Congratulations to the Virtual Event team here at Metia for their recent success in winning a Web Marketing Association Award in the Computer : Software category.

Here's to many more.

Last week was MIX in the UK and we had quite a few of the team attending.

It was a good couple of days, meeting people and talking about what we and they were doing. One of the recurring themes seemed to be the continued integration of design and development teams when working on Silverlight type projects.

This is something that we’ve been doing for a while now, moving everyone around so that they sit next to each other when working on projects, making sure they have joint project ownership, regular integration sessions, regular deployments, etc. Over the last year or so, this has totally changed how we work, not just on these projects but on everything we do, and while the technology has accelerated us into improving things, the bit I find most encouraging is the impetus that this has provided to continually challenge and improve how we work. A great ethos for all companies.

From a technical perspective the ADO.NET Data Services presentation seems to have been the one which the developers enjoyed the most.

At Mix I went to more of the design focused sessions, a few of which were presented by Bill Buxton and while his presentation style may take a little getting used to you, can certainly get value from what he’s saying. One of my favourite bits was his ‘Long Nose of Innovation’ concept which he published on Business Week.



I’ve seen this happen, sometimes with a long time frame, sometimes with it being short, but on the whole it’s always there. I’ve spent some of the weekend trying to think about what I can do to shorten the time frame more consistently. I’ve not come up with any concrete ideas yet but definitely got a few options which I’m going to try out. I’ll try to post those that work.

Tags: MIX, Bill Buxton, Silverlight, The Long Nose of Innovation, ADO.NET Data Services

Microsoft have launched a site called the Mojave Experience and the views on it have been quite wide ranging.

From comparing it to the Milgram experiments in the 60's.
To being critical of people who aren't tech savvy enough to use Vista
To what if Apple had done it
To why did they use Flash for it rather than Silverlight
and a whole load in between

On the whole I think that the Microsoft marketing team were trying to do a good thing and demonstrate that a lot of the feelings about Vista were based on hearsay rather than experience of using it.

Yes I agree that you can make a number of things look better than they actually are in a demo, just ask most start ups, but they have included some videos of people who picked that what they were looking at was Vista.

Personally I'm a Vista user and find it OK. As with most OS's there are some good and some bad bits my team enjoy nothing more than watching me struggle with one of our Linux or OS X test boxes. I don't complain about it I see them as other operating systems in the market that as web professionals we need to be aware of and build solutions which work well on them. I just don't use them every day so will always be a little slower on them and not know all the things they can do. I'm sure that if somebody showed me a top notch demo of Vista I'd hardly recognise some of it either.

Maybe Microsoft should go the whole hog and provide a copy of Vista and a video camera to 100 people and get them to record what they think of their first month of using Vista. I doubt they will.

Full disclosure Microsoft is a client.

Tags: Mojave Experiment, Microsoft, Flash, Silverlight, Vista

Via Digg

For all you designers out there

Business week has an interesting article titled The 10 Commandments of Web Design.

It lists these as

1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash
2. Thou shalt not hide content
3. Thou shalt not clutter
4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections
5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels
6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography
7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences
8. Thou shalt be social
9. Thou shalt embrace proven technologies
10. Thou shalt make content king

Interesting that Amazon and YouTube feature in both their best and worst list.

I agree with most of them but their description for Number 9 : Thou shalt embrace proven technologies is

"Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, and their cohorts have become a part of daily life. Sites that can incorporate these elements into their design will connect with users in a meaningful way by providing functionality and an interface with which they're already familiar."

Surely they can't describe Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook as technologies. What does that make .NET, PHP, XML, JavaScript, and their cohorts?

Surprising there was nothing in there about accessibilty or web standards.

Tags: Business Week, Web Technologies, Web Design

I saw an ad recently for New Balance's Love/Hate advertising campagin and rather than me wanting to go and buy a pair, it normally doesn't take too much encoragement for me to buy a new pair of shoes, all I could think of was Marmite.

There's a slight difference in their adverting style

Maybe its a British thing.

Tags: New Balance, Marmite

Virgin have launched what they're calling the Virgin Eye.

Check it out here

It shows which stories are being written about Virgin companies in a nice graphical manner. My favorite is when you have Beautify on and you see new stories arriving.

The one thing that seems to be missing is displaying stories about itself.

Tags: Virgin Eye, Virgin, Data Visualization