Live video streaming technology and the services providing the means to create, broadcast and maintain your own online television station online are making giant steps as Flash technology, infinite bandwidth and broadband adoption pave the highway to this new revolution in the making. Robin Good and Max Haot CEO of Mogulus.com Less than two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet up with Max Haot, CEO of Mogulus, the newest player in the emerging personal live broadcasting sector. Together with Stickam, Ustream and Operator11, Mogulus is a new web-based service allowing just about anyone to start, at zero cost, her own personal net tv. Mogulus specific focus, as Max Haot clearly underlines in this interview, is on creating net tv channels that have the look and feel of professional television stations: pro-graphics, an effective control room with a video mixer, the option to send live (”on-net” in place of “on-air” should be the term to be used to refer to such live broadcasting online - thanks Blaxwan) even those following the show at a distance, a full playlist functionality and a lot more. But, as its own competitors, Mogulus too has to face issues of usability, reliability and of a sustainable business model to make its offering a true winner. Will Mogulus become the new reference for those wanting to create their own live net TV stations, and what will characterize its offering? Waht features will be there to differentiate Mogulus from its own competition? These and others were the questions that I posed to Max Haot over a coffee table in Piazza S.Eustachio here in Rome before he jumped back on his next intercontinental flight. Max Haot had arrived here in Rome a couple of days earlier to join in to the special party-event-live-stream that Italian tv-video-media expert Tommaso Tessarolo had organized for the announcement of his Net TV book. He was not only kind enough to answers everything I asked but he also did let me live stream and video record everything he said via one of its direct competitors service. Here’s the record of what we shared together that day: Robin Good interviews Max Haot of Mogulus full English text transcript video duration: 32′ mins (the actual interview starts at minute 6′) Robin Good: So Max, where are you based at? Max Haot: I m based in New York, so that s where the Mogulus company is based, and I ve lived in New York for two years now and I was in London for ten years, and then in Belgium, where I was born. RG: And before jumping into the online television world, you have been already exposed to this kind of things I imagine Max Haot: Yeah, I started a work experience in London when I was 17, in 1995, and I wanted to be a television director (for TV companies), and when I started I also realized the power of the Internet, and I actually didn t do any television, and I worked at sites for the bigger sport federations, like Manchester United, European school of golf and so on. So then I built my career there for ten years. RG: With this company? Max Haot: Yes, with this company, IMG. So that s where I learned about TV and technology, and then basically in 2000 I created a software company, called ICF, and what we did is software for broadcasters to help syndicate video via mobile and broadband operators. RG: That s in the UK? Max Haot: Yes, that was in the UK. So that was my first company, incavated with an IMG. And this was a really professional, software for production company. We sold it also to Telecom Italia here, so that s why Telecom Italia uses it for Rosso Alice . And then we were providing all of the format conversion support to all the operators, because one mobile operator wants one format and another one wants another format, and it takes a long time to re-format. Then we sold the company in America to a company called MCI. RG: In which role did you play? Max Haot: I was basically vice-president of digital media at Verizon business, which is the business division of Verizon. It s very big, it s 50,000 employees and many billions of dollars and then we started Mogulus this year. RG: When did the vision come? How long ago? Max Haot: Well, it s been there for a long time, but it s started this year. RG: 2007? Max Haot: Yeah. RG: But when is it that your idea first consolidated? … when was it that you said to yourself: “I wanna go for this”. When that moment came, was the first thing to do to go and search for capital? Or did you first attempt to go other ways? Max Haot: No, I mean I founded the company with some other capital from myself, so that s really how it started, and then very quickly some relationship-and a friend of mine actually-wanted to invest more money .and so, at the beginning, I wanted to do this very small, with a team of very talented people that I worked with; and then basically we raised up to 1.2 million dollars so we re not too big and not too small. RG: so your funding support comes from “Private Angels … is that a company? Max Haot: Yes, Private Angels. RG: And… this is enough funding for you to go on without any money coming in for what..one year, two years? Max Haot: Yes, until the end of the year. But I ve invested it already since two weeks ago, and they offer to invest more. So things are good, the same investors want to invest more As you know, our Mogulus has two versions: the professional version, where if people don t want the advert they can pay for usage, or the advert-supported version, which is free. Keep in mind that before you can get advertisers who want to put ads on your tv channel, you need to have a product, cause otherwise they will not. We only launched Mogulus publicly two weeks ago, we ve let the first few people in, only two days ago, and so now my job starts in looking at the options of getting advertisers on board, and we ll see how it goes. So next month is very important. RG: But why did you choose to go for the small guys targeting the same audience as Ustream or Operator11… to the naive user Mogulus appears as a competitor (nonetheless, everybody says Oh Mogulus is fantastic, so many more features), but you know, the others will be awake as well, and they ll be moving on in features. So, you re not that far above, nor that far behind. The question is why did you choose to go for the small guys, instead of going for the medium size or the biggest size market, which would normally appear as a safer road? Max Haot: What do you mean by small guys ? RG: The small guys is everybody who now wants to be the new net-tv, which is generally some kind of unknown outsider who has good ideas, who has some resources to build this (that is my perception, maybe wrong). That is not generally the traditional broadcaster. So are you going for the small guys because you think they may waken-up the middle and big guys, or because this is a specific business strategy? Max Haot: The way we look at it is to go after existing medium guys, I would call them; they re not big-medium companies, they re not teenagers that just want to play with you. There s this group, and this group is really inspired to create valuable media properties, and they ve started with blogs, some have started with video blogs and they don t look at themselves as players around , they want to become large media companies. So our target is really to empower everybody who has already been creating contents and is very serious about it, …that s really the strategy. I think that everybody has a different angle, and we want to give you everything you need to make exactly what you see on TVs like RAI or Mediaset, or CNN, and that s the objective. That s what appeals, I think, not to medium guys, but to new coming-up guys, who are really ambitious and want to create but who don t have enough money to create a traditional TV studio. On the other hand I ve been meeting some of the traditional broadcasters who used to be my market, and I think that they are more traditional, a lot of them understand but it s slower for them to move in that space, so that is why if I went for the broadcasters it would take me a very long time to convince them of the vision and the product, because there s a lot of traditional ideas, technology and standards that they have to stick with… RG: …This guy knows what he s talking about!… Max Haot: …so, when they slowly get over that I hope they will be interested in the product we ll see. We re not waiting for that. RG: And are you having the facility to bring in also the community participants, just like some of your competitors can? That is, some people can log in and you as the video show director can allow them to participate live into the show via their own webcams? Max Haot: Well, the model today version has just come out, and you know we re very new. Two weeks ago we announced the product, only two days ago we let the first 150 people in, and we ve already 80 channels running so, we re very happy. And the objective is, in the next two months, to create quality channels. So we want to work with all these people who have applied, and to let them in slowly and build with them quality channels and quality products. Now the channels there s nobody that can see them, cause very few people can go in, so slowly we will let the best get their blogs, so that s the first step in two weeks. And then in July you will see that we will replace Mogulus.com with a website for viewing, and at that time we hope we have some channels that show everybody what can be done. And if you look at today, we ve been very happy: we have a dozen hundred applicants, and that will grow the next months, so we aim at having five really good channels in July. This would be a big success for us, and then at that time we ll open up the doors to everyone. So, going back to your question about the features, one of them is the audience participation, and we look at it differently: we ll have a feature on our player which is called call the channel , cause it s like on real TV. They say “please call us” and then you call, and then what happens when you call is that there s somebody in the channel that sees all the calls coming in and they choose who can go live on the air. And in the studio we will add (before July basically) a new tab, so somebody in the team, or the person itself, can select the call, and if they don t pick the calls on time they can leave a video-voice mail. These features, …I think there s one other competitor who has them… are really on the road-map. At the moment the product is showing that we have really good channels, the graphics, the contents, etc We want to make sure that Robin Good TV will look to normal users like a fully professional television station channel, even though it s done with a web camera or a portable camcorder. That s what our