Ajax Girl

The best place to tell secrets may not be while speaking to a room full of journalism students at New York University. But that’s how Keith Blanchard, Wenner Media’s executive director for online media for Rolling Stone and other magazines, released the news that they plan to launch a MySpace-style social network around the Rolling Stone brand.

Andrea Feczko, one of the students in the class, saw her chance to break a story and promptly did so. Her professor, Patrick Phillips, then emailed a bunch of major bloggers with the news.

Feczko says the social network will be separate from the main Rolling Stone website, and will include “best of” lists with user voting.

There may be one problem, though. The Rolling Stone audience may be too old to get into the social networking scene. Feczko says only one person in her class actually admitted that they ever read the magazine.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/108645920/

Akamai has acquired Red Swoosh for $15 million in a stock for stock transaction. We covered Red Swoosh last year when they launched a free, ad supported version of its file serving technology.

This brings to a close the long and dramatic Red Swoosh saga. Their technology bittorent-like technology to quickly transfer files using peer to peer technology. Some companies are starting to use bittorent directly for file sharing, which questions the need for something like Red Swoosh - see this post on the BBC’s useage of Zudeo and bittorent to deliver files to users. Pando, another startup, also overlaps a bit with Red Swoosh.

The company was founded back in 2001, but went through some troubled years during the crash. They recapitalized the company in 2005 and raised an additional $1.7 million from Mark Cuban.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/108638484/

We mentioned WriteWith in a roundup post last month on new Y Combinator startups. They’ve created a group writing platform that falls somewhere between a blogging platform, a wiki, and an online Word clone. The best part of it is that it works with any existing blogging software.

Current blogging software is rather kludgy when it comes to working with other writers on posts. To collaborate on a document in Wordpress, you have to share a draft link with a friend and also create an account for that person. And even then, you only have one version of the document, causing old versions to be lost by new revisions. WriteWith may eventually change that for blogs and any other online publishing platform.

Background

Two of the founders originally got the idea for the system when writing at their college newspapers, the Stanford Daily and Binghatan’s Pipedream. They wanted to find a better way to move articles from thought to the printed word, while handling revisions made by as many as 6 people along the way. Their first product was a newsroom, complete with administrative features for managing an articles lifecycle. That product has been used by 15 college newspapers across the US and Canada, including Stanford and the University of Alberta, which runs a national newswire. Licenses for other enterprise content management applications for newspapers like Managing Editor can cost upwards of $100,000.

The WriteWith team then stepped back, re-evaluated the publishing business and started designing for pixels over print. The new version is more flexible than their newsroom product and tailored specifically for managing collaboratively edited text online. And when I say text, it really is just for text. WriteWith’s text editor is taken straight out of the Dojo ajax library and doesn’t display complex WYSIWYG layout information. However, WriteWith’s focus is on editing, not the editor.

Collaboration

Making a document begins by starting right in the editor, or uploading a document to the site (.doc, .txt, .rtf, Open Office). Once a document is started, you can invite other people to see and edit it by email without their needing to create an account. When you go to a document page you’ll see the latest version, a list of previous versions, a message board, and task assignments. Everyone invited to edit and view a document has the equal ability to edit a document, assign tasks to each other, and post messages to the board.

WriteWith handles the potential chaos through communication and simple version control, which adds a new version of the document to the history each time a user makes an edit. The individual versions can then be compared, with the differences between each version highlighted. The live message board and tasks help to guide these revisions. Any user can assign another user a task by typing it into a task message box or post a note to the message board. When it’s agreed that the document is completed, it can then be published to a blog (Wordpress, Typepad) or downloaded (.doc, .txt, .rtf, Open Office).

There’s a growing need for collaborative editing platforms as blogging becomes a more established business and the ranks of their writers grow. WriteWith may be the solution that fills that need.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/108610582/

We’d like to get a nice digital projector to hook up to a laptop for presentations, etc. I started researching these and have no idea what’s good, bad, or other. This space seems so cluttered with so many choices, sizes, and brands that all sound about the same. We’d like to spend around $1000 or so. Does anyone have any recommendations based on personal experience? Thanks.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/367-projector-recommendations

When Lightbox 2.0.3 was just released I suddenly realised that we hadn’t posted about version 2 at all.

