Ajax Girl

File this under “ridiculous.” Digg clone SuperGu has sent a cease & desist letter to (open source) Digg clone Pligg alleging a number of copyright infringements.

Among the complaints: SuperGu is claiming ownership to ajax effects, sidebars, login boxes, “read more” links, navigation tabs, the expression “Powered by”, tags, the RSS icon and other common web design elements and layouts.

The overall layout and functionality of your yget template is similar in look and feel to SuperGu’s software. First, the location and shapes of the vote box are substantially similar with only a minor variation of inverting the chevron between the vote option and total vote tabulator, Second, the navigation tabs along the top of your yget template, “Published,” “Unpublished” and “Submit a new story” are identical. Third, the left side vertical menu on SuperGu has only been shifted to the right side. Fourth, the “Search” field is in the same location as SuperGu. Fifth, the “sort” feature located underneath the search field is in the same location as SuperGu despite the utilization of different words to achieve the same meaning to the user. Sixth, the “RSS” button (top right) next to “sort” and underneath “search” is similar to SuperGu’s RSS icon. Seventh, the “Tag” feature is located in identical location as SuperGu’s placed in the storybox beneath “posted by” and above “story description.” Eighth, the “Storybox” is the same location as SuperGu and includes the same features of “comment,” “Add the link to…” (Save), and “Tell a friend” (Email). Ninth, the page numbers at the bottom of the screen are similar to SuperGu’s design, and they function the same as SuperGu. Tenth. the verbiage “Powered by Pligg” is identical to “Powered by SuperGu.” Last, the “sidebar” menus are the same as SuperGu in appearance and method of operation. Within the sidebar menus the registration/login box which looks and operates the same as SuperGu. Furthermore, the Ajax effect applied to all the boxes within the sidebar menu when they open and close is identical. The dialog boxes open/close with a button which operates and looks similar to SuperGu with only the minor variation of placing the down arrow in a circle as opposed to a square. The “read more’ link operates the same and is in the same location as SuperGu’s “more” button, It is thus our opinion that your product is an infringement of our client’s copyrights. Moreover. based upon the sheer number of similarities and reproductions between your yget template and SuperGu it is unlikely that this is the result of serendipity but rather a premeditated effort to duplicate SuperGu’s software design.

Adding to the ridiculousness of the claims: SuperGu founder James Phelps has been caught hiring a developer to build the very template he’s claiming Pligg stole, saying “I am only interested in cloning the ‘Yget’ template found in Pligg here: pligg/templates/yget/.” This is a perfect case for the EFF to get involved in, and I look forward to seeing the obligatory video apology by GuperGu founder James Phelps.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/102908696/

Alexa junkies have been using Alexaholic for over a year now. It’s a much better and faster way of accessing Alexa site traffic data and trends than Alexa itself, and is an example of a small startup using Amazon’s own web service in a much better way than they do themselves. Alexaholic is now the no. 3 search result for Alexa on Google, after Alexa itself and Wikipedia’s entry on Alexa.

Instead of embracing the service, Amazon has at times tried to shut it down, and is now trying to obtain the domain name under a trademark infringement action. To avoid any further confrontation, Alexaholic is changing it’s name to Statsaholic. I think this would be a good time for them to also add in additional third party data services, starting with Compete.com.

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/~3/102900208/

Excerpts from the Apartment Therapy book “The Eight Step Home Cure”.

Removing objects to gain breathing room…

Marre’s apartment, despite its severity, had a calmness and openness to it that my apartment lacked. Her apartment was smaller and yet it felt bigger. It was comfortable to sit in Marre’s kitchen, and people naturally gravitated to her apartment to talk. She was right. My apartment wasn’t carefully arranged, it was packed. There was no breathing room. It may have seemed functional, but it was crowded and required a lot of attention…I began to experiment with removing objects from my apartment. I got rid of a chair. I took out the drafting table. I threw out a pile of old, mismatched dishes and mugs. What began as a trickle turned into a torrent, and over the next few months I emptied half of my apartment.

