jib jab

Since it is the holidays, I thought I would take the time and talk about one of my favorite websites www.jibjab.com. If you have never been to the site it is worth the trip. Among other things you can create personalized holiday greeting e-cards for friends and family. You can put you face in the card and it will sing a song and be animated for the viewer. My favorite thing to do on jibjab is to watch the year end review that they create every year where they do a spoof on the major events that occurred over that year, you can go on and see the previous years worth, totally worth it. You can create a whole bunch of crazy personalized e-cards, mugs, mouse pads and countless other items all from the comfort of your own living room. Be careful you my just find yourself addicted.

Chicken on a raft

And just when you think that websites can't get and more pointless we find www.chickenonaraft.com, Yes that is right Chicken on a raft. The site comes with a catchy song that is titled, you guessed it, Chicken on a raft. There is also a counter on the page that tells you just how many seconds of your life you just wasted on the site, I wasted 79 seconds that I will never get back, lucky me. On the plus side the dancing cartoon chicken is cute and fun to watch while he is dancing on the raft but they forgot the water, you really cant have a raft without water. If you feel the need to waste some of your life even if just for a minute you may want to spent it with a chicken on a raft.

The Internet Rainbow

In my pursuit to find the most useless websites that exist, I came upon a real winner of a website http://www.the-internet-rainbow.co.nr/. That right the internet rainbow website. This is a website where when you visit you get your very own special color that they will add to the internet rainbow for you and your color will help make the rainbow brighter, I got the color lime green, that is sure to brighten up the rainbow. There are currently 487,223 people who have added a little bit of color to the rainbow of the internet. There is nothing to do once you get to the website, it is just a bad website in general. No hierarchy created, most of the page in empty except for the maroon colored background and a little bit of poorly placed type and of course your special color. You know you want to go to the site and see what your color is to add to the internet rainbow.

Where's George

Ever wonder where you money has been? Now you can find out thanks to www.wheresgeorge.com the website that allows you to track the dollar bills that have the where's george red stamp on them. The next time you get a dollar bill with the where's george stamp on it visit this site and you may find that the dollar could have been over seas, half way around the world or sitting in a jar for years, you never know until you track. The website overall has a comfortable feeling using the color green was smart considering it is also the color of money. There are currently 181,370,914 bills being tracked and if you want you can start a bill of your very own, just enter the number from the bill on the website and send it off into the world, and you too can see just how are your money really can go.

Dear Future Me....

Welcome to www.futureme.org that right a website that allows you to sent yourself an e-mail in the future. You can send your virtual "letter" all the way into the future year 2060, 50 years into the future. What would you tell yourself? did you turn out to be the person you thought you would be? would you even want to remember who you are right now? currently 1,265,189 have written e-mails to themselves at some point in the future. If you want to know what other people have written there are over 200 letters that are public and available to be read. Feel free to write an e-mail to the future you and just when you thought there nothing good left to do on the internet.

String Drawing

While exploring the wonder that is the internet I came across a website http://www.zefrank.com/memory/stringspin/spin_1.html and on this website you can draw with string, yes that's right string. You hold down the mouse button and a 3D string starts to draw you can move it and control the "string" and after you let go you are left with a 3D drawing that keeps spinning, virtual art, the wave of the future. The site itself is not the appealing to look at as you can see above, it is boring with little color and little else to do besides draw with string. Another brilliant usage of the internet.

Whale Music Really?

I was looking for odd websites to write a blog about and guess what I found, that right a site that plays whale sounds combined with violin music. The website is called http://www.optuswhalesong.com.au/ and all the site does is play the one song of whale music over and over. The site is not a bad design over all, there is hierarchy created through the images since there is nothing to do on the site that makes it easy to navigate all you have to do is listen. Websites really don't get much more strange than this one. So if you have a free minute or are just really curious how they managed to combine violin music and whale sounds from the wild feel free to stop by the site.

Entertainment on demand

We have the ability to get free t.v. and movies on demand all the time. The internet offers t.v., movies, video games, live board games that you can play against people from around the world on games.com and countless forms of entertainment on demand. Of all of the websites that stream video hulu.com is one of the best. They have figured out a way to have the video hold a buffering stream longer then just about any other site, it hold well on high speed connections as well as dial-up. Of course like any thing there is always a down side, in this case it happens to be that they don't offer every show that is on t.v. due to copyrights they are restricted in what they are allowed to show and some of the shows have time delays such as having to wait a week before be able to see the episode. Games.com has thousand of games to choose from and even more players if you can't seem to find any real competition with the people around you, the downside here is that you are at the mercy of the people you are playing against and some of them really like to take their time. We have moved into an age where entertainment is on demand and free and connecting us to people around the world.

