ImageTweak preliminary support for video

Zoom and rotation work already

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The rationale for this is – intuitively – that the pages visited by the majority of  past visitors probably are the pages that the majority of future visitors could be interested in. It actually may sound more complicated than it really is: what it means is that when a user requests a certain page, the module extracts from the server log which other pages have been visited the most by past visitors of the current page.

Starting from this simple idea I’ve been adding a bunch of refinements, such as filtering out pages already linked by the current page, that try to improve the quality of the suggestions. As a bonus, I implemented a (rather basic) visualization of the scores as computed by the module. This can be a quite handy way to spot immediately if there are pages that are not performing really well. This is an early screenshot of this visualization (the column on the left contains the name of all the pages on the site and the column on the right contains the corresponding number of page views) that already highlights some problems, namely that the two top visited pages are poorly linked to the rest of the site (the corresponding row is completely red almost everywhere).

Obviously this approach is far from perfect, but I think is an interesting concept nonetheless. I already have some ideas about how to further improve this method – for example by taking into account not only the current page that the user is viewing but rather all pages the user has visited up to now. Also, since the website has (for now) very low traffic, scalability is not (yet) a problem but obviously for this to be really useful it should be made as scalable as possible.

During the last months I had to do with context-aware applications, social networks, user experience and this kind of stuff for my master thesis in Media engineering. I still haven’t choose any project to work on but I came out with some considerations on the actual social networks.

At the moment Facebook seems to be the best network for number of users, features and API. Google Friend has much less users but gives useful informations about the friends geolocation. Is this so revolutionary? Is this all we could ever have?

For sure I’m able to find my old schoolmates, to keep in contact with some friends living far away, to write my short notes on Twitter and to recall the face of the girl I met last night. But I think we could have much more!

Imagine a service that could manage the relations between people. A service that let the user control his personal data and choose who have the permit to see these data. I’m not thinking about an ethical Facebook but an innovative platform that could be used as the base layer to build applications like Facebook, a pervasive game, a restaurant app that consider my friends preferences to give better suggestions, a tool for keeping my contact list always updated and much more.

Imagine a social network open, free and distributed.

I’d like to know what you think about this idea.

A completely different logo for the upcoming Espressiva.
Made in Illustrator using this tutorial for the design of the patterns.

The default header of the SimpleX theme we’re using was kinda flat, so I decided to rework it. There it is…

The first test for the gears that will be given away at Rock the Pine 2009. Everything has been done in PS.

Cool, ain’t it?