Bored? Take a look at these websites…

This is my 10th and last blog post, so I made an overview of a few of my favorite websites. Have a look at them when you are bored ;)

Flavors.me

Here you can create your own homepage in minutes. It can be seen as your online business card, because you can insert your feeds from the content you have on the internet. Flavers.me brings all your social media platforms together. You can also Customize the layout, background, fonts and colors in real-time, which makes your site personal. Just give it a try!

Brandtags.net

The content on this site is created by the visitors, because every visitor has to tag five brands before entering. This is done by showing a picture of a brand and you have to give a description of one word of phrase. All these words are combined by brand in a word cloud. This is a very inspirational site! 

Learn Something Every Day

Is a very funny site to visit when you are bored, and you will learn a weird fact every day!

Yearbook Yourself

This is your chance to end up in a yearbook with photos from the past decades. Upload your photo, choose the right size and see your transformations from 1950 to 2000. 

Influence of Happy & Sad emotions

Do emotions influence online buying behavior and the rating of a web shop? Buying behavior could be defined as the intention and the need to buy certain products. Because people always use emotions while making decisions we examined if positive emotions made the participants more generous and more satisfied with the web shop.

Two groups were exposed with a positive or negative emotion after watching a movie. The fragment for the emotion 'happy', was from the comedy  "When Harry met Sally" and the "sad" fragment came from the film "The Champ". Afterwards, the different groups had to visit a web shop offering running shoes, and were asked how much they would spend on these shoes. Besides the indication of the price for the product, respondents gave their opinion about the web shop.

Subjects with a negative sad emotion were willing to pay almost the same amount as subjects with a positive, happy emotion. In contrast, subjects with a negative emotion found the prize given by the web shop more acceptable than subjects with a positive emotion. The respondents with a positive emotion appreciated the website more than respondents with a negative emotion. However, respondents who were exposed with a negative emotion found the product information more clear than the other respondents.

These findings indicate that a sad emotion has a positive effect on how people experience the price, which is remarkable while a positive emotion resulted in a more positive appreciation of the webpage.

Are you a visual, auditory or kinesthetic learner?

 Everyone thinks and learns different. It can be that you are learning by words, feelings or images. Most of the time one of those learning styles will dominate. Are you a visual, auditory or kinesthetic learner?

Visual

 When a person is dominate in using images to learn, they see images when they are learning or retrieving information. This is done by making an image in their mind. Also, body language is very important for these persons, because it makes the information stronger. Sixty percent of the population uses visualization to dominate their thought process.

are neat and orderly speak quickly are good long-range planners and organizers are observant of environmental detail are appearance-oriented in both dress and presentation are good spellers and can actually see the words in their minds remember what was seen, rather than heard memorize by visual association

usually are not distracted by noise may forget verbal instructions unless they're written down are strong, fast readers would rather read than be read to need an overall view and purpose and are cautious until mentally clear about an issue or project doodle during phone conversations and meetings forget to relay verbal messages to others often know what to say but can't think of the right words

Auditory

Some people are dominating in hearing. These people focus on the words that someone speaks or is good with verbal instructions. It is estimated that about twenty percent of the population is auditory. Some auditory point their ears to you when you are talking, because that is the best way they will receive the information.

learn by listening, and remember what was discussed rather than seen speak in rhythmic patterns talk to themselves while working are easily distracted by noise move their lips and pronounce the words as they read enjoy reading aloud and listening

can repeat back and mimic tone pitch and timbre find writing difficult, but are better at telling are frequently eloquent speakers are talkative, love discussion, and go into lengthy descriptions have problems with projects that involve visualization can spell better out loud than in writing

Kinesthetic

Is a learning style in which learning takes place by the student actually carrying out a physical activity, rather than listening to a lecture or merely watching a demonstration. By observing the person's eyes, you will notice that they will often look down and to one side or the other. These eye movements are an indication of thinking in a kinesthetic or feeling mode.

learn by manipulating and doing want to act things out speak slowly touch people to get their attention stand close when talking to someone are physically oriented and move a lot, gesture a lot memorize by walking and seeing Reference

can't sit still for long periods of time can't remember geography unless they've actually been there use action words like plot-oriented books - they reflect action with body movement as they read may have messy handwriting like involved games

Viral Marketing

Currently, the passive advertisements on television, radio or in magazines are not enough to influence the target group. More and more companies use viral marketing as a tool to spread their message.

Viral marketing is spreading video clips, games, ebooks, software, images or text messages, mainly, through the internet. The social media platforms have a major role in the spreading of these virals.

However, a viral is only a viral if the audience finds it so amazing, funny or unusual that they want to share it with the rest of their friends.

And this fact, that the target group spreads the message themselves, is the power of viral marketing.

In traditional marketing, a large group of people get reached with a message, often, many of these people do not belong to the target group. Which means that it takes a while before a message has reached the right people? However, viral marketing approaches the target group you want to reach. Because the 'infected' people send a link to friends, who are likely to be persons within the desired target group.

There are a lot of examples from virals, but I will show you only three of them…

Evolution - Dove 
A very famous viral is the one for the "Campaign for Real Beauty" from Dove. This viral promotes their self-esteem fund by focusing on the natural beauty of women.

This viral has led to many parodies, of which this is one.

Boeing 737 lands on water 

This is a Dutch viral, which has been viewed very often.

