Category: www

Focus have published this great diagram, which I believe can help some of us understand what HTML5 is all about, where the web is heading and how ready our tools (browsers) are to cope with the new technology. The diagram covers Canvas and Video elements, as well as Geolocation and Offline web applications. On top of that, there is a table of modern browsers and their compatibility with HTML5 features.

Click here to see the full diagram.

Google released a Chrome 5 beta build this week that brings a significant boost to the browser's JavaScript performance. If only it did support Java (Mac)...

1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old

2. 96% of them have joined a social network

3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.

4. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web

5. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media

6. Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)...

7. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year

8. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.

9. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.

10. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and Indi

11. Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China

12. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction

13. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%

14. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females

15. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama. Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.

16. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?

17. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts

18. Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets

19. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook...

20. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube

21. While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube

22. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica... 78% of these articles are non-English

23. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs

24. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth

25. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour

26. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content

27. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands

28. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.

29. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them

30. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations

31. Only 14% trust advertisements

32. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI

33. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do

34. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas

35. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation

36. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily

37. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us

38. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media

39. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate

40. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second

41. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years

42. Bonus: comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network

And here is the video:

Source: BBC

A Downing Street petition is calling for the UK government to drop Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and move to a more modern browser.

The petition says that IE6 has security flaws and uses outdated technology, creating a burden for developers.

The petition comes as the Department of Health advised the NHS to move away from the old browser.

Other government departments - and many firms - still use the software, which was first released in 2001.

"Most creative and software development companies are forced by government department clients to build websites for IE6 when most of the industry has moved on," the petition reads.

"Upgrading would be a massive task for government, but if the public is encouraged to lead the way and the government follows, that would create the momentum needed."

The petition, set up by Dan Frydman of web firm Inigo, currently has just 44 signatures.

A campaign in the US, called ie6nomore, is supported by more than 70 web firms and claims the software is "holding the web back".

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24 ways is the advent calendar for web geeks. Each day throughout December they publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring you all a little Christmas cheer.

AND THEY ARE BACK with a new article "Working With RGBA Colour" already published today.

Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set:

1. No plug-ins required – it can only use features supported by the client
2. Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market
3. Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases
4. Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text

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