Ajax Girl

Om Malik’s growing blog empire expanded today with the launch of NewTeeVee, a blog covering the exploding world of online video. The primary contributors will be Malik and GigaOm writers Liz Gannes and Katie Fehrenbacher, with contributions from Jackson West, Paul Kapustka, Russell Heimlich and Russell Shaw. There’s good content on the site already.

You’ve arrived at the newest member of the GigaOM family, NewTeeVee.com. We aim to cover online video from end to end and front to back. We’ll point you to hot startups, hot videos, hot pipes — tracing the talent, money, code, and data across the network. We’ll combine the signature GigaOM skepticism with a healthy sense of wonder for all the cool stuff that’s going on out there. And lots and lots of pictures and video.

Congrats to Om and team for another relevant blog launch. We think GigaOm is great - lots of witty analysis and breaking news. It has quickly grown to become possibly the second most interesting blog network overall.

I do have one request - a mashed up feed that has all four GigaOm properties, plus whatever is added in the future. It’s much better than adding new RSS feeds every time Om launches a new site.

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/~3/57279271/

Today, Kapow Technologies has launched a new developer community, OpenKapow, based around their Kapow web-crawling bot. OpenKapow lets anyone use Kapow’s visual IDE (Kapow RoboSuite) to more easily program and share bots that make RSS feeds, REST services, and web clips. The IDE weighs in at 110MB, so sit tight for a long download. It’s not as sleek as Dapper, with its virtual browser and nontechnical interface, but serves as a good introduction to Kapow’s enterprise-level services.

The bot operates much like any other home-grown screen-scrapping bot you would quickly program to grab bits and pieces of pages across the web, but is more flexible and optimized better than bots that rely solely on grabbing html code based on matching text patterns (regular expressions). Instead, Kapow bots follow the DOM structure of a site when grabbing and looping through data.

The IDE’s interface is comprised of three main areas: logical structure of the bot (for loops and all), properties inspector, and an embeded browser you use to direct the bot’s interaction with a web page. Examples of completed bot programs can be found at the community forum page, where all completed bots must be published so that they can be run by Kapow’s servers. Each program can also be downloaded and modified by any user. Look at this NFL sports feed created by one member’s program. With a bit more programming, you can create more interesting mashups based on Kapow data.

Kapow Technologies was founded in Denmark in 1998, with their bot suite originally used to collect the data for the largest marketplace in Europe, Kapow.net. In 2001, Kapow decided to refocus solely on their software. OpenKapow marks a new effort to expose RoboSuite to a wider audience, particularly the mashup crowd. As with Dapper, though, we have yet to see how any copyright issues develop.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/57244354/

VodPod comes out of “private alpha” into beta mode today. It’s a social networking video sharing site and right about now you’re thinking, ‘Why do we need another YouTube?” Well, if YouTube becomes increasingly commercial, as it appears it will be, then user-generated video will need a new home.

VodPod is heavily designed around social networking. Have a thing for birds? Join the bird “pod” and you’ll have an instantaneous collection of birding videos. Like unicycling? Some kids from Australia have started a pod around that pastime too. Users can join multiple groups that cluster videos around various subjects that allows them to post and collect new videos that pertain to that topic. Although you don’t have to join a pod or even sign up with VodPod to search pod videos. Users can “lurk” within the pods anonymously without being socially networked.

Videos added to a pod don’t have to be original VodPod material. They can come from other sharing sites like YouTube using the embed code.

“Basically it allows you to build a video collection from videos you find on MySpace or YouTube or over 100 of these sites on the Internet, or you can put video of your own up on VodPod as the host, and then build a mixture of them.” said Mark Hall, one of the three founders of VodPod, in a phone briefing last Friday.

Hall and his partners are big fans of Last.fm and wanted to create a similar experience where users can build networks of friends with similar tastes and watch what they watch. Although, users can’t necessarily watch everything their friends watch because it is possible to mark certain videos as private, making it impossible for others to know that you have watched them.

VodPod development began over the summer in San Francisco where the company has been privately funded. Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of Linden Labs and Second Life, and Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic, which owns Wordpress, are both outside advisers to the company.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/57215828/

Why are you people searching for Britney Spears!? She is hardly the eye candy she once was so I just don’t understand how she has topped Yahoo’s most popular search terms for the fifth time in six years but is appears that the flashing, divorcing baby mama has.