Only a few elements should play a starring role…

A room stirs our emotions by leading our attention to a few strong elements, while the rest sit quietly in the background. Successful style is all about dramatic touches used sparingly. Most of the elements of a room should go practically unnoticed at first glance, while a few play a starring role, such as a vase of flowers, brightly colored lampshades or a commanding piece of art. If you have too many things jostling for attention, your home will be too busy and over stimulated, but if you don’t have any, your home will lack pizzazz.”

Balance is key…

Whichever type you identify with, the cure is balance. Whether warm or cool, you never want to change your basic temperament. It is who you are and it contains your strengths. Therefore, warm people achieve balance by “weeding,” since they have too much growing. Small things like cleaning out a closet, canceling a magazine subscription, or taking a load of clothes to the Salvation Army provide balance. Cool people achieve it by “watering and feeding,” since they don’t have enough growing. Their small tasks are buying flowers each week for the kitchen table, hanging curtains, and inviting a few friends over for a drink now and then. Both types should start slowly — a little bit goes a long way.”

The home as living organism…

I want you to broaden the concept of home and apply to it the same principles we apply to our own bodies. Like the body, the home should be thought of as a living organism. For starters, healthy homes are homes that consume carefully and get regular exercise. After health is established, style and decoration come much more easily and can be seen as natural finishing touches. In fact, style and decoration are extensions of a healthy home. You can’t have one without the other…

In place of creating a healthy home, we are trying to buy solutions and cram too much into our homes. What was modestly termed “cocooning” in the 1970s by trend-spotters who saw us spending more recreational time at home has become Hypernesting. Instead of asking ourselves what would really make our home work better, we usually jump to the conclusion that there must be something we can buy to solve our home’s challenges — a flatter television screen, a closet organizing system, or color-coded photo albums.

But when we take something new into our home, we rarely let go of something else. This is how our home gains weight, grows unhealthy, and begins to nag at us…Most of us aren’t in need of more organizing; we need to manage our consumption, let go of our stuff, and learn how to restore life to our homes.

Where to begin?…

I often ask my clients what they imagine their apartment would say to them if it could speak. Samantha, a stockbroker, told me that her home would say, “Can’t she see that I am dying? Why doesn’t she do anything to save me?” As she said this, we were sitting in a badly lit, cluttered, unfinished room. Embarrassed, Samantha said that she didn’t know where to begin. It was one of the best things I had ever heard a client say. Besides being completely honest, I told her, in using the word begin she’d hit upon the main issue. The solution was not about eliminating clutter or lightening a room; it was about beginning to work with her home. I told her that I could show her where to begin. It might feel challenging at first, but her home would love her for it.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/328-excerpts-from-apartment-therapys-the-eight-step-home-cure

The Internet has made identity theft trivially easy - a new report from Symantec says that for $14 you can obtain someone’s name, date of birth, mother’s maiden name, social security number, bank account (with password), and credit card information (with security code). At any given time, nearly 150,000 credit card numbers can be purchased online.

When we celebrate and encourage open data on the new web, this isn’t what we’re talking about. The FTC estimates that identity theft costs our economy about $50 billion per year. It takes people years to recover from a full blown identity assault.

In the U.S., our government has done very little to protect us. Part of the problem is that credit bureaus, auto dealers and retailers spend millions lobbying the federal and state governments to keep the laws just as they are. If a company is in the business of selling credit information and/or opening new credit accounts, they’re probably on the wrong side of this issue, and working to keep the transfer of private information as easy as possible.

But at some point this is going to pop. It will probably happen when a few members of Congress have to go through the ordeal of identity theft themselves, or when the volume of citizen complaints becomes too serious to ignore. And at that point, Congress is likely to push legislation that not only cuts out the cancer, but lots of healthy tissue as well.

We saw this with Sarbanes Oxley, federal legislation hurriedly enacted following the Nasdaq implosion five years ago. While Sarbanes Oxley certainly improved the level of disclosure needed for public companies in the U.S., it also put a very heavy burden on reporting companies. Many feel that it was the most significant contributing factor in the huge reduction in U.S. initial public offerings since that time (many companies have gone pubic in London or other countries instead).

