The Future of Marketing - Quick Response Codes

The more I read about Quick Response Codes (QR Codes) the more I see the future of marketing: a true interaction between consumer and marketer. Users able to to scan and get more information simply by scanning a code in a magazine or a billboard. Applications available to help users integrate a new product or service into their daily lives.

QR also brings in scary thoughts of dystopian futures where advertisers and governments know your every move. The technology that can bring a cornucopia of products can also bring in 1984 type surveillance.

Still - the future benefits are evident. QR Codes are easy to create and simple to display. Their uses run from the mundane such as quickly sending users to a website (or a subsection thereof) or providing them with up to the minute promotions. But there are more interesting uses such as stores luring consumers in based upon their buying habits; or by integrating a product with an existing app to give an unintended outcome. For instance you're in the supermarket and pass a product. Your recipe creation app has interfaced with your going out app and "concludes" that you are in the mood for Indian food. A voice or text message appears: "Buy this product and that one over there. Add it a your existing foods and you will have an excellent XYZ meal for your hot date tonight."

Oh, the future is bright. Where are my shades?

IP Delivery and Cloaking: According to Google

Wow!!! I was just having a discussion about this the other day!

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

The same person who asked "why search engines don't work as well as they should" also asked about a history of the internet. I gave her my copy of Where Wizards Stay Up Late. She's an intelligent person with advanced degrees and couldn't believe that there was an "internet" before the web.

What I found striking, when I first read the book years ago, was that the development of FTP was completed in 1972 (RFC 354). That was was the birth of the internet: the means by which files are transmitted from computer to computer over differing networks. It took 20 years from that point for the internet to enter the mainstream.

If you're interested in the history of technology and science this is a wonderful book. I was fascinated by the development of the internet as a series of distributed networks. Simply put the problem was not "how do you protect the system from attact" but how does the system survive after the attack. (Remember, in the beginning, the "internet" was a DARPA project.)

Baran's idea constituted a third approach to network design. He called his a distributed network. Avoid having a central communications switch, he said, and build a network composed of many nodes, each redundantly connected to its neighbor. ...

Theoretically it might might be possible to set up a network with numerous redundant connections ... But there was a technical limitation, since all signals on the telephone network were analog signals. The telephone-switching plan prohibited more than five links to be connected in tandem, because signal quality deteriorated rapidly with the increased number of tandem links.

At the same that Baran was developing his concept of distributed networks digital technology was coming onto the scene.

Wow! The first few chapters describing the breakthroughs were astounding.

The End of XHTML

Long Live HTML. Only 6 or 7 years ago it looked as if HTML was to be supplanted by XHTML, and now HTML survives and, in the taxonomy of HTML, XHTML turns out to be just another truncated branch.

While we recognize the value of the XHTML 2 Working Group's contributions over the years, after discussion with the participants, W3C management has decided to allow the Working Group's charter to expire at the end of 2009 and not to renew it.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about the future of XHTML

A central aspect of HTML5, and the retreat from XHTML is the abandonment of decentralized extensibility:

HTML 5 has a number of extensibility mechanisms, but none yet that satisfies the requirement XML namespaces was designed to address of decentralized extensibility - allowing parties to include their own elements or attributes in content without risk of name collisions (whether those names are the result of a consensus process or not).
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about the future of XHTML

Is this a good thing? Maybe. XML survives and organizations retain the ability to give access to priority data without giving access to their database.

Bad Day at the Office

Not for the squeamish.

Why aren't search engines more useful?

I was asked the other day "why aren't search engines more useful?" Why do they come up with so much junk?

For two reasons. One cataloging data is an incredibly difficult task. New data is added daily in an ever increasing amount of new website; and not only does this data have to be found and catalogued but it has to be presented to people in whatever way they happen to think of.

Second developers and SEOs (such as you would hire at GLM Designs) do their best to make their clients sites rank as high as possible in the search engines. Up until recently there was a perpetual battle between the two with the search engines trying to come up with the most relevant site and the site owners trying to become as highly ranked as possible.

For the most part, except for a few people who game the system, the war between SEOs and the search engines is over. There is a series of agreed upon standards and, by following these standards, you can quickly and surely increase the visibility of your site by providing relevant data to the search engine (Google, Yahoo) users.

Changing Link Colors in Blogger

One of the reasons we went away from our home built blog was to get a better feel of other systems and the problems faced by their users.

Blogger's CMS doesn't let one have much control over the page elements. Changing the link color in the posts also changes the links on the right column. Blogger did a good job allowing users to change a lot of the elements. I’m surprised that they missed this one.

There has to be a work around. We found three.

1. The simplest one to implement is to add a style whenever you make a link. The problem with this solution is that you will have to add the style color code each and every time you make a link.
2. The second way would be to go into LAYOUT > EDIT HTML and add the link style to the existing Blogger template. You would still have to add code to each and every time you make a link, but it would be slightly easier.
3. The third way would not require you to do anything after the changes are made but you will have to alter the code. Don’t worry, it’s fairly simple and straight forward and you cannot ruin your site.

If you don't have any experience working with code see the following post, it will explain the process in detail.

Changing the STYLE in Blogger

To change the link style color in Blogger change go to LAYOUT > EDIT HTML and add a style right after you see the first link styles. Give it a fairly uncommon name so you will be to do a CTRL F. I used

After that select EXPAND WIDGET TEMPLATES and scroll to the bottom. Find the a href tags in the widget; it doesn't look as it normally does. You'll see something that looks like:

<a expr:href='data:item.blogUrl' target='_blank'>

after the "<a" insert your style name as you normally do. It should look like this:

<a class="sideRight" expr:href='data:item.blogUrl' target='_blank'>

Find all the widgets, add the class to the <a href> tag and you're done. Remember, each time you add a new widget you'll have to make this change to the template.