Ajax Girl

Om Malik’s one-year-old media empire continues to grow: it now includes five blogs, a weekly video show and a job listing site. I imagine things are getting a little crazy around the office. Which is why I’m not at all surprised that he’s brought on a seasoned executive, Paul Walborsky, to help him manage and grow the company as its Chief Operating Officer.

Walborsky, who has both operational and deal experience, was most recently a managing director at Hercules Technology Growth Capital. He’s also held senior positions at Lehman Brothers, ING Barings and Swiss Bank Corp.

Walborsky says he will manage the non-editorial aspects of the business - sales, operations, events, etc., and Malik will oversee all editorial for the various properties (in addition to writing full time). The non-writing staff includes just two others at this point - Joanne Wan in business development and Mike Sly, the VP of Sales. The company will be hiring more people in sales and marketing in the near future, he says.

I’m not surprised at all by this move, since I went through it myself. When Om wrote about our hire of Heather Harde as CEO he mentioned how difficult it was to balance what he called “editorial tasks with chief janitorial duties.” It looks like he’s found the right guy to take over those “janitorial duties” for his business, too. Congratulations to the whole team.

In a phone call with Walborsky today, he said the company was planning on raising a new round of financing in the next 3-4 months to add to few hundred thousand they raised a year ago. Walborsky says they may do an internal round just with True Ventures, or bring in a new outside investor. No word on how much they’re going to raise, though.

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/~3/142218670/

TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera makes an interesting observation on the Google News story all over the blogosphere today.

One thing that bugs me: they’re now hosting original news content, yet they prohibit other aggregators from crawling it (per robots.txt restrictions and TOS). Of course Google News relies on the openness of other organizations with original news content.

Google crawls news sites and grabs their content for republishing on Google News. They rely on the willingness of those news sites to get distribution on Google. But Google restricts others from crawling Google News itself via their robots.txt file and terms of use, which state that “you may not…use any robot, spider, other device or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the [Google News] Service.”

That policy wasn’t a problem when Google was simply aggregating news from around the web. But now they are hosting original news content, written by people that are involved in the story. And they are telling the world that no one else can crawl that content and display it. Yahoo News, TechMeme and every other non-Google owned news service on the web is restricted from using that content.

The restrictive policy hasn’t changed with the new feature launch, and this may just be an oversight. We’ll find out soon enough if Google intends to build a wall around this news content, or share it with the rest of the web.

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/~3/142172809/

As Variety is reporting, NBC is gearing up to launch it’s first (well, second) “major assault” against YouTube, Didja.com (currently a parked page).

The site will “celebrate advertising as entertainment” and feature “a free online archive of current and classic television commercials, movie trailers and other brand-related content”. The name, Didja, is short for “did you see that”, the apparent reaction they’re hoping to get from viewers. The site will be cross promoted on NBC’s television channel and will eventually on all divisions of NBC Universal. It’s set to launch the beginning of next year, sometime after the still-unnamed joint venture with News Corp., dubbed “Clown Co.” by Google execs.

The site is all about advertising and NBC getting paid for it. NBC hopes advertisers will pay for prominent placement on the site or to create their own branded pages (e.g. an all-McDonald’s channel). The customizable branded pages will allow advertisers to upload commercials to the site, include product offers, store locators, and other tools.

For viewers, the site will feature an extensive social networking component as well as a mash-up tools to remix their own “advertainment”.

This territory has been heavily treaded before. TBS has their own Veryfunnyads website, featuring *gasp* “Very funny advertisements”. Clipland is a smaller site that’s been doing the same thing. Not least of all is YouTube itself, which attracts the lions share of ads and trailers people actually want to watch.

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/~3/142165896/

Google made an announcement of an “experimental new feature - they will soon be allowing comments on Google News stories. Comments will only be accepted from a “special subset of readers,” which includes people and organizations who are part of the story. The blogosphere, which is of course all about conversation, seems to think the second coming of Jesus Christ himself is here. An example: normally reserved Tony Hung calls it “pivotal” and that it will “change online news as we know it.”

