Ajax Girl

As previously rumored, Aggregate Knowledge closed a second round of financing earlier this year - $20 million to add to their previous $5 million round from Kleiner Perkins and First Round Capital. DAG Ventures led this new round, and Kleiner also participated.

The company works with content and ecommerce sites to provide personalized recommendations to page views and/or sales. The word in Silicon Valley is that they are doing one hell of a job for their partners, which include the Washington Post and Overstock.com. The company has fifteen partners to date, with more than 50 million uses between them.

Later this year the company says they will launch a new product, called Collective Discovery, that brings discovery cross-partner.

The company is also rumored to be at or near profitability, with most of the original $5 million investment still in the bank. This new round signals that they are planning a significant ramp up in operations.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/108151291/

In 1999, Eng-Sion Tan and two friends launched Third Voice, a browser plugin that would let anyone make annotations on webpages. The intent was to encourage freer speech on the internet, but many slammed it as “Web Graffiti.” The company eventually shut down.

The idea of web page annotation didn’t die with Third Voice, though. New services, each with unique features, have carried on.

Diigo

A must have for researchers
Diigo is a research tool that lets you share bookmarks and annotations on web pages using a browser plugin or bookmarklet. Notes are anchored to highlighted text and bookmarks save a cached copy of the site. Diigo will also let you save to multiple other bookmarking services (all the big ones) and email your annotated pages to friends who don’t have the plugin. We covered Diigo earlier.

Diigo has some advanced search functionality built in as well. With Diigo, you can search for the highlighted words on the web with any of four search engines, social bookmarking systems, on blogs, within the current site, amongst inbound links, and seven different content verticals (TV, stock sites, etc.). Diigo also lets you post links to your blog through posts, or a “linkroll” widget listing your most recent annotations.

Fleck

Bare bones
Fleck is the most basic of the annotation services, letting you simply post public or private text notes on a page. Notes can be posted by using a browser plugin or by ajax when Fleck feeds web pages through its servers and adds the necessary annotation code. Permalinks to annotated pages can be emailed to friends and posted to blogs. We covered their launch previously and expect the company to be rolling out more features.

ShiftSpace

Have your way with any webpage
ShiftSpace is an opensource browser plugin (FF only) being developed by NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program and is pretty close to internet graffiti. The plugin allows their users to annotate and remix a website saving it as a communally editable alternate version revealed in your browser by pressing Shift + Space. ShiftSpace allows users to leave notes, highlight text, change images, and edit the page source. It kind of reminds me of the web page analysis plugin Firebug, which allows you to carry out live edits of any web page. For web surfers with the plugin, modified pages are marked with a small ShiftSpace icon (§) in the bottom left side of the screen.

Modified pages are called “shifts”, and if made public, are shared on the ShiftSpace website. Users can subscribe to the shifts of users they like via RSS. The ShiftSpace team also plans to implement “trails”, which are hyperlinked collections of related shifts.

Stickis

Subscribe to only the annotations you want
Stickis is a web page annotation service that lets you subscribe to content “channels” from your friends and the community via a browser plugin. We previously covered their launch. You can also view notes without the plugin when they are served by proxy through Stickis’ website. Channels can consist of text and image sticky notes, RSS feeds (blogs), and even specialized data channels for web services such as OpenTable or Yelp. Every note you make is also stored on your personal Stickis blog, which leaves a trackback to itself if you annotate a blog.

When you subscribe to a channel, it stays with you while surfing the web in a collapsible sidebar, suggesting content based on what page you’re on. Specialized channels, like OpenTable or Yelp, pop up reservation options and restaurant reviews when you visit a page linking to a restaurant. Other content channels populate the tray with notes based on an analysis of a the URL and the note’s tags. When you click on a note, it brings up the notes on the page along with comments on the note made by your friends.

Stickis parent company, Activeweave, also recently announced BlogRovR, a simpler version of Stickis that feeds you blog content from your favorite bloggers as you search surf the web.

Trailfire

Create and share tours of the web
We covered Trailfire’s launch last August. Since then, the social website annotation service has developed considerably, recently announcing some more of the social features it originally promised.

Trailfire is an IE and Firefox plugin that lets you post notes (called marks) right on top of a webpage and string them together with hyperlinks (making “trails”). The plugin consists of a note button for leaving marks and a sidebar for managing your trails. When you arrive at a page you’re interested in marking up, you click the mark button, which pops up a little ajax balloon with a text editor inside that you can position anywhere on the page. In the editor, you can compose a message out of text, images, and hyperlinks. You then title the mark and select which trail (group of notes) it belongs to. Trails can be posted public or private and commented on. When a trail is posted, you follow it by just clicking next.

The new version of the service will now include the ability to make friends and share with them, follow all the trails made by a user, gather your friends into groups, and allow trails to be edited together by multiple users (wiki trails).

Compared with other annotation services, Trailfire has expanded in what I find to be a more effective way. Unlike services like Diigo, and Stickis, Trailfire has really helped its exposure by not requiring a sign-in or download to see annotations unlike Stickis and Diigo (to see notes). Fleck matches this simplicity. For people without the plugin, Trailfire serves the annotated sites through its servers, embedding ajax notes within the page. Trailfire will now also let you add notes to a page through their proxy by a newly released bookmarklet.

