'Cross The Breeze

Fascinating!

January 10, 2008 by Kris Hoet 2 Comments

A good friend of mine, Matth, just sent me this video over IM. It’s about a guy who did some cool development for the Wii:

“Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), you can accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen. This effectively transforms your display into a portal to a virtual environment. The display properly reacts to head and body movement as if it were a real window creating a realistic illusion of depth and space. By Johnny Chung Lee, Carnegie Mellon University. For more information and software visit http://johnnylee.net“

But you know what, just watch the video instead ;)

Imagine how this could be used in gaming, I really hope some game developers do answers Johnny Lee’s request and use this. This is the consumer 2.0 – taking the product further…

beta, consumer, design, electronics, games, software, technology, tracking

3d, illusion, movement, portal, remote, software, space, wii

Any color-blind in the audience?

December 22, 2007 by Kris Hoet 1 Comment

I’ve touched on this before (related to Advertising) and since I’m color-blind myself I hold a strong interest in the topic. Most important fact to repeat out of that earlier post: 8% of all Caucasian males suffer a color vision deficiency. And that might be more than you would expect.

With this in mind I said that it’s not that silly to have your ads tested to see if someone who’s color-blind can see/read everything alright. Same counts for websites obviously, but the most time I personally have problems with it is with presentations.

We all know that every single minute there’s probably someone in the world working on the most horrendous powerpoint/keynote presentation but apart from ugly presentations, some people use texts on backgrounds in a way that I can’t read the slides anymore. And guess what, If you have a reasonable audience, I probably wasn’t alone.

Last week AdLab did a post about this topic again and posted these 2 color wheels. The first one is the color-wheel as seen by a red-insensitive protopane, the second color wheel is a regular one.

So here’s the normal one:

Now it’s very hard for me to say if the first wheel actually represents what I see, since I obviously see both color wheels different then you, but it should give you a good idea. Also read Paul Martin’s post on color-blindness where you can see a whole lot more of comparison images.

advertising, consumer, marketing, media, presentation, technology, tracking

colorblind

blogging, community, influence, internet, research, social media, tracking

Overtaking myself

September 1, 2007 by Kris Hoet 3 Comments

I’m pretty sure that before the week is over, this other blog of mine will have passed this one in traffic. The graph you see here is from the last 15 or so weeks, and shows this blog in blue and I Blog Mustang in red. I would never have thought this would happen, believe me.

The Mustang blog is more of a fun side project, on which I post only once a week maybe and with long periodes of no updates at all. But it’s been growing steady almost since day one. There are also a few curious differences between the 2 blogs. See the dip in the blue line for instance? That was a 2 week no-blogging holiday, which clearly impacts this blog but doesn’t change a thing on the other.

Some differences are maybe a bit more obvious, looking at browsers and operating systems for instance. On this blog 57% use IE and 33% use FF versus 73% for IE and 20% for FF on the Mustang blog. And I see 6% using a OSX on the Mustang blog versus 12% here. Windows Vista is around 10% on both.

Last but not least, although traffic is quite similar now, Technorati authority is way different. This blog has around 246 as I write this and the other one’s authority has a mere 10. It’s fine though, I do tend to believe I know something about marketing but I can assure you I know nothing about cars :)

Clearly a different audience on both, still I’m surprised of the growth over the last few weeks. Hopefully that 3rd little project will do the same (or even better). But more on that later.

Technorati Tags: mustang, blogs, traffic, blogging, audience, brower, firefox, internet explorer, osx, vista, windows

belgium, blogging, internet, social media, tracking

The M20: Top marketer blogs

August 26, 2007 by Kris Hoet 1 Comment

I wrote about this new marketing hotlist before, but now after the alpha, beta and gamma versions the final list is here. This list was created to highlight popular blogs from client-side marketing professionals and I’m happy to be on the list.

