Ajax Girl

Wired Magazine has been working on a back and front end site overhaul since the print and online versions of the brand were reunited last year by Condé Naste. Deeper integration with Reddit, which was acquired in October 2006, is also expected.

We expect at least part of the new design and functionality to be released later this week, and have obtained rather fuzzy screen shots of how it might look.

The first image is the new home page for Wired. The focus is clearly on better story placement on the page (Wired currently simply lists stories in reverse chronological order), with more and bigger images. There are also only two ad units on this page: a stereo ad surrounding the Wired logo and a larger unit at the bottom right (the current Wired home page has four ad units).

The top ad unit is unique in that it breaks the ad up into two pieces and puts the Wired logo in between. The New York Times also publishes these “stereo” ad units, although the ads are clearly broken out from the logo. In the screen shot below it all kind of mashes together - this should drive CPMs they can charge way up.

The biggest change, however, is the navigation and search bar, which is located in the middle of the page instead of at the top. This allows the eyes to fall immediately to the top story.

The second screen shot is an article layout. The biggest change here is the long headline and better use of images with the story. There are again only two ad units on the page.

This is almost certainly the work of Wired’s creative director, Scott Dadich, who just completed an overhaul of the print magazine. He’s known for his heavy and creative use of images to fill out the visual appeal of a story.

Current Wired home page:

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/101515721/

They said that Google’s acquisition of YouTube would be the act that saved it from the fate of Napster - lawsuit oblivion.

And they may have been wrong, if today’s $1 billion lawsuit is a sign of things to come. Viacom, the plaintiff, has been on a warpath against YouTube lately. Unlike Fox’s behind the scenes chats with the Wall Street Journal to get the message across that they were displeased with the Google/YouTube, Viacom has chosen the frontal assault: Massive takedown notices and now the simple request for $1 billion in damages.

Lawsuits like these are statements. The RIAA did it last year by suing AllofMP3 for $1.65 trillion for copyright violations. And there is actual law to back these up. U.S. copyright law allows statutory damages of $750 to $150,000 per violation. In this case, Viacom argues that there have been over 1.5 billion views of 160,000 Viacom clips. Each of those 1.5 billion views is a potential copyright violation.

Viacom really stirred things up in its statement about the lawsuit:

There is no question that YouTube and Google are continuing to take the fruit of our efforts without permission and destroying enormous value in the process. This is value that rightfully belongs to the writers, directors and talent who create it and companies like Viacom that have invested to make possible this innovation and creativity.

After a great deal of unproductive negotiation, and remedial efforts by ourselves and other copyright holders, YouTube continues in its unlawful business model. Therefore, we must turn to the courts to prevent Google and YouTube from continuing to steal value from artists and to obtain compensation for the significant damage they have caused.

John Murrell calls this a “knife fight” and I think he’s dead on. There’s no way this gets settled with Google paying any actual damages. Google will be furiously working to sign a deal with Viacom to get this lawsuit to go away and a licensing deal in place. They’re on a very slippery slope right now, with the Napster carcass lying limp at the bottom.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/101449094/

Good newspaper design is all about effectively presenting large quantities of text/information in a usable, straightforward way. That’s got a lot more in common with good web design than most of the sexy print pieces you find in design magazines/annuals. Some places to check out winning newspaper design:

Best Front Design picks out a noteworthy newspaper cover each day and analyzes why the design works.

Society for News Design has an annual Best of Newspaper Design Competition (archives).

And NewsDesigner is a smart blog about newspaper design.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/316-newspapers-and-web-design

Code Igniter

John Muhl writes:

[Re: last line] Code Igniter really, really speeds up your code.

800-Flowers

Bret Walker writes:

While it’s nice that 1800Flowers.com tries to be helpful with the recipient dropdown menu, the “myself” option seems a little out of place when “recipient” changes to “deceased.”

Dreamhost

Nick Grossman writes:

On the Dreamhost support request form, they ask you to categorize your state of mind regarding your support request. I’ve always liked the way they present these options in a very human way, and with a sense of humor.

Got an interesting screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Send the image and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/317-screens-around-town-code-igniter-800-flowers-dreamhost

Jesse Skinner has created an Ajax Flickr search FlickrCash which uses jQuery.

FlickrCash searches for photos on Flickr in the most efficient way, so that you can see as many thumbnails as will fit in your browser. It loads up to 10 pages in the background, so it’s very fast to browse through to find the photo you need.

It’s got some cool features, like a preview that pops up when you click a thumbnail, listing all the sizes that are available for that photo. If you sign up and create an account (for free), you can save your search results, and put together a “shareable lightbox” of photos with a secret URL. This way you can search for some photos and share them with your clients in order to get their feedback. For example, check out my Sunset Lightbox. This makes it really easy to use Flickr to find stock photography, whether for your print projects, blog posts, presentations, or just for fun.

Below is a screencast:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/flickrcash-view-lots-of-flickr-images

Tobie Langel likes a fistful of dollars and uses them to explain how to use auto scrolling page navigation with the new $$ operator in Prototype 1.5.1 RC.

The article takes the initial:

and gets it down to the unobtrusive:

and the nice new support for CSS 3:

Check out the auto-scrolling demo to see it in action.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/auto-scrolling-page-navigation-with

There was a lot of talk as YUI-EXT became Ext, and added jQuery into the list of supported libraries.

It now appears that Jack Slocum is outdoing himself again and is also supporting Prototype and Script.aculo.us.

You can check out the examples and see the drop down tests to select the library.

There is a lot to come from Ext, and we can’t wait for it to come out.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ext-10-for-prototypescriptaculous

WikiSeek should not be confused with Wikia’s upcoming search engine (although I did). Both, however, are developing community-edited search engines, and both have received assistance from Wikipedia (Wikia, though, is co-founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales).

And while Wikia pushed some more vaporware news last week about their own upcoming community edited search engine, WikiSeek quietly launched an actual product.

The main WikiSeek search engine shows results only from Wikipedia and sites linked from Wikipedia. The new community edited search engine, which they stress is experimental only at this stage, can be found at community.wikiseek.com and the results can be edited by anyone. There are a number of throttles on the service - for example, only ten results are delivered currently.

But you certainly can edit the results, as I did with a search on TechCrunch. I have no idea if a human community can really be expected to deal with the massive amount of spam that will be hitting the search engine if any appreciable traffic to the site develops, but this little (albeit Sequoia backed) company sure has guts, and they launch products.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/101327750/

Seattle based Farecast is turning into quite a good way to find cheap airline tickets.

The core service predicts if airline prices will increase or decrease in the near future from the current prices. They added a price guarantee in late 2006 that allows users to pay a $10 fee and lock in the current low price. They can then make a purchase decision later.

This morning, Farecast is launching a new deals feature. Unlike other travel sites, where deals are generally excess inventory being dumped at a low price, Farecast is saying they’ll find particularly good deals based on their analysis of the airline pricing stream which goes through their engine every day. On their home page right now they are showing a $333 ticket from Seattle to Honolulu.

The company has raised just over $20 million in capital.

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/~3/101320319/

Eurekster, known for their Swicki community-driven search platform, has just announced $5.5 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Technology Venture Partners of Australia and Transcosmos Investments of Japan.

Eurekster’s most popular product product, Swicki’s, are site specific search engines (we’ve included a swicki in our right sidebar for some time). This has turned into a crowded space over the last year or so - Rollyo, Google Co-Op, and Yahoo! Search Builder all have good products.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/101313342/