How does version 2 compare to the old faithful?

• Image Sets: group related images and navigate through them with ease
• Visual Effects: fancy pants transitions
• Backwards Compatibility: yes!

To group images into sets you simply put the set name in the rel attribute: rel=”lightbox[roadtrip]”.

Version 2.0.3 itself offers: “Improved keyboard navigation. Animation off toggle. Hides Flash movies under overlay. Imagemap support. Valid CSS.”

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/lightbox-2-sets-and-effects

Martin Kliehm has written up a nice overview of what is going on in the world of accessible Web 2.0 applications.

The article documents the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) work, primarily done by Becky Gibson, Aaron Leventhal, and Richard Schwerdtfeger.

One of the core problems is that anything can be an input of some time. What we see as a slider could just be <div class="slider"> and how would a screen reader know what to do there?

This is where roles come in:

Roles come in two flavors: XHTML and WAI‑ARIA. A basic set is defined in the XHTML 1.1 Role Attribute Module. It is extended by the WAI‑ARIA Role RDF taxonomy. WAI‑ARIA roles have the wairole prefix, like in role="wairole:slider".

Roles are further divided into widgets and structural roles. Widget roles include progressbar, slider, button, tree, textfield, checkbox, alert, and dialog. So if you want to use a fancy layer instead of a system dialog box, you can tell screen readers what it is by using role="dialog". More cool widget examples can be found at mozilla.org.

I have been playing more and more with the graceful failback side of Ajax, and how microformats can help out. It seems to be able adding semantics to our simple building box (CSS classes and such).

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/accessible-web-20-applications-with-wai-aria

The latest YUI release is out there, 2.2.1.

Although it is primarily a bug fix release, there are some important additions.

onDOMReady

We’re happy to announce the inclusion of the onDOMReady event in the Event utility! Now YUI developers can execute their JavaScript when the DOM loads, and before everything else loads too. This utility also provides the onAvailable event, which fires when a specified DOM node loads, and the onContentReady event, which fires when a specified DOM node, plus all of its children, loads.

The browser support has also changed a little, with support for Firefox 2.x and IE 7 on Vista.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/yui-221-ondomready-and-more

There was a lot of fingerpointing, denials, and “he said, she said” going on today as everyone digested the news that MySpace had blocked PhotoBucket’s 40 million members from embedding videos into their MySpace pages.

From my perspective this looks like MySpace just found an excuse to send a big middle finger to the largest independent widget company in the hope of disrupting their ongoing acquisition talks. Om Malik sees things differently and thinks Photobucket practically asked for this blockade. Robert Scoble calls Photobucket and services like it “parasitic.” Nick Carr says this is all basically inevitable, regardless of who’s to blame.

But the important question isn’t who’s fault this is. What is more interesting looking forward is, can Photobucket survive without MySpace?

I say yes.

Photobucket isn’t like YouTube, which was deeply unprofitable from day one. They’ve been at or near profitability for a long time, dipping back into the red to grow headcount and infrastructure. They have a diversified revenue stream - some from premium accounts and most from on-site advertising.

I took a look at their leaked revenue numbers from last month. Most of Photobucket’s revenue is generated from on-site advertising - 63% of it in 2005, and 68% in 2006. In the leaked documents the company says they’ll do $32 million in revenue this year. That projection is probably dead on because it is being distributed to potential buyers - any future variance could kill a deal in progress and so they are probably being very conservative.

That advertising revenue isn’t going anywhere. Unlike 2006, Photobucket is now set up as a destination site - a good hedge against exactly what MySpace did last night. The company says that over half of video views are now on their site (and generating advertising revenue), way up from a year ago. They also say that only 25% of their users embed videos at MySpace. At their current growth rate, even a permanent ban only sets them back six months or less in terms of users and page views.

And many MySpace/Photobucket users will simply leave MySpace and go to one of its many competitors rather than lose the ability to embed their Photobucket media. Re-creating a profile at another social network takes a lot less time than re-uploading hours of video. In the end, Photobucket could prove to be stickier than MySpace.