Stanislav - Russian mafia on Hyves 

This is a campaign by the Dutch government to inform on web activity and privacy. This viral is running on the Dutch social network Hyves and had 1 million views in the first 24 hours.

 

Interview with Full Professor Emiel Krahmer

For the course Business Information Technology, we interviewed Full Professor Emiel Krahmer. He currently works on the Vici project, which studies human speech production, combining computational modeling and empirical studies. This project, which is a cooperation between Tilburg University and NWO (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek), started in 2008 and will continue until 2013. Emiel Krahmer will explain more about the project in this video.

More information about the Vici project is visible on the project website and more information about Full Professor Emiel Kramer can be found here.

What the font?

In typography, there are two different types of fonts; serif and sans serif. The difference between these two categories is the way the end of the strokes are designed. 

Serif   – Sans Serif

The first word, serif, has details on the ends of some of the strokes, these are the serifs. The sans serif typeface has no details at the end of the strokes. This is especially visible at the bottom of the r, i and f.

Generally, the serif font is used for printed works such as newspapers and books, because they are often considered easier to read in long passages. On websites, the sans serif font is usually used, because it is believed that these are easier to read on a computer screen. This is visible on, for example, Facebook and Twitter.



Here you can see these websites use the sans serif typeface.

There are a lot of fonts developed and downloadable. This are two sites were they have serif, sans serif and other various font categories:
Dafont.com
1001fonts.com

When you have seen a font somewhere and want to know the name of the font, WhatTheFont is a helpful site to use. Just upload a picture or specify a URL and WhatTheFont will match similar fonts for you.

Color tools

Colors are widely used and they have different meanings all over the world. The human eye can distinguish roughly 10 million different colors. However, 16 million is an estimate of how many different colors a 24 bit RGB computer monitor can simulate. I found some useful color related tools which are very helpful when you have to create designs and mood boards or just for fun.

The first one is Kuler. This website, from Adobe, makes is possible to generate and browse inspiring color themes. You can do that by picking your own colors from the spectrum and by uploading a photo where Kuler generates the colors from.

 

A similar one is Colorsuckr , where you can also get color schemes from a picture, but this one is a lot more extended. For example, here you can see colorschemes where the colors from you picture are related to.

 When you have to create a mood board with specific colors Multicolr Search Lab is a good tool to use. You can select some colors and it will search through the pictures in Flickr that contain the colors.  

The last one is 0to255, a tool which helps you to find lighter and darker colors based on any color. This works by filling in a color-code and the tool generates the different shades form that color. When you found the one you need the color-code is copied easily. 

Just take a look, and try some of them!

Banner-blindness

There are a lot of sites with banners, but through the phenomenon banner-blindness it sometimes happens that people ignore the banners. An explanation is the fact that people who search for specific information on a site, only focus on the parts of the page where they would assume the relevant information could be.

Jakob Nielsen studied banner-blindness in 2007 with the help of eye tracking on hundreds of pages. The results showed that users did not fixate on the ads. The following pictures show the eye tracking results for three different stages; quick scanning, partial reading and thorough reading.

 As you can see, the places where most people focused on are red and grey is for the areas where users did not look. The ads, which have a green line, were ignored on all three stages.

What are your experiences with banners, do you see them or not?

Are you addicted to Twitter?

Today, I read about internet addiction and the fact that this is becoming a huge problem. Apparently, if one has this disease, there is a strong urge to use the internet. Symptoms can be spending more time online, denying internet use or even avoiding offline contact. A really extreme example is from a man in Japan who stabbed five of his relatives, because his father decided to cancel their internet connection.

I have noticed myself that the first thing I do when I turn on my computer is check my twitter account. That is no symptom of addiction, but the fact that I log in on Twitter up to 10 or 15 times a day just to check and read my timeline is more concerning… Actually, it sounds more like a waste of time.

Do you recognize this and do you want to know more about your twitter use, have a look at Xefer.com. This site creates a graph of the time and day you placed your tweets.

For instance, the following picture shows the graph of @Dutchcowgirls.

In my opinion it is a little bit concerning when you have a dot on every day of the week and at every hour ;)

Another site is Tweetstats.com, it is similar to the previous one, but slightly more extensive. Here you can view your monthly Twitter use, people you reply to and it creates a tag cloud of your tweets.  

There are several ways to see what you talked about and what you have been doing all the time, maybe you will find out your Twitter use is concerning, but it could also be that it is just not such a waste of time after all.

Social What?

A lot of people think social networks are the same as social media, but… that is not true. Social media can be described as online platforms where users create and share content with other people. This makes social media a dynamic and up-to-date tool.

Social media is divided in a few specified areas, and just one of them are the social networks, which are for instance Hyves, Facebook and LinkedIn.

The image below shows all the categories (publish, share, discuss, social networks, microblog, livestream, livecast, virtual worlds, social games and massive multiplayer online) within the social media landscape and some examples.

In my opinion, one of the most important strengths of social media is the fact that content can be spread very quickly. This is the so called “snowball effect”. It all starts with just one person who spreads some content. When his connections like it, they will be the ones who spread it further and further. There is a theory, the six degrees of separation, which claims that everyone on our planet is connected through a network with six levels. So, this should mean that one needs only six social media connections to spread content and reach the whole world with it.

Thus, a lot can be done with social media, but don’t forget it is more than just the social networks…