To learn more about our presentation as ThePremiumPress; where we introduced the topic of re-defining the social-layer by Geo-Tagging with BuddyPress.

Firstly, let’s point out that the organizing committee - lead by Simon Lim did an outstanding job in the organization and running of the actual event. We hope that as much effort goes into the marketing and promotion of the event next year, where we’ve already started counting down the days!

Furthermore, as Terminal Junkie pointed-out:

This is the very first Wordcamp event to be held in Malaysia and I must commend the effectiveness of the organisers from start to finish. The whole event was on time and on schedule, something you don’t always see in a Malaysian’s event as they are infamous for their tardiness.

We believe the venue was an excellent choice, and the service provided by the hotel was exceptional. Good food and drinks, plenty of snacks and an excellent buffet spread for lunch with cakes and drinks in the afternoon too. Each table had fresh water and sweets stocked each time we re-entered the room, and the internet provided by PI was sufficient to power the 150+ attendees.

Here’s a photo posted by Vironia on Yfrog during Jimmy’s presentation:

If you’re into Twitter, Joshua Ong made the best compilation of the key tweets - very cool stuff:

@Bennimaru Great demo / examples presented by @thepremiumpress on geo-tagging with #BuddyPress. #wcmy

@icednyior Buddypress creates a whole new type of wordpress. Bring ur site out of the box & it’s free #wcmy

@kreativethemes BuddyPress as Event Management and Geolocation tools looks promissing #wcmy

@icednyior Buddypress features easily extensible plugins – make a Flickr like site, add events feature, ratings, geolocation #wcmy

@Bennimaru Extensions for #BuddyPress: doc sharing, photo albums, tweet/face streams, ratings, geolocation, events & more #wcmy

@vernieman Check out http://irrationalgames.com built on BuddyPress + WP. #wcmy | Nice, very nice.

@icednyior U can build ur own foursquare by redefining the social layer in buddypress #wcmy

@vernieman Nice. BuddyPress is a re-definable Social Layer. Build your own Foursquare, FTW! #wcmy

@Bennimaru BuddyPress will be great for focus groups, community sites. Catering for individuals wif similar interests #wcmy

@tjunkie @jimmynguyc from ThePremiumPress up now on geo-tagging with BuddyPress… Let’s Buddy up #wcmy

Talking of very cool stuff and Twitter, when we were asked to provide some marketing material for the WordCamp goodie-bags, we knew we needed something a little more memorable than flyers that would get thrown in the bin by the end of the day. At the time, a few of us here at the office were crazy (still are) about Foursquare, and figured, hell, why not get the Foursquare features we always wanted into gMaps ready for launch, and then go out and build four different square badges, and then we’d be handing out Four square badges! Trouble was, for the life of us, we hunted high and low and could not find anyone in Malaysia capable of creating nice looking square badges, so ended-up with round ones:

Our badges had a small URL hidden on them, which once visited presented people with an image and the task of finding two hidden letters from within the image. Collecting all 4 badges, putting together the 8 digit promotional code and auto-tweeting each discovery allowed us to run the competition live at the event from our mobile devices, where Jimmy was able to announce the winners by the time he presented. It was rather exciting when it got down to the last place and 5 or 6 people were all racing to get the last clue. Speaking of which, as soon as ThePremiumPress is ready to launch, they will post another article with the winners and more details on promotions available to those attending.

Icednyior posted a nice pic of the swag bag contents on TwitPic:

In our opinion, the best presentation BY FAR was from Aizatto regarding Beginning WordPress Plugin Development, which was well presented and good, clean professional code to learn from.

In addition, we also managed to find this video from WeGoPro on YouTube:

OXFORD WORD OF THE YEAR 2009: UNFRIEND
The standard of the English language has been manipulated into ways unimaginable. But among these, a rather unusual word has made its way to the Oxford dictionary, as highlighted by OUP Blog.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most “un-” prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar “un-” verbs (uncap, unpack), but “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”

Other technological words of interest added to the dictionary this year include Hashtag and Sexting.

DECLARATION OF SUCCESS BY SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETERS
As depicted in E-Marketer, social networking within the past 3 years, have shown significant growth in terms of usage and function in the business marketing concepts. In these modern times, it’s practically the best way to market anything, be it online or direct.

Social networking and blogging have seen the most growth in adoption, while other technologies have flattened or even declined in use, including wikis and online video. Twitter usage, of course, has caught on quickly – more than one-half of businesses reported tweeting in 2009. This was the first year respondents were polled about Twitter.

One impressive change over time was in the percentage of Inc. 500 companies that did not use any form of social media. It dropped precipitously from 43% in 2007 to just 9% in 2009.

The Center for Marketing Research also noted that the Inc. 500, a list of the fastest-growing private companies in the US, is outpacing the larger, more traditional companies in the Fortune 500 in many social media activities. Is the rush to adoption bringing marketing success? Respondents overwhelmingly believed it was. The companies polled were mostly measuring hits, comments, leads or sales as primary indicators.

So it should be no surprise that Pepsi have; for the first time in 23 years
cancelled their SuperBowl ads in favor of social-media marketing.

THE DEFINITION OF SOCIAL MEDIA R.O.I.
This brings us back to The Brand Builder, who takes another stab at expressing his views on the ROI of Social-Media:

It’s easy to do, especially since sometimes, what you invest into something isn’t necessarily $$$. Perhaps you invested sweat. Perhaps you invested time. Perhaps you invested emotions. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that when the currency is variable, how you measure the “I” in ROI becomes variable as well. For lack of a better term, you start to refer to any kind of positive outcome as “ROI” even when you shouldn’t. It’s an easy habit to fall into, and if you aren’t careful, your definition of ROI can begin to get a little fuzzy. So I get it: I understand why this is confusing to so many folks, especially when it gets thrown into the world of Social Media.

INSURE.COM SELLS FOR US$16 MILLION
Tech Crunch and Domain News highlighted the largest reported domain name sale of the year to date:

Now trading under the names of Life Quotes and Consumer Insurance Guide, the former Insure.com will retain almost all of its existing customers and business, meaning the value of the sale is almost solely for the domain name. Phil Perillo, CFO, remarked, “This transaction, which calls for a $15 million cash payment now and a $1.0 million payment in 365 days, significantly increases our shareholders’ equity and stockpile of cash. As a result of this asset sale, the Company now has approximately $24 million of cash and investments, no debt, stockholders’ equity of $31.4 million and a book value of approximately $4.98 per share.”

O’REILLY’S DISCUSSION ON ICANN WITHOUT RESTRAINTS
In one of O’Reilly Radar’s articles, Andy Oram made a complete discussion regarding ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names And Numbers) without restraints, that has made several difficult circumstances online.

• It was created hastily and arbitrarily without roots in the communities.
• Its concept of stakeholders is boundless, potentially involving anyone who uses the Internet or gets information that has passed at some point over the Internet.
• Its reach is global, and its decisions are affected by issues of language and culture.

Those in charge of ICANN have compounded these intrinsic problems with poor decisions and bad leadership. But ICANN is currently undergoing one of its regular reorganizations.

AN UPDATE ON THE OPEN TLD
The new GTLD Program proposed by ICANN is growing momentum, with a new Draft of Expression of Interest / Pre-Registrations Model, which is a direct result of community recommendations for such an undertaking – with more information available on the iCANN site.

Highlights of the draft EOI / Pre-registration model includes:

• Participation in the Expression of Interest is mandatory for eligibility to submitting an application for a TLD in the first round
• A deposit of US$55,000 is required for participation in the Expression of Interest, which will be used as a credit against the final US$185,00 evaluation fee

One of the hottest issues arising from these preliminary plans is that they may be limiting the new TLDs to a minimum of 3 characters, where you can view the entire EOI Draft Model PDF online.

Connecting to the whole world on a daily basis is a tough job to maintain, and despite the recent attacks against Twitter, which have been documented in two articles by TechCrunch, they and the general public supporting them have done a good job moving forward and expressing a new side of their lives.

COMBINING MICROSOFT MAPS, SILVERLIGHT AND TWITTER
By using some of the technology acquired through Microsoft, written information on a map can now be written live. And Earthware featured an article that described some of the benefits and uses for such applications on the net.

We (Earthware) have been working on a demo which uses Microsoft’s latest mapping technology to integrate mapping with twitter to allow people to tweet their message and location and plot these on a map to show thoughts and details on a specific topic/event, for an international company, or for global issues. Here is a demo app we created that was used by Microsoft in the launch event for their new mapping product. It shows you the kind of things you can do with animation and mapping.

INTEGRATING TWITTER WITH HOME APPLIANCES
Jennifer Van Grove highlighted in her Mashable article about some cool uses from Tweet Street.

Sockington is one of the most popular cats on Twitter, and currently weighs in at over 480,000 followers. That’s an astounding number given the fact that there’s no science or magic behind Sockington’s online persona — it’s just Jason Scott doing the tweeting on behalf of his cat.

The Washing Machine Hack, created by Ryan Rose (you can follow his laundry @PiMPY3WASH ), adds a network port, BS2 Stamp, 9volt power inverter, and limit switch (detects wash mode) to a Maytag washer to create an automatic way of getting notified that your laundry is done. Now this is useful.

From the inexplicably popular Sockington the cat to the technologically impressive baby kick sensor, plant water level detector, and power monitor, we’ve found a few terrific examples of Twitter with a twist.

