Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week.
Want your content to be found online? Wayne wants you to know about an HTML standard that can be understood by the major search engines. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have all agreed on schema.org as a universal way of providing meta data (or microdata) elements within HTML. This means you can more accurately label anything — whether it’s a movie, a book, song or product — in the eyes of search engines.
Casual looking fonts have come a long way since Comic Sans, Brent thinks. Vandelay Design’s 25 free graffiti fonts provide ample evidence that the look of spray paint can be captured digitally. If graffiti isn’t your style, we recommend checking out some Web typography services that provide fonts for any taste.
Daveed is interested in seeing how Grooveshark will fare against Universal Music Group, which is suing the music streaming service for allegedly uploading 100,000 files illegally. UMG is seeking as much as $150,000 in damages for each infringement, which could potentially cost the fledgling music service $15 billion. This seems similar to the lawsuit between Microsoft and bookseller Barnes & Noble over patents we talked about last week. Intellectual property, of course, should be defended, but some worry that overzealous copyright and patent litigation could stifle innovation.
Finally, we’re all excited for this weekend’s Cut-A-Thon and Toy Drive, where our client Donato Salon + Spa will be cutting and styling all day on Sunday, November 27, and donating all proceeds to the SickKids Hospital Foundation. Kobayashi Online is behind many aspects of Donato’s Web presence, having created its e-commerce website, integrated blog, and a custom email gift certificate solution. For Donato’s latest campaign, we added Cut A Thon pop up ads to its website to remind visitors about the charity event. Go get a haircut for a good cause!