Nowadays, more individuals than ever are publishing personal content online. User generated content seems to be taking over the Web with services which allow people to set up their own pages, spaces, blogs and mashups without having to deal with a lot of code. Still, there are plenty of folks taking the hands-on approach for complete control of their subject matter. In any case, the Web is an environment very much shared by commercial entities and developers, and by individuals publishing content pertaining to their personal interests.

Things will probably be much the same in the frogansphere of the Internet. While Frogans technology opens up plenty of opportunities for enterprises, the door is also wide open for people who want to express their personal interests, in much the same way as it has been with the Web, but in that ever-so-enticing frogans way.

The nature of your frogans is likely to be determined not only by what you wish to express, but also by the technical hurdles that you choose to jump or avoid.

Regardless of your approach, you’ll always start at the same place: with the registration of a frogans address (ex: “frogans*myname”). Frogans can only be viewed using the Frogans Player, which opens a frogans only by its frogans address. In your frogans address settings, which you can modify at any time, you indicate the Internet location of your frogans root directory, which is where the files that make up your frogans are stored (ex”http://www.myhost.com/mydirectory/”).

The table below shows three levels of complexity for authoring frogans and hosting them on the Internet, where A represents the most basic, hands-on, most technically challenging approach, and C the most passive, worry-free method.

A For those who are comfortable with hand-coding, dealing with Internet hosting services, and who insist on having maximum creative leeway, they can author their frogans from scratch, using image processing software such as Photoshop or Gimp, and hand-coding their documents in the Frogans Slide Description Language (FSDL). They’ll upload their files themselves by FTP or SCP to their frogans root directory, at the Internet location that they’d indicated in their frogans address settings.

B With a little bit of patience these same people might wait for an offline WYSIWYG desktop FSDL authoring tool to show up. I know of one already that is under development, and I’d encourage all able developers to consider giving it a go (and to contact me for additional support if you’re interested). They’d still have to deal with uploading to their host’s server by FTP or SCP, but it’s not the trickiest part.

C With an online authoring service for creating frogans easily online, many hosting services could happily propose it to their clients. For instance, in their frogans address settings, the client indicates that their frogans root directory is on that host’s server. With all of the elements under one roof the hosting service can provide a user interface for authoring a frogans, as well as handling all the necessary file management. Even if the application didn’t offer all of the creative possibilities that one could have in hand-coding, it would sure be nice to author and publish a frogans straight from the web browser.

A service that will fall under this third category is under development at STG Interactive. The idea is to make it easy for anybody to publish a simple frogans right away while leaving the door open for them move on to other hosts and publishing methods if they like. Frogans will be created and customized from pre-existing templates. While the options will be limited (eg.: limits on the number of slides, links, images and themes), the results will be quick. And aside from the frogans address registration fee, the service and hosting will be free of charge.

Something that the social web is proving is that a great number of us have plenty of things to say, whether it’s about our interests, hobbies, work, schools, friends, or just about ourselves. And we’re continually open to finding a better medium for saying them. If it weren’t for that blasted learning curve!

This is my first day back from two weeks in the countryside, and since I’m easing my way back into city life and the issues surrounding Frogans technology, I’m going to ease into a pertinent frogans-related subject with a real-life example:

The city of Paris added a new wing, or wheel, to their public transportation service recently: municipal bicycles. This makes sense in a city like Paris where distances are short, destinations are plenty, and rush-hour traffic is an horreur.

The bikes are stationed at, well, at bike stations. Each bike is secured to a post by an electronically-controlled lock. It would take either a welding torch or the jaws of life to steal a bike, which would be hardly worth the bother given that each one is equipped with GPS, and that they’re far too ungainly to be considered a status symbol. Each station is equipped with a kiosk at which you make your transaction and choose a bike. Each kiosk has a display monitor and a numbered keypad, and that’s where the trouble begins.

For procuring a bike, the monitor is your user interface, and the keypad is your input device. Every option presented on the screen is accompanied by a numbered icon which bears a striking resemblance to its corresponding key on the keypad below. But instead of going to the keypad, aspiring bikers apparently prefer to touch the icon on the display. When nothing happens, many give up and take the Metro.

