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I ran across a couple of really interesting sites today while on a search for a new alarm clock. They make generally dull clocks/calendar applications from a pure functional tool and turn them into social activities. As odd as it may sound, Human Clock is basically a photo repository where people submit pictures of themselves or photos they take of a time during the day. Think of it like Flickr on a scavenger hunt. The cool (and possibility annoying) part of this application is that you don’t just get the time by glancing at a clock, but you have to search for it in the picture. Even better, those not in the know will be puzzled at why you have a gallery of random pictures (scores, addresses, product names etc) flashing on your screen.

The sister site to Human Clock is Human Calendar. Because its development only started after the clock was released, it doesn’t seem to have the same polished look or social popularity. Also, the photos in the calendar seem a bit more complex than just someone holding up a sign for 9:59PM. At first glance, I didn’t appreciate the full interactivity of the heads in the month, but if you tweak with it a little bit — change the week to start on a Monday vs Sunday or change the timezone — you’ll really begin to see how much coordination it took to put it together. Craig Giffen did a great job on both sites!

In these times of online ad media spend continuing to increase (projected to reach $70B by 2010), it may sound absurd to diminish the value of page views. However, with the growth in popularity of AJAX & Javascript, user generated content and advances in dependable CPA/CPL based advertising, I believe page views as a metric has less and less value. If you think about it, sites using a large amount of AJAX for navigation don’t really generate a new page, unless they really want to. Sites depending on User Generated Content run into the reverse problem, with users who contribute content artificially inflating the PPV number. Finally, as the industry gets closer to precise tracking for CPA campaigns, the ad impression count will really be used to gauge success versus another ad network. (more…)

I noticed today that Google changed their favicon. It used to be a green capital G on a white background, and now it’s a lowercase blue g on a gradient gray background. Could this mean a bigger design change for Google? For what it’s worth, I liked the old clean and simple icon better, but let me know what you think.

Classic G:

New Coke g:

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In related news, I need a favicon too.