There isn’t a day goes by on the web without someone being a victim of  (or indeed complaining) about Spam. It affects our daily working lives, and has been estimated to costs $20 billion each year in lost productivity. (PDF Report here).  However, regardless of how much Anti-spam software products we create to help solve the problem, the real reason it still exists in 2009 comes down to one thing.

The vast majority of web users are dumb.

Like it or not, the average web user doesn’t recognise spam when they see it. Nor do they know how they should react to it (i.e. ignore or delete it).  Spam wins the race based on both the numbers game and human ignorance.  Send a message to 50 million, and you’ll get a big enough response to make it profitable. i.e. that small percentage of curious folk who decide to react, click the link – or give their bank details to a Nigerian scammer.

It’s not even something that is exclusive to email spam. Bloggers are guilty as well.  Even tech bloggers and major corporations get caught, both through lazyness and poor education on what is and isn’t spam. It continues to amazes me how many tech savvy authors of blogs, and commercial websites fail to spot comment and pingback spam when it occurs.  Or indeed settle for comments which have keywords littered throughout (SEO spam) – or worse still URL’s embedded in the comment body. Regardless of whether no-follow is in operation or not; you are still providing incentive for a spammer to continue when you approve a spam comment. At worst, they gain additional traffic, at best – some SEO professionals claim that no follow still passes value, and can indeed help them rank in the engines.

Its not only you…

Hell – even the Microsoft Team are lazy when it comes to cleaning up site comments. Just today I noticed a plethora of Spammy comments on the Bing Webmaster Blog, that have neither relevance or add to the original article, and some are clearly chasing traffic to money sites.  If the Microsoft Webmaster Team can’t keep a clean spam free site – then what chance do us mere mortals have?

Granted, there are tools out there such as Akismet for WordPress that catches 99% of blog spam, but when that 1% sneaks through, you have to be extra vigilant and realise that alot of the time, a comment or pingback may be placed with an ulterior motive.  Even paranoids have enemies.  I’ve written a tongue in cheek guide before on comment guidelines before which reiterates some of the basic guidelines on what spam looks like.

Newbie bloggers who are just starting out are some of the worst offenders. With them not receiving much traffic or reward for their efforts (yet), sometimes a spam pingback or keyword stuffed comment becomes validation of their hard work – and “better than nothing” thinking comes into effect.

Remove the Spam- Not likely

Spam is not going to go away any time soon. When the doors are closed on one type of spam, or people become savvy to the technique, another method is used – you’ll never be able to solve the problem chasing it with software which all too often is about 6 months behind the techniques. The resilience and creativity of the purportrater sees to that.

Its time we woke up and realised that education is the single best tool we have in the fight against spam. So start educating your clients, showing your friends, pointing it out when you see, and maybe someday, someday, the good guys will win.

Spam is not the problem users are the problem. is a post from: Cloud Mixer - Mixing New Media Ideas

So, I awoke to a flurry of activity yesterday (delicious home page, numerous Tweets in my stream) around one of smashing magazine’s alarmist post entitled “The death of the blog post“. The article showcased a few graphic designers from around the web, who had designed completely custom, graphic heavy designs for each post. They are magazine like in style, and leave the visitor with the wow factor.  I’d seen this myself, and I’m a big fan of Gregory Wood and Dustin Curtis work.

As per usual the design community jumped up and down with excitement with war crys such as:

“Holy shit! We can bring our magazines to the web without changing them! Its ok! Yay!”
“The web is dead. Long live print! Yay!”

Well, maybe in not so many words, but I did see some tweets along those lines. Comments on the article itself contained some other gems..

“Personally, I think it’s a great idea to design for web in the print style”.

What ever happened to designing for the web? Designing for readability? Designing for usability? Tell you what, just for the hell of it lets give the article to a blind user, and see how they get on.

If those issues weren’t important enough for you, how about some of the below:

Speed.

Today’s web demands information in real-time. If you consider yourself any kind of blogger, you’ll realise that you need to be able to get something out there, under people’s noses faster than ever. Whilst you are trundling away creating something beautiful in photoshop, someone else is getting the traffic. It’s only ever going to work with the folks that put out a couple of pieces of content a year.

Yeah. Good luck with getting traffic on that.

Even if the post is visually stunning, you are still going to need to post regularly to build an audience that returns. 9 times out of 10, I’ll outrank this type of content.

Change.

This format is only going to work with timeless information that doesn’t change much. I can’t imagine those guys have “re-edited” their work much, or added anything new to it. In other words it stagnates, or is timeless, depending on what way you look at it.

Consistency.

Where do I click? Where do I get the next post? I love to see a few eye study tests on where exactly people are drawn towards. Does it matter? Well maybe not if you are entertaining with your design skills. Personally I’d rather have my content frequently read, than become the dancing bear of the web.