This almost happened to me before it dawned on me that the keypad below might have other functions than just taking my credit card’s PIN number. Getting past that I was free to struggle through an unintuitive maze of instructions that followed. This quickly attracted an audience of frustrated pedestrians, generally over 50, eager to see how I cracked the enigma. Indiana Jones and Temple of Vroom.

“Oh, you touch the keypad.” And there I go explaining in my awkward French all the little steps that only make sense to those too young to remember the rotary dial. I should have kept my mouth shut. This insane user interface is obviously a stealth public safety measure for keeping the old, and old-ish, away from these contraptions.

What’s this doing on a blog that’s supposed to be dedicated to Frogans technology? Let’s call it an example of what can unexpectedly happen (or not happen) in interactive design when working in a new medium. For every medium out there there’s a long implicit list of do’s and don’ts. When authoring a web site DO put a link to the home page on every page of the site. DON’T run an animated GIF under body text. Ignoring these things puts you at high risk of doing crummy work.

While we can expect to see a whole lot of great frogans by years end, some crummy ones are bound to crop up from time to time.

So hey kids, keep in mind that a frogans is not a website. There’s no “back” button unless you put one there. Keep your text short and concise, not like this blog, because the real estate on a frogans slide is precious. Not too many buttons, because you’ll need some no-button room for moving a frogans around on your screen. Frogans are intended to work alongside the Web, so there’s no need to go trying to replace it. And frogans are intended to be for everybody – it’s not like somebody’s going to take one and ride in front a bus.

Yes Petunia, there is a frogans address registration affiliation program. Even for people in Virginia.

It’s like this: STG Interactive develops the Frogans Player. STG Interactive lets people download and use the Frogans Player for free (without even asking for their email address).

STG Interactive writes the Frogans Slide Description Language (FSDL) and posts the specifications without obligation for whoever wants to use them for authoring frogans.

STG Interactive invests oodles and oodles in technology and servers for the Main Frogans Network to which millions of Frogans Players on the computers of millions of Internet users world-wide may connect simultaneously 24/7 for locating millions of frogans by their frogans addresses on the Internet – for free?

With one exception: A frogans on the Internet requires a frogans address in order for it to be accessible. And you have to pay when you register a frogans address. But it’s cheap. 12 bucks for a year’s registration (20 bucks for two) is cheap. This is STG Interactive’s sole source of revenue (no adware, no private information collecting). I’m not going to suggest what kind of numbers are on the line, but STG Interactive will have to register gobs and gobs and heaps and heaps of frogans addresses to keep the motor running.

This is where the fun begins. Every new frogans on the Internet is an additional reason to download and install the Frogans Player. Every additional person who has installed the Frogans Player on their computer, be it running Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X, is one more reason to be publishing a frogans.

So if you’ve already registered a frogans address and have taken the time, effort and all-out passion to author a frogans worthy of the cause, you’re probably keen to the idea of your frogans having a lot of visitors. As your visitors in turn will want to get the most out of their shiny new Frogans Player, they will probably encourage more people to register frogans addresses who will in turn create more useful and entertaining frogans to be visited. This self-propagation of the Frogansphere (don’t look it up in Wikipedia, it’s a new word) results in there being more Frogans Player-enabled users ready to visit and navigate your frogans. May the circle be unbroken.

But at the time of this posting, the Frogansphere is tiny. In fact, it’s pre-natal, waiting for the upcoming Frogans technology release. But since we want our Frogansphere to grow up big and strong, it’s good to know that there is a frogans address affiliation program in the works to encourage the early nourishment and continued nutrition that it needs.

Here’s how it’s going to work: Once the program becomes operational you’ll be able to enroll into the frogans address registration affiliate program at the Commission Junction website (in the meantime, check out the Community page at frogans.com). There, you will be able to choose from a variety of text and banner ad links for frogans address registration that you put on your website, blog or emails. Every time someone registers a frogans address after following one of your links, not only does the Frogansphere get a little heftier and healthier, but you get a 10% commission. That comes out to $1.20 for a one-year registration, $2.00 for a two-year registration.