• Pets all-a-Twitter: Pets and social media go hand in hand. Cute as Hell is viral, iPhone apps for pet lovers abound, and there’s a smattering of pet related sites all barking for your attention.
• Wish Washers: The Washing Machine Hack @PiMPY3WASH navigates the washing machine activity and lets you know when the clothes are done.
• Communicating with Plants: The Botanicalls kit uses your Ethernet connection to tap into the health of your plant.
• Monitoring Power Usage: Tweet-a-Watt tracks the power usage in every room of the home via Twitter.
• Fresh From Oven Twittering: BakerTweet can tell the world that something "hot and fresh" has just come out of the oven, literally.
• Tooting & Tweeting: The Twittering Office Chair detects the natural gas of human flatulence, yes – farts and posts an update about it.
• Baby Movements: Kickbee is a device created with vibration sensors and strapped to a pregnant woman’s belly to monitor and post each movement or kick in the form of instant Tweets.

TWODDLER: THE BABY TOY THAT TWITTERS
Seems like almost everything needs to be tweeted about, in a way the world has become more "nosey" with the invention of Twitter…but there are some good uses, including devices integrated through Twitter, and Twoddler is one feature that monitors the activity of the baby within the crib and tweets about it, as discussed in Adam Ostrow’s Mashable article.

“The software captures sensor data from the activity center and tries to select a predefined text that is related to that sensor data. We are extending the system so it becomes easier to relate certain patterns of sensor readings with a set of strings. At this point, it’s unclear whether or not the device will make it to market, but the team did win 5000 euros for their prototype at a developer competition earlier this year. While it’s unlikely to ever replace the baby monitoring tools that parents depend on, we certainly could see some use for it when your baby is with the sitter and you want to keep in touch, so to speak.

TWEETING IN KLINGON LANGUAGE
Seems like Twitter has influenced even the fictional universe. In this case, Star Trek fans have the opportunity to tweet in the Klingon language using various Klingon phrases online.

Game publisher Cryptic has created a way to allow you to express your innermost thoughts and feelings in Klingon. Head over  to TweetKlingon.com.  There you can  install an app that allows you to post items to your Twitter account in the language of Kahless. You can translate from English or choose from a variety of useful phrases. The app is part of Cryptic’s promotion of its upcoming Star Trek Online MMORPG, which launches on Feb. 2, 2010.

Being an online global leader of information on the web demands constant change and adaptation to the ever evolving world of information technology. Google is pretty consistent in this matter, as they continue to reach new heights. We will now highlight some of the latest Google headlines of late.

GOOGLE VENTURES INTO DNS BUSINESS & THE INFLUENCE OF OPEN DNS ON THE WORLD
Tech Crunch featured an article by Michael Arrington, concerning one of the latest business ventures of Google in a bid to enhance its revenue potential ratings and increase in data information. A complete response to this new approach by OpenDNS was featured here.

The benefits to users are a theoretically faster and more stable browsing experience, and some additional security against malware type sites. The benefit to Google – tons more data, and some potential revenue. The service competes directly with Sequoia and Greylock backed OpenDNS, a four year old service that has had tremendous usage and revenue growth.

Speaking of which, Open DNS is a global Domain Name System (DNS) resolution service, that you can use as an alternative to your current DNS provider. Instructions for its use is found here. Features of this remarkable resolution service includes:

• Ultra-reliable, globally-distributed network .
• Industry-leading Web content filtering .
• Easy to use for families, schools, and businesses of all sizes.

GOOGLE LAUNCHES ITS OWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE
Efficiency is the name of the game for Google, and what better way to serve the online community better than to introduce a simple programming language that caters to all the necessities for online information services, as described in a Mashable article by Ben Parr.

One of the core philosophies of Google, and one of the reasons it has been so successful, is efficiency. It’s about both being as efficient as possible when serving search results and processing data and creating product that push the limits of efficiency for the user (as an example, Google’s trying to make communication more efficient with Google Wave).

CONNECTING CITIZENS AND JOURNALISTS THROUGH YOUTUBE DIRECT
Google have made customizing web-applications based upon the Youtube platform even easier.

Every day, people with video cameras are changing the ways we get our news. We see it during elections. We see it during earthquakes, fires and other natural disasters. We see it on our freeways, in our schools and in our public spaces. Almost any event that takes place today has a chance of being captured on camera. As YouTube has become a global platform for sharing the news, media organizations have been looking for a good way to connect directly with citizen reporters on our site so they can broadcast this footage and bring it to a larger audience .

Though we built YouTube Direct to help news organizations expand their coverage and connect directly with their audiences, the application is designed to meet any organization’s goal of leveraging video content submitted by the community. Businesses can use YouTube Direct to solicit promotional videos, nonprofits can use the application to call-out for support videos around social campaigns and politicians can use the platform to ask for user-generated political commercials. The opportunities to use the tool are as broad as the media spectrum itself.

Already, we’ve seen ABC News, the Huffington Post, NPR, Politico, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and WHDH-TV/WLVI-TV in Boston using YouTube Direct. We look forward to seeing many more organizations to do the same.

GOOGLE REDEFINES GPS NAVIGATION THROUGH NEW MAPS FOR ANDROID 2.0
Michael Arrington highlighted in his TechCrunch article the wonderful features of a new GPS navigation application from Google specially programmed for the new Android 2.0 GPS system.

For the most part Google is taking a backseat and letting their partners get most of the attention . But Droid is the first Android phone to run Android 2.0, and Google Maps Navigation is clearly the early trophy app for those devices. Google Maps already has 50 million active users across various mobile phones, says Google. But what users have today isn’t even close to the new Navigation product. First off, it’s connected, which puts it ahead of all but a tiny percentage of in-car navigation systems which have no Internet connectivity ( Dash is a notable exception).

SAMUEL L. JACKSON RIDES THE GOOGLE WAVE
To understand new technologies, it always helps to see it in action, and as Adam Ostrow described in his Mashable article, seeing Google Wave in action through the use of Samuel L. Jackson quotes can have hilarious results, Pulp Fiction style! Enjoy!

Still looking for a use case for Google Wave (or an invite for that matter?). Look no further than this brilliant mashup combining Samuel L. Jackson quotes with a demonstration of Google Wave functionality, including chat, wikis, and embedded videos, games, and maps. The video appears to have been created by Joe Sabia of Whirled Interactive . Be forewarned, it uses lots of adult language, so should be viewed with headphones on if you’re at the office. But, you probably could have already guessed that.

GOOGLE WAVE SANDBOX NOW OPEN FOR FEDERATION
In an article featured in Read Write Web, Google tested earlier versions of Wave with a small number of developers on the Wave sandbox and this server will now become the platform for testing interoperability between different Wave servers.

Developers who want to run their own Wave server can find all the necessary information for setting up a Wave Federation Prototype Server in these documents. The server is written in Java and should run on Windows, OSX and Linux-based machines. In the documentation, the Wave team explains how to run the server as an extension to the open source OpenFire XMPP server, though any XEP-00114 compatible XMPP server should be able to talk to the Wave server.

Patience is a virtue, it’s one of the most famous quotes of all time. And by taking this powerful philosophical quote and putting it into good use, great things can be achieved. Such is the case with the technological aspect of Malaysia. From purchasing one of the world’s most famous social network service, to plans of new cyber technology buildings, Malaysia is looking forward to a steady future by fully utilizing the technologies made available to us.

MALAYSIAN LOCAL COMPANY MOL BUYS OVER FRIENDSTER
In a recent article featured in KLews, one local company has bought over the social network giant “Friendster”. According to the article, MOL Global Pte Ltd, is a newly-formed entity spawned from the recent MOL AccessPortal Bhd acquisition of California-based Friendster Inc. The merger of the two companies is aimed at creating Asia’s largest end-to-end content, distribution and commerce network.

The offices of both MOL and Friendster around the world, including the Friendster headquarters in Mountain View, California, will be retained, said Bangah. “In countries where both companies operate, such as Singapore and the Philippines, we will combine the staff and resources,” he added. Friendster’s rivals include the popular Facebook and MySpace social networking sites, as well as local sites JomSocial and Ruumz.

NEW FUND "CRADLED" TO HELP TECHNOPRENEURS TO MARKET
In an article featured in The Star Online, pre-seed funding organization Cradle Fund Sdn Bhd is now offering to finance technopreneurs who are prepared to commercialize their products.

“There is a gap now between the pre-seed and commercialisation stages, so this latest fund is a bridge to that divide,” Cradle chief executive officer Nazrin Hassan told In.Tech. With it, he said, technopreneurs will have access to funding all the way from conception to commercialisation

Cradle said the commecialisation funding would also help technopreneurs survive in the marketplace during the critical one- to three-year period that they are vulnerable as a new business venture. It prides itself on having the highest commercialisation rate (48%) among grants in the country. It hopes the new fund will lead to even bigger success stories among local technopreneurs.

THREE NEW MSC MALAYSIA CYBERCENTRES TO BE DEVELOPED AROUND KLANG VALLEY AND KL
According to The Star Online, three new locations in the Klang Valley will be developed into MSC Malaysia cybercentres: the Persoft Tower in Petaling Jaya, as well as GTower and Bangsar South City in Kuala Lumpur, to coincide with this year’s ICM, which is MSC Malaysia 2.0: Contributing to Malaysia’s New Economical Model.

Datuk Badlisham Ghazali, chief executive officer of the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), said the new locations are to provide more variety and choice to companies and organisations looking to be part of the MSC Malaysia initiative. There are 10 cybercentres in the Klang Valley now — among them are the Kuala Lumpur City Centre, Cyberjaya, KL Sentral and Mid Valley City. There are six cybercities in the states of Kedah, Penang, Malacca, Perak, Johor and Pahang.

With one of Twitter’s co-founders (Biz Stone) coming to Malaysia tomorrow (16th of November), we felt it an appropriate time to publish some updates on the platform:

THE API NAME SQUATTING ENIGMA FACED BY TWITTER
Getting the negative press out of the way first, Nic Cubrilovic wrote an article in Tech Crunch, concerning one of the latest headaches faced by the Twitter department – poor organization and planning around its third party developer platform regarding the API name squatting organization of trademarked and non-trademarked users.

