The Real Scrapblog is Here… Finally

It’s amazing how many people are into scrapbooking. I’m not surprised to see a site such as this get developed. Should prove quite popular.

From the article
Scrapbook maker, Scrapblog strutted its stuff at the We Media conference last month, went off the grid, and finally came back online today.

Scrapblogs are Flash-based slide shows made up of pages of photo or video layouts you can jazz up with a myriad of designs and effects. Transitions can be added between each page and you can set the mood with some background music as your show plays. You can publish a Scrapblog publicly or by invite only and embed it as well. If you choose, viewers can leave Flickr like embedded comments on key spots of the show.

Scrapblog’s editor is a flash application, which may make a lot of you cringe, but not for good cause. Scrapblog, as we’ve mentioned before, has one of the most natural feels of any online application out there. It’s full screen and closely mimics the design of a Windows desktop application.

READ MORE

101 Fantastic Freebies for Your Computer

We all love freebies. The article is right about it’s comments regarding how you used to have to pay for great software. The landscape has changed thanks to OpenSource. You can really get by these days without having to pay at all.

From the article
Want to make your PC more productive, secure, informative, and entertaining? These downloads and services will do the trick--and they don't cost a dime.

Once upon a time you actually had to pay for great software and services -- hard to believe, but true.

We revved up our cable modem and searched for the most intriguing free offerings out there. After we took each download or service for a test-drive, we picked the very best, and came up with the following list of 101 great freebies.

READ MORE

Web-Watching the Widget Way

The Internet is awash with widgets these days. I think they are great. Take MySpace as a prime example. The amount of widgets you can put on your MySpace page is huge. Everyone seems to have widgets these days. Does it make the Internet experience better? I think it does.

From the article
From tracking stock portfolios and mortgage rates to menstrual cycles and baby due dates, widgets are the latest Web wonder to hit desktops.

Widgets, or shortcut links downloaded to computer desktops, are gaining so much popularity that corporations are using them as a marketing tool.

"The user's desktop is extremely valuable, it's prime real estate," said Paul Brody, Yahoo vice president of desktop products, in Sunnyvale, California.

READ MORE

Microsoft in Talks to Buy DoubleClick

There is no doubt that the online advertising industry is huge and growing very rapidly. The surface has only just been scratched in terms of potential. Microsoft obviously realise this and see the need to position themselves by buying one of the market leaders. Can anyone beat Google though?

From the article
Microsoft Corp. is in talks to buy DoubleClick Inc., the Internet advertising company owned by private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman LLC, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation.

DoubleClick hired Morgan Stanley to explore its options, including a possible stock-market listing, the Journal said, citing the people, who indicated there are other potential suitors. Hellman & Friedman is seeking at least $2 billion, almost double the $1.1 billion it paid for the New York-based company in 2005, the newspaper said.

READ MORE

Twitter's Command Query API Launches Today

I have found Twitter to be infuriatingly slow at times. That said the service seems to be growing rather rapidly both in popularity and new “features” that keep getting added. Despite the slow page loads at times I love Twitter.

From the article
Twitter is keeping up with the new feature roll out, and during the great week for mobile apps too. They've launched their API for SMS command queries today, enabling the use of command queries to be text to a twitter username in order to retrieve information. Now you can send a query to "weather" in order to have the latest weather updates sent to you via SMS. And as expected, Twitter's announcement is seemingly correlated with their slow page loads.

READ MORE

Make Money Online. Start a shop at Zlio

Google’s New PPA Program Opens Up New Opportunities for Bloggers

Implemented well this could a win win situation. I can see the smart bloggers actually increasing their earnings under this new scheme and also providing a win for the advertisers themselves. I like what Google are doing with this program.

From the article
Last week, Google announced the beta test of their new pay-per-action (PPA) advertising program. In addition, Google mentioned a new ad format, the text link ad (which will presumably be similar to the current referral text link unit.), would be available. This new ad format, along with the new PPA (or affiliate) model, will open up new potentials for bloggers to make money from their blogs.

There is a big difference between Google’s new CPA ads and their traditional, context-based AdSense ads. According to the AdSense program’s policy, publisher is not allowed to call attention or encourage their site’s readers to click on the ads, since the advertiser pays on a per-click basis. If a blogger writes, “It’s been a tough month, please be kind enough to click on a few Google ads to help make ends meet,” there’s a very good chance said blogger will find their AdSense account suspended. But with the new CPA ads, since the advertiser only pays when a specific action is taken by the user, a publisher is allowed to encourage or draw attention to the ads.

READ MORE

Make Money Online. Start a shop at Zlio

Citizendium: Wikipedia Co-founder Launches a Competing Wiki

I can see this site being just as successful as Wikipedia. I wonder if there is room for both? Certainly I can see merit in Citizendium and the accountability factor. This is sometimes something that is lacking at Wikipedia but on the other hand Wikipedia seems to do ok and in the main is pretty reliable.

