Ajax Girl

Like it or not, wikis are a dime a dozen these days. So when (and if) it comes time to choose one, WikiMatrix is a good place to start. It’s a site that allows you to compare any and all wikis on the market in a side-by-side grid.

WikiMatrix has over 100 wikis to compare. The wiki designers maintain the information on their listing because, as WikiMatrix founder Andreas Gohr puts it, “nobody knows a product better than its creator.”

WikiMatrix was launched about a year ago and Gohr says that it is popular enough within the wiki developer community that wiki owners are proactive about getting their sites listed. But he says that users’ knowledge of wikis usually doesn’t go much further than Wikipedia.

“Wikipedia was written to power an encyclopedia,” Gohr said via IM on Friday. “Not everyone needs an encyclopedia. Others might have the need to have the wiki integrated into enterprise structures. There are various different use cases for wikis and various different engines and each does things a little bit different. If you decide to replace the Intranet of a 5,000+ employee company with a wiki you may need to compare different choices. That’s what WikiMatrix is for.”

Users can also create their ideal wiki on the site and then see which wiki comes the closest to matching their needs. Gohr’s 10-person company also launched ForumMatrix.org last year as a spin-off, which is basically the same site but for forum software, although Gohr admits it isn’t as popular as WikiMatrix yet.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/56547467/

A common issue with testing IE 7 and IE 6 is, how do you get to do this in an environment which is true to the user environment?

The IE team has blogged about IE6 and IE7 Running on a Single Machine, and their answer is to give us a Virtual PC image that contains:

• Windows XP Professional SP2 + high-priority fixes through November 2006
• Internet Explorer 6.0
• Internet Explorer 7 Readiness Toolkit 2.0

The idea is: run IE 7 on your main machine, and boot into this VPC image for IE 6.

On the Mac side there is exciting news. Parallels has a new release that contains:

• Coherence mode: You can run Windows apps that appear like they are mac windows. They fit into Alt-Tab and expose. No need to go to the “windows” window and go from there. This means you can run IE7, Firefox for Windows, etc and it looks like they are just other apps
• Boot from Basecamp partition: People have long asked to be able to boot directly from a bootcamp partition.
• Transporter: Parallels Transporter can migrate the information from live disks of a remote PC computer and create
  images of such disks which can be usedParallels Transporter usage scenarios.

Virtualization is getting better and better, and will help us keep old crud around for frustrating testing

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/running-ie7-and-ie6-at-the-same-time-windows-and-mac

Making preformated

 text wrap in CSS3, Mozilla, Opera and IE

is the tip that let’s you use the pre tag to keep the formatting, without cursing yourself when some of the content is too long and doesn’t wrap:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/wrapping-the-pre-tag

Steve Rubel says page view metrics have four years to live.

The page view does not offer a suitable way to measure the next generation of web sites. These sites will be built with Ajax, Flash and other interactive technologies that allow the user to conduct affairs all within a single web page - like Gmail or the Google Reader. This eliminates the need to click from one page to another. The widgetization of the web will only accelerate this.

This is a dirty little secret in the advertising business that no one wants to talk about. Media companies love to promote how many page views their properties get. They’ve used the data to build equity. They will fight it tooth and nail to protect it, perhaps by not embracing interactive technologies as quickly as they should. But that’s not going to stop the revolution from coming.

As the page view platform crumbles, there’s going to be a shake out. Everyone is going to scramble to find a metric that helps them compete for ad dollars. Enjoy the show.

The question then becomes: What alternatives will be used? Ryan Stewart suggests more emphasis will be placed on how much time people spend with a website, and also an “interaction rate” - how much interactivity there is (mouseclicks etc).

Another likely trend is rotating ads - ads that change periodically and update according to page context.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/death-of-page-view-metrics

JPG Magazine relaunched last month with a new business model: Get users to upload photos to their website, and then have the community vote on and rank photos. The winners are published in a bi-monthly print magazine and get $100 plus a free one-year subscription.

It took me a couple of weeks to get over the fact that they are actually printing a magazine, on paper, just like people used to do in the last century. But after a visit to their offices at Minor Ventures earlier this week and a discussion of how they are embracing their online community to create content, I’ve come around to their way of thinking. And I think it is a model that other tree-killers should embrace, too.

They are doing so many things right. The fact that the community decides what photos end up in each issue has resulted in a ton of activity on the website. Photographers are uploading their best work to showcase their stuff - if a photo gets picked for the magazine it’s just icing on the cake for them. Finally, every issue of the magazine is available, free, as a PDF download. Get the most recent issue here, for example.

The economics work well, too. They have good print advertisers already, including Flickr. Another sponsor, Lensbaby, is giving away a free camera lens to every winner in a category for an upcoming issue. The magazine isn’t cheap at $5.99 (a year subscription of six issues costs $25, five bucks off the cover price), but the high price and advertising success means the run of 30,000 or so print magazines is profitable for them.

And it feeds the website. The online community is the real value here, and the ability to get a photo into print is a big enough incentive to entice photographers to set up shot at JPG Magazines website.

More print magazines should be doing similar things to embrace an online community instead of just copying their print content to their website. Periodic news magazines have no chance over the long run against their own online competitors. But magazines like JPG Mag, which people want to keep and display over the long run, can be successful. If they come up with the right way to bridge the online and offline worlds.

JPG Magazine shares office space in San Francisco with other Minor Ventures companies, including OpenDNS and a new service launching next week called Swivel.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/56447125/

Thank you readers for your support and creating the vibrant community and insight that often plays out in our comments.

We recently implemented Snap on TechCrunch to provide previews of the outbound links in stories. Let us know how you like it in the comments or through Feedback at techcrunch dot com.

Also, thank you to our sponsors for writing our paychecks every month

If you have a moment please express your opinion in this survey for a sponsor, Symantec.

DoubleClick - DoubleClick has ten years’ experience in teh online advertising space, with a variety of advertising solutions for rich media ads, SEO, and consulting services.

Text Link Ads - Check out Text Link Ads if you want to buy ads on some top websites, or in their RSS feeds. When you sign up, they will start you off with $100 in free ads. TLA also has an easy cut-and-paste solution to publish ads so you can start monetizing your site or attach your own rotating announcements in your feed.

oDesk - oDesk is a marketplace for contracting computer programmers. They recently hit some milestones, including 500,000 total billed hours, 6,000 developers, and 1,000 projects per month. You’ll be pleased to know that they have also lowered their fee from 23% to 10% of the developer’s rate.

Carbonite - Carbonite is a set-and-forget backup program that allows you to easily sync your most mission critical files to an unlimited Carbonite drive. You can even use it for a full system restore. I’ve been satisfied user for the past couple of months. Check out their no hassle one month trial here.

Compete - Compete is a search engine and web analytics site. They have an easy-to-use toolbar and personal compete page that lets you track the website trends most important to you. Check out the latest battle between YouTube and MySpace on the Compete.com blog.

Edgeio - Listings from the edge sums up what Edgeio is all about. They have over 100 million classified listings drawn from over 15,000 cities and 144 countries. It’s a great place to publish your listings or find posts for anything from autos to personals.

Flock - Flock is a must-try for any social web surfer. It’s has integrated photo-sharing (drag-n-drop), search, RSS feed management, blog editor, and one-click favoriting.

Media Temple - Media Temple has done a stellar job of hosting TechCrunch throughout our growth. We are definitely satisfied customers. They offer grid hosting, dedicated virtual servers, and ultra-customized web serving.

Thank you to those companies who posted on the CrunchBoard job board.

If you are interested in sponsoring TechCrunch see this page for details.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/56438760/