Canadian Geek

Being behind the times as usual. I just discovered that Google bought Feed Burner.

Damm, Google is becoming THE internet. I mean nobody really cares about any of MS’s efforts so really Google is the internet.

Well I for one welcome our Google overlords, their software is really good. So meh.

You’ve seen them, but did you know that what you were seeing was indeed an advertising web trend?

It all started with lonelygirl15, which managed to fool us all. Lonelygirl was a video blog that was actually produced by a company. In the beginning it was made to seem real, but as the story became more elaberate and internet geeks finally figured out that it was indeed a production the company in charge finaly came out into the open and admited that it was indeed all a farse. Even with that though the series still remained popular and became even more involved with their fans through discussion forums and contests to be included in the story.

Back to today, you’ll find all sorts of “Webcam girls” on youtube. You can tell that these are either produced series or are created for the purpose of ad revenue simply by the ad placement on the right and usually some sort of branding.

Here’s an example of one I saw today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT1VfrOtxv4&feature=dir

It’s an interesting form of income, and not that much different from a video podcast. I just feel sorry for all the young lads out there who may think that this is simply some girl on the net being creative. Wake up guys, there are greater forces at work here.

As Youtube continues to grow in popularity it’s interesting to see all the different content that pops up, and how people are making money from it..

This is something that bothers me constantly. Clients wanting to use a specific web tech or tool just for the sake of using it. Somehow they think that if they use it, they’ll be cool. Lets use the example of a desktop widget. Widgets are great, when filled with the right content. The daily weather? Sure. An RSS reader? Great. Those are both applications that someone might actually use. Now lets say that a Candy company wants to create a branded desktop widget that has some random RSS Feed content in it. Ok, now we all like Candy right? But would you as the average user want to go to the trouble of downloading and installing what is essentially a 24/7 Advertisement sitting on your desktop? No I imagine not.

So get this out of your head advertisers. Seriously, think before you try to sell something, put yourself in the users shoes. Think from their perspective. Even if the client really wants something, sometimes it’s better to save yourself the pain down the road when you program is a massive failure.

This is the start of what I hope to be a semi regular post about trends on the web.

To start off, this week I’m going to talk about Page Peels. If you don’t know what I’m refering to then check out a couple webcomics that have started using it PVP and Least I could do. Now I started seeing these a long while back in early years of Collage. It was first simply a neat thing to do with flash. I’m not sure what came first, the Page peel, or the Flip book which uses the Page peel to replicate the visual of a page turning multiple times to look like a book or magazine.

Now I really hate harping on these trends, but I’d have to say that it’s reached the point of being overused. It was cool in beginning, but now I see it all the time. And does it really have an effect on the user? Just seems very gimmicky to me.

Let me know what you think.

Hello and welcome,

To what I hope is a great blog that you’ll enjoy. For the longest time I’ve had the dream of starting my own blog site. It started way back with a podcast called the Canadian Perspective Podcast. That died after first year in collage. It was fun, but I just got to busy to really have the time to even think about what to talk about.

Now with this blog I have the freedom to really put out some great content that’s…well..Geekish from a Canadian perspective. (Like how I brought that back eh?) To often I’ll look around the net and I see so many blogs and sites based around the stuff I love, but there’s not a lot that’s written by Canadians (Ars Techica being the exception).  That doesn’t mean that this site won’t have any international content just that it will be from the Canadian point of view.

So sit back and enjoy, and if you’re a Canadian who would like to contribute to the blog, give me a shout

Jonathan
jon (at) cangeek.ca