Planet Ajaxian

Pete Cashmore: 70 Fresh And Modern Blogger Templates

Sat, 17 May 2008 09:47:46 +0000

You can never have a too wide choice of templates for your blog, especially if you’re the experimenting type. Therefore, we started another round up of Blogger themes, this time focusing on fresh and modern designs, and came up with about 70 of them.

Please note that many of the template authors’ sites are not in English and you might want to run a Google Translate on them. Some of them might also require a free registration to download the templates.

Don’t forget our originals, 50 More Beautiful Blogger Templates and BLOGGER.COM TOOLBOX: 30+ Templates & Tools for Blogger.

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Emily Chang: Twingly

Sat, 17 May 2008 07:52:00 +0000

A spam-free, next-generation blog search engine. Twingly is currently in closed beta but you can request an invitation code. URL: Twingly.

Tech Crunch: Blabnote: The Voice-Only Social Network. Say What?

Sat, 17 May 2008 03:03:04 +0000

It seems a given that mobile social networking is going to be “the next big thing”, but squinting at tiny text is still a pain on today’s phones. To deal with this issue, Blabnote, a British startup that is currently in private beta, has created what may be the world’s first “vocal social network.”

To login to the network, you simply call Blabnote from your phone, which uses caller ID to match you to your profile. From there, you can vocally enter any number of commands. For example, if I wanted to create a group for TechCrunch fans, I might say, “Create Group called ‘Team TechCrunch’”. Members can be added by saying, “add Mike and Mark”, and you can send messages to group members in a similar fashion.

Blabnote has no shortage of obstacles to overcome, to put it mildly. For one, the entire system is going to rely on voice recognition, which isn’t exactly a perfected technology. Imagine creating a very personal voice message and sending it to an ex-girlfriend on accident - the setup is ripe for disaster. And should you get sick of talking (and listening), you’re out of luck: there is no web management interface, though Blabnote says it will provide an API for third parties.

Blabnote could be a useful organization and notification tool for established groups, like soccer teams or clubs. But if it aspires to become a large social network, this company is going to be teetering perilously close to the DeadPool.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Tech Crunch: Friday Survey: Do You Own An iPhone?

Sat, 17 May 2008 01:39:08 +0000

It’s coming up on a year since the iPhone was released, and the second version appears to be just around the corner. So it’s a good time to check in with our readers and see just how many of you actually use the device.

Please take a second and let us know where you stand.

TechCrunch iPhone Survey
( surveys)

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Alexander Muse: Father and Son Movie and Game Review Site

Sat, 17 May 2008 01:06:46 +0000

I reserved ethanmuse.com for my son a while back and recently he came to me and asked if I would help him build a website. Ethan and I go to the movies most weekends and half the time we both enjoy the same movie and the other half of the time we don’t. I suggested that we start reviewing the movies we see each weekend on his website. He suggested we add games reviews. Anyway, we are just getting started with reviews for Iron Man and Speed Racer. Check them out!

Tech Crunch: Battle Over Data Ownership on Gillmor Gang

Sat, 17 May 2008 00:37:04 +0000

Epic Gillmor Gang today. Everyone went in with guns blazing over the data portability/ownership debate that has spilled out over the Facebook/Google scuffle. DataPortability founder Chris Saad was also on the call, but failed to take a leadership position in the debate (he did, however, weigh in with a blog post on the subject before the call). Their influence may be waning.

As the podcast ended the blog posts started rolling in.

Marc Canter, who I accuse of compromising his position as a thought leader in the data portability debate simply because Facebook is suddenly telling him everything he wants to hear, says that his position hasn’t changed (nevertheless, it has). Robert Scoble simply apologized for being on the wrong side of the issue, yet again. And Dan Farber, a Gillmor Gang regular who missed the call, picked up on the analogy to the founding fathers writing the Bill of Rights and wrote about it here.

All in all, the group seems to be in alignment after the talk. Data ownership is an important issue that cannot be left in the big co.’s hands. Because if it is, they’ll serve their interests first, and that will lead to more walled gardens.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Tech Crunch: Storyblender Brings a Goofy Side to Casual Animation

Sat, 17 May 2008 00:29:57 +0000

Storyblender, which recently launched in private beta, is a new casual animation platform that will appeal to users who want customized movies in a hurry. The site was a presenter at TechCrunch 40. If you’d like to try it out, you can grab one of 500 invites here.

The site is straightforward, which is a good thing because there doesn’t seem to be a tutorial yet. New users are presented with the video wizard that offers a number of pre-created movies that can be easily modified. Each movie is broken up along the bottom of the screen into brief scenes in a manner that will be familiar to anyone that has used a video editor like iMovie.