A couple zillion of those and the Frogansphere is off to college.

Note: Commission Junction should not be confused with “Conjunction Junction”, Bob Dorough’s Schoolhouse Rock boogie-woogie masterpiece.

The Frogans Player is an amazing piece of software, if only for it’s image-processing capabilities.

I come from a graphics background. I’ve been pushing pixels around for so long, it’s not even cool. A result of all this bloody experience is that I’ve now a lot of preconceptions about how images should be prepared and finalized before they can be considered “ready”. Ready for print, ready for multimedia, ready to go.

For instance, say I’m designing a web page. I’ll probably start out by getting creative with a pencil and paper, drawing the basic elements. Before long I’ll find myself in either Illustrator or Photoshop putting a more finalized look together. As I get further into the production, the less room I have to create spontaneously.

Now comes the glorious moment when I like what I see (and my client likes it too). At this point I think about how I’m going to slice it up into pieces which will be easily utilized in HTML. Imagine cutting into a decorated birthday cake. Creation is over, consumption begins.

This last week I’ve been helping out with the writing of the next major version of the Frogans Slide Description Language (FSDL), and it’s been a lot of fun. It’s meant looking closely at its basic principals, and it’s helped me realize that with FSDL you can extend the creative process further into the productive end when authoring frogans.

The Frogans Player is, in part, image manipulation software. That means that I can lighten, darken, rotate and flip, stretch and repeat, assign layers and masks to my images at the FSDL coding phase of my work. In effect, I can write into an FSDL source document commands for performing all sorts of image processing. These image processing tasks will be performed by the Frogans Player on the end-user’s computer when they navigates to that frogans.

This opens the door to new options in the creative process. Whereas before I would concentrate on having a maximum of visual resources handy to meet my varying production needs, I can now start thinking about minimizing my resources and getting the maximum effect out of them on the end-user’s side in real time. This also allows me more creative options, even when I’m far down the production line.

Say I want to put a roll-over effect on a button. With FSDL I’m not obliged to create a separate visual element for each button state. I can simply create one button image and with FSDL treat it differently depending on mouse behavior. For instance, I might change its opacity, hue, lightness, contrast, rotation, size, shadow presence and disposition, etc. when the mouse passes over it. This way, not only do I reduce the number and variety of image files associated with my frogans, but I now have fewer images to manage and update when I modify the structure and look of my frogans.

This is also good news for those who will create frogans using server applications because visual effects can be applied dynamically. For instance, let’s say that I wanted to make a frogans that highlighted the number of winter holiday fat burning days left before the first day of summer. On the appropriate slide I could generate a progress bar. In FSDL this progress bar could actually be a mask for a photo of a volleyball tournament in Malibu, a progress bar that extends to the right with each passing day, complete with a gradient overlay which turns from cold-blue to searing red. My only graphic resource here is the photo. The rest can be written in FSDL, manageable by a server application.

For the “casual” froganizer (Aunt Peg’s decorated birthday cake frogans – 101 unique designs), they know that they have a palette of options at their disposal even if their visual resources are limited. They can fit that picture into that frame, tweak the color, make that text fit just right… On second thought, don’t get me talking about text manipulation. Not today. That’s another (fascinating) subject, and you want to get on to the next entry.

frogans*wrestling
frogans*catnip
frogans*geek
frogans*rockstar
frogans*digital
frogans*cheapstuff
frogans*freestuff

It’s 2008 and 98% of the good ones have already been taken. How could this have happened? Where was I when the light turned green? If only I had listened. If only I had taken action when the time was ripe.

Ha ha, but it’s not 2008. Not yet. There’s still time.

A frogans address is the frogans equivalent of a domain name on the Web, except that it’s easier to say over the phone, since you never have to worry about whether there’s a string of “w”s in it or not.

