www.amusingourselves.com

O.K., this isn’t about content, but I guess the beta launch of Chrome is the biggest news on the web for a while.

I haven’t had time for a full look, however, the most immediately obvious feature, and main ‘take home point’, is that it is really, really fast.

The interface and feature set are a little rudimentary, however, I’m sure we’ll soon see developer toolkits and the like, all of which will sit on top of their superfast engine.

Chrome is undoubtedly serious competition for all concerned. Load times matter. Particularly for complex RIAs. It will be interesting to see how this impacts the ongoing web platform battle between, Ajax, Flex/Flash and Silverlight.

On a side note, my limited research (clicking around a few sites) seems to suggest that it also makes Flash usable. Now that’s some feat.

Usability expert Jakob Neilsen isn’t a big fan of Flash. I agree with him. It’s O.K. in small doses and in the right context, however, it’s all-too-often overused by designers willing to sacrifice usability for fancy fly-ins and huge mp3 files of bland, consumer-friendly house music which crash my browser and have me clicking off before the fancy load bar has got to half way. However, that’s not the worst of it. The main reason for not using Flash is that it isn’t searchable: individual pages or elements of content within a site don’t show up in Google.

However, that’s all just changed because Adobe has just announced that they have made .swf files searchable. I haven’t looked at this more closely, however, from what I can gather it isn’t necessarily the easiest process but it does remove the one of the major objections to using Flash for content based sites.

Now, if only there were some kind of automatic kill file for those house music mp3s, then I might even start liking Flash.

There follows an arbitrary and partial list of the five things I most enjoyed on the Internet this week. It is neither voted for, crowdsourced, comprehensive nor exhaustive. I hope you enjoy it nonetheless.

1. Please Vote for Me (trailer)
Chinese school children elect a class president. And not a tank in sight.

Part 1 2 3 4 5

2. Is that Jackson Pollock? No, it’s penguin shit.
Nathan Myhrvold talks about what he does.
Clifford Stoll talks about what he doesn’t do. From the ever excellent Ted Talks.

3. Ten mind blowing animations
Some of these animations are a bit rough and ready, however, I’m sure if you wait six months or so you’ll probably see strangely similar yet slicker versions selling you washing powder or cat litter. Hurrah for advertising.

4. Demitri Martin

If you’re American you probably got sick of his cheery surrealist schtick some time ago, but
Martin’s not got a huge profile in the UK and I found this pretty funny though you’ve probably moved onto liking something newer, edgier underground act which I’ll probably pick up on in about six months time when they’ll be like, so totally over.

5. Web Design Ting
OK. I know this is supposed to be a blog about what goes on in websites and not how to make them. But this a great place to start for those looking to pimp their digital crib.