Secondly, Trailfire has implemented personal trail pages that consists of a numbered list of each of the links in the trail along with a thumbnail of the website. This has enabled search engines to index their pages and generate a fair amount of organic traffic. One such example was an April fools trail on the site, which received over 168,000 uniques on April 1st, due in large part to search engine traffic.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/108146188/

Netvibes is throwing a party for 600 of their closest friends to celebrate the upcoming release of “Netvibes Universe” (look for our post on it soon). The party is free to attend, but you have to RSVP. Netvibes founder Tariq Krim agreed to give the last fifty invitations away to TechCrunch readers. If you’d like to attend, RSVP now at eco.netvibes.com/sfparty/. After the 50 slots are gone the site will start to create a waiting list.

Please only RSVP if you fully intend to actually go. Otherwise you’ll be keeping someone else out.

Date: April 16, 2007
Time: 9 pm
Location: 111 Minna St., San Francisco, CA 94105

Our previous coverage of Netvibes is here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/108100003/

NetQoS has a little something to bring video game-style drama to the hum drum task of monitoring your system traffic. Their program, Netcosm monitors the traffic flowing across your routers and remasters that data into entertaining clashes of good and evil data packets like the one you see above. The only question is whether your system admin with find it more entertaining to see your system get “Slashdotted” than do anything about it.

Netcosm is a product of NetQoS Performance Labs and currently only running on their servers, but they do have a nifty FAQ where you can ask them about all the fun they’re having.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/108081323/

Viacom hasn’t been gentle with Google this year. In February they slammed Google/YouTube with a massive DMCA take down demand (and an equally massive press outreach). A month later they sued Google for a billion dollars. Between those two events they signed a content deal with Joost, a YouTube competitor in the professional content space. All of this seems to stem from the fact that Google promised Viacom a revenue share deal on YouTube, then failed to table a compelling offer.

Today Viacom snubs Google again, choosing to work with Yahoo on search advertising. There are few details of the deal, but it doesn’t appear that Yahoo is making any revenue guarantees, which are becoming standard in large search advertising deals. Google gave Fox certain guarantees in a $900 million deal announced last year, and Microsoft almost certainly guaranteed revenue to Facebook in order to get access to their search traffic.

In this case at least, YouTube appears to be a liability to Google, and Yahoo gets the benefit of being the next strongest player.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/108067820/

Mozilla, Opera, and Apple have all come together to propose that the new HTML Working Group at the W3C adopt the HTML 5 work from WHATWG.

And before anyone shouts about patents, “Apple, Mozilla and Opera will agree to arrange a non-exclusive copyright assignment to the W3 Consortium”.

Considering the work that has been put into HTML 5, I think this proposal should be taken very seriously.

Here is the letter in full:

Dear HTML Working Group,

HTML5, comprising the Web Apps 1.0 and Web Forms 2.0 specifications,
is the product of many years of collaborative effort. It specifies
existing HTML4 markup and APIs with much clearer conformance criteria
for both implementations and documents. It specifies many useful
additions, in many cases drawing on features that have existed in
browser-based implementations for a long time. And it actively draws
on feedback from implementors and content authors. Therefore, we the
undersigned propose the following:

- that the W3C HTML Working Group adops the WHAT Working Group’s
HTML5 as the starting point for further HTML development
- that the W3C’s next-generation HTML specification is officially
named “HTML 5″
- that Ian Hickson is named as editor for the W3C’s HTML 5
specification, to preserve continuity with the existing WHATWG effort

If HTML5 is adopted as a starting point, the contents of the document
would still be up for review and revision, but we would start with
the existing text. A suitable next step might be a high-level review
of functionality added and removed relative to HTML4.01, followed by
focused discussion and review of individual topic areas, including
both content already in the spec and proposed new features.
Discussions should be guided by common principles along the lines of
<http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/ProposedDesignPrinciples>

If the group is agreeable to these proposals, Apple, Mozilla and
Opera will agree to arrange a non-exclusive copyright assignment to
the W3 Consortium for HTML5 specifications.

L. David Baron, Mozilla Foundation
Lars Erik Bolstad, Opera Software ASA
Brendan Eich, Mozilla Foundation
Dave Hyatt, Apple Inc.
Håkon Wium Lie, Opera Software ASA
Maciej Stachowiak, Apple Inc.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/proposal-for-the-w3c-to-adopt-html-5

Mozilla, Opera, and Apple have all come together to propose that the new HTML Working Group at the W3C adopt the HTML 5 work from WHATWG.

And before anyone shouts about patents, “Apple, Mozilla and Opera will agree to arrange a non-exclusive copyright assignment to the W3 Consortium”.

Considering the work that has been put into HTML 5, I think this proposal should be taken very seriously.