If Congress finally does act to protect us against identity theft, the legislation could similarly go overboard as well, and have an impact on all these great companies making a living on the free exchange of data over the Internet.

Gray market startups like Jigsaw that are in the business of brokering personal information don’t make it any easier for the rest of the industry to show that they take the management of personal information seriously. Other startups, like TrustedID, are trying to find a private sector way of protecting us (see if your personal data is on any of the well known fraud forums with TrustedID’s StolenIDSearch).

Symantec and others sell products to companies that help them protect their servers (and the data on them) from attacks. That’s good, but the ultimate solution is to hold companies financially accountable if their users’ data is stolen from their servers. And the burden of proof that it did or didn’t occur should fall on the company holding the data, not the user.

Companies won’t want this liability, and they’ll start finding ways to get that data off of their servers. New startups will launch that are willing to take that risk. And ultimately, sensitive user data will be stored in far fewer places than it is today. That’s a good thing.

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/~3/102900209/

If you’ve been waiting to see the new Scrapblog, demo’d last month at the We Media Conference in Miami, you only have to wait another day or so. The site is offline, and users have been email.

This application hasn’t twittered yet, but it has a hardcore base of rabid users. That’s always a sign of good things down the road.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/102887236/

Now that South by Southwest 2007 has come to a close I finally have some minutes to write about the two most flaunted services of the show: Twitter and Dodgeball.

With both services, users establish a friends list to whom messages are broadcast. Twitter allows you to update your status through IM, SMS or a web-based client. Dodgeball functions exclusively through SMS at this point. They each have a distinct use when it comes to coordinating with many people while away from home. Because they allow you to send one message that is then sent to all of the people on your list, you can easily inform a group of people of your whereabouts or whatever else you wish to say. You can also elect to receive updates from your friends through IM, SMS or through the website.

Twitter was the clear winner of SXSW, with more people talking about it than anything else. That is not, however, to say that it’s better, it just had more of a presence. This is partly due to the fact that Twitter had giant LCDs setup all around the convention center that streamed messages from SXSW. It was interesting to watch all of the comments flowing in from attendees. I think though that Twitter has a limited appeal. Sure it’s cool at an event like SXSW, but I can’t seeing it maintaining much functionality out of a convention/festival environment.

It’s really just a glorified Facebook status. The service allows you to update your status via different conduits, but in the end it does no more than Facebook’s service. The only thing that it really trumps Facebook on is the fact that there is no presumed “is.”

Dodgeball at least brings something completely new and useful to the table. This service functions under the Google accounts blanket and its a bit more streamlined. Your status can only be updated through SMS, but that’s OK, because its mainly about location. Sending an “@ location” message to Dodgeball will broadcast your locale to your entire list. If your friend is unsure of where that place is, he or she can query the system “location?” and it will ping the person back with an address.

Another interesting feature that Dodgeball adds is Crushes. If a crush is within a 10 block radius of you at the time you check-in, the system will send you a message letting you know that a crush is nearby. It won’t tell you where or who, but if the user has a camera phone, he or she can forward a picture to let you know what you’re looking for. It’s an interesting dynamic, but I’m not sure how well it’ll take off. It can also put you in contact with a friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) in a similar capacity.

To me, the best player in this new arena is currently Dodgeball, but my eyes are on Facebook. It has a far greater userbase than either of these services and could feasibly implement features that could corner the market before it becomes too convoluted.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to follow Dodgeball and Twitter to see if anything new develops. They’re each intriguing services with definite use to people in cities.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/102874212/

Guinness

Josh Charles writes:

I visited the Guinness website this morning, and was pleased to see how they are using their country selection box. Some websites usually only move the U.S. or perhaps a few additional ones to the top. I wonder if there was some marketing data that went into this decision?

What the Font?

Mark Ott writes:

When matching fonts for an unknown font, “WhatTheFont?” has a nice liittle feature that makes your image stay put while you scroll so you can compare it easily with the results. Nicely done.

