I put up a new poll. Actually it is the first poll on Colblindor. If possible I would like to find out if the readers of Colblindor are colorblind themselves or not. Or if they maybe don’t know yet and landed here to find out about it.

The question is as simple as this: Are you Colorblind?

Please join the poll, if you like. I will summarize the results in ten days.

As I am a mostly green guy (we have no car, I love trains and I sometimes even ride my bike to work :-) I love to share this link to a new summer service of Google:

Maybe you like it and spot some good tips for your upcoming summer holidays. As I am living in Switzerland I have to wait until they include some cities from over here.

Today is the day of european football, the day of the UEFA Champions League final. Playing at the Stade the France in Paris we can see two of the best football teams worldwide fighting for the cup.

FC Barcelona, the Spanisch top team featuring Ronaldinho versus Arsenal, the English team from London featuring Thierry Henry. Both teams have not only those two most valuable players but a lot more to offer.

If we look at the colors of the teams I am very happy that these days teams need two different jerseys. Otherwise it wouldn’t be that much fun to watch because the home jersey of Barcelona is blue-red striped and the color of Arsenal is also red.

Coincidentally both teams away jerseys are in yellow. I suppose we will see blue-red against yellow – fortunately for us colorblinds.

By the way: FC Barcelona was initiated from a Swiss football player named Hans Gamper more than 100 years ago. The legend says that the team colors are a homage at FC Basel, the former football club of Hans Gamper. And also on the other side we can find some relations to Switzerland. One of the most valuable defenders of Arsenal is Philippe Senderos, a Swiss football player which joined the club at the young age of 18 years. Also just recently another Swiss defender Johan Djourou joined him. Unfortuantaley Philippe was injured the last weeks and Johan is not in the starting formation and therefore there is no Swiss participation in the game of the games tonight.

Only 4 minutes to go until The Gunners and Barca will fight for one of the most important cups in football. Let’s go and enjoy some great football.

Update: Barcelona wins the final with two goals in the last fifteen minutes. Arsenal was ahead with one goal for more than 30 minutes, but they had to play with one player less because their goalkeeper Jens Lehmann brought down Eto’o in the 18th minute and saw red for this interception. Arsenal fought well but couldn’t strike at last.

Related article:
Switzerland will Win the FIFA World Cup

Today the 191st issue of the Carnival of the Vanities is up with 41 interesting entries at Accidental Verbosity.

Colblindor was featured with the article How to tell if you are Colorblind. Some thoughts about the most common evidences of color blindness.

Carnival of the Vanities calls itself the First Carnival. I don’t know if this is true but with the 191st weekly edition it is definitely running already for a long time.

Related article:
Tangled Bank

I borrow the wording Speedlinking from Darren Rowse the father of ProBlogger, which is a great pool of ideas for all kind of bloggers. Fortunately this blog was even featured once on Darren’s site as a blog case study, but let’s get back to here and now and delve into some articles about color blindness.

• Mike had some problems spotting the good spots to hold on to rock while he was climbing. This made him test his eye sight and trying out some color correction lenses now. With this lenses perception is even more not reality.
• Christopher is another colorblind artist, who first was shocked when he learned about his different vision but didn’t let himself daunted and got on his way to live with it and take on his profession as an artist.
• Richard writes about Coloured Text (– A Rant) because he can’t understand how people change default color schemes and use fancy colored text – just to annoy the colorblinds.

I even don’t spare you with this weeks most talked about feature for bloggers and others, the new Google Trends service which lets you feel like a detective while compare interesting search keywords against each other. After playing around with it for a while I would like to share the following outcomes:

1. While comparing colorblind and color blindness I learned that both terms are used at about the same rate. None of them is used much more extensive than the other.
2. Comparing Ishihara and colorblind, Google Trends tells me that they are also used at about the same rate. But when I had a closer look at the underlying news I learned, that Ishihara is not only the most famous color blindness test but also a quite common Japanese name.
3. Considering the British spelling of colour you can see that mostly people from Australia (hi Darren) are using this wording whereas color is used by Americans. The trends also show that the American syntax is used much more often.

Enough speedlinking for now. Thanks for joining me.

Related articles:
Blog Case Study
From Synaesthesia to Disabled Stickers
Some Pearls about Color Blindness
Color Blindness at the Blogosphere

My article about how Language affects Color Vision was featured at Science Notes: Go climb a tree!, the latest Tangled Bank which is a blog carnival about science and medicine, very broadly defined.