The site has hundreds of pre-rendered characters, backgrounds, music, and effects, which can be added to a scene by simply dragging and dropping. Nearly all of these have a distinctly comical look to them - the site doesn’t seem to offer “serious” movie making at this point. Instead, many of the backdrops and characters are better suited for video greeting cards (samples include “Party Time!“). Users can lend their own voices to clips, and they can import media from YouTube and Flickr. Members can share their movies with friends, who can modify them further if they wish.

Storyblender is competing with other animation sites like Fuzzwich, aniBoom, and JibJab.

Here’s one of the sample videos provided by the site:

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Jon Udell: jonudell

Sat, 17 May 2008 00:20:44 +0000

Last November the New York Times ran an interactive visualization of one of the Republican debates that absolutely wowed me. On this week’s Interviews with Innovators show I spoke with two of its creators, Gabriel Dance and Shan Carter, about that project, and about some of their other work including the stunning Faces of the Dead in Iraq. It’s a great overview of how and why the NYTimes has been raising the level of its game — and therefore of everyone’s game — in the realm of interactive data display.

There’s an odd little Web 2.0 backstory about how we arranged this interview. When I cited the credits for the debate visualizer in my blog post, I had a hunch that my use of those names would appear on the creators’ radar screens. And sure enough, I heard back from Gabriel Dance. When I didn’t find any contact info for him on his website, I went hunting around and eventually found him on Facebook.

We then began an on-again, off-again dialogue that lasted for a couple of months, until we eventually settled on a time for the interview. At one point I tried to steer the discussion away from Facebook and into regular email, but for some reason that didn’t happen, so we wound up doing all the communication in Facebook.

When we finally got together for the interview, Gabriel mentioned that he’d never been involved in such a long Facebook email thread. Me neither. Somehow we got stuck in a loop where each of us thought the other preferred to communicate only in Facebook. I was glad to know that this wasn’t some kind of Gen-Y thing, and that we both thought it was a weird glitch.

The other delightful thing about this interview is the audio quality. Gabriel and Shan called me from the Times’ tape synch facility, so their half of the call was professionally recorded, then I merged their track with my locally recorded track. Nice!

Pete Cashmore: Glubble Filters a $3 Million Series A

Fri, 16 May 2008 23:37:00 +0000

Glubble is a developer of a parental control plugin for Firefox, which aids adults in the ability to watch over their kids internet usage.

In their approach is something similar to the Kidzui method, where they create a whitelist of kid-friendly sites. Instead of working on generating the list themselves, the sites on the whitelist are approved by the community of parents who use the utility.

According to GrowthBusiness, they’ve secured a Series A investment totalling $3 million from investors Morten Lund, amongst others.The investment is said to go towards developing a paid access premium level service, slated to launch later this year.

Pete Cashmore: Confirmed: Wired Buying Ars Technica

Fri, 16 May 2008 21:53:52 +0000

It seems the rumors reported earlier today by TechCrunch were spot on, and Wired is the proud new owner of Ars Technica. In a call to Alexandra Constantinople, Executive Director of Communications for Wired, she confirmed that, “the story is accurate, but (Wired) won’t be issuing an official statement until next week.”

This is sure to be the number one story on tech blogger’s minds this weekend as we all ponder the possible ramifications of a shrinking tech blogosphere. Ars Technica has always been known more for their in-depth reporting style, and product reviews that possibly go on longer than the amount of time the designers spent working on the product. Reportedly the site will remain as-is, with all current staff staying in place, so it will be interesting to see how exactly Wired will integrate this new content stream into their existing skein.

The news coming today brings to a close a long week of purchases, and pending purchases, with Plaxo being purchased by Comcast, CBS buying CNET and rumors of Carl Icahn sniffing around the corpse of the MicroHoo deal being the biggest. It seems that everyone is in a spending mood as of late, and it does leave one to ponder what mega-deal may be around the next bend, because I get a sinking feeling this isn’t the end of it.

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Pete Cashmore: HealthWorldWeb: Find Doctors and Support Groups [The Startup Review]

Fri, 16 May 2008 21:30:41 +0000

Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in “The Startup Review” series, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: HealthWorldWeb

20 word description: HealthWorldWeb.com is a health-focused patients social network, doctors search portal and community-based reviews and recommendations engine for local medical providers.

CEO’s 100 word description: HealthWorldWeb enables users to communicate with other patients, directly or within medically themed social communities as well as facilitates the exchange of recommendations for local doctors, dentists, physical therapists and chiropractors. Our users can create or join specialized local or global communities to connect with other members in the chats or forums, find the doctor’s background information, and get recommendations about medical providers. Members can post simple numeric ratings, text reviews, or surveys as individual or communal feedback endorsed by a group of people. We aim at providing our Users with personalized and relevant recommendations about blogs, forum postings, feeds, communities, and medical resources.

