• 1 billion – videos served by YouTube every day
• 182 hours - number if online videos the average internet user watches in a month
• 82% - of Internet users that view videos online
• 12.2 billion - videos viewed per month on YouTube (US)
• 924 million – videos viewed per month on Hulu (US)

Source of stats: a video of course…

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

I love listening to Ben Watts Buzzin Fly radio show www.buzzinfly.com It could be the reason why people love me or hate me in the office, as I tend to make sure I get in early and switch it on before anyone arrives.   (The artwork they use to promote the label is amazingly cool too).

Watch it in action http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJN8cXyyEQM

On the opposing side @ Bear HQ is Jamie…let’s see if he comes back with anything…

The first is Jake Burton, founder of Burton Snowboards. If you think snowboarding only became popular in the late 90s, you’d be right. But Jake founded his snowboard company back in 1977, when few people had even heard of snowboards, and even fewer wanted them. He designed and made snowboards by himself and went out to show people how much fun they could be. His perseverance payed off and he now owns the biggest snowboard company in the world.

Michael Davidson failed five times before getting it right. He wanted to change the use of a microscope from something scientific to something artistic that could be used commercially, such as for tie patterns. He photographed vitamins, moonrocks and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream through microscopes before getting his biggest hit by photographing beers and cocktails. The resulting photographs are amazing and surprising.

Even more surprising were his silicone chip photographs. Under a microscope, he found silicone chips had been graffitied with doodles, cartoon characters and messages left by the chips’ creators, He called this discovery the Silicone Zoo: http://www.vbs.tv/watch/motherboard/psychedelic-photomicrography-and-the-silicon-zoo

These are just two examples of people who were so focused on their idea, that they couldn’t help but succeed. The digital landscape is always evolving so, from our point of view, there’s always room for something interesting and new. Sometimes it might take a while for the world to catch up with the idea. Sometimes it might seem like nobody will be interested. But the point is, if you believe you’re right, never give up and never give in. You will get to the top of your mountain.

Pie charts are so nineteen-eighty-(actually, was there ever a time when pie charts seemed innovative and attractive?) As you all know, online can do amazing things with images, communication, concepts and networking. Imagine what it could do when it’s let loose with boring, unsexy data…

You want hot data? You want to tease your audience with facts and figures they won’t be able to get enough of? You want to give them dataporn, Or data visualisation if you’re already getting a bit hot under that collar.

Dataporn can turn anything into an eyecatching, memorable and (usually) interactive format. The site http://www.wefeelfine.org/ is a perfect example, which you may have already seen. This is a galaxy of dots that represent how everyone on the internet is feeling. It could have been a simple list or a bar chart to represent who’s feeling happy, sad or indifferent. Instead it’s a journey of discovery where you can click on any one of the dots to find that, right now, someone in Ohio is feeling “loved and a little spoiled”. Or that someone in Japan feels “like Spring is just around the corner.”

Another example is http://labs.digg.com/365/ where you can get any day’s most popular stories in a sexed-up and engaging spider diagram.

Check out www.vizworld.com to get the latest graphics and data visualisation news and info. And, take a look at http://www.vizworld.com/2010/02/state-internet-2009/ – a presentation about internet usage using a very simple graphic style that can be carried through across every statistic. Try it for yourself and you’ll find people begging for your sexy, imaginative graphics in no time.

A few years back, it would be unthinkable to try and do some of the things that Flash is used for without actually using Flash. Today, however, the picture is quite different.

The main uses for Flash can be broken down into the following categories:

Rich animation and page transitions

This is what might push you toward Flash for most projects. Animations and transitions with complex effects are present pretty much everywhere on the internet, whether it be in banner adverts or to illustrate content on a web page.

Flash has had a monopoly on delivering this kind of polish for a long time, helped partially by a lack of cross-browser alternatives and other techniques having a bad perception due to poor performance and a history of bad implementations. However, in recent years much progress has been made to improve this situation. JavaScript libraries coupled with Ajax to dynamically load content combine to deliver animation and transitions in an straightforward manner that works on the majority of modern web browsers. More recently, the HTML5 specification has pushed the Canvas drawing API and CSS3 is starting to arrive with it’s arsenal of animation and transition-related weaponary.

It should be said that these technologies have only extended to web pages so far, and not to banner adverts. Also, Canvas and CSS3 does not currently work natively in the most used browser of all, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but there are workarounds such as the excanvas extension and this situation should improve further with IE9.

Typeface

The web has traditionally been a designer’s nightmare for using different fonts that work on all machines in an accessible way. Flash allows the embedding of different font faces which means that not only your Flash movies can fancy fonts are required, but thanks to technologies such as sIFR, you can use the fonts to replace text on a standard web page.

Non-flash alternatives are catching up, however. Firstly, there’s the excellent cufon that takes advantage of the HTML5 Canvas API and some clever coding to deliver fonts without Flash, but it has been hampered by font licensing issues. To combat the threat of font licensing, there are third-party typeface arbitrators to get around font licensing issues such as Typekit and the upcoming Fontdeck. And lastly, there’s the new CSS3 specification which allows direct embedding of fonts, although this currently has to support different formats due to varying web browser implementations, some of which have the same licensing issues as mentioned above.

Video and Audio

A vast majority of video and audio online are delivered using Flash. Since Flash moved into this area, websites such as YouTube have capitalised on video support in the browser. While video and audio aren’t traditionally where the focus of Flash lay, they have proved somewhat of a “killer app” for Flash and a consistent way of serving these types of media on the web.