From the article
Citizendium, the Wikipedia competitor that will demand accountability from its users, launches in public beta today. Started last year by Larry Sanger, who was heavily involved with the creation of Wikipedia, Citizendium has been in private beta since last October. Citizendum will operate in a very similar manner to Wikipedia: the wiki format will allow for continuous updates and constant reform from user-generated activity.

The information provided will come from users that feel they know enough on a given topic to contribute to a world source. But Citizendium will differentiate itself in one very important way. It will require users to submit their real name, and possibly credentials too. This brings about a great amount of accountability for the contributors of Citizendium.

READ MORE

Revisiting Web 2.0 Startups

A good look back at some recent past. It’s always interesting to see how sites have developed (or not) from their initial startup to present day. As the article rightly points out of the sites they are looking at the real success story is Joost. No arguments there.

From the article
Where are they now? It is about time we looked at some of Web 2.0 startups to see what kind of progress they have made since we last reported, so here are a few favorites and not so favorite Web 2.0 Startups we have reviewed. I submit this first group of re-visitations for our readers as a way of marking the first 3 months of 2007. Some startups are excluded from this set, but will be covered at the end of the month.

READ MORE

It’s Still Very Early, But Scribd Looks Like A Winner

This site sounds interesting. I can really see potential for the sharing of documents this way. The number of cool sites that keep getting developed it is great. Finding new sites such this one is one of the things I love about the Internet.

From the article
We reported on the launch of Scribd, the “YouTube For Documents” a little over two weeks ago. The site drew a significant amount of traffic at launch. Unlike most startups, though, that traffic didn’t just vaporize after a day or two.

100,000 or so unique visitors come the site daily. 12,000 documents have been uploaded to 8,600 unique accounts (35% anonymous). The team says the site’s traffic has been about an even split between U.S. and non-U.S. visitors (and about half of the documents are non-English). One prolific member, Builder (Bill Allin), has 113 documents to his account. One of these, “Why Intelligent People Tend To Be Unhappy”, was so popular that it got on Digg and was mentioned on Adam Corolla’s morning show.

Scribd is an example of a small startup doing many things right. They created a naturally viral product and made it ridiculously easy to use. Posting and viewing can be done anonymously. More interesting documents get voted to the top for discovery by more users. It also seems to be very Google-friendly - many documents are working their way up in search results.

READ MORE

Google Docs to Add Support for Wikis

This is a neat addition to Google Docs. It is getting better and more powerful all the time. I still think it has a way to go but it is moving in the right direction to becoming a major player in the office suite software market.

From the article
Google Spreadsheets has released a new version: 1.2.0i (even though you don't see them, every Google service has versions. In Google Spreadsheets you can actually see the current version in the bottom right corner of the window). The changes are mostly performance-related. They fixed some problems that caused some spreadsheets to not load or to not load fast enough. Google Spreadsheets added a new export format: txt for tab-separated values.

But the exciting things are yet to come in Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Google works for quite some time on adding charts to spreadsheets. After the JotSpot acquisition, the immediate results will be documents and spreadsheets editable by anyone.

READ MORE

8 Headlines To Guarantee You Get On Digg's Front Page

The findings by this person just highlight what some people don’t like about Digg. It’s all in the headline. Of course I don’t suggest you actually use these headlines unless they actually relate to your story.

From the article
As you may know, I'm a PHP developer amongst other things, so I decided to use my coding skills to find out an interesting statistic about Digg. I wanted to know which words I could use in a headline of one of my blog posts to guarantee that it would appear on the front page of Digg.

Here's what I came up with...

I started by creating a PHP script using regular expressions to fetch the headlines from the last 500 articles posted on Digg. I used simple pattern and boundary matching expressions and added each headline into an array. The output looked like this:

READ MORE

75% of Google's Blogspot Blogs are Spam

Wow that is a pretty high number. Spam the curse of the Internet. Something has to be done about it as it seems to be totally out of control. Interesting stats about the spam in the various top level domains.

From the article
14 of the top-15 doorway domains have a spam percentage higher than 74%; that is, 3 out of 4 unique URLs on these domains (that appeared in our search results) were detected as spam. To demonstrate the need for scrutinizing these sites, we scanned the top-1000 results from two queries – “site:blogspot.com phentermine” and “site:hometown.aol.com ringtone” – and identified more than half of the URLs as spam easily.

READ MORE

Twitter Traffic, Blog Buzz Up

Twitter is getting more and more popular. So what you doing?...Sorry couldn't resist. While some people can't understand the whole Twitter thing I for one find it quite addictive and obviously thousands of others do to.

From the article
Twitter hasn't gone completely mainstream, but its traffic figures have gone up as several bloggers, media outlets, and at least one campaigner have taken notice of the site.

The market share of visits to Twitter, a Web site that allows people to send brief text messages to groups, grew by 55% last week, compared with the week before, according Hitwise research director LeeAnn Prescott, who noted the trend in her blog Monday. Prescott labeled the site "one to watch."

She isn't the only one keeping an eye on Twitter. Obvious Corp., the company that runs the site, has issued statements indicating it is trying to increase server capacity to keep up with growing demand. Among the notable Twitter users -- sometimes called Tweets -- is presidential hopeful John Edwards' campaign, which uses it to "Twitter-patter," that is, post information on his schedule.

