Greetings, readers! Welcome to the October issue of ZooNews, from professional Web site design company Zoonini Web Services.

As online social-networking and social-bookmarking services such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and the like have exploded in popularity, so too has the phenomenon of social-bookmarking widgets. These are small icons or bits of text that allow visitors to quickly share a blog post, article, or Web page. On blogs, plug-ins like Sociable for WordPress often result in a row of icons like this:

You can also add a standalone widget to your site, like AddThis, ShareThis and Add to Any. Many of these services offer statistics on how many times each page/article/post was tweeted/bookmarked/sent-to-a-friend, etc., which can be useful for tracking the popularity of different pages and topics.

Zoonini recently placed AddThis widgets on several of our clients' sites, including Box of Crayons' new Flash movie compendium. If you hold your mouse over the custom "Share" graphic you'll see the available options.

Remember when VR (virtual reality) was supposed to be the next big thing? Well, it seems AR (augmented reality) has supplanted VR as the next next big thing. I'd already decided to discuss AR in this month's ZooNews when I discovered a recent article by Gazette technology reporter Roberto Rocha on the same subject. He explains the concept of AR concisely:

"Simply put, Augmented Reality is this: a live video feed of the real world superimposed with computer-generated images that move in accordance with the camera's motion."

While you might immediately think of potential AR applications like military training and sophisticated video games, I was particularly intrigued by one interesting use of AR that Roberto mentions, which is as a method to treat phobias: a "cyberpsychology" lab at Université du Québec à Outaouais places "a person in a fake environment with an animated spider [to] see if that exposure can shock a fear away." Now that's useful technology!

Got a technology term you'd like demystified in ZooNews? Send it to questions@zoonini.com.

Presented in collaboration with A.C. Riley Communications, When Bad Websites Happen to Good People looks at some of the ways in which websites fail their visitors, from lacking credibility to treating the Web as if it were the same medium as print. Over ten weeks, ten tips are revealed that aim to help business owners and others tackle those issues – and create better websites. We welcome your comments each week as the tips are rolled out.

In conjunction with Montreal Girl Geek Dinners, Shannon Smith of Café Noir Design and I will be giving a beginners' workshop on WordPress in November. We'll cover all the basics from the ground up, aiming to help those new to WordPress understand how it works – and make it work better for you. Date and location info will be announced soon via the Montreal Girl Geek Dinners site, Twitter stream, and Facebook group.

À la prochaine,

kp
aka Kathryn Presner