Online strategy game Evony has already made a reputation for itself with its wildly inappropriate and inaccurate banner ads.

I played Evony once, for about ten minutes… not long, however I played enough to be sure it’s not a Leisure Suit Larry-style game set in Middle Earth (although maybe there’s some mileage in that concept).

Previously the blatant cleavage shot of a buxom stock photo model was a favourite Evony ad, but I think this new one takes the cake. What does this haute couture model have to do with a medieval strategy game? Sex sells I guess.

Some more on the wonderful Evony banner ads at Tokyito and Coding Horror.

According to Google’s TV Raman, their top two ‘accessible’ services are their main web search and the new Google labs accessible search. The rationale?

Web search: Result pages include headers to delineate logical sections

Right, that’s good and all, but it doesn’t really excuse the dozens of tables that have no summaries does it? And headers really don’t magically make a page accessible.

And as for the new Accessible search:

Accessible Search: Promotes results that are accessible.

I haven’t played with this search enough to see if it does promote accessible results (I’m sure it’s a good service), but again, Google’s own code is a mess. It’s better than the main Google search, but still has huge amounts of inaccessible code.

You should never claim your site is accessible. Code for it as much as you can, test it as much as you can and show you conform to WCAG, but never claim it’s ‘accessible’. And even if you do, at least make sure it passes some automated tests: unlike Google, who barely scrape in at Priority 1.

Channel 4′s 4oD was down last Friday night at 11:30pm. This really isn’t that surprising it was just after the latest episode of Peep Show had aired, and I imagine thousands of people over the UK were wanting to watch it after getting home that evening.

Thankfully it was up again on Saturday morning and I downloaded the new episode without a hitch. Of course until I tried to watch it around 12pm, when quite possibly everyone else burned the night before were attempting to download the episode yet again.

Now this is where DRM (and bad design on the developer’s part) really bugs me: the video file was on my hard drive somewhere in some mystical format and location, but without being able to connect to the 4oD site, I couldn’t watch it. Madness. Surely it’s easy enough to change the service so you can watch downloads offline, but if this was a torrent download (or any regular download) then this offline business wouldn’t even be an issue.

In similar news, the BBC’s iPlayer is coming later this year, apparently.

Manually entering dates is also frustrating as some part of the Javascript intermittently clears the field when changing focus between the fields. Initially I honestly couldn’t get a date in. I’ve since tried again and it worked (barely). Just as well there’s a fairly obvious Reservations link in the top bar.

By the way, anyone know of any good hotels in Calgary?

However, as I said in the last post, I am still compelled to check Hotmail now and again as I still have a few emails of importance coming in between the far more steady stream of spam. Clearing my inbox today I noticed the Live Mail team have changed the way the inbox interface is laid out. The main difference is that the checkbox for each item now shares its place with the new mail icon:

Basically both icons toggle depending on whether the email is new and/or selected. In practice this is just really bemusing to use. If you want to select messages to delete or move, there is no obvious checkbox. When you work out they’re hiding between mail icons (emphasis on hidden here), the actual task of selecting the check boxes requires a high degree of accuracy: the checkbox is sitting on anchor block linking to the email message, so if you’re slightly off target with the small checkbox you end up opening a message as opposed to selecting it.

And my last gripe is that the checkbox/mail icon column doesn’t line up with the master select checkbox in the top left corner. There is actually room for the checkbox to sit next to the mail icon and be underneath this master selector. Wouldn’t that make far more sense?

I don’t know what the rationale behind the design of this is, but the caveat here is that this is a beta product after all. Although I made that point in my last blog entry as well, after pointing out Live Mail was purely IE6 (now IE7 as well). Windows Live Mail now loads in Firefox 2.0, although load is a pretty abstract concept:

24 errors/504 warnings? Nice.

And for the record, Live Mail is still long way off the simplicity and usability of Gmail.

Almost.

Broadband come back!!

And that’s where the anxiety kicked in. I felt it coming. Then I heard a voice from within my head: “Oh no, not another site to figure out and keep up with”.

Keeping my photostream up to date on Flickr is like a second job for me. I take a lot of photos, and a lot of candid stuff now I have a camera phone. It takes hours to select the best photos, upload them, give them a title and description, tag them, and if you can be bothered, send them to a few groups to try and get some comments, making the whole thing worth while. I have lots of friends and family back home as well who I feel indebted to keep feeding photos too, showing what’s happening in old blighty. Yes, we’re only talking a few hours a week here, but after work and getting home and doing other ‘life’ things (such as eating and washing dishes etc.), it does start to feel like a real chore.

Bandwidth, hardware, interface — none of these are a problem. With 24mbps broadband (and wi-fi to boot) at home, along with Flickr’s great interface, it’s all so easy to get the photos up, but it’s the human side of things that takes so long. But that’s the catch of the whole social semantic web: it just craves human input. And it’s addictive.

A few months ago I was lucky enough to hear a talk from Linda Stone on these sorts of issues. The talk was based on one she did at an O’Reilly conference last year called ‘Attention‘, and it’s really an excellent read: I highly recommend it.

We’re in the middle of a bubble at the moment, which really can’t last. What happens when the 2.0 bubble bursts is anyone’s guess — who’ll survive, who won’t — but all I can say is that I hope Web 3.0 involves me sitting on a couch, relaxing, while I watch some good old totally non-interactive television. Because sometimes, you just want to turn off — and that’s getting really hard in the 2.0 realm.

Going back to the topic of photographing kids in Asia, I always felt very uncomfortable doing this, especially as a white male. There are some amazing kids around Asia with so much personality that you can’t help but photograph many of them. I found another set on Flickr with pictures from Laos, and some far more provocative photos of kids playing in the river. By provocative I mean close detail of the kids — the photographer was merely documenting the kids the same way I was. But the photographer here was female, and this is another interesting thing I picked up on while travelling — and that is that for women to take photos of kids is rarely noticed, yet with men its very different. Often I would be with other female travellers taking photos of cute kids playing or trying to sell things, and while they would snap some terrific photos, I always felt very cautious about doing so, in case someone misjudged my intentions.

Unfortunately I don’t think things here will really change. Of course men aren’t the only ones who are sexual predators, but the vast majority are, and everyone knows the appalling situation with child exploitation in Asia. So next time I’m on holiday and we see a bunch of kids splashing water or jumping off water buffalo, I might just pass the camera to my girlfriend — and make sure that ‘naked kids’ don’t appear in the title on Flickr.

What’s next — Ten Google? I seriously doubt that, but surely Channel Ten will follow suit soon. The Big Brother site is currently hosted by 3, perhaps Ten plans to focus more on the mobile market rather than the broader web market? Considering that Big Brother was previously partnered with iPrimus, the shift in sponsor could well indicate this strategy.