Born On The Web

The biggest internet service provider in Belgium has a problem and the thing is, they initiated the shit they are in right now. They did a campaign for the wrong reasons on the wrong moment. And I’m pretty sure if they thought it trough they wouldn’t have made this fault.

They did a campaign “telenet drukt op de knop“. Which revealed they would “upgrade” their download or upload speed… But people were getting excited telenet would upgrade their traffic limits which wasn’t the case. It’s still about 15 GB a month if I’m not mistaken (I’m not a telenet customer). So if it became clear Telenet would just upgrade the speed, but the datalimit would stay in place. It just fired up the whole discussion about the very limited traffic limit… And now it seems the discussion is more heavily than ever, I’m seeing blogposts, consumer initiatives, facebook groups, fake posters, …

Telenet reacted that just a very small part of the customers need more traffic volume, because there are only a few who cross the allowed limit. Well I’m pretty sure a lot of people just don’t cross the limit just because they know there is a limit. And if they cross the limit they know you’re going to be put on smallband (which is, believe me, hell!) or have to pay for an extra volume pack. Which is pretty ridiculous.

And I’m really not sure people were waiting for faster internet… I’m sure with current download speeds, you can do pretty much everything. So most customers won’t even notice something has changed. That makes it such a useless campaign … and only harms telenet.

Luckily there are alternatives, I switched to Dommel Cityconnect (currently only available in the centre of Leuven). No data limit, 23mbps download speed, 3mbps upload speed, fixed ip, … And it is still cheaper than Telenet. Dommel gives you less service, but more no nonsense internet. Just what I need…

• SnapShot of usps.com (rank #57), ups.com (#71), fedex.com (#153) – Compete
  Was looking for this, they say it’s better than Alexa…
  (tags: beta business graphs internet marketing media traffic statistics analytics tools analysis stats)
• YouTube – EARTH – Trailer
  Youtube should really enable HD for this kind of movies. They just need great quality …
  (tags: movie earth hd quality trailer)
• Flags [PIC] | Presscue
  Beautiful and so simple !
  (tags: photos politics world graphics design flags campaign)

The times of crappy-mostly-failing web uploads seem to be completely gone. I’ve made some screens of the best examples I use:

1. Vimeo, great how you can add metadata to the video while uploading.

2. Flickr, Jay!, multiple file upload. Incredible valuable for a photo sharing site.

3. Facebook, the max file size on facebook is 300 MB, that’s a lot !!

• Sigur Ros Photoblog
  a real beauty !
  (tags: blog design flash photography photo sigurros music photos photoblog cool)

I’m following the video stream of the StuBru music 4 life action. They are collecting money for charity. And I thought it would be nice if people could integrate the stream into their own pages. So quickly made 2 widgets… feel free to use them if you want to support Music 4 life.

There is a small widget:

You can integrate the player and logo by just copy pasting following line of code:

<script src="http://www.bornontheweb.be/music4life/music4life_small.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

There is also a bigger widget, which gives you the full streaming page. But you need a bit more place for placing that one, you can view it right over here.

to embed, copy past following code in your html:

<script src="http://www.bornontheweb.be/music4life/music4life.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Spread the word!

• URL Hacking: Generate Charts On-the-Fly with Google’s API
  this will come in handy !
  (tags: productivity interesting tools api graphs tool google charts)

• Edit your photos! On Flickr! « Flickr Blog
  Yay! thanks for this … A bit of a shame you need to pay for premium feature. I understand you have to have a business model but still. It’s $ 25 USD a year, that’s more than you pay for Flickr for a year…
  (tags: editing editor flickr images photography photos tools picnik)
• Google’s Infrastructure is its Strategic Advantage – GigaOM
  Google’s massive infrastructure is their best competitive advantage… building a second google requires a huge amount of raw cash … to much I guess.
  (tags: google infrastructure strategy businessmodel hardware networking business)

• Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia | The Register
  I think wikipedia’s problems are so enormously intriging … This kind of problems aren’t really good news for wikipedia. But they do prove how revolutionairy wikipedia is… great to read. Would love to have more info about the democracy of wikipedia.
  (tags: censorship socialnetworking politics networks socialnetworks wiki wikis scandal wikipedia web2.0)

• Blog | Acquia
  Startup from Drupal Founder Dries… A very good move for making the drupal community more succesful … will follow ! Good luck !!
  (tags: agency business opensource support startup dries acquia drupal)