Ajax Girl

Yoono, the Firefox and IE link suggestion plugin, recently added blog and article suggestions to their product. The new suggestions have been added to the top of Yoono’s sidebar and show stories related to the page you’re currently viewing. For instance, a trip to Techcrunch yields the results pictured to the right.

Yoono is sort of like Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon combined. Instead of staggering around the internet or searching through tagged links, Yoono gives you a list of suggestions in their sidebar or ticker based on what page you are actively surfing. It doesn’t maintain your surfing history. Suggestions are generated based on an analysis of the bookmarks and live bookmarks (RSS feeds) shared by their over 140,000 users. By looking at the bookmarks users share in common and how they are organized by folders, Yoono finds related links. Each of those links is then given a popularity score based in part on the number of users sharing that page as a bookmark. Last month they were serving up over six million suggestions per day.

I find the new feature a useful addition the Yoono and actually got drawn into following along the thread of suggested blog articles covering Bill Gate’s most recent appearance. However, the service still needs some tweaking. Every once in a while I get suggestions in languages I can’t read or repeats of stories from blogs containing multiple overlapping feeds. The new suggestions do fill a gap in the product by providing more frequently changing suggestions for each site. The community’s bookmarks just don’t change frequently enough to create new suggestions for pages I visit frequently. Yoono has also been toying with another idea to solve this problem, short-term bookmarks that clean up after themselves by expiring after a given time period.

For more on article suggestions, check out SphereIt.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/62053776/

Microsoft has updated their main microsoft.com homepage and it has a new navigation style that is very dhtml.

When you click on the right sidebar (or search) results popup in an inline div that you can sort and play with.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/microsoftcom-is-updated

Dojo is more than “an Ajax library”. It is a set of JavaScript libraries and packaging system. It just so happens to have a remote binding API in there too.

Phobos has seen this and you can now use Dojo on the server side when using the Phobos framework.

We talked about how Phobos could be a killer app under the nose of Sun in the past.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/phobos-and-dojo

YUI has a CSS Reset set of style that aims to normalize the browsers so your CSS can start on an even playing field.

The entire CSS file (which you can see here) is just 30 simple lines of getting explicit.

Dean Edwards wants a <reset /> button

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/yui-reset-the-browsers-css

Patrice Neff and his team have released a new market place at market.local.ch.

Ajax features are abound, and include:

• An input form for creating a new listing is a WYSIWYG form where the inputs are immediately displayed the way they will look in the end. (Example)
• The upload of pictures is done with a nice progress meter so users get feedback about how long the upload is going to take.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/localch-marketplace-3

Microsoft’s latest operating system, Vista, which went on sale to corporate customers November 30 — can not run the latest version of Microsoft’s corporate database product, MS SQL Server. Microsoft is working on a SQL Server upgrade (SQL Server 2005 Express Service Pack 2), but it’s in beta and available for testing purposes only.

Last month I commented on the lack of internal talks at Microsoft, discussing how their Zune device isn’t compatible with Vista — TechCrunch commenters felt this didn’t matter, considering the consumer release of Vista was months away and that “Microsoft probably does not give a sh*t that some twelve year old cannot use Zune on his pirated copy of Vista yet.” Fair enough. But Vista not working with their corporate database product, SQL Server? That’s not smart for a company trying to grab their piece of the $14 billion database pie.

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Steve Poland, a guest contributor. Steve is the founder and web strategy consultant for Vested Ventures, a firm specializing in website consulting, internet marketing, and high-end custom web development.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/61927502/

A company called BlogKits launched on Monday with the goal of helping to monetizing the blogosphere. The company matches smaller-potato blogs to advertisers and provides a risk-free way for both to work together.

When most people begin blogging, it is not with the purpose of making a million dollars. It is because they have thoughts swimming around their head that they want to express in a public forum. But maintaining a blog takes money and I’d wager most new bloggers don’t know the best way to find advertisers to support their site.

One option is Google’s AdSense, which is a contextual pay-per-click model. Another is BlogKits, which only charges advertisers if someone actually makes a purchase. So if you’re reading a blog and you decide to click on the eBay ad, eBay will pay the blogger a percentage of your transaction. If no one ever clicks or buys anything from eBay through your site, neither you nor eBay will ever exchange money.

