Tag Archives: Competition

Jana Herwig

A good reason not to participate in Google’s Favicon challenge

by , Category: Calls & Competitions

Google\'s new FaviconOf course none of you power users out there has failed to notice Google’s new, to my mind abysmally ugly Favicon. It looks weirdly smudged, like something that the CEO’s nephew might have designed on his first computer 15 years ago – the image to the right shows both the old and new favicon in browser view, the new one as a design proposal and finally the actual browser favicon if you blow it up the the dimensions of the design proposal.

According to a recent joint blog post from their VP Search Products & User Experience, Marissa Mayer, and web designer Micheal Lopez, they were looking for an icon “that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices.” I don’t quite see improved scalability happen here – the close-up of the new icon looks anything but convincing. Designers: Just because you want your product to be web2.0 doesn’t mean you have to add glossiness and shine to every bit you make. Also: Changing an icon that’s been around for 8.5 years (in a company that went online 9.5 years ago) and has become an online household name is probably not a good idea.

Yet things get more baffling: It seems as if the folks at Google are not too happy with the current solution – which they chose from a selection of over 300 permutations – either, because they have also launched a little crowdsourcing competition for yet a newer Favicon: “Submit your Google favicon idea“, they say, and those who do consider to participate, I dearly urge you to have good look at the fine print first.

As is the rule with such competitions,* participants “irrevocably assign and transfer to Google, all rights, title and interest to any content you submit as part of this event”. The real catch comes in point 4: Continue reading →

Jana Herwig

Vision Competition: First Entries

by , Category: Conferences & Events

Vision CompetitionThe first entries have begun to trickle in in our Linked Data Vision Competition – the fabulous prize is full conference pass for this year’s LinkedData Planet conference in New York, worth $1095!

James Yue Gee (drawing on N.J. Slabbert) proposes the idea of a tele-community “composed of enterprises, individuals, homes, schools, hospitals, retail shops, and everything possible” which “are all the nodes of a huge web of this tele-community.”

Colin Herridge build his vision around LEADSExplorer, a tool to “identify B2B website visitors by company name and qualify these companies as leads by analyzing the website data on company level.”

Rob Styles, in a prose account of his vision, offers a rereading of Georg Orwell’s 1984, as he believes that “so much of what we see in the news, media and politics today is described as Orwellian”. He proposes that “the semweb, and therefore Linked Open Data have to be the antithesis.”

According to Rajkumar Kannan, “semantic web is the only way of interconnecting and interrelating the information universe of data by means of tagging through ontologies” and his expectations are that this “will certainly enable the society to achieve high impact on its developments.”

Aman Shakya points out that “if we want to see the network of Linked Open Data explode on a similar scale, we need to enable general users to publish “data” directly on the web and link to other “data”. We need to move the paradigm of web page publishing and hyperlinking towards data publishing and data linking. We should enable people to post structured data about anything rather than just unstructured text.”