Welcome to Techlife, where the crossroads of Technology and Life intersect. The syndicated print column is published exclusively from this blog, a form of Digital Ethnography. Comments may appear in print.
We are always exploring technology for our clients and one of the biggest areas of growth with our client base has been blogging. Thanks in part to Techlife’s success, clients often ask us to help them start a “successful” blog, at which we laugh quite a bit — both the knowing laugh and the naive laugh and finally the “let’s talk” laugh. Outside tools are very useful in blogging and Tehcnorati which creates a Technorati Profile is no exception.
Clueless yet? Drop us an email and let’s talk. helpmeblog [at] dkworldwide [dot] com
As our readers know, Techlife believes in work hard, play hard. We often cover fun toys. Clearly our readers agree that games are important in their life too. Some of the most popular past topics here are based on Stick Arena and Line Rider. Other staff favorites are games like Chick Chick Boom and Guess the Google.
Today we bring you Bauns (translated to English it means Bounce). This game has a short learning curve and is quickly addictive (consider yourself warned.) You control a catapult-like launcher that can send a ball airborne. As it lands it erases any balls of the same color that are touching the color it lands on. Simple. Of course the designer Ferry Halim, threw a few tricks our way. There is a special timer ball and a color morphing ball, hit either of these two and special things start to happen to your board.
Our current high score is 16,622, which I suspect some of readers to quickly surpass. Post your high scores below. Do you like this game let us know?
Overall: Bauns is well crafted, with an easy to understand control system, just a mouse. I would have liked to see more special blocks that would cause havoc to the gameboard.
Call for submissions: Got a game that you love? Let us know and we will consider reviewing it. Tell us about it at: reviewmygame [at] dkworldwide [dot] com.
Father’s Day is sneaking up fast. We all know that means gifts, but dad also taught us many things. This year pay back your dad and teach him how easy it is to switch to Firefox, a web browser with a really great feature. Enter the online Techlife contest, “Who’s your Daddy?” and introduce your Dad, a wealth of of family knowledge, to Geni, an online family tree. Finally, your dad would really appreciate learning about the changing world us, in an easy to watch video with some amazing facts. Happy Father’s Day.
(part of the syndicated print column’s writing process exposed to online readers)
Something as simple as adding audio to your website can revitalize your employees and your customers, to get them talking and thinking about the company. Sit down with the marketing and technology vision of a proven “venture strategist”. Dave Kaufman wants to meet your business and organization, all it takes is an invitation. Did you know that Dave worked with China and customers who do business there? Ask him about it . Contact Dave, it’s easy: techlife [at] dkworldwide [dot] com.
Is your local community evangelizing your business? You need to light a fire under them. Consider me the lighter fluid to ignite the discussion, a fresh perspective for your company? Can technology really save money? Want your company’s website to shimmer with new links and a new look too? Will technology improve my day to day? We can help. Hit me via email at: techlife [ at ] dkworldwide [dot] com. Did we overwhelm you with to many links this month? No problem, visit the TechLife weblog where all you need to do is point and click.
(part of the syndicated print column’s writing process exposed to online readers)
I am a big fan and had been busy lately. I was looking forward to spending a break from reality in a quick multi-player browser game. Stick Arena is of course the best. I spent maybe all of 2 minutes in each arena, and constantly was dealing with hackers popping in and ruining my time. Eventually I just left, which is sad. We all want the next generation of gaming to get here soon from XGen, but not at the risk of losing gamers with the current product.
Skye and his team make their money from serving me ads, and I can tell you that I am less likely to sit and watch ads and play Stick Arena with the recent increase in hacking. It used to be tolerable, you report the hacker, leave the arena and move on to the next arena. Now the hackers seem to outnumber the non-hackers. Inmates running the asylum? I don’t think so. What do you think? Join the discussion.
I opened the mail the other day and my friends at Geni sent me some swag. Hat’s, shirts, tanks. And sharing with my readers is what we are all about here at Techlife. Geni has added a ton of new features since we last wrote about them:
All of them let you connect with your family more easily. Do you like one? Is there one that will make you now try the site? Let us know in the comments.
Now the contest….In honor of Father’s Day, enter the “Who’s your daddy?” Un-official Geni Contest. All we want to know is your Dad’s first name and would he use Geni? If you win and want to share with your dad well that’s your call? He might look funny in the pink fitted women’s shirt though! Click here to enter, remember first name and would he use Geni, that’s it. We’ll draw a winner on June 17th, 2007, Father’s Day.