I get the concept, and appreciate that it’s not going to work for everyone. But yet again the lines between design and self gratifying visual pleasure get blurred; stop designing for the sake of design. A good designer will enhance the reader’s experience, without the visuals becoming more important than the content. Period.

So there. I’ve said it.  The blog post isn’t dead – nor will it be anytime soon.

The blog post isn’t dead. is a post from: Cloud Mixer - Mixing New Media Ideas

I read another narcisitic article from the newspaper industry locally (offline) talking about the new media age, and debating back and forth on whether independant online publishers (i.e. bloggers) will be good or bad for media as a whole. Yada yada ya.

The argument suggested that their superiority lies in the fact that online sources of information are often misleading at best, whereas traditional printed media check their sources more thoroughly – giving them much more trust. Its not the first time I’ve heard the war cry, and frankly its starting to get a bit old.

A resonating theme within the article described how there is still a need and requirement for high quality authoritive journalism, (as opposed to the so-called talentless hacks like you and me) and by definition how this will somehow manage to keep it afloat. Bullshit.

Finding Trustworthy Sources

Whilst I understand where this is coming from, and the importance of trustworthy sources in journalism, essentially a large section the web has survived without accurate or decent sources for some time. Not because we no longer need them – but because we crowdsource it.

Firstly – News Bloggers on the whole, don’t get headache’s over their  sources before posting -  its much more important to publish something quickly before other sites get a hold of it, and get it picked up by Google before they do.  Case in point, Techcrunch’s embargo stance. Google’s algorithm as it stands at the minute, rewards breaking news, and isn’t likely to change anytime soon. Speed is of the essence with information today – everyone wants it faster, and in bite sized chunks – and ultimately newspapers in their traditional format simply can’t provide for that need. The faster you can publish a breaking story, the more traffic you receive. Simple.

I don’t need to elaborate on the growth of Twitter, but forcing us to communicate in such easily digestable chunks of information which facilitates sharing has made it the best place on the web for hearing about a story first, and indeed in finding reliable sources of information.

As has already been proved with sites like Wikipedia – opening information sources up for community edits leads to greater depth of content, and greater accuracy. For example – studies have shown that Wikipedia is every bit as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britania.  Blogs present the perfect platform for collaborative journalism and are here to stay.

Secondly, the open nature of the web allows readers to either correct details of the story, or tear it to shreds elsewhere on the web. Live by the sword; Die by the sword mentality means the web polices itself.

Google controls Brand

According to astudy from iProspect, three-quarters of internet users use search engines. However, 16 percent of internet users only look at the first few search results, while 32 percent will read through to the bottom of the first page.

Only 23 percent of searchers go beyond the second page, and the numbers drop for every page thereafter.  Basically, the laws of the web state that we trust, what Google trusts. Google’s entire algorithm is based around the concept of counting “votes” i.e. links to authoritive pages which people trust. So well; we’ve kinda got that angle of the argument covered as well. Brand recognition no-longer matters. Brands in the age of the social web are dead, and that includes the media moguls – the crowd decides who to trust, and where to get information.

So where am I going with this?

Traditional media is much slower – and for good reason. A mistake with a source stays in print forever; or at best, stays a week in the public domain until an apology can be printed. The luxury of the web is that we can print first; edit second. As more details about a story breaks, the holes in the report get filled in. Commentors add value to the existing article, taking the story from a solo effort to a global crowdsourced scenario.

Now I appreciate quality journalism as much as the next guy, but crying that the web of free, and how Google stole your pocket money – isn’t doing you any favours.

The game is up. Its already over. Stop bitching about the change and adapt. We aren’t going anywhere.

Bloggers are here to stay. Get over it. is a post from: Cloud Mixer - Mixing New Media Ideas

Catering for Accessibility is something which should be at the forefront of every web developers and designers mind. It is all of our responsibility to ensure the experience we provide on the web is as trouble free for ALL users. Prior to going live, take a look at some of these tools and run your site through them to see how it performs from an accessibility perspective.

Colour Tools

Colourblind Web Page test

URL: http://colorfilter.wickline.org/

This invaluable tool allows you to run your live site through a series of colour blind “filters” – highlighting any problematic areas before you are too far into your production cycle. It covers the three types of colourblindness – protanopia, dueteranopia and tritanopia.

Colourblind Image test

URL: http://www.etre.com/tools/colourblindsimulator/

Similar in nature to the tool above, this allows you to upload a JPEG rather than specifying a web page URL. If you’ve only got to the mockup stage, rather than a prototype – its a great testing tool.

Juicy Studio – Luminosity Contrast

URL: http://juicystudio.com/services/luminositycontrastratio.php

Guideline 2.2 of the web accessibility Guidelines suggests that the contrast between foreground and background color combinations provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen. This tool uses an algorithm to determine if you are doing so, albeit by inputting the colours you intend on using manually.

