I was talking to a good mate of mine who works in web dev and we shared a little giggle earlier on, here is an exert from the conversation:

“…I got the best CV sent to me yesterday. This was for an Interface Design position - check out his personal site (that he encouraged me to visit in his covering letter): http://www.nicephotog-jvm.net/ OMFG”.

What is even worse is the fact that he was sent over to my friend by a recruitment agency, if that’s the best they had to offer him then god help us! Here’s a screen shot of the guy’s site:

Unless you have had your head buried under a rock for some time, you should have heard about the rise of Web 2.0 and AJAX-driven web applications.

AJAX is collection of technologies and stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, which in plain English means that you can update part of a web page without having to reload it. The exponential rise of content-rich sites such as Flickr, Google Maps, Google Suggest, YouTube, Facebook and Gmail all employ AJAX technology in varying degrees.

Site metrics & paid-for advertising

From an advertising point of view this throws a big spanner in the works. Traditionally the staple metrics of internet advertisers were page impressions and unique visitors. Internet properties were valued in terms of the amount of traffic they attracted. Advertising campaigns revolved around CPM (cost per thousand), a model built upon the notion that each time a page was served up your banner/ad would also be served. The problem now is that as the popularity of AJAX increases, both existing and new sites are finding it harder to measure traffic to their sites and in turn maintain advertising revenues.

To quote Julian Zilberbrand, associate director, digital operations, MediaVest, “if you are a publisher that is really focused on user experience, [Ajax] does make sense, but it potentially severely limits the ad opportunities you have” (Media Week, 02/04/2007).

An AP report discussed Nielsen//NetRatings and its measurement future. They are expected to announce an end to rankings based on page views and are “planning to publish a new ‘total time spent’ metric” (Media Week, 02/04/2007). This is a step in the right direction, but Nielsen//NetRatings ‘total time spent’ metric might not give us the whole picture, as there is a notion that web users are becoming more efficient in their online activities, and AJAX applications are fuelling this increase in efficiency. So whereas a web user might have traditionally visited 2 or 3 sites to view content, they can now use a RSS news aggregator to view the same content much faster, without even launching their web browser.

The notion of the page impression is also becoming less important because of the widgetisation of web pages, where small pieces of AJAX functionality are the point of interaction with the user, rather than them clicking on the ‘next page’ link to continue their user journey. This means we need new tools such as ajax metrics to track user behaviour and from an advertising point of view, serve up appropriate content to the right portion of the page.

This is a new challenge to the metrics market place, and there are no hard and fast rules as yet, but expect a shake up of the traditional paradigm over the coming months.

SEO

Hand-in-hand with the paid-for advertising is search engine optimisation. AJAX also directly effects how your site is viewed by search engines. By implementing more JavaScript-powered interactivity in your site you are in turn increasing the barriers to your content, (as far as search engines are concerned). But this doesn’t have to be the case, if you employ a web standards and accessible approach to web development then you can still provide the necessary structure for search engines to index your site’s content.

Check out more about web standards and accessibility:

• http://www.webstandards.org/
• http://diveintoaccessibility.org/
• http://www.w3.org/WAI/
• http://www.w3c.org/
• http://www.alistapart.com/

This article was written by Ben Ellis, but was based on discussion and ideas that come out of chats with Simon Price, the search guru here at Crayon.

Today I took 2 of my boards into the shaping room (a.k.a the back garden) for a bit of an overhaul. I had gained a few battle scars from surfing in Brazil, Portugal and Devon, both in the way of the normal cut up feet, but also damage to my hardware (no I don’t mean my tackle, haha).

I had a few heavy collisions in both Portugal and Devon which occurred, mainly due to inexperienced surfers not knowing what they were doing, more on that later. Anyway I spent 2 hours today cutting out the bad foam, mixing up the resin and hardner and cutting the fibreglass cloth to size. The end results are pretty good, check out the pics below.

