PC vs Mac: Breaking Advert Placing Barriers

I'm always amused when Apple comes up with their quirky "PC and Mac" video advertisements. And apparently their creative team seem to know how to utilize traditional online advertisement place holders in a creative way.

As you can see from the image on top, they utilize TWO advertisement spaces: the top banner and side panel ad space and orchestrate a situation in which PC touts their own "PC Newwire" which pipes through the coolest PC news. And instead of what he hoped for, what we see are news of Vista bashing and people downgrading to XP and an agitated PC. And then we'll get to see a Mac after the punchline is delivered.

What I really liked about the ad is how Apple's advertising team are willing to experiment and think outside the box. In fact I didn't really get the joke until I notice they used two online advertisement space. Typically my eyes were "trained" to "overlook" those typical (yet effective) ad placement areas. So in effect it really got me curious and trying to play that ad video again and again until I found out their creative trick.

Apple may have paid the cost of having two ad impressions and this unusual "two ads working as one" act may not work that effectively. But I had to say that this concept is very impressive and I would applaud them for being creative :).

(*Note: This ad is not sponsored by Apple in any way, and I didn't intend to publicize what blog that sports the ad :p)

Swinging Preferences

Having more time for myself, I'm back into the continuous effort in tuning my Ubuntu installation to match my usage preferences and making it more pleasant and efficient to use.

Two of the most interesting switches in my own preferred software: namely favouring Quod Libet over Rhythmbox; Emenese over Pidgin (previously GAIM). What's more interesting that both Quod Libet and Emesene were written in Python and were fairly new players in the open source universe.

Now, as we know it, the beauty of software in general is all about choice: there's a lot of different implementations of any application domain and users are free to choose any alternatives that were available to them. However, what kept me thinking is that: what had me making the switch from more established open source projects (Rhythmbox and Pidgin) to newer projects instead.

To think about it, Rhythmbox and Pidgin have served me very well indeed to a point I didn't see the need to change: afterall, it does what I wanted and probably more. But then came Quod Libet and Emenese that not only does everything plus the "killer feature" that I wanted badly:

• Quod Libet: The "Random by album" plugin (Implemented as a plug-in)
  
• Emesene: MSN personal message feature

Now, looking at the two features above, it's not hard to notice that these two features were never "essential" features; but rather, they were "highly desired" non-critical features. Granted, both of these software doesn't do everything their similar counterparts does, but the thing is that they position themselves as a promising alternative by not only providing all the essential features while being stable but also being able to adapt to more "minor" but "highly desirable" features.

So really that begs the question: how high such small but highly desirable features be in terms of development priority? On one hand, you need these new features to be in to attract a larger user base (especially if the feature is perceived to be important to a large number of users); on another hand, the feature may as well be a fad that lasts for a short term and devoting too much time with such "features" spells disaster for any projects. I suppose in the end, it's important to have an extensible infrastructure (the plug-in infrastructure?) and a means for users to install and uses these features in a prompt and user-friendly manner (either by bundling them with the main package like Quod Libet, or provide an easy way to obtain them like Firefox).

RedesignMalaysia: Glitch or Gone?

Was browsing around today and noticed that Redesign Malaysia's site was gone!

For the uninitiated, Redesign Malaysia is "an initiative to improve Malaysia’s broadband facilities" (extracted from their site as last cached by Google), which provides information and news of all broadband providers in the country as well as serves as a platform for the rakyat (Malay word for "citizens") to voice their complains and concerns on the services being provided or any development that will hinder the development of wider and faster adoption of broadband.

I'm not sure what had happened behind the scenes, but should we lose the site, it would be a great loss for Malaysia. Just hope that it's just a temporary matter that will be solved swiftly.

[TechnoRant] The Latest Eyesore Of The Web

Remember those days when webpage eyesore was the "in" thing? You know, over abundance of animated GIF, scrolling and blinking text, Comic Sans font everywhere, bad Flash splash pages, the "green text on red background"...

I know, I know, I admit that I did commit those "offenses" once, and learnt my lesson well. But just as I thought people learn how to do better web design this time round, this time we have an even worse eyesore: Webpage advertisements.

Somehow with the recent development that makes webmasters to put advertisements to earn a quick buck, it seems that these amatuers seems to have money blinded their artistic eyesight that they seem to throw great web design concepts out the window.

And more often than not, they seem to flood the whole page with advertisements that I thought that I just bumped into one of those badly maintained subway corridor walls cluttered with enough recyclable (and ugly) paperwork.

Really, somebody really have to kick those webmasters back to school to learn how to build a good, solid site.

[BlogEXP] Blog Haitus

This is what I orginally posted as a comment in enrii.blog, in which he talks about how bloggers should handle blog haitus (i.e. not posting any new content over a period of time).

You can read the article here:Handling Blog Haitus.

Here's my comment:
Like any publishing content, it greatly depends on the type of content and how "time critical" your content is to be.

Let's say for example, if your blog focuses on the news item that can't afford any sort of delays, say, exclusive news piece/gossip, then probably you cannot afford any sort of haitus of any kinds. Imagine your newspaper isn't delievered daily or the news item is pretty much "old news". On the other hand, if your blog focuses on delivering lengthy tutorials and articles, and doesn't go stale for a long period of time, usually you aren't expected to post every single day. Imagine a magazine or sorts.

So it was a good idea to evaluate what kind of content that you wanted to share in your blog, how much resources you have (in terms of contributing authors, time and technological factors), and your overall direction of your blog (i.e. the big picture/vision/long-term goals).

As much posting frequency and time consistency contributes the most to your loyal reader/subscription base, it's OK to be a little bit late (on a haitus) in posting but always delivering high quality posts.

P/S:
Speaking of which, I personally don't believe in guest posting. It's more of a partnership affair between you and other contributing authors.

As for advance posts, it literally means that you have typed several entries in one day, but releasing them one at a time with a certain time gap in between. That's what I usually do, since I pretty much scrapbook my content and develop them over time before I actually do a review and post them up.

Use revive posts and "announcing you are away" very carefully because it's much easier to make yourself look unprofessional (it's perfectly OK if it's a personal blog). Revive posts is a good tactic to use if you have some new updates to your old content, or that there's some sort of relationship between what you are "reviving" and what you are going to post.