The Internet as we know it

Our lives seems to revolve around the internet. We log-on through our phones and computers multiple times a day. I can't help but think were we would be if the internet had never been invented. We survived as a society for more than 2000 years without it and now if we go just a few days without it we feel as if something is missing from our lives. I have to stop and ask myself is the internet really worth the price we pay to have it. The current generation grows up too fast, it seems our world is moving faster and faster and we are more disconnected from people than we have ever been, even with facebook around. Maybe the previous generations have figured out something that we have failed to learn from them, how to connect with people face to face and how to live in the actual moment not the virtual one.

Denmark

While browsing the internet I looked up foreign websites and found the official website for the country of Denmark. The site is clean, well organized and easy to navigate. You can study abroad in Denmark and they have a section on working and living there as well as visiting their country. You can learn about their culture and lifestyles or if you have to conduct business there is a section for that. The website also is set up for 4 different languages. The website is http://www.denmark.dk/en/ If you ever wanted to know anything about Denmark this is the site to be at.

The future of t.v.

The internet has changed the way we live and they way we see our world. For most people television is an everyday part of life. The internet has changed the way we watch t.v. I don't have to wait for commericals anymore to be over I can just fast forward and return to the show. With websites such as netflix.com where you can stream movies and television live from the internet to a game console and play it on your t.v. anytime you want. With websites such as hulu.com you can watch t.v. and movies on demand for free, anytime. This change has made it harder for advertisers to make us sit through 4-6 minutes of commericals several times during a show. I guess they are just going to have to get more creative.

Since the beginning of the internet some people were thinking. The need to keep track of how websites change over time is going to be a necessary function to know where we will be going. The websites that keep changing and adapting with the times are not only the ones that survive be also the ones that thrive. thanks to the website waybackmachine.com we can we just how far websites have come since 1996, the year they started tracking web pages. they have corrected and preserved millions of web pages as they existed for the current time. They catalog the biggest websites such as amazon.com and google.com as well as temporary websites such as those designed for 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. They log websites for business that tried and failed and everything in between. You can think of this website and a modern day time capsule for web pages, how do you want future generations to see us?

I was wondering by creating the internet how many businesses have suffered by not adapting quickly. I was looking at a newspaper and realized how long it had been since I actually picked up a physical newspaper with the invention of the internet and news so easy to access on the go. You can just log onto numerous websites or you can just have news updates send directly to your phone all for free. Since the need to actually read the newspaper has diminished the businesses that actually produce the printed material have to come up with a new way to make money. By selling advertising space online companies have been able to fill in the gap of lost revenue.

Most Popular Websites

A question came into my mind today, what are the most popular websites? It is no surprise that google is # 1, yahoo.com and youtube take spots 2 & 3. Live.com and facebook round out the top 5 websites. What makes them the most popular websites it traffic. The popularity is based on how many people visit the website. It is not based on sales or how productive or well organized the site is it is solely basic on hits to the site. Each of these sites recieve millions of visitors a day. Many people visit the same sites multiple times a day, how many times a day do you check your facebook account? and each time you visit the site gets another hit making their website popularity rise. Just in case you wanted to know msn.com, wikipedia.com, blogger.com, myspace.com and yahoo.co.jp rank # 6-10 in that order for most popular websites.

source website http://mostpopularwebsites.net/

The world's most boring website

I was looking for something to write my first blog on and it is amazing what you can find through google. It never ceases to amaze me what people will spend their time doing. I was looking for boring websites that people had put together and the first hit on google was "the world's most boring website" so of course I just had to visit it. They are right they are really boring, no color, white background with gray type very little variance in type size and color creating no hierarchy. If you want though you can buy a T-shirt or other world's most boring website merchandise. Would I say that they are the most boring website ever created, not really sure I have visited every website that has ever been created. I guess it just goes to show you, you really can make a living from anything even the world's most boring website.

Websites

In order to find a good website for this assignment, I started by typing random words in as websites. Some were good most were bad. For one of the websites I typed www.wood.com just to see what I would come up with, it was not what I expected. The site is an international investment and banking website and their full name is Wood &Company. I started to take a closer look at the site and realized that it is a simple clean site. Few links easy to find at the top give only the necessary information and when you leave the home page is when you get a link to return to the home page. The site is asymmetrical, a large globe, several pictures with links, overlapping type and and easy log on/subscribe section break up the page creating the asymmetrical balance. The page is not loaded down with unnecessary pictures, links, or type and because of this there is white space. There are several places just on the home page that are viewed as white space, the area around the globe and the breaks around the login box are some examples. The site has strong contrast from the various shades of green from dark the light and offset with white. The usage of reverse type also helps to create contrast within the website.

Overall I would say that this is a good website based on the four rules.