Flashturbation hall of shame

It’s no secret what I think of Adobe Flash. It seems that most commercial applications of Flash on the web either tend to be intrusive, annoying ads or over-designed websites that only detract from their own usefulness. Our industry has even coined a special term for it.

Read more >>

Adobe kuler ain’t so flash

Adobe have been promoting Kuler as their “first web-hosted application” whose reason for existing is to “create, and share color themes online”. But try actually getting Kuler to work on their website, if you use Firefox.

Read more >>

Is your mobile diverting to voicemail too quickly?

I finally learnt how to extend the time my mobile phone rings before going to voicemail.

Apparently, the “default” setting on digital networks is 15 seconds of ringing before diverting to voicemail. This is good for the network carrier but often not so good for users. To extend the ringing time, you’ll need to know your voicemail number. For us Telstra users, this is 101. So, to extend the ringing to 30 seconds before diversion, enter this into your phone and press “send” or “call”, depending on your make and model:

**61*101**30#

Apparently, the number of seconds can vary from as low as 10 and as high as 30, with 5 second increments. If your phone is a Nokia, you’ll need to pause at least 2 seconds between entering the asterisks.

100 million websites

The latest survey from Netcraft shows that there are now more than 100 million websites on the internet, noting that:

“blogs and small business websites have driven the explosive growth this year”

This is obviously quite an achievement, when you purely consider the numbers. While pragmatists among us would argue that the “rubbish” to “useful” ratio is still very high, we shouldn’t overlook what is probably the most important thing about the web:

The autonomy for individuals to publish their own content.

Searching for search engines?

If you want proof that there’s still a significant percentage of internet users who haven’t bothered to learn even the basics of how to use their browser, look no further than the Wordtracker top keywords list:

Based on the current top 30 keywords, we can see that 7 of the top 12 searches didn’t need to be searches at all.

If only users understood that their browser has a location bar, where they could directly type in the URL of the website they’re trying to get to, they wouldn’t have to search for search engines like Google and Yahoo, which they’re doing at the moment.