Here’s how it will work. If you are involved in a story, you send your comments in to Google along with statements supporting how you are connected to the story. Google won’t edit your comments but can have them removed for hate speech, etc. And they aren’t yet saying how connected to a story you have to be to get in. Whatever the rules, this is going to require a ton of manual labor on Google’s end. This stuff simply can’t be automated. Google is going to have to see a very, very large increase in page views to justify the expense.

Having direct participants chime in with their two cents is certainly a good idea. It adds to the debate around a story, which until now on Google and most mainstream media sites is a one sided affair as interpreted by a fair and impartial journalist who may or may not have personal bias, financial bias, or laziness bias screwing up the real facts of a story.

But wow is this going to be a lot of effort on Google’s part. And all just to exclude the opinions of non-participants? That doesn’t make any sense to me. I certainly value the comments of participants in our blog posts. But equally valuable are the insights of third party experts who know more about given subject areas than we do. And getting the opinions of the interested masses also provides deep insight. It’s always good to take the temperature of the readers on story - and that’s why we and most other blogs allow even anonymous comments/rants. The downside is trolling and lobbying, but the upside is one hell of a good conversation/street fight. Good conversation is also why I tend to go to Newsvine for big media news. They’ve always allowed comments, which are usually better than the stories themselves.

At least a few people have avoided the group orgasm and see some problems with Google’s idea. John Murrell says this will result in a huge PR hiring boom and to expect “spin, spin, spin” as every negative fact/opinion is countered. Danny Sullivan says Google doesn’t know what it’s getting itself into. Frank Shaw, who basically controls all Microsoft PR, says this is “stupid” and predicts it will never get out of beta. That’s a pretty clear statement from the king of spin. And I agree 100%.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/142148693/

It’s no secret that video sites like YouTube benefited from added traffic generated by hosting copyrighted content. But as these sites get acquired, integrate advertising, or just want to avoid a billion dollar lawsuit, they seek to shed their seedy past to stay kosher with the big media giants they hope will feed them content and advertising dollars.

There are a lot of startups offering technological means of keeping their noses clean. Most of the solutions function as digital detectives, comparing the video fingerprints of copyrighted content with uploaded content for a match. Some of these companies include Audible Magic, Advestigo, Gracenote, MotionDSP, Philips, and iPharo. YouTube has implemented Audible Magic, although I haven’t noticed a difference. MySpace also incorporated Audible Magic but took the added step of banning re-uploading content violating copyright (“Take Down Stay Down” initiative).

However, while computers are great for solving well defined problems at a dizzying pace, they don’t always do that well when the rules become murkier. Judgments need to be made about whether playing a song or video constitutes “fair use” and simply changing a few characters of the title can fool more basic filters. That’s why 5-year-old BayTSP has decided to keep humans in the loop. The WSJ takes an in depth look at the company.

The Journal reports that BayTSP has hired more than 20 “Video Analysts” to watch videos and report copyrighted content starting at $11 an hour. Their searches are helped by BayTSP’s software, which most likely gives them a head start on what to look for. The company’s most notable client is Viacom, which it supplied with the data for their 100,000 video DMCA takedown request last year. Viacom says it pays BayTSP more than $100,000 each month for the service. The takedown requests have resulted in over 230,000 clips being removed from YouTube for Viacom. BayTSP says its error rate on Web videos is only around 0.1%.

Despite these efforts, video piracy remains rampant both on Google video search and many other social video sites. Once content is taken down, some users simply re-upload them to the site. MySpace is apparently countering this behavior through a file blacklist, but other video providers are certainly concerned with pushing away potentially valuable content and users. Content providers have continually leaned on the heavily manual DMCA safe harbor clause, while copyright holders clamor for embedded filtering. Google has recieved a long list of take down notices. AT&T has expressed an interest in filtering their network directly.

