SEM Wired

CSS transition have been finally made available on Firefox (3.7, pre-alpha2). With this feature developers will finally be able to apply movement to CSS elements, quite a good alternative to the more common use of Javascript. Here’s the developers Firefox version if you want to have a try.

// HTML
<ul>
 <li id="long1">Long, gradual transition...</li>
 <li id="fast1">Very fast transition...</li>
 <li id="delay1">Long transition with a 2-second delay...</li>
 <li id="easeout">Using ease-out timing...</li>
 <li id="linear">Using linear timing...</li>
 <li id="cubic1">Using cubic-bezier(0.2, 0.4, 0.7, 0.8)...</li>
</ul>

// CSS
#delay1 {
 position: relative;
 -moz-transition-property: font-size;
 -moz-transition-duration: 4s;
 -moz-transition-delay: 2s;
 font-size: 14px;
}

#delay1:hover {
 -moz-transition-property: font-size;
 -moz-transition-duration: 4s;
 -moz-transition-delay: 2s;
 font-size: 36px;
}

Since Twitter went online, beside the early adopters enthusiasts, I always heard many people debating on its actual usefulness.
Still, it is one of the fastest growing platforms, despite its weaknesses, its extreme vulnerability to spam, or its 150 characters limit…

This very last point has been thoroughly debated: 150 characters are not enough to deliver any message and force people to limit the scope of the message they can send.

A few weeks ago, Johnathan Schwartz, former Sun Microsystem CEO, resigned via his his twitter account.

Within 150 characters he managed to say that we resigned from his position, and also gave an explanation for his resignation with a haiku:

Financial crisis

Stalled to many customers

Ceo no more

This should be the right way people should use twitter, and haikus, because or their ability of defining a whole world within a few lines, just fit perfectly this media. Johnathan just seems to have understood this pretty well.

When resigning from a position we often send plenty of emails out, to co-workers, colleagues or acquaintances: Johnathan just exploited the speed and efficiency of Twitter, with no need to waste that much time on writing emails, also getting positive results for his personal brand, communicating directly with the right audience and successfully delivering the message.

Next time we twit, let’s just make sure it is for something meaningful..!

Companies prefer to spend/waste their money on banners, Adwords and affiliates campaign rather than producing some silly tv clip. It was pretty predictable.

Especially if we realize the current economic downturn. I guess it means that advertiser prefer to spend money where they can get some more valuable feedback information, with a more precise and extensive targeting and value for money.

Sounds right to me…but are we really sure that sticking banners and Google Adwords actually works?

Let’s get some hints from the same Guardian article’s comments:

Record £1.75bn online spend… and you still can’t make a profit with your website.

Indeed. Everybody knows or has been working on a company or project which injected a awaful amount on money on internet advertising without getting any profit back, not even in the long term.

This one it’s even better:

I don’t think they actually wasted all that money but expectations on conversions and sales, yeah, those might be quite high if spending get’s up to those digits. And guess what, while only getting away from the last economic downturn, so they guy here could be pretty right.

Anyway, the following comment might settling this down:

I disagree with many of these posts. Web advertising is much more accountable than TV, radio and print advertising – which is why it works. It doesn’t matter if some of you ignore them. Enough web users see them, and, more importantly, click on them.

That’s pretty much my opinion on the problem. And also the way things actually work out in a real enviroment, if you happen to work in marketing or advertisement.

The perception people has got of online ads it’s quite biased though: those who do not click on ads think they do not work:

…but according to these figures (1.75bn quids is not a few pennies) there’s actually some people who click on those ads and purchase products.

In the end, better a few more ads on a page (and adblock activated) rather than more tv crap (who does watch tv anymore… ).

The original article here.

It’s quite of a surprise but it seems that Google has just added a tiny line of text into his homepage in order to launch a new HTC mobile with Google Android.

Until now, the ad is displayed only in the italian and spanish mirrors:

This is Google.it homepage:

This is Google.es:

The links goes to a Google Landing page which describes the HTC Mobile features. On this page there’s a another link which goes straight to the vendor’s ecommerce page.

Bing has just released its Bing Webmaster toolbox.

It’s basically the Bing version of Google Webmaster tools. According to Microsoft, Bing Webmaster Toolbox development will aim toboost user engagement and traffic to websites and web-based application. The Toolbox is an organized set of tools for the entire Bing community, plus links to Webmaster and Developer community blogs and forums.

Compared to competitors like Google and Yahoo, I guess the community its the real bonus of the toolbox. The collaborative and collective help of users is way more valuable than any webmaster toolbox, especially when it comes to SEO and content optimizacion, considering how recently Bing has been released.