priority is. RG: Let s see how good the guy is: what is the feature I miss the most right now? Max Haot: Recording! RG: All right! …so what about that one? Max Haot: We had the choice to bring the product to market earlier without recording, as that is still in testing at the moment. So basically what Robin is talking about is that is that at the moment, on Mogulus.com you can either broadcast your blog or you can put the playlist, which is called the autopilot in Mogulus, which is a unique feature that we have. What you can t do is when you re mixing yourself and record you can t recall that and broadcast it on the playlist again, that s coming in a couple of weeks. And that s a great feature,, because nobody wants to produce a great show and see it only once. But anyhow, by the time the channel will be live, that feature will be there. RG: Good, good. Max Haot: You will have it very soon. RG: OK, I will take some pressure off my friend Max, so that he can take some of his appetizer as well, and I think I will let him go as far as questions, because he has been under pressure all this time, he s come to Rome to relax a little bit, and so why not let him have his time. I think we are going to look at Mogulus not only for the things Max has just mentioned but also for things that this small companies do not maybe lack, but sometimes overlook.. I m quite sure Max is aware of it, and that is the usability aspects. There is a lot improve here, and that may be the very competitive area, in my humble opinion, where you can take a true advantage, because people get discouraged very easily. So, we can wait for better features, but things must be one click instead than three when they can be one click, and they must be obvious. I think that right there your competition has not done a great job so far, so you should take advantage of this instead of shooting forward for more. Max Haot: I think, as you say, that usability is the key. We want to allow anybody to be able to launch the channel - that s the way we look at it. We don t want this to be for professional, and obviously if it s made easy anybody can use it. The other very important thing I want to mention is that what we re doing is live all the time, because it can change at any point and time. The other aspect is the graphic, which is unique: today we have one template that you can customize a little bit, but we ll have many templates you know, you ll have a music template which may look like MTV, you ll have a news template which may look like RAI or CNN. And because we have Flash technology we can also add interactivity and hyperlinks into the tickers, and then the real surprise is when later this year (we don t have a date for that yet) we will have a software that anybody who is familiar with Flash could use to develop new custom templates. At the moment we keep it for ourself, but it s already done, and very soon we will release it onto our community. If you look at blogging web-sites, you have templates for your web-site (you don t have to be a designer), you can make one because you can become a very popular blog, you can make a custom one, and you also have people who make custom ones and they give it for people to use. We want to applicate the same model for the broadcast graphics and we hope, in a few months, to have so many different options that every channel can look very different. You can have a finance channel, where we integrate with a charting and data RG: What about the possibility of translating this same approach to the very young content that your Mogulus producers will be making. That is, part of my content I may tag it as being re-usable by other broadcasters, so they can put in their playlist-that would be very good! Max Haot: That s a very good point. At the moment with the Mogulus interface you have an option which is what we call get video RG: And that s a great one! Max Haot: Yes, it will become get content , and you have two options today: from the web , and we ll integrate with YouTube, but we re going to integrate also with Revver, Flickr, and other sort of things you can take images or video from; and then you also have from my computers , and there s a third one coming soon which we will call The Mogulus store , which is basically licensed content that we will provide. Some of it is free, some of it may be with a charge, that is fully licensed, so that if you use content from there, content that comes from the store, it will come with a licence (and it may be free, or it may have a cost), so we hope to work with big media companies that want to put their movie trailers, or their music videos and so on. And our producers will be able to match it up in their channel 100% secure, 100% copyright safe and, as you say, if you had VOD content and you wanted to give it or maybe charge people, well you can start giving it, then you ll be able to give it in the Mogulus store and anybody could be able to pick it up for their things-like an iTunes store. That s the way we re going to address that issue… because when you put it in the store, you have to give other people the right to use it. RG: Yes, one very last question, I promise: in the business where you have the pro-version, do you already know what the prices are going to be like? Max Haot: What we know is the structure of the price. We ve been debating whether we should do deals with broadcasting companies, expensive deals, or whether we should do what I call self-service pro: you just put your account or your credit card, and you don t have to talk to us. And I think the model we re going to go towards is the pro-version which is very easy: anybody can get the pro-version, and we will charge per Gigabyte transfer, which is like any what ISP does with CDN. We don t have the price yet, but we hope to be very competitive: and that s why we can make the advertising model work and why we hope we can offer a pro-version. RG: So the more audience you ll have the more you would pay? Max Haot: Yeah, like a plan when you buy a web-server; you can buy a plan and you have a number of Gbyte you can transfer, and if you go over that same concept! RG: Yeah, but we all wanna go pro-version! So we usually have a negative feeling, we get flies in the stomach every time we have a meter going from the taxi on it s already a stress! (ride) So, it s nice if you forecast to us such a traffic and then if you go beyond you say “we meter it”. I think this is more compelling to us small guys, it s just this bad feeling to have to watch what I m doing, and also have the feeling that if you do better, you actually pay more. Max Haot: But I think there s two points here. Firstly, we think that if you do pro it s because you re going to monetize it yourself, and because your monetization is linked to your success, so hopefully the two work together and we hope to make it cheap enough so that if you have advertising that you do yourself on the pro-version, you still make money. Our objective is for our partners, who are the producers, to make money. So the point is that monetization is something that in the pro-version you can do yourself, and maybe another option will be for the non-pro version (that may be a long time because we want to prove that the business works first, and that there are advertisers). That s something we are thinking about, and we have to wait a bit longer, but again: our philosophy is to empower the producer with our platform and monetization, not to take it away from them and charge them. RG: But you are charging them! Max Haot: Well, but they re monetizing up for this! RG: But you re hoping they re monetizing, you re not charging them like e-Bay Max Haot: But then use the non-pro version, because the only difference is the advert! RG: Yes, but that s not a small difference! Max Haot: Well, somebody has to pay for something! RG: No, but we want to share with you the money we make , so that if we are successful you are too. So that s something to think about. Even Brightcove, I m sure you know about it, makes it as easy as possible for me to make money, while not really charging me in advance for making that possible. Max Haot: But that means inserting the advertising RG: If I want. …but there are also other options. Max Haot: Well, I think that s what the meter is about, and we have to listen to all users. RG: That s what we wanted to hear and he said it now! Max Haot: So if we bring something that nobody wants, then that doesn t work for us or for the producers. RG: Thank-you Max, and daddy and mummy Haot: you re working in the labs as he said, please be tough! Be very tough and do your job for us. From Robin Good here live in Rome in Piazza Sant Eustachio, with Max Haot from Mogulus, it s everything! I will get back to you later on tonight, for now I close my connection. See you soon!
Source: www.masternewmedia.org

Reboot 9: Matthias M ller-Prove
Matthias M ller-Prove is a computer scientist, and working as a User Experience Engineer & Interaction Designer for StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. He is giving a talk about “A Duel between Desktop and Web”. He and I talk about: his interest in the history human computer interaction the short summary of his thesis books from the cellar Douglas Engelbert’s demo we do not reinvent - earlier interaction designers had it easier because there was no need for backward compatibility general environment of web application is not seen in a holistic way computer system should empower the user! desktop environment is not improved anymore, web people do not have the big vision and do not get out of the boundaries of the browser - both are crippled the problem of different OS and the different ways to work with them there is no consistent global guideline for all kind of devices - www to mobile to consoles stay in first life and empower it! Download MP3 (34:18 min, 20,1 MB) Visit his profile on the reboot page or visit his blog. Some notes from him:My claim Still looking for a personal dynamic medium for creative thought… My home (his master thesis) Vision and Reality of Hypertext and Graphical User Interfaces User Experience Project for OpenOffice.org An article on the subject to be published in “interfaces” (magazine of British HCI Group) [Link for the podcast feed - if you subscribe in itunes, be careful to adapt the settings or you only will get one episode per day!] Tags: reboot9, pre conference podcast,interview, Matthias Mueller-Prove,human interaction design
Source: crueltobekind.org

Designs In Your Kitchen
Transforming ordinary stuff around my home into compositions of forms and colors is full of surprises for me. My problem is to know when to stop playing all the visual games with the photos and computer graphics and decide.
