David Lawton » Web

Official Google Blog: Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results – and denies it

David — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 22:20:26 +0000

This is from the official Google blog!

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html#

Wirify lets you turn any web page into a wireframe

David — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 21:50:46 +0000

http://www.volkside.com/2010/12/introducing-wirify-the-web-as-wireframes/

Surfing The Web With Kinect

David — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 23:10:55 +0000

DepthJS on Vimeo on Vimeo

via DepthJS on Vimeo.

WordPress Wins CMS Award

David — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 01:33:13 +0000

I was just informed that WordPress, in head-to-head voting against Joomla and Drupal, has won this year’s Open Source CMS Hall of Fame award.

We have to be careful because if this trend continues people might think WordPress is a real CMS, useful for more than just a blog. This would ruin our stealth campaign and might bring dozens of new users to the WordPress community. If you could keep this on the DL we’d appreciate it.

We don’t want WordPress to develop a reputation.

via WordPress › WordPress Wins CMS Award.

Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive

David — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 22:33:02 +0000

Microsoft just launched the Beta for IE9 today

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/

Looks like it doesn’t work with Windows XP though?

The New Video Ad Format

David — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 21:14:15 +0000

Hulu is going to be rolling out a new ad format for video which allows a user to select which ad they want to watch from a selection of related ads. Seems like a win-win for everyone, I think we can expect to see this format rolling out across other similar sites. I can’t think of any other platform which allows users to select between ads but this could potentially work elsewhere, it’s certainly an interesting concept:

Hulu Will Be First to Launch New Video Ad Format – Website Magazine -Website Magazine.

Youtube Releases New Embed Code And 4k Resolution

David — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 06:10:24 +0000

Google owned Youtube is testing new code for playing/embedding videos. The new code uses an iframe and actually embeds the video using HTML 5, meaning it doesn’t require flash, or any other plugins at all. Pretty cool!

Here’s an example of using the new embed code:

The video will only play in HTML5 if certain conditions are met, such as the user having opted in, and the video not containing ads.

Another interesting update for Youtube recently was support for 4k resolution videos. While 1080p is 1920×1080 resolution, 4k is a whopping 4096×3072! Unfortunately most processors/graphics cards can’t even handle it yet, mine certainly doesn’t To try it out just change the video mode on the Youtube player for applicable videos to ‘Original.’

Here’s both updates in action:

Wolfram | Alpha

David — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:14:51 +0000

I remember reading about this a long time ago and only just saw that it has gone live:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

The idea is that you ask a question, and unlike Google where you are (usually) presented with a list of potentially relevant resources, you are given an answer. It still doesn’t understand a lot of things but presumably will improve over time. However, as far as ‘ask engines’ go, Wolfram is very promising and powerful.

As a test one of the first questions I asked was “how many employees does telus have?”, here’s the Google response:

Now the Wolfram response (pretty impressive!)

Initial Online Conversion Rates For The iPad Are Very Promising

David — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 03:22:39 +0000

Thus far the iPad is performing particularly well as an E-Commerce device. Online stores which are not optimized for mobile devices have an average conversion rate of 0.37% but the iPad is converting up to 2.04%. For some online stores the iPad is converting at double the standard PC rate. This increase could at least partially be attributed to the majority of iPad owners being technically savvy and comfortable buying online, only time will tell, but the results are still looking quite strong.

Source: Shopping on the iPad – Website Magazine

Google Search With SSL

David — Tue, 25 May 2010 07:47:25 +0000

Google has released a beta SSL encrypted version of the Google search engine: https://google.com

Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/search-more-securely-with-encrypted.html