With the arrival of HTML5 however, the introduction of <video> and <audio> tags is set to herald a new dawn of rich media that doesn’t require a browser plugin. The problem is again browser support and more significantly that browser manufactures can’t agree on the standard! YouTube and Vimeo are currently trialing HTML5 video that works with web browsers that support the h.264 video codec, so if you have Apple’s Safari or Google’s Chrome, you can check out YouTube’s implementation here or by clicking “Switch to HTML5 player” on any Vimeo video.

Small web applications

Another major area of functionality that Flash has been used to achieve is in the field of small web applications. For example, Flash can be used to add functionality to a web page to perform tasks that HTML wasn’t really built for, such as an interative photo gallery.

JavaScript libraries such as jQuery can provide an alternative by allowing web developers to deliver these kind of sophisticated types of web applications without having to resort to Flash or other third-party technologies.

Summing up

While the technologies above show what Flash is capable of and what it is now having to compete with, it by no means equates to Flash’s iminent demise. Flash still delivers the best experience for users over the majority of web browsers and that situation is here to stay for the near future. However, its dominant position is likely to be eroded by Apple excluding it from their flagship devices, as well as companies such as Google increasingly delivering their vast amount of YouTube content in HTML5 video format, as well as focusing on HTML5 and CSS3 for developing their web applications such as Google Docs.

Developing for IE6 adds a significant amount of time when building a web page, due to it’s reluctance to conform to agreed web standards and some quite significant bugs and random behaviour.

However, IE6, a browser that is almost 9 years old and still used by 20% of internet users simply won’t die. Microsoft officially won’t drop support until 2014 although they are starting to recommend that people stop using it.

If you or your company use IE6 you should be aware:

• Developing for IE6 adds a disproportionate amount of time, increasing the cost of projects.
• IE6 was designed for the internet of 2001 and doesn’t support many new technologies that are emerging. The fact that it is so widely used hinders progress and prevents many developers from being able to take advantage of these newer, more exiciting ways of using the web.
• Internet Explorer regularly grabs the headlines due to the number of exploits and vunerabilities it is susceptible to. Granted, the fact that it is the most used browser means it is an easier target, but that doesn’t make the problem any better. IE6 itself is 2 versions old and more susceptible to hacks and security risks than newer IE versions or the competition. This doesn’t mean that you aren’t going to have your computer hacked if you stay away from IE6 or IE altogether, but given the figures you stand less of a chance of this happening.

There have been many vocal campaigns for people to stop using IE6, but with Google phasing out support in their Google Apps and recent bad press it seems there is growing momentum to finally rid the web of it once and for all. There is even an online petition to kill IE6 in UK government you can sign up to on the Number 10 website.

So, do your part. Write to your MP. Sign the petitions. Upgrade your browser, or download another. Tell your mother, spread the word, do what you must, but let’s keep this momentum going and make the web a better place!

Update: YouTube have now started warning users of IE6 that support for the browser will be dropped from March 13th

However, choosing the wrong Content Management System can introduce inefficiencies, unnecessarily restricted designs and ultimately lead to a poor user experience and disappointment.

Here are our top tips for helping clients choose a CMS.

User interface

The whole point of a CMS is to enable anyone to manage a site, so a CMS without a decent user interface is completely pointless. It needs to be accessible to editors and authors that aren’t of a technical background, allowing content to be edited without delving into the nuances of coding for the web.

When you are doing repetitive content entry or editing large areas of the site at once, it is imperative that the user interface enables you to perform what you want to do in an efficient way.

A decent CMS user interface will have:

• Clear, consistent navigation, call to actions and descriptive text.
• The ability to browse your site and content in a way that is intuitive and closely related to the published site. The better CMSs allow you to edit in context while browsing the site.
• A rich text editor just like your favourite office application for styling areas of content.
• A simple mechanism for linking to uploaded images, downloads and other pages.

Functionality

With a good set of tools at your disposal, repetitive or complex tasks take no time at all.

Examples of CMS functionality:

• Browser-based and online so that you can login from anywhere without having to install any software.
• Drafts and previews ensure that you can check new changes before publishing them.
• Versioning means you get a historical log of content edits and can revert to a previous version if necessary.
• Users, roles and workflows make sure that the right people can edit your site and give more privileged users the power to veto or publish amends. Your editors can edit, your proof readers can proofread and marketing directors can give the press the button to push live.
• Upload centre to manage files, images, videos, documents and other assets.

Integration

Do you need to pull in data from a third-party or publish edits to your Twitter feed? Integration ensures that content can flow into and out of your site easily.

Examples of integration:

• Pull in your data from other sites, such as Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, or Blog posts with ease.
• RSS feeds allow people to subscribe to your newest content, news feeds and in some instances user comments.
• Social media sharing allows your content to be distributed by others who read your site and are interested in what you say. They can publish links to your content on their Facebook or Twitter feeds, for example.
• Newsletters allow you to drive traffic to your site. A CMS might allow you to collect signups in a database and some may even have a newsletter module that allow you to email the users directly.

Community

A strong community around your chosen CMS drives innovation and development.

We here at Wandering Bear champion open-source products that rely on their communities to exist.

Other benefits from a community are:

• User-sourced help from forums and wikis. Real users answering and solving problems together.
• Lots of themes and plugins available for you to drop in functionality easily.
• A strong community usually means there is a greater focus on fixing software bugs and product development.

In conclusion

The points covered above should give you an idea of what to look for when choosing a CMS. There will always be specific features that you’ll need to check to meet the needs of a particular project, but the above should hopefully act as a basis for benchmarking and sourcing the right CMS to fit your need.

Related links

Ten Simple Rules for Choosing the Perfect CMS
http://www.noupe.com/php/choosing-cms-tips.html

Wordpress
http://www.wordpress.org/

Drupal
http://www.drupal.org/

SilverStripe
http://www.silverstripe.org/

Concrete5
http://www.concrete5.org/