Ajax Girl

One thing people really like about the Snap search engine is that it gives a large preview screen of every search result. The idea is that users can save time by seeing the site before they click to it. That can be an advantage when wading through increasingly sophisticated SEO and spoof sites that aren’t relevant to your search. Snap has 300 million stored site images, updated regularly, and adds new ones as unique searches are performed. The search engine is now serving up to 50,000 searches per day.

Last week they launched Snap Preview Anywhere, a free service that lets any site owner add previewing technology to their sites. When installed, every link on the site (internal links are optional) will show a preview of the linked site when a viewer hovers over the link. To see how it works, hover over the “Try Snap Preview Anywhere here” link near the top of this page. Snap Product Evangelist Jason Fields and Business Development executive Josheph Sarmiento gave me a demo of Snap Preview Anywhere at the Web 2.0 Summit last week.

The preview optionally includes a Snap search box, and large partners are eligible to negotiate a revenue share with Snap based on usage. For others, having the preview functionality will be incentive enough.

Someone has already created a wordpress plugin for the functionality as well, which makes installation easier.

Since launching a few days ago, Snap reports that 500 sites have integrated the functionality and 70,000 page previews have been created. Note related services Browster and Cooliris, which users can integrate into their browser to view page previews for certain links on any site.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/51087744/

A round-up of some articles and ideas that I’ve enjoyed recently with a focus on global change, community, action, and design thinking.

Worldchanging: A Users Guide for the 21st Century

“A groundbreaking compendium of the most innovative solutions, ideas and inventions emerging today for building a sustainable, livable, prosperous future.  From consumer consciousness to a new vision for industry; non-toxic homes to refugee shelters; microfinance to effective philanthropy; socially responsible investing to starting a green business; citizen media to human rights; ecological economics to climate change, this is the most comprehensive, cutting-edge overview to date of what’s possible in the near future—if we decide to make it so.”

A Tale of Three Communities by Derek Powazek

“Some great things happen when these three communities become one. You can no longer treat your readers like sheep, because if you do they’ll leave. When your community makes your magazine, you have to give them as much respect and reward as you give your editors (that’s why we pay the people we publish in JPG). You can no longer tell advertisers one thing and the readers another (a development advertisers should love). And you can no longer limit the power to contribute to just your writers. Everyone has a voice, and the ability to help sort the good from the great.”

Now that’s what I call infectious action by Diego Rodriguez

“A Firefox crop circle.  Created by a band of loyal (and unpaid) Firefox customers…How might your brand stoke this kind of infectious action?”

The Power of the Marginal by Paul Graham

“If you really want to score big, the place to focus is the margin of the margin: the territories only recently captured from the insiders. That’s where you’ll find the juiciest projects still undone, either because they seemed too risky, or simply because there were too few insiders to explore everything.”

Enlightened Innovation: 5 Keys to Promoting Thoughtful Design Leadership in Education by Xanthe Matychak and David Morgan

“Traditional business models are failing in the face of global competition, and American companies are scouring design schools for design-innovators to lead them into the twenty-first century with creative strategies. Great. But the question is, where will these young designers lead us?”

The Talent Hunt

“The power of this new approach, called design thinking, to promote innovation and open up business opportunities is attracting the attention of corporations around the globe. Design has evolved from a narrow discipline dealing with the form and function of products into a major new approach to developing business models.  As business increasingly turns to India and China to provide low-cost, high-quality goods and services, companies have to focus on innovation to be competitive. That driving need makes design thinking the hottest trend in business culture today.”

Source: Emily Chang
Original Article: http://www.emilychang.com/go/weblog/comments/suggested-reading-november-18-2006/

Walter Higgins is a believer in having a template language for you to use within JavaScript. He had issues with TrimPath’s templating system, so he ended up creating SXOOP.template:

Writing TinyTemplate in Perl was a breeze and the codebase is tiny. I used a similar approach to writing SXOOP.template which resulted in a tiny codebase for the Javascript version too.

What need for Javascript Templating you ask ?

Well, JSON gives Javascript Templating something to do. More and more webservices are supporting JSON.
What’s more; if you combine SXOOP.template with this brilliant XML javascript library, then suddenly javascript templating becomes 1000 times more useful (most existing WebServices use XML). You can mix and combine XML data sources (like the ubiquitous RSS and less well known formats like OPML) and use them to construct Human-readable web-pages without resorting to XSLT.

Example template usage

This example snippet is taken from the poor mans blog template

The entire library is here at 82 lines of commented code.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/sxooptemplate