What frogans addresses and Internet domain names have in common is that they’re registered on a first-come-first-served basis, meaning that the really good names are the first to get snatched-up.

When you register a frogans address at frogans.com you indicate the IP address where your frogans root directory (containing your frogans resource files) will be located. This information is stored on a Frogans Network System (FNS) server so that an end-user’s Frogans Player can find and go to your frogans.

As you can normally have any number of directories on a hosting server, you can have any number of frogans addresses on the same host.

You can reserve a frogans address whether or not you already have a web hosting account. You simply update your frogans address account settings at frogans.com once you know where your frogans root directory is going to be. By the same token, you can change the host for your frogans whenever you like. You need only update that information in your frogans address account settings.

You can transfer the rights to an address to whomever you want, and the terms of the deal are entirely between you and the recipient. That means that if you paid $12 for a year’s registration of “frogans*rent-a-car”, and then decided that you’re no longer interested in renting whatsoever, you’re at liberty to transfer that registered address, along with the rights to renew it, to the highest bidder.

The kick-off date frogans address registration has yet to be announced, but I’ll be kicking myself ’til 2020 if someone gets “frogans*joecady” before I do. Hey, don’t get any funny ideas!

Coffee? Club sandwich? A slice of Rosie’s homemade pecan pie?

Frogans? Well why didn’t you say so in the first place, Hon? They have their own section on the menu. It’s right here:

• What is a frogans?
  • Frogans basics
  • Why indeed…
• Who’s behind all this?
  • About STG Interactive
• Is making a frogans reserved for big development firms?
  • Frogans FSDL Publishing – part1
• What’s Frogans technology?
  • To put it quite simply…

“They were saying that cyberspace should be designed by architects. I told them that it’s already being designed: by developers!”
- some guy at a party in 1994

I had to agree at the time that people who were used to designing buildings, bridges and bathrooms were under-prepared to impose structure in what we, at the time, called cyberspace. It was like proposing that jumbo jets be piloted by tour-guides. Just wacko.

We don’t use the word cyberspace anymore, because there’s rarely anything spatial about it. Under the “page” model the Web is a series of flat surfaces, each crammed with zones of information, each zone begging for your attention, enticing you to click and to find yourself on another flat surface, much like the one that preceded it.

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” – Johnny Rotten

Back in the days when we used words like “cyberspace”, we had certain expectations of what the information revolution would bring. Since were living in a three-dimensional world where the information amassed daily was in a real three-dimensional context (TV notwithstanding), we naturally imagined that cyberspace would work the same way. What we got instead was an environment that was amazingly rich in content, but only two dimensions deep. There are 1,133,408,294 Internet users world-wide* crawling around on their bellies like reptiles.
(*ref: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm June 18, 2007).

In the real world we humanize our surroundings. We furnish rooms, not only with essential items such as chairs, tables and lamps. We also decorate them with objects that remind us of who we are and what we hope to become. We put pictures on the walls of our friends and family, and are glad to see our friends and family doing likewise.

When I first heard about frogans, Alexis and Amaury kept talking about how frogans can provide a way to really open up Internet publishing to the masses, and I must admit, I didn’t quite get it. Since then the Social Web has emerged, and it’s beginning to sink in: Frogans allow for a human dimension for publishers as well as end-users that’s hard to imagine on the Web.

It’s almost too simple: A principal idea behind frogans is that they can exist on your desktop in harmony with other elements. You can even have several on display and still go on with whatever else you’re doing. Or, you can zoom-up one or more to look more closely, navigate to another slide on the same frogans, or to another frogans, all without being obliged to lose sight of my other activities. You can treat a frogans much in the same way you would the physical objects that you’ve chosen to have around you.

I can imagine having an individual frogans for everybody I know, or at least care about. (I can’t imagine having a MySpace page constantly open, much less several.) I’m looking forward to the day that everyone in my family has published a frogans containing at least a recent photo, perhaps a whole selection of them, and a slide featuring text that rounds up everything that they’d like to share at that moment with the people on the other end. And I’ll do the same.

