Apple has a nice track record for shaking up entire industries by introducing new devices. It changed the way we buy and consume music with the iPod (arguably not the best music player in the field, and not the first either), it changed the mobile phone industry with the introduction of the iPhone (same here, probably not the best smartphone out there, nor the first). The core of the success of these devices wasn’t the device itself, but the way it made accessing and using content easier and more enjoyable. I think we will see a repetition of this strategy later today.

My prediction: the Apple Tablet will shake the media publishing industry to its roots. And that is what the device will be aimed at: consuming rich content.

Just look at this concept movie Time Inc. made last year, and see how this affects the way you consume your favorite magazines and newspapers. Heck, just based on that concept movie alone I’d be willing to pay for subscriptions for rich media content.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, if Time Inc. makes the content of it’s flagship publications available to be consumed as shown on a device like that, and others (like McGraw Hill, The NYT, Washington Post) follow it’s example, now that would make a device interesting to use.

Sure, I have a MacBook and an Iphone, so why should I want such a device? The answer is in it’s main strength: accessing rich content. And why would publishers enrich their content, basically cannibalizing on their paper publications? Because in-app purchases and content subscriptions for this kind of rich media is the future. You need a MacBook to effectively edit and create content, and an iPhone to access it from your pocket. But to get the maximum (and optimized) rich experience, you’ll need the Mac Tablet.

Now on the iPhone you can get apps for watching missed episodes of TV shows, news channels, newspaper articles, etc. This device will be the platform to access the content I want, when I want, how I want. It’ll be a new revolution, as Time Inc. and McGraw-Hill and the NYT are just the beginning.

What if Amazon.com comes with an app for the Mac Tablet that does exactly what the Kindle does, and more? If this opens up the Amazon Store to a larger audience, with the ease of use we’ve come to expect from Apple’s user interface (as opposed to the Kindle’s UI), this will drive sales for Amazon, making the Kindle less important for them. But that’s what this revolution is all about: content content content.

And because this is an Apple device, it’ll look great, and it’ll be ultra-usable. But it’s not about the device itself, but about the platform it will represent: a new era for media publishing.

So what is this prediction worth? Absolutely nothing. I have no inside information, don’t read all the blogs all the time or just came back from the future. But to me, it makes sense. It fits Apple’s previous strategies to introduce a device with the great ways to use it for something special, not about the specs of the device itself. But this’ll stand or fall with the content publishers. But as you can see from mr. McGraw, they’re as excited as I am.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ik zoek een illustrator/cartoonist/tekenaar die mij wil helpen met illustraties voor nieuwe persoonlijke site! #durftevragen please RT

Die simpele vraag leverde al heel snel een aantal uitstekende reacties op. Om die behulpzaamheid ook voor anderen te bewaren, geeft ik hier een kort overzicht van de suggesties.

JellePelle.nl

pixar-achtige stijl van JellePelle

Een van de eerste reacties kreeg ik via een Direct Message, en daarin werd Jelle Gijsberts (aka @JellePelle) van JellePelle.nl aangeraden. Jelle heeft een prachtige, frisse en kleurrijke pixar-animatieachtige stijl. Zijn tekeningen zijn vrolijk en door de grote mate van detail niet kinderlijk of kinderachtig. Op zijn site heeft hij een film staan van hoe hij in 5 uur tijd een illustratie maakt, en dat maakt zijn werk alleen maar indrukwekkender. Hij heeft al prijzen gewonnen voor zijn werk, en zijn project Tekenclub.nl toont dat hij ook passie voor het delen van zijn kennis en vak heeft.

Ik heb hem gelijk een mail gestuurd, en het lijkt erop dat hij zijn talenten voor mijn nieuwe site gaat inzetten!

