Ajax Girl

Gelato is an open source tumblelog “content management system” (CMS) from a group of Mexican developers. Tublelogs are the ADHD version of blogging, meant for easily throwing up mixed media posts made up of photos, videos, chat logs, links, quotes, and short paragraphs.

Similar to full blown blogs, you can host a tumblelog on a site like Tumblr, but Gelato lets you own the code. There have been a couple other open source tumblelogs out there, such as Bazooka and Tumble but Gelato is a little more ambitious. They’re following Wordpress’ lead, incorporating themes and plugin support TBA.

Installation is simple and similar to Wordpress’ 5 minute install, requiring only a MySQL database and setting a config.php file. Once installed you can post up short paragraphs, pictures, video, links, quotes, and chat logs. Pictures can be uploaded from your computer or through a URL. For URLs, it doesn’t hotlink, it downloads the photo to your server. Videos (YouTube or Vimeo) and mp3s can only be added through URLs. To make playback simple, Gelato also comes with its own built in mp3 player.

Tumblelogs are rather short on conversation, because they don’t support comments. It’s a deficit trying to be corrected by other thought casting services like Twitter and especially Pownce, with its multimedia focus.

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/~3/133234468/

More good news around the upcoming TechCrunch20 Conference in San Francisco this September: Ron Conway, Loic Le Meur and Sarah Lacy have agreed to join the Expert Panel, bringing the total number of experts who’ve agreed to participate to 16. The full list of experts is here.

The deadline to submit applications to launch a startup at the event ended last week - and we had over 600 submissions that we are reviewing now. If you are one of the companies that doesn’t make the cut into the twenty finalists, don’t worry. We’ve got a cool program that we’ll be announcing that will give you the opportunity to have a presence at the event.

The early bird registration discount ends on July 16.

More on the new experts:

Loic Le Meur

Loïc Le Meur is a well-known French serial entrepreneur who has created and sold multiple Internet startups, including B2L (sold to BBDO), RapidSite France (sold to France Telecom), Tekora (sold to Access-Commerce) and Ublog (merged with Six Apart.) Working on his next venture, Loïc continues to be an active investor. He organizes Europe’s largest annual web event, LeWeb3, that gathered 1300 participants from 37 Countries in 2006. Loïc’s blog is one of the most popular in France, read by more than 250,000 unique visitors per month.

Ron Conway

Ron Conway is one of the Internet’s pre-eminent angel investors. He was the Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds whose investments included: Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Red Envelope, Good Technology, Opsware, and Brightmail. Ron was named #6 in Forbes Magazine Midas list of top “dealmakers” in 2006. He is an active advisor for a number of Internet companies and also very active in community and philanthropic activities, including Vice Chairman of UCSF Medical Foundation in San Francisco. Most recently, Ron has been leading the “Fight for Mike” Homer and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD.)

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy has been covering start-ups and venture capital in Silicon Valley for the last seven years. She has been a contributor to the San Jose Business Journal. Most recently, Sarah was a reporter and blogger for Business Week. She co-wrote last year’s famous magazine cover story on Digg’s founder Kevin Rose titled “How This Kid Made $60 Million In 18 Months.” She is currently taking a year off from reporting to work on a book covering Web 2.0.

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/~3/133224961/

More good news around the upcoming TechCrunch20 Conference in San Francisco this September: Ron Conway, Loic Le Meur and Sarah Lacy have agreed to join the Expert Panel, bringing the total number of experts who’ve agreed to participate to 16. The full list of experts is here.

The deadline to submit applications to launch a startup at the event ended last week - and we had over 600 submissions that we are reviewing now. If you are one of the companies that doesn’t make the cut into the twenty finalists, don’t worry. We’ve got a cool program that we’ll be announcing that will give you the opportunity to have a presence at the event.

The “early bird” registration period ends on July 16, so register soon.