Facebook

Sebastian Hirsch writes:

I like part of the privacy settings on Facebook: Very effective on what it does and doesn’t do. There was bit of a row when the news feed was rolled out, but I think this screen is a great answer to users’ privacy concerns. Too bad that it just came as an afterthought.

True, Facebook had to do something to respond to its pissed off customers. But this kind of preference-mania is overkill. Too many indecipherable icons. Too many options. (From Getting Real: “For customers, preference screens with an endless amount of options are a headache, not a blessing.”) How about just an on/off switch and be done with it?

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/318-screens-around-town-guinness-what-the-font-facebook

One of the programs I am pleased to be associated with at the Google open source programs office is the Google Summer of Code where Google partners with open source projects and students to create bits not burgers.

If you are a student, how about making the Ajax world (and hence the web in general) a better place by working on open source projects?

There are some great ones. For example,

• Alex Russell has put up great advice for students and the list of project ideas looks compelling. How about being the person to write an activeX CANVAS tag? or working on Dojo Offline? or the JS Linker? or gfx 3d? or Mobile Dojo? The list goes on and on… and don’t just consider this list, what would you like to work on at Dojo.
• SilverStripe is excited to be part of the program. Sigurd Magnusson told us that “All of the resulting work will be released open source, for everyone to use, and the point is for it to be good enough to featured back on sites like Ajaxian later in the year :)”.

But look around and see. Is there some killer Ajax work that you would love to get out in open source this summer? Maybe on a project such as: BBC, Drupal, Joomla!, Mozilla, PHP, Plone, Ruby Central, Apache, WordPress, XWiki, Zope, or any others on the list.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/make-it-an-ajax-summer-of-code

It is fun to take a peak beneath the kimono. The ECMAScript 4 exports their committee wiki, which covers:

• The ’spec:’ namespace is intended to hold actual agreed-on chapter text for the final spec document.
• The ‘proposals:’ namespace is intended for informal discussion of proposed changes.
• The ‘discussion:’ namespace is intended for permanent archival of discussion.
• The ‘clarification:’ namespace is intended to capture high-level issues that need clarification.
• The ‘resources:’ namespace is for uploading papers or listing pointers to external sites of interest to the work of this group.
• The ‘bugs:’ namespace is for tracking the status of bugs in the spec document.

Here you can watch the group discussing features like block expressions (fun with let and with), local packages, versioning, and more.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/participating-or-observing-ecmascript-4

Peter Michaux has taken some time to writeup a Front-End Architecture Case Study: Blog Article Composition User Interface.

He plays with a couple of potential architectures for building a simple blog admin interface, such as:

• Old school: Normal Request/Response
• RJS Ajax Updates
• Client-Side App

Discussion

I have not considered degradation paths in details because I have not included the code in blogApp.js. Some users can cause real grief. For example, a user with Internet Explorer 6, JavaScript enabled but ActiveX disabled (and hence no Ajax) really throws a wrench in the works. The client-side app solution fairs much better in this situation then the RJS app.

You could argue that a solution like the second one presented, where all logic is on the server, should not return JavaScript but rather just data. This could be returned in the form of just the HTML to be inserted or XML or JSON. The client-side would know what to do with this data. I think that for the sake of this investigation the tradeoffs are the same for returning JavaScript remote procedure calls compared to HTML, XML or JSON data because the size of the requests and responses would be almost equal.

You could argue the user interface should be WYSIWYG like the FCKEditor. A WYSIWYG editor would fall in the full client-side app category. It is virtually the same for this discussion as the third solution presented above. The WYSIWYG editor would submit the HTML with bold tags that will be used for the blog article rather than form data with asterisks. As mentioned earlier, the client-side app presented in this article could also submit HTML generated for the preview rather than the form data.

Each of the three solutions presented is still appropriate today in particular situations. I am planning a big project that may use a full client-side app solution. There would still be times where I use a classic solution for a web page that isn’t commonly used and doesn’t need to be responsive. It all depends. What I have learned from this investigation is that RJS and similar solutions are probably too expensive for live previews. If the DRY principle is to be implemented and the logic must be on both the client and the server then some JavaScript should be used on the server.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/case-study-blog-article-composition-user-interface