I've used Flash a little, and I've done a whole lot with Director. So how tought could it be to learn how to put a sound on the web using Flash?

A quick Google and I found that the Adobe website has a great little tutorial on how to make a Flash movie that plays a sound. You import  the movie via Dreamweaver and use a Behavior to trigger the sound when you click on a link. Exactly what I was looking for! Looked like it would take about 10 minutes.

As you imagined, 45 minutes later I was muttering under my breath and still not hearing any sound from the Flash movie you see at the left. I'm sure it's some perfectly obvious small error I've made, but I've been back over the tutorial four times now and I can't find what the problem is. Grrr....

Newspaper info-graphics made webby

Show above is a great use of information design by the New York Times. This chart from Jan. 23, 2006 lets you compare G.W. Bush's State of the Union addresses from 2001-2007. The red bars at left in “thumbnail” versions of each year's speech show exactly where the chosen word appears. The circles on the right vary in size to indicate how many times that word was used.

This info-graphic lets the reader/viewer see the facts quickly. Unfortunately it only shows a few words chosen by the author/editor of the article. In the print version of the Times you have to live with this limitation. Here's where webbiness comes to the rescue.

I'm not sure where I first heard the term, but webby is a quick way of describing something that can only be done on the Web (or other electronic interactive media). In this case the graph is not simply a static graphic—it's an interactive tool that allows  you to search for any word you're interested in and see the results for yourself. The newspaper gives you the power to explore seven speeches (34,000 words) using this tool.

Kind of amazing, yet I suspect that a few years from now this will be standard fare. In fact, I'm pretty sure we're just scratching the surface of webbiness.

What's your favorite example of webbiness?