When Tweets are published there is an additional layer of information below the main message that says when the message was posted, and how it was posted. Here’s an example message: Michael Arrington just posted from the Seesmic Twitter web app. If you click on “Seesmic” in that Tweet it takes you to Seesmic.com.

But there’s a problem. Twitter’s API allows developers to register any application name, and Twitter messages posted from that third party application will show that name and will link to anything the developer wants. Only names that contain “twitter” or “tweet” are filtered out. Everything else is fair game.

Robert Robb from TweetBorder emailed us about this, and show this test Twitter message that was posted from “Windows.” He also registered the Microsoft name but deleted it to avoid any legal trouble.

MICROSOFT CONTRIBUTES TO TWITTER
In an independent Flotzam post, a new Windows application called The Archvisist was introduced and described in detail.

The Archivist allows you to start a search and will get as many results as it can on the initial search.  If you leave The Archivist open, it will update with the latest results every 10 minutes.  You can also close The Archivist and open it later. The Archivist will save the tweets and get all the tweets it can since that search.

The Archivist will display a chart that shows the number of tweets per day for a given search, so that you can quickly assess traffic for a given search. For more comprehensive data analysis, The Archivist lets you export Tweets to Excel. It also natively saves tweets in an XML format, which could also be parsed  for deeper data analysis and research.

CAN FRESH FUNDING FROM HOLLYWOOD RE-DEFINE TWITTER ADVERTISING…?

Has Ad.ly, with its focus on high-profile advertising partners and celeb Twitter users with a large number of followers, cracked the nut of Twitter advertising? Impossible to say without seeing some numbers, but it appears to be striking a chord or two.

Not that Ad.ly is the only one trying to capitalize on Twitter’s growth and celebrities’ massive audience. SponsoredTweets (from IZEA) does much of the same, and then there’s ExecTweets , a cooperation between Microsoft and Federated Media. Others, like Be-A-Magpie and Twittad , have their sights set on the long tail of Twitter.

Whilst on the topic of Twitter advertising, the Telegraph UK ran an almost mind-boggling article recently that claimed uSocial offered Twitter US$ 500,000 to place a banner ad at the top of their homepage for 24 hours:

“While $500,000 may seem like a large amount to invest in one banner for one day, we believe that the investment will be more than worth it,” said Leon Hill, chief executive of uSocial. Despite uSocial’s extravagant offer, technology watchers are sceptical that Twitter would choose that company as its debut online advertiser. The marketing company works on behalf of clients to target Twitter users who have posted messages on a topic that relates to the client’s business. It then sends a message to those Twitter users suggesting they follow their client’s account, a practice that some Twitter users view as spam.

And let’s not forget all the hype about Twitter Lists, for which Mashable published an extremely in-depth FAQ.

EFFECTIVE TWITTER BACKGROUNDS: EXAMPLES AND CURRENT PRACTICES
Saud Khan featured in his article in Smashing Magazine; a huge collection of examples and practices for Twitter backgrounds, as well as detailed explainations how they can be effectively applied.

Merge Background With Timeline / Sidebar: This is probably the least used technique among all tips and techniques discussed here. By merging your background graphics with timeline and/or sidebar, you can create a unique layout with a very distinctive look and form.

Reveal More With The Page Peel Effect: Your profile picture (it can be an avatar, logo or photo) is your main identity on Twitter; it will be displayed next to every tweet that you send out to your followers. For instance, you can use a background image that is somehow related to your profile picture and thus convey more information about yourself or your brand. In other words, you can use this classic approach of creating design around your logo or brand identity to communicate information in a more effective way.

Add A Header Bar : Adding a header bar could be used for creating unique look for your profile page, but it can also be used to separate Twitter logo and top menu (which contain links to user’s profile) from the rest of your page.

Less Is More: Andre Gide once said that “Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better”. Here are few illustrations of how minimalism can be used to its full effect:

Put Information In A Memorable Way Composition is the plan, placement or arrangement of the elements. You can arrange elements on your background in a unique and memorable, showcasing information that is important to you and your readers. This techniques allows you to create an environment, show your personality and provide additional information.

Here is the complete list of Effective Twitter Backgrounds & Practices.

When technology is mentioned, especially when we mention it – social-media is usually the thing that comes to mind, but the virtual world is steadily advancing itself in various ways, ways that we cannot afford to let go unnoticed, and so we have decided to feature some of the most important headlines from the virtual-scene:

SECOND LIFE AND ITS POTENTIAL IN SCHOOLS AND ENTERPRISES
Dana Oshiro wrote in a Read Write Web article concerning the influence and potential that the virtual giant Second Life has in the education system of schools; something especially important as children grow more reliant on technology.

ReadWriteWeb has already written about data visualization capabilities in sites like Second Life. Due to a fledgling economy, many suggested that these institutionally-branded education initiatives may also become popular. Nevertheless, apart from this recent endorsement by the University of Texas, mainstream educators still don’t have the green light to teach in virtual worlds. Many argue that video teleconferencing and instant messaging have replaced the need for virtual world interaction. However, neither of these offer the same immersive experience.

Read Write Web also wrote an interesting article regarding the introduction of private Second Life worlds being sold to enterprises that they can host behind their own firewalls for conducting virtual meetings and other collaborative events.

Second Life is introducing a behind the firewall service for enterprise customers, another sign that the very definition of collaboration is changing as more companies seek ways to do their work in virtual environments. The Second Life Enterprise environment provides users an added layer of security and the ability to scale an avatar community. Servers are installed in a company’s data center, providing the 3D experience. The service can support up to 800 concurrent avatars. Second Life is made up of regions. Second Life Enterprise has the capacity for eight regions that also run concurrently.

VIRTUAL PROTESTS ERUPT IN YOVILLE
Rick O’neill wrote in All Facebook concerning the use of virtual society power, when a protest was staged in one of Facebook’s largest virtual worlds; YoVille – against a major change which modifies the way users earn virtual currency.

The position of the users was that less money was being generated per user per hour. Most likely Zynga implemented this new place as a way to stave off inflation but sudden changes that are intended to impact the money supply can result in user backlash. Whatever the rationale behind the protests is, it appears that they are most likely much ado about nothing. So far one site which is collecting signatures for a protest has only 67 signatures.

However, perhaps one of the hottest topics in the virtual-worlds as of late has been Augmented Reality – finally stripping Second Life from it’s dominating position as the hottest virtual topic, so we wanted to highlight the following headlines:

NEW YORK WORLD TRADE CENTRE TOWERS IN AUGMENTED REALITY
Tech Crunch featured an article by Lukas Zinnagl concerning the latest augmented virtual reality feature on the iPhone that enabled the World Trade Centre in New York to be "virtually rebuilt".

The effect was made possible by upgrading Wikitude’s Android App to 3D and it’s newly released iPhone app, out today ( here from iTunes in the US only ). From now on anyone in New York, using an AR enabled mobile phone, has the ability to see a virtual World Trade Center through the phone’s display. Wikitude demo shows how a “Memorial of light” at Ground Zero could be the next-generation of ‘virtual’ memorials. View a full video demonstration of this after the jump .

JOHN MAYER RELEASES AUGMENTED REALITY MUSIC VIDEO
Not every musical artist knows how to fully utilize the technology of today for their benefit. However, John Mayer did just that when he introduced a new chapter in musical and technological history, by becoming the first artist to release an augmented reality music video, as featured in a Jennifer Van Grove article in Mashable.

The music video for “Heartbreak Warfare,” from the upcoming Battle Studies album, is now featured on John Mayer’s website. After the Flash player loads, viewers can activate their webcam and hold up a printed or mobile version of the Battle Studies icon to their webcam, which, if aligned correctly, will prompt the video to begin playing with you as an extra in the background.

It’s clear that social-media has reached a saturation point in our popular culture, but it’s surprising that so many businesses, especially SMEs still find it hard to commit to full-time social-media marketing strategies. The good news is that with each week, more big brands continues adopt new and exciting social-media marketing strategies, which allows us to provide more examples and case studies for those that are still on the fence.

FORD SPENDING 25% OF MARKETING AVENUE ON DIGITAL AND SOCIAL MEDIA
David Kiley wrote a Business Week article describing an effort by world renowned car brand Ford, investing 25% of its marketing avenue on digital and social media, to reach out to potential customers around the world.

Perhaps Ford’s biggest single bet on digital and social media has been the Fiesta Movement, a program that began in 2008, 18 months before the cars will actually arrive in dealerships. Ford gave 100 European Fiestas to people to drive and live with. The results of the blogging, Facebook-ing, YouTub-ing and Tweeting by those people, plus the echoing of those messages by the blogosphere, followers, etc. has been an eye opener. Consider this: The awareness level of Fiesta, a car that is not even in the U.S. yet (though it has been a fixture in Europe for years), is 37% among Generation Y, according to Ford-commissioned surveys. That is about equal to the awareness level of Fusion and Flex, models that have received, especially in the case of Fusion, hundreds of millions of dollars in traditional media spend. “The Fiesta movement has changed the way the whole company views media planning and buying,” Farley said at the conference.

Here we have one of Ford’s online video storytelling, featuring the Ford Mustang muscle car.

Gary Dilts, senior vice president of J.D. Power’s global automotive practice, who is former sales chief at Chrysler, says he would have thought any company “crazy for starting such a marketing program 18 months ahead of showroom launch.” But, Dilts added, “I think the Fiesta campaign, and the other digital video Ford is running is already a case study for any marketer in or out of the auto industry.” Up to now, Monty’s responsibility as Ford’s social media chief has been concentrated on North America. But he is gearing up to take his job globally, coordinating social media practices among Ford’s global operating units, all of which, under CEO Alan Mulally and Farley, are much more answerable to Michigan headquarters than in the past.