Michelle Thonen

Soms hoef je helemaal niet ver te zoeken, en is het antwoord veel dichter bij dan je denkt. Michelle Thonen (site in aanbouw), die nu ook voor het project Webrichtlijnen van ICTU werkt, maakt ook prachtige illustraties. Zo heeft zij haar afstudeerwerk van illustraties voorzien. Haar stijl is open en handgetekend, en vooral illustratief (maar dat kan ook goed zijn omdat ik alleen dat deel van haar werk heb gezien!). Het nadeel voor gebruik op mijn site is dat de overeenkomst met de Webrichtlijnen stijl dan wel groot wordt –en aangezien ik daar gewerkt heb, wil ik die verwarring voorkomen.

Jenny Lindhout

Kijk Mij door Jenny Lindhout

Een andere aanrader is Jenny Lindhout. Op haar website is goed te zien wat haar stijl is. Zij combineert fysieke creaties met illustraties, en maakt daar de mooiste dingen mee. Wat mij erg aanspreekt is dat ze die stijl ook toepast bij het overbrengen van informatie in infographics. Het is echter niet de stijl die ik zoek voor mijn eigen website.

Willem Kolvoort

Willem Kolvoort is illustrator en beeldend kunstenaar. Zijn tekenstijl is kleurrijk en kinderlijk, zonder kinderachtig te worden. Ook maakt hij prachtige natuurtekeningen. Hij heeft voor allerlei publicaties illustraties gemaakt. Ik mis echter de achtergrond in zijn stijl, waardoor ik deze niet voor mijn site kan gebruiken.

Rolf van Slooten

Tenslotte Rolf van Slooten. Die is 3D Visual Artist –wat dat ook moge betekenen. Van dat soort termen gaan mijn nekharen altijd om hoog. Maar laat de schijn je niet bedriegen: Rolf is een ware professional op het gebied van 3D illustraties. Zo heeft hij bijvoorbeeld voor Albert Heijn de ‘koperen lantaarns’ met het AH logo erin ontworpen en getekend. Deze werden gebruikt in alle winkels en op de boodschappentassen e.d. Erg mooi allemaal, maar ook dit is niet de stijl die ik zocht.

Screenshot of the Child Support Ghana homepage

Out with the old

In the old situation, there were three different places you could find new and out-dated information about the various projects and activities. First there was the Wa Yiri Children’s Home website, which I quickly built using the Mambo content management system. This was 2004–2005, and Mambo has matured a lot since those days. I used Mambo mainly because I needed a system that non-web-savvy people could use and publish content. But this turned out not to be such a good choice. The non-web-savvy people were non-Mambo-savvy people too –or better yet, Mambo wasn’t as user-friendly as it lead us to believe. So the information published on the site quickly became outdated and irrelevant.
In february 2005 my dad went to Ghana to find out if he could settle there –at least for a while, maybe even indefinitely– and make a real change. He wanted a weblog to keep everyone informed of his travels, his journeys, his experiences, and as he settled in more, his projects as well. His weblog was dubbed Under African Skies and became the major source of information about the works of Child Support Ghana. This is chiefly due to the fact that my dad could publish all this information, including photo’s, all by himself (he doesn’t have running water or is connected to a sewer system, but he does have an ADSL broadband internet connection –when there’s power…). And this was made possible by the awesome WordPress blogging platform, which has grown in sheer awesomeness ever since those days. Now the new website is powered by WordPress too.
The third site you could find all kinds of information about the project is the Child Support Ghana Foundation website, the main website. This website should have been maintained by the Board and volunteers of the Child Support Ghana. It was also created by me, and I was seen as the person who should keep it up to date. But, since I’m not the best at keeping sites up to date, this didn’t work very well. So this site contained outdated information as well, and as it is part of the official communications of the Child Support Ghana Foundation, this became a growing problem.
The solution was simple.

