It was a night filled with work, mostly like every other night. I was sitting and doing my regular sharing / posting on twitter. All of a sudden my updates weren’t refreshing, I couldn’t navigate backwards or forward, I couldn’t click any links either. So the good old F5 (Command + R on the beloved MAC) had to come to the rescue.

What appeared infront of my eyes next was nothing less than mindblowing. At first I though I had been forwarded to a different website, but after a scouple of seconds I realized I had just witnessed a massive Twitter upgrade. Not only did they run this massive UI upgrade on their website, they also upgraded the apps for Android and iPhone users.Even though I had anticipated the update for quite some time, I didn’t expect it to come this fast. I am really impressed with the work the twitter team has done. The UI is a lot more user friendly and more importantly it is so much easier to navigate.

I’m not going to go into detail about all the new functionality and technical improvements, it’s all very well documented on the twitter homepage. To give you a little head start you can go to the official twitter page and read more about hte upgrade right now. I’ve summarized some of the main features  below.

Home is where you view Tweets from the people you have chosen to follow. It’s your personal collection of Tweets, featuring the latest news, commentary and information from the sources you care about.

The new Connect section is where you get in on the conversation. It’s the place to see who has followed or mentioned you, retweeted or favorited one of your Tweets. Connect is your way to keep the conversation flowing.

When you use Discover, you’ll see results reflecting your interests—based on your current location, what you follow and what’s happening in the world. As you use Twitter more, Discover gets even better at serving up more content just for you.

The new profile section puts you and your interests front and center. Others can Tweet directly to you and view your lists, favorites, followers, photos and more. The Me tab is also where you can stay current on your direct message conversations.

Twitter really has it going now and we’re looking forward to some really exciting times in the battle between the social media giants. I have to be honest with you. This twitter upgrade has impressed me far more than the Facebook timeline implementation.

Have you ever wanted to know how many iphone applications are downloaded in a minute? Ever wonder how many new videos are uploaded to youtube in 60 seconds? What about the number of Facebook status updates?

Well, this chart breaks down the most important numbers for you. Some of these numbers are really mind-boggling. Click on the image to view the fullscreen image.

If you think you’ve seen art, think again. What artist Craig Tracy has come up with is nothing short of amazing.

He chose a canvas with a difference for his striking three-dimensional picture of a tiger.

Three naked women spent an amazing 24 hours as his subjects as he assembled his masterpiece to raise awareness about the plight of endangered creatures. Mr Tracy assembled the women on the floor of his studio and then used paint specifically designed for human skin.

“I’ve never had a negative interaction regarding what I paint or how I paint it” – Craig said. The self confessed art nut believes this particular work is his most successful and important of his life. He added: The South China Tiger image is certainly one of my favourite images so far.

“I love what it represents and all of the good that it has done to help save the tiger.”

Below is the final painting. Can you spot the women?

From humble beginnings as an airbrush artist in a local shopping mall at the tender age of 16 – Craig has gone on to set up the world’s first art gallery dedicated to body painting.

After graduating from The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, he went on to become a freelance illustrator.
But soon decided it wasn’t the right career choice for him.

He said: “I actually hated being an Illustrator. I was so disappointed by just how mind-numbingly boring and lonely it all was.”

The body painter started with just a small amount of face painting before, several years later, he took to painting whole bodies into art works. Now he owns and operates the first gallery dedicated solely to body painted images – which includes his stunning South China Tiger work inspired by Tom Mangelsen’s photograph.

The gallery allows visitors to see firsthand how body painting is done and he personally meets and educates hundreds of people each week in the New Orleans studio.

I don’t often find time to update my blog but I think it’s time that I post some links to some of the websites that have taught me a lot over the years. Some of you know that I’ve been online since the early 90’s and I’ve witnessed a lot of websites come and go. Some are greatly missed, some are not.

Every person in the online world has his or her favorite websites. We go there, we read, we learn, we’re passionate about the content and we’re always looking forward to the next update. I’ve taken a closer look at some of the websites that have shaped me over the years and helped me stay on track in the continuous online evolution.

Namepros – A community for people in the domain industry. If you’re not into domaining that’s fine, I’m not a big domainer myself but I like to keep myself up to date with the latest news from the world of domains and registrars. Namepros is the perfect place if you’re looking for a friendly but professional discussion forum. You can ask questions without being laughed at, you can ask for help without  being flamed.