COCA-COLA CAMPAIGN SENDS 3 BLOGGERS AROUND WORLD
Forbes featured an article by Emily Fredrix, soft drink giant Coca-Cola is launching a new social media push that will send three bloggers to over 200 countries to uncover what makes people happy in as part of its "Open Happiness" campaign.

The effort, dubbed “Expedition 206,” marks another venture by a big-name brand to delve deep into social media. Such efforts, which include blogging, posting updates on Twitter and adding videos to YouTube, can generate talk by consumers and sales, companies hope.

The around-the-world journey is ambitious, involving stays of just a day or two in each of 206 countries, all where Coca-Cola ( KO – news – people ) is sold. The three people – who will be chosen in an online vote starting Wednesday – will spend the entire year traveling. Coke will pay their travel expenses and pay them a salary. It wouldn’t disclose the cost of the venture.

COCA COLA’S URL SHORTENER
And coke’s efforts do not stop there. Mashable featured an article by Adam Ostrow, describing the new steps taken by soft drink giant Coca-Cola, in creating a URL shortener of their own for the convenience of twittering and flexibility – as this allows them to maintain their own branding, something that we envision more companies will likely do in 2010. Speaking of which, we have our own URL Shortening Service that allows us to brand the framed links – UR1 – where we have some very interesting plans laid out for its future…

URL shorteners are a dime a dozen, and some industry onlookers actually believe they are bad for the Web. But in reality, if you’re sharing links on a service like Twitter, you need one, at least for the moment. So how do you choose? Some services offer detailed analytics (like bit.ly), while others offer schemes that can get you more traffic ( DiggBar and StumbleUpon’s Su.pr for example). Coke moving to its own shortener is a big deal in this little corner of the Internet. While for most people, tinyurl, bit.ly, or any other third-party service will continue to be more than sufficient, big brands and celebs certainly have an opportunity to benefit by launching their own shortener. With the relative ease with which it can be done, expect Coke to be far from the last major name to go this route.

BIG BUSINESSES HIRE TWEETERS
The Times and Democrat highlighted a Heather Lalley, describing a new marketing strategy by big businesses – hiring Tweeters that enable them to expand the business to greater horizons around the world, using various social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

Multinational corporations, such as Ford Motor Co. and Coca-Cola Co., are beginning to use social media to increase positive sentiment, build customer rapport and correct misinformation, says Adam Brown, Coca-Cola’s Atlanta-based director of social media.

“Having the world’s most-recognized brand, we feel like there’s an obligation or a responsibility when people are talking about us, we have a duty to respond,” Brown says.

STARWOOD LAUNCHES TWITTER, FACEBOOK AND IPHONE APPS FOR LOYALTY PROGRAM
Starwood have launched applications for many of the major social media platforms; such as Twitter, Facebook and iPhone, to enhance its Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) loyalty program, as featured in an article by Mary Elizabeth Hurn in DM News.

The social media tools, which can also be downloaded by non-members, include SPG TripShare, a Facebook photo application developed with Buddy Media . Mike Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media, explained that Starwood’s goal is to create loyalty among and retention of current customers, “but getting new members is always great.” The apps can be accessed at www.spg.com/stayconnected. SPG also launched a travel tips “mash-up” using Twitter and Google Maps. SPG Insider enables travelers to Tweet about restaurants, bars and entertainment destinations around the world from their Twitter application of choice. The app then uploads the tip and places it on the map using longitude and latitude coordinates.

TWEETING PLANES
In an extremely interesting article from Mashable by Pete Cashmore, we find that now, even commercial jets are making waves by applying the benefit of Twitter for its passengers.

Admittedly, it’s not the plane itself doing the Tweeting: it’s the airline. Lufthansa has set up a new service named MySkyStatus that automatically posts the current position of your flight to Twitter or Facebook so your friends can follow your travels (and your friends living in those cities can look up! ). .

Typical status updates read “flying over San Francisco Intl, California 94030, USA on United Airlines” or “flying over Grantsville, UT 84029, USA on United Airlines”. It seems the system posts the flight’s position around once per hour, pulling info from a database of flight information.

EARNING FANS VERSUS BUYING EYEBALLS
An interesting discussion about the use of social media and its potential ROI in comparison to the old days and what we can expect from new engaged audiences took place in Marta’s article featured on the Espresso blog:

Instead of relying on traditional advertising to introduce their feminine hygiene products to teenage girls (who represent a massive pool of prospective life-long customers) or wasting money “selling” to them, P&G created BeingGirl.com , an online community where teenage girls can “Learn and share about growing up and puberty while having fun playing girl games and listening to the latest teen music”. Instead of bombarding their target audience with ads or pouring dollars and resources into “campaigns,” P&G is investing in conversations; in context that supports the growing library of content (both user- and professionally-generated) around the issues that their target audience cares about. The challenge in moving from traditional to new marketing is in weaning oneself off of the addiction to “buying eyeballs” instead of “earning fans.

RAKING IN THE MILLIONS USING SOCIAL MARKETING
The Bonafide Marketing Genius Strikes Again; explaining that tweeting to promote a low graded movie was all it took to rake in millions at the movie box office. If this does not prove the value of social-media, is there really anything left to say…?

Remember the Blair Witch Project? Rumored to be “the most profitable movie in US history”, Blair Witch cost $38,000 to make and raked in $48 Million in its first weekend thanks to an expertly orchestrated buzz campaign in the pre-Facebook era (or was it just plain dumb luck? Thoughts?) And so the clever folks at Dreamworks (or whomever they hired to promote the film? Anyone know?) have done turned their artillery on hungry-for-good-horror fans across the social web to promote Paranormal Activity, another low-budget film ($11,000) that screened in just 160 theaters last weekend… and grossed $7 million.

As Facebook continues to grow (with over 300 million users; 50% of which log-in on a daily basis), we’re dedicated to keeping you up-to-date with some of the feature and activities that continue to allow it to grow:

TAG FRIENDS IN STATUS AND POSTS
Tom Occhino featured an article regarding new features allowing you to tag users.

People often update their status to reflect their thoughts and feelings, or to mention things they feel like sharing. Sometimes that includes referencing friends, groups or even events they are attending — for instance, posting “Grabbing lunch with Meredith Chin” or “I’m heading to Starbucks Coffee Company — anyone want some coffee by any chance?”.

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.

LAUNCHING OF NEW GROUPS LAYOUT
In an article from All Facebook, we hear about layouts for groups now being identical to Facebook Pages.

For the longest time there has been a discussion as to which product was better to use for organizing groups of users. There have been pros and cons of both and at this point there is very little remaining to differentiate one from the other. While Facebook has suggested that Pages are for people to organize around companies and individuals, the two products have been meshing together overtime.

FACEBOOK NOW RUNNING OVER 30,000 SERVERS
Having a lot of users would need a lot of servers. As reported by All Facebook FB is now running over 30 thousand servers to power their network.

This information came from a presentation delivered by Jeff Rothschild, Facebook’s VP of Technology, at the Center for Networked Systems . With so much growth over the past two years, the company has been forced to invest heavily in infrastructure. There have been large capital investments in infrastructure at Faceboook over the past couple years. The company previously borrowed $100 million to fund server expansion, and with around 20,000 new servers, it’s clear that a decent portion (if not all) of that loan has now been allocated.

FARMVILLE SURGES PAST 60 MILLION MONTHLY USERS
All Facebook highlighted in an article that Facebook’s largest application Farmville is thriving continuously.

FarmVille has become an icon on the platform as no other application has come close to matching its massive user base. It has almost doubled the second largest application, Causes, in terms of monthly active users and has tripled the Facebook iPhone application in terms of daily active users. The second most popular, non-Facebook developed, application based on daily active users happens to be Café World which has just under 7 million daily active users.

The results have been nothing short of astonishing. If Zynga keeps at this pace, the company could soon come close to matching Facebook’s own revenue, at least until Facebook releases their payment platform and opens the gift shop to developers. Playfish has also proven to be a stellar company which not only creates top tier games but also has a great revenue model.

ONLINE GAME LEGENDARY CIVILIZATION IS COMING TO FACEBOOK
Mashable featured a Stan Schroeder article, showing yet another breakthrough about to take place on Facebook, stating that the online game Civilization will be coming to Facebook soon in the form of Civilization Network.

Originally released back in 1991, Civilization is a turn based strategy game so fun and addictive that players kept playing its various iterations for decades. Sometime in 2010, we’ll also be able to play it on Facebook

Whilst on the subject of Facebook, we also threw together our own application this week, a simple tool that mimics TweetDeck by allowing people to manage their Twitter accounts and search trends all from within Facebook – we’ve called it No Twitter Limits – let us know what you think…

With The Nielsen Company reporting that internet users have increased the time they spent on social networks by a substantial margin in August 2009 from just 6% to 17% and advertising spending on the top social networking and blogging sites more than doubling from $49 million in August 2008 to about $108 million in August 2009; everyone is looking for that miracle formula that will clearly define a Return on Investment that can be expected by adopting social-media, but unfortunately, it is just not that simple. If it were, ad-agencies and PR firms would have figured it out long ago.

While it is tempting to believe that there is a single, simple equation or calculator that can clearly define the Return on Investment that can be offered by social-media, it does not exist, especially when the goals and objectives of adopting social-media can differ for each company and brand – where one looks at lowering turn-over by having more engaged employees and another wants to influence the market that they occupy. Quantifying the Return on Investment by visitors and traffic severely limits the potential of social-media and how it can affect one’s bottom-line.

In order to ascertain any returns on investment, you have to take timelines into consideration – measuring the start and end of a specific campaign in relation to changes in sales and other metrics, and it’s the other metrics that really stand-out with social-media. The ability to engage an audience and targeted demographics in conversation, to measure the results of those conversations and refine products, ideas and other marketing messages. Listening to staff, developing capabilities and encouraging personal growth in those that work with you – this is new territory, and it’s governed by social-media…

LAUNCHING SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIES
We begin with a special article featured in Ross Dawson’s blog, showcasing the launch of the Social Media Strategy Framework that should provide vital basic understanding as to how social media functions in the world we know.

