The adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn is the full title of a new film by Steven Spielberg. Tintin is the creation of Belgian comic artist Herge who has sold over 200 million copies worldwide.

Tintin was created in the 1920’s for kids section in a Roman Catholic newspaper. Right from the start Tintin was brave and pure. No girlfriend, no vices, in fact nothing to distracting from his pure moral code and fighting for truth and justice. Partly this was what the catholic newspaper wanted but it was also very much what Herge wanted. He was a keen boy scout and was always eager to set a positive example for his readers. So long after Herge left his original publishers and set-up his own publishing house, Tintin kept is upright, pure moral code.

The film is based on the book The Secret of the Unicorn but include elements from many of other books and presumably the second part of the adventure – Red Rackham’s Treasure. It seems that there will be elements of The Crab with the Golden Claws in the film as well. These three books do combine to give a nice story arc around Tintin’s greatest friend Captain Haddock.

Spielberg’s direction of Tintin is causing some fans to worry. Herge’s hero is very much a European character and there is some worry the Spielberg will Americanise it too much. Or worse, turn it into one of his kid movies that are overly sentimental. In the books, Tintin almost never shows emotions. He is calm and distant from the events around him. Only occasionally, such as in Tintin in Tibet does he show a lot of emotion.

How will the film look? is another worry for the fans. Herge used a Ligne Claire style that is highly distinctive. Ligne Claire (or clear line in English) uses a consistent width of black line around areas of flat colours. There are no shading or shadows in this style of work. The result is a very bold style that allows great detail in the drawings and yet retains clarity. To achieve this style on the screen, Spielberg is working with Peter Jackon’s Weta special effects company. Everything is to be CGI but using movement captured from human actors. This is the technique used in Lord of the Rings to create Gollum. Jack and Spielberg are promising that the techology at their disposal will allow them to create a lifelike world that keeps the bold style of Herge.

The film, The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn is in production now. Motion capture started in February 2009 and the expected release date is 2011.

This a bit of an experiment in predicting the future and getting in early.

Google’s newly created browser, Chrome, has a feature that should mean it never crashes because a web page is badly behaved. Instead, just one tab should crash and an image, known as the Sad Tab, will appear.

As with any new Google product, Google Chrome will generate a lot copy and web sites about it. Getting in their quickly and establishing a site as the home for all Google Chrome news would be a smart move and I’m sure that someone is doing it as I type. I don’t have the time to put in to that sort of project so I’m experimenting with spin off keywords. e.g. the Sad Tab

It is unlikely that “Sad Tab” as a keyword will generate the millions of impressions that “Google Chrome” but it will generate some. “Sad Ipod” generates 6,600 per month, “Sad Mac” 1,900 per month and the “Fail Whale” 590 searches. Not exactly earth shattering traffic but for a couple of hours work and in the spirt of investigation, I want to see if I can get my Sad Tab image on Poosk as the number one result.

This may generate a few t-shirt sales and a bit of traffic but mostly I want to see if my approach pays off so that I can use it for future SEO operations. So the Sad Tab may not make me a fortune but it may make we wiser and this worth the time to create an article on the Sad Tab to support the Poosk page and of course there is this post as well. I plan to plant a couple of comments here and there as well and that is it. What happens next is down to Google and their algorithms.

The Sad Tab is the “I’ve Died” image for the new Google Chrome web browser. Simply put, it means whatever the web page on that tab was trying to do has expired, ceased to be, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It is an Ex-Tab. Whatever you were doing on that tab has gone and you had better start again.

The reasons behind the Sad Tab’s appearance are varied. It could be a bug in the Google Chrome browser. Or it could be that the Javascript or plug-in running on that page did something really really bad. Whatever the reason it appears it means the process is now gone but Chrome’s promised technology should mean that it doesn’t take the whole of the web browser with it. So no longer will one badly behaved page take down those twelve other tabs you had spent hours carefully collating as reference for your next killer blog post.

The Sad Tab is one of a number of Screens of Death, images that indicate everything has gone pear shaped. Most are accidentally iconic such as Microsoft’s Blue Screen of Death that plagues Windows 95 onwards. Some are more deliberate like Apple’s Sad Mac, Sad IPod or Bomb images. Online services have generated even more failure messages, notable the Twitter Fail Whale that appears whenever Twitter is overloaded.

How iconic the Sad Tab becomes depends on the quality of Google’s new browser. If it is as well written as they suggest then the Sad Tab should almost never appear. Only truly badly behaved web pages will create it. On the other hand, if Google have been hiring ex-Microsoft programmers, then it will be a common sight to all.

So let us salute the Sad Tab. May we never, ever see you!

Little Black Spy Bag

Hilary Duff has one, Nicole Richie has one and the Olsen twins have one each. The Spy Bag by Fendi is pure fashion: beautiful, stylish and most important of all, desirable. Created by Karl Lagerfield, the creative director of Fendi, this is not a classic handbag in the style of Chanel or Louis Vuitton. It does not ooze with the cold, clear feminine lines of old school handbags. Instead it screams out sassy, smart and willing to get you want whatever the cost. The true handbag for our celebrity obsessed culture where brainless nobodies like Paris Hilton fill our newspapers.