Source: www.harphampix.com

Mashups: What Are They? Mashup Genres And Technologies - Part 1
Mashups are an exciting genre of interactive Web applications that draw upon content retrieved from external data sources to create entirely new and innovative services. They are a hallmark of the second generation of Web applications informally known as Web 2.0. Photo credit: (c) Quasimondo - (c) Design by Jasmine T. Mashups are certainly an exciting new genre of Web applications. The combination of data modeling technologies stemming from the Semantic Web domain and the maturation of loosely-coupled, service-oriented, platform-agnostic communication protocols is finally providing the infrastructure needed to start developing applications that can leverage and integrate the massive amount of information that is available on the Web. As mashup applications gain higher visibility, it will be interesting to see how the genre impacts social issues such as fair-use and intellectual property as well as other application domains that integrate data across organizational boundaries, such as grid computing and business-to-business workflow management. For a deeper-dive into mashup development, stay tuned for the launching of a new series of tutorials on developerWorks that will teach you how to construct your own mashups. In fact, the series will even teach you how to use Semantic Web technology and ontologies to enable others to create their own mashups. This introductory article explores: a) what it means to be a mashup, b) the different classes of popular mashups constructed today, and c) the enabling technologies that mashup developers leverage to create their applications. Additionally, you’ll see many of the emerging technical and social challenges that mashup developers face. Here the details: Mashups: The New Breed of Web App by Duane Merrill Illustration credit: (c) Dion Hinchcliffe - via RemixTheory.net Introduction A new breed of Web-based data integration applications is sprouting up all across the Internet. Colloquially termed mashups, their popularity stems from the emphasis on interactive user participation and the monster-of-Frankenstein-like manner in which they aggregate and stitch together third-party data. The sprouting metaphor is a reasonable one; a mashup Web site is characterized by the way in which it spreads roots across the Web, drawing upon content and functionality retrieved from data sources that lay outside of its organizational boundaries. This vague data-integration definition of a mashup certainly isn’t a rigorous one. A good insight as to what makes a mashup is to look at the etymology of the term: it was borrowed from the pop music scene, where a mashup is a new song that is mixed from the vocal and instrumental tracks from two different source songs (usually belonging to different genres). Like these “bastard pop” songs, a mashup is an unusual or innovative composition of content (often from unrelated data sources), made for human (rather than computerized) consumption. So, what might a mashup look like? The ChicagoCrime.org Web site is a great intuitive example of what’s called a mapping mashup. One of the first mashups to gain widespread popularity in the press, the Web site mashes crime data from the Chicago Police Department’s online database with cartography from Google Maps. Users can interact with the mashup site, such as instructing it to graphically display a map containing pushpins that reveal the details of all recent burglary crimes in South Chicago. The concept and the presentation are simple, and the composition of crime and map data is visually powerful. In this first part of this report the focus is on Mashup genres, as I’ll guide you to survey the popular genres of mashups, including mapping mashups. Also in this part, Related technologies overviews the technology landscape that relates to the construction and operation of mashups. In the yet to be published second part of this report, I will cover Technical and Social challenges affecting mashups. Mashup Genres In this section, I give a brief survey of the prominent mashup genres. Mapping mashups In this age of information technology, humans are collecting a prodigious amount of data about things and activities, both of which are wont to be annotated with locations. All of these diverse data sets that contain location data are just screaming to be presented graphically using maps. One of the big catalysts for the advent of mashups was Google’s introduction of its Google Maps API. This opened the floodgates, allowing Web developers (plus hobbyists, tinkerers, and others) to mash all sorts of data (everything from nuclear disasters to Boston’s CowParade cows) onto maps. Not to be left out, APIs from Microsoft (Virtual Earth), Yahoo (Yahoo Maps), and AOL (MapQuest) shortly followed. Video and photo mashups The emergence of photo hosting and social networking sites like Flickr with APIs that expose photo sharing has led to a variety of interesting mashups. Because these content providers have metadata associated with the images they host (such as who took the picture, what it is a picture of, where and when it was taken, and more), mashups designers can mash photos with other information that can be associated with the metadata. For example, a mashups might analyze song or poetry lyrics and create a mosaic or collage of relevant photos, or display social networking graphs based upon common photo metadata (subject, timestamp, and other metadata). Yet another example might take as input a Web site (such as a news site like CNN) and render the text in photos by matching tagged photos to words from the news. Search and Shopping mashups Search and shopping mashups have existed long before the term mashup was coined. Before the days of Web APIs, comparative shopping tools such as BizRate, PriceGrabber, MySimon, and Google’s Froogle used combinations of business-to-business (b2b) technologies or screen-scraping to aggregate comparative price data. To facilitate mashups and other interesting Web applications, consumer marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon have released APIs for programmatically accessing their content. News mashups News sources (such as the New York Times, the BBC, or Reuters) have used syndication technologies like RSS and Atom (described in the next section) since 2002 to disseminate news feeds related to various topics. Syndication feed mashups can aggregate a user’s feeds and present them over the Web, creating a personalized newspaper that caters to the reader’s particular interests. An example is Diggdot.us, which combines feeds from the techie-oriented news sources Digg.com, Slashdot.org, and Del.icio.us. Related technologies This section gives an overview of the technologies that are facilitating the development of mashups. For further information about any of these technologies, consult the Resources section at the end of this article. The Architecture A mashup application is architecturally comprised of three different participants that are logically and physically disjoint (they are likely separated by both network and organizational boundaries): 1) API/content providers, 2) the mashup site, and 3) the client’s Web browser. The API/content providers. These are the (sometimes unwitting) providers of the content being mashed. In the ChicagoCrime.org mashup example, the providers are Google and the Chicago Police Department. To facilitate data retrieval, providers often expose their content through Web-protocols such as REST, Web Services, and RSS/Atom (described below). However, many interesting potential data-sources do not (yet) conveniently expose APIs. Mashups that extract content from sites like Wikipedia, TV Guide, and virtually all government and public domain Web sites do so by a technique known as screen scraping. In this context, screen scraping connotes the process by which a tool attempts to extract information from the content provider by attempting to parse the provider’s Web pages, which were originally intended for human consumption. The mashup site. This is where the mashup is hosted. Interestingly enough, just because this is where the mashup logic resides, it is not necessarily where it is executed. On one hand, mashups. can be implemented similarly to traditional Web applications using server-side dynamic content generation technologies like Java servlets, CGI, PHP or ASP. Alternatively, mashed content can be generated directly within the client’s browser through client-side scripting (that is, JavaScript) or applets. This client-side logic is often the combination of code directly embedded in the mashup’s Web pages as well as scripting API libraries or applets (furnished by the content providers) referenced by these Web pages. Mashups using this approach can be termed rich internet applications (RIAs), meaning that they are very oriented towards the interactive user-experience. (Rich internet applications are one hallmark of what’s now being termed “Web 2.0″, the next generation of services available on the World Wide Web.) The benefits of client-side mashing include less overhead on behalf of the mashup server (data can be retrieved directly from the content provider) and a more seamless user-experience (pages can request updates for portions of their content without having to refresh the entire page). The Google Maps API is intended for access through browser-side JavaScript, and is an example of client-side technology. Often mashups use a combination of both server and client-side logic to achieve their data aggregation. Many mashup applications use data that is supplied directly to them by their user base, making (at least) one of the data sets local. Additionally, performing complex queries on multiple-sourced data (such as “Show me the average purchase price for real estate bought by actors who have co-starred in movies with Kevin Bacon”) requires computation that would be infeasible to perform within the client’s Web browser. The client’s Web browser. This is where the application is rendered graphically and where user interaction takes place. As described above, mashups often use client-side logic to assemble and compose the mashed content. Ajax There is some dispute over whether the term Ajax is an acronym or not (some would have it represent “Asynchronous JavaScript + XML”). Regardless, Ajax is a Web application model rather than a specific technology. It comprises several technologies focused around the asynchronous loading and presentation of content:XHTML and CSS for style presentationThe Document Object Model (DOM) API exposed by the browser for dynamic display and interactionAsynchronous data exchange, typically of XML dataBrowser-side scripting, primarily JavaScript When used together, the goal of these technologies is to create a smooth, cohesive Web experience for the user by exchanging small amounts of data with the content servers rather than reload and re-render the entire page after some user action. You can construct Ajax engines for mashups from various Ajax toolkits and libraries (such as Sajax or Zimbra), usually