The Accessibility Colour wheel.

URL: http://gmazzocato.altervista.org/colorwheel/wheel.php

Whilst the contrast tool provided by Juicy Studio offers a manual entry of the colours, followed by a contrast ratio; this tool allows you to utilise the provided colour wheel to select the colours which are used within your web design via the mouse, and the contrast ratios are provided in real -time.

GrayBit

URL: http://graybit.com/main.php

Graybit converts any web page to grayscale, allowing you to quickly determine if the contrast is sufficient for those visually impaired visitors who may have difficult distinguishing between low contrast colours.

Check My Colours

URL: http://www.checkmycolours.com/

Check my colours offers another easy to use contrast checker which dives into your HTML and CSS and highlights the problematic styles – all from the browser.

Web Accessibility Flicker Rate Test

URL: http://tools.webaccessibile.org/test/check.aspx

Some web viewers may have photosensitive epilepsy, this tool checks animated gifs and web page flicker to see if you are likely to set off a seizure. Hopefully the web is learning from web design mistakes of 1990, and the faithful animated gifs is less likely to make an appearance in a professional design.

Readability Tools

Juicy Studio Readability Tool

URL: http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php

The Juicy Studio readability tool uses mathematical formulas to determine readability, in keeping with the guidelines set out by the W3C. Useful for blog articles as well, it may highlight places that require sentences and prose to be broken into more comprehensible parts.

Compliance Tools

WCAG are guidelines set out by the World Wide Web Consortium. These are the closest thing we have to official usability standards on the web. Compliance tools help highlight potential areas of your site that may have usability issues – validating against WCAG.

Web Aim Accessibility Tool

URL: http://www.wave.webaim.org/wave35/index.jsp

The Wave accessibility tool marks online pages of your choice with icons revealing the accessibility of that page. It easily allows you to see at a glance sections of your site in need of attention.

Total Validator

URL: http://www.totalvalidator.com/

Total Validator is a free one-stop all-in-one validator comprising a HTML validator, an accessibility validator, a spelling validator, a broken links validator, and the ability to take screenshots with different browsers to see what your web pages really look like. It also offers a useful Firefox extension.

Truwex

URL: http://checkwebsite.erigami.com/accessibility.html

Truwex manages website compliance with web accessibility and provide WCAG1 priority 2, WCAG1 priority 1 and Section 508 all from the one online tool.

11 tools to improve your sites accessibility. is a post from: Cloud Mixer - Mixing New Media Ideas

About Moi!

Evenin folks,

I’m Paul Anthony, a twenty something web developer from sunny Northern Ireland. More precisely – Omagh Co. Tyrone – a rural agricultural village slap back in the middle of the province.

Its a priviledge to be amongst some of the most talented writers, technologists, designers and digital marketers here on cloud mixer.

I guess I started tinkering properly with Pc’s when I was pretty young. I got my first PC (the Amstrad CPC 464) when I was seven. Not content with just playing the various games which came free with that badboy – I started playing with the computer code provided in the back of the manuals, teaching myself BASIC – and writing the odd program. I was fascinated by the fact that I told it what to do – and it did it. I guess early on, I was wired with the autodidactic gene through and through.

How the web found me

My own background is that I was about 13-14 years when a friend introduced me to the web, it was instant addiction from that moment on. I used to collect free internet trials from PC magazines, connecting to the web at the archaic speed of 32kbps, and tying my home phone line up in the process. In comparison to today’s broadband speeds this built a certain patience when browsing the web, and in learning how to optimise sites for speed.

For me the opportunity to reach an audience just by publishing a document online, and getting it found by search engines, and millions of others became a geeky obsession. I started teaching myself HTML, and used the web to feed my craving to learn more. I found free trials of Dreamweaver on said cover magazines, and built a few applications, including a website for a local nightclub in my home town of Omagh. The programming I’d picked up through the years translated easily in classic ASP, and database programming. I’ve always strived to pick something up myself if I needed to know it, and read everything I get my hands on about it.

I gave university a spin for a while, but was later financially encouraged to drop out by a local company to come work as a web developer. Which was nice.

Developing for the web

From that point forward, I knew I was going to be heavily involved with the web, and I’ve developed sites for companies locally, nationally and internationally. My own site has been referenced from major online publications such as the Guardian, About.com, Sitepoint.com, WebdesignDepot to mention but a few, and I’ve developed and sold software in France, Italy, India and the US.

Ok – that’s the self-obsessed writing done for now – here’s to staying tuned, and reading some articles of more educational benefit as the days go on. I have to say I’m looking forward to seeing how successful Cloudmixer becomes, and hope it goes on to bigger things.

Introducing Paul Anthony – Cloud mixer author. is a post from: Cloud Mixer - Mixing New Media Ideas