How to Design Web Accessible Pages for the Color Blind

We have a client site going live next week. During our normal quality control testing procedures the client called me to see if the site would be viewable by people who are color blind. The base corporate color is a shade of maroon. Actually my brother is color blind as was my grandfather. I asked my brother to check the site and it passed with flying colors (no pun intended ;-) ).

But it got me to thinking about other sites that include Red and Green. How would they fair?

Check out How to Design Web Accessible Pages for the Color Blind for more info on this.

Free Fonts

My oldest Son Evan LOVES fonts. He likes to install them and collect them and print them out.
He is going to go crazy when I show him this site.

A HUGE LIST OF FREEWARE FONTS

Tax Time Again! - Use Your Favorite Tax Software For Free

The IRS has a list of free online tax filing software. If they had their way, EVERYONE would file online. It's quick, easy and efficient.

Last year I purchased a copy of Turbotax and also filled out all the information on their free website version. The final outcome was IDENTICAL! I'm going for the free version this year at:
http://www.taxfreedom.com/

Firefox 20% market share in Europe

A new study out from XiTi shows a major gain in Europe in the use of Firefox.

Baker Street Blog - How to do great creative without being clever or talented

In the early days of motoring, Michelin weren't selling enough tires. They had to persuade people to drive more. So they invented Michelin Guides, which contained everything you needed to plan a motoring holiday, from maps to restaurant reviews. They made it chic to travel hundreds of miles to Switzerland and Italy in noisy, uncomfortable cars. Thousands did, and millions do it today. Wearing the tires out as they go. Genius.

WOW, It's Been a Whole Month Since My Last Post!!!!

I've been on vacation from the blog for a while. I am just starting to catch up on the goings on.
One interesting article in btobonline.com says that online video is projected to show a big growth over the next two years. They report that online video ad spending in the U.S. will reach $640 million in 2007, approaching triple this year's online video ad spending of $225 million. By 2009, advertisers will spend $1.5 billion on video ads online.

"Podcast" - Word of the Year

CNet reports that Podcast is word of the year. Its amazing how fast the popularity of this word has grown! Last year it was rejected because not enough people were using it. I have found podcasts to be quite useful to listen to while I am cleaning the kitchen or doing other tasks on the o computer. I'm a REAL geek, I run my laptop through my stereo system and us my cordless speakers to listen anywhere in the house.

Google Source of 10.8 % of Visitors to Retail Websites

Hitwise reports that search remains a major source of visitors to e-tailers contributing 17.9 percent of all visits for the week of December 3rd. Google led in search engine referrals, having provided 10.8 percent of all visits to online retailers. Yahoo Search and MSN Search accounted for 4.1 percent and 0.8 percent, respectively.

Online Advertising Reaching the "Tipping Point"

Brian Morrissey at Ad Week reports that Web ad spending will increase to $55 billion worldwide within the next five years. They report that big advertisers like Absolut Vodka, General Motors and Ford earmark 20 percent of their marketing budgets to Internet marketing.

Latino Lingo - Growth of Online Marketing

Wilson posted a link to an interesting article called Surfing in two Worlds.
He states that marketing to Hispanics online is up 33% as compared to last year.

Proposed Extensions To RSS To Share Calendars And Other Things

I just read the latest post from Ray Ozzie at Microsoft. He and his group are proposing a new addition to the RSS protocol called SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions) to allow asynchronous sharing of data between multiple sources. What does this mean in ENGLISH???? -->

It means when this is implemented RSS can be extended to synchronize calendars, address lists, task lists, project plans or anything else that needs multiple source updates from ANY application that supports the standard. Microsoft is releasing this under the Creative Commons License, so it will be freely available to all. This is awesome! All the geeky details are here.

This is yet another example of how SUBSCRIBE is the next evolutionary step on the internet

My First Skype Call

Well the big news this week is that Skype has released version 2.0 beta that supports high definition streaming video.

I made my first Skype call today with a colleague in the UK. The quality was excellent! I was so impressed, I am talking about rolling this out to more employees at Mason. In the past, I tried the voice over IP options with Yahoo, MSN and AOL IM, but none were as clear and natural as Skype. I recommend checking it out especially since it's free!

Nice Introduction to RSS

RSS enables the next evolutionary step on the internet with the ability to consolidate information and subscribe. Wizard Creek Consulting has a great introduction and tutorial to bring you up to speed on Really Simple Syndication. Check it out here.

Spambots Gotcha Down?

Looking for a good way to stop spammers from harvesting email addresses off of your website?
Check out http://www.mways.co.uk/prog/hidemail.php. Here you can generate javascript to post that obscures your actual address, but still works when you click on it.

Here is what my address looks like as javascript ;-)

Spambots say --> Huhhhh?

But click here to see what it looks like on the web...

Naked Conversations: Starting with Scoble: Bumps & Brilliance

Shel writes about one year ago when Robert suggested the blog2book idea.
Hopefully they have started a trend! I think this process worked extremely well for Naked Conversations. Are there other books that could benefit from this approach? hmmm.... Let me know what you think.