implemented in JavaScript. The Google Maps API includes a proprietary Ajax engine, and the effect it has on the user experience is powerful: it behaves like a truly local application in that there are no scrollbars to manipulate or translation arrows that force page reloads. Web protocols: SOAP and REST Both SOAP and REST are platform neutral protocols for communicating with remote services. As part of the service-oriented architecture paradigm, clients can use SOAP and REST to interact with remote services without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation: the functionality of a service is completely conveyed by the description of the messages that it requests and responds with. SOAP is a fundamental technology of the Web Services paradigm. Originally an acronym for Simple Object Access Protocol, SOAP has been re-termed Services-Oriented Access Protocol (or just SOAP) because its focus has shifted from object-based systems towards the interoperability of message exchange. There are two key components of the SOAP specification. The first is the use of an XML message format for platform-agnostic encoding, and the second is the message structure, which consists of a header and a body. The header is used to exchange contextual information that is not specific to the application payload (the body), such as authentication information. The SOAP message body encapsulates the application-specific payload. SOAP APIs for Web services are described by WSDL documents, which themselves describe what operations a service exposes, the format for the messages that it accepts (using XML Schema), and how to address it. SOAP messages are typically conveyed over HTTP transport, although other transports (such as JMS or e-mail) are equally viable. REST is an acronym for Representational State Transfer, a technique of Web-based communication using just HTTP and XML. Its simplicity and lack of rigorous profiles set it apart from SOAP and lend to its attractiveness. Unlike the typical verb-based interfaces that you find in modern programming languages (which are composed of diverse methods such as getEmployee(), addEmployee(), listEmployees(), and more), REST fundamentally supports only a few operations (that is POST, GET, PUT, DELETE) that are applicable to all pieces of information. The emphasis in REST is on the pieces of information themselves, called resources. For example, a resource record for an employee is identified by a URI, retrieved through a GET operation, updated by a PUT operation, and so on. In this way, REST is similar to the document-literal style of SOAP services. Screen Scraping As mentioned earlier, lack of APIs from content providers often force mashups developers to resort to screen scraping in order to retrieve the information they seek to mash. Scraping is the process of using software tools to parse and analyze content that was originally written for human consumption in order to extract semantic data structures representative of that information that can be used and manipulated programmatically. A handful of mashups use screen scraping technology for data acquisition, especially when pulling data from the public sectors. For example, real-estate mapping mashups can mash for-sale or rental listings with maps from a cartography provider with scraped “comp” data obtained from the county records office. Another mashup project that scrapes data is XMLTV, a collection of tools that aggregates TV listings from all over the world. Screen scraping is often considered an inelegant solution, and for good reasons. It has two primary inherent drawbacks. 1) The first is that, unlike APIs with interfaces, scraping has no specific programmatic contract between content-provider and content-consumer. Scrapers must design their tools around a model of the source content and hope that the provider consistently adheres to this model of presentation. Web sites have a tendency to overhaul their look-and-feel periodically to remain fresh and stylish, which imparts severe maintenance headaches on behalf of the scrapers because their tools are likely to fail. 2) The second issue is the lack of sophisticated, re-usable screen-scraping toolkit software, colloquially known as scrAPIs. The dearth of such APIs and toolkits is largely due to the extremely application-specific needs of each individual scraping tool. This leads to large development overheads as designers are forced to reverse-engineer content, develop data models, parse, and aggregate raw data from the provider’s site. Semantic Web and RDF The inelegant aspects of screen scraping are directly traceable to the fact that content created for human consumption does not make good content for automated machine consumption. Enter the Semantic Web, which is the vision that the existing Web can be augmented to supplement the content designed for humans with equivalent machine-readable information. In the context of the Semantic Web, the term information is different from data; data becomes information when it conveys meaning (that is, it is understandable). The Semantic Web has the goal of creating Web infrastructure that augments data with metadata to give it meaning, thus making it suitable for automation, integration, reasoning, and re-use. The W3C family of specifications collectively known as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) serves this purpose of providing methodologies to establish syntactic structures that describe data. XML in itself is not sufficient; it is too arbitrary in that you can code it in many ways to describe the same piece of data. RDF-Schema adds to RDF’s ability to encode concepts in a machine-readable way. Once data objects can be described in a data model, RDF provides for the construction of relationships between data objects through subject-predicate-object triples (”subject S has relationship R with object O”). The combination of data model and graph of relationships allows for the creation of ontologies, which are hierarchical structures of knowledge that can be searched and formally reasoned about. For example, you might define a model in which a “carnivore-type” as a subclass of “animal-type” with the constraint that it “eats” other “animal-type”, and create two instances of it: one populated with data concerning cheetahs and polar bears and their habitats, another concerning gazelles and penguins and their respective habitats. Inference engines might then “mash” these separate model instances and reason that cheetahs might prey on gazelles but not penguins. RDF data is quickly finding adoption in a variety of domains, including social networking applications (such as FOAF — Friend of a Friend) and syndication (such as RSS, which I describe next). In addition, RDF software technology and components are beginning to reach a level of maturity, especially in the areas of RDF query languages (such as RDQL and SPARQL) and programmatic frameworks and inference engines (such as Jena and Redland). RSS and ATOM RSS is a family of XML-based syndication formats. In this context, syndication implies that a Web site that wants to distribute content creates an RSS document and registers the document with an RSS publisher. An RSS-enabled client can then check the publisher’s feed for new content and react to it in an appropriate manner. RSS has been adopted to syndicate a wide variety of content, ranging from news articles and headlines, changelogs for CVS checkins or wiki pages, project updates, and even audiovisual data such as radio programs. Version 1.0 is RDF-based, but the most recent, version 2.0, is not. Atom is a newer, but similar, syndication protocol. It is a proposed standard at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and seeks to maintain better metadata than RSS, provide better and more rigorous documentation, and incorporates the notion of constructs for common data representation. These syndication technologies are great for mashups that aggregate event-based or update-driven content, such as news and weblog aggregators. End of Part 1 In the second, upcoming, part: Social and Technical Challenges of Mashups. Resources Learn Programmable Web: Stay up to date with the latest on mashups and the new Web 2.0 APIs. Considering Ajax, Part 1: Cut through the hype(Chris Laffra, developerWorks, May 2006): Consider this set of discussion points for every developer before you use Ajax techniques for a Web site. Ajax page: Visit this page sponsored by the Mozilla Development Center The Interplay of Web Aggregation and Regulations (LawTech): Be sure to read this good review of Web aggregation and regulations (PDF file). DB2 and open source: Put yourself on the map with Google Maps API, DB2/Informix, and PHP on Linux (Marty Lurie and Aron Y. Lurie, developerWorks, March 2006): Create an easy-to-use map with your data on it. Building Web service applications with the Google API (Nicholas Chase, developerWorks, May 2002): Learn to embed Google search results and other information in your Java applications in this tutorial. The ultimate mashup — Web services and the semantic Web tutorial series: Take the all the tutorials in this series and create a custom mashup. Second Generation Web Services: Read this XML.com article for coverage of the REST architecture. REST and the Real World: Read more on REST from XML.com. The W3C Semantic Web Activity site: Read about the Semantic Web. W3C RDF Activity: Visit this site for the latest on Resource Description Framework. W3C RDF Activity: Visit this site for the latest on Resource Description Framework. Introduction to Jena: Use RDF models in your Java applications with the Jena Semantic Web Framework (Philip McCarthy, developerWorks, June 2004): Find out how to use the Jena Semantic Web Toolkit to exploit RDF data models in your Java applications. What is RSS?: From XML.com, learn about this syndication format for news, content, and personal weblogs. Atom Overview: Read about the XML-based Web content and metadata syndication format and application-level protocol from AtomEnabled.org IBM XML 1.1 certification: Find out how you can become an IBM Certified Developer in XML 1.1 and related technologies. XML: See developerWorks XML Zone for a wide range of technical articles and tips, tutorials, standards, and IBM Redbooks. developerWorks technical events and webcasts: Stay current with technology in these sessions. Get products and technologies W3C SOAP Specification: Get the latest version. Scraping with style: scrAPI toolkit for Ruby: Try this technology for your mashups. Discuss XML zone discussion forums: Participate in any of several XML-centered forums. About the author Duane Merrill has developed grid computing and distributed data integration platforms for over five years. He has been a contributor to the Legion Project at the University of Virginia and a core developer for the Avaki Corporation’s distributed enterprise information integration product Avaki. He is currently obtaining his Ph.D in Computer Science at the University of Virginia. This article is copyright 2006, Backstop Media and has been republished with permission.
