With the new release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7, I only have one question: when is Microsoft going to make a web developer’s life easier? For the past few years we have been demanding web compliance, and we are even more organized now under the banner of the World Wide Web Consortium, but IE still does not support CSS 2.1 and has spotty glitches with XHTML when its competitors already perform these tasks with ease. That only means that IE will continue to be that one browser that we cannot quite get our web page to look right in. After IE 7 failed the Acid 2 test, a web compliance test created by The Web Standards Project, lead programmer Chris Wilson stated that it was more of a “wish list” than a “compliance test.” The Web Standards Project has given kudos to Microsoft for acknowledging failing the test, but I say it just shows they are even more incompetent when it comes to web compliance.

For the past couple of years as IE 7 was in development, fearful web developers were worried that because of Microsoft’s worldwide control, IE would decide what we can and cannot use when it comes to web technology. Everybody started pushing Firefox to steal from Microsoft’s power. Though, with this release it seems Microsoft’s thunder is dying. The tone of that predicted technology takeover seems like it was wasted worrying. With IE 7 only having 3 million downloads in the past few weeks, it still did not beat Mozilla’s record of 2 million downloads in the first 24 hours of the its release of Firefox 2.0. It’s still too early to see who will win the browser war, but with its lack of web compliance, still existing security issues, and finally incorporating features that only mimic what other browsers can do, its pretty much safe to say Microsoft will always be on the losing side.

Yes, Fr-Ajax [fr-ey-j-a-x]. Frame-based-Asynchronous JavaScript. It’s here to stay. Well, not really, it was here to stay in 1999, on a project I worked on, but got scrapped - probably because it was too cool - before it ever launched, and in my never-ending quest to become Master of All Media and Inventor of the Universe, I feel gypped.

Let me back up a bit. I am totally behind on the Ajax wave. I just finished playing with a couple of demos on my local box. And it’s exactly what it’s supposed to be: easy, fast, seamless, a great interface helper. For me this is liberating: remote connectivity and activity is seamless, back-grounded, and independent of the current URL state, and user interaction is freed from the typical HTTP-Request -(Wait)- Response-and-Load format — I’m ecstatic, as I can now control one more facet of a visitor’s experience to my site.

It prompted a few thoughts for me though: it’s just a matter of time before the experience is elevated to the better Flash experiences. What does this do to Flash? Will it slowly be abandoned for the non-proprietary technology? Isn’t this DHTML? And most importantly, shouldn’t my 1999 team & I get credit for inventing it? Ok, so we didn’t use XMLHttpRequest, and cross-browser JavaScript support was a joke (we developed in Netscape 4.x, then, contrary to best practices moved to the more unpredictable but, as it turned out, stable MSIE 4), and we were using a dozen or so hidden frames to send and return data requests on demand, but it was the same idea, right? Anyway, I’m hooked now, AJAX is great, and my decade-old struggle to elevate DHTML as an attractive and easy-to-use interface up and over the top of the web-gui heap has been re-ignited.

Down with misused, abused, bandwidth-hogging, proprietary plugins! Up with DHTML!

In my previous post about Our Lives Online, I raised the specter of our impending digitization. And, as it turns out, the Storage Cloud is out there, and it’s waiting. What is this ominous-sounding Storage Cloud? According to Jeremiah Owyang, it “is/will be the amorphous entity of online data that will be uploaded from a variety of sources, retrieved from a variety of tools, and rehashed into new forms and outputs.” While this may be an apt description for the conceptual interface for our future, it has greater implications than the above business requirements. The Storage Cloud is the Earth flattened.

Whereas we exist in a society tiered by different levels and combinations of trust, experience, calculated risk and physical awareness, the future of Cloud-World is one where all acts are created equal, where access is objectively evaluated, where all results are assumed innocuous. When the playing field is level, everyone’s a target. Here’s one version of that story [click on “Epic 2014 ” or 2015].

I know I sound paranoid, but they said television would be good for us too.

Advertising in video games is not receiving enough attention. It’s a relatively new medium with great potential that marketers aren’t taking notice of because of common questions asked by advertisers when first introduced to the new concept. Is the target right? Can we grab the target’s attention? Will we increase our Return on Investment? If your target audience is the young, web savvy MySpace and YouTube visitors, then the answer to all these questions is yes.

First we need to understand the development of this new way of advertising. Massive, the ad-serving company that invented the technology for advertising in games is only a few years old and has already been acquired by Microsoft. Not only will Microsoft’s games feature the technology, but Massive has also signed contracts with Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, the top two video game distributors in the world. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony PlayStation experienced the success of online play with their previous consoles and are building their new consoles with emphasis for online gaming, giving them the capability to use this advertising technology.

A study done by Neilsen found that three-quarters of households with televisions with a male 8-34 years of age own a video game system; and these gamers watch less TV the older they get. But males are not the only ones that you can advertise to through video games. Ubisoft and EA have started trying to appeal to females as well. All this is creating one great resource for advertising.

Outlets such as MySpace and YouTube are over populating the scene and in turn becoming a drawn out trend that will lose consumer interest. So we need to be ready to adapt the next new way to advertise. Video games could be the key.

Are gaming platforms the next entry to the web? Nintendo seems to think so. With the Wii console, gamers will not only be able to chat with friends like XboxLive, but possibly share photos, and check the weather and news via Wii Channels. Can’t wait to see how this develops.

Wii

Everyday, I take more and more seriously Sandra Bullock’s quote in The Net “It’s all right there. Everyone is stored in there…and you know what? They’ve done it to me, and you know what? They’re gonna do it to you.”

Recently, AT&T joined an illustrious and ever-growing group including AOL and the Federal Government that is succumbing to an annoying, but here-to-stay problem of The Information Age: keeping me from getting ripped off. Like it or not, transfer, let alone distribution of information is a security threat, weather you are The Social Security Administration or that teenager that asks you for your zip code at Radio Shack.
So, remind me not to 1) answer anymore telemarketing calls; 2) sign up for anymore “services” from my a) phone company b) bank c) credit card company; 3) buy anything from anyone anywhere on the internet that doesn’t accept hand-delivered cash.

Since some of us here are geeks and we don’t even know it, or we just like things that wouldn’t be permitted in the mall’s parking lot; or maybe we like to take apart radios (yes, AM/FM and all that) and put them back together, and get a chuckle when there are a few unattached pieces leftover; or we read David Macaulay’s Castle when we were young (and again last month); or we knew what a google (googol) - have you been to Googolplex.com? - was before 1995; or we like to rationalize the randomness of life through M&M’s - we decided to engage in a good old fashioned act of self indulgence, and launch 0s and 1s.

Real Technology Used to Keep Real Americans Where They Really Want to Be

It’s fifty years later, and now YOU can do it with the click of a mouse

Buy me this. Seriously.

I’m healthy, because it tells me so.