Ajax Girl

The trick to any good humor or hoax site is an attention to detail and a seriousness about your work. Useless Account is the best recent example I’ve seen. It’s clear, for example, that more work has gone into this joke than many of the startups we see every day.

The site has a single function - to create a new account. “Open ID is a pipe dream” the site argues, which also has a fake quote from “TechLunch” that says “Slightly more useful than Twitter.” Once you’ve created your account, you can log in, and edit your account. That’s it. The reason this is really, really funny (for us) is because that’s what we do all day - create new account after new account at every new Internet startup that comes along. I am a seriously huge expert on account creation.

The best part of the site are the FAQs. Note the email for customer complaints and their plans to give away “free pro accounts.”

Useless Account was a fun diversion for a few minutes, and for that we are sharing it with our readers. It was created by Jim Whimpey and the Brisbane Creative team.

Other recent humor stories on TechCrunch:

Google TV - An Elaborate Hoax
Forget Second Life. Get a First Life.
Social Network Backlash
bullshitr

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/~3/87036693/

Norwegian enterprise search provider, Fast, released its AdMomentum product today. The new product is private-label contextual advertising platform similar to Google’s Adsense and Adwords platforms paid for by a software licensing fee instead of a revenue split. The product is aimed at high traffic sites taking part in the $6.7 billion search advertising market (PDF download). The product was born out of market research and their WebAds and Platefood Performance products.

AdMomentum provides publishers with a GUI to manage their site’s ad zones from purchase to delivery with tracking analytics. The system supports a variety of familiar advertising models that can be applied to the different ad zones: keyword auction, CPM, CPC, CPA, and flat rates. Ad zones can host ads based contextually on user input and page content in various formats such as videos, banners, and text links on the web and optimized mobile sites. Context can be determined based on keywords, geography, content, and a users click stream data. Having your own ad system also allows for finer grained tweaks to the system, such as how often the ad bot crawls pages to determine the advertising context. Australian search engine Sensis and US local search engine Local.com have been trialling the product for a while now. The sites have been selling ad inventory through their own marketing departments and through branded self-serve platforms. Sensis’ Bidsmart ad market allows anyone to bid on keywords or buy spaces in ad zones which can then be placed in an approval queue.

Fast’s AdMomentum fits in a niche between contextual ad networks like Quigo, Miva, and DoubleClick and third party advertising engines like those offered by Google, Yahoo! Publisher Network, and MSN adcenter. Dylan Fuller, a Senior Director of Product at Fast told me sites with as many as 5 million impressions a day have turned a profit on the platform. ContextWeb is another end-to-end solution in this space, but only supports text link ads.

Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim is skeptical about AdMomentum. Rob Hof believes publishers will welcome the change.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/86947770/

“Are You Watching This” (RUWT) is a new sports fan site you can use to follow the most popular sports games on TV based on votes from the community and the real-time score of the game. It’s meant keep people from missing the really spectacular sports games as they develop. The main page consists of a TV schedule listing all the sports events across the different TV networks that you use to vote on upcoming games. The default feed is based on east coast time, but you can customize by postal code and cable provider within the US and Canada. Each game in the TV schedule tells you where and when it will be aired, a written preview of the match, lets you vote, and lets you “shout” your opinion to a comment thread. The site also tracks news, standings, and teams across 15 sports.

The other major way to follow games on the site is through their sport specific scoreboard page where they list the votes for each game in real time by sport or team. As games get closer or work their way into overtime, the scoreboard automatically adds points to reflect a more entertaining matches. The NCAA Basketball board has been pretty active today and the NHL board includes game highlights pulled from YouTube.

It’s a good application of the community voting model that benefits greatly from the automated analysis of scores to determine interestingness. They also tie it all together by letting you track your watchlist by RSS and iCal feeds, check if your friends are getting a game you aren’t.

Via TechCrunch Forums Company Reviews

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/86943427/

Keeping with the theme of Mike’s Online Photo Editing Overview, I wanted to cover some of the entrants into social music. Music was probably the first type of rich media to really go “Web 2.0″ and it’s become a pretty popular place for startups. As a result, there are some great Rich Internet Applications built around social music. Anyone who makes music a part of their daily lives has no shortage of options when it comes to finding new music and sharing with friends.

