New Olympic logo animation a cause for seizures

The unveiling of the garish 2012 Olympic logo and its supporting site has caused quite a brouhaha in its host country of England. The vast majority of objections are to the logo’s appearance, which is more a matter of taste. But one objection — which is a first in my experience — came from those evaluating the online animation that was created to announce the logo’s unveiling. A portion of this animation was quickly pulled because of its ability to trigger seizures in people with epilepsy. As humorist Dave Barry likes to say, I’m not making this up.

2012 Olympic LogoI have to say this adds another level of complexity to the design of online media. They should now, wherever possible, comply with ADA standards, but also not trigger seizures.

By pulling the animation immediately the 2012 Olympic committee has done the right thing for epileptics. On the other hand, for purely aesthetic reasons, I see much more public foaming at the mouth in this logo’s future.

StumbleUpon buy begs this question: What’s he building in there?

As you are almost certainly aware, the large media and internet firms have lately been on a buying spree. This week news came of one more acquisition: StumbleUpon, to be purchased by eBay. Tom Waits recorded a spooky little ditty (made even more creepy by the video), called What’s He Building? In this spoken word song, the narrator wonders aloud what his loner neighbor is building in his basement. Well, I’m feeling a lot like that guy, scratching my head and wondering what strategic purpose eBay would have with this social bookmarking site.

With 2.5 million registered users, StumbleUpon behaves somewhat like a search engine. It recommends various categories of sites based on the votes of its members. In this way it uses the collective intelligence of a network of backlinks, in the same way that Google made famous. Instead of clicking on a link that states “I’m feeling lucky,” you press a Stumble! button on your specialized browser toolbar, and a new, fun site is served up for a category you enjoy.

The odds that you’ll like the recommended site are quite high, since your peers have already given it hundreds of “thumb’s ups.” You can add your own Thumb’s Up/Thumb’s Down to refine future recommendations, ala Pandora.com (a song recommendation site which, coincidentally, is a perennial favorite that StumbleUpon recommends to anyone saying they like “Music”).

Wait a minute. What did I just say? Toolbar. Google. Just yesterday a friend was wondering if Google would find its share of users eroding because it introduced Personalized Search. That’s a way that Google uses information gleaned from its toolbar and other sources to customize search results. My friend suggested that Personalized Search’s results will often miss the context of a person’s search. After all, when we go home at night we search on very different things, and for very different reasons — than during our workday. So will there be an opportunity for other search innovation to capture some of Google’s share?

True, three years ago eBay launched A9, a search engine in the stricter sense of the word than StumbleUpon ever will be. But maybe eBay is hoping to bolster A9 with a more social mechanism, to make it some sort of social bookmarking mega-search. Or perhaps they’ll try to combine StumbleUpon with another acquisition: CraigsList.org.

I’m baffled. Maybe you can help. “What’s he building in there?”