Mashable’s Take: What if you had a personal start page for your health news and communities? HealthWorldWeb is providing a tool that’s somewhat reminiscent of personalized start pages, as it has some added search and news aggregation features for creating a tailored health portal.

As with similar health aggregation tools, HealthWorldWeb offers search functionality, communities formed around various health topics, and content from across the web. What’s interesting is the associated doctor search tools, which pulls information from content submitted by users within the site. You’ll need a great deal of information about any given doctor in order to submit a doctor’s profile, and this is of course for security reasons. Once a doctor has been added to the database, however, any user can give them a review. This all goes into the search content that’s available for doctors on the site.

In general, it appears that HealthWorldWeb is looking to be a similar search and support community somewhat like RevolutionHealth, especially given the doctor search tools that are included in HealthWorldWeb. My biggest concern with HealthWorldWeb, however, is the privacy that goes along with joining and creating groups. There are no options for creating private groups or leaving replies to group forums anonymously. Given the sensitivity of the discussions for health-related topics, I imagine this could be a concern for group members in HealthWorldWeb.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

Richard MacManus: Demand.OpenID.net: A One Click Call to Action

Fri, 16 May 2008 20:47:37 +0000

OpenID provider JanRain has launched an interesting project called Demand OpenID, which lets users click a bookmarklet whenever they are on a website that they want to request OpenID support on. It's a handy, if a touch rude, way to demonstrate user demand for OpenID on popular websites.

Right now the most popular services for users to demand OpenID are Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Facebook, Amazon and Google.

JanRain's Brian Ellin says the project was inspired by blogger Aaron Hockley's recent oath to no longer comment on tech blogs that fail to offer OpenID login. Way to go Aaron!

Bumps in the Road

Unfortunately the service doesn't check to see if there's OpenID login already available on the site you're on - so my apologies to photo sharing site Zooomr, for example, if I made them feel at all defensive in testing.

It would also be nice if there was some way to know that the vendors were made aware of the demands. One way I can think of would be to publish a feed of each demand and ping the blogsearch engines with that feed. Then each demand would get picked up by company PR monitoring blogsearch feeds for mentions. I could set that up myself using a scraping service and FeedBurner, but that might not be so nice.

Early shortcomings aside, Demand OpenID is a great and simple idea.

Until now I've been twittering every time I get angry about the lack of OpenID somewhere. Now I'll use the bookmarklet. You should too, everyone should. Demand OpenID is built on the Google App Engine, so it can take the kind of click quantities that the lack of OpenID adoption around the web warrants.

Thanks to the Vidoop blog, a great place to unearth all kinds of OpenID related news like this.

Tech Crunch: Breaking: Condé Nast/Wired Acquires Ars Technica

Fri, 16 May 2008 20:40:36 +0000

Condé Nast has acquired popular technology blog Ars Technica (ranked #5 all time on the BloggerBoard), we’ve confirmed. The site will become part of Wired Digital (which in turn is under CondéNet, run by Sarah Chubb). Wired Digital assets include Wired.com and Reddit (acquired in 2006). The acquisition price will not be disclosed, but our sources say it is in the $25 million range, which is what Condé Nast paid for Wired.com in 2006.

Effectively, Ars Technica is now part of Wired. Look for an official announcement next week.

This marks a new beginning for Ars Technica, which was originally founded in 1998 by Ken “Caesar” Fisher (based in Boston) and Jon “Hannibal” Stokes (based in Chicago). They, along with their 8 or so employees, will remain with the company as it is integrated into Wired Digital.

Comscore says Ars Technica has just 1.5 million monthly unique visitors and 4 million page views, but our understanding is that the actual number of unique visitors to the site is around 4.5 million. The audience demographic is very similar to Wired, although our sources say the overlap is relatively small.

This is also another lost customer for Federated Media Publishing, which sells advertising for Ars Technica (Digg left Federated Media last year to accept a very lucrative Microsoft deal that will pay out over $100 million over three years). CondéNet will now take over advertising sales.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Richard MacManus: Snackr is an RSS Addict's Dream Come True

Fri, 16 May 2008 19:32:16 +0000

Snackr is a new Adobe AIR app that lets you display items in your RSS feeds in a beautiful scrolling ticker on any edge of your screen. I am absolutely giddy about it after only a few minutes of use. Snackr is something you'd supplement your existing reader with, not a replacement. It is not for the faint of heart or information averse, either.

If you've ever fantasized about having the river of news flow straight into your brain, this is the closest I've seen yet. I've uploaded a small OPML file of my top priority feeds, limited Snackr to displaying items from within the last 5 days and am in heaven. Read on for screenshots and some critique.

Snackr was built by Narciso Jaramillo, a long time Adobe developer now working on the Flex product line.

