A partial apology to Google!

How it grates!

Yesterday I posted about how Chrome does not display my RAW images edited in Lightroom as they display in Explorer, and every other browser.

Well, it was me. I hadn't chosen the Export command from Lightroom which generates a jpg image, because it wasn't obvious to a simpleton like me. Instead, because there is no Save As command in Lightroom, I had opened the edited image in CS5 and used Save As from there.

Save As is not the command to use for RAW images. Choose Export.

When you choose Export, the resulting jpg looks absolutely fine in Chrome. See the example above.

The fact remains that Chrome does display colour differently from other browsers, as is documented elsewhere on the web.

Colour management FAIL in Chrome and Android browser

Yes, I know it's been a while since I posted. Put it down to a life phase crisis.

But the flat in Morocco is finished and available for rent. During the quieter months of the year, it's heaven to lie in bed at night and hear the waves slapping on the shore.

Mobile broadband has not improved particularly for visiting tourists. Several hotels have free-ish wifi connections. Don't look for widespread free wifi in Tangier. Nor, am I told, is installed ADSL reliable. I haven't asked for a broadband connection to my flat as a result. Check out McD's opposite my flat for free wifi - sometimes.

But this is not the point of this post. I have been taking my photography much more seriously over the year and have installed Lightroom 3.4.1 and Photoshop CS5 with Adobe RAW Converter as a result.

Delightedly, I have started taking photos in Camera RAW, tweaking them a bit in these two programs and saving them as jpgs for upload to Flickr.

Imagine my horror when on viewing them in the browser, the colour balance was totally wrong and the photos looked dreadful.

At first I thought it must be me. I'd done something wrong in the processing, or not altered a crucial setting somewhere.

And then, in desperation, I opened the flickr page in Internet Explorer, which rendered the photos exactly as I had seen them in CS 5 and Lightroom after editing. As does Firefox, and FF and Safari on a Mac.

So it is NOT me. What then is the culprit?

Google CHROME. I use the Chrome browser all the time. A Google (ahem) search brought up results instantaneously. Google does not support colour management. Whereas other browsers do.

Not only that, the Android browser on mobile and tablet devices doesn't seem to support colour management either. I had a quick look on my Xoom to check.

This is awful Google. I don't even know whether I'm seeing any of my other photos on Chrome as others see them.

I did try this tip for adding 'enable colour profile,' but it didn't seem to work.

How can this have been allowed to go on for so long. It's not as if I'm the first to howl with rage.

Please, please Google, get some colour management into the act for your browsers. Or somebody else out there tell me what I could have missed.

Buzzed off with control freak business

In my previous post, I conjectured that my 3mobile mi-fi might be able to provide a wifi signal for an iPad, should I buy one.

Not so! Cunning Mr Jobs has put the dampers on that one. First thing I saw on my twitter list this morning was a link to a headline: Jobs: iPad can't tether to iPhone.

And if it can't tether to an iPhone, it can hardly be expected to work with a 3mobile connection - I guess.

As Mr Jobs explained so glibly, Apple are producing the 3G version of the iPad to provide constant net access, so there won't be a need for tethering.

That's another idea fallen by the wayside.

Did you see that headline earlier this week saying that big business in America thinks that open source should be banned, because, presumably, it's unbusinesslike and offers unfair competition. That includes such staples as Apache web server software, MySQL database software, Linux operating system etc

At least SourceForge reversed its earlier unpopular decision to block downloads of open source software to users in countries on the US Office of Foreign Assets Control sanction list, which includes Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. There's quite a few in these countries who are glad to be able to get hold of software which enables them to participate in the global community, despite their governments' best endeavours.

Should we actually be grateful to American and other multi-millionaires for creating an infrastructure that increases wealth and money supply? It certainly isn't because they're providing goods and services at a fair price if they're blocking potential demand and access to information.

Oh yes. Buzz. I'm still using it but am SO frustrated at the confusing lists of comments, most of which are dross. This means that I am not following a load of people who are following me, because there's just too much to scan and read. It puzzles me that Google doesn't reverse the policy and let users choose whether they want to see comments rather than displaying them by default. And how about putting tick boxes by posts so that you can mute all those you don't want to see any more in one fell swoop?

Here's Wavin' at you Kid!

Thanks to Foamcow, the only real web developer I know, I got an invite for a Google Wave account.

Rubbing my hands with glee, I signed in. And then what?

Pete was the only listed contact, and he's far too busy working and tweeting to indulge in a spot of Google waving.

Happily, one of my Omani contacts saw my plea on Twitter and added me. She, Deepak and I got seriously stuck into a Wave conversation. Goodness me, how quickly the wave scrolled. We added maps and videos and ended up knowing each other somewhat better, but I haven't seen them on Wave since. Probably because the conversation could be carried out as effectively using Twitter or Live Messenger.

