Ajax Girl

Dean Edwards has come out with what he calls Yet Another JavaScript Library Without Documentation.

But, this is from Dean, not your cousin Bubba, so what is interesting about it?

Highlights

• A fast implementation the Selectors API
• Fixes broken browser implementations of the DOM events module
  including document.createEvent(), dispatchEvent(), addEventListener(), etc
• Supports DOMContentLoaded
• Fixes getAttribute()/setAttribute() (Internet Explorer)
• Implements getElementsByClassName()
• Implements a few other useful DOM methods like getComputedStyle() and compareDocumentPosition()
• Supports a variety of browsers including ancient browsers like IE5.0 (Windows and Mac)

There aren’t fancy effects, but that isn’t the mission. “It only does standards. But it is my belief that if you build on standards in the right way, you can help future-proof your scripted pages.”

Dean is looking to see if there is any interest in this. What do you say?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/dean-edwards-puts-out-base2-a-standards-based-javascript-library

Am I breaking the law with my embed above of this copyright-violating music video on YouTube? Or am I providing a valuable marketing service to Silversun Pickups and their current tour? The answer is: both.

The Wall Street Journal notes that CD music sales are down 20% from the same week a year ago. The seven year decline in CD sales doesn’t look to be turning around anytime soon.

And while legal music sales are increasing by 50% or so a year, overall industry revenue is still down 25% from a year ago by some estimates.

The faster music labels realize their massively profitable days are over, the better it will be for them, as well as the bands they represent and us, their customers. Digital music sales are not going to make up for lost revenue. Suing their customer base is not going to make up for lost revenue. In fact, absolutely nothing is going to make up that lost revenue. The industry, revenue-wise, is going to continue to shrink.

The problem is that their main product, recorded music, has a zero marginal cost to produce. It’s so cheap to make that consumers can actually make it themselves. And they do. A billion songs a month are downloaded, mostly illegally, from P2P networks.

As the marginal price of recorded music continues to fall towards zero, its natural price, bands will need to make money elsewhere. Live concerts will become more and more popular, and will be the largest source of revenue for many artists. Recorded music will be used to promote those live events. Popular artists will still make a very, very good living. Others will have to decide if love of their art is enough to keep going.

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/~3/103391674/

Classified search engine Oodle got a pile of cash today, $11 million from new investor JAFCO Ventures and the leaders of their previous $5 million round, Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures. Like LiveDeal, Edgeio, and Vast, Oodle repackages and aggregates classified listings from around the web to make them easily searched by category, attributes, and location. Google Base also dipped its feet into this territory. Oodle’s model is taking on nearly every established vertical search by hosting listings for cars, real estate, rentals, jobs, personals, merchandise, tickets, pets, and services.

Oodle has expanded its listings through direct postings and a series of local listings partners, which it syndicates on sites like Yell.com, Local.com. include Engage.com, Local.com, ticket sellers, real estate brokers, colleges, and newspapers. However, Last year they lost their Craigslist feed. Edgeio and Vast are also growing through crawling the web. They are branching out by grabbing data from more obscure RSS feeds from across the web (Edgeio) or the deep web that lies behind login and search forms (Vast).

Oodle reports 20 million active listings from more than 75,000 sources in the US and the UK, when compared to Edgeio’s over 100 million international listings and Vast’s 25 million classified listings across 70,000 sites. Oodle, however, has some more advanced search features than these others, adding price tracking and maps where it makes sense. Their price tracking is a more basic version of what Mpire is offering in the shopping vertical.

Disclosure: Michael Arrington is a founder and director of Edgeio.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/103528199/

The Laszlo guys caused some buzz when they said they were going to support Ajax and Flash as runtime platforms for their new release. That release, OpenLaszlo 4.0 has just been released.

With or Without Flash

OpenLaszlo is designed to support deployment of Ajax applications across multiple runtimes and devices. OpenLaszlo 3.x can deploy applications running Flash 7 or higher, and OpenLaszlo 4, now in Beta, provides DHTML support.

OpenLaszlo 4 gives developers the option to run applications using Flash or DHTML, an open standard built into most browsers. Future extensions include embedded runtimes in consumer devices, such as mobile phones and TV set-tops. Adopt OpenLaszlo today and open a new world of options for deploying compelling Web 2.0 applications now and in the future.

Power with Flexibility

OpenLaszlo LZX is a declarative XML markup language with embedded JavaScript designed expressly for advanced Web applications. Its syntax is familiar to developers experienced with JavaScript, HTML and XML, and it provides advanced language features such as animation, layout, drawing, data binding, and server communication (persistent connections, SOAP, XML-RPC and XMLHttpRequest) to create an extraordinarily rich user experience. OpenLaszlo comes with a robust set of components and is supported by extensive documentation.