Photobucket execs were in a chipper mood today when I spoke to them, noting that traffic to the site is way up and that they’ve had more press attention in the last 24 hours than in the last year combined.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/108496889/

Personalized home page startup Pageflakes is under new management. The Benchmark-funded startup opened an office in Silicon Valley and brought on Dan Cohen, who previously led the teams working on Google IG and then My Yahoo, as CEO.

He’s made some noticeable changes already. Last month they quietly launched a video widget that pulls videos from major video sharing sites based on a keyword. I actually passed on covering it, but have since become hooked on the module and it’s become a sort of personal tv channel on my start page. This morning they will launch a new set of features designed to make creating a new home page as easy as possible.

There are two features think are worth noting in the release - personalization and a number of very cool RSS/widget features.

Personalization

Like the recent My Yahoo release, Pageflakes will focus on customization as soon as you come to the site. Unlike Yahoo, they don’t have a lot of data on your prior web usage, so they will ask you a few questions to start. You pick the things you are interested in - news, sports, tech, gossip, food, games, etc. and tell it your city or zip/postal code. Pageflakes will then build you a personalized start page with pre-populated modules (they call them “flakes”). Weather, local news and local events are set to the user’s location, and can be edited or removed for different content via an Ajax interface.

RSS And Widget Features

Any module on a pageflakes page can be turned into a widget and placed on another site. Above I’ve embedded a widget for the TechCrunch RSS module, but this works for any widget.

By far the most interesting new feature, however, is the “power user” RSS reader. Pageflakes and other Ajax home page sites provide a very good view of RSS information, but only for a few sites. Too many feeds on a page and it gets too cluttered. I use Pageflakes to read a few key feeds multiple times per day, and Google Reader for reading a much longer list of feeds less frequently. With Pageflakes, you now have the best of both. Click “Reader” in the top right corner of any of your pages and you’ll be taken to a RSS reader that looks very much like Bloglines or Google Reader (sometimes called an “Outlook” view because it has two or three panes like Outlook). All feeds from all of your Pageflakes pages are included. It isn’t as feature rich as Google Reader, but it’s close. And it’s fast. Posts can be viewed with or without the original site’s CSS included.

This means Pageflakes is making a play to become THE place users keep all of their RSS feeds, not just the few that are checked constantly.

Other New Features

There are additional features as well, although they will be overshadowed by the RSS reader. Most of these are new modules that can be added to the site, including a nice mashup module of Google Maps and local event data that shows you what’s going on in your location. There are also new modules for stock prices, MySpace profiles, a Hot Or Not viewer, and horoscopes.

Pageflakes is in a very crowded space dominated by Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. They have a larger startup competitor in Netvibes as well. But statistics show that once someone starts using a personalized home page they tend to stay there. Since the vast majority of Internet users don’t use any of these products yet, there is still a race to grab users. Whatever happens, it’s good for us consumers - competition is driving innovation. I’d like to see Google combine their IG and Reader products in a similar way, for example. Perhaps we’ll see that soon.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/108489074/

Silicon Valley based oDesk, which is a marketplace for developers and companies looking for outsourced developer help, seems to be sailing along nicely. Next week they’ll announce that $10 million has been spent on outsourced projects to date, and they have 750,000 or so total billed hours. That’s up 50% from last November, when we reported that they had reached 500,000 billed hours. oDesk keeps a flat 10% of fees.

Until recently oDesk only allowed projects to be priced on an hourly basis. Two weeks ago they launched fixed price jobs as well, which is something many comments here requested in our previous posts about them. After a month of quiet beta testing, 750 jobs were posted at a fixed price, with an average price of around $500

The company says their top markets for buyers are the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Saudi Arabia and Australia, while the most popular markets for providers are India, Russia, the Ukraine, the U.S. and the Philippines. The programming skills most in-demand are PHP/MySQL, C#/.Net, ASP, Java/J2EE and C/C++/Win32SDK.

oDesk is based in Menlo Park and they have raised $6M from Sigma Partners and Globespan.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/108477735/