A new website has launched called WeVee with the aim of opening up West Midlands based archive footage.

You can edit clips together through the sites interface to create your own "WeVee's", this one is a nice example showing the changes in transport over the region:

Pros: Great tool for school kids, nice simple editing tools.

Cons: No easy way to download clips to edit offline.

Full press release below:

"WeVee is a new unique, online tool.  It gives anyone the chance to view clips from the region’s fantastic archive collections of film and video, edit them to music tracks and make a short ‘mash-up’ (two and a half minutes max) as your personal take on the region’s history.  Try out different effects by mixing the original sound of your selected clips to music.

This approach deliberately uses the latest digital technology as an incentive for the next generation to explore their region’s history.  And that history will reflect the different communities, as well as the struggles and successes the region has experienced. The beauty of WeVee, thanks to our region’s archive holders, is the richness of the moving image archive.  There is footage from as early as 1901 and as recent as just five years ago, so you can put quite different clips together, add a music track and effects and create your own WeVee.  Initial trials have shown the process has a very personal appeal for children, students, parents and silver surfers, because you can use WeVee to say something about yourself, your home and locality and reference past events that mean something for you today. 

The ease with which you can WeVee means you can have fun as you create and save, create and change, create and delete while playing with moving images from the past. It’s fun to WeVee, and at the same time it gives you a truly unique opportunity to marvel at how the region has been captured on camera.  Cadbury’s have generously made some of their previously unseen archive available for the site. Other archive includes footage from the Staffordshire Film Archive collection accessing the heritage of the potteries and the Midlands Archive for Central England.

WeVee’s official launch is in January 2010.  At this stage you’ll be able to share your WeVees, not just on the WeVee Gallery but across social networking sites. 

In the meantime you can visit our website www.wevee.co.uk to register for updates and follow us on Twitter www.twitter.com/weveecreate

The project is supported through Screen West Midlands’ Digital Film Archive Fund with support from the National Lottery through the UK Film Council."

Google will be phasing out support for Microsofts eight year old browser starting in March. This is great news for anyone who has to develop for IE6 and for users who haven't found the benefits of a modern browser.

You can sign an online petition on the number 10 website to force the Government to phase out IE6 in its departments.

Full details from Google:

"In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team"

Just a quick update this week as I've been busy working on my book. I've launched a new website that has all the best deals from Argos.

www.argosdeals.co.uk

Check it out for some great offers.

Cinema chain Cineworld have put in some serious work into their mobile site over the past few months concentrating heavily on exploiting latest technology to improve usability.

The updated site fits nicely on the iPhone screen, automatically finds your local cinema and suggests others nearby.

After selecting a film you can click on a time to book tickets through the mobile site.

The improvement in using the mobile site over the normal site on the iPhone is huge and finding film times for your local cinema is much faster.

I took this tonight at sunset from my back garden.

Part 2 of our best motivational posters series. Read part 1 here.

Taken from my gym and fixed: