Ajax Girl

Zillow has been down this afternoon as the popular real estate site adds a number of new features.

They may have been taking a look at the runaway success of Yahoo Answers - Among the changes is a new product called Home Q&A, which allows users to ask and answer questions about any of the 70 million U.S. homes in the Zillow database. Answers are rated by other Zillow users.

Every home in the Zillow database has its own dedicated page. Any user can now also add photos and information about any home and its neighborhood to the site. Users can also indicate if a home is for sale, and the asking price, as well as additional information. This is an expansion on user-generated content features added last September. Previously only the 600,000 registered users who claimed their homes or over 150,000 real estate agents could list a home for sale or post photos of the home. Now any registered user can list a home for sale and post an unlimited number of photos for the home, although the prime real estate on the listing is still reserved for a certified owner or agent. Bad photos and information can be flagged by other users.

Zillow is moving beyond the general site wide advertising they got from brokerages and home improvement stores, enabling registered users to carry out targeted advertising campaigns for their home listing. The new ad units are called “EZ Ads”. Users will be able to target their campaign by zip codes and specify the number of view or bank roll their ad will run for. The effective CPM for these ads will be a penny per impression.

Zillow claims 4.1 million unique visitors came to the site in March (Comscore (U.S.) says 1.8 million, down from 2.3 million a year ago, and 33 million monthly page views). They say that 90% of visitors own a home, and 54% play to buy or sell in the next two years. The company has raised $57 million in venture 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/~3/106480572/

Two days and two episodes into the new 80-segment, Internet-only show Prom Queen and I’m completely hooked.

Ok, not really. High school dramas aren’t really my thing, and I’m betting I spend a lot more time watching Justin.tv than Prom Queen. But the show does have merit (the story moves along briskly). MySpacers may be drawn to it, and it is as good as much of the user generated content out there. Michael Eisner’s Vuguru may have a mini hit on its hands. Episode 1 is embedded above. Episode 2 and future episodes are here.

Advertising intrusion was not as bad as I had feared after reading Eisner’s interview last week. There was a three second pre-roll ad for the upcoming Hairspray movie, a short ad for Verizon Vcast and then a fifteen second post-roll ad for Hairspray again. There were no obvious product placements that I saw in the first two episodes, and the last two ad units were easily skipped since the episode was over. Three total seconds of forced pre-roll ad watching for 1:40 worth of actual content is a lot better than normal TV.

With a budget of $100,000, the show could be very profitable.

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/~3/106459070/

Ajax pioneer Brent Ashley has written a Developerworks article about making Ajax mashup secure. It looks at where it’s at today and where it’s all headed.

He begins by surveying current techniques for calling external servers, such as the popular On-Demand Javascript technique. This has well-known security issues.

The scalability benefit of the <script> tag comes at the cost of sidestepping the Same Origin Policy security model, introducing potential attack vulnerabilities:

• Cross-site cookie access becomes possible: Scripts from one site can access cookies from another site.
• There is no opportunity to inspect the retrieved code for safety issues before running it: The code runs immediately upon loading.

One short-term solution is the following IFrame fragment identifier hack.

A more recently developed content-retrieval technique employs communication between a page’s script and a hidden iframe through its src URL’s fragment identifier (the part of the URL that comes after the # sign). Scripts in the parent page and embedded iframe can set each other’s fragment identifiers despite coming from different origins. An agreed-upon communication protocol is maintained between the scripts, driven by JavaScript timers that periodically fire routines to check for changes in the fragment identifier.

We’ll hopefully see more flexible, purpose-built, solutions in the future, and Brent’s article summarizes the proposals under discussion - JSONRequest, <module> tag, content restrictions header, W3C Access Control List (ACL) System, Cross-browser.xml.

With all these facilities potentially in the pipeline, one can only hope there will be a clear winner that works in all major browsers, or at least enough overlap that the Ajax libs can provide a straightforward abstraction!!!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/towards-secure-ajax-mashups

Blog search engine Technorati has always been more secretive about itself than most other startups. They won’t comment on venture financings, for example, even to correct incorrect information. So it means something when CEO Dave Sifry comes out and discloses a ton of information about recent page view and unique visitor growth.

Technorati, he says, has had 9 million unique visitors over the last thirty days, up from 3.5 million two months ago (that’s such a dramatic increase as to appear implausible). And while he isn’t disclosing actual page views, he says they increased 53% in March, and 141% over the last three months. Wow.

That’s big growth for the four year old blog search engine. But, why is Technorati suddenly so open with its data?

It could be two reasons. They took a reputation hit in December when Hitwise reported that Google Blogsearch had overtaken them. When Kevin Marks, a key developer, left the company in February to join Google, people started to talk. And Technorati’s investors reportedly started looking for a new CEO. So Sifry might be simply defending his turf by saying “look at how well we are doing.”

A second reason for the report is that Technorati is now serious about getting acquired, and this is a marketing document for would-be suitors.

Either way, data transparency is good. I hope Technorati makes a habit out of posting their internal number.

I also pulled Comscore data to compare to the Hitwise and Quantcast reports that Sifry showed in his post. Comscore also says that Technorati has more unique visitors and page views than Google Blogsearch. Just don’t ask about what happened last June (Technorati was too small at that point for Comscore to properly measure it).