FineTune

Finetune is a relatively new application written in Flash. It’s my favorite out of the bunch and I covered it on my ZDNet blog. What makes Finetune stand out is that in addition to the standard “artist radio”, it allows users to build playlists of specific songs. The minimum playlist is 45 songs and you can have up to three songs per artist. With custom playlists, you can make sure you’re only listening to songs you want. Finetune also gets points because in addition to the web version, it runs on the Wii and there is an Apollo-based desktop client.

Pandora

Pandora is the granddaddy of the bunch and it’s one of the Web 2.0 applications that Mike can’t live without. It is built using OpenLaszlo and provides the cleanest experience out of all the applications on the list. Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to generate a stream of songs that you’ll like based on how you rate previous tracks. You create stations around artists, songs or albums and you can provide feedback (thumbs up or thumbs down) on the songs Pandora chooses. Tech Crunch’s coverage of Pandora is here.

Last.Fm

last.fm is another Web 2.0 veteran and is more socially-slanted than the others. Tagging is a big part of the last.fm experience and you can tag any song that comes along in addition to being able to listen to “user tag radio” which is based on tracks that users have tagged with a specific genera. last.fm has a separate desktop application that “scrobbles” the songs you listen to and generates a music profile that you can share with friends. See Tech Crunch’s coverage of last.fm here.

MOG

MOG is all about a music community. It’s very blog-centric and revolves around user pages, or “Mogs”. You build your Mog around songs you’re listening too and artists you like. That builds something like a profile for you that users can browse to and comment on. It also uses this profile to suggest other people or music that you might like. Tech Crunch’s coverage of MOG is here.

RadioBlogClub

radio.blog.club is another music service that builds playlists based on an artist or song you specify. I’ve heard the least about it, but the interface is good. When you browse to the site and type in an artist or song, it builds a playlist of 10 songs for you. In my experience the recommendation system for radio.blog.club wasn’t the best, but they do allow you to embed their player on your blog. This seems to be the least robust of the applications but still worth a mention.

MyStrands

MyStrands started off as MusicStrands and is a downloaded desktop application that works with your current music players to build recommendations based on what you’re listening to. In many ways it’s similar to last.fm’s “Scrobbling” but MyStrands ties in with your mobile device and seems to provide a more social recommendation system. By tying in with music on mobile phones, MyStrands is a bit ahead of the others and it helps tie all of your music collections together. Tech Crunch’s coverage of MyStrands is here.

Ryan Stewart is an expert in Rich Internet Applications. Ryan writes his personal blog here and also writes a RIA blog for ZDNet called The Universal Desktop.

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/~3/86939503/

RailsConf ‘07 is going down in Portland, Oregon this May. But it’ll be without you in attendance, if you don’t hurry up and secure yourself a seat. We opened up for registrations on Friday afternoon and today, Monday morning, we’re sold more than half of the 1200 tickets!

This makes RailsConf ‘07 the fastest selling conference that O’Reilly have been involved with.

37signals will of course be there with yours truly doing a keynote on Rails 2.0 and Jamis Buck a tutorial on Capistrano (our cluster-deployment tool) and a live version of The Rails Way. If you’re into web development, we hope to see you there!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/250-railsconf-07-sells-faster-than-any-other-oreilly-conference

David Temkin has previewed Laszlo Webtop “a commercial product that enables the delivery of multiple windowed applications in any browser. You can think of it as a framework for creating and delivering a browser-based “desktop” or “WebOS” experience, in which each application is written using OpenLaszlo. Laszlo Webtop provides the overall user interface, the glue to integrate the applications, and the server pieces that make it possible to integrate existing data and services into a seamless Web-based desktop, or webtop.”

The final release will support OpenLaszlo 4, which will mean support for both Ajax and Flash applications.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/laszlo-webtop

Cell phone sound quality was bad enough, but now we accept further degradation introduced by bluetooth headsets.

CD-quality sound is being replaced by further downsampled downloadable digital music.

Now you can buy TV shows and movies online that are lower quality than the ones you can see for free on an actual TV.

Text messaging is introducing new lexicon that eschews punctuation and sentence structure for simply getting the point across.

YouTube brings pixelated motion to the masses.