READ MORE

5 Reasons Why The AppleTV Rules And Sucks

I'm mostly in the pro corner when it comes to Apple TV. The product sounds great. With so many iTunes users out there now being able to get their content to the TV it will really have an impact on home entertainment. The "old style" of TV is very much on the outer and products such as Apple's TV are helping usher in a new era.

From the article
The AppleTV is finally shipping after a month of nail-biting anticipation and most people are excited while others are attempting to justify some reason to order it. I’m still on the fence about shelling out $300, but Gadget Lab’s “5 Reasons Why AppleTV Rules, 5 Reasons Why it Sucks” tells it like it is and backs up some of the reasoning why I think it will change home entertainment. One reason why it rules is that it’s the only way to stream iTunes content to your TV…duh!

READ MORE

MySpace Blocks Widgets (again, and again, and again)

While I welcome MySpace developing there own add-ons I think they are making a mistake if they start blocking to many widgets. One of the beautys about MySpace is the ability to add some of the really cool widgets out there to your profile. If MySpace stop that then bye bye millions of users.

From the article
The New York Times reports on the sentiment of users regarding MySpace's recent crackdown on widgets. The social networking king has been notorious for cutting of parasitic widget companies for some time now, but as MySpace increases their own in-house offerings for feature add-ons, they are becoming even more restricting in terms of what widgets they'll allow on their users' profiles.

READ MORE

Cali Lewis: Geeks Geek

Who wants to take Cali Lewis to the prom? Me Me! Cali Lewis does a fantastic podcast. As Crunchgear points out she really does seem to enjoy what she is doing. For those of you who don’t know her podcast check out Geekbrief.tv

From the article
If geeks had a prom (other than Burning Man), we’d all probably all ask Cali to it. She raises the tech video podcast to an amazingly professional level and she actually enjoys what she’s talking about. She, my friends, is the geek’s geek. And when CG gets faved by Cali, you better believe our hearts are aflutter. It feels like getting the Apple TV one day early with an extra HDMI cable that we didn’t order.

READ MORE

How Google Blog Search Ranks Results

This gives an interesting insight into the blog ranking process. For all of us who have blogs and there is a lot of us this is useful to know information. Lets face it, we all want our blogs to appear at the top. Now you know what it takes to get there.

From the article
Unlike most blog search engines, Google Blog Search ranks the results by relevancy. You can change that by clicking on "sort by date", but the default option is useful if you want to find the most significant blog posts about a topic. But how does Google rank blog posts?

A new patent gives us some answers. Google uses indicators to reflect the quality of a blog or of a blog post.

READ MORE

New Social Bookmarking/News Site Launched

The whole social bookmarking/news market is becoming very crowded. This site looks promising but honestly how many sites do we need. Competition is always a good thing as it keeps the big boys honest but there really is only room for a few “big” sites. The rest will just be bit players.

From the article
There is a new Social Bookmark/News site that has been launched lately, and after using it first for a while, before writing about it, we can say that it surprised us, and sometimes we even got more visitors from there, then any other familiar sites, such as Digg for example.

coRank is a site where you can share whatever you find interesting on the web with people who value your opinion, and where you can also find what's interesting for people whose opinion are important to you - your sources - whether they know who you are or not.

READ MORE

April to See Month of MySpace Bugs

It pays to take any such threat seriously. It’s better to be over cautious. It can prove to be very costly if your sites goes off line for any length of time because of hackers, particularly sites as big as MySpace. What would 24 hours off MySpace being off line cost Rupert?

From the article
An anonymous reader passed us a link to PC World's coverage of the upcoming Month of MySpace bugs. Organized by a pair of wiseacre hackers tired of the 'Month of X Bugs', they are set up to 'highlight the monoculture-style danger of extremely popular websites.' Though it's supposed to be funny, outside security analysts have apparently been consulted on the project.

READ MORE

Why You Should Never Display All Ad Units Google Allows On One Page

So more is not always better. I don’t like to go too over the top the adsense ad’s on my sites. Too much advertising puts users off. Take head of the advice in this article if you want to get a better return on your adsense ad’s.

From the article
Google allows up to three AdSense ad units (plus one adlink and one Google search box) on a website at any one time. In most cases, it is best to run the maximum three - the more ads you show, the higher the chance it will catch a reader’s eye. However, there are times when having less ads could make you more money. This is caused by something known as the Google Bid Gap.

What Is The Bid Gap

The bid gap is the difference in price between the Google ads. The top spot always cost the most, with each lower position costing less and less. The gaps between the top four bids are normally very close. However, once you get pass that, the gap can widen substantially. For example, the bids on a high paying keyword might be $5.00, $4.99, $4.98 and $4.97 for the top 4 spots, and then 10 cents for the fifth spot. There is only a 1-cent gap between positions 1-4 but a $4.87 gap between positions 4-5.

READ MORE

Watch Live TV on Your Google Home Page

A nice little article. TV is moving to the internet so why not have it on your Google homepage. It's as good a place as any.