BlogKits costs bloggers nothing. They need only register their site.

“The reason this works in our model is because there are 50+ million bloggers out there according Technorati, 99 percent of which are what I call ‘low-traffic bloggers,’ or ‘real bloggers’ - people who are getting maybe 100 visits to their blog per day,” said Jim Kukral, founder of BlogKits. “That’s our target. These are people who started a blog because they want to write, NOT to learn how to be an expert marketer. We help them keep blogging, taking the confusion and difficult parts out of the whole ordeal, so hopefully they can concentrate on writing excellent content instead of worrying about making money.”

BlogKits is owned and funded by the Forge Corporation, a marketing firm, which is why the company has connections with such high-level advertisers in just its first week of business. Some advertisers already working with them include eBay, Starbucks, Buy.com, and StubHub. Kukral said that the company has already signed up a few thousand bloggers.

“The best is getting that email from them saying they have had AdSense on their blog for the past six months and made $10 total, then saying, ‘I’ve had the BlogKits ad on my site for three days and made $10 in commissions,’” Kukral said.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/61926857/

Google has entered the domain business with partners GoDaddy and eNom. An already crowded industry, Google has begun allowing people to register ‘.com’, ‘.net’, ‘.biz’, and ‘.info’ Web site addresses. Web sites that register their domains directly with Google for $10/year will automatically be setup to use Google Apps for Your Domain, which includes Google’s Page Creator (for easily making a Web site), Calendar, Email, and IM.

With this move, look for Google to tap more into the domain parking business using their Google AdSense for Domains product a bit more. I’d also imagine their Blogger product will integrate this announcement and allow you to easily setup a blog with your own domain for $10/year.

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Steve Poland, a guest contributor. Steve is the founder and web strategy consultant for Vested Ventures, a firm specializing in website consulting, internet marketing, and high-end custom web development.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/61918183/

JamGlue, one of the YCombinator companies, publicly launched today. JamGlue is an online community, similar to SpliceMusic, where you can listen to or mix music from a library of tracks and other mixes. JamGlue was originally in private beta with 2,500 members and a basic library of 1,500 tracks.

JamGlue, as their slogan suggests, is about providing “Remixing for the Masses” via their Flash-based mixing board. The board is a lot slicker than its Splicemusic counterpart. Key differences are that it expands to fill your browser window, allows you to add innumerable tracks to a mix which can be nested in groups, zooms in and out on tracks, and reacts to changes to the mix while still playing. JamGlue managed to do it all on their initial $18,000 budget and a bit of their own finances. Splicemusic, however, supports beatmatching and recording your own sounds within their sequencer.

Both sites allow you to remix other users’ mixes. JamGlue does this by generating an XML file representation of the mix that contains all of the edits to the original sound clips and tracks. When you’re finished, both JamGlue and SpliceMusic master the final mix and let you download your masterpiece as an mp3. JamGlue’s track nesting, however, makes it easier to manage additions to existing remixes or remixes made up of multiple remixes. Take a listen to some of my favorites from the site.

The Ballad of Haggity WagBag by fluffy

Help Me Somebody by bushofghostsremix

A community built around derivative works begs the big question: copyright? Close to Lawrence Lessig’s rip-mix-and-burn philosophy, both JamGlue and Splice use the Creative Commons license. JamGlue has it broken down into five different licenses that always allow remixing, but also control commercial use and modification of the original license. They also seek protection by respecting take-down requests under the DMCA “safe harbor” provision and user flagging.

For the launch, JamGlue is also holding a music mixing contest with the forward-thinking Nettwerk music label. The song “Peace and Hate” by the band Submarines will be put on the chopping block under the Creative Commons license for the community to mix and mash. The makers of the six most popular mixes will get prizes.

For more Creative Commons beats, check out ccMixter.com.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/61896520/

Speaking of Edward Tufte, at his seminars, he hands out a list of suggested readings (scroll to see list at end of page). It’s chock full of good gift ideas for designers.

So is Greg Storey’s Things Designers Want For Christmas A-Store.

And the editors at Design Observer have a 2006 Holiday Reading List too.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/162-holiday-gift-ideas