Peter Kim, the analyst at Forrester Research in Boston that created the list, calculated som form of rank based on a combined set of metrics:

Authority: 20% Technorati Authority + 20% Google PageRank
Attention: 10% Alexa traffic
Influence: 50% Feed subscribers

Since feed subscribers is the most difficult to track, Peter uses Feedburner stats when available and Bloglines for others. In the case of Bloglines he makes the assumption that these only account for 20% of the actual amount of subscribers. This assumption is based on cases where both numbers were available so that makes sense to me.

Here’s the list, which will be updated every month from now on, now we just need a blog badge for this ;)

Technorati Tags: hotlist, marketing, m20, authority, influence, attention, peterkim, forrester

community, hotlist, influence, internet, marketing, tracking

Eyetracking: practice what you preach?

August 26, 2007 by Kris Hoet 3 Comments

Am I the only one to find this ironic? Marketing Pilgrim brings good content most of the time and they’re in my RSS reader for quite a while. But when I opened one of their last posts on eyetracking in my browser, I couldn’t help wondering how serious they take their own content. The eyetracking study they talk about shows clear results (and so did other eyetracking studies in the past) about banner advertising on websites, but look at Marketing Pilgrim’s own sidebar. One third of the screen filled with ugly banner ads… that nobody looks at. Why tell other people smoking is dangerous when you’re a smoker yourself?

Technorati Tags: marketing, eyetracking, banners, advertising, irony, research

advertising, blogging, fun, research, tracking

Read what matters

August 22, 2007 by Kris Hoet 10 Comments

When I was going through my feeds today I discovered a new service called aideRSS and given my +300 subscriptions I’m always interested to find out better ways to manage these. It seemed like that is exactly what aideRSS is able to do so I checked it out immediately this morning. First thought: brilliant.

AideRSS2

There are some feeds in my reader that definitely could be skimmed down to the most interesting posts, like the del.icio.us/popular feed (image above) for instance so I gave that a try. After uploading a feed you can select to see all posts or only the good post, great posts or best posts. This is based on the PostRank feature that is propriatory to aideRSS and unfortunately the help page about that is offline for the moment as I’m curious to find out more about how they calculate that.

You can upload your whole OPML into the service, you can subscribe to a filtered feed (like all best posts from a feed) in the integrated feedreader or in your own. There are sharing widgets etc etc. And as you can see in the screenshot above, you get immediate info from del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, … on the interaction for that post. This is something that I suggested to Technorati a few weeks ago so I obviously like that as well.

Best of all? It’s pretty amazingly fast (especially when they have a blog on record yet). And it’s there that I see the only problem for now as well, each time I did get an error it had something to do with uploading a feed that wasn’t in the system already. Hopefully they’ll fix that soon. And as said the PostRank information page gives an error as does the aideRSS blog for the moment.

Overall I think aideRSS still needs work but it offers a pretty good and fast solution with very good navigation so definitely worth a try. Sometimes it crashes when trying to add a new blog and I get the feeling there’s work to do on the PostRank score as well looking at some of the differences between blogs on that topic. I also think they have an opportunity to do some of the stuff we saw on http://share.opml.org. Anyway good stuff you guys, I would give that feedback on your forum as well if it weren’t down for the moment ;)

[Via Blogologie]

Technorati Tags: aiderss, feedreader, rss, feeds, optimization, filtering, service

blogging, community, hotlist, influence, internet, research, technology, tracking

Modern data visualization

August 14, 2007 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

I don’t remember how I came across this post of ‘Data visualisation: modern approaches‘ on Smashing Magazine, but it describes some pretty cool stuff. It gives an overview of some utterly fascinating ways to visualize data, something you definitely have to go see for yourself. Some of them could be art.

One of my favorites is amaztype ‘a typographic book search’ where each amazon query gets visualized in a very interesting way. Here’s my search for ‘travel’:

You got a see for yourself how cool it is, not quite useful but pretty. Make sure you check out the original post for a lot more interesting examples. And I’ll tell you in a few days why that query on amaztype had to be travel ;)

Technorati Tags: data, visualization, travel, amaztype, smashing, magazine, amazing

design, other things, research, tracking, travel