Suddenly my desktop environment has a vertical dimension. There’s a real world element to the cyberworld. I can stop crawling around like a lizard and get back to my human ways.

Hey kids. Would you like to experiment? With frogans? I thought as much. That’s why I’ve put this little tutorial together. It’ll blow your mind.

It started with a play on a word invented at STG Interactive by Laura Whiteman, which is froganize. According to froganslore (a word that I just now invented for the purpose of getting through this paragraph), you can froganize your Web site by integrating it with one or many frogans. For instance, you might include a link to a frogans on your page, or inversely, link from a frogans to your site. Anyway, as catchy a word as froganize is, froganeyes seemed to say much the same thing, but with an added visual aspect.

Before long I tumbled on this photo by Jan Pietruszka on iStockphoto of this Agalychnis callidryas (or Red-eyed Tree Frog) sat atop a halved kiwi, which I integrated into the head area of this blog site. As it turns out, the Red-eyed Tree Frog, if we are to trust what’s said about it in Wikipedia, lends itself to comparisons with frogans.

For instance, the Red-eyed Tree Frog is native to the rainforests of Costa Rica and Central America, and stays near the water so that it can reproduce. Frogans technology was conceived in France, but makes its habitat on the Internet, and a frogans will reproduce anywhere where there’s an Internet connection.

The Red-eyed Tree Frog is nocturnal. Frogans are 24/7.

The Red-eyed Tree Frog relies heavily on it vision. A frogans is visual, and if you want to make a frogans, it’s always a good idea to do it with vision.

The Red-eyed Tree Frog is also visual. As a tadpole it can change color like a chameleon. As an adult it closes its big red eyes and covers up the blue regions on its sides when it wants to blend in with the green foliage and hide from a predator. Then, if it senses that it’s under attack, it might open its eyes and show its full color range to throw its attacker off guard while it hops to safety. A frogans can catch your eye with its capacity to have different visual aspects, including its shape and colors, but can also blend in with your desktop environment thanks to its zooming ability.

The Red-eyed Tree Frog can pull its big red eyes through the roof of its mouth to help push down food… Okay, okay, we’d all like to see a frogans do that, wouldn’t we?

I’ll be a lot happier when the Frogans Player is out, because then I’ll have an easier time talking about the key perks when browsing with a frogans.

The user experience aspects take the top slots on the perk list. After all, that’s what’s going to make or break the implantation of the technology; to convince Internet creators, developers and publishers to trust the platform with their content, create frogans, put them online, and finally get people to check them out. The principal focus in Frogans technology development has always been (according to Alexis and Amaury – and I tend to believe them) on what works for the end-user.

People scour the Internet for content, but often pay a certain price when they receive it: a cluttered desktop, for instance, is one of those things that we’ve come to live with. You’ve got this, that, and the other thing hogging your screen space, right up to the point that you’re no longer sure which page is open, and which isn’t. You ask yourself where that second and third window or tab came from, and why you simply don’t have what you want there in front of you.

It zooms up and down in real time

Frogans give the end-user new options for viewing on-line content. You might have read the entry I wrote on widgets (and other mini-apps), and how, at first glance, frogans can resemble widgets: relatively small, differently-shaped windowless objects floating on your screen. The real differences between frogans and widgets, in fact, outweigh their similarities.

The first thing that an end-user is likely to notice is that their frogans is never covered up by a window. So you say, “Yikes! It may be small, but it’s in front of MySpace!”

Relax. Take a breath. Click on the edge of your frogans and drag. It zooms up and down in real time. When you zoom down (click on the edge and drag towards the center) the whole thing shrinks – images, buttons, type and all. Since there’s no window around it, it can get really small. At its smallest size (depending on how it’s authored) it might take on a more simplified appearance. At any rate, it’s now no bigger than your typical desktop icon, only it’s still on the top layer of your interface.

Now you can tuck it away somewhere, an edge, a corner of your screen. You can get back to it without the usual mental shuffling; you know: “Spreadsheet -> Web -> Spreadsheet -> Web -> Media Player… where was I?”