We’re also proud to announce the launch of a new range of Web Marketing Seminars. Supporting this, we have a range of Web Marketing Training, Social Media Training, SEO Training and bespoke web advice, and much more.

If you need impartial web marketing advice, or guidance on your Digital Strategy, visit Berea at http://www.berea.eu

This version of the site is I believe (officially) version 6, and although there are at least 200 other Photoshop designs that were muscling for the title, the one you now have in front of you was ultimately the winner (though a wealth of great PS content now exists, too)! The site has intentionally been designed to be minimal, and to require as little input as possible, hopefully meaning it will receive more frequent blog input in the future on my wide range of Internet interests.

You’ll find more of my articles on Berea’s website at http://www.berea.eu/info/blog/ if you’d find regular updates of interest. Otherwise, I will be using this outlet for more general information surrounding topics that interest me.

There are a number of amends required to this theme that I’ll be rolling out through-out the year as time and priorities allow, though if you do discover a bug or rendering issue please do leave a comment.

If you’re unlucky enough to have landed on this site with IE6, sorry – you’ll never be able to read any of this! IE6 is blocked on this site. Whilst I do believe in open web standards, 10 years has been long enough to politely ask people to upgrade, so this site now actively blocks people who still intentionally use it. If this bothers you, my bad! All of our other sites had many hours spent on them solely for IE6 and IE7 display perfection, this one won’t.

VE, based at http://velang.aaronyates.co.uk, is a platform facilitating the global aggregation of symbol/word associations to generate, through enforced social principles and a demographic voting system, a globally accepted ideographic database. The aim of this project is to enable a new medium for cross-cultural communications, to assist in communication and collaboration where participants may not share a native language. Prototyping this fully automated, unbiased and neutral territory for the grass-roots growth of an experimental ideographic medium has allowed me to significantly expand and fine-tune my programming skill set.

As mentioned in previous posts, ColoursEngine (CE @ http://www.coloursengine.com) has been refactored back in to the final output of VE. VE contains a public message board and personal messaging functionality that, when these items are viewed, are constantly parsed and checked against the ideographic database and ColoursEngine for up to the second latest information for emotion overlays and symbol replacement.

For example, when a user wishes to express emotion in a message, they preceed the word they wish to overlay with the specific emotion in square brackets Take for example the string: “[sadness] Me”, firstly, the PHP Class assigned to this task searches the string for emotions and returns the appropriate colour to overlay over the word or symbol. When the word is processed, the Class searches the Ideographic database for the word. If it is found, the symbol is returned with its appropriate colour overlayed, else the colour is overlayed directly onto the word itself.

If you’re interested inparticipating in the VE Alpha that shall generate data to be analysed as part of my projects findings, please drop me an email for the Alpha Invote Code.

The WWW, at its conception by Sir Time Berners-Lee, was designed to enable individuals to share data globally, with its initial purpose being the sharing of mathematical data and other such academic research where the global language of scientists, their Lingua franca, was math. As the WWW began to percolate into the consumer market, becoming affordable to residents of many different nations, segregation began to occur. Web sites are written in every language, with users of the Web able to differentiate the majority of language specific sites by their TLD’s (Top Level Domains, e.g. .co.uk = UK, .co.jp = Japan). Presumably, much information available on the Web has been written many time in many languages to allow for users to utilize the Internet in the easiest way for them, in their own mother tounge.

The EU’s Esperanto, constructed by expert linguists to enable greater communication between citizens of its nation states, appears to fail because their is no great use for it. English is taught in all European schools and is the de-facto language of International business, and knowledge of yet another, being enforced by a state entity, does not take into account how languages grow naturally (with necessity being the mother of all invention).

From these facts and findings, I propose to design and build a Wiki-esq system (a platform where individuals can contribute, edit, modify endlessly) with the aim of allowing the international society itself to construct a language. This language, envisioned to be symbol based, will offer International communication anf collaboration on a scale never before seen, with the benefits of such a system hopefully already obvious to the reader.

