Flickr and leefjedoel: both addictive

My beloved Flickr has turned 4 years old 10 days ago. I find it amazing how addictive Flickr really is, there are times that I can’t be bothered to check or upload a photo but I’ll always come back. I can look at the Explore page forever without becoming bored. It really gives inspiration to look at some of the photos posted on Flickr.



Another thing that I find inspiring are the goals on our leefjedoel.nl . Every time when I take a peek at the new goals on the site I ‘m thinking: “hmm this is something I want to achieve”. I can easily get addicted by looking at the new goals that people come up with. That’s probably the reason that I’ve got over 80 goals.

Free speech

The power of Youtube is once again very visible these days. In reaction to Geert Wilders anti Koran film, hundreds of people placed their homemade movie on Youtube telling they are sorry for Wilders upcoming film. The ultimate free speech for all.

The idea behind the initiative is that people abroad can see for themselves that Wilders is not representing Holland, but just the opinion of a few; so do all the people telling they are sorry.
An interesting side effect of the initiative is that Youtube cannot longer form Wilders theater to show his movie since hundreds of movies are tagged with its title by now.

My goals

We recently soft-launched our new web 2.0 initiative: leefjedoel.nl (translated live your goals). This community website helps you to list the goals in your life, work on them and most important: share your progress with others. When you get connected to people who have the same goals as you, it gets easier to stay motivated.

It's quite a big project, fully developed in Ruby on Rails. But we’re not through yet! The beta version of leefjedoel.nl has just been released and we’re squashing the last few bugs as we speak.

Being part of the team who created this site, I already have over 30 goals . I take pride in the list that I’ve created over the last few weeks. The list of my goals really tells something about me, I’m in to sports and cooking. I’m moving to Amsterdam in a couple of weeks, so there are some goals involving that event as well on the list. The number one goal for me is making this site a complete success, what is yours?

A content nightmare?

Looking for information about the prickleleaf, American burying beetle, butterfly fish or peregrine falcon? Check out the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org), just launched and already holding detailed information about tens of thousands species.

EOL has the ambition to grow, but not just a little. Their short term goal is to gather and present information about 1,8 million species. Around 1 million pages have already been made, filling in the authenticated information is in progress. The long-term goal is even more ambitious; to tell us all about the 5 to 20 million species we expect out there and that we haven’t even heard of yet.

Although you’re often linked away to specialized institutions as soon as you start to dig deeper, the current content is well organized and clearly categorized: descriptions, photo’s, video, DNA-profiles, scientific publications and so on. The question is how to maintain a website like this, especially with the collaborative approach. Is this really a wiki where we all can add or edit content? And if so, who is reviewing and keeps an eye on quality and truthfulness?

I’m looking forward to see EOL become its own ecosystem and wonder what digital evolution will do to it.

Internet in Dubai

The United Arab Emirates have been in the news recently because of the poor internet connectivity. After an under water cable had been cut it became quite clear the region isn't well connected yet. Another thing interesting about the UAE is the governmental control of the content. Obviously anything related to pornography is blocked but also some of the social communities, but not all of them. Orkut is blocked, facebook is available.

This weekend a small delegation of Indivirtual was in Dubai. We experienced that their internet connection is indeed not the fastest. But despite the central proxy most corporate on-line tools we use work fine. Skype doesn't because the government wants you to use their phone company. When we got stuck in the desert it's nice to know that a big part of the desert actualy does have cell phone coverage :-)

Barrack vs Hillary

With this video released by a Dutch political party a couple of weeks ago. Dutch politicians are finally using the internet and are starting to look like the American equivalent. It seems to be a good idea to see what the Americans are doing online to reach their potential voters, so that we know what to expect here in a few years.
The next American president is probably going to be a democrat, that’s why I’m going to compare the websites of Obama and Clinton.



Barrack Obama

Obama’s website looks very sleek and clean and has an overall web2.0 look and feel. The media compare Obama to John F Kennedy or Martin Luther King, both known for their charisma and inspirational quotes. You can see that the designers wanted to catch some of his charisma into the design.
The use of colors is just like all the other candidates: red, white and blue. The website of Obama isn’t very annoying in its patriotism. The colors are more subtle and the overall design doesn’t look like the designer was Uncle Sam himself.

Hillary Clinton
Hillary clearly has to communicate that her personality is kind and warm. When I look at hillaryclinton.com I immediately see a very big smile from Hillary. I also see a page where you can get a recipe to make cookies.
This is clearly an attempt to make her look more like a human being.
While navigating through the content pages, I couldn’t help noticing that Clinton has a lot to say but doesn’t know how to say it. She uses a lot of text, and no distinctive paragraph headers or bullets. Competitor Obama does it a lot better with an easy to read layout.

Who’s the winner?
Purely based on the two websites and not on political grounds, my vote goes out to Obama. Its design and content is a step into the future and not as conservative as Clinton’s website. Maybe a little tip for Hillary: the only cookies I want to see on your website look like this .