More on the new experts:

src=’http://techcrunch20.com/wp-content/uploads/ronconway.jpg’
alt=’ronconway.jpg’ />
Ron Conway is one of the Internet’s pre-eminent angel
investors. He was the Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors
LP funds whose investments included: Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Red
Envelope, Good Technology, Opsware, and Brightmail. Ron was named #6 in
Forbes Magazine Midas list of top “dealmakers” in 2006. He is an active
advisor for a number of Internet companies and also very active in community
and philanthropic activities, including Vice Chairman of UCSF Medical
Foundation in San Francisco. Most recently, Ron has been leading the “Fight for
Mike” Homer and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD.)

src=’http://techcrunch20.com/wp-content/uploads/sarahlacy.jpg’
alt=’sarahlacy.jpg’ />
Sarah Lacy has been covering start-ups and venture capital
in Silicon Valley for the last seven years. She has been a contributor to
the San Jose Business Journal. Most recently, Sarah was a reporter and
blogger for Business Week. She
co-wrote last year’s famous magaz
ine cover story on Digg’s founder Kevin Rose titled “How This Kid Made
$60 Million In 18 Months.” She is currently taking a year off from
reporting to work on a book covering
Web 2.0.

src=’http://techcrunch20.com/wp-content/uploads/loiclemeur.jpg’
alt=’loiclemeur.jpg’ />
Loïc Le Meur is a well-known French serial entrepreneur who
has created and sold multiple Internet startups, including B2L (sold to
BBDO), RapidSite France (sold to France Telecom), Tekora (sold to
Access-Commerce) and Ublog (merged with Six Apart.) Working on his next
venture, Loïc continues to be an active investor. He organizes Europe’s
largest annual web event, LeWeb3, that
gathered 1300 participants from 37 Countries in 2006. Loïc’s blog is one of the most popular
in France, read by more than 250,000 unique visitors per month.

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/~3/133224961/

The U.S. Court of Appeals has rejected a request to delay the onset of new royalty fees that could wipe out most of the US internet radio industry.

The court said that the issues raised by the webcasters did not satisfy its “stringent standards.”

The new Copyright Review Board imposed fee structure comes into affect this Sunday, and imposes a per song, per listener charging model that is retrospective to January 2006. The new fee structure could immediately bankrupt many existing players, whilst driving the remaining sites offline as the economics of streaming music become unprofitable. Previously Internet Radio stations paid royalties on a percentage of profit in a similar way to terrestrial and satellite radio operators.

The Internet Radio Equality Act of 2007, a bill before Congress would replace the new royalty structure with a flat fee equal to 7.5 percent of the webcasters’ total revenues, however the bipartisan bill has yet to pass.

As we noted previously, the only people to benefit from the new fee structure are big media. CBS in particular has a lot to gain and would appear to be supporting the changes by failing to pull their streaming radio stations or Last.fm off air for the National Day of Silence June 26, despite nearly universal support from others including Yahoo, Pandora and Real. A world with less competitors strengthens CBS’s position and certainly would help CBS build a better return from the $280million it paid for Last.fm, a site hosted and run from the United Kingdom and therefore not subject to these royalty changes.

The biggest losers of all from the potential wipe out of internet radio is us. Whether you listen to internet radio or not, having the choice available enriches the internet for everyone. Lack of choice was the driving factor in the decline of terrestrial radio in the Western World; do we really want to replicate the same market online, where in one years time the only choice in online radio is from sites owned by CBS and Clear Channel?

(in part via Ars)

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/133194983/

After a two year hiatus Steve Yen has brought the original “JavaScript RoR-like thing”, TrimPath, back to life with a new release of Junction and Next Action.

The new release is huge, literally, since it has gone from < 150 KB back in 2005, to 5.3 MB today. This is mostly due to the new server side code based on Helma.

