Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp’s Web 2.0 blog

The Library of Congress has continued to add photos to its Flickr account, at a pace of about 20 per week.  Enjoy them.  Be inspired by them.  Tag them.

Here’s a cool photo of the Austrian Calvary:

I have the coolest mom on the face of the earth.  She is an inspiration and an angel in my life.  She has been there supporting me and cheering me on through every twist and turn.

Happy Mother’s Day Mom!  I love you.

If you haven’t yet, call your mom and tell her you love her.

A lot of my friends have been talking about the Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games but I haven’t really gotten into them yet.

The other day I found the Guitar Hero Widget over on one of the Wired blogs.  Inside the widget, they give a mini version of the game.  It includes three songs.  It’s really cool.  Instead of using a plastic guitar, you’re using your keyboard but none the less it’s fun.

It gives me a taste of the game and would get me potentially excited about buying it.

Making a widget is SOOOO genius for a video game company.   If i’m a big fanboy of the video game, I’d send this widget to my friends who were yet to be converted so that they too could get a taste.  It empowers word of mouth advertising, which is the most powerful advertising technique.

So… Go play with the widget.

(Note: I would have embeded it here but I use WordPress.com and they don’t allow me to embed third-party flash. *frown* )

Happy Wednesday everyone!

So… a co-worker sent me this video of the R2-D2 DVD projector. It made my inner-nerd smile.

Anybody wanna buy it for my birthday?  Just kidding.  I can’t imagine what a lady would think if you brought her back to your apartment to watch a movie and you pulled out a R2-D2 DVD projector.

There is this new trend which has been popping up.  Instead of sitting at a desk, people are standing.  I noticed this first at Clearspring.  There are a handful of guys who work standing up.

Last week, Jamis at 37 Signals wrote a blog post about, “Standing versus Sitting.”

I’m really starting to think about it.  Maybe I should give working standing up a shot.  What do you think?  Would you do it?

Just read on Gez Lemon’s site Juicy Studio that with WebKit’s recent announcement of support for WAI-ARIA, all the major browsers are now doing something to support it.   This ROCKS!

For those of you not familiar with WAI-ARIA, it’s a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for making all those ajaxy fancy user-interface components (like tree menus or alerts) accessible to people with disabilities.

Last year at a W3C conference, I got to see WAI-ARIA demoed by a blind gentelmen.  It was WAY cool.  I hope all browsers move quickly to suppor this as much as possible.

Yesterday, Robert Scoble announced the redesign of his blog.  That’s awesome. My question is: if he wouldn’t have said anything, how many people would have noticed?

I go back to my thesis: No one cares about your Web site.

I care about the content and functionality that your site provides me.  I experience the Web through feeds in Google Reader and widgets in NetVibes.  I do 90% of my enjoying of content in those worlds.  I typically don’t notice your fancy designs or user interfaces.

We’re moving away from a Web page world to a Web of data that gets aggregated together.

The Web is getting broken into pieces.  If you write interesting things, I’ll grab the piece of the Web site that is your content (your RSS feed) and put it where it’s more useful to me.

What do you think?  How often do you look at Web sites vs. feeds in Google Reader?

So… yeah! I forgot to tell you all.  This weekend I’m on my way to BarCampPortland in Portland, Oregon.  I’m currently sitting in airport in Philly.  I have a small lay over.

I’m excited.  For one, I heart BarCamps.  They’re always just a wild ride.  You never know completely who you’re going to meet and get to know but you know they’ll be crazy smart and crazy passionate about tech/web-related things, which is AWESOME!

Plus I’m really excited to make this initial foray into the Northwest.  It’s not a place i’ve been yet.  I hear there is a lot of really cool tech going on up there.

It will also be an opportunity to tell a new audience about all the awesome things that we’ve been doing at Clearspring Central Command.  Can’t wait for this!

So… Portland look out!  I’m coming your way.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that one topic I’m passionate about is making the Web accessible to people with disabilities.  We all depend on the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) guidance via the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to help us through the process.

Well… WCAG 2.0 has just advanced to the next stage of the standards development process, Candidate Recommendation. What they need you to do is to go use it.

This weekend, get together with your friends and convert all of your sites and your blogs to being WCAG 2.0 conformant.  It won’t take that much work.  When you’re done, write about how it went.

Have you converted yet?  What do you think?  Let’s make our sites accessible so everyone can use them and access them.

I’m really starting to have a dislike of contact forms.  You want to get in touch with someone or with a company and the only option that you have is a contact form.

Contact forms really feel like I’m sending my thoughts into this ominous black hole where nothing comes out of it.

As a company if you wanna be more inviting of conversation with your customers, don’t force people to e-mail info@yourcompany.com.  Give your customer a person to get in touch with… an actual person.

Yes, you’ll say “oh but I’ll get spam.”  Well, spammers are smart enough that you’ll get spam regardless.  Plus, spam filters are good enough that it really shouldn’t be a problem any more.  I get spam once a week.

So… be welcoming!  Put an e-mail address for a real person on your Web site.