Tonight at 9 p.m. PST, Yahoo will release their most popular search terms of 2006. In the top five are Britney, WWE, Shakira, Jessica Simpson, and Paris Hilton.

When the site goes live, users will see that this year, Yahoo scored the most popular user-generated content in addition to most popular Internet searches. The list includes the top online videos, top Flickr photos, and top Yahoo Answers content.

In other celebrity news, the top famous baby list is led by Suri Cruise, daughter of TomKat, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, daugher of Brangelina, and Britney’s two sons Sean Preston and Jayden James. Other top-ten results will include celebrity searches, news stories, TV shows, sports teams, song lyrics, movies, World Cup players, blogs and bloggers, and politicians.

It’s not that I have anything against Britney because I’d like to see her reclaim her hot self just as much as the next person. But I do wish that people were searching for more productive terms. I guess it goes to show that the Internet is not the intellectual hub that those of us who work in tech would like to think it is. But at least there is no shortage of cultural capital.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/57214055/

We’re looking for video clips of Basecamp customers telling us why they love Basecamp. If we use your clip to promote the product, you’ll get a $250 voucher for Basecamp.

What should I say?
Tell us why you love Basecamp, how you use it, how it’s helped you, what you would say to recommend it to a friend, and/or anything else you’d like to share. No fancy production skills required — what you have to say is what matters here. Also, screenshots aren’t necessary. We want your story, not a tour of the product. A simple shot of your head while you talk is fine.

How long should it be?
Clips need to be under three minutes.

How do I submit a video?
Option 1: Use a file uploading service like MediaFire (unlimited file size), DropSend (250 MB limit), or YouSendIt (100 MB limit). Send it to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Option 2: Upload the clips to your own server and send the link to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Also, make sure to include your Basecamp URL.

Important: Please do not email the video clip directly to us. Also, do not use a video-sharing site like YouTube.

Is there a deadline?
No, but videos that get here sooner rather then later may have an advantage.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/143-wanted-a-video-of-you-talking-about-why-you-love-basecamp-reward-250

Yahoo wants you to work for their news site. But you might not get paid.

The company announced on Monday that they would partner with Reuters to solicit public contributions to their news service. The new submission page is live but not yet accepting submissions.

CNN has been accepting public picture and video submissions for quite a while now but it doesn’t seem to be a significant part of their news coverage. It is more of a supplement to professional journalism.

Yahoo’s You Witness news will syndicate the submissions they receive to other news networks. The company is currently developing some sort of compensation method where they will reward users that send in submissions that get used.

“There is already a lot of quality amateur journalism being created by our users,” Scott Moore, head of news and information at Yahoo Media Group, told Reuters. “Yahoo needed a more efficient process for soliciting and publishing user-contributed photos and video.”

Except for the time it takes some poor soul to sift through the crap that they will inevitably receive, Yahoo has little to lose with this news model. As long as they’re just soliciting art and not writing, I’m okay with it.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/57137714/

Mobile phone application company bluepulse released version 2.0 today to rave reviews on our sister site, MobileCrunch.

Blogger Oliver Starr could not say enough about the new platform. “I’ve seen quite a number of mobile applications in the last twelve months and many have been very comprehensive but I do not believe that I’ve seen a single platform that had as many different functions as bluepulse 2.0; especially not one with the diversity of widgets or the ability to run on so many phones,” he writes.

Bluepulse 2.0 is a full-fledged multimedia platform that allows users to socially network, create detailed user profiles, chat, text, and link to Flickr, Gmail, Digg, and more. In fact, the Digg widget allows readers to read news, log in, Digg stories, participate in comment forums, and blog and email stories.

Starr writes that this mobile application is groundbreaking for two reasons: because it works on virtually any phone, and because of a combination of the user profiles and the broadcast messaging capability which will allow for “highly targeted broadcast mobile advertising.”

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/~3/57131174/

Jesse Kuhnert, Tapestry/Dojo team member, spent time on caching and compression mechanisms in the effort to give the best experience “for free” with Tapestry.