Judging by quality, these products are getting better by “getting worse.” Convenience trumping quality is nothing new, but its pace seems accelerated these days.

Which companies do you see bucking this trend? Who is competing by delivering higher quality goods and services? Who is saying convenience is important, but it’s not the most important thing? What opportunities are out there for companies looking to differentiate through quality? Who is excelling by raising the bar on both convenience and quality?

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/249-convenience-over-quality

Three sites that restrict text by 1) number of words, 2) number of questions, or 3) amount of space.

Panopticist
Panopticist limits the word count on its sidebar link roll. Check out the haiku-like “five five-word links.”

Tull’s Ian Anderson loves cats!

The horror of overcompressed music.

Bronson Pinchot’s now a freemason.

The aesthetics of wind farms.

Mike Davis on “horrific mega-slums.”

SuprGlu
Instead of offering typical bios, SuprGlu conducts interviews with employees in a “three questions, three answers” format (example).

3. 3 things you’d bring with you to an island, for a week?
That’s funny, I didn’t even know this Island question was next. For a week, let’s see. I think I’d definitely bring my wife. Now this is always the tricky part. If I bring my laptop or ipod does the battery magically stay charged for the week or am I just out of luck. If it stays charged then I bring my laptop as one item. If no magic batteries exist then I guess I bring my pet unicorn and a sci-fi anthology. The unicorn is cool right?

Similar: Guy Kawasaki’s “Ten Questions With…” interviews, the “5 Questions” bit Craig Kilborn used to do at The Daily Show, and FiveQs (the same five questions are asked to various “inspirational” people).

37signals
Columns present a challenge for online layouts when text runs too long or short. When we recently redesigned our marketing sites (Basecamp and Backpack shown below), we decided to embrace space restraints and shape our text so it shows up in matched columns which end at the same point.

It means shaving a few words here and there but that’s all part of the challenge. You’ve just got to make it work.

Related: Embrace Constraints [Getting Real]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/239-on-writing-restricting-text-at-panopticist-suprblog-37signals

Peter Michaux has written a detailed post on the window.onload problem:

The goal of unobtrusive JavaScript programming it to separate the JavaScript behavior from from the HTML content and is analogous to the goal of unobtrusive CSS design to separate the CSS presentation from the HTML content. Separation of presentation and content has been possible for years but there is one wrinkle standing in the way of completely separating the behavior. This article is about previously suggested techniques to enable this separation, their problems and a new option that combines the strengths of the current techniques with an extra bonus into a new robust solution.

Peter goes into detail on the various tricks and hacks that differ between browsers in many cases.

He discusses:

• Just putting a script tag where you need it
• DOMContentLoaded for some browsers
• script tag with an onreadystatechange
• document.readyState
• DOM Polling (e.g. YUI event library)

Summary

Event handler attributes in the HTML are the most robust but do not allow separation of concerns.

The bottom script technique works cross browser based on de facto standard browser behavior but has a compromise in separation of concerns. Must remember to put the JavaScript element at the bottom of each page.

Dean Edwards script allows for complete separation but is brittle when looking towards the future. Old and exotic browsers will not enliven a page until window.onload.

DOM polling is cross browser, robust and allows for complete separation of concerns. In extremely rare cases a dummy element can help the code know that content is available.

The Fork JavaScript library svn trunk now implements DOM polling with DOMContentloaded and window.onload fallbacks as well as the ancestor walk as discussed. These features will be part of Fork release 0.2.0.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-windowonload-problem-revisited

Hamish Friedlander has created djax, a language translator that takes code written in a javascript superset, and turns it into regular-ol’ javascript.

What does the language try to give you?

• Continuations (ish). Suspend a javascript function anywhere, and start it again later easily. Code synchronous ajax without locking the browser. sleep().
• Threads. Execute long-running jobs in the background, while animations run smoothly in the foreground. No browser-lockups.
• Generators. Iterate over anything. Easily.
• ExtendedArguments. Variable-length arguments, keyword arguments, default values. Without the pain of the arguments property
• Compatibility. Any javascript function should still work fine called from or translated through djax. Mochikit’s self test passes all tests after translation.

You can see a threading example in action.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/djax-language-on-top-of-javascript