Ajax Girl

The video for the “Mr. Ten Questions” Australian press prank on Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales that we wrote about a couple of days ago is now online and embedded above. See our original post for a transcript of the questions and additional background.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/113794261/

Disney has joined the ever growing list social networking destinations with the launch of Disney Xtreme Digital, targeted directly at Disney’s core market of pre-teens.

The new service, said perhaps lazily by some outlets as being a MySpace clone, comes complete with user generated profile pages that leverage the wealth of Disney’s pre-teen friendly content in terms of allowing customization, as well as offering the standard competitions, video, music, games and networking features. Naturally Disney has also included strong parental controls, that include the ability to limit access access to the various features on the site, including chat.

The service currently opens in beta, with users restricted to the United States only.

The pre-teen marketplace has been ignored to date by most existing social networking sites, the litany of potential, and actual legal issues regarding children under 14 keeping many away. For that very reason though, it’s an online demographic that lacks a lot of serious competition, and holds a wealth of potential for Disney in further expanding the Disney brand online.

From a parents perspective though, I couldn’t help but think that the entire service was nothing more than a constant stream of advertisements for Disney movies and related products. Parents who worry about their children being exposed to marketing messages are not going to like Disney XD.

One can only hope that they don’t mix the content up on the new service, as it appears as if they’ve done recently by exposing children to porn on Comcast.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/113763963/

eBuddy and Meebo made it clear that there is significant demand for instant messaging via the browser - many users work from computers where they can’t download software and so web based instant messaging is the only way they can use the service.

Microsoft has its own web messenger and Google’s Gtalk is integrated into Gmail and other properties. Yahoo has also experimented with web chat previously, with their integration of chat into their Yahoo Mail site.

This evening Yahoo will launch a dedicated site for Yahoo chat at webmessenger.yahoo.com. It should be live around 6 pm PST. They will also be publishing a screencast overview of the service a little later here.

Unlike most other web based chat services, Yahoo Web Messenger is built on Flash 9. At launch it will include only basic functionality, and is integrated with MSN Messenger (you can add Live/MSN Messenger contacts to your Yahoo friends list). Users can also add avatars and emoticons are supported. Yahoo says VOIP functionality may be added later.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/113752154/

The June issue of Business 2.0 magazine was inadvertantly deleted from the editorial server on April 23, according to a number of sources. And the backup server wasn’t working properly. The result? An entire issue down the drain just two weeks before press time.

Editor in Chief Josh Quittner told the New York Times that they’d still make the print deadline because their lawyers had email copies of all of the text. All of the artwork and page layouts were gone forever, however, and had to be recreated from scratch.

A 2003 article in Business 2.0 likened backups to flossing - “everyone knows it’s important, but few devote enough thought or energy to it.” I guess Business 2.0 forgot to floss.

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/~3/113701952/

Gizmo
Matt Carey: “i came across the ‘learn more overview’ at the gizmo project site today. wow, someone needs to tell them that ‘less is more’! i’m still confused! box and arrow overload!”

Abel Cole
Melissa Fehr writes:

Abel & Cole are an organic produce delivery company here in the UK, and I just signed up to them this morning. The interesting bit is that within your account preferences, you can specify which fruit and veg you dislike, which you don’t mind, and which you love, all with an easy smiley face matrix. Then the system takes these into account when filling your box each week so you get the stuff you love if it’s available (like blueberries and squash for me) and never the stuff I hate (like brussel sprouts).

What’s cool is that you can specify groups all at once, so if you dislike all berries, you can choose to exclude all of them at once, or just exclude strawberries put keep all other berries, and you can set up temporary exclusions, like if you have a ton of apples on hand already and don’t need any more for this week’s delivery.

I just thought this was such a great way to get across quite complicated information about each person’s food foibles, and it was done in such a clear and simple way.

eBay
Brett Gibson on eBay result tips: “I can see where this would be helpful.”

iSquint
Michell Zappa: “this is from iSquint’s help menu. i’m glad to see some people still have a sense of humor :)”

(Note: Probably not that funny if you actually need help.)

Got an interesting link, story, or screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Contact svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/402-screens-around-town-gizmo-abel-cole-ebay-and-isquint

Dare Obasanjo, of Microsoft, is an obvious fan of Silverlight, and has a piece on how Ajax is now an Endangered Species.

Now, there is some compelling work in Silverlight, but come on

Flash has been around for a long time, yet Ajax became en vogue a couple of years ago. It wasn’t because it could pull off richer effects than Flash. In many ways Flash is superior (storage, access to webcam, graphics, browser quirk issues), but it didn’t have some of the webby features that we love. It is a plugin. Silverlight is a plugin. Silverlight doesn’t have the install base of Flash. It doesn’t run on Linux, and I don’t expect everyone to drop arms to take it up after MIX.

Ed Burnette has dissected Silverlight, and he discusses the very different 1.0 versus the 1.1 future.

Sam Ruby has discussed his experience trying to get samples working.

What do you think about the new Flash / Silverlight / Open Web world?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajax-is-now-an-endangered-species

If you haven’t already submitted your presentation idea for The Ajax Experience in San Francisco July 25-27, too late! The call for papers officially closed last week. We received over double the submissions we received in the last call and are hard at work reviewing them. Thanks to all of you who submitted a paper. We’re stoked at how universally interesting this year’s batch are; it’s going to be a great show.

We’re also pleased to announce that the Ajax Experience conference registration site is now live. Check it out at www.ajaxexperience.com and sign up today. With the call for papers in the review stage, obviously there’s going to be a ton of content at the show not yet represented on the site, but you get the idea.

You may also notice that ajaxexperience.com now redirects to ajaxexperience.techtarget.com. Earlier this year, we joined forces with TechTarget to co-produce the Ajax Experience conferences and to bring more resources to running Ajaxian.com. Ajaxian has been getting less and less of our time through the years as our lives have gotten busier and we felt like it was time to get some help as we move into the future. This means you can expect to see more content from us and more features on the site (e.g., resources for people who are new to Ajax and don’t find a stream of news stories as helpful as more remedial content, a section devoted to the frameworks, a *regular* podcast, and so forth).

Thanks to TechTarget for agreeing to help out and we hope to deliver great content to you for years to come.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-ajax-experience-call-for-papers-closed

If you wanted a hack to allow you to put JavaScript and CSS into the same file you got it:

You could of course just use JavaScript and add CSS programatically, but then you need to deal with browser quirks, and JavaScript has to be on and such.

I would love to see any stats on why you would want to do this

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/squeeze-css-and-js-into-one-file

When it’s no longer politically correct to call it a “Boarding Pass” the next logical step is the “Departure Management Card” by United.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/404-departure-management-card

The full release of Prototype 1.5.1 has been released, and if you are on the 1.5 branch you should upgrade.

Features

• Incredible Selector speedup and full CSS3 support (read about it in the original post).
• Full JSON encoding and decoding support and options for improved security.
• Optimized Element#get/setStyle for cross-browser compatibility and speed.
• Various String method enhancements and fixes.
• The new Form#request method simplifies the common case of submitting a serialized form with XMLHttpRequest.
• Many form serialization fixes—if you had troubles before, now they’ve been squashed.

For more info view the Change Log, or Download away.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/prototype-151-released