From the article
This is really cool and a sign of where things are going. Just add this widget to your personalized Google home page and you can watch live updates from CNN and other networks. LabPixies has a similar widget.

READ MORE

TechCrunch has 15,000 Spam Comments Per Day

Puts the minimal amount of spam that I receive to shame. Well done to the guys at Techcrunch for keeping the site spam free. It's important that sites do remain vigilant and keep there user contributed content spam free otherwise the users legitimate users will jump ship.

From the article
On January 4 we reported that the Akismet filter had stopped a million spam comments from reaching TechCrunch. At that point we’d been using it for about nine months.

The number of blocked spam comments is now two million, just ten weeks later. That works out to about 15,000 spam comments hitting TechCrunch every day.

If we did not have Akismet, we couldn’t allow anonymous commenting here on TechCrunch. We used to go through all spam comments to pick out the occasional false positive and accept it. Now, there are just too many to go through. All comments marked by Akismet as spam get deleted almost immediately.

READ MORE

Google Acquires Gapminder's Trendalyzer

An interesting purchase. I would most definitely say they have plans to use this with Google Analytics.

From the article
An interesting Google buy today: they just snapped up the Trendalyzer software created by Sweden-based stats company Gapminder.

What does it do? Well, it plots data in pretty animations like the one pictured below. Or as Gapminder themselves describe it, Trendalyzer “unveils the beauty of statistics by converting boring numbers into enjoyable interactive animations.” The Trendalyzer team will of course be joining Google: always good to get more stat heads aboard.

READ MORE

Toward a Better Digg

Despite what some people say about Digg they are the undisputed leader in this area. Once a site has gained the major market player in a particular area it is always difficult for others to move in late and over take them. That said we need competition and I like what some of these others sites are doing.

From the article
Digg revolutionized social bookmarking when it launched in 2004. Since then, it has become the undisputed champ of link ranking sites. They just recently crossed the million mark. And their influence goes far beyond those user registration numbers.

Tangible evidence of Digg’s importance: the raw number of clones and Digg gaming schemes out there. We’ve seen rigging, vote buying, profile sales, and accusations of thug rule. The dozens of clones include a not-bad SourceForge project called Pligg, which lets users “build their own Digg”.

READ MORE

MySpace Defeats YouTube in War Game

An interesting analysis of MySpace and YouTube. It is a battle ground out there in the social network / user contributed videos and general web 2.0 environment. Only the best will be left at the end of the war.

From the article
Which business model is likely to be the most successful: MySpace, YouTube, Facebook or Second Life?

According to a war game played out at London's Business School last week, MySpace wins. But, in a conclusion that was validated by this week's Viacom lawsuit against Google and YouTube for copyright infringement, the participants concluded that both MySpace and YouTube are vulnerable to legal attacks and government regulations that target illegal activities and objectionable content, like child pedophilia and pornography.

Copyright lawsuits will be a "major distraction at best or they could undermine" the businesses, says Leonard Fuld, president of Boston-based Fuld & Co., which ran the war game. "Sexy and cool as MySpace and YouTube seem, they are prone to attacks."

READ MORE

The Google Phone is in Development

Exciting times ahead for mobile phone users (that’s everyone). With the iPhone not far away this news from Google that they are going to making a Google phone is great. We all wait with baited breath as to what goodies the Google phone will pack. Do I delay getting an iPhone? Oh what a dilemma.

From the article
So it seems that the oft-rumored handset from Google has taken that final leap into the "confirmed" column, though it may not be quite the be-all, end-all device we were expecting. Isabel Aguilera, Google's chief executive in Spain and Portugal, has admitted that the searchmeisters have some mobile goodness in the works but appeared to play down the project, noting that the phone is just one of 18 R&D initiatives the company currently has underway.

READ MORE

How to Increase Revenue without Adsense

Most bloggers seem to rely very heavily if not totally on Adsense for their revenue. As this article rightly points out this is not the best strategy if you want to make some good money. There are plenty of other options out there. Combine them all together and you could make a living.

From the article
When I first started my blogging adventure, my goal was never to make money from it - I just wanted a place to post my ramblings. However, because one of the rambling topics I cover is about making money on the Internet, it made perfect sense to use this blog as a case study on how to take a blog and turn it into an Internet money machine.

John Chow dot Com was monetized back in September, where it made $352.94 - all of it coming from Google AdSense. In October, I added Vibrant Media IntelliTXT to the revenue mix and posted $1,361.64 in blog income. In November, blog traffic went down but income went up to $2,139.93 thanks to additional advertising options. Traffic dropped even more in December but income continued to increase as I posted a record $2,790.05 of blog income.

January is an interesting month for web publishers. Traffic is normally higher than December, but advertising rates are generally lower because Christmas is over. The end result is usually a drop in income. However, I’m happy to report that the blog posted another record breaking performance.

READ MORE

Three billion eyeballs served

The article hits the nail on the head. Viacom in suing YouTube/Google are possibly shooting themselves in the foot. Surely the extra exposure (billions of views) is a good thing. By suing YouTube/Google, Viacom are alienating the community. People will still use YouTube, with or without Viacom.

