Posted via email from drnoor’s posterous

“Leadership is over-gloried… Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire… There’s no movement without a first follower ”

(via: Mashable)

As recently as the last decade, most of the media for public consumption were produced by professionals. Those days are over…. The question we all face now is how can we make best of this medium. Even though it means changing the way we’ve always done.

This is good watching, for those in a hurry, skip straight to 13:00 of the video and onwards.

“Adobe® Flash® Catalyst™ is a new professional interaction design tool for rapidly creating user interfaces without coding.”

This is the new tool for coolest presentation and Flash web building and for all the designers we can forget about the Power Point already! This is next amazing software from Adobe® for Flash.

Do check the demo video here to see the Adobe® Flash® Catalyst™ in action!

“Number of product roll-outs does not equate to product innovations. Most times, it works the opposite” [link]

And today I found this website, still in beta, in my RSS streams – FootyTube, as if to prove a point regarding the above. FootyTube is an aggregator site with an engine that trawls the open web and gathers football related content in the form of videos and articles and republishes them into, yes, FootyTube. Better yet, the value of FootyTube is the categorisation and channels it creates out of the jumbled up, perhaps noisy search data that gets returned form these searches.

I’m pretty impressed by what FootyTube has done in terms of organising these disparate, mixed up data and turning them in visual-information gems.

Website is in beta. You’d need to be a registered member to view videos. (I registered) Here are some screenshots. And my annotations/review.

First off. Page is long. REALLY long. That’s undeniable. Yet, it’s a joy to scroll through it.

There are many schools of thoughts here – which is better? shorter or longer page. There’s no proof to either one and opinions differ.

My simple answer to this is… USABILITY.

How user friendly can a site be by being short or long? By forcing a page to be short, will it force content to be cramped? Thereby leading to confusing multiple nested navigation? Or by making it long, will it lead to overpopulation of content? Plus never judge a website’s usability by looking at the entire screenshot of a page. The user WILL NEVER see the entire page. Instead, the user will see snapshots of the page. The size of the snapshot depends on screen resolution. The larger the browser window, the larger the snapshot. However it is, it’s still a snapshot. What’s important in usability is getting content right within each snapshot.

In the case of FootyTube, although it is long, having large image thumbnails and large typography makes the site visually enticing as well.

Video view page. Data visualisations. And of course content.

This is the the truth now with the web – how well can information be linked and how well can they be presented? Beyond content (which is a given since that is the first purpose of any website), what is the value-add that this website has? It’s data visualisation. Check out the match statistics and opinions. Smarter still… check out the disclaimer below their video panel.

More data visualisations in Channel page below.

Notice the last line  of the screenshot – “From Google News using Query: “Manchester+United+Football”.

Ideas perhaps for our future video channels?

Their “What’s Popular” page. Simple, uncluttered and to the point. May not appeal to some of you but it’s very usable.

Oh look. No “we recommend this” items either. Insight being… If these are already popular content, why need to recommend other things that does not fit the the popular category?

Are your photoshop cs4 colours different when u save documents as web?

If so, here’s a solution and some reasons behind this.

STEP BY STEP SOLUTION: (for those who don’t wanna know why)
http://www.usabilitypost.com/2008/07/30/photoshop-color-profiles-for-web-images/

Have a read on this if ur curious instead:
http://www.viget.com/inspire/the-mysterious-save-for-web-color-shift/

Have a good day designing with synchronized photoshop > web browsers colours.
Choose your colours wisely friends (:

All the movements on the web site are controlled by sound and music.
So change songs, upload your own music, play on your keyboard or sing into the microphone.

Visit the site

I’ve always been fascinated by title sequences. Finally someone archived everything in high resolution for our enjoyment.

Please refrain from jaw dropping while viewing these videos. :)

Check out this clip, for those designers who working day and night and get bang from your boss and sales person for fully Flash or Ajax stuff for couple of hundreds bucks! This guy is our hero! Jess Gibson’s documentary, The Draplin Thing.

This is a cool addition to Youtube. You can see advertisers scrambling to be the first to create something big with this kind of interactivity.  Is fun and easy to use the tools, is time to start thinking how to create more interactive and creative video on Youtube.

Here’s how to add your own annotations to a Youtube video.

Here’s a video of Johnny Lee’s tech marvels created out of a $40 Wii remote. The head mounted viewer is mind blowing. More from the Top 10 videos after the jump.

I could not pass on this chance to see this other video… Hans Rosling’s debunking third world myths. The best stats reports you will ever and have ever seen. His software’s been acquired by Google. Access that application here if you’re an interested data-cruncher.

It’s really worth watching.

Hans Rosling also run a non-profit foundation called Gapminder, a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels.