Crude Technologies

CNET very quietly launched a simple new photo uploading site called AllYouCanUpload last week. At first glance it doesn't appear to be very special or disruptive. But it is.
Via TechCrunch.com -- [ read more | digg story ]

Naysayers are asking, "What's the business model?"

For years now, email marketers and web sites have been using tracking bugs (small embedded images) to understand audience flow, and spending big bucks to do it.

If your business depends on staying on top of Internet trends as CNET's does, the data from a service like this is more valuable than the infinitesimal costs for storage and bandwidth consumed by JPEGs.

A nice web gallery size image is less than 500K. Storage and bandwidth these days is often under $0.50 per gigabyte. Amazon's S3 charges about 20 cents per gigabyte. That's $0.0001 per image. For CNET to know what sites 100 people have visited, only costs them a penny with web gallery images.

They don't just get data about the web sites visited where people posted photos, they also get tracking information about the audience visiting those sites. Since forum images are typically under 50K, CNET can probably learn about 1000 sites and 1000 visitors at that price.

It's well worth it.

Posted by MST at 06:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A current Digg topic asks, "Yahoo releases a beta preview of their new site, and excludes 800x600 viewing without horizontal scroll bars.  Could this set the standard?"

In over 200 comments, the point wasn't made that just when most desktop screens are reaching 1280x1024 sizes, we're seeing a whole new crop of devices with alternative resolutions.

The original poster has an interesting graphic of resolutions at the dugg URL:

SkeyMedia » Blog Archive » Is it Time to Abandon 800×600?

A couple things jumped out at me.  First, people are using HDTV resolutions to surf his site.  Way to go, home theater PCs!  But I also noticed not a single result appears to be in portrait mode.  Could it be that the stats don't know which way someone has their screen turned?

I, for example, have a Gateway convertible.  I use this Tablet PC in "portrait" mode, so it's the same shape and size as a traditional paper pad.  This is comfortable to write on, and even more comfortable to surf the web on.  This puts the horizontal resolution at 768, and vertical resolution at 1280.  Subtract the scrollbar and browser chrome pixels, and an 800x600 site won't fit.  My solution was to install the Opera browser and surf at 90%, but now those sites are just a little less legible, and I spend a little less time there.

Now Microsoft is pushing a new ultra mobile PC (UMPC) platform, and we're seeing resolutions of 800x480 (some real, some simulated).  DVDs are 720x480. The PSP is even smaller.  I've got a QTEK 9100 phone with a 320x240 display.  More and more truly portable devices, designed to take advantage of the web while on the go, will have similar resolutions.

Designers, publishers, listen up:  remember the web is supposed to be device independant.  Table design broke that meme, but XHTML+CSS2 gave it back to us. 

Don't design your site so visitors can only look at a little corner of it, or your site will be relegated to a little corner of the web.

Posted by MST at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Planning to be back on the air this summer, thanks to a little more time and the clever usable Performancing 1.2 extension for Firefox.  With that in mind, what do this blog's categories represent?

• Chants and Petroglyphs : music and art
• Flints and Clay : technology foundations, hardware, and software
• Pitfalls and Snares : quality assurance, security, bugs
• Seashells and Beads : markets and finance
• The Kilns : corporations or individuals behind technologies
  
• The Potshards : gadgets, products, end results of companies using tools with funding from markets to make nice things
• With Talking Stick : our turn to "opinionate"...

Fresh new opinions, coming soon.

Posted by MST at 07:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)