How I know the economy is in bad shape...

Edit: Have been too busy these past coupla' days to do a proper cerebral post, so bear with me on a coupla' brainless ones first.

So back to the post, this is the effect of the recession on Mamee:

Outside:



Inside:



I know, I was surprised too.

Toilet humour

Most of Malaysia's best jokes can be found in our lavatories.

Needed: Photo-tags standard in EXIF?

Was having a discussion with some techno-nerds yesterday about photo management. Yes, we all know, it's pretty painful.

My ideal photo management system would be to have all the tags stored in the picture file's EXIF data so that I can easily transport photos and not have to re-tag them in each device / service.



For example, take the picture above. If I had tagged it "bird", "parrot", "Wildlife" in Flickr and then moved it to ShareOnOvi, I'd have to retag it again. Similarly, while Windows Vista lets you tag photos, it loses all its tags once you moved it to an online service. Now, even the new Symbian S60 3 FP2 devices allow you to tag photos which can then be searched in-device. But all that is lost once you've saved those pictures to your Vista PC.

[Okay, for the unsavvy, a tag is essentially a word / category you can associate with a file (not necessarily a picture) that will help make searching for the file easier. So, if I tagged the picture above "bird", the next time I or someone else searches for "bird", this picture will come up.]

With devices becoming so connected, and content often stored on the "Cloud", what would really work is to have tags stored within the EXIF data of each picture file. This is similar to the idea of ID3 tags that audio files get. This way, no matter where I push, import or move the file, I can easily search for it using the same familiar tags I use, and without having to re-enter all those tags again.

What do you think? Will a smart company out there start working on this (if you haven't already?)

Monday suggestion: Better cookie management for future browsers?

Good morning, it's Monday! I know I've been away for a week (or more) so first, let me apologise, because things have been really busy between work and church (upcoming Song Festival 6!) so I have had nary a chance to blog, much less draw comics.

Cookie image taken from: http://trashmenagerie.com/images/CCC/Cookie.jpg

Coming back to the topic of this post; I was fiddling with browser settings on my Eee PC when it hit me that I could no longer turn off the "block ALL cookies" option with the impunity I had 10 years ago. Yes, we all know that cookies (not the pastry kind) can do all kinds of awesome stuff like track all your activity on the internet, and leave you open to hackery and password-theft. But we've also come to be reliant on cookies to help us get past signing in to 20 different services everytime we log on.

So on one hand, I'm struggling with leaving it on to protect my privacy, and on the other, I'm missing the convenience. Dont' tell me about 'exceptions' because with the various cookies from each site (take yahoo.com, for example) making the domain an exception will allow both a tracking cookie and one that lets you save your login.

What we need is (and I'm just suggesting this with totally no programmer nous at all) a better way of managing cookies.

Let's start with categories of cookies -we could tag each cookie as "password-remembering". "auto-login", "track all the sites I've been to" or "session-authenticating". This then allows us to setup filters where in my browser I could then say: "yeah, I'd like to have my passwords remembered at all these sites, but i don't want any tracking cookies on my computer." Simply deselecting the categories of cookies enabled will let us get the kind of behaviour we want from our web-browsing experience.

Of course, we could then add exceptions to sites - like I only want password-remembering on Blogger, Flickr, Ovi, Technorati, Digg and Delicious.

And maybe throw-in a nice GUI in the process.

Say hello to Singapore's newest PR / Digital media outfit

Got word this morning that my ex-colleague Karen Ho has just gone and started her new PR outfit, together with (surprise, surprise) my other ex-colleague Gavin Foo.



I must say Karen's face looks smoother than I remember :p! Check out the website here.

Two-cents worth: I think XPR is headed in the right direction and the focus on tech / digital media underlines what I see as the transformation of the industry as it adapts to the new ways people get their information, and more importantly, start conversations. The future looks bright.