-selecting, filtering and locating stuff of interest – like in every area online now – are needed, beyond just search…
Okay, I’m not a Twitter power user, but I get asked about it a fair bit. Sarah over at Random Sarah however IS, and explains how it all works really clearly here:
Courtesy of the guys at Widgetbox I’ve been exploring what’s available out there to embed and add value to visitors. The answer is, unsuprisingly, “what isn’t available out there”. I picked up couple of examples at random that I thought were interesting. Added value? Well…
Video calling has never taken off despite a long history of attempts starting in 1955, and culminating in today’s front-facing cameras on 3G handsets. But finally someone has worked out a useful application: signing for the hearing impaired.
The technology behind it compresses data with attention to skin tones (hands/face) as that’s what is conveying the important information. That’s needed because 3G hasn’t properly hit the US yet, so the compression needs to work over GPRS-speed connections; also, sign-language is too fast for existing compression methods.
An application which Google Maps doesn’t yet trounce – Stormpulse(featuring Hurricane Ike at the time of writing) provides some great interface onto storms, including historical path and the more vital projected paths. Unfortunate circumstances, but a neat online mashup of a bunch of information sources.
Ever since I first heard about 3D printers, I’ve wanted one.
Now you and I can get all the benefits without the ($12,000) overhead of actually owning one.
Right now objects are made out of a base resin. The days of nano-technology and creation of new objects atom-by-atom so that creation of ANY object is possible are some way away still, I’m guessing.