The result was:

• Browser Caching: Previous versions of the framework weren’t aggressive enough in the way that all of the bundled assets (images/javascript/css/etc) were managed with http headers. Though the Expires and If-Modified-Since headers were being used it wasn’t really the complete solution. All of these resources now have realistic / appropriate headers set depending on the type of content and browser being delivered to. (Etag / Cache-Control / Expires / etc) Things will probably still be undergoing more and more change as this section is refined but anyone currently serving this content from the core Tapestry jars (or their own) - with no other configuration - should see a significant performance boost with the added caching support.
• Gzip Compression: The biggest (and scariest) change has been the addition of intelligently gzip’ing content where appropriate. Now all javascript/css/html content that is typically managed by Tapestry gets a good once over with some gzip compression to help make those responses as snappy as possible.
• Much Faster load time: The overall load time for pages should be much better now. The bundled version of dojo with tapestry is now served at a size of roughly 50k - down from the default size of 200k.

I would love to see some benchmarks on the gzip compression side. I used to read that for smallish file sizes, and certain machines, and certain networks, the overhead wasn’t worth it.

Have anyone in the community done good work on when to gzip versus when not too?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/compression-caching-for-faster-load-times

Mathew Brooks of RDF Group has published a summary of his experiences in developing mform — an Ajax-enabled mortgage application — using the Echo2 platform. Although fairly high level, the post is thought provoking and doesn’t just focus just on Ajax. With regard to best practices in using Echo2, he writes:

Whilst using echo 2 we discovered that whilst it was the most advanced tool for the job (at least when we started, which was before GWTcame out) we did find that we had to undertake the following:

• Adjust some of the java script in widget peers where it was not quite performing as we expected
• Subclass the echo 2 servlet to ensure that:
  • We can trap non java script type clients and present a “non javascript” type version of the page
  • We can present a more polished start up page rather than the ||| presented as default by echo 2
• Some post back functionality does not work well with IE either under load or restricted bandwidth. Due to the way that IE polls for the post back other events on the browser were being missed.
• Develop our own widgets where necessary if there was no suitable one available from echo or echopointNG

Beyond Echo2, the application makes use of ServiceMix (the Open Source ESB), Spring, Hibernate and EJB3. It also integrates with a CMS — Hippo — for conetent management. I haven’t used ServiceMix myself, but I have used the Mule ESB myself (it has much better docs and tutorials, IMHO), and beyond the SOA help it provides, I’ve found it’s support for FutureTask very helpful for some of the asynchronous processing you see more of in Ajax apps.

Mathew’s analysis goes well beyond just Ajax, of course, with some thoughts on how to avoid the Anaemic Data Model antipattern, among other things.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/application-development-with-echo2-plus-soa

I’ve long been fascinated with movie reviewer Jeff Craig of Sixty Second Preview, a man who seems to love bad movies. About “Swordfish,” he said, “One of the most breathlessly entertaining releases of the summer. You’ll be pinned to your seat by Swordfish.” “The Chamber” was “an explosive, gripping drama!” And “Free Willy III” was breathtaking.

So who is Jeff Craig and what is Sixty Second Preview? NPR tried to track him down but couldn’t.

The Kevin Pollack/Sheryl Lee Ralph vehicle, titled “Deterrence,” wasn’t one of the top ten of the year, it was one of the most important films of our time. Now, there’s a movie lover. So we naturally wanted to speak to him, but we couldn’t find “Sixty Second Preview” — not any trace of it anywhere we looked. We don’t even know what medium it is.

Roger Ebert also asked, “Has anyone ever actually seen Jeff Craig of ‘Sixty Second Previews’ at a movie? For that matter, does anyone know what ‘Sixty Second Previews’ is? I ask in all sincerity.”

Little Rock native Ron Breeding has an answer:

I once worked for a radio station that aired “Sixty Second Previews,” a daily modular program one minute in length. Jeff Craig is the host of the thing, but since the program comes on CD a month at a time, he apparently hasn’t actually seen most of the movies — thus “previews,” not “reviews.” Still, his gushing about an upcoming movie he hasn’t yet seen ends up being used as blurbs in movie ads.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/139-who-is-jeff-craig-and-what-is-sixty-second-preview