Source: www.masternewmedia.org

40+ Books For Professional Design & Development
Professionalism is built upon knowledge and experience. To become or remain professional, you permanently need to improve your design and programming skills, be aware of new approaches and now how other designers and developers achieve both beautiful and effective designs. And to improve your design and programming skills all the time you need bulletproof sources to learn properly and to learn from masters who have a profound understanding of the field they’re working in. Renowned books from well-known designers, developers, artists and authors might be just the right thing - serving as the inspiration or helping you to stay in touch with popular techniques in your field. Over the last weeks we’ve selected over 40 expert books in the fields of typography, color, graphic design, brand identity, inspiration, web design and programming, Web 2.0,usability, data visualization and simplicity. We’ve ordered most of them (some books were unavailable). And we’d like to give them all away - to you and for free - as the appreciation of your trust, your interest and your support of Smashing Magazine over the last year. How can I participate? To participate, you have to answer the question “What is the best thing to start a perfect day with?” in the comments to this post (one word is enough), choose one book in the table (not in the list!) you like most and post the number right after the answer (on the next line). Please notice that participants can post comments until the 11th of September, the winners will be determined by chance - among the group of visitors who’d like to have the same book, only participants who’ve selected one book listed in the table can participate and make sure that you fill your e-mail in the comment field correctly, so we can contact you afterwards. Below you’ll find the table of all books you can win, commenting on this article. Below the table you’ll find the full description of the books we’ve considered as important and valuable for professional design and web-development. Books You Can Win # Cover Title by Autor Description 2 Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton The fundamental knowledge about organization of letters on a blank sheet. 3 Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works by Erik Spiekermann, E.M Ginger Design guidance in choosing type for legibility, meaning, and aesthetic appeal. 5 Color by Paul J. Zelanski, Mary Pat Fisher A comprehensive introduction to the art and science of color use in all artistic media in both fine and applied arts. 6 The Elements of Color by Johannes Itten Presents the key to understanding color in ltten s color circle and color contrasts. 7 Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Muller-Brockmann, Josef Muller-Brockmann The definitive word on using grid systems in graphic design. 9 The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture, and Type by Alexander W. White Explores the role of white space as a connection between page elements. 10 1,000 Graphic Elements: Details for Distinctive Designs by Wilson Harvey 1,000 of small embellishments collected from all kinds of projects, books, brochures, invitations, menus, CDs and annual reports. 12 The Designers Complete Index by Jim Krause Hundreds of ideas, creative solutions and practical instructions which provide an insight into problem-solving in graphic design. 13 Photoshop CS / CS2 Wow! Book, The by Linnea Dayton, Cristen Gillespie Bestselling mix of step-by-step tutorials for creating both commercial and fine-art images with Adobe Photoshop CS2. 15 Designing Effective Communications: Creating Contexts for Clarity and Meaning by Jorge Frascara The book consists of essays written by a group of experts on communication design. 17 Designing Brand Identity A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands by Alina Wheeler Describes approaches for designing a sustainable identity. 18 Letterhead and Logo Design 9 by MINE Features innovative work in the field of logo design. Showcase of creative techniques and full-color images which can inspire new design solutions. 19 Logo Design That Works: Secrets for Successful Logo Design by Lisa Silver Examines the evolution of 100 popular logo designs and illustrates how and why these designs work. 20 Logo Design Workbook: A Hands-On Guide to Creating Logos by Noreen Morioka, Terry Stone Sean Adams What makes a logo work? . The entire logo-development process is examined step-by-step. 21 LogoLounge 3: 2,000 International Identities by Leading Designers, Bill Gardner, Catharine Fishel Thousands of new logos, providing designers with a source for design inspiration and a resource for design solutions. 22 Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman, 2nd Edition Covers the current state of web-development, best practices and advances of standards-based web design. 24 The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird A simple guide with hundreds of full-color examples and illustrations, which will lead you through the process of creating beautiful and functional web designs from scratch. 25 The Unusually Useful Web Book by June Cohen A detailed discussion of planning, designing, building, and maintaining your web site. 26 CSS: The Definitive Guide by Eric Meyer A comprehensive introduction to CSS, along with a thorough review of all aspects of CSS 2.1. 27 CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions by Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Cameron Moll The book is meant to support advanced CSS-developers and present professional techniques, approaches and solutions. 28 Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke, Molly E. Holzschlag, Aaron Gustafson, Mark Boulton Discover how to implement highly original designs through visual demonstrations of the creative possibilities using markup and CSS. 30 Professional Web 2.0 Programming by Eric van der Vlist, Danny Ayers, Erik Bruchez, Joe Fawcett, Alessandro Vernet Covers the key programming languages, techniques and technologies of Web 2.0 - at a professional level. 31 Professional Ajax by Nicholas C. Zakas, Jeremy McPeak, Joe Fawcett, 2nd edition Provides a developer-level tutorial of Ajax techniques, patterns and use cases 32 The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki Large groups of people are smarter than an elite, no matter how brilliant the latter might be. Wisdom of Masses seems to work better at solving problems, coming to wise decisions and predicting the future. 33 The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson Explains what The Long Tail is and shows the development modern economy is currently undergoing as well as benefits one can gain from this process. 34 Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham The book explains the world we re living in and the motivations of the people who occupy it. 35 Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug, 2nd Edition Describes a common sense approach to web usability and facts designers should keep in mind developing usable web-sites. 36 Prioritizing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen, Hoa Loranger Nielsen’s extensive guide for designers who aim to make their designs more usable. 37 The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web by Jesse James Garrett Describes the ideas and techniques of user-centered design for the Web with clear explanations that focus on ideas rather than tools or techniques. 39 Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative by Edward R. Tufte Tufte emphasizes the principle of using the smallest effective difference to display distinctions in data. The book describes techniques to present and visualize data in an effective and beautiful way. 40 Beautiful Evidence by Edward R. Tufte The book identifies excellent and effective methods for presenting information, suggests new designs and provides tool for assessing the credibility of evidence presentations. 41 The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda Offers 10 laws for balancing simplicity and complexity guidelines for needing less and actually getting more. Typography 1. The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst ISBN: 978-0881791327 Thought-out typography supports and enriches the content. The Elements of Typographic Style teaches how to approach the choice of typography and how to create beautiful and “working” typography. The book is essential for professionals who regularly work with typographic designs. Robert Bringhurst writes about designing with the correct typeface; striving for rhythm, proportion, and harmony; choosing and combining type; designing pages; using section heads, subheads, footnotes, and tables; applying kerning and other type adjustments to improve legibility; and adding special characters, including punctuation and diacritical marks. The Elements of Typographic Style teaches the history of and the artistic and practical perspectives on a variety of type families that are available in Europe and America today. 2. Thinking with Type A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students by Ellen Lupton ISBN: 978-1568984480 The organization of letters on a blank sheet or screen is the most basic challenge facing anyone who practices design. What type of font to use? How big? How should those letters, words, and paragraphs be aligned, spaced, ordered and shaped? In Thinking with Type Ellen Lupton provides clear and concise guidance for anyone learning or brushing up on their typographic skills. The book is divided into three sections: letter, text, and grid. Each section begins with an essay that reviews historical, technological, and theoretical concepts, and is then followed by a set of practical exercises. Sections also include an insight in practice, examples of work by leading typographers, creative approaches and no-no’s to avoid. 3. Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works by Erik Spiekermann, E.M Ginger ISBN: 978-0201703399 Erik Spiekermann explains precisely and clearly what typography is and offers design guidance in choosing type for legibility, meaning, and aesthetic appeal. Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works guides the reader through all aspects of typography, from the history and mechanics of type, to training the eye to recognize and choose typefaces. The book helps you to understand the basics of type and its placement within society; it also teaches you how to use space and layout to improve overall communication. This guide is revised and updated to discuss the particular design challenges of type on the Web. 4. The New Typography by Jan Tschichold ISBN: 978-0520071476 Since its initial publication in Berlin in 1928, Jan Tschichold’s The New Typography has been recognized as the definitive treatise on book and graphic design in the machine age. The book covers theoretical discussions of typography in the age of photography, mechanical standardization and practical considerations in the design of business forms. Profound reading for designers, art historians, and all those concerned with the evolution of visual communication in the 20th century. Color 5. Color by Paul J. Zelanski, Mary Pat Fisher ISBN: 978-0130984869 A comprehensive introduction to the art and science of color use in all artistic media in both fine and applied arts. It provides a solid and thorough foundation in the aesthetic, science, psychology, and history of color, with extensive illustrations covering all media and historical periods to the present time. 6. The Elements of Color by Johannes Itten ISBN: 978-0471289296 A useful simplification and condensation of Johannes ltten’s major work. The Art of Color covers subjective feeling and objective color principles in detail. It presents the key to understanding color in ltten’s color circle and color contrasts. Grid-Based Design 7. Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Muller-Brockmann, Josef Muller-Brockmann ISBN: 978-3721201451 The main idea behind grid-based designs is a solid visual and structural balance of web-sites you can create with them. Sophisticated layout structures offer more flexibility and enhance the visual experience of visitors. In Grid Systems in Graphic Design Muller-Brockman offers the definitive word on using grid systems in graphic design. With examples on how to work correctly at a conceptual level and exact instructions for using all of the systems (8 to 32 fields), this guidebook provides a useful framework for problem-solving. Graphic Design, Creativity, Inspiration 8. A History of Graphic Design by Philip Meggs ISBN: 978-0471699026 A History of Graphic Design includes over 1.200 illustrations which has impacted all aspects of contemporary design and communications. The book offers a comprehensive overview of creative innovators, breakthrough technologies, and important design innovations. 9. The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture, and Type by Alexander W. White ISBN: 1-581152507 “White space” is supposed to improve the legibility of the content and make it easier for the readers to read the information and understand it. However, to use it effectively, you need to understand the theoretical basics of “white space” in typography and graphic design. With the help of selected examples from art, design, and architecture, The Elements of Graphic Design explores the role of white space as a connection between page elements. The book contains insightful comments, interactive design elements, suggestions, ideas and and scores of illustrations challenge designers to “think out of the box.” The book inspires more creative and thorough thinking. 10. 1,000 Graphic Elements: Details for Distinctive Designs by Wilson Harvey ISBN: 978-1592530779 Mostly this is the attention to details which gives your designs a profound and solid nature. This book covers 1,000 of small embellishments collected from all kinds of projects, books, brochures, invitations, menus, CDs and annual reports. This book invites designers to literally shop for ideas. Content is organized by type; if you re in the market for an unusual binding, turn to the bindings section to see a wide collection of fresh ideas. Other topics covered include fasteners, graphics, unique materials, embossing, debossing, specialty inks, type treatments, interesting color usage, add-ons, die cuts, and much more. 11. Graphic Design Solutions by Robin Landa, 3rd edition ISBN: 978-1401881542 Graphic Design Solutions provides a clear and comprehensive introduction to graphic design and advertising design, with step-by-step visual solutions that readers can apply to their designs and advertising projects. The book offers an illustrative overview of modern graphic design solutions for a variety of media including print, Web, television, and unconventional formats. Graphic Design Solutions helps designers to gain a new way of thinking about their work and understand demands of modern graphic design. 12. The Designers Complete Index (Boxed Set) by Jim Krause ISBN: 1-581805519 The Designer’s Complete Index is a boxed set which contains all three of Jim Krause’s “Index” Books, including Idea Index (graphic effects and typographic treatments), Layout Index (solutions for effective, dynamic layouts) and Color Index (over 1100 color combinations in CMYK and RGB). Each volume is packed with hundreds of ideas, creative solutions and practical instructions which provide an insight into problem-solving in graphic design. 13. Photoshop CS / CS2 Wow! Book, The by Linnea Dayton, Cristen Gillespie ISBN: 978-0321213457 Photoshop CS/CS2 Wow! delivers a mix of explanations and step-by-step tutorials for creating both commercial and fine-art images with Adobe Photoshop CS2. The book also includes short features in which professional photographers and designers let you in on their creative techniques and quick solutions. The DVD includes hundreds of before-and-after tutorial files, Layer Styles and Patterns, as well as Actions, gradients and custom tools. You ll learn innovative techniques for creating and enhancing images, graphics, and type. 14. Creative Sparks by Jim Krause ISBN: 978-0715317358 A collection of advices, concepts, suggestions and exercises to stimulate the innovative way of thinking designers need to become or remain professional. This book teaches you how to find inspiration and spark new ideas. Each spread describes a thoughtfully designed example of creative thinking as well as practical advice and idea starters. A guide to each designer’s creative path. 15. Designing Effective Communications: Creating Contexts for Clarity and Meaning by Jorge Frascara ISBN: 978-1581154498 Designing Effective Communications consists of essays written by a group of experts on communication design. The book challenges the traditional “the medium is the message” theory; experts discuss the physical, visual, cognitive, and cultural meanings of messages and look at how interpretation plays a fundamental role in the creation of meaning. Icon Design, Brand Identity, Logo Design 16. The Icon Book: Visual Symbols for Computer Systems and Documentation by William Horton ISBN: 978-0471599005 Icons, visual pointers to the chunks of information, are used widely but not always used wisely. This book demonstrates an orderly process for designing sets of icons, suggests fresh ideas and explains how to refine and test icon ideas. Furthermore, it demonstrates how to design large sets of related icons and presents the development of icons for the international market. The book uses a practical, research-based approach to the design of icons. A classic. 17. Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands by Alina Wheeler ISBN: 978-0471746843 Building a unique and memorable brand isn’t an easy task. To create a distinctive identity, designers need to be able to offer real substance. Designing Brand Identity describes approaches for designing a sustainable identity. The book is based upon a five-phase process for creating and implementing effective brand identity and offers tools for both designers and companies. 18. Letterhead and Logo Design 9 by MINE ISBN: 978-1592531820 This latest edition of the annual Letterhead and Logo Design series features innovative work in the field of logo design. Well-known design leaders, design firms and artists submit their logos, labels, business cards and envelopes annually; the result is the showcase of creative techniques and full-color images which can inspire new design solutions for age-old challenges that beg for a fresh approach. 19. Logo Design That Works: Secrets for Successful Logo Design by Lisa Silver ISBN: 978-1564967596 This book examines the evolution of 100 popular logo designs and illustrates how and why these designs work. Drafts are compared with each other and the benefits of made changes are discussed until the final version is released. Exploring the changes made to achieve the final result you can learn how to improve your own logo designs. The book includes short tips which address issues such as testing designs, sourcing inspiration, and typography. 20. Logo Design Workbook: A Hands-On Guide to Creating Logos by Noreen Morioka, Terry Stone Sean Adams ISBN: 978-1592532346 Logo Design Workbook tries to answer the question “what makes a logo work?”. The entire logo-development process is examined step-by-step. Among other topics covered in the book you’ll learn how to develop a concept that communicates the right message and is appropriate for both the client and the market. Apart from that, you’ll get an insight into choosing colors and typefaces, avoiding common mistakes, and deciphering why some logos are successful whereas others are not. The book also offers in-depth case studies on logos designed for various industries. Each case study explores the design, the relationship with the client, the time frame, and the results. 21. LogoLounge 3: 2,000 International Identities by Leading Designers by Bill Gardner, Catharine Fishel ISBN: 978-1592532384 This third edition of the LogoLounge book presents thousands of new logos, providing designers with a source for design inspiration and a resource for design solutions. The first part of the book profiles the recent work of 10 top logo designers; the second part contains almost 2,000 logos organized by typography, people, mythology, nature, sports, etc. Web Design 22. Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman, 2nd Edition ISBN: 978-0321385550 Jeffrey Zeldman covers current state of web-development, best practices and advances of standards-based web design. Zeldman describes how to create sites that load faster, reach more users, and cost less to design and maintain. Among other topics Zeldman also explains new techniques to make CSS layouts work better across multiple browsers and ways to make web content more accessible. 23. Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS by Dan Cederholm, 2nd Edition ISBN: 978-0321509024 Dan Cederholm outlines standards-based strategies for building designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control. Each chapter starts out with an example of an unbulletproof site one that employs a traditional HTML-based approach which Cederholm deconstructs, points out its limitations and gives the site a make-over using XHTML and CSS. The book also covers several popular fluid and elastic-width layout techniques and pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single-page template. Bulletproof Web Design offers a practical guide for development of standards-based designs. 24. The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird ISBN: 978-0975841969 Even if you have an experience at working with both XHTML and CSS, you don’t necessary have a profound understanding on how to create designs from start to finish. The Principles Of Beautiful Design is a simple guide with hundreds of full-color examples and illustrations, which will lead you through the process of creating beautiful and functional web designs from scratch. 25. The Unusually Useful Web Book by June Cohen ISBN: 978-0735712065 The Unusually Useful Web Book is full with worksheets, lessons, advices from experts, and precise explanations related to web design. You can skim the sidebars and checklists for tips and techniques you can use right away. Or you can follow along with the main text for a detailed discussion of planning, designing, building, and maintaining your web site. CSS 26. CSS: The Definitive Guide by Eric Meyer ISBN: 978-0596527334 CSS: The Definitive Guide provides you with a comprehensive introduction to Cascading Stylesheets, along with a thorough review of all aspects of CSS 2.1. The third edition is updated to cover Internet Explorer 7 and covers also the theory behind CSS positioning, lists and generated content, table layout, user interface and paged media. 27. CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions by Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Cameron Moll ISBN: 978-1590596142 CSS Mastery assumes that you already know the basics and why you should be using CSS in your work; it is meant to support advanced CSS-developers and present professional techniques, approaches and solutions to CSS-based web design. Each chapter explains a particular aspect of CSS-based design, such as visual formatting model, styling lists, forms and data tables, layouts, hacks and filters, bugs and bux fixing. Case studies support the book giving an insight in CSS-development in practice. 28. Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design (Voices That Matter) by Andy Clarke, Molly E. Holzschlag, Aaron Gustafson, Mark Boulton ISBN: 978-0321410979 In this book you ll discover how to implement highly original designs through visual demonstrations of the creative possibilities using markup and CSS. You ll learn to use a new design workflow, build prototypes that work well for designers and all team members, use grids effectively, visualize markup, and discover every phase of the transcendent design process. Transcending CSS covers the cross-plattform functionality, CSS 3 as well as an effective collaboration with team members. 29. The Art and Science of CSS by Jonathan Snook, Steve Smith, Jina Bolton, Cameron Adams, David Johnson ISBN: 978-0975841976 The Art & Science of CSS shows you how to take the building blocks of your designs (headings, navigation, forms etc) and bring them to life with fully standards-compliant CSS-solutions. This book helps you to design web sites that not only work well across all browsers, are easy to maintain, and are highly accessible, but are also visually appealing. Web Programming 30. Professional Web 2.0 Programming (Wrox Professional Guides) by Eric van der Vlist, Danny Ayers, Erik Bruchez, Joe Fawcett, Alessandro Vernet ISBN: 978-0470087886 Web 2.0 architecture opens up an incredible number of options for flexible web design, creative reuse, and easier updates. Web 2.0 Programming covers the key programming languages, techniques and technologies of Web 2.0 - at a professional level. The book offers code for several applications built with popular frameworks. You’ll first take an in-depth look at XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and Ajax. Next, you’ll gain a better understanding of the protocols and formats that enable the exchange of information between web clients and servers. Ultimately, you’ll discover exactly what you need to know about server-side programming in order to implement new ideas and develop your own robust applications. 31. Professional Ajax by Nicholas C. Zakas, Jeremy McPeak, Joe Fawcett, 2nd edition ISBN: 978-0470109496 Professional Ajax provides a developer-level tutorial of Ajax techniques, patterns and use cases. First you dive into the architecture of Ajax and a detailed discussion of how frames, JavaScript, cookies, XML, and XMLHttp requests (XHR) are related to Ajax. Afterwards request brokers such as hidden frames, dynamic iframes, and XHR are compared and contrasted, explaining when one method should be used over another. A brief overview of HTTP requests and responses makes the overview complete. Web 2.0, New Economy, Computer Age 32. The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki ISBN: 978-0385721707 James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite, no matter how brilliant the latter might be. Wisdom of Masses seems to “work” better at solving problems, coming to wise decisions and predicting the future. To prove it, The Wisdom of Crowds gives an insight in popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics and show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives and think about our world. 33. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson ISBN: 978-1401302375 The Long Tail is a powerful new force in the New Economy: the rise of the niche. The cost of reaching consumers drops dramatically, and so our markets are shifting from a model of mass appeal to one of unlimited variety for unique tastes. New efficiencies in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing are essentially resetting the definition of whats commercially viable across the board. The book explains what The Long Tail is, covers these changes and shows the development modern economy is currently undergoing as well as benefits one can gain from this process. 34. Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham ISBN: 978-0596006624 The book explains the world we’re living in and the motivations of the people who occupy it. The ideas Paul Graham discusses in this book have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design and internet startups. Usability, User Experience 35. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug, 2nd Edition ISBN: 978-0321344755 We don’t read pages we scan them. We don’t figure out how things work we muddle through. Users’ behaviour is predictable and there are several heuristics one can use to achieve the best level of user-friendlines. Don’t Make Me Think describes a common sense approach to web usability and facts designers should keep in mind developing usable web-sites. Much of the content is devoted to proper use of conventions and content layout, and the “before and after” give concrete examples and how usable designs can be achieved in practice. 36. Prioritizing Web Usability (Voices) by Jakob Nielsen, Hoa Loranger ISBN: 978-0321350312 Prioritizing Web Usability is an extensive guide for designers who aim to make their designs more usable. Through the authors wisdom, experience amd results of real-world user tests you ll learn about site design, user experience and usability testing, navigation and search capabilities, old guidelines and prioritizing usability issues, page design, user-friendly layout and content design. 37. The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web by Jesse James Garrett ISBN: 978-0735712027 The Elements of User Experience describes the ideas and techniques of user-centered design for the Web with clear explanations that focus on ideas rather than tools or techniques. You get the big picture of Web user experience development, from strategy and requirements to information architecture and successful visual design. 38. Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience by James Kalbach, Aaron Gustafson ISBN: 978-0596528102 This book offers a fresh look at a fundamental topic of web-development: navigation design. Designing Web Navigation demonstrates that good navigation is not about technology - it’s about the ways people find information, and how you guide them. Data Visualization 39. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative by Edward R. Tufte ISBN: 978-0961392123 Visual Explanations describes techniques to present and visualize data in an effective and beautiful way. The book ranges through a variety of topics, including the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, magic tricks, a cholera epidemic in 19th-century London, and the principle of using “the smallest effective difference” to display distinctions in data. Tufte presents ideas with clarity and illustrates them in exquisitely rendered samples. 40. Beautiful Evidence by Edward R. Tufte ISBN: 978-0961392178 Beautiful Evidence is about how empirical observations turn into explanations and evidence presentations. The book identifies excellent and effective methods for presenting information, suggests new designs and provides tool for assessing the credibility of evidence presentations. The book digs more deeply into art and science to reveal very old connections between truth and beauty. Simplicity 41. The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda ISBN: 978-0262134729 The Laws of Simplicity offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design guidelines for needing less and actually getting more. The author explores the question of how we can redefine the notion of “improved” so that it doesn’t always mean something more, something added on. Books To Keep Track On (Not Released Yet) 42. Five Simple Steps: Designing For The Web by Mark Boulton Five Simple Steps teaches you how to design your website using the principles of graphic design. Five chapters, each covering a core subject: Ideas and Research, Typography, Grid Systems, Colour, Layout and Form. The book focuses on applying the core principles of graphic design to the web. 43. Web Form Design: Best Practices by Luke Wroblewski A comprehensive work about the modern approach to design web forms, achieving optimal user experience and avoiding common usability mistakes.
