Ajax Girl

After months of intense and very public debate, closely tied to the Google acquisition, YouTube is reported to have licensed copyright filtering technology from AudibleMagic. The San Jose Mercury News cites two unnamed sources as saying that Google will soon unveil filtering technology for YouTube from the leading third party filtering provider, Audible Magic.

What does this mean? It means that the months of assurances that YouTube had copyright filtering technology in development and about to be implemented were either a ruse to buy time or a failed effort that has collapsed under pressure today.

Ten days ago it was announced that MySpace has licensed AudibleMagic’s filtering technology for copyright protection. The huge question that everyone asked was - what does this mean for YouTube? While reactions ranged from waiting with baited breath for a mystery technology to accusations of mafia like behavior on YouTube’s part - the truth may be something far more mundane. YouTube was arguably never a technology company in the first place.

Google and YouTube spokespeople have made repeated statements about the imminence of content filtering but did not respond to the Merc’s report.

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/~3/94573981/

Insider Pages, a user generated review site for local businesses, has been acquired by a public company, according to sources close to the deal. I’ve emailed Insider Pages for their confirmation or comment but have not head back yet.

The company, originally founded by idealab, has faced heavy competition from Yelp and others. They closed a $8.5 million round of financing from Sequoia and Softbank Capital in March 2006, but let a substantial number of employees go at the end of the year. Another company in this space, Judy’s Book, made substantial changes to their business model to avoid the same layoffs.

Our understanding is that the acquisition price is more than the total capital raised by the company, but not by much. More details as they become available.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/94441095/

Fox Interactive Media announced this morning that it has acquired the thrillingly named Strategic Data Corporation (Google cache of site). SDC offers ad optimization technology that it claims helps clients “typically see network-wide revenue increases of 50-150%.” Fox Interactive spans a large number of sites from AmericanIdol.com to AskMen.com but is dominated by MySpace. Thus today’s acquisition can be understood primarily as an attempt to leverage some high level algorithms to crank up MySpace monetization. SDC will optimize graphic ads and compliment Google’s search ads on MySpace.

Rupert Murdoch said two weeks ago that the site is bringing in close to $25 million in ad revenue each month. Murdoch says that in five years roughly ten percent of Newscorp’s earnings should come from its online properties. In order to best serve ads to an increasingly age and geographically diverse userbase like that of MySpace, the acquisition makes sense. A person can only click on the same dating service and punch the Flash monkey ads so many times; SDC’s technology could help make MySpace more appealing for more diverse advertisers. For a related example of a large content network taking control of an outside ad optimization service, see our coverage of the Yahoo! deal with RightMedia in October.

If MySpace is populated primarily by young people who treat it like email (probably not the best place to advertise) and old people who are there to try and sell things to young people themselves - then there may not be much hope for drastic improvements in ad revenue.

The SDC acquisition is the first major deal made since Peter Levinsohn took the helm of Fox Interactive Media after replacing his cousin Ross Levinsohn, the man who led the deal to acquire MySpace in the first place.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/94439102/

From the You-Know-When-Ajax-Has-Gone-Mainstream-Dept, Google announced today it will be offering businesses a premium service for its key productivity applications, at $50/user/year. The package includes:

• Access to office-style applications - Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Page Creator. No presentation package yet - perhaps Google should acquire S5 :-).
• Access to communication applications - GMail (@your-own-domain), Google Calendar, Google Talk (voice/IM).
• Access to Google Homepage (maybe corporations could deck this out to become their intranet homepage?)
• Control panel to manage the domain
• Ads can be turned off
• Storage at 10MB/user
• Integration with organisation’s sign-on and email infrastructure
• Phone support

The apps themselves are available to anyone, but the integration and extra services come with the premium service. Google provides this comparison table.

The giant elephant in this room is your company’s data sitting on Google’s servers. In the absence of an “Apps Appliance” sitting inside the firewall, there will always be a major proportion of the market unwilling to commit to a solution like this - increased risk of data loss, theft, and manipulation. Google’s pure-external model keeps things nice and simple, but it’s not for everyone.

Zoho, for example, offers “in-premise edition” to run inside an organization’s network. Similarly, Zimbra’s collaboration app. It’s also becoming possible to make your own stack, with apps like Wikicalc and the various wikis, though nothing as comprehensive as Google’s offering. It’s feasible MS will move their apps in that direction too.

The comparison among these approaches will be worth watching in coming months. For now, though, it’s great to see how much Ajax and the web has evolved in the past two years, with Google providing a lot of the inspiration. From TechCrunch: “Beyond competition and concerns, tonight is a good time to recognize the incredible force of innovation that Google is as well. Its nearly full-service suite of sophisticated, integrated online services is something of historic proportion.”

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/google-apps-premier-edition

RSS management megavendor FeedBurner released an interesting report this morning about the relative market shares of the various leading RSS reader vendors.  The statistics go beyond mere subscription numbers and focus on what FeedBurner says is more important - reader engagement.

That engagement is measured in two ways, the number of times the feed’s items are loaded and displayed in the reader (called views)  and the number of times a feed’s link is clicked through (called clicks).  TechCrunch, for example, may now have almost 300,000 people subscribed to its feed who log on to their feed reader in a given day - but only a portion of those people view the TechCrunch feed in particular on a given day. I know I’m subscribed to many feeds that I almost never actually read, FeedBurner’s engagement metrics try to parse that behavior out from active readership.

The winning vendors in reader engagement are interesting but so are the larger implications of the numbers being reported. Full details and discussion below the fold (for those not viewing this in a feed reader, that is!)

The moral of the story is that Google Reader has come out of nowhere and stolen the hearts of active RSS users.
(more…)

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/~3/94338906/

Harel Malka needed a right click context menu for an application, and found that the offerings out there although provide a right click menu, do not actually provide any context. The menus are predefined in advance and dot really relate directly to what you clicked.

