toodlepip - ramblings and other miscellany from Sam Michel

Immersive video makes my head spin

Sam Michel — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:37:12 -0800

Like being a virtual owl, but without any head movement required.

Click play, let the video load and then click and drag your mouse inside the video screen.

Whilst static 360 degree views have been de rigeur for estate agents and restaurant owners for a while, this is the first example I've seen moving video. Bonkers.

Zombie children

Sam Michel — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 01:00:00 -0800

"Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go Out And Do Something Less Boring Instead?"

If you're a child of a certain age (the show last aired in 1994) that'll mean something to you. If not, you missed a cult kids TV show that implored yoof to get outside during their Summer holidays. Back in those days video games weren't what they are now.

What brought this to mind was a series of photos taken by Wolfram Hahn that glared out at me whilst leafing through an old copy of Adbusters magazine. The collection, "A Disenchanted Playroom" is a study of children's faces as they watch TV.

Their faces look glazed, passive, devoid of any emotion almost like their 'off switch' was flicked, just before the photo was taken. Do we look like that when surfing the web? Or playing computer games?

Hope not. Perhaps it's time to get our more? Why don't you?

There's a detailed interview with Hahn on the C/O Berlin - International Forum For Visual Dialogues website.

[Pic courtesy of Grant Neufeld]

Finally a use for all those lost Post-It notes

Sam Michel — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:20:50 -0800

I'm a hoarder of Post-It notes. Forever grumbling as I rummage around the stationery cupboard for another pack whilst there are dozens secreted away around my desk.

As everyone obsesses, quite rightly, on important things like crunchy credit and the US election, here's a beautiful office-stationery-related distraction that uses almost as many Post-Its as I've found on my desk. Ain't it marvellous?

EepyBird's Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

Using your powers for good

Sam Michel — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 12:26:03 -0700

What happens when a hot new director makes a film, which turns into one of the 1990s' most memorable ads, then turns his powers for good. Wassup? This. Brilliant.

Thanks to the rather ace Bringing Nothing to the Party blog from Paul Carr.

Is my Google Analytics code working?

Sam Michel — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 22:27:37 -0700

If you're like me, you'll probably spend as much time tinkering with the layout and technical gubbins of your website, as you will writing for the site in the first place. This bad habit isn't help in any way at all by the rather excellent Google Analytics service and worse still the desktop application which even saves the hassle of firing up a web browser.

Launched in November 2005, it's easy to install, easy to use and rather addictive. Start digging into the data and there's all sorts of weird and wonderful information tucked away. Like my friend Billy found when looking at keywords that brought visitors to his website, the results can be disturbing.

Imagine my despair then, when all of a sudden after what could be called an unintentional upgrade (remember kids, always back up your website before tinkering) my Google Analytics stopped recording anything. Surely everyone hadn't deserted the site? Yikes.

After wading through the help text on the Google website, I was pretty certain that the code was in the right place and almost certainly right. But, and it's a big but. there's a delay of about 12 hours between adding in the tracking code and the results showing up.

12 hours! In that time the refresh key would be completely worn out.

Thankfully, after some judicious Googling, Epik One's Sitescan popped up. Whack in the website to test and this tool will scan up to 15,000 pages and send an email with the results. For testing one page only, there's a Sitescan widget for the iGoogle homepage. Ahah. No more waiting.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg, for starters here's a list of dozens of hacks to super-charge Google Analytics even more and a book, Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics written by the guy who used to run Google Analytics in Europe.

Get measuring.