Ajax Girl

Boca Raton, Florida based VOIS Inc offers yet another social networking site but with one distinct difference: it’s traded on the OTC:BB.

The site itself offers your usual array of social networking features: user profiles, blogs, groups, classifieds etc etc. Traffic to the site isn’t wonderful, but I’ve seen far worse as well, with vois.com tracking at around the 10,000 mark on Alexa. Of course it wouldn’t be a social network if it wasn’t popular in a country most of you won’t care about: VOIS is big in Egypt, Palestine and Jordan, tracking in the top 1000 sites in each country.

The OTC listing looks and feels like a Web 1.0 play it’s because it is. VOIS Inc., was previously MedStrong International, and changed its name to VOIS Inc in March after acquiring (or merging) with VOIS Networks in February. Back-door listings might be on the way back; this is the second social networking site listed this way we’ve reported on recently, with BOOMj having taken the same path in late October.

I can’t see VOIS winning any awards for its service, but those with a stock market fetish looking to play around with some investments in this space, VOIS gives you that option.

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

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/182499816/

Receipt organization service Shoeboxed has moved into social shopping with a relaunched site that introduces the concept of “receipt flaunting.”

At the basic level, Shoeboxed allows users to organize all their e-mail and paper receipts, providing a cut-down accounting style package for those looking for basic spend-tracking as opposed to a full blown accounting program such as Quicken. With the new release, users can now organize the items contained in their receipts, add photos to those items, and share them with Shoeboxed’s community of shoppers. Embracing the social side of shopping, users can now give feedback to other users about their items.

Shoeboxed was originally founded in Germany but now calls Durham, N.C its home. The site has angel funding from a number of parties, including Michael Brehm, the founder of leading German social networking site studiVZ.net

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/182484946/

It is amazing that we still have major instant messaging platforms that don’t talk to one another. Yahoo and Microsoft got their two systems to work with each other more than a year ago, but AOL is still working on interoperability issues with those two.

In the meantime, it looks like AIM will soon be working just fine with Google Talk, Google’s IM client. In fact, AIM and GTalk are already talking to each other in tests, reports Google Operating System (see screen shot).

If this gets rolled out to regular users, there will soon be two major IM camps: Yahoo-Microsoft and Google-AOL. It’s funny how a $1 billion investment gets things moving along.

Of course, you can always use Meebo, which has somehow figured out how translate between AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and GTalk (but not Skype).

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/182442091/

Next in our series of interviews with 2008 presidential candidates is a Q&A with Senator John Edwards. We were not able to schedule time on the phone with Senator Edwards, but he has agreed to do a written interview and answer all questions we put to him.

I first met Senator Edwards in April 2006 when he visited Silicon Valley and met with a group of bloggers. This was not a fund raising event - he came simply to hear what was we thought were the biggest issues from our perspective.

As we did with Mitt Romney, I’d like to ask for reader comments with suggested questions on technology-related issues (hear the podcast with Mitt Romney here). The core issues I’d like to address are below; please help me fill this out with issues and questions that are important to you.

Issues to cover:

• China human rights issues - specifically the Yahoo issue that developed earlier this week.
• Net Neutrality
• Digital Divide
• Education/ensuring our children are technically literate
• H1B Visas
• Identity Theft
• Mobile Spectrum Allocation
• Internet Taxes
• Venture Capital Tax Rates
• Intellectual Property Issues - both copyright and patent law evolution
• Renewable Energy/Carbon Emissions
• Mac v. PC, why Macs are superior

We’ll take comments today and over the weekend and finalize the questions on Monday.

Also, we’ve recorded a podcast interview with Senator John McCain, which we will post on Monday. There are some real zinger sound bites in that discussion.

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

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/182420065/

Gary Haran wanted to see how well the latest versions of Prototype and Script.aculo.us worked, so he created a game, Same Name.

The 179 lines of JavaScript has fun with animations and sound.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/182395861/2994

From the Department of Duh:

A recent study by IBM, titled “The End of Advertising as We Know It,” found that 40 percent of the 2,400 consumers and 80 advertising executives it surveyed found ads during an online video segment more annoying than any other format.