Below is a screenshot of the live ticker, paused when an item is clicked. The scrolling is really smooth, story order is randomized. When you click on an item, the full text will appear if it's available in the feed. The link at the bottom of the pop-up will take you to the full post.

You can have Snackr running at the top, bottom, left or right margin of your screen. I clapped my hands and jumped up and down like a little school girl upon seeing each different view for the first time.

The idea is not to read every item here, but to give your eye some opportunity to catch items it might not otherwise. I love it.

Wishes

So far I've only got two requests for Snackr development. The site supports authenticated feeds (password protected, something Google Reader can't do) which is great. When I click on an item from a particular filter's RSS feed in my GMail account though, the popup window prompts but doesn't allow me to log-in. I wish that were different.

Second, once I uploaded an OPML file, I ended up with some feeds I wanted to unsubscribe from and had to do so one at a time. Bulk feed management would be nice. A javascript bookmarklet to add a feed to Snackr with a click, when I discover it around the web, would be great too. Media handling could be improved as well.

All in all though, I am very excited to discover the app. It was the first app I happened to look at on FreshAIR Apps today, an AIR site we reviewed earlier this week. I plan to spend a lot more time on that site, as AIR is a very exciting platform.

Pete Cashmore: Why’d You Have To Go And Make Things So Complicated?

Fri, 16 May 2008 18:44:22 +0000

When Data Portability was first announced, it sounded like it would solve what had become one of the biggest problems in the social networking space: a seemingly endless array of new services, each of which required you to setup and maintain your own profile, friend’s list, photo albums, etc. With the support of just about every key player in the industry, Data Portability offered the promise of “being able to access [your] friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems …” Problem solved, right?

Not quite. At first, it seemed like Data Portability was a lot of hot air, with everyone scrambling to put out a press release and associate themselves with “the open Web,” but offering little in the way of specific plans. But then last week, MySpace announced Data Availability. Finally, there was a real implementation of Data Portability on the horizon, that out of the gates promised us integration with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter. But then, Facebook announced Facebook Connect. And then, Google announced Friend Connect. Facebook then decided it didn’t like Friend Connect and blocked it. So much for that idea. There’s a word to describe this, and that word begins with cluster and rhymes with duck.

The thing is, as we move to an environment where one profile essentially controls them all, all of the corporate interests want to be THAT profile, and for good reason. If I can make updates to MySpace and keep up with my friends that use it from Facebook, why would I ever login to MySpace if Facebook is my preferred network? In that scenario, MySpace loses page views and revenue, and gains what? Positive PR from a bunch of tech bloggers who push for open standards? Rupert says “No Thank You!”

So, What Are Consumers Left With?

For consumers, there will be marginal benefits from having at least 3 (and probably many more) big players in the social space offering portable profile data. The thing is, similar to what we saw on the application side of things, where developers needed to consider apps for Facebook, OpenSocial, Bebo, etc, developers will now need to consider which social networks they allow users to port data over from. So, if Twitter implements only MySpace Data Availability, but not Facebook Connect, new Twitter users will be out of luck. Of course, they can still do things the old fashioned way and just, you know, create an account.

So, What Does a Developer Choose?

Much like with the social networking application race, if you have the resources, you should support every big social network that wants to let you port over their profile data. Your competitors will, and if you don’t, you’ll be left behind in terms of gaining users and seeding your community with valuable data. However, if you don’t have the luxury of building to support every protocol under the sun, your best bet is to go with the one which has the demographics most similar to those you are targeting. Building a new flash widget company? Support MySpace. Building a new site for study abroad students? Support Facebook. You get the idea.

What About The Google?

Although Google might not be a huge player with any one social networking destination site (minus Orkut’s supposed popularity in Brazil and India), they have a huge advantage over everyone else (except maybe Yahoo): accounts. Between Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, Google Apps, YouTube, and so on, it won’t be long before just about everyone that’s anyone on the Web has a Google account, either by choice or as required (by an employer).

While you may not implicitly think of Google as a social network, the company has been aggressive (some might even dare say “evil”) with building your contact list behind the scenes, the most obvious example being the way contacts are added to your Gtalk and in turn Google Reader. The company is many magnitudes more mainstream than Facebook, MySpace, or any other social network could ever hope to be, and hence, as Friend Connect spreads its tentacles (and they will be spreading … 19,000 employees need *something* to do all day), it’s not inconceivable at all to think that the company could in the not-so-distant future be the one that owns your universal profile. After all, who do you think Middle America is more apt to trust? The company consistently voted one of the world’s most respected brands (Google), Rupert Murdoch, or a mysterious company run by mostly twenty-somethings?

So What?

