Ajax Girl

I named blog spam catcher Akismet as one of the products I couldn’t live without in a post a few days ago. Today we hit the magic number - Akismet has captured over 1 million spam comments and trackbacks, just on TechCrunch. That’s over 1 million pieces of bogus content that we didn’t have to read, sort through manually and delete.

Akismet is a relatively easy plugin to install if you use Wordpress, and there are developer tools available if you want to use it on another blogging platform or website. If you have a blog, and don’t know about Akismet, take a minute and check it out.

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/~3/70999156/

It’s not often that a company announces the acquisition of another company and then subsequently walks away from the deal, but PayPerPost isn’t a typical kind of company.

In a post on the PayPerPost blog today, the company said “We…dug into the Metrics platform and regretfully found that it wasn’t what we were looking for right now.” That came just a week after the official announcement of the acquisition.

Whatever happened, this isn’t pretty. Performancing moved their non-acquired assets to a new domain name and re-launched that service. They certainly stopped talking to other potential acquirors, given that the deal was officially announced. In merger-land, this is what’s known as “being left at the alter” because everyone down the road who you talk to will want to know why the previous deal exploded.

Performancing should have had a more nailed down acquisition agreement, so they aren’t entirely blameless. But PayPerPost is becoming an increasingly ridiculous startup, and a black eye for investor Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Our previous coverage of PayPerPost is here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/70973453/

Ad Network Adbrite, which we wrote about in November, has soft launched a new video product that is going to be very popular with bloggers and other sites that embed a lot of video.

The new product is called In Video. Adbrite has created an embeddable video player similar to YouTube, Photobucket, etc. (see video below using their player). If we choose to show a video on TechCrunch, we can use this embeddable player, and at our option it will include Adbrite ads and our logo as a watermark. Anyone who takes the content and embeds it on their own site will show the same video, with the same ads and watermark (revenue goes to the original video creator). And all click backs on the video go to the original site (whereas with YouTube all click backs go the original YouTube site).

Whether you want to embed ads or not, this is the best way I’ve seen to show video on your own site.

Adbrite is not hosting video, so you’ll have to upload it to YouTube, Photobucket, or wherever, in .flv format and then point Adbrite to the URL for the video.

In Video is in private beta testing - users can sign up for an invitation on the about page.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/70854117/

The controversial Google “Tips”, where Google promoted certain of their own products over organic search results, have been quietly pulled down.

Until recently, Google searches for Calendar, Blogging, Photo Sharing and others returned “tips” above normal search results suggesting users try Google Calendar, Blogger and Picasa, respectively. Firefox co-founder Blake Ross criticized the change in a widely read blog post, and the rest of, the world generally piled on. Even Google’s Matt Cutts had said he’d turn them off if he could.

There’s been no official announcement on this by Google, so the removal could be temporary. My guess is they are gone for a while, though, based on the overwhelmingly negative feedback from bloggers.

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/~3/70825245/

New York based Daylife, a news aggregation site I invested in long, long ago, has finally launched. We first mentioned the company back in July. After quickly reviewing the launch product, I am unhappy to report that I am underwhelmed by what Daylife has to offer.

The Daylife site is a well designed collection of news items from around the web, and they do a very good job of associating text and rich media content to other content. News collection is automated, although the stories that appear on the home page are chosen by human editors. It’s easy to find your self clicking around the site to related news items. DayLife also has a bookmark feature where interesting stories can be saved by users.

But Daylife enters the market about a year after a slew of other competitors came out with their products. Gather.com, Inform.com, NewsVine and Topix all have competing products. Google News reigns over all of them.

What makes Daylife stand out is not so much what it does well, but what’s been left out. There are no RSS feeds, even for your bookmarked stuff. Even worse, there’s no ability for users to leave comments on articles, a feature that has been wildly successful at NewsVine and Topix. And the fact that the front page news is gathered by humans, instead of the algorithmically determined news at Digg, means the company will always have a higher cost of doing business.

To learn more about Daylife, take the tour here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/70822669/

We are sending a full team from CrunchGear to cover CES in Las Vegas Jan 8 -11. See a few teasers on some of the new gear being released at the monster electronics show, over on Crunchgear.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/70806478/

Someone sent me this quote yesterday:

“The details are not the details. They make the design.”
-Charles Eames

I think that’s a great way of putting it. It’s also one of the reasons I like the Patterns series by R.BIRD. In many ways it’s all about the details.

For example, take their latest report, Crunch, where they take a look crunchy things like cereal, crackers, chips, candy bars, etc.

They look at things like packaging texture, windows that reveal the product, illustration, colors, typography, mascots, and more. It’s a dissection of the details that make the design.

Other recent reports include energy drinks, children’s cold medicine, and women’s razors. Good stuff.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/184-details-are-the-design

Here’s another simple invention: The Hercules Hook. This one is for hanging pictures or other items on drywall. Billy Mays does the hocking.

The hook/hanging business seems primed for a renaissance. 3M’s quickly expanding Command Adhesive line seems to be doing really well too. It’s always cool to see new products address problems that seem like they’ve been solved long ago. It’s a reminder that room for improvement is plentiful.

What’s interesting about the Hercules Hook is that while you still do need to put a hole in the wall, you don’t need any tools anymore. All you need is your hand and a little muscle. So while the end-game remains the same, the effort needed to get there is reduced.

It’s definitely a novel alternate solution to traditional hammer, nail, and hook system. Neat thinking.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/183-hercules-hook

After a previous flirtation with Fox Interactive that ended abrubtly, Toronto-based BubbleShare finally found a buyer who’ll love them forever.

Today they announced their acquisition by Kaboose Inc. (TSX: KAB), a small public “family focused online media company” in Canada, for US$2.25 million plus up to another US$750,000 based on an earn-out provision.

This marks 28 year old founder Albert Lai’s second entrepreneurial success. He was a millionaire before his 20th birthday after founding MyDesktopNetwork and selling it in 1999. He dabbled in a few other startups before BubbleShare, and has now made another mini-fortune. Congrats to the entire team.

Our previous coverage of BubbleShare is here.

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/~3/70768724/

The big debate over the winter holidays seems to be people shouting about JSON vs. XML.

Dare Obasanjo has a nice round-up, as well as his own opinions on the matter:

In the past two weeks, I’ve seen three different posts from various XML heavy hitters committing this very sin

1. JSON and XML by Tim Bray - This kicked it off and starts off by firing some easily refutable allegations about the extensibility and unicode capabilities of JSON as a general data transfer format.
2. Tim Bray on JSON and XML by Don Box - Refutes the allegations by Tim Bray above but still misses the point.
3. All markup ends up looking like XML by David Megginson - argues that XML is just like JSON except with the former we use angle brackets and in the latter we use curly braces + square brackets. Thus they are “Turing” equivalent. Academically interesting but not terribly useful information if you are a Web developer trying to get things done.

This is my plea to you, if you are an XML guru and you aren’t sure why JSON seems to have come out of nowhere to threaten your precious XML, go read JSON vs. XML: Browser Security Model and JSON vs. XML: Browser Programming Models then let’s have the discussion.

If you’re too busy to read them, here’s the executive summary. JSON is a better fit for Web services that power Web mashups and AJAX widgets due to the fact that it is essentially serialized Javascript objects which makes it fit better client side scripting which is primarily done in Javascript. That’s it. XML will never fit the bill as well for these scenarios without changes to the existing browser ecosystem which I doubt are forthcoming anytime soon.

Next up: CSV vs. Fixed Width Documents.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/json-vs-xml-the-debate