Particularly egregious are pre-roll ads, those 10-to-30 second video spots shown before the actual video, as any Web video entrepreneur can tell you. Mid-rolls (spots in the middle of a video like a regular TV commercial) and post-roll are other variations. But there are lots of alternatives—traditional banner ads around the video in the player itself, clickable ad “bugs” that crawl across the screen, pop-up ad-overlays, even video hyperlinks that make people and objects inside the videos linkable.

A lot of this is hit or miss. Take the idea of video hyperlinks, where you can draw a little box around an object in a video or highlight them in some other way to signal that you can click on it for more information or to see an ad. Below is an example of how that looks like from Asterpix (other startups, as well as Microsoft, are working on similar technology):

While the idea is cool, I’m not sure it works. The box is too distracting and ruins your enjoyment of the actual video. Links in a separate sidebar would be better.

Advertisers like to stick with pre-rolls because they are easy to make and it is a format they understand. But as the more adventurous among them experiment with different formats, though, they will gravitate towards the ones that actually produce the best results. Tell us what type of video ads you think have the best chance to succeed in the poll below:

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

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/182387629/

Here at TechCrunch, there is nothing we love more than when one of our posts gets linked to and talked about. And like the majority of other blogs out there, we try to be good citizens by linking back to any source from which we excerpt. But there is a growing minority of spam blogs, or splogs, that indiscriminately take entire posts from other blogs and present them as their own.

For example, here is a screen shot from one random splog that just reposts TechCrunch’s entire feed with no links back to TechCrunch or even acknowledgement of the source:

Just for the record, taking any blog’s entire feed and republishing it as your own content is not okay. Notice that the only difference between this splog and TechCrunch is all the Google ads splattered everywhere.

We are not alone in this. Any blog that produces fresh content on a daily basis is an easy target. Google makes it economical to create such splogs through AdSense and then rewards them with traffic through its search engine. Google (and the other search engines) need to stop rewarding such behavior.

We knew the splog problem was bad, but we didn’t know how bad until earlier this week, when I did a post about Attributor (a new startup that can track who is copying your stuff all across the Web). I noted that Attributor found one TechCrunch post that had been copied in one way or another 572 times (not all of them bad).

Attributor catches all matches of blocks of text, so I asked them to break that number down. First, they threw out anything that was less than a five percent match, which left us with 467 matches. Of those 315, or two thirds, linked back to the original post. So that is the good news. It appears that most bloggers are good citizens. But 152 of them, or fully one third, did not link back. And of those, 115—or 25 percent of the original—were plastered with ads, making money off our work without so much as a link.

Here is a screen shot of the original post, which covered the beta launch of Hulu:

Now here is a screen shot of one of the splogs (notice the similarity?):

And another one (complete with a Jessica Alba cheese ad—although it arguably does give the headline an unintentionally different nuance):

You get the idea. Admittedly, this is completely anecdotal. It is only one post. But it does point to a larger problem. Other bloggers out there, have you been splogged today? Probably.

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

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/182351210/

Gary asks a follow-up question to How has open source helped or hindered?:

Why do you use Mac OS X as your laptop/desktop/development machines OS instead of a Linux distro?

There is really nothing religious about our use of open source. We use it because it’s better on the scales of merit that we care about. For infrastructure software, such as web servers, databases, server operating systems, programming languages, and web frameworks, the scales of merit lend themselves incredibly well to open-source development. Thus, we use it and are passionate about it.

For desktop operating systems? Not so much. There are just too many disciplines involved that programmers are not naturally good at and don’t have sufficient levels of taste to prepare masterfully. And programmers constitute the vast majority of builders in the open source community.

So it’s not unreasonable to think that these programmers will do exceptionally well when they’re designing for them and their kind, but at the same time do less well when they’re trying to figure out what makes a great iPhoto or iTunes or what have you.

Therefore I tend to think that open source is at a natural disadvantage at creating end-user applications, in which I include OS X and Linux destined for the desktop. It’s not impossible, just very hard.

