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.
If you’re interested in Internet traffic, Wayne wants you to check out some very cool visualization tools from Akamai that show how the Internet is doing at any given moment. Akamai is one of the largest content delivery networks — basically they help speed up the serving of online content — and this position give them a lot of insight into the day-to-day health and use of the Internet. Wayne especially likes that it breaks down the net usage by traffic type into categories like retail, news, and financial services.
Another company that knows a lot about the Web, Google, has also opened up its data on traffic to its services, helping show where the free flow of information has been disrupted — whether by a government blocking information or a severed cable.
Eva found nipponcolors.com, a website that shows the colours traditionally used in Japanese literature, textiles, and other Japanese arts and crafts. Created by Tokyo-based Web designer Ono Takehiko and drawing upon the book Traditional Japanese Color Palette, nipponcolors.com shows 250 of the Nippon Colours of Japan’s ancient, hierarchical color system in a modern way. The site makes picking colours for use in print and Web design easier, but it also provides the colour values that can be used in Photoshop, and hexadecimal codes for Web design, making it even more valuable.
Earlier this week, Brent was at the Top Employer Summit to help demonstrate hireimmigrants.ca, an online resource for helping Canadian employers hire immigrants. Hireimmigrants.ca is an initiative of ALLIES, a non-profit that supports local, Canadian efforts to adapt and implement programs that further the suitable employment of skilled immigrants. Hireimmigrants.ca was recently redesigned by Kobayashi Online with users in mind. The site easily guides employers step-by-step through the various stages of hiring immigrants: from simply getting started; to furthering efforts to recruit, integrate and retain skilled immigrants; and finally to becoming a model for other organizations.
Finally, Scott and Daveed both participated in “Wear Your Old Band T-Shirt To Work Day”, representing the bands The Hyena Dog Robbery and No Means No respectively. By wearing their old band shirts on December 2, 2011, they joined countless music fans celebrating the importance of the good old fashioned band T-shirt. The idea for this day was conceived by Steve Lamacq on his BBC 6Music program, and is now in its sixth year.