The Framework begins by LEARNING (Use social media yourself, Study relevant case studies, Educate senior executives, Hear from practitioners and Explore the latest trends), from where it then follows two streams of ENGAGEMENT (where we can listen, converse, measure and refine) and STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT (where we can prioritize, establish governance and define), all ultimately leading to the imperative to DEVELOP CAPABILITIES, which will in-turn allow us to return to LEARNING, where we can start the cycle again.

It’s no wonder people are asking for an ROI with facts and figures such as these:

300 MILLION AND ON
In a recent Facebook article by Mark Zuckerberg, social network giant Facebook are registered with 300 million people on a global scale. And it doesn’t stop there, it has been revealed that Facebook is aiming to reach out to EVERYONE! That’s right…every living person on the planet. On how that can be achieved, only time and strategy will tell.

PLANNED 2010 INCREASE IN SOCIAL MEDIA, SEO AND VIRTUAL EVENTS BY MARKETERS
Marketing Charts featured an article about a research by Unisfair, that explains the numerous strategies marketers are prepared to use in order to increase their outreach to social media in 2010.

MACY NOW DIRECT THEIR ADVERTISEMENTS TO SOCIAL-MEDIA PROFILES
As explained in an article by Nick O’Neil in All Facebook, Macy’s is the latest brand to promote their Facebook Page through display advertising campaigns around the web. The strategy appears to be working. Over the past month, the Macy’s Facebook page has grown from 28,000 to 67,000 fans.

Another interesting aspect of the company’s new promotion is that they are giving one meal to Feeding America for every Twitter follower that they obtain. By promoting this campaign through Facebook it seems weird that the company would direct people to become a fan on Facebook before following them on Twitter. Despite the confusing strategy by the company, what’s more important is the apparent shift from promoting the company’s own website to sites that they can directly engage users on.

AMERICAN FOOTBALL TEAM NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS USES FACEBOOK AS PRIMARY ONLINE PRESENCE
When it comes to fan power, sports can make a sure bet of being the first to be given great attention into promoting that influence. And as described in an article in Inside Facebook, New England Patriots teamed up with Buddy Media to give primary source of online content for their fans.

Several of the features in the Fan Zone still link back to the Patriots’ official Web site , but the new Facebook page is intended to be their primary online portal for fans. Both the team and Buddy Media acknowledge that it’s much easier to bring together fans through Facebook, where followers of the team are already congregating. “It’s still very difficult to pull people into other gated communities. We think leveraging against Facebook is a no-brainer. The audience they have and their data speaks for itself,” said Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow, whose company also handles social media for sports-related clients like Reebok and Sports Illustrated.

Which brings us back to the ROI and Bogus Social-Media Experts:

Olivier Blanchard created an interesting article in The Brand Builder concerning the misuse of social media and the many frauds who use it without fully understanding its benefits and consequences.

Here’s a flash of obvious: When most of us don’t know how to do something, we typically know that we don’t know how to do it. Yet this line of logic (and basic sense of professional ethics) seems to escape a disturbingly large group of people who evidently have latched-on to Social Media as an easy meal ticket  – one to be earned, in many cases, on the backs of people and companies who don’t know any better.

This stuff isn’t just going to go away on its own. It’s great to see some folks in the Social Media management community speak out against this kind of BS, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

Below is another example of social media nonsense passing for expertise. I don’t want to make any assumptions about anyone’s motives in this specific case, so to be fair, it’s probable that whomever put this together genuinely thought that the thinking behind the equation and methodology was sound. There is no reason to think that anyone at Digital Royalty was trying to make a quick buck off unsuspecting clients when they developed this. (My guess is that they mean well.) But the fact remains that the people behind this thing don’t understand either Social Media or program measurement well enough to teach either, which is downright mind boggling.

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF ROI (RETURN ON INVESTMENT) FOR SOCIAL MEDIA
Jason Falls wrote an article in Social Media Explorer, regarding the discussion on how ROI for social media.

What Katie evangelized a bit in her session was that the conversation (comments on your content) was the best measure of a level of engagement. Avinash Kaushik says much of the same in his discussions on web analytics. This isn’t an end-around the need for ROI, it’s the answer. Or at least a big part of the answer.

When you ask businesses why they are participating in social media, what do they say? If they say, “to make money,” then they will fail because currency in the social web is found in both relationships and content. If they say, “to grow our business,” they’re just saying, “to make money,” in a nicer way. If they say, “to participate in the conversation,” which is the more appropriate reason to be involved in the social web, then why on earth would they not measure success by the value of the conversations they have? This is why every session on measuring ROI in social media is a waste of time. None of the measurement experts are going to make that point and that point alone because without throwing page views and unique visitors and number of subscribers and sentiment and tone, they have nothing to offer.

THE BONAFIDE MARKETING GENIUS VIEWS ON SOCIAL MEDIA
In these two videos posted on Posterous by the Marketing Genius, we can witness the impact social media has had on humanity and the many sectors of marketing frontiers.

However way we see it, social media has changed the face of communication and information as we know it. We may or may not know what comes next to take its place, but like all things, it evolves…

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you…

For it seems we have gone full-circle and that this very concept is more relevant today than ever before, which was the inspiration for this article and the importance of Social-Media for Brands & Businesses, which to some business owners is a difficult concept to grasp.

In all our searching and researching, we have found one lady (Marta Kagen) who has done an exceptional job of getting straight to the point and summarizing the importance of these new tools and platforms in a presentation she has titled What the F**K is Social Media:

One of the most important factors from this slideshow is that over 93% of social-users expect brands to have a social-media presence.

Facebook has become the obvious leading social-platform, especially with statistics such as:

As of August the 14th, 2009; there are more than 250 Million active users…
…and over 8 Million users become fans of pages each day…

If brands can learn anything from these facts and figures, the most certain fact of all is that the marketing and advertising strategies of brands and businesses not using social-media to its fullest must change their ways if they want to compete with other brands already using such tools, and as such; we have another interesting slideshow that deals directly with this very issue from Paul Isakson:

The key differences between social-media communications and other forms of mass-communication include the facts that social-media can provide spontaneous feedback directly from the consumers and gives them the control to spread the word - not only that, but it can be targeted to niche user-groups and specific demographics.

Perhaps the most powerful insight into social-media can be seen by this simple flow that demonstrates the inter-connected and true underlying power of social-media and how an interesting article, photo or video can be perpetually spread through the viral-marketing mechanisms of social-media:

For those still not getting-it, the only option left is CommonCraft’s plain-English:

01. Social-Media in Plain English:

02. Social-Networking in Plain English:

LEARNING CODEIGNITER FROM SCRATCH
Nettuts Plus featured Jeffrey Way’s article about the focus on the CodeIgniter PHP framework which seems promising for all web developers.

With raw PHP, building a simple image upload utility,performing some validation, saving the file to uploads folder, and automatically create a respective thumbnail, can be somewhat time-consuming. However, with CodeIgniter, it’s simply a matter of referencing the correct library, and passing in some configuration options!

Learning the CodeIgniter - Day 1

Learning the CodeIgniter - Day 2

Learning the CodeIgniter - Day 3

Learning the CodeIgniter - Day 4

CREATING DIFFERENT TOP NAVIGATION
Designing websites that have good navigation designs are always a challenge. And designers often face the question of horizontal or vertical navigation. Connor Zwick explains in Nettuts Plus that sometimes a drop-down system is usually the answer and it’s always a good idea to think out of "normality" to create navigation that stands out.

CREATING A SIMPLE WEB-BASED CHAT APPLICATION
We have all heard about tutorials for web applications, but what about chat applications? Nettuts Plus featured a tutorial by Gabriel Neva teaching us in great detail as to how it is done.

In this tutorial we will be creating a simple web-based chat application with PHP and jQuery. This sort of utility would be perfect for a live support system for your website.

CREATING LITTLE PLANETS USING PHOTOSHOP
Abduzeedo.com featured an article that teaches users how to create a "little planet" effect from flat horizontal pictures by using Photoshop.

40+ HIGH QUALITY ADOBE FIREWORKS TUTORIALS, RESOURCES AND PNG FILES, NOT TO MENTION 30 SELECTED FLASH AND ESSENTIAL ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 TUTORIALS
Sites like Noupe.com offer some cool tutorials and other essentials that will certainly make your day, such as: Fireworks latest tutorials, and Actionscript stuff.

Tutorials on how to use software is one thing, but how about the programming stage? Noupe.com featured 30 hand-picked essential tutorials for Flash and ActionScript 3.0.

30 OF THE BEST PHOTOSHOP WEB LAYOUT DESIGN TUTORIALS
As designers and programmers, we need all the help we can get in designing and programming the best website possible. Dzine Blog made a featured article concerning some of the best Photoshop design tutorials for Web Design.

How to create PDF Files with PHP
Theme Forest.net featured an article showing us how to create PDF files using PHP and a free PHP library called FPDF.

PDF is the de-facto electronic document standard because of its security and integrity. Making a PDF isn’t limited to high-end desktop software though; they can be created quite easily on the fly from your web application. Add in a sprinkle of free code, and you got one great recipe for PDF-ala-mode!

Creating a Polaroid Photo Viewer with CSS3 and jQuery
What if you could do more than just create Polaroid pictures on your site, such as having fun modifying them online? Marcofolio.net came up with a detailed tutorial on how to make this possible.

By combining the CSS3 Box Shadow and Rotate properties, this effect is relatively easy to create. When dragging a Polaroid around, you’ll see the shadow. When it’s placed down, it’s rotated to the left or the right (random).