Firefox is always heralded as a great example of good end-user software, but I do think that in part is because they’re mostly just doing great infrastructure advances (spec compliance, developer tools, security) in a familiar shell (how much difference is there between Firefox and the early browsers on the UI?).

Which interestingly enough is also how my usage of Firefox goes. I use it for development purposes (primarily because of the developer plugins, like Live HTTP Headers and Firebug) and I use Safari for recreational purposes.

So what I’m trying to say is that for me, OS X is just better on the scales of merit that I care about when it comes to an operating system that needs to be so generally applicable as to deal with my email, IM, browsing, music, pictures, productivity apps, and more.

In other words, I’ll stick to OS X on my Macbook Pro (tight integration between hardware, software, and services is the hallmark of OS X’s superiority), but be equally thrilled to use Linux and FreeBSD on the server.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/695-ask-37signals-why-os-x-and-not-linux

Pete LePage has posted on the IE blog about the change to component activation in IE. Microsoft licensed the silliness from Eolas, which now means that you don’t have to click to activate a component anymore.

Previously, people were getting around that by using SWFObject or UFO, but shortly you will be able to just embed away. Here is the timeline:

So you’re probably wondering when we are going to release this update? The first chance will be with an optional preview release, called the Internet Explorer Automatic Component Activation Preview, available in December 2007 via the Microsoft Download Center. Additionally this change will be made part of the next pre-release versions of Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3. After giving people enough time to prepare for this change, we’ll roll this behavior into the IE Cumulative Update in April 2008, and all customers who install the update will get the change.

If you have a custom application using WebOC or MSHTML, there may be some changes that affect your application. For example:

• If your application uses the DOCHOSTUI flag to opt-in to the current “Click To Activate” behavior, that behavior will continue to be respected and your application will require “Click To Activate”
• If you application uses the registry key FEATURE_ENABLE_ACTIVEX_INACTIVATE_MODE to opt-in to the current “Click To Activate” behavior, this registry key will no long be respected. If you wish to continue to use the “Click to Activate” behavior, please use the DOCHOSTUI flag.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be updating the MSDN article with descriptions of the new behavior. Keep an eye out here for when the preview goes live. 

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/182263724/no-more-click-to-activate-no-more-swfobject-ufo

Andrew Dupont has written a tutorial on how to normalize proprietary browser events using Prototype’s new custom events feature.

The piece is interesting as it talks about how the Prototype core team originally went down the wrong path trying to boil the ocean with great features that were a bit too much. And then:

we refocused, trimmed the fat, and added a whole bunch of features to the event system while still excluding thie kitchen sink. We picked some low-hanging fruit; for instance, we normalized the event object so that properties like target exist in all browsers, and we ensured events fire in the scope of the element in IE (so that this refers to the proper thing).

But we also added cross-browser support for custom events. Now developers can fire their own events alongside native browser events and can listen for both types with the same API. Custom events will make Prototype add-ons at least 50% more righteous, allowing for even more control than the standard callback pattern. Imagine TableKit firing an event when a cell gets edited, or PWC firing an event when a dialog is resized.

Since the 1.6 RC1 release, several people have asked whether we have any plans to add native support for mouseenter, mouseleave, or mousewheel. I think we ought not, lest the event codebase become an unholy thicket of special-casing. That’s the sort of environment where bugs thrive.

But, as Sam points out, the addition of custom events makes it easy for third parties to add their own support for proprietary browser events. To demonstrate, today we’ll write 20 lines of code to add sane, cross-browser support for mouse wheel events.

I’m calling these pseudo-custom events because they serve the same purpose as standard browser events: they report on certain occurrences in the UI. Here we’re using custom events to act as uniform façades to inconsistently-implemented events. Together we’ll write some code to generate mouse:wheel events. At the end of this article, you’ll know enough to be able to write code to generate mouse:enter and mouse:leave events document-wide.

This leads you into the example itself which takes you through a number of iterations before ending up with:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/182257859/pseudo-custom-events-in-prototype-16