Angry Birds: An infographic of addiction.
Like like to play the occasional video game. I mostly play FIFA and F1, anything else and I just get bored. That is until Angry Birds came along.
I own all three of the Angry Birds games on my iPhone, and I think they are quite enjoyable. I am in no way addicted to playing it, but I know others who probably are.
AYTM have recently done a study into the addiction of Angry Birds and they put together a handy infographic to show their results to people like me who like pictures. You can find the original post here.
Introducing: Tyro Designs.
I’m doing something that I don’t normally do, I am asking you for a favor. If you like things that are designed nicely, it might even interest you.
Recently I started a discussion with a good friend of mine about design and social media. We came to some realisations. One of them being the reality that decently designed stuff is pretty unattainable for the ‘little guys’. The little guys being individuals, churches and small businesses. Good quality design these days can be expensive, and for good reason, but the problem is that it then pushes it out of reach of the ‘little guys’.
What has been bourn out of this has been a new design ‘company’. We are calling ourselves Tyro Designs, and we are hoping that we can help in some way. We have started Tyro to help people get online (individuals, bloggers, musicians, etc) and to help people with offline visual design (posters, books, powerpoints, resumés, etc).
If you’re in this boat and would like some good quality design for less (most probably even free!) head over to the website and sign-up to find out when we launch the site. Additionally, you can like our facebook page and follow us on twitter.
We’d appreciate any help you could give us. Recommend us to your friends (we are working on getting a weekly competition going), sign up for our newsletter and keep in touch on facebook and twitter.
Do you need help understanding the internets?
The internet is a busy place. Sometimes it can be too busy. Technology is also a busy and ever changing industry. As soon as new technology gets released people seem to just start talking about the technology that will come along afterwards.
I felt this about a year ago when the iPhone 4 was released. As soon as it released, people started to talk about the iPhone 5. Which might be released in the coming weeks.
If you don’t have your head constantly in technology websites, you can miss stuff. Even more if you didn’t understand the technology in the first place.
If you are confused, it’s ok, there is some help. The ABC has put together a handy little website called “Technology Explained” to help out people who want to get caught up on where technology is up to. Below is a video about social media, and you can look at some more here.
Introducing @TwitSprout.
Any good website owner will have analytics attached to it. These analytics will give them vital information about the people who visit that website. It tells you how long they spent at your site and how many pages they looked at, along with 100′s of other things.
With so much communication moving away from just websites, to now incorporating stuff like facebook and twitter, the challenge has appeared as to how to analyse data from these services. You need good data so that you can make good decisions about how you or your organisation use that service etc. This is where a handy app called TwitSprout enters the scene.
But first a story.
A couple of weeks ago I spotted a tweet from a friend which was advertising the beta test of a new twitter service. I’m normally dubious of advertising on social media, but the tweet read; I’m one of the first in line for the “One Page Twitter Dashboard” from #TwitSprout. Join me bit.ly/JoinBeta via @TwitSprout.
I was immediately hooked, firstly I could be one of the first people in the world to test out a new twitter service, and with a name like twitsprout, how could I refuse?
I clicked the link, quickly put my details into their webpage. I was kindly told that it would take a little while for my stats to grow, but that they would be watered and looked after by the team at TwitSprout. Nice!
I hadn’t really thought that much about it until this morning, when I received an email saying that, “your seeds have finally sprouted!”. My twitter stats were ready.
I clicked the link, and I was presented with an awesome page of analytics for my twitter account. I realised that I tweet the most on Thursdays, and the least on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. After seeing this, It completely made sense, Tuesday and Wednesdays are my two busiest days of the week, with Thursdays being alot less busy. It also gave me a neat graph of my followers and people I am following. It’s a really neatly laid out page, with heaps of useful info.
Then a little box popped out of the bottom of the webpage. It was a guy called Dan. Dan is the CEO of TwitSprout. Dan was offering me help in understanding the data that I had just been presented with, an awesome thing, because not everyone knows alot about reading graphs. Even though these graphs are super easy to understand.
Dan was also asking my opinion about things that I would like to see added to TwitSprout in the future. I said it would be cool to have some stats on re-tweets, and he thought it was also an excellent idea.
To sum up, today ive been shocked by 2 things.
- That someone has actually made a really good, accessible and understandable twitter analytics application.
- That the CEO of this (little) company has made the time and invested the effort to not only speak to his users individually about what they would like to see in the future, but to walk them through their own stats. Both rare, and helpful.
If you are on twitter. Sign up for the beta here.
If you are not on twitter. Get on twitter and then sign up for the beta here.
Practising Hospitality, in style.
I don’t know about you, but my Wife and I love to have people over to our home. We often have our friends over to our house for dinner or afternoon tea. Being open and welcoming to others is something that both of our families exampled to both of us as we were growing up. So, to Kirsty and I it is just a normal thing that we do, and because we learnt heaps of stuff from our parents, we don’t find it that difficult.
You might fall into the category of not quite knowing what to do, or why you should even be hospitable to others.
If this is you, then I want to commend a great website to you. Its called Practising Hospitality, and it is run by two friends of ours, Calum and Alice Henderson. Kirsty and I met Calum and Alice a few years ago while we were all leading on Kiama Beach Mission. Ive found their website incredibly helpful in thinking about being hospitable to others. From how to cook a roast, to how you should approach food allergies, to what kind of music should you play when guests are over. (Salmon Hater might of made it into the 2002 hottest 100, but it is never a good option for dinner parties)
So check out their website, you might even enjoy it.
You can also follow them on twitter @practisinghosp
Introducing Qwiki – Wikipedia, but better. Way better.
This week has been a weird one. Kirsty and I spent most of this week in bed sick with some kind of winter lurgy. I know its autumn, but still we were sick. Along with trying to keep up to date with college work, my mind wandered several times.
This involved several attempts at trying to get 3 stars on every level of both Angry Bird games, trying to complete a season in Formula 1 2010 and looking around the web for some cool websites to entertain me.
I came across a website called Qwiki. Basically speaking, a normal wikipedia entry is pretty plain, in most cases they contain only text, and one or two images. What the warlocks over at Qwiki do is turn those plain text entries into an interactive movie slideshow thingy.
Seriously, have a look, and you will know exactly what I’m talking about. Or not talking about.
Introducing, SIFC online.
I heard recently that “if it isn’t online, then it doesn’t exist”. While being wrong, the phrase is also right.
One of the things I’m responsible for at my new church has been developing a new web presence for them. Something worthy enough that you would be proud of it enough to actually want to show someone. Still with me?
We meet in a school hall, and have very strong ties to the school in which we meet. We are running various community events during this year, and in the essence of the quote above. To exist, we needed to get online, and quick.
Anyway, I thought I would share it with you. There are still a few things to iron out with it, but here it is.
I introduce to you. St Ives Family Church online.