Are you looking for tools like this that can deploy to multiple platforms, or do you prefer staying closer to the platform?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/openlaszlo-40-released-now-with-ajax

Are designers the enemy of design?

“Business men and women don’t like the term ‘design.’ I think they think it implies drapes or dresses. Even top CEOs who embrace design don’t want to call it that. They want to call it ‘Innovation.’ That has a manly right to it. It’s strong, techie. These folks are perfectly willing to use the word ‘vision,’ whatever the heck ‘vision’ is. They like ‘Imagination,’ whatever the heck that is. But they don’t like ‘design.’ Go figure.”

Typography in music notation

“Layout should be pretty, not only for its own sake, but especially because it helps the reader in his task. For performance material like sheet music, this is doubly important: musicians have a limited amount of attention. The less attention they need for reading, the more they can focus on playing itself. In other words, better typography translates to better performances.” [tx ML]

Southwest Airlines' chief apology officer

“He composes about 180 letters a year explaining what went wrong on particular flights and, with about 110 passengers per flight, he mails off roughly 20,000 mea culpas. Each one bears his direct phone line.”…President: “She learned that a law client who was promised something in two weeks but received it in one was vastly happier than a client who was promised something in one day but received it in four. “Under-promise, over-deliver” became her mantra.”

Learning interaction design from Las Vegas

“Looking at the casino experience in particular you have the idea of tiered functionality. Anyone can slide a quarter into a slot machine and play without any knowledge or training. From there to the high-stakes poker game every level of the experience is really good and readily available. Each tier is its own rich experience. Yes, the high-stakes poker game is given special treatment, but the slot machine is the bread and butter of the casino.”

“Facebook Sneak Preview” will show upcoming feature additions and changes before they go live

“My bet is that this is their response to the user backlash and protests last year after after Facebook made some fairly dramatic changes to the site. With the new group, Facebook can ease users into the new stuff, and also get their feedback before it goes live. It’s an easy way to build consensus and dissolve criticism before it gains any steam.”

SXSW Podcasts

Web Typography Sucks, The 4-Hour Workweek: Secrets of Doing More with Less in a Digital World, A Field Guide to Design Inspiration, Opening Remarks: Kathy Sierra, etc.

ESPN.com’s march (information) madness

“To the editors of ESPN.com, I simply request that you (a) kill the pop-up ads, (b) tear the home page apart, (c) take a look at what the NYT has been up to in terms of integrating textual and multimedia content, and (d) don’t try to cram every conceivable product onto the homepage.”

Smokin’ Aces director shows poster designs that didn’t make the cut

“It’s a rare opportunity to see all the unproduced movie posters that never make it to your local movie theatre lobby. As most film advertising art directors and designers will tell you, sometimes their best poster design work never sees the light of day beyond their own portfolios.”

Filmmaker Jorgen Leth on using limitations in "The Five Obstructions"

“When I have something to work against, it liberates my imagination. I believe very much in authentic inspiration. I’m not about calculation.”

Fuzzy math at Verizon

Ridiculous conversation where a customer tries to explain the difference between .002 cents and .002 dollars to Verizon customer service. [via RVV]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/331-sunspots-the-vision-edition

Brett Taylor wanted to see if he could make a parallax effect in HTML+CSS+JS and make it cross-browser and came up with Parallax Backgrounds.

Scroll around and you will see that the text and content scrolls normally, but the different background layers scroll at different speed.

Maybe as useful as SKIP INTRO, but a nice experiment.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/parallax-effect-for-backgrounds

This is an ancient tip, but a good-y. Jeffrey Larson put together a little hack to do auto copy to clipboard in a cross browser way (i.e. failing back to Flash).

It is the kind of thing that can easily be abused, and you can make your users mad (You just nuked something important out of my clipboard!).

I just saw it used at Brett Taylor’s urlTea service, and it was kinda nice to have the result right there. It made me wish I knew if there was a key stroke to “send to url in clipboard”.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/auto-copy-to-clipboard

Google announced the testing of a new pay-per-action, or PPA, advertising product today. It’s important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Google controls so much of the online advertising market that just about anything they do in advertising has real consequences around the Internet.

Background

Until now, Google has primarily sold cost-per-click, or CPC ads. Advertisers pay a fee when someone on Google or a Google partner site clicks on the ad and is delivered to a web page designated by the advertiser. Advertises like this because they only pay when a potential customer is in their hands. They don’t like it because of click fraud - publishers and advertiser competitors have an incentive to click those ads and generate revenue (or just cost to the advertiser). Since Google has a short term financial incentive to actually promote click fraud, there’s been a lot of debate around the subject over the years.

PPA advertising is meant to mitigate the risks of click fraud. Now the advertiser pays only if a customer has been delivered to a website and takes a further action, such as buying a product or filling out a web form.