From the article
Suing YouTube is not going to alter the fact that people’s media habits have changed - people want content on-demand, they want choice and they want community served right along with it. How else could you chat with someone who loves the David Bowie/Ricky Gervais scene from Extras at 4am or 7am or anytime, anyplace? This type of interaction is no longer a novelty - in fact, it feels like a necessity but the suits appear not to get it… once again.

If YouTube were sued out of existence tomorrow, people wouldn’t suddenly flock back to their television sets. Get over it. And even if they did, hello Tivo/PVR - problem still not solved.

READ MORE

Technorati Acquires PersonalBee?

If this is true then I’m sure Technorati have big plans for the site. While the article says that PersonalBee has not gained much traction I’m sure that will change if they become involved with Technorati. This could be a site to watch in the future.

From the article
We’re still waiting for confirmation from founder Ted Shelton on this one, but I give a fairly good probability to the news today that blog search engine Technorati has acquired PersonalBee, the “news discovery engine” that uses human editors and algorithms to sort through the news, creating a series of niche portals. It’s a similar idea, in fact, to Boxxet.

PersonalBee doesn’t seem to have gained much traction in terms of traffic, visitors and buzz, and there doesn’t seem to be a strong motivation to build your own “beehive” (portal page).

READ MORE

MyBlogLog The New MySpace for Spammers?

Spam, the plague of the internet. Unfortunately any community driven sites such as these will always have some element of spam regardless of the controls in place. Obviously the bigger the community the more spam there is. I hope MyBlogLog doesn’t become a spam haven as I personally find it really good at the moment anyway).

From the article
I had a MySpace account once. At first it was all good - I used it to send messages to a few friends and what not. Late last year after "automatically add 1,000 friends in 1 hour" tools such as BadderAdder.com become more well known, all I started to get were spam and affiliate messages, so I closed my MySpace account. Today MySpace is littered with spam posts - even though they have CAPTCHA authentication security on posts.

Enter MyBlogLog. You've probably heard of them. Purchased by Yahoo a few months ago, they give bloggers like myself stat's on their visitors. You can also add a widget to your site showing which MyBlogLog members recently viewed your blog (see mine, lower right of the site).

Any blog that becomes a member of MyBlogLog can setup their own community, for example here's mine. Other MyBlogLog members can post public/private comments on your MyBlogLog community area and all posts are shown by default, so you can find a high traffic MyBlogLog community, post a link back to your blog/website/affiliate link and get a bit of traffic fairly quickly - until your post is removed.

READ MORE

The Ten Most Important Games

Gees this list brings back some memories. There are some great titles here that I used to play for hours and hours. Tetris has to be one of the greatest games off all time. It’s so addictive and a complete time waster. Now what would Tetris look like on my PS3?

From the article
Taking a page from the National Film Preservation Board, the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University and a group of five prestigious games industry figures have inducted ten games into a sort of 'canon'. The New York Times reports that some of these titles represent the start of weighty gaming genres, while all are laudable for their place in gaming history.

READ MORE

PicksPal Is Beating Vegas Sports Betting Odds

I’m not surprised by this. It shows that if you get enough people to follow something for a period of time and combine all that knowledge together then maybe, just maybe, you can beat the odds.

From the article
Last year I wrote about PicksPal, a fantasy sports betting site where well over 100,000 members bet their friends and coworkers on the outcome of sporting events (and they just launched a nifty March Madness site as well). No money changes hands, but top users can win various prizes.

It’s all for fun, but the company started selling the top picks of its best users in October. For $10, you can get the collective picks of the top 30 users on five games. The idea was that people could use these for-fun picks to win bets in Vegas. The question was, would PicksPal be able to consistently beat Vegas odds, and the spread, with these picks.

So far, yes. By a lot. PicksPal’s overall record, against the spread, has been 562-338, or a 63% win rate. In college basketball, the win rate is 66%. In pro football, 62%. They are even getting a 52% win rate in pro hockey, their worst sport.

READ MORE

Apple may have trouble selling 10 million Phones in 2008

Given the hype surrounding this phone and interest showen in the product even before it's announced I disagree with Forbes. I think the iPhone will roll out the door quicker than they can produce it. 2007/08 will be ht eyear of the iPhone in my opinion.

From the article
According to Forbes, it may not be as easy to sell ten million iPhones in 2008 as Apple hopes, both because of Apple's strategy and because the market it has to compete in isn't as large as Steve Jobs alluded to in his January keynote.

First and foremost, the high price of $499 for the 4GB model and $599 for the 8GB version will scare away a good many potential customers. But even those of us who are willing to pony up the steep price may find having to break a contract with another wireless service provider a bridge too far, or the Cingular GSM network may be a deal breaker. However, Forbes apparently overlooks that this issue is only relevant in the United States, which constitutes only around 10 percent of the global mobile market.

READ MORE

iTunes Staffers Becomes Music's New Gatekeepers

I would imagine there is a lot of games played over getting prime position. What sort of back room deals are struck I wonder. Prime position at iTunes is like winning the lottery. It could really send your career into orbit or further strengthen an already strong name.