On the client side, there is now Google Gears support:

• If your end-user has Google Gears installed, they can execute the web-app primarily within the web-browser. Here, the client-side RDBMS is an asynchronously replicated cache of records from the main server-side RDBMS. The big benefit is increased UI responsiveness. And, the web-app can go offline and survive down or flaky network connections. By flaky, I’m thinking iPhone on AT&T, or 200 attendees trying to share a conference WiFi hotspot.
• If your end-user does not have Google Gears, no problem. They can still execute the web-app completely within the web-browser, for increased UI responsiveness. And, the web-app can still survive flaky network connections. Here, the client-side RDBMS is not persistent, just a memory-only SQL engine. The downside with a memory-only DB is you can’t truly go offline where you power-cycle, or close and restart your web-browser.
• The last option is where your application code executes on the server side, running on a traditional-style, server-side web application server. It communicates directly with the full, main RDBMS that is the source of truth. While not as snappy as the browser-hosted web-app, at least the user is working with the full set of data, not a cached subset, minimizing outdated views of information. Also, the pages served up by the web application server are crawlable, if you wish, by your favorite search engines.

I met Steve Yen a long time ago and we chatted about Junction as well as other topics. He is a very smart guy, and it is great to see him back in the TrimPath game….. at the perfect time.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/133171477/trimpath-is-back-now-with-gears

The Pew research group just released a study (PDF) today outlining the growth of internet users in China today. The study estimates there are 137 million internet users, second only to the US’ online population estimated at 165 million to 210 million. ComScore estimated the entire online population at 694 million last May.

Natrually, with a population of 1,321,851,888, they have a higher possible number of users than the US. In fact the growth in Chinese users is out pacing the growth in the US, and China is projected to overtake the U.S. in the total number of users within a few years. China’s internet population grew by 18% in 2004 and 2005, and 23% in 2006.

For the past few years China huge economy and user base has been a big target for online businesses, but has remained a tricky market to enter. These problems have largely been cultural and political, rather than technical. The language barrier allowed a Chinese Facebook clone to be snatched up. eBay was close to selling off its Chinese operations after facing cultural problems and stiff competition from the homegrown Tom.com, which coincidentally distributes Skype. That rumored sale became a partnership and relaunch this summer. Search engines, Google most notably, have had difficult ethical decisions with China’s political restrictions on information.

Broadband’s increasing growth in China is heartening for bandwidth intensive programs like Skype and IPTV. Recent numbers estimated China’s broadband population nearly on par with the US at 56.2 million (US 60.3 million) during Q1 2007. Skype reportedly had over 25 million Chinese users toward the end of last year, growing at 100,000 users a day. That’s similar to the meteoric growth iLike experienced after launching on Facebook.

Below is a map outlining internet usage worldwide. Click to expand.

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/~3/133154470/

The OS split for visits to BasecampHQ.com, (the marketing site, not the actual app).

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/482-os-split-at-basecamphqcom

Othman Laraki of the Google Gears team has published news on the Gears Roadmap and Development Process in which he discusses new features and details on the open process that the Gears team is going to follow.

Two concrete features that are forthcoming are:

Cross-Origin API

Google Gears has a strict same-origin security model. However, some web applications need to affect Gears resources in other origins. We can solve the problem by making a few incremental additions to the WorkerPool class. Those additions are noted below.

Improved Workerpool

WorkerPool has several issues today that make it harder to get started with compared to the other Gears APIs and this proposal addresses these issues by recommending the following changes:

• Add WorkerPool.load();
• Add WorkerPool.onerror;
• Support for the defacto standard Console object
• Remove the requirement to set google.gears.workerPool.onmessage inside workers

An example with console.log

If you have ideas, join in and be part of the process for a better web.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/132957218/google-gears-roadmap-and-features

Jozef Sakalos has created a File Tree widget for Ext that features:

• Ajax load and display of nodes
• File type icons
• File upload
• Folder create
• File or folder delete
• File or folder rename
• File or folder move by drag & drop
• On demand folder reload

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/132934315/ext-file-tree-widget

Zach Leatherman has created another DOM creation class, DOMDom, (with support for HTML Fragments) that uses
the CSS query language. But instead of using the language to query nodes, it is used to create nodes.

To make <div style=”width:100%;border:1px solid blue” class=”testClass”><a href=”http://www.google.com/”><span>Google</span></a></div>, you’d have to do the following in other packages:

DomHelper:

jQuery’s FlyDom:

This can be achieved in DOMDom, with comparable speed and code size with the following descriptor:

Currently works with YUI, but it will probably be ported to jQuery and other libraries.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/132927675/domdom-more-dom-less-dom