Episode #1: Interview with iToot.net team

Finally the first episode of dotShow, the pilot. An exciting show with an interesting interview with a creative and talented group of entrepreneurs behind iToot.net –the Arabian Blog Network.

Episode outline

• Show introduction
• Interview with iToot.net team
• Next episode teaser

iToot.net interviewed members

• Karim Arafat, Project Manager
• George Akra, Quality Control/Marketer
• Jad Madi, Web Developer
• Wael Atili, Art Director

Get to know the team, what they do, and where they want to go. Advices for startups and new businesses along with an insightful team spirit (fights, disagreements, diversity) that’s a real team spirit that is not hidden to anyone. No faking, no fabricating. I love the way they think.

Running time: 00:42:43
File size: 39.1 MB
Download episode #1: Interview with iToot.net team

Don’t forget to subscribe to the show’s feed, subscribe now.

Enjoy the show and please kindly leave your feedback as a comment, there’s a lot of room for improvement, thanks.

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A desktop love story

Even if my real desktop looked messed up and dirty my screen desktop had to be neat, futuristic and tidy. I just minimized all the open windows to get shocked with my forgotten desktop. Icons are overtaking the whole screen, post-its all around, can’t see my wallpaper anymore.

It starts with, one thing

Windows 95 was damn ugly for me, I remember using Kobe Bryant’s wallpaper to hide the mess. Come Win98 I learnt about MicroAngelo my icons were all cool guys then, with Active desktop I was on top of desktop love, having an updated one page of CNN.com always on top of my desktop. Win2K, oh my it was smoother, I could finally install Litestep and get it work like a charm. My screen looked like a million bucks. WinXP was a little charmer, not after I got me a Mac it was forced to lower hand. Still got me a neat litestep shell to compete and now it’s forgotten.

Post-its are evil

Ever had those people around competing with you over a girl? Girls competing with your girl over you? 3M post-its are of that kind. You start with a little note. Comes a huge to-do list. It then becomes your next article draft, Wassup? Cuz it floats!

Cool guy widgets

Even with 20″ wide screen, you got widgets? They suck. They eat RAM, they eat space, they float in windows. And come gadgets, Google Desktop , c’mon how many desktops?

With ditching my screen desktop I see that my desk-top is actually clean, I mean the one that holds my caffee cup.

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It’s alotta’ fun!

Podcasting, oh man, I didn’t know it could be this much fun. Being a reporter is not bad at all, it’s a lot of fun. May be the first time since it’s a new thing? I’m just lovin’ it, for real. Just finished producing the first episode of the dotShow that I’ll air on July 1st and I had so much fun doing that.

What I did

I freaked out. I backed off and changed my mind. I bought an expensive USB microphone and tried my voice, wasn’t that bad, got some hope. Read a podcasting 101 and my fav podcaster’s article ; hey, I can do that! Made a list of hot topics and people that I wanna’ talk to. Recorded some more of my voice saying whatever. I was ready. Gave it a lot of time. Had more fun. It’s now done! I want more.

What I used

While I had a good set of audio editing software such as Sony Sound Forge 8.0 and Adobe Audition I was shocked by the existense of a proper open source audio editing software: Audacity. I mainly used Audacity for editing this time and for interview recording used Skype and Total Recorder.

What you have to do

Get yourself geared with the show feeds. Get hooked up to dotShow RSS feeds for your podcatchers.

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Worldcup branding, 1990-2006

FIFA world cup is one of the most lucrative events for advertisers and creatives in the world. Every four years this important event boosts the advertising industry dramatically. What’s really done for the world cup creative itself? Let’s take a look at what kind of work is done for the worldcup every four years, starting from Italy 90 to Germany ‘06.

Traditionaly every worldcup has its own Mascot and Logo. Let’s take a look at every worldcup and see what’s in them.

Italia 1990

Simply an expressive logo using the Italian triocolor and the b/w football. Ciao is the name of the Moscat which is a Stick Figure formed by cubes of triocolor and a ball head. Very expressive and simple. It inidcates the level of creativity in simple use of symbols and colors alike–one of my favorites.

USA 1994

Turning the USA flag into a football tournoment logo. Very national to Americans and signifies the Amercanization of the worldcup in 1994. The use of the ball instead of the states stars is yet another concept that conveys, ballin’ everywhere in US. The moscat is a dog called Striker. A very US related animal. Fun, reminds us of Disney characters too. Goofie? Again a very expressive and simple branding; effective!

France 1998

While the American logo signified only America in the logo France shows it all; a world by using the map shape and using the French triocolor for the French part. The nice colored ball which looked so much like the ball used in the games is yet another unity that branding acheived in France 98 worldcup. The mascot, another phenomenon icon, very relevant to everyone who follows football, it’s the French team logo that has the cockerel. One of the most interactive and fun mascots ever; it’s called the Footix

Korea & Japan 2002

This worldcup was a dramatic change in the quad-yearly sequence. It was different in all the senses including branding. Fully techno and futuristic colorizing and symbolizing. One of the best logos ever for worldcup which eventually became the official FIFA worldcup logo. Firt time to witness continious color tones and shining logo for worldcup. The logo mixed many ideas but in a short and compact manner, using the worldcup trophie in the centre of the logo with abstract shapes. Nice typography as well as using the colors of both of the countrys in the title; Red and Blue. The mascot itself is yet another industry/techno symbolizer in which shows the world the face of technology and futuristic visions of two of the top technology countries in the world. Three characters: Ato, Nik and Kaz.