This example is making use of CSS3 and jQuery, just to show the effect when combining two powerful techniques. The CSS3 is injected by jQuery, keeping the CSS file clean.

Creating a Cute and Furry Vector Monster in Illustrator
Trying to create something cute and fuzzy vector monster but don’t really know how, then Blog Spoon Graphics‘ article about creating such a thing using Illustrator.

Follow these steps in Adobe Illustrator to create your very own super cute fuzzy monster character. We’ll be working with the basic shapes to start, then use a variety of gradients to add depth. We can then finish it off with some detailed fur effects to really lift the design from the screen.

Building a better Tooltip with jQuery’s Awesomeness
With this tutorial, tooltips that appear whenever you hover your cursor over it won’t seem so boring anymore, as Net Tuts Plus demonstrates in this cool jQuery tutorial by Jon Cazier.

One of the great tools we have in our web development goodie-bag are tooltips. A tooltip is a box that appears when you hover your cursor over an element like a hyperlink. It provides supplementary information about that element. For example, a link with little or no text (an icon) may become confusing. Provide an extra sentence or two within a tooltip to explain to your users what will happen if they click on it.

Smart Columns with CSS and jQuery
Soh Tanaka.com featured a simple article concerning how to rectify certain problems on site columns with the help of CSS and jQuery.

One solution that would be able to benefit the situation of excess white space and being restricted to having a fixed number of columns per row is to take the good of both scenarios and mash it into one.

TURN-BY-TURN DIRECTIONS WITH THE GOOGLE MAPS API
Nettuts Plus featured an article by Noah Hendrix portraying a cool detailed tutorial in creating a small widget allowing users to retrieve turn-by-turn directions to a specific location in Google Maps.

I challenge you as developers to continue to find interesting ways to integrate maps in to your applications. Anytime a model is location aware, you should question if your project has a use for visual representation on a map.

RETRIEVING YOUR GMAIL EMAILS USING PHP AND IMAP
In David Walsh’s blog, he features a useful tutorial on how to retrieve emails from Gmail in the shortest possible time without the hassle of connection interruption. In this case, he uses the MooTools FX Accordion plugin to display each email through a cool demo.

MAGENTO TUTORIALS
Inchoo.net highlighted an article of a tutorial about the implementation of multiple ways for Magento’s various features in detail provided by Branko Ajzele.

Basically, what you need to do is to create the directory inside your template directory and place the bestseller.phtml file in it. In my example, I’m using the custom-created directory /inchoo

Using Facelift Image Replacement (FLIR)
Ivan Weiler posted a small tutorial in Inchoo.net to show users how to operate the Facelift Image Replacement script using Magento features.

Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors.

Twitter has come a long way and is expanding like it was an unstoppable force in the virtual world. In its awesome evolution, we’ve compiled some of the coolest articles featuring its various usage on the net.

TWITTER CHANGES THE WORLD OF POKER WITH A "TWEET"
Read Write Web.com featured an article about a poker game by an elderly man who probably used Twitter to his advantage at a $10k stake game in Vegas recently.

As a growing number of poker players are beginning to send out short messages to the world via Twitter, existing poker media is being disrupted and the news sites are scrambling to out-compete with each other in responding to the players’ direct and immediate communication with their fans. Players are reading each others’ Tweets, too, and that has consequences.

 

BRINGING TWITTER TO YOUR SITE WITH TWEETBOARD
TechCrunch.com featured an article that depicted one of Twitter’s global usage as a main conversation spot on the Web, and now it can be applied to any site with Tweetboard forum, as seen to the left…

Once a site adds the Tweetboard code to their site, a site-wide tab appears which allows visitors to have forum discussions by simply logging into Twitter (via OAuth). All the conversations are threaded, and comments appear on Twitter as well, potentially drawing in a larger audience into the specific conversation.

COLLECTION OF RECENT UPDATES ON MASHABLE AND TWEETS FROM YOUR COMMODORE 64
Here we have a small collection of Twitter articles featured in Mashable.com

Space Twitter
Imagine being able to text message from space! That’s exactly what transpired for the first time in this part of history captured by Mashable, when astronaut Mike Massimino became the first human to Twitter from outer-space!

The tweet in question comes courtesy of NASA’s Mike Massimino, a.k.a Astro_Mike , whose status update reads, “From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!

Mashable also complied some inspiring Twitter backgrounds, as sampled below:

Doug Cone (@nullvariable) : Doug, a web designer and consultant, brilliantly integrates his face with his brand and contact information in this spacey theme.

CoolTweets (@cooltweets) : CoolTweets, which collects, well, the coolest tweets on the web, gets an A for its simple and clean layout. Perfect for many brands.

Justine Ezeraik (@ijustine) : The popular new media star has a balanced theme reflecting her brand.

7 Helpful Twitter Background Resources

MyTweetSpace: MyTweetSpace is one of the simplest ways to create a Twitter background with minimal effort.

TwitterBacks: This website provides a set of templates perfect for creating your ideal Twitter background.

TweetStyle: TweetStyle offers free background templates, custom Twitter backgrounds, and a few useful blog posts on the subject of the backdrop.

Free Twitter Designer: This handy little app provides an easy-to-use image editor to help you create a professional-looking theme.

TwitBacks: This is another tool for creating backgrounds.

TwitterGallery: TwitterGallery is a directory of themes based on color and category.

Peekr : If you stumble across a great Twitter background and want to take a quick look at it in its pure form, the Peekr bookmarklet is the way to go.

 

5 Ways to Post Twitter to Facebook
Mashable.com featured an interesting article concerning guidelines as to how to apply our Twitters into Facebook as status updates.

From auto-updating your Facebook status, to more calculated updates, we think these five ways to share Twitter updates with Facebook will satisfy those of us with a predilection for maintaining dual social presences.

1. Auto-Update with a Facebook Application
If you’re looking to automatically post your Twitter updates straight to Facebook, the Twitter application (by Twitter) is your best bet.

2. Use a Twitter Client
Two such applications are TweetDeck, a desktop client (rivaling Seesmic Desktop), and PeopleBrowsr, a multi-purpose web-based application.

3. Via Facebook Connect
Facebook Connect offers site developers and website owners an immediate way to let new users log in to their sites using their Facebook accounts.

4. Just Speak It
Vlingo’s mobile application for Nokia, BlackBerry , and iPhone does speech recognition for a variety of functions, but we love it for status updates.

5. Ping Your Page or Profile
You can use Ping.fm and HootSuite together to disseminate your tweets everywhere. Plus, there’s also a convenient way for admins to link their Facebook Pages with Ping.fm to seamlessly post updates.

Ashton Kutcher Hits 2 Million Followers on Twitter
Mashable.com made a featured article regarding the next milestone of Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter follower base, where he has now reached a huge sum of over 2 million people!

Ashton’s rise to the top of the Twitter food chain has certainly been helped along by the competition with cnnbrk and his appearance to talk all things Twitter on Oprah . His closest competition for Twitter’s #1 comes from @TheEllenShow account, which is still about 300,000 followers behind.

Making Millions via Twitter
Mashable.com came across one of the benefits of Twitter in the business sector as computer giant Dell can testify as being one of the biggest companies using social media. It used its Twitter account @DellOutlet to tweet out major discounts and sales increased in no time!

It has gained quite a following (620,000+ followers) and sold a lot of computers – at the end of last year, they surpassed $1 million in revenue , after about a year and a half’s worth of tweeting. Well throw those numbers out the window, because Twitter’s phenomenal growth and Dell’s social savvy have pushed sales from Dell Outlet to over $2 million , in 1/3 the time needed to pass the first milestone. And @DellOutlet is still on the rapid rise.

Twittering From Your Commodore 64
News.Cnet.com featured an article by Matt Hickey concerning the new usange of Twitter through Commodore 64, and applying its function through an application called Breadbox 64.

Not only does Breadbox 64 allow you to tweet, it also lets you access your friend feed, as well as individual friends’ timelines. And, of course, Van den Brande also has details on the hardware in a post on his site, like the MMC plug-in ethernet adapter, as well as various screenshots. It looks pretty awesome.

TWEETCRAFT - THE WORLD OF WARCRAFT TWITTER CLIENT
Tech Crunch.com featured an article about Twitter’s influence on The World of Warcraft fans. It revolves around an in-game Twitter client for the popular online game that allows the user to send and receive Tweets within a game, especially useful when waiting for raids to start.

TWITTER WHORE - THE ESSENTIAL TWITTERING AND FOLLOW ME
This video is but one of the many videos by @lisa_nova featured in deburca.com that demonstrates what Twitter can be to some people and the driving force of increasing followers - no matter how ridiculous or annoying it may be, attention is everything to some people.

TWITTER USERS CAN NOW "BUY" FOLLOWERS
Telegraph.co.uk wrote an article about the new feature of Twitter where users are now able to literally "buy" new followers through a new company called uSocial.

The company finds potential followers by searching through Twitter to discover areas of common interest to match people more closely. uSocial then send these potential followers a message, alerting them that there is someone on Twitter they might want to follow. The potential follower then decides whether or not to follow that person.

HIGH QUALITY TWITTER ICON AND TWITTER TOOLS FOR DESIGNERS AND DEVELOPERS
Hongkiat.com featured some pretty cool high quality Twitter icons that are so adorable and catchy!

