Imagine walking down a street with a pair of high-tech augmented reality sunglasses. As you walk informative graphics pop-up for places of interest in the area, like restaurants, clubs and museums. If you are interested in a particular restaurant you can instantly access information about it and within a few seconds you will know how the restaurant is rated by other users, what is on their menu, have looked through their current specials and checked their opening hours. This is augmented reality and, according to those in the know, our not-so-far-off future.

Augmented or virtual reality blurs the line between what is real and what is computer-generated by enhancing what we hear, see, feel and smell by adding graphics and sounds to the real world. It utilises data from the Internet about places (and in future people too) to merge the physical world with the Internet. According to HowStuffWorks.com using image-recognition software in augmented reality will soon allow us to point our cellphones at people, whether you know them or not, to see their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social network profiles.

The possibilities of augmented reality are immense. Watch these videos where Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry from SixthSense explain how they foresee the future of augmented reality.

Simpler versions of augmented reality are already available on smart phones like the iPhone and Nokia N97. For instance, an app called Layar is available in the Netherlands and uses your cellphone’s camera and GPS capabilities to gather information about your surrounding area. When you point your phone at a street, Layar shows information about restaurants and other places of interest in close proximity by overlaying this information (augmented reality) on the camera image (reality) on the phone’s screen. Definitely handy for travelling!

There are several augmented reality applications for phones that run on the operating system Android. A few of these apps include:

Twitter 360 for the iPhone 3GS
This application makes use of Twitter’s new Geotagging feature and allows users to “visualise” their Twitter friends located near them by using the iPhone’s camera.

Le Bar Guide
An extensive guide of the best bars around the world this application includes reviews and ratings of the clubs plus an integrated taxi number service.

Pocket Universe: Virtual Sky Astronomy
Keen to learn about the night sky? Download Pocket Universe and learn about the starts, planets and constellations.

On the one hand this technology is fascinating and exciting and on the other scary. Is human interaction going to become something of the past? I certainly hope not.

Well-known online properties participated in World Aids Day today to help create awareness for HIV and AIDS. This year the drive to raise awareness about AIDS was taken to a whole new level. Google, Mashable.com, Facebook and Twitter are a few of the brands that participated in the 2009 World Aids Day. Google did their bit by adding a ribbon beneath their search bar with a link to learn how you can help.Mashable.com, as a media partner to the World Aids Day, featured a prominent red banner on their home page linking to the (RED) Facebook fan page.The (RED) Facebook fan page urged people to help them turn Facebook red by changing their profile pictures to one of the pictures supplied by them.Twitter changed their login page and urged users to follow @JoinRED. If you tagged your tweets with #red duringWorld Aids Day, the tweet appeared in red font in your followers’ streams.According to Joinred.com 3 800 people die from AIDS every day – have you done your bit to help? Go to the Join Red take action page and see how you can make a difference.

Following up on part one, in this post we discuss further website design and development pitfalls to avoid.

Make use of web-safe fonts
Not all fonts render the same on different computers. Web-safe fonts are those fonts that are commonly installed on all computers by computer manufacturers. The overall look and feel of a website influences your visitors’ first impressions, and the font you decide to use is an important part of establishing the “look” of a website. Ideally, the font used should be attractive and easy to read. To help you choose a font, use the Font Tester.

Make sure your website is compatible with all browsers
You want visitors to see the website as you’re seeing it. Since each website browser and operating system interprets code in a different way, it is important to ensure that your website renders properly in all browsers. Brower Shots is a handy tool that allows you to preview your website in various browsers.

Make use of a sitemaps
A sitemap classifies website information and graphically illustrates the structure of the website. Not only does a sitemap help human visitors to find information easily but an XML sitemap is a communication tool used to show search engines all the pages on your site.

An XML sitemap allows search engines easy access to all of your site’s content and also notifies them quickly when your site is updated. You should create one using the correct protocol and upload it to the root directory (yoursite.com/sitemap.xml). Once you’ve done this, submit the sitemap to Google to ensure that the search engine’s spiders visit your website and index those pages.

Meta tags
In September 2009 Google announced that their search engine no longer makes use of the keyword meta-tag to rank websites. Yet, this does not mean that meta-tags should be ignored since other search engines still use them.

Search engines use the content in your website’s meta-description tag on their results pages as the ‘snippet’ describing your page. It’s therefore important to optimise the meta-description by making the content enticing and descriptive of the page to ensure higher click-through rates.

Title tags are one of the most important elements on a page. They play an important role in SEO and for click-throughs from SERPs. The title tag is used on the search engine result pages as the clickable link, and these need to be descriptive and concisely describe the content of the webpage. Titles should contain the page’s most important keywords.