In with the new

About a year ago, I decided to merge all three websites into one, using the Child Support Ghana domain, where all information is published by those who know it best. I created an information structure based on the available information and topics, and set out to validate that at some of the visitors and users of the websites. It was tweaked a little, and accepted. I based thenew structure as much on the information that wasn’t available, as on the information that was. Thus, I hoped to create a content strategy for the volunteer-driven site, ensuring the publication of compelling and motivating content.
Te new site caters to three different groups of visitors. First and main, it’s targeted at potential sponsors and donators. These are people who support the projects Child Support Ghana executes in Wa, because they feel connected and want to be involved in small and bigger ways. So, the website needed to provide information about the projects and their merits. More so, it needs to sell the projects to draw people into the site, and make them think “something special is going on here, I’d like to learn more about it!”. And for this kind of third world development work, nothing conveys this better then photo’s of the people Child Support is helping out. So on the homepage, I added a photo carrousel (using JonDesign’s excellent SmoothGallery script) with photo’s of the projects.
I also learned that the second best way to sell the projects is to provide authentic content. This means that we’re not hiding the fact that working in the Upper West Region of Ghana is difficult, and that Child Support Ghana is forced to make difficult (sometimes even life-and-death) decisions. By merging Eric’s weblog into the new site, we’re ensured of hundreds of authentic posts filled with experiences and anecdotes of life in Ghana and the work of Child Support Ghana.
Now that we have the visitors attention, we need to make it easy for them to become involved in Child Support Ghana, and donate funds and/or time and effort. Donating funds is easy using the TipIt service, a quick donation via iDeal and/or creditcard is available on each and every page on the site. Since our main audience is based in The Netherlands and Belgium, iDeal and creditcards basically covers the main means of doing online transactions. If people want to participate in other ways, there’s a whole section on how to support Child Support Ghana.
The other group we’re trying to convince to participate on the site is the potential volunteers. These are good people who want to donate their skills and experience and participate in the projects in Wa. This group is really looking for information on the projects, trying to find what their value to those could be. Also, they’re looking for practical info about the life in Ghana, as well as infom on how to get in touch with the people behind Child Support Ghana to see if going there for 6 months is a viable option. We try to provide the necessary info on the site, but I still feel that’s the one area we don’t have enough information –yet.
The third main group is English-speaking/reading visitors. As the success of Child Support Ghana spreads through the news channels of Ghana and other non-BeNeLux countries, the need to provide quality information in English is growing. More and more people and organizations abroad are supporting Child Support Ghana now, so we created a whole new section just for English content.

The new design

A large part of my time and effort went into the redesign of the site. This is because I’m never really satisfied with the quality of my skills and experience to create a really high-end design, but for this site, I tried pushing my limits. First though, I went looking for inspiration, and was awestruck by the beauty and effectiveness of Rob Goodlatte’s Wiser Girls theme. WISER is also a third world development project, supporting and running a girls school in Africa. The design of the WISER site is stunning. I definitely didn’t want to copy and steal it, but as you can see, a lot of elements from WISER went into the Child Support Ghana site.
Because I didn’t want to copy it, I had to recreate the design. And to complicate things more, I decided to create the theme using the Carrington Blog theme framework for WordPress, created by Crowd Favorite. This framework would allow me to create a flexible and sustainable theme, which is easy to extend and add new template types to. This would make maintaining the site easier.
And to top it all off, as a self-proclaimed webstandards advocate, I had to bring it all together in standards-compliant, semantic markup and stylesheets. Due to the complexity of the Carrington Blog theme, and trying to recreate a look and feel, I’m sure there are many many opportunities to optimise the code I used. But overall, I’m quite happy with the results!

So, please take a look at the site, read through some of the projects, perhaps even read a few blog posts made by my dad, and let me know what you think of the new site!

Herko supporting Webstandards Blue Beanie Day

Excerpt from the 3rd Annual Blue Beanie Day Event Page:

It’s easy to show your support for web design done right. Beg, borrow, or buy a Blue Beanie (or Blue Toque in Canada) and snap a photo of your mug wearing the blue. (Or get creative with Photoshop). Then on November 30, switch your profile picture in Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, (and any other social network) and post your photo to the Flickr Blue Beanie Day 2009 group.

Want to help with planning the 3rd Annual Blue Beanie Day? Planning a meetup or tweetup in your hometown? Organizing a group photo in your city? You might qualify to win a free copy of Zeldman and Marcotte’s (brand new) Designing With Web Standards 3rd edition. Contact Douglas Vos.