Germany 2006

One of the most disliked worldcup logos ever. Happy people, German flag, worldcup logo, heavy typography, and 2006–all in one logo. While worldcup logos do not need to be noticed given the amount of advertising that is done for them. This is not a simple-to-get logo. Looks good, it’s just too much. The mascot is cool, a new thing, but again what does it have to do with Germans? It’s already been used by Britishs before them. The lion mascot in Germany 2006 is called Goleo that is a mix of Spanish/Italian/Latin and English words Gol and Leo. It’s everything and nothing.

Which one’s your favorite? Have a nice tournoment logo you want to share?

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Microsite: Sony Reader

I can’t get enough of Sony’s microsites. This time, no flash, no music, and no movie; simple, plain, and a readable microsite .

It’s the reader. Pay attention to the landing page, see how readable it is? How easy it is to skim through the information and the well organized text? That’s the theme! It’s about a digital reading gadget, they’ve passed the message right. A reader deserves an extra-readable page. That’s the theme, that’s the message, and it reaches the reader.

While it is simple in style, it’s amazingly intack with the product being showcased: Sony Reader, check it out.

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i18n and true localization Pt1

With localization and internationalization going main stream and being wider supported on systems, apps and websites, there are steeps to overcome and bridges to be built. Problems with filenames and domain name localization direct problems to findability in which search-bots rankings depend on. On the other hand, the date and system wide Unicode support on operating systems with standardized sets of language elements and support for localized numbering are the stoppers for truly localized websites and web-services.

Localized domain names & filenames; servers vs. browsers

Recall when you last registered a domain name, remember the allowed characters? It’s a range of A-Z, 1-9, and “-“. Any characters of another language? Easter languages? Farsi, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, or Japanese? Not even accented European characters right?

While domain names are nothing but alphanumeric representation of IP addresses we’re still stock with only one way of doing it; in English. A number of labs have tried to implement the non-English domain systems which are in beta or in testing levels such as U.A.E’s Etisalat’s attempt to bring it to the developers, it is still going slow. You ask why?

While web-servers do not accept other than the allowed and standardized characters for domain linkage there is the client side problem; the browser side. Web browsers tend to support Unicode or any non-English characters to be typed in the address-bar but do they post it the right way? When the request is made to a server using a non-English set of characters such as an Arabic name or a Farsi name is it really taken the way it is? No, it’s URL-encoded, meaning it is converted to its hexadecimal characters equivalents and then sent over to the server.

Which browser supports Unicode to be typed in the address-bar or which one do really send and take a non-English domain name or file name? IE6 does not! FF does, Mozilla obviously does too Opera and Safari do not. That said about domain names, the file names hang out there waiting for an explanation. File name are another level of difficulty for true i18n. Some servers do not take other than Latin characters for file names while some others do. Windows servers tend to take it well in most cases but Linux server have a little lower compatibility with file names character encoding, it causes hiccups; question marks characters instead; all that cause download/upload problems for non-English named files.

The locale problem

Previously I’ve written about the usability for non-English websites and applications and how it is confusing to have an app in a language but still have your numbers and date formats in another format and language. That’s what happens online on non-English websites and particularly Arabic and Farsi languages. Unless you have your OS settings set to a particular locale you’re not going to get the right date and numbers/currencies formatting.

On the web, web-pages and web-apps, it is a confusing and weird to see different sets of characters adding that the addresses and domain names are still not united with the language of the site, so we witness an Arabic language web page yet showing dates, numbers, currencies, and numbered lists showing English numbers (note: you don’t get that if you’ve set your locale to an Arabic region) but if you don’t then you’re to face the variety of languages in one page, which is not true localization.

The problem resides again on two sides; the server-side and the client-side. The server has to know how to speak a certain language and how to output its locale data. Speaking of Apache, you could have the locale installed on its OS but then the tables are different on different OSes, come client-side is the same thing; it’s the OS again. Now the third element that plays the big role is the middle-ware which in our case is the web-page. How does it handle the communication and the handshake of the languages spoken by both server-OS and client-OS?

There are a number of techniques to do that which forces the Server to talk a certain language and output the proper locale along with the Client to accept and talk the same language. I’ll elaborate more on this on my next post regarding how to solve this issue and output the right locale of numbers, dates, and currency formatting. So I’ll leave it out now.

Findability and SEO issues

Search engines rely heavily on the page-title, domain name, file-name, and the copy in order to optimize an index to serve searching algorithms. Simply put, if you have a blog which resides on an English domain name and your file-names (even if they are all renamed URLs) are all in English but your page title and copy are in Arabic, you’re actually going to be loosing the search engine optimized results. To be précised, in the practical world it should not effect you a lot since all the rest of the websites that are served in Arabic would have the same problem so again it does not hurt at the moment but it could enhance the way searches are made. Or do search engines try it in a different way for non-English websites? Do tell if you know.

Related readings:
* SEO
* i18n and l10n
* Unicode
* Arabic
* Farsi

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Testing podcast

3ood.mp3

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dotShow! Podcasting, July First

Podcasting! Yea! Finally went final on this decision. I’m going to start a little bi-weekly(or weekly) podcast on subjects that matter the most to me and as I can observe, the rest of professional web developers, marketers, and digital artists in the Middle East. The podcast title, obviously the dotShow.

Starters, I’m good to go with the list of topics like the one below:
* Web Dev in general, CSS, JS, and XHTML
* Online media, branding, and advertising
* Dubai & ME web/new media market gossip
* ME web news and happenings
* Designers/Developer interviews

Well, as you could see the scope of the list is scattered but all related, that’s going to be confusing for the audience so I’ll have to take a good number of them or divide the showtime or weektime for each version. I don’t think I’m going to start with a heavy work in the begining but sure it will be after the first month untill everything settle down and I get the hang of it

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