UK sites sometimes make the accident of using various American spellings with ‘z’ instead of ’s’ and ‘o’ instead of ‘ou’ which is a tiny difference in our language and isn’t all that bad. They’re regional differences which normally get converted magically when crossing the Atlantic, in the same way Amazon.com converts prices such as $ to £ on the Co.Uk and so on.
However terminology such as ‘Tags’ and ‘blogs’ are a totally different kettle of fish. Mainly if your audience isn’t narrow and you’re thinking about age ranges or users that aren’t always on the computer all the time. And there still is a vast number of those users. People are improving with online words such as ‘tagging’ and ‘blogging’, but loads will just not get it in the way some sites position them.
The word tagging is far more of an American word from tags on clothes and yet in England the meaning has evolved to being graffeti sprayed onto in walls. It makes you wonder if Banksy or another graffeti artist will spay a tag cloud for Internet fame…
Anyways, there was a recent debate about people using IE6 Internet browsers and how we should cut support off where possible, but why should people just know better in any case. Rather than just ignoring this we need to educate people in the right manner and help them help themselves, in this case, it could well be a matter of retrunculating links to our own language so they learn for themselves.
Ooooh. It’s raining outside.
Firstly realign your language. That’s not to say never use the word blog, in posts you could try to drop the word in so that they wonder - “what does that mean?” Subliminally hinting to them to come to their own conclusion or google it.
Something friendlier can often be perfect, on Innocent’s website they use a great alternative for the name blog. It’s brilliant and clever because people aren’t intimediated by that link that takes you through to their… blog. Then when you read through the content you find they’ve cleverly used the word ‘blog’ on numerous occasions so people will either come to the correct conclusion or google it. Blog, blog, blog.
Fantastic and simple to implement, but what about Deaf communities? I was told at an Ability Net conference that there are words which we take for granted which don’t exist in the deaf vocabulary (for people born deaf) - if anyone has a link to some kind of common words used which don’t translate at all, let me know!
One of the examples (forgive me if I’m wrong) was with Marmalade, where there it mean’t nada and the BBC ended up changing it for accessiblity reasons. Where do we draw the line with trying to do everything and can we do everything? Will things like browser plugins help solve these problems or do we need do as much as possible and hope it’s enough?
If you have a fantastic and understanding community around your site, the answer lies with them… only they can really help you out of those tough situations and sometimes it just requires you to ask them for that help. A little bottle of wine never goes amiss.
PS. I dropped in a little experiment… if you saw it, let me know what you thought and how you interacted with that word.
PPS. Anyone in the deaf community or experts out there, I’d really love to hear back from you about how sites can improve with language or anything else you have on your mind.
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Tags: Misc
Loads of people said to me, “Kai… that last post of yours was very civil and amusing.” So… I thought about it, pondered endlessly in the shower (I hope there isn’t food/drink now covering your screen) and decided I’ll try harder next time. But not faster. You just can’t rush these things.
Which reminds me… I thought of something incredible whilst doing my hair yesterday (my hair is short, so this was rather brief). Sadly for us all, I’ve forgotten what it was. I promise to let you next time know if I remember!
For today’s agenda I want to talk about Flickr and about view counts. One of the fun thing about the site is stats… being able to take a photo of a girls shins or fingers gives you huge view counts. Seriously take these
two for example.
Hayley is pretty hot so it doesn’t really surprise me that much how high the stats are. So if you’re on flickr and you have someone with great shins or fingers… take a photo! You’ll get huge stats and it’s probably the nearest way to getting into explore. So that’s it, my quick guide to you getting huge hits on Flickr. Don’t tell anyone or I’ll have to kill you.
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Tags: Misc
During this week, Mex (of Moo and herself fame) invited my little old self along to a wine tasting party at the legendary Robert McIntosh’s house. The twist, to use Twitter as an open forum for discussion on the different flavours and so we could blog on the go about the grape juice tasting session.
Even despite being sent the totally wrong direction by a train worker, getting there was a synch thanks to my iPhone’s most awesome GPS system!
The first test of our senses prior to the formal wine testing would be with a little nasal aroma game, with some random songs in the background from Blip.fm. Smells such as chocolate, leather, strawberries, vanilla, lemon, mold and let’s not forget the ever so delightful cat pee were all available in these little kindergarten styled eggs.
So, on that note let us talk about the wine!
Robert and with the help of Andrew the wine_scribbler came out and produced some tasty food, the starter was scallops with Hugel Tradition Gentil (aka Les Fleurs d’Alsace) 2006. A nice and clearing mix… not being the greatest with words (despite my forte of rambling and babbling), I loved the way it seemed to gently ease the seafood flavour away and softly clear the pallette. Bite after bite.