For example, If I right click a contact name link, I’d like my context menu to show me action links relating to that specific contact, such as: Email [contact email], Call [contact phone], Edit [Contact name] etc.

Harel created a library to do this for him called rightcontext.

Features

• Menu items that link somewhere
• Menu items that perform a custom javascript function
• Menu items that display hardcoded text
• Menu items that retrieve text via a remote ‘ajax’ call
• Menu item separators
• Image icons for menu items
• Supports multiple different menus that can be called depending on the element clicked
• All menu items can contain [tags] which are transformed at runtime to the values embedded in the clicked element
• Conditional evaluation of menu items. An item can show or not show depending on a specified condition in the menu template (new in v0.2.3)
• CSS based look and feel
• Unobtrusive standalone javascript: no additional js framework required.

You simply define your menu ‘templates’ and add a ‘context’ attribute (and any additional custom ones you need) to each element you’d like to have a context menu:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/dynamic-right-click-context-menu

PQuery is to jQuery as Rails helpers is to Prototype and Script.aculo.us:

PQuery is a set of helper classes for JQuery JavaScript library.This library allows you to easily integrate AJAX , Effects and other JQuery functionality into your PHP scripts.IT has a small foot print and is compatible with PHP4 and PHP5.

• Download PQuery
• PQuery Demos
• PQuery Documentation

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/pquery-php-and-jquery

Jeremy Gillick wants to keep the peanut butter separate from his jam, and to aide this has written a couple of YUI extensions to help out:

When you’re animating a rollover or fading some colors do you stop and thing what you’re doing? You’re putting the colors, dimensions and effects into your JavaScript! The presentation layer that you’ve worked so hard to externalize is leaking into your JavaScript code. This is a slippery slope that we have to prevent now. The presentation layer should remain in the CSS, markup in the HTML and logic in the JavaScript. If you want to change the colors or sizes the elements are morphed into, you should be making those changes in CSS.

How it works

1. ClassAnim starts by reading the styles from the base element.
2. Then it quickly applies the new CSS class to it, reads the new styles and removes the class. This happens quicker than the user can notice.
3. Now it compares the styles from both versions, extracts the differences that can be animated, and invokes the animation.

HoverHijax animates colors and does it on mouseover and mouseout. My original prototype would actually honor the :hover pseudo class, but good ‘ol Internet Explorer wasn’t allowing me to get to those styles through JavaScript. The current implementation adds a ‘hover’ class to all links when they are being moused over.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/classanim-hoverhijax-keeping-presentation-out-of-your-javascript

Think Small looks at the trend of tiny second homes (500 square feet and under). Less house means less upkeep, energy, and waiting are required.

Minimal square footage means reduced maintenance costs, less upkeep and reduced energy consumption. Prefabricated and pre-built models can require little or no site preparation, which means no anxious weekend drives to the country to make sure construction is moving along. Add to this an element of instant gratification (once the planning stage is over, most houses go up in days, even hours, and many are delivered, turn-key, to the site).

There’s an audio slide show of a some different tiny homes too.

Reminds me of that Geico “Tiny House” commercial.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/283-less-house

Vu Magazine: Photos, Robots and Cutting-Edge Design

“The Maison Européenne de Photographie here in Paris is just wrapping up an exhibition about Vu, the French photo magazine of the 1920s and ‘30s. I expected a nostalgic survey of period feature photography, but instead got a ton of insight into something more contemporary: how technology works to spark design inspiration…the thing that really struck me was the layout of the pages. The design is full of sharp angles and wild proportions—vigorous, effusive, dizzying, almost violent. It commands attention.”

Joel Spolsky's steps to remarkable customer service

“I was sputtering, trying to figure out how best to express my rage at being forced to spend the morning going back and forth. ‘Ah. It’s my fault,’ he said. And suddenly, I wasn’t mad at all. Mysteriously, the words ‘it’s my fault’ completely defused me. That was all it took.”

Entrepreneurs reveal best decisions and worst mistakes at Startupping

“I asked many successful Internet entrepreneurs about lessons they learned starting and running Internet companies. I asked for their best decision and their worst mistake, and I received many insightful replies. Here is the first set of responses.”

The slow mojo-death of Microsoft over the last five years

“Mojo isn’t about what’s right or wrong inside an organization — it has much more to do with what’s going on externally — and how your actions and behaviors make people feel. A wise woman once said that it’s not what you say, but how you make your audience feel that matters.”

The Onion: "Apple Hard At Work Making iPhone Obsolete"

“When the second-generation iPhone comes out this fall, we want iPhone users to feel not just jealous, but downright foolish for owning such laughably primitive technology.”

Using Campfire for blog comments

“If you’ve visited the site in the last week or so, you may have noticed that I’m experimenting with Campfire as a replacement for comments. This is a quick retrospective about how it’s gone.”

Personalized calendar of upcoming concerts

“iConcertCal is a free iTunes plug-in that monitors your music library and generates a personalized calendar of upcoming concerts in your city.”

Walking tours as MP3s

Buy them online, visit the place, have your own tour guide on your iPod.

Seth Godin cheers companies that refuse to discuss policies?

“Three cheers for the organization that says, ‘In order to keep prices low and traffic moving, we’re unable to discuss our policies with you. We’re very sorry if this inconveniences you.’ It’s far better than the charade that so many large companies go through. It saves the expedient from having an argument and gives those that can’t stand this approach fair warning to look for an alternative.”

Mustache Hall of Fame

“A few brave men have gone against the stereotype by continuing to cultivate varying degrees of upper lip hair, but the mustache is a dying breed.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/288-sunspots-the-effusive-edition