Tools And Tutorials For Designers And Developers
What would Twitter be without properly knowing how it works and using its right tools to make full use of it? Smashing Magazine featured an article for designers and developers to refer to various sites, tools and tutorials to help them "Twitter". Here are some of the many tutorials featured in the article:

1. Twitter Development Links
Twitter Technology Blog
Twitter API Wiki home page
Twitter API Announcements - Google Groups
Twitter Development Talk - Google Groups
Follow Twitter Development via Twitter

2. Introduction to the Twitter API
Twitter API for Dummies
Using the Twitter API
Get Started With the Twitter API
Getting Started with the Twitter API

3. Building Your Website Around Twitter
Build Your Own Social Home!
How to Create an RSS-Enabled Micro-Blog with Twitter
How to Make a Unique Website for Your Twitter Updates
How to Build a Maintainable Website Using CushyCMS and Twitter
Send Message from a PHP Page Using the Twitter API
How to Run Multiple Twitter Feeds on the Same Page
Add Twitter to Your Blog (step by step)
Scripting Twitter with cURL
PHP + Twitter + Google Calendar + SMS
TwitterZoid PHP Script

For those not already following us on Twitter, please do so, or drop a tweet using our Tweetboard…

LANGUAGE RSS ICONS, BUTTON DOWNLOADS, FICTION ICONS, FREE FONTS & MORE FREE STUFF!
Andrea from CSSGlance designed five cool Language-based RSS icons that are meant to identify content in different languages that was once only a thought.

Komodomedia.com featured these finely Refined Social Network Icons:

Mochivation.com featured some downloadable buttons with various themes and designs:

With the option of being able to download free resources online, there are countless elements and theme-based icons to download. Noupe.com featured some cool and free high quality icon sets that are based on famous feature films, Japanese anime and other interesting concepts.

When most would look for free icons and picture resources, those who are into Typography and copy-writing would want to have some free typeface or fonts to facilitate them. Fontex.org features the very best hand-picked free fonts:

While icons and fonts are on the menu for free stuff, templates for websites give a big helping hand for the designer too, as Smashing Magazine featured in an article about free PSD and (X)HTML Templates.

Speaking about templates, ThemeForest.net featured an article that presented a Free template File for the Month of July 2009 called Nice & Clean exclusively from YA Design.

Starting today, each marketplace in the Envato network will be offering one free template for the entire month. This site template is the complete package: five page theme, portfolio slider, AJAX contact form, etc. From now until July 31, it’s 100% free!

Smashing Magazine featured an article concerning Icon sets specially for Web Designers to use:

Naldz Graphics featured some free high quality doodle Photoshop Brush sets:

ONLINE BACKGROUND GENERATORS, DYNAMIC FONT REPLACEMENTS, AND MORE
Numerous elements are put together to make a website look beautiful and classy. And there are many online applications to help designers get the very best for their website designs.

A website’s background may seem to many as an after-thought in design, but it is equally important to help bring out the information of the website. Single Function.com featured an article consisting of a few interesting Online Background Generators.

MODIFYING IMAGES INTO PATTERNS
Studio Ludens created a free pattern creator that literally turns images into unique patterns:

Regarding online assistance, DezinerFolio.com featured some pretty handy text replacement solutions.

Whilst on the topic, let us recommend Font Jazz the simplest of them all…

Smashing Applications wrote an article concerning an interesting open source invoicing application:

And what better way to manage your code anywhere through an online PHP control application?

Referring to correct resources is essential in web design. Therefore Ext Core is the right choice for your Cross-Browser Javascript Library.

Ext Core is a cross-browser JavaScript library for building dynamic web pages. It includes the following features high performance, lightweight, clear, maintainable code, an intuitive, easy to use API with an MIT Open Source license

BUILDING ONLINE GAMES USING SIMPLE METHODS
For the online game junkie, creating a new game is cool. And what better way to do so than with a variety of free game creation applications as featured in CNet News.

CREATING AN ONLINE PROFILE AVATAR WITH MANGA CONCEPT
Ever wanted to know how you would you look as a Manga character or simply need a cool avatar to represent you online through the various social networks that you use?

EXCHANGING REAL-TIME DATA ONLINE WITH A.P.E. (WITHOUT RELOADING PAGES)
Exchanging data in real-time online with thousands of users is easier to do with Ajax Push Engine.

As a complete packaged solution, it is designed to push real-time data in a lightweight, highly scalable and modular way, only using Javascript for the client side. With the use of those Web Standards, APE is fully cross-browser and uses all the latest browser features and provides backward compatibility for older ones.

And that’s why today is such an exciting day, because today marks the launch of KalturaCE…

Kaltura Community Edition (KalturaCE) is a free, self-hosted, community supported version of Kaltura’s Open Source Online Video Platform.

Following installation any site can gain comprehensive video and rich media functionalities including video management, searching, uploading, importing, editing, annotating, remixing and sharing. It is intended to solve all your video-related needs, and allow you to easily create your own rich-media applications – all behind your own firewall and on your own servers.

Guess what we are playing with today…?

During day 2 of Google I/O, they dropped a bombshell called Google WAVE, which will without a doubt revolutionize online communication through an OpenSource browser-based collaborative protocol that will surely replace emails within the next three to five years…

Built by the same engineering team who are responsible for the Google Maps API, and who, for the past couple of years have been secretly developing this new service out of Sydney Australia, the more and more that they explained about this platform and protocol, the more and more one’s jaw finds itself dropping towards the floor.

As Mashable were quick to point-out…

The concept behind Google Wave is to “unify” communication on the web. It’s a hybrid of email, web chat, IM, and project management software. It features the ability to replay conversations because it records the entire sequence of communication, character by character. Because of this, discussions are also live in Google Wave: you will see your friends type character-by-character.

The features don’t stop there, either. Google Wave also supports the ability to drag attachments from your desktop into Google Wave. It loads that file and sends it immediately to anyone in the conversation. It’s also embeddable, so you can embed Google Wave conversations on any blog.

CNET were amongst the first to officially break the news and have since posted the following video, live from the Google I/O conference where they first announced this news to the world:

(be warned that this video is 90 minutes, but well worth it)

The API feature set of WAVE is phenomenal, and some of the demos being showcased by Google include live translations between 40 different languages as you type, where integrated form functionality and Google Maps are just some of the native possibilities encouraged by the platform. What’s most important here is the underlying protocol (not just the product or platform, but the underlying technology itself) is also OpenSource, which is a clear attempt to put an end to the static irrelevance of POP3 email messaging protocols.

Waves can be created and hosted by anyone, not just Google!

This must surely have Microsoft VERY worried - for in many ways, it threatens Microsoft Exchange, which may ultimately become the first truly powerful platform that Microsoft releases as an OpenSource project, but then again, perhaps that’s taking dreams a little too far…

Without exaggeration or flamboyance, this is quite possibly the most interesting and exciting technological (internet-based) breakthrough since the internet itself…

It also helps to explain why there were never any rumours that Google might buy Twitter or why they were not participating with live-communication - because it’s quite clear they have just reinvented what LIVE communication is really all about…

THE MILLION TWEETS OF ASHTON KUTCHER
And what about Oprah’s first tweet …? Or the whole Ashton Kutcher Vs Larry King in the quest for one million twitter followers, who then goes and get one million Facebook fans whilst he is at it…? Am certain that the fact that one of the new online animated shows from his media company is primarily available from within Facebook certainly helped.

The most impressive aspect of this milestone is that Ashton has grown from around 400,000 fans to over 1 million fans in under 3 days! It’s an impressive feat and it shows the viral nature of Facebook public profiles.

We feel it is Facebook that is responsible for this final stage of saturation, which has in many ways even made it possible for Twitter to grow the way it has, something that is somewhat limited here in Asia but nonetheless a force well worth keeping in sight…

With growth at a staggering rate of over 480,000 users a day and demographic shifts of the over 35 year olds doubling a day , it is no surprise that rumours of Microsoft buying Facebook for US$50 Billion have re-surfaced and some have taken notice.

Yahoo!’s stock price shot up  on the news of his comments, but I think the press and the markets are missing the big picture: Microsoft’s is using the “potential Yahoo! deal” as a red herring with investors . Ballmer is using Yahoo! to convince the market that Microsoft needs to buy Facebook to compete with Google, and to set a price floor of 50 billion for the acquisition.

It’s not all rosy at the top though, the recent re-design they forced upon users almost caused riots in France , and their sudden change in their Terms of Service caused quite a up-roar with those that care, forcing Zuckerberg to quickly re-strategize.

The fact that Facebook may eventually sell our personal data is another matter entirely, and the fact that the platform is being used for blackmail and countless other spamming and scamming techniques , it seems only natural that Facebook would fight back with private groups for families .

The Consumerist has noticed a seemingly slight but very important (and disturbing) change in Facebook’s terms of service , regarding user-generated content. In short, all of the content you’ve ever uploaded on Facebook Facebook reviews can be used, modified or even sublicensed by Facebook in every possible way…

With plans for adding the ability to integrate Facebook chat directly into Facebook Applications , and the news that some Facebook developers are earning over US$ 700,000 a month , it’s impossible to miss applications as fun and engaging as the ones that BuddyMedia (a company specifically developing Facebook Applications) are creating. Take the new InTru3D application for Intel :

In talking about 3D worlds for Facebook, how could we not mention Sacred Seasons & Small Worlds?

Turn based multi-player games have been a huge hit on Facebook but there are few that have a real-time multiplayer environment. Sacred Seasons can’t see any reason why there shouldn’t be more multiplayer games, especially massively multiplayer games. So the team behind this virtual game environment has ‘created a Facebook application that combines the Sacred Seasons world with the Facebook community.

Given SmallWorlds’ focus on social media integration, it’s not surprising to see SmallWorlds with a Facebook app. It’s designed to push engagement and media-sharing opportunities, which is a core concept for the SmallWorlds virtual environment to begin with.

The SmallWorlds Facebook app mostly consists of an embedded version of your SmallWorlds creation on your Facebook Profile. From there, you can interact within the SmallWorlds virtual realm without leaving Facebook.

With that said, please come VISIT US ON FACEBOOK and find our if and how we utilised the following:

• 30+ Business Apps for Facebook
• Strategies for Developing Fan Pages
• Optimising Fan Pages
• Facebook Application Development Strategies
• The Facebook Flash ActionScript API

THE BUMPTOP EXPERIENCE IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD
It’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally here! The awesome reinvention of the Desktop in 3D with cool Social Site Integration - The BumpTop has arrived.