From the article
Every day, the roughly one million people who visit the iTunes Store home page are presented with several dozen albums, TV shows and movie downloads to consider buying -- out of the four million such goods the Apple site offers. This prime promotion is analogous to a CD being displayed at the checkout stands of all 940 Best Buy stores or featured on the front page of Target's ad circular.

How do bands get these boosts? Who decides whether Arcade Fire is plugged at the top of the iTunes site -- or whether Nickelback gets no mention?

Apple has jettisoned some of the conventions of traditional music retailing -- notably, the practice of selling prime promotional spots to recording companies willing to pay for better visibility for their acts. But behind the scenes there's plenty of horse-trading going on that influences which songs are seen and purchased by iTunes customers.

READ MORE

Windows Live OneCare eats Outlook mail for lunch

The more I read about OneCare the more I feel that it really is bad. This article continues the spate of articles I have read lately on just how poor OneCare is. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this offering from the God’s at Microsoft.

From the article
A recent update to the Microsoft antivirus engine for Windows Live OneCare will quarantine the PST file used to store e-mail messages for Microsoft Outlook, preventing access to messages, appointments, tasks and journal entries. It affects versions of Outlook, including Outlook 97 and 2000, and Outlook Express running on Windows XP when the .pst file contains an infected attachment. Microsoft will issue an update on Patch Tuesday, March 13, 2007. In the meantime, in a post on one of the Microsoft forums, Microsoft representatives suggest the following actions to regain access to lost e-mail:

1. Close the Outlook or Outlook Express application.
2. Click Change OneCare Settings in the main OneCare user interface.
3. Click on the Viruses & Spyware tab.
4. And then click on the Quarantine button.
5. Select the PST or DBX file.
6. Click Restore.

READ MORE

Major Update for Picasa Web Albums

These updates are great. Picasa users have been waiting for sometime to get these. It’s always pleasing to see suggestions that users have made actually get implemented so thumbs up to Google for this.

From the article
Today Picasa Web Albums has the most important update since its launch, in June 2006. Basically, it adds the most requested features and even some obscure features that will make you very happy.

First, the free version of Picasa Web gets 1 GB of storage (up from 250 MB), enough to host 4000 high-quality photos. It's interesting that Google says "1 GB (and counting)" so the storage could increase like it does in Gmail.

Like in Flickr, you can also search the public photos posted by other people. Until today, you could search only your photos and the public photos uploaded by your contacts. Google wanted to be polite and ask you before including your public photos in the community search, so you must go to settings and enable this.

READ MORE

Why YouTube bans don’t work

This guy certainly has a point. Banning or trying to ban YouTube doesn’t make the problem go away. I totally agree with him that young people will always find ways of accessing stuff they are not meant to. That’s the way the world works. If you ban it they want it even more.

From the article
Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the internet and now a senior executive with Google, has cast doubt on the efficacy of recent attempts to curb cyber bullying by blocking student access to video-sharing sites such as YouTube.

Interviewed in Brisbane where is he due to make his only public appearance in Australia later today, Dr Cerf said it was clear that many schoolchildren had the wherewithal to circumvent the ban.

"I believe that many young people have those skills that may be well beyond those of their parents and their teachers and will find ways of accessing information," he said in a telephone interview.

Instead, he said, students should be taught about social responsibility.

READ MORE

Ex-Google Answers Researchers Launch Q&A Site

What I find interesting is that you have to pay to get answers. Wouldn’t you be better to use Yahoo Answers where it is free? Sure there’s a lot of rubbish on Yahoo Answers but if you filter through that then it’s superb. It will be interesting to see how this site goes.

From the article
This just in: Uclue.com is a new website by a number of researchers who used to work for the (now cancelled) Google Answers program. This is cool, and I wish my former colleagues all the best! (Disclosure: I watched the site come to life from afar, though I wasn’t actively involved in it.) I’m also happy to have another way now to pose urgent questions, and I’m curious how well the system will work out in the future. Certainly the biggest obstacle will be marketing the service right to find lots of people asking questions (especially people with little time... because with competing services like Yahoo Answers, while you don’t invest money, you usually have to invest more time).

READ MORE

Web 2.0 Content - Can You Trust It?

If you really want to know whether to trust a sites content then you need to verify it with other sources. Obviously some sites can be more “trustworthy” than others but you really need to earn that trust. The example quoted about Wikipedia really highlights the need to check. Yes Wikipedia is great and I use it all the time. However the only way I know if something is correct is if I verify it using other sources

From the article
Last week, a prominent Wikipedia editor was outed by the New Yorker magazine as a fraud. The editor, using the handle Essjay, claimed to be a professor of religious studies at a private college, and said he taught both graduate and undergraduate classes in theology. As an editor, he had the ability to settle disputes between contributors, remove vandalism on the site, and edit submitted articles in his subject area. And while he claimed to have a PhD and a tenured faculty position, he was actually a 24-year-old college student named Ryan Jordan who was using the book Catholicism for Dummies to assist him in his work on the site. His true identity came to light after an interview with him ran in the New Yorker last summer, and the magazine published an editorial note with their findings.