The Spy Bag Who Loved Me

The Italian fashion house Fendi was founded in 1918 but it wasn’t until the arrival of Karl Lagerfield in the 1960’s that the company became the fashion brand we know and love. The Spy Bag is just one of his many successes that started with his redesign of the Fendi logo. The distinctive double F logo, know as the Zucca, made the brand far more recognizable but it was the high quality leather goods that Lagerfield designed in the 60’s that made the brand. Picked up by high priced American department stores such as Bloomingdale’s, Fendi’ goods were now available to the fashion conscious, wealthy American woman with nothing better to do that spend their husband’s money.

Back to Black Bag

The crack addicted, crowd punching, walking disaster zone with a golden voice, Amy Winehouse was paid half a million dollars for doing a private gig at the opening of a Fendi store in Paris. You can see and exclusive video of Amy on the Fendi home page, www.Fendi.com. However there is little else of use on the Fendi website because it looks pretty but doesn’t have anything useful on it such as details of its products. Having something as crassly commercial as a list of stockists or suppliers does not fit the haute couture image despite the fact it sells ready made, off-the-peg clothes.

I Spy Bag

The most noticeable thing about the black Spy Bag is that the people who carry them do not fit the image. When you think of a spy, you think James Bond. Suave, sophisticated, stylish with a beautiful woman on his arm. If you look at the people carrying Fendi’s bags, they don’t match the image. Fendi is a brand carried by women who aspire to be the Bond girl, who want to be in with in-crowd but who fail to carry it off. Part of the problem is that Fendi’s brand is a target of counterfeiters on a large scale. Because the bags and all of Fendi’s range is available through high street stores, the average shopper may not realize they are buying a fake. If you are offered a Rolex for $99.99 you know it is a fake but how do you tell is a $99.99 Fendi bag is real or counterfeit. Not that it makes much difference. Both real and fake are made in chinese sweatshops. The only real difference is that if you buy a real one, your money goes into the belly of the multinational LVMH monster whereas if you buy the fake, honest criminals get your money.

My latest project, 6d6Fireball.com, is slight change in direction for me. Rather than just being a blog it will be selling fantasy miniatures for Dungeons and Dragons that we manufacture. Its a combination of my web skills, a friend’s knowledge of manufacturing and our joint love of role playing games.

At the moment the site is very basic blog with only one or two posts but it will be growing very rapidly. It is involving extensive planning as there are a large number of keywords available but generally the amount of traffic they each attract is small. So our policy is one of creating sticky content (see Friendly Affordable SEO) but will require as vast amount writing. Of course links mater as well as content so I will be making extensive use of Micelife.

I have a new web site out so expect to see several articles promoting it in Micelife. In fact, the first one is in SEO Purgatory right now. Its Friendly Affordable SEO and as its name suggests, about affordable SEO. There is a selection of SEO articles along with an SEO blog covering news and site updates.

Designing for SEO

The reason why Search Engine Optimisation is so hard to master is that it involves so many different elements. You have to find the keywords, you need to be able to write SEO friendly copy, your link strategy has to be top-notch and you need to be able to convert those hard-won visitors into customers. One skill perhaps brings all of this together: SEO Web Site Design.

The SEO Design Problem

Designing a web site to be search engine friendly is easy. The problem is designing one to be search engine and human friendly. SEO is all about Google’s and Yahoo’s computers. Forget all about CSS and graphics. Simply get the right words in the right place supported by the right links and bingo, you will be flying high in the search engines. But it won’t do you any good if everyone who comes to the site immediately hits the Back button. This is why SEO web site design is such a skill. Balancing the need of the Google’s computers against the needs of your human visitors.

An SEO Web Site Design Template

Achieving the balance between these two competing forces is best done with quality content focused on a single subject or keyword. Each and every page needs to have its SEO elements: Keywords in the URL and the HTML Title and Meta tags; articles of 750 words that mention the keywords once in every paragraph; short headings that use the keyword; and incoming links using the keyword as their anchor text. (For other key SEO points, see the SEO Web Design Checklist).

All the carefully crafted SEO needs to be built on genuine content. The 750 word article has to be about the subject, well written and above all, informative. This is the human side of SEO Web Site Design. Google won’t know if the article makes sense but a human will and its humans that are your customers, not Google’s computers.

Chris Tregenza is a writer on SEO and has a range of free SEO articles online.

Test of Purgatory bug

I’ve registered a new domain called Friendly Affordable SEO.com. There is nothing there yet, just a place-holder but that will change soon. I’ve written about 20,000 words on SEO techniques that I plan to share. I’m not sure exactly what format it will take, blog, ebook or something else but it will be up soon. More news when I have it.

I’m a big fan of the Nintendo DS but I don’t play it a lot. What I like about it is its versatility and great design. |t and similar handheld devices offer new ways of interacting with the world and are great devices for teaching people new skiils. I write about this on Myomancy. Now new game has that I was so smitten by that I’ve set up a web site all about it: Guitar Hero: On Tour