Call for contests: Do you have swag or product that would look great in a reader’s life? Techlife is always looking for unique products and services as prizes for our contests, all it takes is an email. prizes [at] dkworldwide [dot] com Of course, we create the contest how we see fit, but you trust your products right?
My readers are really the best. A long time print and online reader sent along the link to the site “Open for Design” which was built by MSN, a Microsoft company. If this site were a person it would wear sunglasses at night, as part of the uber-cool group. It clearly took the idea of being “open for design” and tried to improve on it.
I think it failed in many ways, but because they are subtle failures it could almost be seen as successful.When you arrive, you don’t really know much about why you are there. The pretty flash interface has some real nice lines, and a design that pulls you in. With five simple large boxes that are buttons you roll your mouse around and explore.
But then it gets confusing. You quickly notice an “Issuse No. 7: Light”. Curious? I was. Why would a website have an “issue number”. Looking further you see the various boxes had titles and subjects. A “Light” goes on! This must be some sort of e-zine (electronic magazine.)
Ok, I know this is really not “my logo” it’s Joost’s logo. But this specific image I created for Techlife’s Joost articles. I spent the time to create it and thanks to the way Joost’s site displays their logo in a flash animation it is pretty cool that both Nick Denton and I captured this logo at exactly the same moment. After being alerted by readers about the logo capture similiarity, I originally claimed that Nick had swiped the image. But after watching the multiple minute looping flash animation, I realize we both just have a great sense of timing. Valleywag used it for their Joost finance post.
I have written about and participated in both Nick Douglas projects and Nick Denton projects as a good standing member of the community, hopefully they will consider this moving ahead. As we certainly have a matching eye and keen sense of timing, I would be happy to have Gawker hire me, as I do visual design for many of my clients. I could certainly create much more interesting imagery, if they so desire.
Thanks to a heads up from a few of you eagle eye readers on this.
GeekBrief.tv just stunned me with this revelation, that George Lucas is making a new Star Wars movies, but this time for television! A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away Lucas made some lameEwok movies. So bad they were, made for television only, with no theatricial release and apparently he wants to try that again. (I wonder if they will use this classic “worst trailer ever” styling.)
I did actually like the styling and story of the animated Clone Wars, but can live-action movies really work? As I write this I think with all the CGI characters these days it just might work. I remain on the fence, but of course will watch.
I am stunned Lucas would go this route. Are you? Comment here.
Original Geekbrief Source is /film - read the comments
Many experienced internet users have made the switch to Firefox, a web browser built by the Mozilla open source group. I know a lot Techlife readers are less likely to just switch from Internet Explorer or AOL’s web browser, because “Why switch, this is so easy and all my bookmarks/favorites are in Internet Explorer or AOL?” Today, I am asking to you think about switching.
While many sites tout the new features, extensions or the browsing speed of Firefox compared to other browsers, I have found the most compelling feature to date. Restore a previous session. This simple feature understands that brownouts, blackouts, kids, dogs, cats, husbands, wives and even your foot is often the culprit in your computer restarting. Here’s the genius part…
You are surfing doing a big research project on your trip to London
As you are dreaming about being knighted by the queen, your foot slips off the desk and hits the power button — restarting your computer
Quick before you say “Oh, no!” which browser were you using?
In Internet Explorer, I hope you took note of the sites you had open because all is lost otherwise
In Firefox, the restore the previous session feature when you reboot allows you with a single push of the button get back ALL the pages you had open previously.
Even writing this column, I have 25 windows open at a time. Restoring them has never been easier and even makes me wish other times in life had a restore button. So yes…it has happened to me that the PC crashed or I shut down or restarted and this little feature makes it so much less scary than before. Give Firefox a try and let me know what your favorite feature or extension is in the comments.
Techlife’s recent article about Digital Ethnography based on the video “Web 2.0 - The Machine is Us/ing Us” by Professor Michael Wesch has really blossomed garnering over 1.2 million views since our last article in February 2007, to total 2.2 million views and counting. The topic of information and the processing of it, certainly has become of interest to the readers of this column.
Recently the above video was sent to me by a loyal reader (Thanks Allan!) . Titled, “Did You Know; Shift Happens - Globalization; Information Age” this video by educator Karl Fisch, has had about 500,000 views so far. What do you think of it? I am really interested in reading your opinions of this video in comparison to the Web 2.0 video. I have reposted that video after the break. I am also interested in any personal stories with your feelings about globalization and the information waterfall we all encounter daily. Comment here. (more…)