READ MORE

Why sites get kicked out of Google and how to get reincluded

Fortunately I can say that I have never had a message like that. I can see how it would “freak” you out. This article shows that there is no need to panic and all is not lost. Yes you can get reincluded. Phew!

From the article
I'm freaking out. I went and logged in to Google Analytics this morning and it reported this: "No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines. Please review our webmaster guidelines and modify your site so that it meets those guidelines." Ohmygod! What guidelines? How can I figure out what caused me to get the boot and how do I get my site re-included?

Yow. That is a scary thing to find once you log in to your admin account!

The good news is that if you aren't trying to "game" the search engine, then it's likely that you've inadvertently done something that's easy to fix and yes, you can get back into their index if you request a reinclusion.

What you must do immediately is go and study the Google Webmaster Guidelines, take notes on anything you think might be a mistake you've added on your pages, and then methodically ensure that each and every page of your site is clean of any problems.

READ MORE

How To Buy And Sell Popularity Online

What does it say about someone who “fakes” their popularity? I find the emergence of such a thing as quite sad really. I like how the article mentions that prospective employers could gain an insight into a applicant’s lifestyle etc by checking out there social networking page. I can’t say I have ever been asked for or volunteered my MySpace page or whatever when going for a job. How many of you would be comfortable with a prospective employer seeing your MySpace page?

From the article
Popularity was never easily measured, until the advent of social-networking sites. Now, prospective employers and others can gain some insights into an applicant’s lifestyle and character by looking at a person’s social-networking page, including the roster of friends.

So what if a job applicant’s networking page lacks friends?

Enter FakeYourSpace.com, a business founded by Brant Walker, which offered users of MySpace.com and similar sites a way to enhance their page with photographs and comments from hired “friends” — mainly attractive models — for 99 cents a month each.

FakeYourSpace was doing very well, attracting 50,000 hits a day, until a service that provided the photographs of the models, iStockPhoto.com, noticed that use and objected to it.

Kelly Thompson, iStockPhoto’s vice president for marketing, said its licensing agreement did not allow Web sites to post photos that might lead the average person to “think that the model endorses” the product, Web site or person in question.

READ MORE

Top 10 Predictions of New Uses for Your Mobile phone

Some great insight into the changing face of mobiles. The article forgets to mention the iPhone though which I believe has (will be) set the benchmark of where mobiles should head in the immediate future.

From the article
Mobile phones are becoming increasingly more powerful. Here are 10 new uses of mobile phones that will create new opportunities for entrepreneurs to tap on. Many of the features are in prototype phase or already in commercial use in countries where cell phones are more advanced i.e. Japan.

Top 10 Predictions of New Uses for Your Mobile phone

1. Larger Processor, bandwidth, Storage (Always)
a. Similar to the computer industry, the capabilities of cell phones are matching those of old generation desktops. Although it is certain that cell phones will always be underpowered compared to desktops, it is also true that cell phones do not need to be as powerful as a desktop as the application range is different.

READ MORE

The iPod Crows at Midnight

The iPod can do anything! This is certainly a very interesting use off an iPod. According to the article it has created a bit of a controversy with the American Birding Association. As much as I love my iPod, rest assured I won’t be making bird calls with it.

From the article
spotted a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal this week about bird watchers who are using portable technology to find birds. Some are using wireless devices like Blackberries to receive bird proximity alerts, while others are using iPods and speakers to mimic bird calls.

READ MORE

Firefox – Advanced Settings

This link has a great list of settings you can change in Firefox. Some of them you may already know about others you may not. A great list for those Firefox fans amongst us (me included).

From the article
Always use the cursor keys to navigate within pages: When ticked you can use the arrow keys on the keyboard to move the cursor on the current web page. You can then use the SHIFT key along with the arrows to highlight portions of text. This is the same as if you were using the mouse by highlighting portions of text with the mouse cursor and using the left mouse button to begin/end selections. Set to suit your tastes, however note that firstly you may have to click on a portion of a site to initiate the cursor, and secondly, if enabled this option may force a flashing cursor to appear on many web pages even without being clicked on, which can be annoying.

Search for text when I start typing: If ticked, this option allows you to initiate a search in Firefox simply by typing one or more letters. That is, if you start typing the search box automatically appears at the bottom of the screen and accepts your input for a new search. If unticked, you will have to press the Find shortcut key (usually F3 or CTRL+F) to open the search box. I suggest you tick this option to begin with, and if you find it annoying then untick. See the Customizing Firefox and Advanced Tweaking sections for more details of ways to speed up searching.

READ MORE

Social Networking Through Time

There’s so many social networks out there these days it can be hard to differentiate one from the next. This one sounds interesting with their “timeline” type of linking of events. I’m going to check it out to see if it’s any good. If anyone has tried it let me know what you think.

From the article
I like Nearbie. Not because it’s a particularly outstanding new social network - it’s very similar to many social sites built around people, photos and events - but because it creates a new paradigm for thinking about social networks.