Rolling out next was a red onion tartette with salad with a Hugel Tradition Pinot Blanc 2006 WSome people weren’t as impressed about this as some of the other wines. Although I quite appreciated how it added a kind of oily softness to the eggy tart.
The 3rd dish was fried grass or as other people called it Frois Gras alongside quite possibly the best wine I’ve had in a long while (Hugel Tradition Gewürztraminer 2006). Compared to the other wines, this truely burst on the scene with variety of wonderful flavours to match the pate perfectly. And I do love a good spread on bread with chutney! A dazzaling and explosive wine.
4th was a pork and mustard mash with apple and cider gravy. Accompanying the Hugel Riesling Jubilee 2004, at this point I was using the word ‘bold’ and ‘body’ far too much. I blame the wine. Wonder what this wine would be if it was type? Font weight of 700, a bit too much kern from the offset - gradually redeeming itself and the face of a helvetica medium. I digress. This wine was good… but I still see it or anything matching the Gerwurstwinner.
So now the desert, we were pretty much in a rush by now. Everyone had iPhones/vanilla phones to investigate when their last train home would be. Coconut maccarroons were amazing… with chocolate on them no less! The wine was Hugel Gewürztraminer Vendage Tardive 2001. People always say don’t fight fire with fire. But when it comes to a sweet dessert, I totally disagree and loved how this panned out. Fair to say that the sweetness of one to the other was awesome.
Huge thanks to everyone involved! Special thanks obviously to Mecca, Robert and Andrew for being awesome in hosting and inviting me!
More reviews and info can be found at Robert’s wine tasting spectacle of a blog!
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Tags: Life
Not too long ago I came back from Japan. A wonderful country, filled with things you would not necessarily get in others… sounds, visuals, words and all other things that explode in front of your senses.
During the trip there were some real eye opening things, adverts everywhere on trains. You couldn’t even look up without seeing another advert full of copy on why you should buy this, that and the other. Adjacent to it is a small 10″ digital screen in between reminding you, that you should have gotten off at the last stop, they remind you to buy that cream for thrush… or something or other… “Ding ding ding ding,” chimes some musical you would expect whilst visiting Disney land, to remind you to get off the train.
It was all so wonderful an experience. We arrived with a guided tour from the owner of the apartment’s dad to the hotel. Swish went the doors and with a little head bow to the man on security we wondered through to the apartment which sat on the 24th floor.
With one amazing view of the city.
Our first adventure was to climb Mt. Fuji, some 3776 meters high in the clouds. Don’t ever do the ascend without proper equipment! Myself and friend, Tom Vong almost didn’t take proper jeans for the trip. It gets pretty cold up there so thankfully the jeans, walking boots and big tops helped lots.
Actually going up that monster was quite something. We started at 9pm in a dark and long walk up to the first station. We’d taken a bus up to the 5th station where normal mortals begin at. Just getting up to the 6th station took quite some feat. The most difficult, we agreed, from 7 to 8.
Arriving at around 7 in the morning, we got there in time to take photos of the sun rise. It was breathtaking. And every station we’d hit, other people had their walking sticks burned with a stamp that said which station they’d reached. Completing it was something else.
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Tags: Life
Last week I was lucky enough to take part in the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge. It was amazing, running around Battersea Park with tons of encouragement from all the staff was a real test for me and I did it in just under 40 mins.
There had been talk of us pulling out and I was really surprised that despite earlier being worried about it (I felt a bit rough that morning and then fell over running for a train), to say no… we’re not off to the pub… we must do atleast get to the event!
One of the problems with London is the transport. As soon as it rains, the trains have pains. And stop. We tried looking for cabs, buses and the tube. Sadly they were all failing until we moved further away from the busy area of Holborn and managed to get on a bus to Waterloo.
At this point I was dying for the loo. That’s the toilet, if you’re not familiar with the English slang.
We got to the event, relieved ourselves of excess fluids and proceeded to do the run in more fluids and mud. It was fantastic! And to add to it all, I didn’t come last. Which is a first for me… and I had some great encouragement from fellow runners.
After a final sprint to the end and a nice queue for our bags. Thankfully by then it had stopped raining.
What next then? Well I’m trying to keep doing the odd bit of training here and there and I’ll be off to Japan as of this Friday, which I’ll try and blog and flickr every moment of with the aid of my iPhone!
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Tags: Misc
