Nov 11 2008
I came across a very innovative YouTube page recently containing a video promoting the Nintendo Wii.
The video is Wario Land: Shake It – Amazing footage!
You need to watch the video to the end to see what I am talking about! I presume that the effect is created using JavaScript.
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Nov 06 2008
I read three articles on TechCrunch today regarding Internet traffic on election day of the US election.
I do not expect that websites outside of the US experienced significant increases, because there is less interest in the US election, and the time differences made it a bit impractical!
Finally, Twitter also had an extremely busy night, as described in OMG, That Was A Big Day. It is a pity that this post does not give some more general statistics. For example, are any of these statistics new records?
I think that it is very impressive that all of the major websites that experienced heavy traffic were able to cope with it. I particularly like Twitter’s approach:
Our technical approach over the last several months has been to find the weakest point of the system, fix it so it’s no longer the weakest, move to the next weakest point, and so on.
I also notice that the new president is a Twitter user! It will be great if he can continue to find time to maintain his online presence!
Nov 05 2008
I have stayed up very late to watch the US election, and it is now clear who the winner is! However, I do not want to get into politics in this blog!
From a technology point-of-view, I am amazed how much attention the mainstream media has given to the online election campaigns. In particular, I am sure that every viewer must now be aware of Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. Also, the winner thanked his supporters by email before making his first public appearance!
It will be very interesting to see some statistics from the main news web sites over the next few days regarding how busy their web servers were. I would expect some records!
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Oct 31 2008
The winners of the IIA Net Visionary Awards were announced last night at a black tie event in Dublin. Some of the nominations, and indeed the eventual winners, are very interesting. Congratulations to all involved, and in particular to Blacknight for picking up two awards!
The first winner that caught my attention was Pixie. I heard of them before, but I never actually visited their website. It seems to be very user friendly, and I happily browsed through random photos for a while. I think that they are in a very competitive market, especially if they want to have a global audience rather than an Irish audience.
The other winner that caught my attention was lichens.ie. Yes, this really is an entire website about lichen! The website is well designed, and it is interesting to look at, even if you are not a biologist! I really like the magnifying glass cursor that appears over the photos on the top of each page.
Of course, I am not saying that the other sites are not worthy of a look either!
There are several other similar types of awards during the year in Ireland, such as the Irish Web Awards and the Irish Blog Awards. I think that both of these are the brain children of Damien Mulley. I am not familiar enough with them to know the differences!
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Oct 30 2008
There is currently an explosion of websites appearing online with information and details about blue jumpers in Irish (“geansai gorm”). Some examples include:
If you would like me to add your website to the above list then let me know. However, I do not think that Google has indexed Teknovis yet :o
So what is the cause of this sudden explosion? It is a SEO competition that was launched by Damien Mulley last Tuesday. The full details are described in his blog post titled “Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the greatest SEO of them all?“.
Good luck to all who enter!
Oct 29 2008
After many years of surfing the Internet, I finally reached the end of it today!
You can too, simply by visiting www.ro.ro.
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