Born On The Web

Sing for me baby

I’m not that good with colors so I listed here a few sites that can be very useful while designing.

• Color Blender: Sweet blending tool, photoshop import,… My favourite!
• Colorcell: Community with most popular color schemes
• Colormatch Redux: Simple colormatch tool
• Colorlovers: Community with color schemes
• Color scheme generator 2: Great tool for making your color schemes.
• Color Scheme: color schemes.

Why would you spend money on expensive photo hosting if you can have a Flickr account? But still want to integrate your photos into your own site? Well we had the same problem. So we started developing this viewer…read on

As said in this forum before, we’ve finally come to launching a beta. The current beta is live this means that the .fla source is not available yet, but within a week we will release it.

For now it’s important to get some good feedback from you guys, flickr users. So comment here or on the “read on” blog.

Read on…(features,todo, bugs, beta,…)
FLAPI viewer public beta

Thanks,

Lev, Fritz & Jesse

http://spellbound.sourceforge.net

Great for checking spelling in textarea’s like these.

Support for a lot of languages even Dutch.

Yesterday evening I got an invitation to the “sphere” blog search engine. When I was testing it out, I noticed what a great tool a blog search engine can be in the search for information. Next to my blog, there is, believe me, some valuable information on blogs. Actually I look at a blog engine as a community tool. It searches the blogosphere community. So you can compare with the search function in Wikipedia.

So a tool that gives you easy access to all the information on all the blogs in the whole world, that’s a power tool !

http://www.sphere.com/

I simply love my music, and always on the look for new bands. Being a member of last.fm for a while, I discovered a lot of unknown, great bands such as M83. And today I found out that pandora.com (thanks to techcrunch,an interactive internet radio, switched from being a paid service to a free service.

You just give in one band you like, he starts playing songs in the same genre you decide if you like the song or not. Great for discovering new bands. It would be great if they had a supporting community like last.fm.

I love their flash application.

CIMG2110

It’s a petty the picture is a bit dark. I need to adjust it a bit in PS I guess, but that’s not really “my thing”. Euhm … well what is my thing??

This is often a very difficult question. Developing a specific community platform is often a lot of work, and costs tons of money. A community needs some time to grow, you have to nurture it the right way.

These uncertainties make it difficult for marketeers, creative developers to convince decision makers (CEO, company managers) of the use of an on line community and how a community can help the company to book more profit. This doesn’t mean that the community directly makes the profit, often the community gives the company a stronger brand which indirectly gives more profit. So you will never have exact figures on how much a community can bring by to the profits of a company.

In my opinion, some companies are obligated to have a good on line community I’m talking about companies who have a close relationship with the consumer. For example end product sellers (tech stuff, clothing, software, …), service providers (tv/radio stations, …). For most of those companies an on line community can only mean better customer relationship. Consumers want to get rid of their frustrations, needs, joy for the product. An on line community is a good medium to give the consumers the opportunity to have that voice. Can you imagine a product like this wordpress without a community ? No, I can’t ;)

Why keep managers the skeptic attitude towards communities?
Most managers want results on a short term period (personal achievements), sometimes a community can give you that. Think about community viral games. But mostly an on line community gives you positive results on the long term. So my suggestion for idea makers, and creative thinkers. Try to convince your company of a very small community game. Something viral, let them see the power of the community. Don’t start right a way with fora and logins, … start small. From that you slowly build credibility with the decision makers and make them ready for a real on line community.

There are 2 reasons why I started this blog :

The first reason was to make a database of information for myself. So I could look back to certain information, and what was my attitude towards them.

The other reason was to get back some useful feedback from the community. In my research field the community is very active, especially the blog community. I hope by reading interesting blogs, and writing interesting articles I can get more information for the community. So if you got something to say, always more then welcome.

Please bare with me if my English isn’t always that good. You may always correct me. :)

For one of our modules (the Interface) we’re currently developing a Flickr Image viewer in Flash. It fetches the images from flickr using the REST api and pulls them into our flash interface. The viewer is going to be fully customizable : color, layout, which flickr photo’s, …

More information ? :

Our development blog
Flickr photoset with mockup

I simply love developing applications like this. There are so much possibilities with API’s. I hope it’s going to be used by some flickr users. They can keep using the great flickr backoffice for uploading and managing there images. But have the flexibility of changing or integrating it to there own layout.