I’m still trying to wrap my head around Twitter and why I find it so fascinating, but I definitely have a new term for it: microblogging.

If you put SMS, IM, and blogs into a “Will it Blend” commercial, I think Twitter is the result.

I believe you’ll see me post less “small” things on this blog and more “articles” while I move the other stuff to Twitter. It’s so fun to just whip off a one-liner about something I’m reading, or learned, or thinking about… Very addicting.

Oh, and Twitterific rocks.

Come say hello.

I met Evan Williams a few months ago at Web 2.0 Expo and told him I thought he’d done a brave and awesome thing by buying back his company, Obvious, and taking control of the direction it was heading.

Today, I finally bit the bullet and tried out his latest product, Twitter, and I’m afraid to say that I may be hooked. So if a SmugMug feature is delayed, you can blame Evan.

The crazy thing is that Twitter seems sorta useless and meaningless when you first glance at it. I know I did, since I checked it out on the day it was announced. I didn’t even bother signing up, I’m afraid.

But Scoble’s been preaching the Twitter gospel a lot lately, so I took the plunge today. It’s a blast. It’s sorta like IRC-to-the-world or something, and it’s clearly going to waste a lot of my time. But oh well - it’s fun.

Oh, and you’ll likely get sneak peaks of what I’m working on there, too. So if you wanna peek, better stop in.

Cya there - here’s my profile.

One of the things I love most about the Internet is the way jaw-dropping photos bubble up on sites like Flickr, PBase, Zooomr, and SmugMug.

We sponsor an independent site for the love of photography called Digital Grin where people with photo lust indulge their passions. It’s truly photo-sharing site agnostic - we don’t care if you use PBase, Flickr, Zooomr, or anyone else. We do it because we love photography, and if you do too, you’re more than welcome.

Over time, the Digital Grin community has started hosting photo contests where photographers from all over the world have entered spectacular photos for all kinds of reasons: prizes, exposure, critiques, etc….

So this year they’ve upped the ante American Idol-style, where the best of the Internet face off until a new supreme god of photography is anointed and grabs some major prize love. The total prize pot is $25K.

Got a great shot or know someone who does? The world is waiting.

My programmer personality type is: DHSC:

You’re a Doer.

You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a High level.

The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.

You work best in a Solo situation.

The best way to program is by yourself. There’s no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a Conservative programmer.

The less code you write, the less chance there is of it containing a bug. You write short and to the point code that gets the job done efficiently.

Man, I love the company we’ve built!

We had a bunch of SmugMuggers in from out-of-town this week and, being a fun-loving photography company, we had to get some shots of our employees. Since our Help Desk is manned by Support Heroes, we thought a Super Hero theme would be appropriate.

I’m blue-and-gold Wolverine, above, with my co-founder and father Chris MacAskill as J’onn J’onnz aka Martian Manhunter. Last night four of us even showed up at the YUI party at Yahoo’s HQ with our faces still on. It was a blast - congrats to YUI on their first year!

Below, you can see the half of the company that was in Silicon Valley this week. Can you name each hero?

Lots more shots, including close-up portraits, in the gallery.

Neat, this got dugg. Go give it some love.

I’ve known the answer to this one my whole life, but at least we know the test is accurate.

I wonder how she feels about Lex Luthor or Green Lantern?

Why the web can look wonky on a Mac by Chris MacAskill, President of SmugMug

The PC is a soldier. When Direktor Gates demands color #e3823c, PC responds “Sir, Yes Sir!!” Color #e3823c looks identical on the PC whether it’s in a JPEG, GIF, PNG, CSS, or HTML.

The only colors Direktor Gates tolerates are found in the box of crayons called sRGB. Internet standards like HTML, CSS and Flash march in step with the same colors.

The Mac Thinks Different. Color #e3823c is different on Macs. Except sometimes*.

If you have a Mac with Safari, check out this wonkiness (if you don’t, here’s a screen shot). Now check the page with Firefox. It looks completely different than it does in Safari, and different from Firefox and Internet Explorer on the PC.

Why this is a big deal:

Most people don’t have light-controlled rooms with color-calibrated monitors. I don’t, and you probably don’t, either. Almost everyone will see your photos slightly differently than the next person. We’re not talking about perfect color precision here, because on the net, that’s an impossibility.

What *is* important, though, is for your photo to match the rest of the page. If you’ve selected a background on a PC to match the blue in your subject’s eyes, you don’t want background and eyes to be mismatched on a Mac. Or your photo to look different in some Mac web browsers than it does in Photoshop.

Yet this is exactly what’s happening. And the fix is simple.

Demystifying the wonk:

#1: Macs ship with a display gamma of 1.8. The word gamma was probably chosen to make it sound like nuclear physics, but it’s fairly simple. It’s a setting, like brightness or contrast, that adjusts your image. Halfway between black & white (midtones) the changes are greatest; they change less as the colors get darker or lighter.

If you’re a mime with white makeup and black clothes, photos of you on the Internet will look similar on Macs and PCs. But if you’re gorgeously mid-toned, you’ll lose some of your tan on a Mac. Except sometimes*.

Internet standards, including HTML, CSS, and Flash, are based on a gamma of 2.2, making colors partway between black & white appear darker and higher contrast than 1.8 gamma makes them appear. Examples.