Like CPC ads, PPA advertising wasn’t invented by Google. Search engine Snap has been selling ads this way for some time, for example. Another startup, Turn, is also in this business. As are others.

PPA requires an additional level of complexity in the ad network as well. Previously, Google delivered a user to a website, and sent a bill for the click. Now, Google needs to verify that an “action” has occurred by receiving confirmation back from the advertiser.

The advertiser will of course have an incentive not to confirm the action, but Google will be able to easily adjust for this. Like CPC ads, PPA ads will be ranked by profitability to Google. Google need only calculate the average value of a click to a PPA advertiser, and those ads can then be ranked by profitability. CPC and PPA ads could even be mixed, although Google isn’t doing that yet.

Consequences

This won’t affect big advertisers much, because they already track ROI on CPC advertising very closely. For smaller advertisers though, click fraud can wreak havoc. The ability to largely filter out click fraud will help them track ROI much more closely that they previously could. This will be a big help for them.

Affiliate marketing networks like Commission Junction and LinkShare are screwed. These networks also operate on a cost-per-action basis, mostly with online retailers. Even though some of them have scale, they will not have the ability to compete with Google on sheer size of network. Advertisers flock to volume, which drives average pricing up. When prices increase, publishers flock to the new platform because they’ll earn more. Look for serious publisher leakage from the big affiliate networks over time as this new product scales up. If you want to argue this point, note what happened to the stock price of Commission Junction’s parent company, ValueClick, today. And that’s even though the market has largely adjusted for this news already - this move to add PPA ads has been rumored for some time.

This should be good for Google’s overall market share and long term revenue growth. Anything that drives fraud out of the network will get advertisers to actually spend more money, not less, as their ROIs increase.

And Yahoo is now in the unenviable position of playing follow the leader again, even as they catch their breath from the massive Panama release earlier this year.

Oh Yeah, Google Also Released…

Google also announced a new “text link format” ad unit today. This was mentioned in the fourth paragraph of the blog post (not exactly highlighted), and is also discussed in the PPA product FAQs:

What is the text link format for pay-per-action ads?
Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.

For example, you might see the following text link embedded in a publisher’s recommendatory text: “Widgets are fun! I encourage all my friends to Buy a high-quality widget today.” (Mousing over the link will display “Ads by Google” to identify these as pay-per-action ads).

Though the maximum length of a text link is 90 characters, we’ve found that shorter links perform better because they allow the publisher use the link in more places on her/his site and in different context. The maximum length is 90 characters but less than 5 words is best. Even better, just use your brand name to offer maximum flexibility to the publisher.

No longer will Google ads need to be confined to their own space on the site - publishers can subtly embed ads right into hyperlinks within the main content of the site itself (see second paragraph of quote above). Other companies already do this, but Google has never tread into the “advertorial” space before.

They’ve crossed a hazy ethical line here. If this product was announced on its own, it would be heavily debated by the blogs and press. But by burying it in other, bigger news, they’ve mostly avoided the critical analysis that this actually deserves.

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/~3/103264878/

When the OpenAjax Alliance was created Microsoft was invited, but didn’t take up the offer. They were noticeably absent from the early meetings.

Well, now Bertrand Le Roy of the Atlas team will be at the meetings as the OpenAjax Alliance Welcomes Microsoft and Other New Members and Announces Interoperability Awards:

“Microsoft is joining the OpenAJAX Alliance to collaborate with other industry leaders to help evolve AJAX-style development by ensuring a high degree of interoperability,” said Keith Smith, group product manager of the Core Web Platform & Tools to UX Web/Client Platform & Tools team at Microsoft Corp. “By joining OpenAJAX, Microsoft is continuing its commitment to empower Web developers with technology that works cross-browser and cross-platform.”

The newest OpenAjax Alliance members include: 24SevenOffice, ActiveGrid, ActiveState, Appeon, Aptana, Arimaan Global Consulting, Custom Credit Systems (Thinwire), ESRI, Getahead (DWR), Global Computer Enterprises, GoETC, Helmi Technologies, HR-XML, iPolipo, Isomorphic Software, JSSL, Lightstreamer, Microsoft, MobileAware, NetScript Technologies, OpenSpot, OpenSymphony (OpenQA), OpSource, OS3.IT, Redmonk, Tealeaf Technology, Teleca Mobile, Transmend, Visible Measures, Visual WebGui and Volantis Systems.

The Alliance is also announcing that the following members have all been awarded OpenAjax Interoperability certificates: Apache XAP, Dojo Foundation, ICEsoft, ILOG, Isomorphic, IT Mill, Lightstreamer, Open Link, Open Spot, Nexaweb, Software AG and TIBCO. The interoperability certificates represent progress by both OpenAjax Alliance and its members towards defining and achieving industry support for OpenAjax Conformance.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/microsoft-joins-the-openajax-alliance