Sitepoint – Sitepoint is a webmaster forum. If you’re looking for information on various topics like online marketing, webpage design, search engine optimization (SEO), programming or monetization, you’ve come to the right place. Not only does Sitepoint have a great community forum but they also have great e-books for sale, a great web portal and very knowledgeable staff members. If you’re into web-development, Sitepoint needs to be in your bookmarks.

WebHostingTalk – WebhostingTalk has been around for as long as I can remember. This forum is great if you’re new to the web and you need to find a great hosting company. What I like about WHT is the fact that you get the chance to interact with a lot of  the people from the hosting industry. This gives you a chance to narrow down the wide range of companies that offer their hosting services.

WHT also offers great reviews of a lot different hosting companies from around the world. If there are hosting companies you should stay away from, WHT and the members there will tell you.

DVinfo – The Digital Video Information Network is a great website and a fantastic resource if you’re looking to get into the video business. The website covers everything you need to know if you want to stay up to date on digital video, photography, media production and editing software.

The community forum is also a great place to interact with people in the media, movie and television business. This is definitely a website to look at if you’re interested in video or television production.

Dvxuser – This website is another great community forum if you’re looking to get into video/TV production or media related businesses. The forum has a lot of highly talented, passionate members with a keen interest in everything that deals with media production and online entertainment.

CGSociety – CGsociety is the ultimate place for people with a passion for anything that has to do with digital art. The society for digital artists offers software reviews of the hottest tools and programs needed to create stunning computer graphics. The website also offers a separate section where people can find the hottest GFX jobs in the industry.

Members of the CGsociety have the opportunity to post their own portfolios on the website to attract potential clients. I’ve personally looked through some of the portfolios and the quality some of these artists put up is AMAZING!

Last but not least does CGsociety offer a fantastic community forum where members from all over the world can exchange ideas, critique each others work and learn a lot of new things. If you’re an aspiring GFX artist, CGsociety will be your new home.

I hope you have enjoyed this little review of some of my favorite websites. It doesn’t matter if you’re new to the web or you’re a professional, these websites will always contribute to the expansion of your knowledge. I’ll leave you with some amazing facts added up in this youtube video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another short, much too short week is coming to the end. The weeks fly by faster than ever and it seems like this catch-up game with my to-do list is everlasting. I must say it has been a very good week though. We’ve got a lot of work done, we’ve acquired another great domain that will help us broaden the Prime.TV horizon. and we’ll eventually add it to our list of development projects.

Enough rambling for now – here is what’s on the blog-post agenda for today.
- Talk about the Prime.TV progress
- New faces in front & behind the cameras
- Some interesting domain news
-  Other news of interest

The Prime.TV Network progress
I am very happy with the development progress of the domains / channels we’re currently working on. In terms of back-end development we’ve talked to several people about video & CMS solutions that meet our demands and expectations s in terms of stability and reliability. We encourage high-end companies and media pro’s to get in touch with us if you can deliver solutions that lift our visitors .TV experiences to new heights.

As some of you already may have noticed on the Prime.TV blog, we followed up last weeks RealLife.TV acquisition with HighQuality.TV! This domain has such a broad potential in terms of high-quality video demand or online video entertainment that we couldn’t pass on this one. As if that isn’t enough, we have one or two more domains coming later this year, so I’m very excited about the future of  the Prime.TV Network.

New ideas & New cast members
It is always important for me to point out that it is never too late for our visitors, viewers and .TV addicts to show us what they’ve got. We’re always on the look-out for talented people that can add more inspiration and passion to our network. You can get in touch with me directly through twitter (@Fabnomena) or go straight to the Prime.TV contact form. You can also get in touch with us on Facebook! Send us a URL with some of your work in-front or behind the cameras and we’ll get in touch with you.

Domains of the week
If you’ve been online a lot this week you can not have missed the big news of the Sex.com sale. According to court documents filed on October 19th, the domain name Sex.com has a pending sale, subject to court approval for $13 Million Dollars. The proposed buyer is Clover Holding Limited and the parties are asking for a court hearing to be held no later than October 27th, 2010. The domain has a long and complicated history and the most recent change of ownership in 2006 cost between $10 Million and $14 Million.

That’s it for today. I still have a few hours of work ahead of me so I’ve got to end it here. All comments and feedback are welcome, as always. Have a great weekend all!

Most of you know that I’m a big fan of the .TV domain extension. I haven’t been involved with .TV for more than a year, but I’ve been involved with the internet for almost 20 years and I’ve seen the changes that have taken place. I remember when I first heard of .TV 10 years ago. It seemed like such a great opportunity to create TV shows online, watch videos and share all the stuff we do with video clips instead of long, boring articles. But for some reason the .TV extension really never caught on and most people haven’t heard of the extension so far.