There's quite a Twitter community in Oman, and the majority have protected their tweets. There may be a feeling that Wave is not as 'protected.' Oman has only one ISP at present, Omantel, which is heavily censored. Neither can you be sure that the security services are not reading what you're writing. The filter even bans gmail from time to time.

Does everyone have to be online at the same time to participate in a Wave? Tweeting is more independent. You can pick up a tweet and reply when it suits you, rather than being constrained to follow a conversation in real time.

My five 'wavers' never seem to be online. So that avenue of enquiry has expired.

I have yet to work out how to incorporate Twitter and Facebook into Wave as Mashable suggested.

I had had an idea of how I might use Wave with my toastmasters group. I have to build a mini-website to inform my co-members about developments in a topic that I'm to present as the last project in the Technical Presentations manual. I thought Wave might be a suitable way of bringing people up to speed, particularly as I could use Wave to build a wiki, load photos, documents, maps etc.

Some hope. The club members won't even sign up for Google email accounts so that we could share Google Calendar and Google Docs. And if they don't have a Google account, there's no way they can be offered a Wave account in the future.

Enter the Google Wave cheat sheet. and a welcome clue. If you enter with:public in the search box, you see what everyone else is waving about.

Whoaaaaaaaah! An endlessly scrolling list of Waves that disappear out of the window in less than 3 seconds, most of which look as if they're junk. Too many Waves offering to check if your link works. That looks like spam. Honestly, it was disheartening.

I did follow two Waves. One on learning Swedish, since I did work in Stockholm as an au pair between 1969 to 1970 and learnt a bit of Swedish, and another for women in social marketing.

Love and bless them, the Google engineers have created something, essentially, because they can. We proto-Wavers are the sandbox. How many of us will survive the evolution of Wave?

I'm digitally distinct! Sort of.

Trawling through Google Reader, I found a blog post preening of being Digitally Distinct, thanks to the Online ID Calculator.

The Online ID Calculator reckons it can assess how distinctive you are on the net. More specifically, how well does Google recognise you? Because, if Google hasn't a clue who you are, you're not going to show up in its search results.

Canny, really. You part with some personal information, answer some questions about the number of valid results that Google returns about you, and hey presto, the calculator shows your position on a graph.

The graph plots volume of results on the y axis against relevance of results on the x axis. There are four quadrants.

High volume + low relevance = Digitally Disastrous
Low volume + low relevance = Digitally Dissed
Low volume + high relevance = Digitally Dabbling
High volume + high relevance = Digitally Distinct

And you get a nice little badge which you can post on your website, if you choose. But I guess only the Digitally Distinct WOULD choose to do that. I mean, would you tell the world you were Digitally Disastrous?

The calculator has been devised by William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson, who are partners in Reach, an online personal branding club.

While your data may be protected, the terms and conditions suggest that the statistics may be used to devise a personal branding model and could be used as part of a database in the writing of a book on the subject.

Why could the Online ID Calculator be instructive? If you look for yourself on the net, you can bet your bottom dollar that people like recruiters or potential business partners will be looking too.

How do you want your personal brand to come across? What would you want people to find out about you?

I too can now display the little red rectangle. But I did learn something. In my quest to be a world acknowledged expert, I need to focus more on getting a higher volume of relevant results. I'm just a little too near the Digitally Dabbling quadrant for my liking.

Using Google to advertise your Twitter feed

Google is allowing Adsense users to define ads marketing their Twitter profiles. Instead of being directed to a specific web page selling a product, the ad clicker ends up at the advertiser's Twitter profile.

Apparently Intuit has spent a pile this way, promoting their TurboTax software. TurboTax spokeswoman, Colleen Gatlin, said that using Twitter humanises the company's interaction with potential customers. As well as being able to answer customer questions about the product quickly, it also gets customer feedback via Twitter.

I wonder if Intuit will publish the results of this advertising campaign as opposed to more traditional approaches.

Intuit's marketing department is analysing the results. As the marketing director says, it's not just the customers who subscribe directly who are the target, but their followers.

The same article also mentions newly launched Tinker. Tinker aggregates conversations from Facebook and Twitter relevant to 'event streams.' Oh and by the way, there'll be associated advertising.

East Midland Speakers with WebJam

I signed up to Webjam a week ago. You won't see anything terrific on my personal webjam but that wasn't the main reason that I joined.

Webjam does what I had hoped Google Sites would do. It offers a collaborative system using modules and themes which enables a group to build and maintain a website.

And it works.

I've created the East Midlands Speakers Club website using Webjam, with a blog and bulletin on the front page. I've been able to add a Google map showing the location of our meetings and also a Google calendar.

Because of the faffy way Google goes about things, I couldn't just drop and drag a calendar. I had to copy the code and paste it into the html, but Webjam still made that process easy.

Parts of the website can be limited to group members, which might have its uses.

Two members of our club have signed up as co-editors. I just need some information to write up now.