Anyway this brings me onto my second point. Beginners not knowing what the f*ck they are doing in the surf. This happened to me a few times whilst in Portgual, with some of the surfers who were learning. What became evident whilst surfing with these people was that they didn’t really have an awareness of their surroundings. I am sure they didn’t intentionally drop-in on me, but the end result is the same, a dangerous situation where large surfboards go flying, both into other boards and into people.

I admit awareness of the waves, the situation and safety comes with experience, and I have dropped in on a few people in my time, but I think a lot of this could be avoided by surf schools teaching surf etiquette to those learning to surf. People need to how to surf safely, both in terms of not hurting themselves or others, but also to avoid getting a thumping from some local.

I must admit, I often get the hump on in the surf, when I miss a wave or someone snakes me, or I just generally f*ck up by wiping out prematurely, but I nearly actually belted someone the other week whilst in Devon, surfing Croyde.

I had clearly got a wave and had been riding nicely along it for at least 5 seconds, when suddenly out of nowhere a lamo on an indescructable NSP board dropped in on me and caused the ding you see above. To say I was unhappy with his general lack of awareness was an understatement, but I let it go and just gave him a firm look and then paddled off. Croyde is not worth getting the hump over in the summer, the waves are generally small, sloppy and very over-crowded. Had I been on a low-tide barrel in a heavy swell and something had happened then maybe I would have got more annoyed, but battle scars go with the territory I guess.

Anyway hoping to go surfing towards the end of September at some point, with BJC and Sulli, hopefully the swell will get a little more consistent and the waves will be a little more challenging. I am also thinking of investing in a 4/3 or even a 5mm wetsuit this winter, as I want to hit up Thurso East up in Scotland, which is reportedly an amazing wave, reminiscent of Indo, and yes you can get some pretty good rides up there, they even host a WQS event: The Highland Open, all good!

I finally got a little spare time to create a mini site and get my Brazil Surf DVD: ‘BST07 Ondas do Brasil’ up online. For those not lucky enough to have a hard copy of the DVD, the YouTube version should give you a little taster of what it is like to live and surf in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador da Bahia.

Go check it out: http://bst07.hungrybrowser.co.uk/

I just logged onto youtube to check out my old account, with a view to upload the new BST07 DVD I made and found that a scene from the DVD I made last year, WST06 had a little nomination in the California Coastal Views Film Festival. I didn’t win, but was kinda stoked to get a mention. Maybe BST07 will get a little more attention, website and videos coming soon!

One of my all time favourite artists, Ben Harper, is releasing a new album in a few weeks, you can listen to it here before it hits the shops.

So the 2 week surf-fest had to come to an end. Am back on Terra firma now after having a wicked week in Devon and then a second in Portugal.

The first week was spent surfing my arse off in Croyde with the Lee Bay Massive (a.k.a BJC, P-dog and Luke), many a wave, many a beer and many a Caipirinha were served, all good fun.

The second week me and P-dog hit up the Southern Coast of Portugal for a week’s surfing in the Lagos area. We had a wicked time with the Extreme Holiday’s crew and partied pretty damn hard every night, with the earliest we went to bed being 2.30am and then latest something like 7am, pretty hardcore.

We met some great folks, and ended up sharing a room with 2 great guys: Tim and James who pretty much made the holiday. We had a cool surf instructor called Eurico,who told some great stories and really made us feel welcome.

I managed to surf between 5-6 hours every day, with the wave size varying between 1-5ft on the face. I surfed the 6′0, 6′4 and 9′2 all giving unique rides. It was great to have such a varied week’s surfing, from dropping into some nice pits with a nice steep take-off, to some really mellow right handers that peeled off a nice reef called “Pliers”. The last day was spent on the 9′2 and I was loving it, moving up and down the board, getting in my first floater and generally ripping it up to the extent that I nearly passed out on the beach afterwards from exhaustion.

I was also stoked when one of the instructors told me with a little practice I could easily go out to Fuerte’ and become a surf instructor with Extreme, so that was a huge compliment. I feel my surfing has improved a huge amount over the past few weeks, and I can’t wait to get back in the sea as soon as we get some decent swell coming through.

Back to work tomorrow, looking forward to seeing everyone and will pop up some photos from the hols soon.