Initial design stages indicate that this project will be composed of two distinct platforms that shall both contribute to the final deliverable. These platforms shall be the Colours Engine and the Verse Engine. Of these two systems, Colours Engine (CE) forms the smallest component of the overall project, with Verse Engine (VE) formulating approximately 80-90% of the overall project that shall be presented.

Colours Engine will facilitate users of the internet to contribute their associations of colours with emotions, building a rich (and most importantly) constantly up to date record of these perceptions. Contributors will be able to browse the data by contirbutors countries, by the emotion dictionary, and by colour.

Verse Engine shall be an open platform built with consideration given to the key findings of my dissertation, namely: tendency of heirarchical group formation, benefits of enforced social capital (karma) systems, and observations from Clay Shirky on how and why Wiki platforms work through disproportionate contribution.

More information will be posted regarding the respective areas of this project as and when time (and suitable material) becomes available. Any questions should be directed to: airs@me.com

This dissertation seeks to understand whether advancement in speed of communication via personal computers is affecting the social interaction of individuals in developed nations, and the argument for the research is based upon the theory that any change in the speed of communication between individuals alters the way we communicate, and therefore alters how we interact. This paper considers the areas relevant to the question, consisting of; how speed of communication has advanced, how affordability of technologies has allowed for saturation of society, an investigation into the popularity of social interaction through these tools, and lastly, the most prominent areas of social study affected by these cumulative increases. The studies undertaken reveal that advancements in our ability to communicate has significantly altered our social tendencies through enforcement of social concepts in the WWW realm, and that proliferation of services operating in this manner is accepted by individuals. Immediate findings note that whilst our concepts of identity and group formation have been taken with us online, the advancements in speed on communication has rendered the traditional equivalents obsolete, indicating that, where these tools may have at one stage been an aide to interaction, they are rapidly becoming the primary means of social interaction. A significant shift that is aided by the accessibility and affordability of technologies within developed nations, where saturation of the youngest affected socio-technically aware demographic incites an inertia for peer-pressure driving greater uptake. The exploration of these particular fields has generated interesting unforeseen conclusions, providing a generous wealth of questions for future investigations.

This system will aid my major project by supplying the latest/freshest data for overlaying on sentences where emotion needs to be strongly typed. For instance, the sentence, ‘I am going to the shop’, when printed, gives no hint to the emotional state of the author. Based on current data in ColoursEngine, if this text were written in red, it would imply a warning, if written in Yellow, it would imply the author was happy to be doing such a task.

Further usage of the collected data will become visible when my Major Project is released in the first half of May 2009.

This system was custom built on PHP, MySQL, XHTML and CSS using TextMate/MAMP on a Mac. Further information is available upon request.

The idea: To augment a web application with the functionality to write it’s own journal. The journal would be written daily by the application under the guise of ‘The life and time of an autonomous entity’. The primary idea behind this project is to form a parody of the similarities between the constant cycle of routines undertaken by a person and those done by a web application.

Utilizing the language we have describing our associations with others, a web application is an independent entity existing within its own ecosystem of other networked individuals that forms the world wide web. This project will represent, with a human veneer, a work showing how we interact with an application on a human level through it maintaining a diary of it’s life.

Live journal: http://www.aaronyates.co.uk/labs/narrative/
Live web application who ‘owns’ the journal: http://www.aaronyates.co.uk/labs/ColoursEngine/

Hopefully this component part will stand on its own two feet as an independent entity whilst consuming enough data to effectively feed in to my final project. Stay tuned for the release announcement.

Screen shots below (taken in Blender) show the current model, likely to change after further meetings with Shaun tomorrow.

A 3D render of the current model is shown above.

Above, the model being created and manipulated in Blender

The final screenshot shows further Blender activity.

This model shall be completed by the end of the week (13/03/2009) and Rapid Prototyped next week in a durable plastic material for the final presentation.

This could provide a great platform/interface for pushing micro-blogging systems, as I don’t think I could sit here for too long typing.