You may have heard of a similar concept with yearbookyourself.com where you can create your own yearbook photos with all sorts of hairstyles from different eras? Well this website works off a similar concept, except you can put your face on billboards, bus advertisements and other fascinating places.

Photofunia got me thinking…. If someone came up to me and told me I could make any advertisement/publishing I wanted and they would pay for it, what would I do?

Well first and foremost, I would put my ongoing idea of cat-books into action. These books would provide a series of interesting things for cats to view at their pleasure. My first book would educate cats on “The 10 most entertaining characters in the 1990s”:

Then I would provide some public announcements in order to help the community and do my part for society.

Queensland is a great place and factually better than all other states in Australia according to the internet but we still have minor issues. One minor issue is Queensland public transport. The bus way is a great concept if there were actual buses and they weren’t driven by misanthropic people with no common sense (of course this is a stereotype and the bus driver you‘re friends with or related to does not fall under this category). Anyway… to lower the expectations of outsiders and ease any frustration of people who are using the bus system for the very first time, I would like to make a sign like this one:

I have seen a few building construction sites come up in Brisbane recently. The trend seems to be that people don’t like new buildings. They always have something to say about it… “oh it’s blocking my view” etc. I have also noticed that people in the CBD are usually in a rush and have serious faces on all the time. Just because you’re in the business district doesn’t mean you have to keep a business face on! So with that in mind and the fact that most new buildings are often located in the CBD I would like to have a banner like this one:

I found myself sitting next to my father (the Issmeister), helping him out with looking for some cars on carsales.com.au. I was astonished at how incompetent he was in actually navigating around this website. He firstly had no idea how to fill out a form with more than a single field. Eventually with some aid I made him fill out the fields and walked off. I came back and found him still sitting at the form all filled but looking for a button to click to submit the form. I stood there behind him in utter disbelief as his mouse cursor hovered over the ‘Search Now’ button several times until he eventually went to the top-right corner of the window and just closed the browser. My Dad loves buying and selling cars and I’m sure there are copious amounts of Issmeisters with the same ability in using computers and the same love for cars. Let’s pigeonhole them and say that carsales.com.au lose all this demographic because they can’t use the website properly. When we see this:

Carsales.com.au as we see it

The Issmeister sees this:

The Issmeister is fine with using Google, and reading news articles but as soon as there is too much stimulus on the screen, his eyes totally fail him. It occurred to me though, after surfing millions of websites which all follow these best practices, you become accustomed as to what to expect on a site and can therefore distinguish a button from an image, or a form field from a bordered box…..but there are those who are new to the internet like Issmeister that just have no clue.

Now I’m not saying it would be a valid option for all websites but adding a bit more accessibility for websites with demographics such as old folk, outback farmers etc. would surely be appreciated. One of the methods I thought of was to provide an opening dialogue for those sites…

Intro dialog box

This page will take out any styling which may confuse our most basic internet users. If nothing is done over the span of 1 minute on this first introductory page the site will load at its highest accessibility level:

Basic styling and overload of aids

The same principle is used on this page. Very basic, making sure the buttons have been highlighted in colour and helpful text with arrows.

Same thing...

Instead of overwhelming a simple user with more than one form field at a time, break it up so they only have to read a short sentence and answer one question before looking for a button.

Don't present too much information on the site. This confuses him

Even though these users don’t like a lot of text on screen, they are more than capable of reading large volumes of text in email. This is where the site should provide larger packets of information.

Now I showed my idea to the Issmeister and he said… “See, now that I can use!” He is wondering why all sites aren’t catered to him in this way. I’m thinking if carsales.com.au worked in such fashion, the Issmeister would be their number one customer.

Who wants to help me make websites like this?

Before I start with that I would just like to go off on a tangent and mention how easy it is to create a personal blog. It took me roughly 1 hour and 30 minutes from purchasing a domain to installing word press and blogging away. It was incredible.

Ok so let’s move on to the really educational stuff (not really). I have been thinking about how the internet liberates me in ways I never thought possible. Back in the day as a child in order to express myself I would have to use my outside voice to get my point across in a family of five. Now we have this amazing thing called the internet that lets me broadcast whatever the hell I want and potentially billions can read it. I then thought about the reason why I spend so much time on the internet and I realised it’s not just all about the interesting content out there. It’s the fact that when I’m surfing the net I have virtually no governance from others and I’m basically cut off from any kind of political control….and I really hate politics. This is where the real feeling of freedom kicks in for me.

I then thought about it a little further (yes I have way too much time on my hands at the moment) and became conscious of the fact that the only reason our internet is so liberated is because of our great Nation’s democracy. We are in fact a lucky country. While we complain about the government as they put fluoride in our water or protest the hogwash fact that recycled water is icky there are countries out there which arrest bloggers for having a point of view.

Accurate illustration of freedom levels

I then had a quick look at the great Wikipedia about internet filters and which countries use them. I found an amazing trend (haha it’s not amazing in the slightest) which I have thoughtfully placed in an extremely legible graph for you:

Although my graph was hand drawn in paint, a trend is evident here. More political control leads to more restrictions on the internet. Why? Because the only way to act out against a government is to create a following and what better way to create a following than to use the internet.

I have placed Australia under mild filtering. Now some will say that’s not right, Australia has no filtering. This is somewhat true. We have restrictions on hosting hardcore pornography but that’s about it. We are for the most part a working democracy but we take a look at the other countries which have a hard time trying to use google without breaking a sweat and see how fortunate we are. Saudi Arabia filters immoral content in general and even has a security committee that can block whatever the country’s internet users can see. Moving up on the graph and we have South Korea who actually censor and delete blog posts which criticize the government in any way. Then we have Iran….Iran is a lovely country, but seriously I would crawl up into a ball and die if I had to live there with their internet laws. Iran has actually arrested bloggers for expressing their opinion. They also block women’s rights websites, weblogs and online magazines. This is an outrage…ladies I’m all about women’s rights but their most ambitious block is youtube. Who the hell blocks youtube?

Anyway that’s enough ranting for one day. Stay tuned for more mediocre blog posts from me and make sure you look at the “drunkie pants” category once it shows up. I am full of epiphanies once inebriated; I just haven’t had a chance to be so yet.