Kevin Cornell makes it even easier for us this year by providing an illustrated blue beanie photoshop file.

So don a blue beanie, spread the word and keep working towards a truly open web.
Some of my collegues also support Webstandards:

Raph dons his blue beanie

Jules also supports webstandards

OWMS Smurf supports anything for a beer

@michellethonen manages to look like a kitten

Standards in da hood! Word.

Euhm… no comment.

A Lean Mean Blue Beanie Machine

I haven’t been involved in organizing this barcamp at all, but as a member of thh Webguidelines project I take a special interest in it. The idea for this barcamp probably was born when Cinamon Interactive, a (mostly) Dutch Website builder with a reputation for building accessible sites got the assignment to build a web 2.0 platform for the Ministry of the Interior. Since the application of the Webguidelines is mandatory for state government websites since 2006, Cinnamon wanted to know how to secure accessibility on the platform with all that user generated content, widgets, data sharing and other web 2.0 technologies.

This is one of the known criticisms on the Webguidelines, accessible user generated content. The main question is ‘how to ensure that user’s contributions are accessible conforming to the webstandards and webguidelines, without making it too hard for users to interact with the platform’. This quickly turns into a discussion about what is more important: contributions from people, or accessible government content. While there is a lot to be said about that discussion, there is no clear answer for it, and thus it doesn’t bring us any closer to a solution.

What will? One thing to look at definitely is W3C’s WAI-ARIA standard. If you’re interested, read this excellent article by martin Kliehm on A List Apart titled “Accessible Web 2.0 applications with WAI-ARIA”.

Anyways, I’ll be attending the barcamp, and I hope more people will to. The more people, the better we’ll be able to find creative solutions to a pretty serious problem.

**UPDATE** As of today, june 22nd, there aren’t any more places available for this Barcamp. Thanks everyone for signing up! I’ll keep you posted on the results. You can probable follow the barcamp with twitter. Now to find a decent hashtag for this event.

Defriend yourself!

The term of this week seems to be ‘defriending’. It’s not even in Wikipedia –yet– so it must be fresh. Website Marketing Facts writes about it, a sure sign that it is to be a trend for 2009. Basically, it means you clean up your social network so that only people who you’re actually in a friendly or closer relationship with remain. The basic premises behind this idea is that the value of your social network is higher, if the online equivalent reflects your offline one –or something like that.

It was fast-food chain Burger King who took defriending to a new level. With the Facebook app Whopper Sacrifice you earned a free Whopper for every 10 friendships you ended on Facebook. After a week, Facebook ended the viral as 233.000 friendships were sacrificed.

Facebook sacrificed the Whopper Sacrifice viral

I think the whole assumption that your social network should have only “real friends” is wrong. At least, in my case. My social network is made up of people I’d like easy access to, and who do, like and know things I find interesting, and with whom I’d like to share some of the things I do and find interesting. I haven’t personally met all these people, nor have had contact with them. That doesn’t make their ideas any less valuable to me tho.

The Dunbar Number

So why is the scope and extent of my social graph important for why I use Twitter? For that, I need to introduce you to the Dunbar Number. Dunbar is an anthropologist at the University College of London, who wrote a paper on Co-Evolution Of Neocortex Size, Group Size And Language In Humans where he hypothesizes:

… there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.

The number he calculated was 150. If you carry this number to the social graph, you could argue that the human brain is only able to cope with 150 or so stable relationships, thus anyone with a higher number of friends in any of their networks, has unstable relationships, and are therefore worth less then those with stable relationships. Thus, one should defriend and stabilize his graph. (for more info on this subject, read Christopher Allen’s great blog post The Dunbar Number as a limit to group size)

Source of inspiration

Like I said in my introduction, my online social network is my main access to a lot of inspiration. I have real life and long time friends there, family, co-workers, people I have worked with in real life, people I have collaborated with online, people I haven’t met and would like to meet some day, people I’ll probably never meet but whose ideas, skills and works I admire. I haven’t got stable relationships with 150 of them –probably far less. But they reflect on who I am, and how I like to be perceived, and what I do and don’t do, and what ideals I have and don’t have. They reflect on me.

Now, lets get to the topic of this post, why I use Twitter. Twitter is especially in the picture when the defriending topic sails along, as it is both easy to add people to your network (you just click ‘follow’ and you’re done) and for other people to add themselves to your network (all they have to do is follow you). But for me, Twitter isn’t just a representation of my social graph and an easy way to know what my friends are doing all day, but something else entirely. It is a source of inspiration.

The modern day Hearth

This is something Stephen Fry pointed out in his talk at the Apple Store in London on Apple and Twitter and so forth. He basically said that the human race has a long history of exchanging ideas and transferring knowledge. He was talking about audiobooks, but the same applies to Twitter in my opinion –he is Twitter’s self proclaimed vice-president, as only Barack Obama has more followers then him.

Anyways, he basically says that with the invention of he printing press by Guttenberg, knowledge exchange moved from a social, interpersonal experience into a distanced, individual experience. Before the mass distribution of printed knowledge and experience, there were storytellers who, in different forms –songs, tales, plays, opera’s, etc.- immerse the listeners into the story, thus conferring it’s meaning and sharing its experiences and lessons. The most basic form of this oral distribution is the hearth. Around the hearth the storyteller is in direct contact with his or her audience, and shares not only his words, but also the non-verbal meaning, suspense, experience and even drama. Thus, making it a rich experience, probably anchoring the experience in the audiences minds far better then most books ever could.

This struck me as true, and I immediately followed this logic to my use of Twitter. To me, Twitter is the modern day hearth or village pump. It’s a place where I choose to go to and share my experiences, my daily finds, my emotional states, my inspirations with anyone who is interested –for whatever reason. And I look for other people’s experiences, knowledge, daily finds, etcetera as well.

And the beauty of Twitter –for me– is that it’s not long distance. Yes, it is a-synchronous, but I can reply to tweets, send them a direct message, and start conversations. In other words, the barrier to get in touch with the storyteller is very low. I can easily get in touch and enrich their experience with my own, and even build a relationship.

This is why Twitter for me is such a source of information, experience and inspiration. It lets me see things from a different perspective and surprise me with insights –both good and bad. It is the Social Graph and Social Network stripped of all web-technology-imposed barriers. I interact with other people, not with web applications or websites that aggregate the personal aspect to a manageable social blob. To me, Twitter is the modern day hearth.

The World Wide Web Consortium announced yesterday that it has formally adopted the next version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0)  as an official recommendatio. This is a big step towards eWCAG 2 becoming a web standard. The creation of the WCAG 2.0 specification has been a long and arduous process, but the W3C promised to show a result by the end of this year. And so they have.

11 December 2008 — Today W3C announces a new standard that will help Web designers and developers create sites that better meet the needs of users with disabilities and older users. Drawing on extensive experience and community feedback, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 improve upon W3C’s groundbreaking initial standard for accessible Web content. [source:W3C  press release]

The W3C hails WCAG 2.0 as the “Standard that Defines Accessibility for Next Generation Web”. the impact of WCAG 2.0 is big, on websites that need to conform to accessibility standards like governement and educaion websites, and for quality frameworks such as the Dutch Web Guidelines –where I work. W3C has listed a number of documents in their press release explaining the impact on various aspects such as design and changes from WCAG 1.0.

W3C validators need your money!

In other W3C news, Molly Holzschlag –the well known and respected web standards guru– posted a call for community support for the much used W3C validator services. Apparently, the W3C’s validator services cost so much in infrastructure and bandwidth, tha this is too much of a strain on the W3C budget. So they launched the Validator Donation and Sponsorship Campaign. Molly explains:

It works like this:

• Donor: A donor is anyone interested in donating money to the cause. A micropayment of 1.00 USD if the validator “saves your day” can be very helpful!
• Sponsor: A sponsor is a company or organization that donates to the W3C
• Community Fundraising: There are two badges available at the W3C that link to the fundraising page. If you support the validator, encourage others by placing a badge on your site and blogging about the topic
• Time Not Money: If you cannot or do not wish to donate money, your time is as or even more valuable. There are opportunities to help the W3C maintain and grow validation services.