Complicated? Yes, but only to those of us who eat, sleep, and breathe this stuff. The bottom line is we’re not moving towards openness at all, but we are moving towards a more manageable online social presence. The Internet behemoths will slug it out over who we use to manage it, but at the end of the day, there will be plenty of consumer choice and the free market will win – always a good thing in my book.

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Microsoft Makes Windows Live Contact Info Portable
Data Portability is Boring
MySpace Announces “Data Availability” with Yahoo, eBay, Twitter
Flixster Calls Down $5M of its Series B
Podcast: A Conversation with DataPortability’s Chris Saad
Zude’s Platform Supports Portability Between Facebook and OpenSocial
LinkedIn Joins the DataPortability Workgroup

Tech Crunch: Become a Virtual NewsCopter Passenger on AirFox Live

Fri, 16 May 2008 18:30:55 +0000

Chicago’s Fox affiliate WFLD has launched AirFox Live, a mashup whose spec list reads like a technophile’s pipe dream. The site combines a helicopter, GPS, live video, and Google Maps to produce a realtime data stream of the network’s newscopter that serves as uniquely informative eye-candy.

Live video taken from the helicopter’s cameras are displayed alongside an embedded Google Map that shows its current location. It might not sound particularly riveting, but I had a hard time pulling myself away from the tiny red copter as it hopped around Chicago.

Unfortunately, the site is only active when the helicopter is in the air (technically you can watch it sit at Schaumburg Airport, but have fun with that). The only guaranteed time to see it in action is from around 5:30-8:30 AM CST during the network’s morning show, which probably isn’t going to be too exciting.

But AirFox will also be active whenever the helicopter is involved in breaking news, which is where its real potential lies. The site will add a new element of information (and excitement) to events like police chases and fires. Of course, the new technology will probably only appeal to residents of Chicago, but if the program is a success we can expect other affiliates to follow suit.

You can watch a clip of AirFox in action here.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Tech Crunch: Live Universe Picking Up Jangl’s Pieces

Fri, 16 May 2008 18:11:02 +0000

Just over a week ago the founders of and five engineers from VoIP services provider Jangl left for Jajah after the company failed to find a proper suitor. Following their departure, it was unclear what would happen to Jangl’s assets and remaining staff. Now we hear from multiple sources close to the deal that Live Universe has agreed to acquire both.

This appears to conclude the Jangl saga that started late last fall. Around that time, Jangl’s board began telling the founders to pursue an acquisition strategy in lieu of raising more money. The board’s decision came even when the company had closed deals (some profitable) with several partners, including Plentyoffish and Tagged.

We hear there was a disconnect between the VCs, who had a more enterprise background, and Jangl’s executives, who were set on developing a consumer-facing brand. The founders, and Michael Cerda in particular, are said to have worked diligently to carry out the board’s marching orders. But despite many companies showing interest in Jangl, it struggled to find the right company for its exit.

An acquisition deal (apparently with WhitePages.com) came close but unraveled after the terms changed and became far less acceptable. With no apparent options left, much of the company’s staff was notified that they would probably have to find new work, and it was finally announced that Jangl’s founders were indeed jumping ship.

Just what Live Universe plans to do with everything they left behind has yet to be seen. I’m sure Jangl’s partners will be interested in hearing the fate of their agreements, if they haven’t already.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Richard MacManus: The Most Popular Twitter Apps According to the Blogosphere

Fri, 16 May 2008 17:51:49 +0000

Six weeks ago, ReadWriteWeb published their definitive list of the top Twitter clients. The methodology for that list was watching the Twitter public feed and logging tweet sources. However, how does the list of clients people are using match up the list of the ones people are talking about? Using data from blog search engine Twingly, we decided to see which Twitter clients are getting the most buzz on blogs. The result is a list of the most popular 3rd-party Twitter-apps according to the blogosphere.

This is a guest post from Anton Johansson, a business developer at the Swedish startup Twingly.com, which developing a spam-free blog search engine focused on Europe.

Top 5 Overall

ReadWriteWeb's public feed study in April also found Twhirl to be the most popular Twitter client. It was helped in the blogosphere by all the buzz created by its acqusition by Seesmic last month. [Incidentally, that also drove a lot of traffic to our Twitter clients list post as well. -- Ed.]

Top 5 Desktop Apps

The top two desktop apps -- Twhirl and Twitterific -- are again the same ones ReadWriteWeb saw last month in their study. But after that, things deviate a bit. Snitter, Tweetr, and Twitteroo were all farther down the list in terms of usage, but are getting a disproportionate amount of coverage in the blogosphere.

Top 5 Web Apps

Launched just a few weeks ago, Twistori (RWW coverage) has already garnered a lot of attention. Interestingly, Twistori actually uses data from Summize, one of the more popular Twitter search engines -- and clearly one of the most talked about, as well.