Fact is; the desktop has not seen any major innovation in a while. It’s still the same lines of icons on a 2D area. Neither the Mac OS nor Windows goes as far as BumpTop does to completely reinvent and re-imagine the user experience when it comes to the desktop.

Two years ago, a bright engineer, Anand Agarawala, gave a presentation at the TED conference about a new technology he and a team were working on that showed how they believed the desktop should work. Just like how people use a real desk, they believed that the user should be able to interact with desktop items in 3D, pin up photographs, pile related items into stacks, and more.

RISE OF THE VIRTUAL WORLD
Revenues, trends and investments have been poured in by the millions towards the availability of virtual goods and advertising concepts. Companies like Habbo raked in a whopping $74 Million from such methods by using the interactive features to lure teenagers, which makes up more than half of its profit.

Popular mostly outside of the U.S., Habbo Hotel is a mostly free online virtual world which earned $30 million in revenue in 2006. The site is targeted towards a younger demographic ranging from 13 to 18 year olds (90% of users fall in this range). It is free to register and walk around the hotel, yet users can pay extra for more functionality, club membership and furnishings for their hotel room.

Millions have been spent on investments in 63 Virtual Worlds by related companies in 2008, resulting in an astounding $594 Million! Virtual World Management has now officially become the leading trade media company for the virtual world. The Executive Director for Virtual Worlds Managements quoted:

“Nineteen youth-oriented properties received over $70.47 million over the course of the year. The bulk of that was in Q1 and Q3. As more and more youth worlds came to market over the course of the year, spectators worried that the space was overcrowded. Others have seen it as a sector for opportunity, and it appears as if venture capitalists are still at least somewhat interested.”

While that certainly makes a good investment profit sector, discussions on using this brave new media for enterprises have been ongoing. Second Life Grid featured a detailed article on usage of this media.

Today, hundreds of global organizations, including Fortune 500 companies such as IBM and Northrop Grumman, use the Second Life Grid platform to bring distributed teams together in a shared virtual workspace to collaborate, meet, learn, and prototype new offerings.

Speaking about Second Life, Profy featured an article about a $10 Thousand improvement expenditure for Real Life applications.

Today the team is announcing Linden Prize, a contest with the $10,000 in prize money to be paid to a member or a team of Second Life residents for the most innovative in-world project that will improve real lives outside of the virtual world.

With this interesting approach, business meetings in the corporate world are also venturing into virtual conferences to avoid the hassles of real meetings.

As featured in articles for Cnet News, and Read Write Web, Avatars and the Enterprise Virtual Worlds are proving to be more effective than Web Conferencing.

IMPACT AND EVOLUTION OF THE VIRTUAL WORLD
On the subject of the impact and influence that Virtual Worlds have on society, Mattel’s Barbie Girls, which used this media as its marketing source,amassed 11.2 million sign-ups, most of which are of the fairer sex. According to an article in Giga AOM, it’s now about to launch a subscription option for memberships. This incredible strategy can certainly rake in billions within no time! As such, other deals involving Virtual Worlds from the likes of IBM are fast becoming common knowledge. Here we feature some articles from Read Write Web regarding the global impact of Virtual Worlds and Second Life.

There’s been a lot of speculation - and hype - about using virtual worlds for enterprise learning and collaboration. In January, a Forrester report into the use of virtual worlds in the workplace was analyzed, which claimed that “within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today”. However at that point there seemed to be much work to do before virtual world software became user friendly to the enterprise crowd - “you’ve practically got to be a gamer to use most of these tools”, Forrester noted in January.

This year was a rocky one for virtual worlds. They continued to move out of the spotlight as media darlings and found, instead, more taciturn media and struggling communities. Second Life dealt with stagnant numbers and Google decided to pull the plug on Lively .

Now, the shot in the arm for Second Life seems to be as simple as a redesign that emphasizes the benefits of the community to would-be users and encourages them to register to try the service for themselves. Plus, they’ve thrown some Cooliris -like panning interactivity in there for good measure.

 

THE VIRTUAL EVOLUTION COMES TO FACEBOOK
Many social websites will definitely be influenced to use at least a small part of the virtual world media to enhance online response. In an article in All Facebook, we discovered that the web-based virtual world platform of Smallworlds is releasing a Facebook application that is designed to push engagement and media sharing opportunities.

Once you’ve added your SmallWorlds virtual environment on Facebook, you can go on to crate avatars, decorate rooms, play games, watch videos, listen to music and embark on the popular SmallWorlds missions, offering a pretty robust virtual experience that’s akin to the standalone site. There’s also a more social option of making your Facebook profile accessible to others within SmallWorlds, linking the SmallWorlds site with individuals’ Facebook pages in a deeper manner.

 

MOVIE VIRTUAL MAGIC COMING TO LIFE IN REALITY
Hollywood movies have paved the way for creative ideas when it comes to advanced technology. And the virtual world has been used as a concept for countless movies. "Minority Report" was a futuristic sci-fi movie, that involved a revolutionary spatial user interface, that has now been made possible, as seen in this video from Fubiz.

Dubbed g-speak, the mind bending OS combines gestural information, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels, to deliver what the creators call the first major step in a computer interface since 1984. The G-Speak system basically “consists of an off-the-shelf DLP projector and special gloves embedded with reflective beads".

IDEAS FOR THE VIRTUAL WORLD
As society itself begins to shift towards a more interactive future, ideas and preferences are needed more to be fully accustomed to the usage of Virtual World media. Here we have two examples of what this Open Virtual World could be spawned from - Beyond the online boundaries of a Metaverse will be the legends of a counter-culture long forgotten….

The key deliverables of the OpenSource Metaverse Project are a server engine and a client component.

The server engine can be installed, configured and administered by anyone to create their own metaverse, somewhat analogous to an Apache web server for web content. Instead of web pages, a metaverse server will serve up the data and contents of a 3-D virtual world that can be customized by the administrator.

Beyond 2 establishes a foundation for four types of virtual world simulation: Physical, Logical, Cognitive, and Narrative. Beyond specifies an API for the Physical simulation model and provide bases classes and abstractions for the Logical, Cognitive, and Narrative simulations.

 

VARIETIES OF VIRTUAL WORLDS AND OPEN SOURCES
Here we feature some cool open source virtual worlds where custum-made applications can be created by using those sources as a base. Among these are RealExtend, Open Croquet, Qwaq, Project Wonderland and Project Darkstar.

We’ll be on the lookout for even more news and features regarding the Virtual Worlds of the future…

ARCTIC PAPER 2009 AGENDA CREATION
Helene Ryenbakken teamed up with four other creative people and created the 2009 Agenda for Actic Paper - a paper production company with the idea of showcasing some paper qualities while promoting Arctic Paper and Studio3.

The theme of the agenda is computer and internet on paper. You have these expressions from the paper world that the internet and computer have borrowed, and now we borrowed them back – in an internet wrapping.

INGENIUS LANDSCAPE CONCEPTS OF LEVI VON VELUW
Levi van Veluw is a renowned designer with an awesome imagination of realism in his work. Here we take a look at one of his achievements in one blog article of Abduzeedo - "Landscapes"

Levi van Veluw´s photo series are self-portraits, drawn and photographed by himself: a one-man-process. His works constitute elemental transfers; modifying the face as object; combining it with other stylistic elements to create a third visual object of great visual impact.

Using the human body as a design concept is always fun and imaginative. In a blog article from Design You Trust, we discovered an interesting design made for Socks Anatomy depicting the human muscle structure and giving off a unique illusion of realism.

Within the subject of creativity, you should check-out Siggi Eggertsson’s work:

AMAZING PACKAGING DESIGN COLLECTIONS
Packaging is a living example of graphic design in physical reality. Numerous blogs such as Dzine Blog and The Dieline blog have compiled whole galleries of them for all to see. It’s wonderful to see what a little bit of imagination and creativity can accomplish within the world of packaging.

Dzine Blog’s compilation of 45 Really Nice Packaging Designs:

The Dieline compilation created articles featuring some of the world’s most creative packaging from Jeff Krichmar and The Soda Studio

Other cool packaging creators such as Turner Duckworth and The Brand Union were also featured.

BOTTLE PACKAGING DESIGNS AT ITS BEST
When it comes to packaging, alcoholic beverages are often the cream of the crop. As featured in the articles of Abduzeedo, Designer Daily and Touchey, these packaging creations are by some of the world’s greatest designers and are truly unique if not attractive examples of world-class design..

NAME CARDS OF EXCELLENCE
A name card can carry great importance as it projects the introduction to a company. Here are numerous collections of some of the world’s greatest name card designs featured in blogs such as Altered Advice and Abduzeedo.

Among the most unique in these is the AEN business name card. This is probably the best example for the effectiveness of being simple and stylish at the same time!

This is as minimalistic as one can get without crossing the line of insanity.

CONCEPTS THAT ARE LITERALLY OUT OF THE BOX
Art can be defined in various ways. Digital art is one way to tweak any masterpiece into a unique blend of photo manipulation and creativity as featured in one of the articles of Hong Kiat’s design blog.

Out of bounds (OOB) photos are post processed photos where the contents are taken outside the boundaries, presented in creative 3-dimensional perspective. OOB photos can be achieve with some basic photo editing skills. Getting an interesting OOB photo depend largely on the photo angle and individual creativity.

As the digital age evolves, digital concepts in 3D using JavaScript are also being taken to the next level. Kawanet and Nihilogic are but a two blogs that feature articles concerning this new step into Java modifications and online interactivity.

With the introduction of online JavaScript modification, interactive experiments such as CubeScape have been created, where users can build, destroy and view their block-building progress along with the option of being able to save their progress online.