I’ve decided to take a closer look at the .TV phenomenon, where it’s heading and why it disappeared in the past.

The Technology
Technology is a major key player in terms of video production and the evolution of the .TV extension. Look at where technology stands today compared to 10 years ago. The whole video production cycle has changed dramatically in the last decade. The video equipment has become a lot better, and a LOT cheaper. More people can afford a video camera to start their own video diaries or video shows. The sofistication level of video editing software has also changed dramatically for the better. A lot of video editing software out there like Sony Vegas, Pinnacle Studio or Adobe Premier have made it a lot easier to edit video content, to add effects and to create a all-round great viewer experience. The software is also a lot cheaper today and the computers needed to run the software have also improved a lot. You can also find a lot of free editing software on the internet that will get you started in the video editing field.

.TV popularity today

Video is being used more and more on all kinds of websites on the internet. You can see it being used for news coverage, sports events, live shows and entertainment. Google TV, Sony Internet TV and a lot of other major corporations are contributing big-time to the merging of the internet and television. This causes a lot of what we call end-user awareness. End-users are the everyday people in the store buying new TVs or regular visitors to our developed websites. The awareness doesn’t necessarily include the .TV extension for now, but it’s good for the overall awareness of the merging of TV and the internet. I believe that in the future more and more people will become aware of the .TV extension due to the fact that 1) more and more video is being used online and 2) because the TV and internet are merging to become one thing in the near future.

.TV Domain Pricing

Like any other product on the market it is important to look at the pricing structure. Up until March 18th of 2010 a lot of so called “Premium Domains” were reserved with ridiculously high annual renewal fees. A good example was News.TV which would cost the owner $1,000,000 to renew on a yearly basis. 50,000+ domains were included in this pricing structure. This type of pricing and marketing didn’t exactly excel the domain extension into the hearts of media companies when extensions like .Com or .Net cost less than $10 per year. On March 18th, 2010  Verisign removed this pricing structure and implemented a new, much improved price plan. Certain “premium” domains now hold a one time premium fee, with regular renewal prices after that. A regular renewal price varies somewhere between $20 and $40 dollars, depending on the registrar of your choice. To give you a example of a currently available premium .TV domain: General.TV is available for purchase at around $1500 for the first year and $30 every year after that. Some registrars run multi-year registration promos where you can register a non-premium .TV name for as low as $9.99 for multiple years in one go. Name.com is one of them.

Google .TV stats

To give you a quick example, look at it from googles perspective. I found a pretty old thread over at Namepros.com. This forum thread is 173 days old and I think it’s pretty interesting to see how .TV has evolved since February 2010. Out of pure curiosity I did a new search on google for indexed .TV sites today using the regular site:*.TV or site:.TV command in the google search box.

The numbers google returned very nothing but astonishing.

Let’s take a look back -

* In February 2010: 11.2 million .TV sites were indexed by google.

* By late April 2010: 28 million .TV sites were indexed by google.

* By mid October 2010: What do you think? How many .TV sites were indexed today?

Here is a breakdown of the numbers:

* February 2010: 11.2 Million .TV sites were indexed.

* April 2010: 28 million .TV sites were indexed – a 250% increase since February 2010.

* October 2010: A whopping 76.8 million .TV sites are now indexed by google. That’s a massive 274.3% increase since late April 2010.

Now, I don’t know about you all, but I think a total increase of 524.3% indexed .TV sites in a timeframe of 8 months is a pretty impressive increase and it can’t be ignored. As a friend of the .TV extension I hope we’ll continue to see this kind of development for .TV but we also have to remember that a lot of work remains. The only way to make this extension grow in the long run is to create quality, brandable websites that put the .TV extension on the map! Own.TV is a good example by the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Google also recently announced that they treat .TV as a gTLD (generic top level domain), not a ccTLD (country code top-level domain).

For more information on the .TV extension you may want to look at Watch.TV, Enom.TV or Verisign.TV.

Good luck and welcome to the future :)

Adobe has finally launched the much anticipated Creative Suite 5!

The product revamps PhotoShop, Illustrator, InDesign, DreamWeaver and Flash and it comes with a new feature: Omniture, a tool to track the relative success of different versions of websites, such as a new home page design.