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/~3/106383781/

A couple of months ago I let my innate love of gadgets get the better of me and I picked up a Sony Reader. I’m going to gloss over all but the most interesting bits, you can find all the technical details on Sony’s site.

1. The Screen: The crowning jewel of the Reader is the screen. The eInk display is a whopping 150dpi, has fantastic contrast, and has a 180 degree viewing angle. It doesn’t have a backlight, so you do have to have a light source to read by, but that also means that it is extremely thrifty as far as battery consumption is concerned. It really does seem like you’re reading from a printed page. It’s that good.
2. Battery Life: Sony advertises 7,500 page turns. I’m not sure that I believe them, but I know that I can get at least 4,000. I typically recharge every 3 or 4 books, at around 1,000 pages per book, and my reader hasn’t come close to running out of power yet.
3. Format Support: It supports Sony’s proprietary BBeB format as well as RTF, PDF, and JPEG for display. It also has a rudimentary MP3 player, but I haven’t bothered with it since I already have an iPod. The PDF support has a few gotchas, and it’s really only good for all text material, so if you have PDFs that have a lot of figures, the Reader is not a good choice for viewing them.
4. Content: Sony’s Connect store has a fairly limited selection of books, but it seems to be growing at a reasonable rate. There is quite a bit of text content available online from sites like Project Gutenberg, and Baen offers all of it’s books in a number of DRM-free formats. I haven’t had a problem finding things to read, but it is definitely a limitation right now, particularly if you have a specific book that you’re interested in reading and aren’t willing to limit your selections to what is available.
5. Navigation: The biggest weakness of the Reader is it’s navigation. The eInk display refreshes slowly, around 3 seconds per page turn, so Sony had to get creative with the UI. They added ten buttons across the bottom of the Reader as well as a 4 way thumb stick. You can navigate menu items either with the thumb stick or by pressing the corresponding number directly. The page refresh speed isn’t really an issue when reading, but is definitely an annoyance for navigating the UI for selecting books. Fortunately, when reading the only two buttons you’ll care about are the next and previous page buttons, and they work just fine.

All in all, it’s a great device. It keeps me from adding to the mountain of books that I struggle to find places to store and ensures that I’ll always have something new to read when I finish whatever it is that I’m reading at the time. Highly recommended.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/351-mini-review-sony-reader

Our next Fireside Chat is with icon designers from Cuban Council, Firewheel Design, Hicks Design, and Icon Factory. What question(s) would you like to see us ask?

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/350-questions-for-icon-designers

pack:tag is a static-resource compressing JSP-Taglib. It caches ad hoc compressed JavaScript or CSS in memory (in a Java Servlet) or in a generated file. It works transparently to the developer and the compressing-algorithms are pluggable.

Features

• Minification of JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets
• Caching to filesystem or memory (servlet)
• When caching to memory, the minified content is additional gzipped
• Apache Standard Taglib support for evaluations
• Compression and hashcode-generation adjustable on single resources

Examples

You would use JSP tags such as the following in your JSP files:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/packtag-compressing-jsp-taglib

Dan Yoder has created the Cruiser Behaviors Library, extensible stylesheets for decorating
DOM elements with interfaces and event handlers.

Cruiser uses Prototype, and is inspired by the Behaviour library itself.

A simple example shows the library in action. A new behaviour of “strike out a link with the special class of ‘demo’” is added to the page by doing:

Creating a strikable class

Creating an ESS file

An ESS file is extended CSS and this sample looks like:

Tie in the ESS

To link in this ESS file you need to use a link tag similar to CSS:

Read more details on Cruiser.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/cruiser-behaviors-library

Brian Walsh has written an article on Ajax CRUD with Struts 2 and TIBCO GI:

In this article you will learn how to create a new Ajax RIA front end to an existing Apache Struts2 .jsp application using TIBCO General Interface (GI), an open source Ajax toolkit with a MVC architecture similar to that of Java Swing. GI is optimized for creating business productivity applications and communicating with XML, SOAP, JSON and other types of services in a SOA.

Specifically we’ll extend the Struts2 CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete) sample that comes with its installation to expose XML data services optimized for GI interoperation and create the Ajax application that connects the end user with those services though a rich graphical user interface. The intent behind this approach is to demonstrate how you can make incremental changes to existing applications rather than having to rewrite from scratch.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajax-crud-with-struts-2-and-tibco-gi

MySpace has more registered members than the population of Mexico. If it was a country it would be the 11th largest in the world. So while it may be a major marketing event for MySpace to say it’s holding a presidential primary next January, you can be sure the candidates will take it seriously.

The MySpace primary will be held on January 1 & 2, 2008, before any of the official state primaries. Every user will be asked to vote for their favorite candidate.

Most of the candidates already have MySpace pages. See, for example, Hillary Clinton (7,468 friends), John Edwards (16,921 friends), Rudy Guiliani (private profile), John McCain (3,596 friends) and Barack Obama (89,465 friends).

We recently covered an enhancement to John McCain’s MySpace page.

I actually think it would be much more interesting for Facebook to do this than MySpace. Facebook’s user accounts are each tied to an email address or cell phone, resulting in far fewer fake or duplicate accounts. Given the low quality of the MySpace user base (multiple accounts, no identity check, etc.) it would be relatively easy for a campaign to create a significant number of fake accounts to stuff the ballot box in their favor. Facebook can also tie their users to U.S. residency much easier than MySpace. The results would actually be interesting.

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/~3/106272328/