Hello leading websites (except MSN, of course). Get a clue. NOW is the time to start encouraging your users to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. Where are the ‘Get Firefox Now’ buttons on your homepages? Where’s the customized Firefox browsers? Come on!!

Why aren’t Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, Ebay, et al. doing this? I donno. I guess they must really like having Microsoft control the key piece of Internet client software.

In a perfect world, these companies would get together and start creating some more mind share for Firefox — especially in the minds of the general public. How about a big PR event announcing their ‘partnership’ to promote Firefox? How about each company kicking in some bucks to buy some advertising talking about the benefits of Firefox? How about a ‘Download Firefox’ day where each site dedicates a big chunk of their homepage to encourage downloads?

Do the math. Longhorn isn’t shipping for years, Bill Gates is scared and Firefox has momentum. If Microsoft maintains its hegemony in browser share, you know who to blame.

Deeeaaamn, I hate it when you go to a site like Yahoo! Finance, and they don’t have the default focus of the cursor set to the search box… you know, like when you go to Google and you don’t have to mouse to the search box, you can just start typing your query. Ironically, it works on Yahoo!’s home page.

Who’s in charge of sites like finance.yahoo.com? Do they think that by not setting the cursor, that I am more likely to look at the ads? I’ll look at the ads if they interest me, thank you, regardless of where the cursor is. Or perhaps — worse yet — do they just not Get It?

Yahoo!, if you are going to have a stand-alone site like finance.yahoo.com — which represents an important sub-brand — then make it work right, or you’re just wrecking your brand.

The New York Times today has a piece on WalMart’s in-store TV service (a.k.a., WMTV). Here’s some food for thought from the article:

According to Wal-Mart and to an agency that handles its ad sales, the TV operation captures some 130 million viewers every four weeks, making it the fifth-largest television network in the United States after NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox.

That’s a lot of viewers, which translates into some advertising nice profits for WalMart.

According to Wal-Mart’s rate card, advertisers pay $137,000 to $292,000 to show a single commercial for a four-week period, depending on the length of the ad and the number of stores where it is shown.

However, as Phil Lempert, editor of Xtreme Retail 23, an industry newsletter, notes that just because you have a huge number of customers (i.e., “viewers”), it doesn’t necessarily mean they are paying attention to the programming. The article goes on to talk about how WalMart is upgrading its old-school monitors to 42” plasma screens. Some interesting reading.

I did a little A9ing/Yahooing/Googleing on the web, and found that PRN is the company that creates (or helps create) the in-store network for WalMart (it’s interesting that the NYTs didn’t mention this in their article). According to an old Forbes article PRN started out as music-sampling kiosk distributor. PRN’s current customers include Best Buy, Costco, Sears, Circuit City and Ralphs among others.

This is a link to a two-page PDF that gives an overview of WMTV, and this (warning, 57Mb file) is a link to a MPG file that gives an overview of PRN’s services and finally some statistics from PRN’s site on WMTV:

PRN’s network operates in 2,650+ Wal-Mart Stores

* World’s largest retailer offering a wide variety of general merchandise at everyday low prices
* $158.5 billion annual sales
* 84.1 million shoppers per week

I remember a few years ago that this gas station near where I used to live had several monitors blaring out CNN or something to ‘entertain’ the customers when pumping gas. I found them annoying, so general avoided that establishment. I haven’t been in a WalMart lately to view their media offering, but it would be interesting to see how it all works… definitely some powerful marketing lessons to be learned.

Funny, going to WalMart to watch TV.

P.S. I doubt this would work at your local WalMart.

I found this on a random link on del.icio.us. If you input your user name, it will generate a bookmarklet that greatly improves on del.icio.us’ bookmarklets. It adds a list of your existing tags and some recommended tags to the pop-up ‘add to del.icio.us’ interface.

Click on the thumbnail below to see what this improved interface looks like.

It’s nice to have a list of all of your tags when added a new site. You can also click on a tag in the interface window, and it will add that tag to the new bookmark’s tag list. The site says that it’s experimental, but it seems to work. Sweetness.

Today’s digital camera’s dynamic range is comparable to slide film or about five F stops. Over at Liminous-Landscape, they discuss dynamic range as follows in their Understanding Histograms tutorial.

The digital imaging chip in your camera is very similar to colour transparency film when it comes to its sensitivity to light.

Like slide film, if a part of the image receives too much light it becomes burned out, and if too little light it is rendered as black. A recognizable image is only recorded if the light hitting the chip falls within a range of about 5 F stops. (Remember — each F stop is a doubling or halving of the amount of light hitting the film). With digital things are much the same and even the dynamic range is about the same as for slide film; about 5 stops. Also keep in mind that the total range of brightness values encountered in the real world is only about 10 stops — from the dimmest light that you can read in to the brightest beach or snow scene in which you might find yourself).

With a potential of 10 F stops of light information and shooting with a camera that can only interpret five F stops means that a lot of shots will have areas that are either under or over exposed. There are ways to get around this problem using flashes or split neutral-density filters, but these methods have their limitations.

Another way to increase the effective dynamic range of a camera is to shoot two or more shots of the same scene, and blend them in Photoshop. This technique works well of a lot of situations, but is rather tedious. Luminous-Landscape has a tutorial called Blended Exposures that walks through this process.

Potentially even better (or at least faster), is to use Photomatix software to blend exposures automatically — and for free (Photomatix Basic). I’ve yet to try out Photomatix, but some of the examples on their site look promising. I’m looking forward to trying this software out.