Just sharing a blog about technology...

http://blog.fallphoto.com/

NBC officially dumps Silverlight in favor of Flash for online video.

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/nfl-nbc-tap-adobe-s-flash-for-live-football

The Target Corporation has agreed to pay $6 million in damages to plaintiffs in California unable to use its online site as part of a class-action settlement with the National Federation of the Blind.

As part of the settlement, announced Wednesday, Target will place $6 million in an interest-bearing account from which members of the California settlement class can make claims. The settlement also requires Target to use internal guidelines to make its site more accessible to the blind by Feb. 28, 2009, with assistance from the federation, an advocacy group for the blind.

The retailer and the National Federation of the Blind agreed to a three-year relationship during which the advocacy group will test the site to make sure it is accessible to the blind who use technologies like screen-reading software.

WHY? I have no clue really. I have had this installed for some time and loved it whenever I used it. I just recently tried to use it a boom, it is dead.

It is just a shame, just simply because of the expansive use of mobile devices. Companies shouldn't be retreating from services like this, but expanding them... Just a shame.

http://toolbar.google.com/send/sms/index.php

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/09/ google-send-to-phone-free-sms-in-us.html?showComment=1219426320000#c1789496352149615211

With the expansive use of OpenSocial, does it still make sense to develop in FBML for Facebook? I currently see FaceBook as an island into itself and it doesn't appear to be getting better anytime soon.

If you were to create a social network from scratch what features would you include? What features would you not include?

Here is some of what I came up with:

- It should allow networking or adding users as friends
- It should allow users to import contacts from other social networks.
- It should allow users to share music choices
- It should allow users to share tv programming, possible tivo integration?
- It should allow users to share online bookmarks
- It should allow unlimited photo storage, possible tie in with flickr?
- It should allow a tie in with youtube via the free youtube api
- It should allow users to pull in unlimited RSS feeds.
- allow location based status updates. Enable your phone to update status with where you are at currently

Basically it should enable users to do what they want to do. Anticipate things that users might want and enable that. I think that the success of myspace was because people were able to hack it and customize their displays.

I recently got an email from LinkedIn about groups. Here is an excerpt:

"As an active member of LinkedIn Groups, we wanted to let you know about some changes we're putting in place in the coming weeks.

We are in the process of adding new functionality to enhance the experience of Groups, including the recent release of a searchable directory. We are also working with our development teams to bring new tools and widgets to this collaborative space throughout the rest of 2008."

So more tools and functionality are coming soon. I think that this is great news and will add more collaborative functionality to the communities (groups). In the email they also noted that they have set a limit of 50 groups that you can belong to.

Since we are talking about LinkedIn, here is a shameless plug for my Flash Coders group:

Flash Coders

For the past few years the common experience was that when you went to Nike.com you could expect to see a website that was completely in Flash. Just recently that appears to have changed. While Nike.com has Flash at the top of the page for a video player, the rest of the page is in HTML.

While this may shock some Flash evangelists, I think that this is a move for the best. More and more you will begin to see sites that were completely in Flash begin to move away from that approach. These reasons are not only for SEO reasons, but also other issues like load times and accessibility.

What does everyone else think? Is the era of full websites being in Flash dead?

There has been an update to the Google Webmaster Blog about the whole Flash Search index issue. I still have 2 issues.

1) There is no way to predict what Google will see. What would be ideal would be a tool or SDK from Google that would allow Flash developers to see what Google sees before it puts a flash file online.

2) It is unproven technology. There just aren't enough examples online to show how this new search feature is being used. Until more Flash files start showing up properly in the index I am going to keep doing what I have been doing to serve searchable content up to Google.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

Update: Everyone, thanks for your great questions and feedback. Our focus is to improve search quality for all users, and with better Flash indexing we create more meaningful search results. Listed below, we've also answered some of the most prevalent questions. Thanks again!

Flash site in search results before improvements


Flash site after improved indexing, querying [nasa deep impact animation]


Helping us access and index your Flash files

@fintan: We verified with Adobe that the textual content from legacy sites, such as those scripted with AS1 and AS2, can be indexed by our new algorithm.

@andrew, jonny m, erichazann, mike, ledge, stu, rex, blog, dis: For our July 1st launch, we didn't enable Flash indexing for Flash files embedded via SWFObject. We're now rolling out an update that enables support for common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, including SWFObject and SWFObject2.

@mike: At this time, content loaded dynamically from resource files is not indexed. We've noted this feature request from several webmasters -- look for this in a near future update.

@captain cuisine: The text found in Flash files is treated similarly to text found in other files, such as HTML, PDFs, etc. If the Flash file is embedded in HTML (as many of the Flash files we find are), its content is associated with the parent URL and indexed as single entity.

@jeroen: Serving the same content in Flash and an alternate HTML version could cause us to find duplicate content. This won't cause a penalty -- we don't lower a site in ranking because of duplicate content. Be aware, though, that search results will most likely only show one version, not both.

@All: We're trying to serve users the most relevant results possible regardless of the file type. This means that standalone Flash, HTML with embedded Flash, HTML only, PDFs, etc., can all have the potential to be returned in search results.

@dsfdgsg: We've heard requests for deep linking (linking to specific content inside file) not just for Flash results, but also for other large documents and presentations. In the case of Flash, the ability to deep link will require additional functionality in Flash with which we integrate.

@All: The majority of the existing Flash files on the web are fine in regard to filesize. It shouldn't be too much of a concern.

@brian, marcos, bharath: Regarding ActionScript, we're able to find new links loaded through ActionScript. We explore Flash like a website visitor does, we do not decompile the SWF file. Unless you're making ActionScript visible to users, Google will not expose ActionScript code.

@dlocks: We respect rel="nofollow" wherever we encounter it in HTML.

After reading more about the whole Adobe announcement, they really seem to be pushing SwfObject 2.0. Why? Simply because it not only makes use of Javascript, but uses the older embed tags that we used to make use of before the whole IE "Click to Activate" issue.

This may also seem familiar if you publish an HTML file directly from Flash. It not only uses JavaScript, but has a no-script area that uses the older embed tags. To my knowledge Flash has already been doing this since Flash 8.

The problem with doing this is that it doesn't allow you the opportunity to make a search engine friendly version of your site. I know that this is the purpose of the Adobe announcement, but it is unproven technology. Additionally there is no way for a developer to test it or program Flash to have things show up properly in Google or Yahoo.

Currently creating an search engine friendly version of your flash site affords you the ability to have control over the way search engines will see your content. It also affords you the ability to create a non-flash version of the site for users that don't have Flash at all. So in theory you are creating a highly accessible version of your site by using .NET or something similar to transform the XML and assets that are used by the Flash into an XHTML version of your Flash.

It isn't all about search, it is also about making your content accessible to everyone, even those that don't have Flash.