Source: feeds.feedburner.com

Amiga Says New Hardware On The Way
In the mainstream computing world, Macintosh users are generally considered to be slightly insane, what with their cult-like devotion to the brand, appreciation of elegant designs, and a willingness to buy into a vertically-integrated platform. But, folks, Mac users have got nothing on fans of the Amiga, and they just got something to crow about: Amiga has announced two new PowerPC-based systems are on the way for Amiga users. Amigas were popular niche computers in the during the late 1980s and early 1990s—once counting for nearly 5 million users—and quickly garnered a following in the multimedia, gaming, and production communities thanks to their custom graphics hardware Read | Permalink | Email This | Linking Blogs | More Images | Computing
Source: news.digitaltrends.com

Why does so much VJ software disappoint me?
I've been aching to get more into VJing short for "Video Jockeying", realtime performance of visuals and effects, often synced to accompanying music as part of a multimedia experience but I've run into one aggravation after another when demo'ing different VJ tools. There are a lot of them, many of which I've tried, but no clear standouts. This, to me, says there's some glaring holes in the market, opportunities that can be taken advantage of to boost the awareness and practice of VJing as an artform. At present, if you're uninitiated, it's not as easy to get into VJing as say, step-time image or video editing. Speaking of, one of my fave Sony Vegas features, that I've used in such videos as "Submarines", is that I can change the grid units from time (in seconds) to beats per minute (BPM) and easily sync and lock events to the tempo of a track. Vegas' interface is very amenable to those who're already familiar with video sequencing. (Video art by Nam June Paik, rhymes with cake.) So where are all the VJ apps that allow you to record sequences of your moves and not just play them back, but edit them too? You could turn a promising-but-rough performance into a polished basis for a music video, ad, or other promotional material. Even ArKaos, which touts themselves as being a "world-leading provider", is missing this feature. And it has many odd, rough edges in its UI which remind me of Cubase… circa 1995. ArKaos also BSODed me when I tried to export a recording as QuickTime, and its Windows Media Player output was oddly tinted pink. Advanced users are familiar with the likes of Max/MSP, Processing, and Quartz Composer. Newcomers, including myself, would like something easier to get into. But even those options are limited: Livid's site looked pretty fresh and promisingly indicative of product quality (save an odd misspelling of "downloads"), but even their new intended-for-beginners Cell, despite having a "DOWNLOAD DEMO" link on the page, doesn't actually have a demo version. The more advanced sibling, Union, does have a demo. However, I was also frustrated here, because despite some potential hawtness like being easily able to "scratch" video clips akin to a pictorial turntable, I didn't see an easy way to get the visuals to respond to an audio stream (at did figure how to do that in ArKaos). Hey, maybe it was a really easy control I missed, but that wasn't apparent upfront. If I can't find it, I can't make use of it. No good. And then there's the likes of Resolume, sometimes compared to ArKaos, which has its own share of quirks. The interface is devoid of antialiasing and uses a hard-to-read font almost bordering on cursive, and reminiscent of something from an old Mac. It's nice they have a demo, but hopefully they'll fix the broken download link on one page. Once more, despite the potential, too many problem points deter me from exploring it. There's also Modul8, which is only for Macs, which won't do a mostly-Windows-using person like me much good. And again, it looks like it can record a sequence of events, but not edit them later before rendering. Is this really such a stretch? Not when you think of something like Ableton Live, which as the name indicates, is geared for live music performance and has a capable, configurable sequencer. Live 6 also added the ability to play QuickTime vids, so it wouldn't surprise me if they end up biting more of a chunk out of the VJ market (and deservedly so). Let's not forget the more esoteric and even free VJ possibilities either, like Neon v2   the demo vids are reminiscent of ye olde computer demoscene, but you really need to create your own settings, because presets are scarce. It's certainly uncomfortable how prevalent skimpy stock material is amongst various VJ softwares to help you get started. Even Winamp visualizers like MilkDrop offer a lot more presets! I would expect no less than an abundance of ready-to-roll awesomeness, because audio synthesizers routinely offer hundreds of sounds to base your further adventures on. To be fair, some VJ softwares boast of how many effects and Freeframe plugins they include, and I'm enthused about the use of one's graphics card and pixel shader effects to provide eye candy, but the path to applying these glorious sights and feeling rewarded that you're getting stuff done in the proggy is muddy. International possibilities like Japan's motion dive are also out there, but even harder to use in some cases if not localized for English. (Try figuring out an obfuscated set of controls that looks like a NASA scientist's workstation without a decent manual or tutorial!) Overarchingly, I've observed a number of VJ packages seem to have redeeming parts that should all be within a single, unified program instead of "VJ app X does 1 but not 2, while VJ app Y does 2 but not 1 or 3 or 4". Would that be too much of a behemoth? Not if well-designed. Clutter needs to get out of the way so you can focus on putting on a great show, and as appropriate, modifying it afterwards. Looks like a common trend that a lot of VJ software, perhaps because of their inherent nature to be "cutting-edge creative", have outright wack interfaces. Lack of familiar conventions makes it difficult to begin and far too many text input fields, buttons, sliders, knobs, etc. packed into a tiny space without any intuitive inference as to what each one does leaves me at a loss. Throughout all this, I'm really thankful more advances are being made in the field as time goes on, and altho I generalize, existing VJ software is certainly capable of doing many great things. But really, there should be an easier onramp. I know a number of these VJ software sites are peppered with praise about how stable the software is, or how it helped the crowd whip into an (good) excited frenzy, but to reinforce my earlier point, actual testimonials of how easy a particular program is to use are hardly anywhere to be found. Is this important? Yes. I'm hoping that similar to what Apple did with iMovie and GarageBand, a company will make a significant impact in popularizing VJing by way of easy-to-use-yet-powerful tools. The key feature for me here is combining realtime performance with steptime editing, since it looks common to have one, but not both. Maybe it's already happened and I haven't come across it yet in my many searches if so, they need better advertising, and that includes word-of-mouth joy. I'm sure Peter Kirn and friends know something I don't.
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A Look Ahead: Developing the Skills Needed to Get a Job When You Graduate
Even though it is the start of a new school year, it doesn’t hurt to look ahead to what awaits the senior class when they graduate and start looking for a job. Better yet, those with a few years to go should be looking ahead and acquiring the skills that will make them employable. In that pursuit, it might help to look at the University of Georgia’s James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research’s Annual Survey of Journalism and Mass Communication Graduates for 2006, which found that the job recovery that started two years ago for communication and journalism positions has now stalled (pdf of survey results). “Graduates of U.S. journalism and mass communication programs confronted a weakened job market in 2006 and early 2007,” according to Lee B. Becker, director of the Cox Center and professor of journalism in UGA’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. But it isn’t all bad news, while benefits are in decline (for all workers), salaries for graduates with full-time jobs increased and even outpaced inflation slightly. Before you get too depressed, remember that the best and brightest will still find a job. They will just need the skills that employers are looking for. The survey gave some clues as to what those skills are.  Here are the skills that employed graduates reported using in their jobs:   Write, report and edit for print 38 percent Still camera 15.4 percent Write, report and edit for broadcast 14.5 percent Photo imaging 9.2 percent Video camera 8.1 percent Designing and creating computer graphics 8.9 percent Video camera 8.1 percent Produce content for mobile device 1.6 percent   Looking at these numbers you might think that you should specialize in writing, editing and reporting for print.  But I would say that while you MUST have the skills that are used most, having skills like producing content for video and mobile devices might make you stand out from the crowd and win the job.  Most communication professionals are looking for ways to include these new skill sets and many don’t have them.  An entry-level employee with these skills in hand looks attractive. I know this because in my consulting business I am often hired by these same senior managers to do the jobs for which they haven’t developed the skill sets in house.  As a new graduate, you can save your company a lot of money (hiring people like me) by bringing these skills with you. So, join your school television station, learn graphic and web design by getting an internship or helping a non-profit, learn how to take and edit photos at the school newspaper…and so on. What skills do you think you need to get a job and how do you plan to get them?  Let’s share ideas and resources to help your fellow students and those that will come in the future.  Share This: email to others, bookmark to del.icio.us, etc.
Source: www.marcomblog.com

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