Launched officially yesterday, Nearbie allows you and your friends to post events and link them to a place and time. Perhaps you visited Starbucks Fillmore Street in San Francisco yesterday - post about it and share that with your friends and the world. Nearbie creates a “history” of you, your friends and the places that members have visited for the sake of preserving those memories. Obviously there are pages for individual users, places and events, but technically it’s not that different to Flickr, or even an events social network like MingleNow or HeyLetsGo.

READ MORE

After the honeymoon: Playstation 3

As far as honeymoons go this has been a bit of a rough one for Sony. Things haven’t always gone as they planned since the release of PS3. Sales haven’t exactly taken off. There have been some mutterings about the games that have been on offer so far but I can see these improving. I think the PS3 will gain momentum as the year goes on and I can still see it being the dominant gaming machine.

From the article
Sony started releasing PS3 firmware updates almost instantly after launch; not a lot of time goes by between updates still. The firmware is now up to version 1.5 (which was released hours after this story was published). The updates have been fairly focused: you can now stream media from the PS3 to the PSP as well as download PSone games through the PS3 to be played on the PSP. It's clear Sony wants the PSP and the PS3 to be very close friends. I'm also glad that Sony is adding these features at such a speedy clip, but the problem is when an update is released no one knows what the hell it does.

Microsoft has no fewer than three blogs I can name off the top of my head that keep me up to date on what's going on with the 360 in terms of firmware and downloadable games. Sony? They got burned when they asked you to rap for your PSP in a fake blog. When a new update is released the various forums around the Internet go crazy with Sony fans trying to figure out what the update does; it can take hours or in some cases a day or so before we know for sure. Why can't Sony simply tell us what each update does? Why do we need to translate their Japanese-language information page ourselves? This can't be hard, just tell someone to update the software page on Sony.com the second the update goes live, and I'll be much happier.

READ MORE

Digg Should Sue Wired

Looks like a war of words is happening over this one. I think they have a point at Techcrunch. That said, all’s free in love and war or is it? Where should sites like Wired draw the line? Should they be forced to act/write within some sort of guidelines?

From the article
Wired Magazine seems hell bent on convincing the world that Digg is falling apart. I have a problem with that because Wired Magazine’s parent company, Condé Nast, owns Digg competitor Reddit. And because Wired isn’t just reporting Digg news - they are actively engaged in using Wired to undermine Digg.

Reddit was acquired in late October. By December, Wired had predicted the fall of Digg, saying “Digg Becomes the New Friendster” without disclosing that they were a sister company to a competitor. I wrote about this on Crunchnotes, saying it was inappropriate because of the (undisclosed) conflict of interest.

Today Wired takes another, more elaborate shot at Digg. In a piece of investigative journalism, Wired reporter Annalee Newitz used a service called User/Submitter that pays people to Digg a story, which resulted in it getting to the home page of Digg. Newitz does mention the conflict of interest, albeit in a parenthetical in the middle of the story (”Wired News is owned by CondéNet, which also owns Digg competitor reddit”).

READ MORE

10 Steps to More Productive Feed Reading

Some really good tips here that should hopefully save you time. I myself seem to spend an increasing amount of time going through all my feeds. Yes I could delete some but then I might miss something.

From the article
Like it or not, RSS is now very popular across the internet, and it is widely believed to be the most productive way of staying updated on your favourite blogs and sites. The ease and efficiency of RSS feeds vs. visiting the actual web page has allowed people to subscribe to many more sites than they would regularly have time to read. Unfortunately, as your feeds pile up, you are forced to spend more and more time on your feed reader. Here are ten steps to (hopefully) help you streamline your feeds, and reduce the time you spend on your feeds each day.

READ MORE

How Popular are Google Gadgets?

Some pretty big numbers here. How we all wish we had that many people using our own web sites. Does Google had the most popular gadgets/widgets on the internet?

From the article
That's a tricky question. But Google decided to reveal a part of the mystery by showing the number of page views per week for the universal gadgets - those gadgets that work in the personalized homepage, in Google Desktop or syndicated in other sites.

Fortunately, it's very easy to see the numbers for almost any gadget (but not for feeds), so here's a list of some of the most popular gadgets:

* Date & Time - 130,290,121 page views per week
* Google Calendar - 91,491,639 page views per week
* Driving Directions - 38,615,797 page views per week
* Map Search - 31,460,719 page views per week
* Wikipedia search - 27,314,972 page views per week
* Dictionary.com search - 12,520,786 page views per week
* YouTube search - 9,515,502 page views per week
* Google Reader - 3,383,720 page views per week

READ MORE

Adobe to offer Photoshop for Free

Cool. Everyone loves getting something for free. Great move by Adobe. Isn’t competition great? It’s clear they are doing this to keep Google at bay.

From the article
Adobe intends to offer a hosted version of its popular Photoshop image-editing program in the next three to six months, according to CEO Bruce Chizen. The hosted version of Photoshop is part of a bigger company strategy to introduce Internet-delivered services that complement its shrink-wrapped applications and head off likely competition from Google.
Like Adobe Remix, the hosted Photoshop service is set to be free and marketed as an entry-level version of Adobe's more sophisticated image-editing tools, including Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.

READ MORE