Browser Stats

I don't know about everyone else out there, but I am becoming increasing frustrated with having to test web sites in IE6

Surely it is time to call it a day and banish it to browser heaven? The latest browser usage stats from w3schools show it is on a steady decline and now Chrome has been up for a couple of months we can see how it is performing.

Geek out time...

2008	IE7	IE6	Chrome	Fx	Moz	S	O
October	26.9%	20.2%	3.0%	44.0%	0.4%	2.8%	2.2%
September	26.3%	22.3%	3.1%	42.6%	0.5%	2.7%	2.0%
2008	IE7	IE6	IE5	Fx	Moz	S	O
August	26.0%	24.5%	0.1%	43.7%	0.5%	2.6%	2.1%
July	26.4%	25.3%	0.3%	42.6%	0.5%	2.5%	1.9%
June	27.0%	26.5%	0.5%	41.0%	0.5%	2.6%	1.7%
May	26.5%	27.3%	0.7%	39.8%	0.7%	2.4%	1.5%
April	24.9%	28.9%	1.0%	39.1%	0.9%	2.2%	1.4%
March	23.3%	29.5%	1.1%	37.0%	1.1%	2.1%	1.4%
February	22.7%	30.7%	1.3%	36.5%	1.2%	2.0%	1.4%
January	21.2%	32.0%	1.5%	36.4%	1.3%	1.9%	1.4%

Image Tagging.........Done!

One thing that makes me reluctant to upload loads of photos to Flickr or Facebook is having to tag them all manually with key words, dull, dull, dull. Not that it's compulsory to tag pictures, but we all know it's important to have keywords so images can be indexed and found through search.

Well, my life could be about to get a whole lot easier with ALIPR (pronounced a-lip-er) which stands for Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures in Real-Time. The site uses software that can train computers to recognize the content of images rather than text tags. Researchers at Penn State who developed the technology started by manually tagging 60,000 photos, they then built a statistical model to teach the computer to recognize patterns and assign the keywords to new photos that seem to contain similar elements.

According to one of the developers it's not 100% accurate, but It works by recognising patterns in colour and texture.

Give it a go at, http://alipr.com, where you can also upload images to teach it yourself.

You Tube - Hot or Not

After a recent discussion around the hallowed tables of Tamar about rating images and videos that users send to sites, as luck would have it I came across an article on Google discussing the issue, but with an added twist.

It states, "What if you could learn not just which of your videos are hot on the site, but which specific parts of those videos are hotter than others? What if you could know exactly when viewers tend to leave your videos, or which scenes within a video they watch again and again?"

This information is now available to all YouTube video uploaders with an innovative new feature for Insight called "Hot Spots." Once logged in a graph sits beside your video showing you the peeks and troffs of where viewers have left. It works out the hotness or notness by comparing the video's abandonment rate at that moment to other videos on YouTube of the same length, and incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards.

If this was to be used in the wider world it may prove very useful for advertisers as they would be able to place specific ads just before key drop off points. Analysing the data may also result in having to edit the original video to get rid of less interesting elements

Build your own Search Engine with Yahoo!

Looks like Google isn’t the only ones handing out internal technologies to the public. Yahoo announced that it will be making its search technology available to users, with a new package called Build your Own Search Service (BOSS).

This however, must be the best part. BOSS taps directly into Google API’s to retrieve information! That’s right, Google API’s. The service then allows users to stick the information onto their websites and to add them to data from other web services.

Yahoo says that this new package will allow users to create customized search engines that return results based on there search preferences and social networking network connections.

BOSS is being offered as an alternative to Yahoo’s previous search API’s, which restricted users to 5000 queries a day.

If you've ever wondered what a mash up is...

.. then here is a fine example from the BBC. The Wikipedia definition of a mash up is "a web application that combines data and/or functionality from more than one source". A developer at the BBC, Simon Cross, has taken online information already available which tells him what is currently being played on the Radio. He then uses this information to fetch related pictures from flickr.com and information from last.fm as to which are the most popular tracks and what the upcoming related events are.

If you visit the site and it tells you 'Nothing playing right now' then hang in there, it's worth checking out.

Yahoo Life

With a number of stories floating around at the moment it is hard to ignore that something new and vibrant is happening within the Yahoo camp in California  This new direction appears to affect all aspects of the business, which could only be a positive for the user. They hope to re-gain ground lost to its rivals (Google, msn, newscorp) but also challenge the social networks.

Yahoo is looking to adopt a similar social networking strategy as Google which is to base everything around yahoo mail.  However, this is only part of the strategy; the key for success will be to bring mail, search, instant messaging, mobile web, etc into one. Yahoo also recognises that users have a particular preference of social networks and have accounted for third-party applications to be integrated into their products. 

Yahoo has taken the next step in social networking by making an intelligent social architecture. From a users perspective this excellent and proof that social networks aren't fads that come and go.