Here is the letter in full:

Dear HTML Working Group,

HTML5, comprising the Web Apps 1.0 and Web Forms 2.0 specifications,
is the product of many years of collaborative effort. It specifies
existing HTML4 markup and APIs with much clearer conformance criteria
for both implementations and documents. It specifies many useful
additions, in many cases drawing on features that have existed in
browser-based implementations for a long time. And it actively draws
on feedback from implementors and content authors. Therefore, we the
undersigned propose the following:

- that the W3C HTML Working Group adops the WHAT Working Group’s
HTML5 as the starting point for further HTML development
- that the W3C’s next-generation HTML specification is officially
named “HTML 5″
- that Ian Hickson is named as editor for the W3C’s HTML 5
specification, to preserve continuity with the existing WHATWG effort

If HTML5 is adopted as a starting point, the contents of the document
would still be up for review and revision, but we would start with
the existing text. A suitable next step might be a high-level review
of functionality added and removed relative to HTML4.01, followed by
focused discussion and review of individual topic areas, including
both content already in the spec and proposed new features.
Discussions should be guided by common principles along the lines of
<http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/ProposedDesignPrinciples>

If the group is agreeable to these proposals, Apple, Mozilla and
Opera will agree to arrange a non-exclusive copyright assignment to
the W3 Consortium for HTML5 specifications.

L. David Baron, Mozilla Foundation
Lars Erik Bolstad, Opera Software ASA
Brendan Eich, Mozilla Foundation
Dave Hyatt, Apple Inc.
Håkon Wium Lie, Opera Software ASA
Maciej Stachowiak, Apple Inc.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/proposal-for-the-w3c-to-adopt-html-5

One of the things that always gives us a good laugh over here is when people pull out the “real world” card.

As in “you don’t understand the real world” or “your products would never work in the real world” or “you’ve obviously never worked in the real world.”

It’s thrown around so often that it must mean something obvious. So, in 10 words or less, what does “real world” mean to you?

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/363-define-the-real-world-in-10-words-or-less

Sigh. Front page of the New York Times yesterday: A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs.

The Blogger’s Code of Conduct has arrived to keep us in line. Look at the initial version of 102 words vs. the current version with 569 words. How big will it get?

I have tons of respect for Tim O’Reilly and I know the intentions here are good, but do we really need a policy document to tell us that death threats are bad? Do we need a manifesto to tell us that we have the right to restrict nasty comments on our own blogs? What will this code actually do anyway?

I hate the idea of an FCC-like mob of nannies determining which word are acceptable (see George Carlin). This document certainly isn’t that bad, but it’s a step in that direction.

Let’s rely on common sense instead of a code. Blog owners shouldn’t be held responsible for content written by site visitors. Blog owners should decide on their own which comments are acceptable or not. Let people post whatever they want and let blog owners delete whatever they want. If you don’t like that someone is deleting your comment, you can start your own site complaining about how that blog is suppressing you. If you don’t like what someone allows at his/her blog, don’t read it.

The web forces us to confront some ugly truths. We see humanity as it really is, good and bad. The same thing that makes the web wonderful is, occasionally, what makes it terrible. That’s the tradeoff we agree to when we get on this ride. And it’s worth it.

It’s like living in a city. You deal with a loss in civility. (Any girl who walks around NYC hears more offensive comments in a day than most bloggers hear in a lifetime). But in exchange you get the wonder of being in a thriving metropolis. The culture, the diversity, the excitement, the energy, and the vitality. Let’s not all move into a gated community just because there are a few bad apples around.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/361-living-in-the-city

Coach Wei of Nexaweb has been spending time on the Dojo Footprint and Ajax Performance Recommendations.

Coach compares the Ajax usage scenarios, from building a rich application, to doing a little HTML enhancement.

He ran a Dojo Performance Overhead Challenge which involved creating a simple widget with Dojo, and one from scratch:

After building and packaging the my simple Dojo widget, the custom build produces a new dojo.js that has packed all necessary files, but only the necessary file, into one single download. The footprint of this custom dojo.js is 168KB.

In contrast, if I wrote this simple widget from scratch without using Dojo, its footprint would be under 10KB(with compression, it would be under 2KB).

Given the dramatic difference in footprint, my conclusion is that Dojo is not suitable for this use scenario.

There are three use scenarios of Ajax technologies:

1. HTML enhancement: Using Ajax to enhance HTML pages. In this case, the majority of the application code is HTML and CSS, and Ajax is only a small portion of application code that provides enhanced interactivity;
2. Web Widget: Using Ajax to develop an embeddable web widget. Widgets are small code snippets that can be easily embedded by third party websites to provide focused functionality. The popularity of widget is so high that Newsweek even declared that “2007 is the Year of Widget”. Ajax is certainly the technology of choice for developing widgets.
3. Desktop-like web application: Using Ajax to develop a desktop-like application. The application contains many screens. Majority of the application code is based on Ajax and HTML/CSS are only to compliment these Ajax code.

This discussion isn’t just about Dojo, it is about any of the frameworks, and it needs to be discussed as the community to make sure we come up with solutions that allow Ajax to continue to grow as a development platform.

Would the initial download matter so much if the browser cached Dojo libraries?

Dylan Schiemann responded discussing how the Dojo team is pushing hard to solve some of these problems.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/dojo-footprint-and-ajax-performance-recommendation