So if you’re a regular user of the validator services, please help out and show your support!

Change.gov

Centraal in de transitie staat de website change.gov. Op deze website staat de agenda van de nieuwe president, en nodigt hij iedereen uit mee te denken en te werken aan de grote veranderingen in het land. Zo nodigt hij iedereen uit vragen te stellen aan het nieuwe team dat het land gaat besturen. En iedereen kan weer op die vragen reageren.
Zo ontstaat een nieuwe en vooral open dynamiek bij het opstellen van het politieke programma van een nieuwe regering. Dus geen campagne leuzen meer, geen loze beloftes, en ook geen onderhandelingen achter gesloten deuren.
Maar open betekent ook dat het open staat voor uitersten. En dat geldt zeker als Internet ingezet wordt.

Polarisatie

Ik ben nu Obama’s boek “the audacity of hope” aan het lezen. Daarin beschrijft hij hoe de Amerikaanse politiek de laatste decennia (sinds Reagan, eigenlijk) vooral aan het polariseren is. Als je geen Republikein bent, ben je Democraat. Ben je niet voor, dan ben je tegen. Misschien is dat een gevolg van een twee partijen stelsel, maar ik denk dat het marketing denken er ook een grote invloed op heeft.
In zijn boek zet Obama zich daar tegen af. Hij is Democraat, maar ziet ook veel waarde in Republikeinse standpunten en argumenten.
En nu laat hij het volk dus meepraten over de veranderagenda. Met als gevolg dat mensen –vanuit de gepolariseerde politiek– lastige vragen stellen om vooral tegen te zijn. En dat voorstanders die lastige vragen verwijderen.
Mijn punt is dat hieruit blijkt dat open niet hetzelfde is als anders of zelfs als verandering. Open weerspiegelt het nu, en geeft alles en iedereen de mogelijkheid op het podium te klimmen.

Open data

Naast die belangrijke les over open overheid past Obama er nog meer toe. Zo is alle inhoud op change.gov vrijgegeven onder een Creative Commons licentie, waardoor het mogelijk en legaal is die inhoud te hergebruiken. Zo kan je nu bijvoorbeeld de veranderingen op die site volgen. En meer toepassingen zullen wel snel volgen.

Change.gov draait overigens op Expression Engine, een CMS waar ik ook wat ervaring mee heb. Het is geen open source software, maar is wel van de makers van Code Igniter, een open source PHP franework. EE is gebruikersvriendelijk, en volgt de webstandaarden.

Obama volgt een strategie van openheid, iets wat politiek gezien een verademing is. Ik vraag me echter af of die strategie in het sterk gepolariseerde Amerika voldoende bijdraagt aan de daadwerkijke verandering. Openheid legt ook de verschillen bloot. Maar het geeft ook de veranderingsgezinde mensen de instrumenten en het podium om mee te denken en te werken aan een betere toekomst. Ik volg de ontwikkelingen met grote interesse!

p.s. Deze blogpost is geheel op de iPhone geschreven, later zijn de links en koppen toegevoegd. FYI

Basically, it comes down to synching with the cloud. All I want to do is push the calendar data in the MobileMe calendar to my omputer at home. That’s simple, you might think. But, iCal has found some ‘inconsistant data’ and is refusing to recieve the data from the cloud.
So I set and reset everything, cleared my local calendars, everything. Nothing works. Apple’s Geniusses (no sarcasm intended here) tell me now that the only way to solve the problem is to send my corrupted data to the cloud, overwriting my good data, thereby resetting the connection, and then synch my bad data back to my computer, thereby restoring my connection.

Ouch.

So much for gathering your vital data in the cloud.