Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Via this CyberNet News post I got to Zoomii.com.  There is a saying about all new being well forgotten old.  And that’s exactly what Zoomii.com is about.

There is something magical about walking through a bookshop - touching books, flipping pages.  Especially, when you don’t know exactly what are you looking for.  Amazon has sort of taken it away.  You get in, get your stuff, maybe grab something that is recommended nearby, and leave.   Zoomii.com combines the best of both worlds.  You can still get stuff from Amazon shop at Amazon prices, but instead of visiting a rather cumbersome interface of their site, you can browse through a familiar bookshelf area.

The combination of a good design with intuitive interface makes it almost a “Wow!” site fo me.  It took me exactly three seconds to figure out how to use it.  And even if I wasn’t tech savvy, there is a little friendly popup that appears when entering the site, which tells briefly how to navigate around.  The control panel on the left is small, and has only the things that I care about - navigation, category selector, and information about my cart.  Brilliant.

The only thing that I wish Zoomii.com had that it doesn’t have (or at least I couldn’t find) is the option of choosing which Amazon shop to buy from.  If I could buy directly from Amazon.co.uk, it would be a 10 of 10 web site.  Hope, they will add this option later.

Sites like this should be taught to web designers and developers.  This is how the web should be - clean, simple, efficient, and intuitive.

Scobleizer believes in longer videos:

Advertisers also will pay a lot higher rates for those long-form ads.

Why?

Because someone who’ll watch a 30-minute video is HIGHLY ENGAGED. They are far more likely to become a customer than someone who just watches a two-minute entertaining video.

I think that “video” is too broad for this topic.  To consider only educational and entertainment videos, I see a huge difference.  I don’t believe that entertainment videos will become longer.   Entertainment is a sort of thing that doesn’t have to go either deep or long.  Thus it doesn’t need large chunks of time.  Educational video is a totally other story.  While there are many “howto” type of videos, many topics require more than 5 minutes to explain.  Take Google Tech Talks for example.  They are pretty popular and each one takes about an hour.

There is also this factor of production costs.  It’s much harder to create 60 minutes of high quality (and I don’t mean pixels or bytes) video material, than 10 minutes.  Or 5.  Filmmakers know that.  And the audience knows that.   While less and less filmmakers will risk it, and more and more of those who do risk it will produce crapy long videos, the audience will learn the benefit of a short video and will be more inclined into choosing shorter formats.

However, since I am not at all involved in any video production or distrubtion, I might be totally wrong on this.  Judging purely from my own experience.  And my own experience mostly comes from YouTube and Google Video.

I’ve recently enjoyed the “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” movie.  However there was one particular scene which sticks out.  It was the moment when Indiana yet again avoided his certain death, this time by hiding in the kitchen fridge.  He was supposed to die of a nuclear explosion, but the fridge saved his hat.

Impossible?  Of course.  But there was something more to this.  Something that bothered me for the last few days.  Something that I could not find the words to express.

It turns out, I am not the only one.  There was a hot discussion at IMDB forums, and at other places that have crowds of movie watchers and reviews.  And apparently, a new term was born - “nuke the fridge“.

This is also a nice example to illustrate how the world changes with the Internet.  Lots and lots of people talk about lots and lots of things.  24×7.  Non-stop.  That generates lots of ideas, sub-cultures, products, and services.  And, in tern, lots and lots of money for people who dig it.  Nice.

Here is something useful I learned today.  Until recently I’ve been using Firefox 3 beta 5.  It was working fine for me after I found all replacements and upgrades for all the extensions that I need.  One of those extensions was CompactMenu (not giving a link for now).  This extension replaces the whole main menu (File, Edit, View, etc) with a single icon.  You can place this icon anywhere on your toolbars and when you click it, you’ll get a drop down with your main menu items.  Huge space saver.

Yesterday, I upgraded my Firefox to the latest and greatest stable version 3.  The update came as an official package from Fedora updates.  However, once I fired up the new Firefox, it notified me that CompactMenu was not compatible with this version and so it was disabled.  Can you guess where I ended up?

Exactly.  No menu and no way to get to the menu.  I tried uninstalling the extension, intalling another version of it, unintalling it again, cleaning up options in about:config, customizing the toolbars, and so on and so forth.  Nothing worked.  And so I Googled.

It turns out that Firefox has something called a “safe mode“.  All you need to do to get to it is start firefox with “–safe-mode” parameter.  Once it comes up, you’ll see the window as on the screenshot above.  One of the optios is “Reset toolbars and controls“.  It works wonders.  I got all the toolbars to their default state, and with View -> Toolbars -> Customize I could easily get them to the state I want.

How well are you familiar with YouTube celebrities - Numa Numa, the Star Wars kid, leave Britney alone, Coke and Mentos, etc?  If you missed any, of if you want to refresh your memory, here are they all on one page.  The first clip is a music video “Pork and Beans” by Weezer band.  After that, each and every one of them in a separate, original video.  Loads of fun!