Top 5 Mobile Apps

There have been far fewer blog posts written about mobile Twitter applications in relation to other categories. Hahlo, the first iPhone and iPod Touch client for Twitter takes first place in terms of buzz, followed by Cetwit, a popular app for Windows Mobile. Twittai is a Java-based Twitter cell phone application.

Notes and Methodology:

We used the the list of Twitter apps on the Twitter Fan Wiki as our source of applications to watch for. The list contains 209 Twitter apps, most of which have not been linked to from the blogosphere at all.

LoudTwitter, an app that publishes tweets to blogs, was excluded because most of its links came from link backs included when the service pushes tweets to blog posts. They didn't get many mentions in posts specifically about them, but their autolinks generated a ton of links within the blogosphere.

Tech Crunch: What Windows Might Look Like On The OLPC

Fri, 16 May 2008 17:26:03 +0000

Google’s Bob Lee creates a much better image to go with our post yesterday about One Laptop Per Child and Windows teaming up. More at CrunchGear.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Pete Cashmore: AOL Launches ParentDish

Fri, 16 May 2008 17:04:18 +0000

AOL has added a new channel to its AOL Living portal; this one is for parents. As we all know, blogging has become a favorite pastime for parents all over the world. Sites like CafeMom has taken off, and have raked in some high valuations. Most of the older portal sites from Yahoo, etc. are still leveraging this format, and AOL has been growing out its Living portal for some time, with verticals health, and other topics of interest.

The new parent destination is called ParentDish, and will feature editorial content from parental experts, celebrity contributors, and more. Supported by AOL-s advertising network Platform-A, AOL plans on incorporating information from across its Living portal (and beyond) to supplement a wide array of multimedia content for readers. That even includes video content from Warner, specifically promotional content from MomLogic.

Between verticals becoming more niche and larger companies like AOL hoping to tap into specialized demographics in order to expand their advertising potential, we’re sure to see a lot more networks such as ParentDish cropping up. What’s even more interesting is AOL’s blog approach to this particular vertical.

However, there’s little interaction for the readers of this content, meaning ParentDish isn’t likely to completely attract the mommy-blogging crowd. As mommy bloggers are a force to be reckoned with, I imagine a few more appealing factors geared towards this audience would be helpful.

Richard MacManus: AideRSS Updates Filtering: Adds Twitter

Fri, 16 May 2008 17:03:47 +0000

Allen Stern points out that RSS filtering service AideRSS has added Twitter to its PostRank algorithm. AideRSS works by measuring social media interaction with blog posts, and then comparing them to what's normal for that blog. The service then algorithmically applies a ranking to each post allowing users to filter out only the best posts based on the theory that people will only bother interacting with the most interesting or worthwhile content.

We're huge fans of AideRSS at ReadWriteWeb. Not only have we written about them a lot, we've also used AideRSS to filter aggregate feeds for the top content for a number of our toolkit posts. Adding Twitter support is an interesting move because it confirms Twitter's growing influence in the social media space, and lets blog owners see how their content is being spread across the microblog service.

Since we published our first look at AideRSS last July, their PostRank algorithm has changed a lot. At launch, PostRank included information from comments, Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, IceRocket, and Bloglines -- now the latter three have been replaced with Twitter links and Google blog search conversations. Some of those changes likely had to do with API restrictions, some likely with just general tweaking to make the algorithm perform better.

Because AideRSS calculates PostRank against only that blog's past performance, the ranking is a fair representation of that blog's best work. For example, a PR 10 post on ReadWriteWeb would require different interaction metrics than a post on a small personal blog. PostRank would be easy to cheat -- you could comment a million times on your post, get your friends to Digg it, tweet it, add it it del.icio.us -- but since the service isn't measuring you against other blogs, there's really no incentive to cheat it.

AideRSS also announced support for OpenID.

Pete Cashmore: Vodafone Buys ZYB, Cites Likeminded Interest And Philosophy

Fri, 16 May 2008 16:02:59 +0000

Vodafone, the largest mobile network operator in Europe, has announced the acquisition of ZYB, a company based in Denmark with an eye on content backup as well as social networking. Vodafone intends to add ZYB to its “Total Communications” strategy, in which it seeks to serve customers with an integrated mobile phone and PC experience.The purchase price is reported as 31 million euros, or 48.65 million dollars.

We first mentioned ZYB as it was expanding its business model to encompass items other information storage in the cloud. At that point it seemed to be finding its place among Web services devoted to mobile users whilst maintaining connections to users’ primary information portals: their desktop and laptop computers and full-fledged social networks.

In the months since, ZYB has evidently kept its focus on users’ contact lists uploaded to the Web from their devices, which Vodafone apparently considers a business model quite in line with its own. Vodafone’s Internet Services Director, Pieter Knook emphasizes the importance of the social network that everyday mobile users rely on through the mobile rolodexes of their handsets.

