I was catching up on one of my favorite bloggers, David Pogue of the New York Times. On his blog, Pogue’s Posts, you’ll see a lot of reviews of gadgets and commentary on tech news. Yesterday, for the first time ever, I watched a video he had up on the site that reviewed free cell phone voice-activated services. The video is funny and useful, and observing his geeky enthusiasm serves to remind you that he’s just a regular guy — like you or me.
It reminded me how often I am surprised to see the real live personality behind a blogger, a radio personality, or anything else where you usually don’t get to see the human on the other end. It’s usually a pleasant surprise.
Web media like blogs, and especially video, give us that human connection we all crave. I think this can be a place where a lot of websites fail miserably. In an attempt to appear professional and creditable, they take the human element out. But sites that do have that human element — say, a how-to video, or a blog with an active comment section — tend to make more of a real and lasting connection with users.
Is your site guilty of being sterile and cold? Here are some signs:
You have no photos with people in them.
Your site colors are all cool in tone.
Your site is static with no interactivity.
Your content focuses on your business and organization rather than your visitors wants and needs.
You have no audio or video media.
If you suspect your site may be too cold, try any of the following:
Add a video message, demo, or interview.
Start weekly or monthly podcasts and make them easy to download from your homepage.
Find professional and appropriate graphics that prominently feature people.
Add an interactive element, such as user ratings or testimonials.
Integrate a blog into part of your marketing strategy and keep the posts personable and down-to-earth.
Incorporate some warmer colors into your site design.
Making your site “human” is easier than ever to do now. Have at it!
What do you get when you splice Mary Poppins with some creep-tastic music? One impressively sinister movie plot:
Videos like this are the natural offspring of popular video and social networking sites; you can see mash-up spawn all over the web on YouTube and beyond. You don’t have to be a genius to make one yourself. Here are some examples and websites to whet your appetite:
1. The Trailer Mash: Users create new twists to movie spots by remixing and changing up the soundtrack. Scary Mary, above, is just one example.
2. Terminator vs. Robocop is a mash-up with some of that video annotation that Nick mentioned a few posts ago. It was created by the people at AMDS Films, but I’m guessing most of y’all don’t speak French.
3. Vader Sessions includes Star Wars clips with quotes from James Earl Jones’ various roles spliced in. It gets really good when he starts talking about being a breadwinner (3 minutes in or so).
4. Total Recut has it all — source clips, video editing tools, and contests, with categories from political to education to advertising to trailers.
5. Check out The Recycled Cinema for a history of found video footage and a more academic approach to mash-ups.
6. For the politically bent, Political Remix is a blog-style video mash-up site with some very moving and politically charged messages.
7. Jumpcut is Yahoo’s answer to the video and social networking equation. You can use it to upload source material, edit your clips, and share your remixes. Still in beta (what isn’t these days), but the is design slick, unobtrusive, and very user-friendly.
I take comfort in the fact that even sites like Digg have occasional issues. It reminds me that everyone is fallible, and puts my mistakes into perspective. Maybe I have a broken link on my site, but hey, at least my site isn’t Digg.
If you act quickly you too can enjoy this once in a lifetime opportunity. Go to Digg, click the upcoming button, click the “cloud view” link, then click the “switch to story view” link.
By now even casual web users are familiar with the term “Web 2.0″. Probably because the most popular brands (YouTube, Flickr, FaceBook) of the Web 2.0 revolution attract large amounts of novice and first-time web surfers.
Now there is a new revolution on the horizon, one that lacks the glitz and glamor of Web 2.0. This revolution is less about the human user, and more about the machine user.
Welcome To The Semantic Web, Where Machines Do All The Work
Imagine if you didn’t have to dig through Craig’s List, eBay, and Google separately for the best deals on antique soup spoons. Now imagine there is a way for web developers to aggregate all those sites together without much effort, therefore being able to offer users a single point of reference for antique soup spoons.
Welcome to The Semantic Web, where machines do all the work. Continue reading for a preview of the revolution.