It was my first contribution to a blog carnival, and definitely not the last one.

The third month of Colblindor is just over and as I learned this is a first critical milestone to reach on the way to get a lasting weblog running. Maybe one day Colblindor will reach this climax and until then I would like to share some statistics and facts with you of the first days.

First of all I will show you the top ten articles of Colblindor as they are measured by Performancing Metrics. This measurement takes into account all articles since this weblog started on the 21st February 2006.

1. Color Blindness Test by Dr Shinobu Ishihara (March 15th)
   A lot of people are looking around for tests about color blindness. The most well known test was introduced by Mr Ishihara, a Japanese professor, in the last century. I listed my (disappointing) test results in the article. Maybe you have yours as well?
2. Fuck the Colorblind (April 1st)
   I don’t no why but this article got many hits through Google. If I read through the comments, I must have a very hardliner opinion. The readers seem to enjoy the t-shirt very much – no matter if they are colorblind themselves or not and if they bought it or just have seen it on the road. Maybe I have to reconsider my point of view.
3. Daltonism – Named after John Dalton (April 9th)
   An article about John Dalton, born in the 18th century, who was researching his own color blindness and shaped the wording Daltonism.
4. BP advertises with Ishihara Pictures (March 17th)
5. Firefox Extension – Colorful Tabs (March 29th)
6. The Biology behind Red-Green Color Blindness (March 7th)
7. 5 Misbeliefs about Color Blindness (March 30th)
8. Are cats and dogs really colorblind? (February 28th)
9. Simulating Color Blind Vision (February 25th)
10. Battle Against Color Blindness With EyePilot (March 24th)

At the moment about 40 distinct visits are counted every day. Not much but for me this is much more than I thought of when I started in February.

There are 72 posts written on this weblog (including this one) and the highest comment entry count was scored by Fuck the Colorblind.

I gathered some experiences while Shooting at Digg and Reddit and Colblindor was featured as a Blog Case Study at ProBlogger.

That’s it with figures and facts. I also would like to hear from you; your opinion and maybe even some hints what could be interesting topics to talk about.

It is interesting to read what other people tell about their color blindness or color vision. Sometimes there even pop up some funny questions related to color blindness. I would like to post a little excerpt over the last few days and hope you enjoy.

• Jac tries to explain at Ooh! Look at the pretty music! how life with Synaesthesia looks like. With Synaesthesia for example the hearing of a sound can produce some visualisation of colors.
• In Do you see what I see? g8s tells his story of color blindness, including a white ‘go’ traffic light and how life would be working as a color printer.
• Jes asks Does anyone know if cows are colorblind? Unfortunately the site appears in such a badly chosen color scheme that if cows would be colorblind, they couldn’t give her an answer.
• Chris observes the Benefits of Wine where the question arises, if drinking wine is a major cause of color blindness.
• Pete describes in his recent article Colourblind his confusion about color vision. What I like best is the nice colors he choosed to reflect the confusion.
• Why did they change the colour of the disabled stickers from Orange to Blue? This is another favourite question to Jarv at Ask Jarv.

Related articles:
Some Pearls about Color Blindness
Color Blindness at the Blogoshpere

The previous week Colblindor was featured at ProBlogger in the blog case studies series. Many comments were posted to give me some really good advice.

Improving my English skills I will take to heart. It will not be easy because English is not my mother tongue. But as one reason for this blog is to improve my written English I will keep an eye on it through:

• Word spell and grammar checking
• Common Errors in English
• A Preposition Training Book
• Online German-English Translator

But nevertheless I will stick to the spelling color (American English) and will not change it to colour (British English). I love British English don’t get me wrong on that. But after checking the two spellings with some keyword analyze tools I concluded that more people are looking up the word color than colour. Just some SEO here.

One last point: Doesn’t color blindness excuse for spelling and grammar mistakes?

Related articles:
Blog Case Study
Colorblind People are Wise Persons
5 Misbeliefs about Color Blindness

Colblindor is featured today at ProBlogger as part of the ProBlogger Case Study Series. I feel very honored and would like to thank Darren for all his great advices and of course welcome everybody visting me today.

If you are interested in my (short) story: The Story of Colblindor – Blog Case Study