Such logic does certainly make sense in Vodafone’s case, but it is also worth noting the popularity of standalone networks like Facebook (a website Vodafone has partnered with; MySpace, too) as the means by which more and more subscribers of mobile Web services communicate. It is undoubtedly the case that mobile users consider today that the basic services delivered by mobile networks - like 3G broadband access, for example - are mere gateways through which users can venture to preferred websites, entirely independent of their service providers’ influence. So whether Vodafone can exploit the assets of ZYB effectively to offer a networking solution that its subscribers indeed latch onto rather than pass over, is an open question - and one that may likely be answered in short order.

Financially speaking, of course, the investment made in the purchase of ZYB is one that Vodafone can likely consider an afterthought when all is said and done.

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37signals: Robert Rauschenberg on process, change, boredom, and more

Fri, 16 May 2008 15:48:00 +0000

This obituary of Robert Rauschenberg contains some great quotes from the artist…

An improvisatory process was what mattered most to him:

Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.

Embracing change is essential:

John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.

Boredom and understanding are the same thing:

I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop. At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.

Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.

There is poetry in simple, everyday designs:

I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly. Because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.

His description of an encounter with a woman who reacted skeptically to one of his pieces:

To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly.

So I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed, it might sound very much like what she’d been saying. For instance, she had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture of ‘The Blue Boy’ on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning to understand.

Richard MacManus: Songza Announces Facebook App and API

Fri, 16 May 2008 15:11:48 +0000

The music search engine and Internet jukebox, Songza, lets you seek out any song on the web and stream it immediately. In January of this year, we announced the site's partnerships with Seeqpod and Skreemr, which allowed them to grown their online library to 28 million songs. Now, Songza grows again with a launch of a new Facebook app and the arrival of a Songza API.

The Songza Facebook app lets friends see what each other are listening to on the Songza web site. Whenever a song is added to your playlist, that information is posted to your mini-feed and your profile page. Your friends can then click the link to the song to be taken to the Songza site to listen to it for themselves. In order to use the Facebook app, you have to first sign up for an account at Songza.com

Songza in the Mini-Feed

Along with the Facebook app, Songza is now also offering RSS feeds for the site's top-played songs, the featured songs list, and each user's playlist of newly added tunes, which is found on the user profile page. With that last one, the user playlist feed, you now have the ability to add Songza to a lifestreaming service such as FriendFeed, for example.

The last part of the Songza announcement involves the launch of their API. By using the API, developers can build custom widgets and applications based on Songza data. The API can be used to access the featured songs list, a user's playlist, and the last ten songs a user has added to their playlist. At the moment, Songza isn't imposing any limitations on the number of times requests can be made to the API, but they do remind developers that their feeds only update every 15 minutes, so there isn't much point to polling more often than that.

Because Songza finds its music on the internet, it can be useful for locating more obscure artists or live performances. And since the service doesn't allow for downloads, only streaming, it's legit. They even pay artists based on how many times a song was streamed via licenses with the major performing-rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC). However, the best thing about Songza is that you can listen to a song as many times as you want in its entirety, unlike Last.fm, whose on-demand service lets you play any particular song, too, but only in full three times before receiving a prompt to purchase it.

Pete Cashmore: Jerry Yang To Workforce: Nevermind The Pitchforks And Torches. Keep Coding.

Fri, 16 May 2008 15:06:24 +0000

The past 24 hours have been thoroughly intriguing. It hasn’t been very long since Yahoo and Microsoft ceased their deeply fouled rendezvous with a reversal from Redmond. And though Yahoo seems to have staved off a shareholder mutiny in post-prod, at least for the short term, it is now forced to contend with a purportedly peeved Carl C. Icahn.

As many have now learned, the billionaire investor now claims himself as a shareholder of the Sunnyvale-based Web giant. And in this newfound role, he strongly suggests to the Yahoo board that they reconsider a purchase by Microsoft. (Semi-official word from Microsoft is that the company has “moved on” from its buyout attempt.)

Now, we heard yesterday from Yahoo’s chairman, Roy Bostock, as to the company’s aversion to Icahn’s suggestive hostility play. Yet in the hours following Yahoo’s initial volley, word has also escaped the CEO’s desk, according to Dawn Kawamoto of CNET News, intended to update the executive and working classes at the company as to his own thoughts about the week’s unexpected developments. Naturally, Jerry writes mostly in the collective mindset of “we.” As in, “what’s best for us to do,” not, “what’s best for me to do.”