#2: Some Mac browsers (IE, Safari and Omniweb) go part way in preserving the artist’s intent: if you know what an ICC profile is, you can attach it to your photo and the Mac will render your photo with a gamma of 2.2. Then it will look like it does in Photoshop on your Mac, or on the Internet on PCs.

There are three problems:

• Safari still won’t know to adjust the rest of the page, such as borders drawn in CSS or background colors specified in HTML, leaving you with color mismatches like you saw on the wonkiness page.
• Other Mac browsers like Camino, Opera and Firefox don’t know for ICC profiles. The good news is they don’t get color mismatches. The bad news is nothing on the page matches your intent. (Except sometimes*.)
• Very few photos on the web have ICC profiles because they slow down browsing, especially on thumbnail-sized images. In this case, Safari doesn’t render them with a gamma of 2.2 unless your monitor is set to 2.2.

#3: PNG images have their own issues with Safari, unless they’re specially prepared, as you saw near the bottom of the wonkiness page. Read it and weep.

What’s this ‘except sometimes’?

If your Mac’s gamma is already at 2.2, you’re golden. Unfortunately, this is rare. Macs ship with a default gamma of 1.8, even though Apple recommends you and your friends change your gamma to 2.2. Here’s what they say:

If you calibrate your monitor with a Huey, for example, you’ll be asked what you do with your Mac. If you answer photo editing and web surfing, it will quietly set your gamma to 2.2 to make web pages match the artists intent. The good news: theoretically, now web pages look the same in Firefox & Safari — and on the PC. Photos look the same as they do in Photoshop. And in print. Color mismatches disappear.

In practice, devices like the Huey are not 100% accurate and the calibration they provide is influenced by the room’s lighting. So if you’re using Safari, you’ll probably notice that color mismatches will be reduced but not gone on the wonkiness page.

If you want to see almost no mismatches on the wonkiness page, go to Apple > System Preferences > Displays > Color > and pick sRGB IEC61966-2.1. Then quit Safari and restart it. Now everything should be as it is on a PC except the PNG may not match perfectly. It will match in Firefox.

What would Photoshop do?

If your monitor is set to the factory default, Photoshop is between a rock and hard place. It knows to display your photo with a gamma of 2.2 because it’s smart. But how should it preview your photo when you choose Save for Web? It has no idea. Will you be viewing your photo in Firefox or Safari? Will you be seeing it with an ICC profile or without? On a Mac or PC? It can’t know.

So by default it plays the odds and takes its chances: you’ll probably end up viewing it on a Mac and since few photos on the web have ICC profiles, it shoots the crap and renders the photo the way your monitor is set, with a gamma of 1.8. Tens of thousands of photographers are tormented by the shift in color they see between an open photo in Photoshop and the save for web preview they see of the same photo right beside it, and they wonder why Photoshop is so wonky.

If you set your monitor to sRGB IEC61966-2.1, that color shift goes away.

What should Steve do?

It seems to me…that artists and photographers want their admirers to see the web the way they intended, which they would if Mac browsers used a gamma of 2.2 for everything on the page.

I worked for Steve’s company in the NeXT days so I can understand the dilemma. High-end publishers standardized on 1.8 gamma before consumers seized the web. But publishers understand words like gamma, ICC profiles, and calibration. Try saying gamma to a consumer. They just want the web to look right.

As it is, companies like Pantone are deciding for Steve to set the gamma at 2.2 with their Hueys. Except sometimes*.

And let’s not forget that Apple already recommends changing the gamma to 2.2 after you buy your Mac.

Why not ship OS X with gamma at 2.2 and say farewell, wonkiness?

UPDATE: The story gets worse. Turns out the right sRGB profile isn’t included by default on the Mac, so you can’t fix things yourself without some outside help. Photoshop installs it for you automatically, as do some other apps. You can download the right profile here and stick it in /Library/ColorSync/Profiles yourself to fix things up.

If anyone from Google is reading this, please, hear my plea!

I, like many people, have more than one email address. One for work, one for home. It’s nice to keep them separate. I’m sure you know what I mean.

I also like to use Google’s services, such as Calendar or Docs. Since I use multiple computers, it’s nice to have stuff centralized out on the net. I’ve wanted this for decades.

But my friends & co-workers don’t always know which email address to send meeting invitations or document permissions to. So I get a Calendar invite or a Docs link, and click on it, and I’m greeted with “Sorry, you don’t have permission to use this.” WTF? I clicked on the unique link in my email, and I’m already logged into Google, what do you mean I don’t have access? Oh, duh, they used my personal email address instead of my work email address. Crap.

So I’m left with two choices: Just not interact with Google on this particular event or document (most likely) or email the party back and ask them to resend (least likely).

Please, Google, let me add email aliases (yes, verify that I actually own them first) to my Google Account so all your services will recognize me from my multiple email addresses. Pretty please? With a cherry on top?

Oh, and it’d be nice if our years-old application to Google Apps for Your Domain was accepted too, but that seems to have gone into the void. Doh.

Fantastic web marketing. Bruce Campbell is still my hero. Easily the funniest “online test” I’ve ever taken, complete with references to everything from DOOM to Jimmy Wales.

Man, I wish I was smart enough to come up with something this clever.

I’ll make this short and sweet: A ton of great people from lots of great companies teamed up and managed to get satellite and aircraft imagery up on Amazon so that you, and everyone you know, can quickly and easily help sift through and help in the search.

You can help find Jim Gray. Go now.

You can also read more here if you’re curious about the heroic efforts behind this part of the search.