KAYWEB Blogs: Internet News Blog - Web Trends Blog

July 31, 2010

Social Media in the UK is going gangbusters

The United Kingdom is known best known for its Royals, football, bad teeth, bad weather and the Beatles.

Now a video produced by UK social media firm Simply Zesty shows how the phenomenon has spread across the masses in the monarch.

In the last few weeks, the world saw Facebook users reach 500 million in population, meaning 1 in 14 people globally maintains an active Facebook account.

More locally for UK audiences, as well as Commonwealth folk like us down here in Australia, Queen Elizabeth herself became a member of a social network - in her case, photo sharing website Flickr.

It is little wonder when you see the stats revealed in the video below. Most astoundingly, 64% of Brits have Social Media profiles while 60% admit to reading blogs. Enjoy all the numbers!

July 29, 2010

Embed charts to your web page using Google Chart API

Google has provided us an easy-to-use tool for creating dynamically generated charts that can be embedded to your website.

Just by passing your data to a URL string, the Google Chart API will load the chart image in your browser.

To get started in creating your own chart, just open a browser and paste in address bar our sample URL below:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World

In our sample URL, the text “http://chart.apis.google.com/chart” is the source address of our chart.

Then after the question mark (?) are the parameters and their corresponding values that you will provide in order to generate our chart. The parameters are separated by the ampersand (&). So the parameters based from our sample are:

cht – specifies the chart type like bar, line, pie and others. In our sample, we are displaying a pie chart (p3). For other types of chart and their corresponding value, just click here.
chd – specifies the data that will be plotted in our chart in x, y format. You can also customize the data format of your chart.
chs – specifies the size of the chart image in width x height format. In our sample, the size of our chart image is 250x100.
chl – specifies the labeling of our chart separated by pipe (|). The labels are displayed along the x-axis. To customize the labeling of each axes, use chxl instead.

Now that we have our URL string, it is now time to embed this in our web page. Just open your favorite html editor and paste the following html code:

<html>
<head>
<title>Sample Chart </title>
</head>
<body>
<img src=”http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World
” alt=”Sample Chart”/>
</body>
</html>

There, we have just created our very simple chart.

Of course, if you want to add more customisation (e.g. legends, line markers and colors, visible axes, axis label styles, data scaling, data formatting, etc.) to your chart, just go to the Google Chart API site.

July 21, 2010

World of Warcraft and video games can be a positive influence

Playing World of Warcraft can teach a gamer how to be good follower, a good leader and develop positive relationships because of the social interaction available in today's gaming world.

Video games have long been thought of as distractions to work and education rather than aids.

But there is a growing school of thought that says game playing in moderation and in your free time can make you more productive and successful in your career.

In our daily lives, we will encounter challenges that we learn something from. Video games can also present players with unexpected challenges.

Gamers learn to respond to, and even seek out, new challenges in order to progress. They also learn to improvise and are thus more likely to be able to solve real life problems creatively when there is no solution to be found in a manual.

Video games can train you to manage and organise high volumes of information.

Elliot Noss, chief executive of domain name provider Tucows, says spending some time playing World of Warcraft helped him become a better leader.

One of my favorite quotes from World of Warcraft is "Always take things in moderation, even World of Warcraft".