The full product, called Master Collection, is priced at $2599 and if you have the predecessor,  its upgrade is $899.Advantages ?

• Industry-leading performance enhancements – work faster with the native 64-bit support for both PC and Mac.
• Support for evolving web trends – now Dreamweaver CS5 comes with full support for content management frameworks, including Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress.
• Expressive motion graphics and blockbuster visual effects – A revolutionary Roto Brush in After Effects CS5: isolating, moving foreground elements from their backgrounds with automatic transparency is now dramatically faster.
• Truer Edge detection technology – Hair selection has never been easier !
• Crisp graphics for web, interactive and mobile delivery – Create clean artwork that aligns perfectly – no more fuzzy graphics for the web and mobile apps !

• Type enhancements for the web – create sophisticated typography for the web with support for bidirectional and vertical text, flowable text layouts, and support for more than 30 writing systems including Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, and more.

Mac OS

• Multicore Intel processor
• Mac OS X v10.5.7 or v10.6
• 1GB of RAM or more recommended
• 10.3GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on a volume that uses a case-sensitive file system or on removable flash-based storage devices)
• 1280×800 display with qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card, 16-bit color, and 256MB of VRAM
• Some GPU-accelerated features require graphics support for Shader Model 3.0 and OpenGL 2.0
• DVD-ROM drive compatible with dual-layer DVDs

• Java Runtime Environment 1.5 or 1.6
• QuickTime 7.6.2 software required for multimedia features
• Adobe Flash Player 10 software required to export SWF files
• Broadband Internet connection required for online services*

For more details, please visit Adobe.com

I found this video on youtube. Jesse breaks down the numbers for some of the most interesting internet activities up to 2009.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s not often that a technology product, even a successful one, enters the language as a verb. Some of us google, but nobody iPhones, Excels, or HDMIs.

But by remaining influential over a history that now spans 20 years, Photoshop software has achieved a place in the English language.

Over its two decades, it grew from a single black-and-white image-editing package to a multi-product franchise, a starring member of Adobe Systems’ Creative Suite line, and, of course, a verb.I have used Photoshop for as long as I can remember, atleast 16 years by now. It was love at first sight and it’s by far one of the most amazing tools on the market, EVER! I couldn’t do all the work I do if it wasn’t for Photoshop. ( That goes for my Wacom board too btw :P )

Photoshop got its start in 1987 when Thomas Knoll wrote software that could display grayscale images–those with a range of gray tones–on monitors that could show only black or white pixels. He and his brother, John Knoll, licensed the software to Barneyscan in 1988, then to Adobe in 1989. Adobe Photoshop 1.0 arrived in 1990, a Mac-only product initially, and in 1995, Adobe acquired the Photoshop software outright.

Pixel-level manipulation software turned out to be popular. Photoshop’s clone tool let people copy one part of an image to another. And even at this early stage, it enabled sophisticated tonal controls through levels and curves adjustments.

Photoshop acquired many more features over the years. By providing a nicer interface to raw mathematical image-processing algorithms, Photoshop let people sharpen edges and change colors. Layers enabled creation of composites that blended multiple photos, text, and other elements. Adjustment layers opened up the idea that changes could be revisited rather than baked into the pixel data. Camera lens problems could be corrected.

Adobe’s Photoshop franchise has been expanding gradually. At the lower end, where people rarely are willing to spend hundreds of dollars for software, the company has released a cheaper enthusiast version, Photoshop Elements. Adobe killed the free Photoshop Album Starter Edition version.

Another new direction for the software was the photography-specific Lightroom. This software is tailored for high-quality “raw” images that come directly from camera image sensors and handles cataloging, captions, titles, and other image management matters.

The company continues to work on the core Photoshop product, too. For example, it’s got refinements in the works to automate one of the most difficult processes, selecting complicated subjects to isolate them from backgrounds.

So, first of all let me give a big thanks to Thomas & John Knoll. I also want to thank Adobe and all the other people involved with the development & evolvement of Photoshop. I am looking forward to another 20 years with more exciting features and a lot of new fancy additions. Good luck!

Source: Cnet

I totally love it when stuff works and everything runs smooooooth. BUT – when things DON’T work (especially when I’m in a hurry), worlds collide.

Patience is really not one of my strong attributes. I don’t like slow websites, I don’t like slow computers, I hate it when stuff doesn’t work at all. Can anyone relate to the frustration? ;)

Here is a pretty good example for you guys. God I hate it when that happens. Yet, while writing this post, I can’t help but to smile about it.