In reading Mr Yang’s response to Icahn’s quite explicit letter (whose openness seems a bit refreshing, given Microsoft and Yahoo’s elusiveness and general passive aggressiveness in their correspondences of the last few months, no?), one might be forgiven in thinking that Yang is playing a propagandist. And not a very good one. He mentions to the broad employee base of Yahoo to disregard rumors and speculation and to continue to do “what we do best.” Over and over again. Odd? Odd.

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Richard MacManus: Spongecell Promote: The Event Management Platform

Fri, 16 May 2008 14:35:01 +0000

Last August we called Spongecell "the most intuitive of the online calendar apps," and picked it as one of our 10 Must Have Online Office Apps. Since then, though, a lot has changed. Spongecell is no longer just a personal calendar, but rather a full-scale event management platform aimed at businesses with complicated event calendars. Last week I caught up with Spongecell CEO Ben Kartzman and Chief Strategy Office Marc Guldimann to learn a little bit more about what the company is up to.

With Google Calendar now dominating the online personal calendar space, Spongecell decided to take a different approach to the market. Spongecell reworked their product and launched "Spongecell Promote" in March 2007, a full event-marketing platform provides publishing, messaging, and reporting tools to event organizers. After seeing that they were getting more traffic via embedded calendars than via the personal calendar service that had been their main product, Spongecell decide to shift gears completely and make Promote their core offering.

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Above is a sample Spongecell calendar widget.

The service compares somewhat to Evite, but Kartzman stressed that Spongecell isn't focused on one-off events like birthday parties -- though the product could be used that way -- but rather hopes to help organizations or event managers who run a large number of gatherings to manage their entire calendar.

Spongecell's service has three main components:

Publishing: Each event gets a web page that allows people to RSVP, comment, get directions, etc. Event pages can be syndicated to MySpace, Facebook, Eventful, Upcoming and elsewhere via widgets.
Messaging: Spongecell lets users spread the word about their event via SMS and email. About 2 million emails are sent out each month via the service.
Reporting: Event managers can use Spongecell's reporting features to track their email and SMS blasts and guest lists.

Spongecell's calendar widget has about 12,000 installs and serves 2 million pageviews each month, Kartzman told me. About 25% of those come through the app's RESTful API, which allows developers to create custom calendar applications. Parenting site lilaguide.com, for example, uses the API to power its event section and has customized it so that parents can add events to the site's calendar.

Conclusion

Spongecell has already landed some pretty big clients for their platform, including CNN, but plans to expand into new markets over the coming year as part of an ambitious plan to become the event marketing management platform for any industry.

Spongecell may no longer be a must have office application -- if you're looking for a simple calendar, try Google -- but it is now a very well made and versatile platform for running an online event calendar on any web site. Deciding not to compete with Google was probably a smart move for the company, which now has a much better chance of cornering their intended market.

Alexander Muse: Filipino Emotional Intelligence

Fri, 16 May 2008 14:13:40 +0000

Ruben Canlas, of the Philippine Startup Blog, has a post up today titled, “Leading a Startup”. He describes how important emotional intelligence is for anyone running a startup. Check out the post.

Pete Cashmore: Pushed By Icahn, Yahoo Jumps Back Into Ad Deal With Google?

Fri, 16 May 2008 13:45:09 +0000

According to the New York Post, Yahoo-Google advertising deal is not far from reality. After Carl Icahn announced his plan to seize Yahoo’s board of directors, which would consqeuently accept a Microsoft buyout, Yahoo execs are up for an open alliance with Google, and there’s a good possibility that an ad deal between two companies wiill be announced next week.

The deal will likely result in (yet another) open platform, which would allow other companies, besides Yahoo and Google, to bid for contextual ads tied to search queries. The big question is: would this open platform be fair to everyone? Not everyone thinks so. Kevin Lee, chairman of search engine marketing firm Did-It, and Michaek Kassan, founder of advertising consulting firm Media Link, both think that such a system would be biased towards Google, who would win in most of the bids.

The advantage of such a system is the fact that it’s less likely that it would be called a monopoly, which was the biggest obstacle for the actualization of any advertising deal between Yahoo and Google. Furthermore, an open platform would make it less obvious that Yahoo gave up on Panama (although, clearly, this is what’s happening) which would enable them to create more optimistic predictions about their future growth which no one believes in.

One thing is certain, though: in every scenario we’ve written about so far, Google is always a winner.

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

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Icahn Announces Plans to Seize Yahoo Board with Help from Mark Cuban
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Ajaxian: Cubescape: Isometric Pixel Fun

Fri, 16 May 2008 13:37:54 +0000

Ever wanted to create your own isometric pixel picture, but didn’t know what the word isometric meant? Well, now you can fulfil your wildest dreams with Cubescape!

That is the headline for Cubescape, a site that released a new jQuery based front end that lets you drop the cubes!

Perfect for a Friday, go ahead and get dropping on this very clean interface.