One thing’s for sure, there’s still a lot more debate needed amongst us humans before the computers chime in.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/142137633/

Photo and video sharing site Pickle.com has been purchased by Scripps Networks for a reported $4.1 million. Scripps is the company behind many lifestyles brands like DIY, the Food Network, HGTV, and Great American Country. This is their second web purchase after Recipezaar last month. We covered the site’s launch last June.

Pickle is different from a lot of other sharing sites in that it relies heavily on email and mobile phone submissions to personal and shared project pages. It’s essentially a multi-modal service for dumping your content into a bucket of content that you can expose through their widget. The service supports uploads of photos and videos from computers, mobile phones or digital cameras to any Web site. Scripps plans on incorporating the product into supporting content sharing across their existing lifestyle properties. It was created by an Arlington based company called Incando.

You can see an example of their content sharing widget after the jump (auto-plays).
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Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/142182895/

Windows Live Director Tetuya Onoda apparently showed the above and below slides as part of a presentation yesterday to Japanese press. The slide above shows what the personalized Live.com home page may look like (compare it to the current version here).

Still no sign of direct integration with Vista Gadgets (promised in early 2006), but there are are links to a number of Microsoft services like hotmail and a calendar. And right in the middle a link to “Jonathan’s Space” which is almost certainly a reference to their upcoming SkyDrive.

The second slide to the left confirms this. SkyDrive is specifically mentioned as one of the cornerstones of a “seamless” Windows Live service. It’s been rumored to be coming soon for a long, long time and is yet another area where Microsoft will compete head to head with Google.

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/~3/142098637/

As part of the Apple announcements yesterday they showed off a new .Mac Web Gallery that uses Prototype and Script.aculo.us to give you a rich web view of your photos.

Shaun Trennery blogged about the features:

The main page is a collection of album thumbnails that change as the user hovers over them. The powerful effect allows the user to quickly scan through the album’s photos without the need for a single click.

Once within an album, the photos are displayed in either a grid, mosaic, carousel or a slideshow. The user can quickly change the background colour, resize the photo thumbnails and subscribe to the galleries RSS feed. The carousel view is the same as the cover-flow album art display that iTunes and the new iPhone uses. Once the photo’s are fully loaded, its performance is really slick.

Very slick indeed.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/142090009/mac-web-gallery-on-prototype

We posted about a nice syntax highlighting JavaScript editor awhile back.

Now we also have a “web-based source code editor with syntax highlighting written in JavaScript that colors text in real time while it’s being typed in the browser” named CodePress.

It groks languages such as JavaScript, CSS, PHP, Java, Perl, SQL, and HTML, and it features:

• Real-time syntax highlighting » just write some code
• Code snippets » on PHP example type “if” and press [tab]

• Auto completion » simple type ” or ( or ‘ or [ or { on any example below (except Plain Text)

• Shortcuts » on PHP example press [ctrl][shift][space]. It’s shortcut to  
• Multiple windows » you can add multiple CodePress windows to the same page

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/142072715/codepress-real-time-syntax-editor

Yesterday we posted about how we prompt for an upgrade when someone hits the 5 page limit on their free Backpack account.

Old vs. New

The old version of Backpack always had the upgrade notice. We felt that was a little too in your face. The new version of Backpack only prompted when you hit the page limit. We felt that was more polite.

New too abrupt?

However, some of the feedback suggested that only prompting when someone hits the page limit was a bit startling and abrupt. There’s no warning, it just hits ya. No more pages for you!

New new

We agree that the abruptness can be a little harsh. But we also don’t like the way we used to do it where the upgrade notice was there all the time. So what we’ve done is implement a “you’re close” notice.

This shows up once you’ve created your third page. “You’re close” lets you know a limit is near, but you’re not there yet.

Funny story… When I asked the guys if they could hook this up we realized that we already had it hooked up but we never turned it on! So we tweaked the language a bit and flipped the switch. And now we’re live.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/566-design-decision-revision-when-to-prompt-for-an-upgrade