Born on the Web

Hello audience, I'm Frederik, aka frits, a new media pipo from Meise / Hasselt. Jesse just invited me to be a guest blogger here and off course I take him up for the challenge. We've been doing small and bigger projects together for the last four years, in school and just as friends / young entrepreneurs, and it's always been a a very satisfying experience. We're both graduating now, moving to different places, doing different things and a blog is a great way to keep up with what we're both doing. Since I'm also kind of 'born on the web' this place is a good haven for me to talk about web related things that have taken my attention and that I want to share. My main interests are closely related to Jesse's. Yes, I'm also a sucker for web 2.0 apps and the growing social aspect of the web, but what really makes my eyes moist and gives me a big smile are downright beautiful, shiny websites rich of explorative experience. One of my daily stops is the FWA, the Favourite Website Awards. Everyday the site showcases the best new website on the whole world wide interweb. And every month the FWA jury, formed by the crème de la crème of international web designers, chooses a site of the month. There you can truly find the very best of rich media webdesign. The archive of The FWA goes back until 2000 and this allows you to see the incredible change cutting edge websites have gone through. One of the most notable changes is the use of full video environments, made possible by the ubiquity of broadband, the Flash plug-in and the rising budgets for online advertising. Take a minute to remember the text based web of a few years back and then point your browser towards one of the new FWA winners: In-Sync Challenge. They offer a full video 3d interactive experience where you can test your knowledge of safety issues around the house. Complete and utter madness I think. A few years back the company behind this site maybe would have put this info in textual form on a few html pages with some images. Now, people can play around for a very long time and do the tests as if they're playing a video game, or even as if they're experiencing it in real life. It's wonderful to see how the language of hypermedia is evolving in a much richer language, taking influences from game design, film and environmental design. Admittingly, a site like the In-Sinc Challenge will only be possible to be made for very big players with huge advertising budgets, but since the budgets for online advertising keep on rising, the use of online by consumers is ever growing, ànd the expectations of users keep on getting higher, I'll believe we'll see more and more of these kinds of immersive experiences. That's it for now about rich media experiences. It's a bit hard to stop once you're on a roll :) Thanks for having me around here Jesse, cu soon!