Ajax Girl

Technorati continues to redefine itself under CEO Richard Jalichandra, who joined the company in October 2007. In June they launched Technorati Media, a blog advertising network.

Today they are announcing the acquisition of Blogcritics, a six year old blog network that we first wrote about in 2005. The price, which was all cash, is not being disclosed but our guess is that it is in the $1 million range.

Blogcritics is similar to Salon’s newly launched Open Salon, which lets lots of people write articles from time to time on topics they’re familiar with. The site has had published submissions from 2,300 authors, many of which maintain their own blogs as well. 73,000 articles have been published in the six years since launching. The site draws about 1 million unique monthly visitors who generate 3-4 million page views.

Authors maintain the copyright on their content and grant a perpetual license to Blogcritics.

Technorati will incorporate Blogcritics into its Technorati Media property, which is run by VP Publishing David White. The site already runs some Technorati ads. Over time most or all ad units will be through the Technorati ad network. Eric Olsen, the founder of Blogcritics, and Philip Win, the lead developer, will become Technorati employees.

Jalichandra says that they will likely acquire more content sites in the near future. He also made it clear that there will be a wall between the Media and Search properties, and that no favoritism will be shown to Blogcritics content.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/LZXUPlAC5iI/

Is there an overlap between readers of Wired and viewers of Dexter, the Showtime series about a serial killer? An upcoming ad campaign for the show will feature Dexter (aka actor Michael C. Hall of Six Feet Under fame) gracing the cover of a magazine that looks exactly like Wired, which is owned by Conde Nast.

I guess Dexter is a hacker. I’m not sure. I’ve never seen the show, only the ads on the New York City subway. If they replace those ads with these fake Wired ads, I wonder which brand will get the recognition bump.

Is this an effective ad? Does it make you want to watch the show, or buy the magazine? Or neither one? It’s a shame what he did to that suit.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/5f852ssS7HM/

In the “oh wow, I didn’t know JavaScript could do that” category, I just came across a cool new jQuery plugin called jParallax which implements a parallax effect on selected elements. Now, I’m not ashamed to admit not knowing what “parallax” meant so I looked it up on Wikipedia which totally added closure to the concept being implemented. Till then, I just thought that was a really cool effect!

Parallax turns a selected element into a ‘window’, or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way.

jParallax includes several options for controlling the effect including setting the animation timing and layer positioning control. The demos can be viewed here.

We also covered Brett Taylor’s implementation of a parallax effect last year where he showed how to build parallax backgrounds.

Update: I’ve added straight links to the demos

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/375267794/jparallax-turns-elements-into-a-viewport

Mobile search and advertising startup Jumptap has raised more than $26 million in a series D round led by AllianceBernstein. Existing investors General Catalyst Partners, Summerhill Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Valhalla Partners, and WPP also participated. That brings the total capital raised to $73 million.

Jumptap us going to need all the gunpowder it can get. Mobile search is the next big frontier in search as more and more Web-capable phones hit the market. Witness Google’s recent deal to power Verizon’s mobile search. Nevertheless, only 7 percent of mobile subscribers in the U.S. use search. Going up against Google, even in a nascent market, is a tough proposition. But Jumptap thinks it has an edge. CEO Dan Olschwang says:

We have a little different approach. We present a more usable result on the mobile phone than incumbent search engines. We are not trying to take Web results and shrink them onto a small screen. If you are standing on a street and looking for Tylenol for your baby, you are not interested in the recent press release. You are interested in the closest open drug store.

Jumptap’s search algorithm tries to rank actionable results higher than others, and it tries to deliver results appropriate to the device from which the search is being conducted. It also delivers targeted search ads along with the results. Of course, Google understands these principles as well. Jumptap has one more thing going for it in its quest to sign up mobile search deals with phone carriers: it is not Google.

The wireless carriers are wary of Google. But Google can pay them to overcome that fear, as it did with Verizon. Google can afford to pay Verizon more than Verizon could ever hope to make on its own from mobile search, at least in the short term. That may be an attractive short-term business proposition (Verizon can always take over default search when the contract with Googel expires and it ios a bigger business), but it risks ceding the mobile search business in the future.

Olschwang warns mobile carriers:

You give away your monetization ability, your understanding of the customer, and you transition your understanding of the customer to the other party,. In three to five years, Google won’t care about your traffic. It will train the customer to go directly to Google.

That message is resonating with some carriers. For instance, AT&T, which is a Jumptap partner, is about answer the Google-Verizon deal with a new deal with Jumptap. When I asked Olschwang about this, he couldn’t confirm any details other than to say: “We are broadening our relationship with AT&T.”

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/c5jpdIx0jEQ/

In July, after Hasbro and Electronic Arts launched the official version of Scrabble on Facebook, they asked Facebook to take down Scrabulous, the competing app that started it all (and borrowed heavily from the trademarked game). Facebook complied, but left Scrabulous up in other parts of the world, where the international rights belong to Mattel. Now, in response to a request from Mattel, Facebook has taken down the game worldwide, reports the San Jose Mercury News .

The only place you can play it now is in India, the home country of the Agarwalla brothers who created Scrabulous. Although, a pending court case there may finally wipe the beloved game off the face of the earth (or, at least, the Facebook version of Earth—you can still play the game on Scrabulous.com).

After Scrabulous was taken down in the U.S. and Canada, the Agarwalla brothers encouraged fans to sign up for Wordscraper, their other Facebook word game. Currently, Wordscraper has ben able to attract 249,000 monthly active users, but it trails the 371,000 monthly active users who have switched over to EA’s official version of Scrabble. Before it was shut down, Scrabulous had about 500,000 active users a day. The bulk of those users may never be claimed by either of the remaining games.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/dPdS6hxsM8Y/

More rumors about the new Kindle are emerging, which we first wrote about on July 15. The first device will have a similar sized screen as the existing model but will have a much enhanced form factor. The second will be a large screen device aimed at students and will come later.

Somewhere around a quarter of a million Kindles have been sold to date and Amazon is clearly pushing out the last of the current units via a credit card promotion on their site that drops $100 off the $359 device.

Kindle is currently tracking the iPhone/iTunes model - Amazon sells the Kindle for a profit and then makes more revenue on content purchases from the Kindle site that they run. I don’t know how much margin Amazon makes on each Kindle sale or how much they make on average from content purchases. But if they really want to push ebook adoption by the masses and stay at the center of that universe, I’d recommend a dramatic shift in business model.

Imagine if Amazon launched a licensing program that gave hardware manufacturers the ability to build Kindle clones, along with an incentive to sell them at near-zero margins. Amazon would give those manufacturers access to the core Kindle hardware specs (there’s no real magic there anyway) and the right to call it a Kindle device so long as they also put the core Kindle software on the device. That software links the device to Amazon’s store, meaning downloads revenue flows through Amazon.

Amazon would then share a percentage of net margin generated from downloads with the hardware manufacturers.

Very quickly we’d see a wide variety of Kindle devices, all competing on price, features (large and small screens would just be the start) and form factor. Hardware manufacturers, who are all constantly trying to squeeze a tiny bit of margin out of their products, would suddenly have another revenue stream to tap.

Amazon would continue to control the signature device and would likely be able to sell them at a premium since a lot of consumers would prefer the Amazon brand. But a whole ecosystem could emerge around the device, including multi-function versions that do other things. And each of those devices would be linked to Amazon and making money for the company.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/BUVEa8aW8fI/

Images from around the web are showing the HTC Dream AKA the T-Mobile G1 in all its bendy, screen-sliding glory. This Sidekick-like phone has a pop up screen, full QWERTY keyboard, and none of the buckets of suck that characterize Windows Mobile phones. Android is still fairly nascent so I worry that the application environment will be limited on launch but an open, powerful platform backed by a major, web-focused corporation is better than a useless accretion of outdated functions owned by a Borg-like conglomerate or an OS created by a gnomic, arbitrarily pissy design company in my book. And then there’s Symbain…

That said, expect to see the G1 hit T-Mobile stores next month. Here’s hoping.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/zvQmyvG6MvQ/

Last week I wrote a simple WhereAreYou? application that used the Google Ajax APIs ClientLocation API to access your location via your IP address.

At the same time, we announced support for the Gears Geolocation API that can calculate your address using a GPS device, WiFi info, cell tower ids, and IP address lookups.

Add to all of that, the W3C Geolocation API that Andrei Popescu of the Gears team is editing. You will notice that it looks similar to the Gears API, with subtle differences. The ClientLocation API is quite different.

To make life easier, I decided to put together a shim called GeoMeta that give you the W3C Geolocation API, and happens to use the other APIs under the hood.

If you have the Geolocation API native in your browser (no one does yet, future proof!) that will be used. If you have Gears, that API will be used, and finally, with nothing the ClientLocation API will be used behind the scenes.

To you the API will look similar:

// navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(successCallback, errorCallback, options)
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(position) {
      var location = [position.address.city, position.address.region, position.address.country].join(’, ‘);
      createMap(position.latitude, position.longitude, location);
}, function() {
      document.getElementById(’cantfindyou’).innerHTML = “Crap, I don’t know. Good hiding!”;
});

At least, that is what I would like. Unfortunately, there are a few little differences that leak through.

• The W3C API only seems to give you a lat / long, so you have to do the geocoding to get address info
• The Gears API gives you an additional gearsAddress object attached to the resulting position object. This can contain a lot of information on the resulting area (street address to city to …) however for certain providers the API returns that as null, the same as the W3C standard
• That gearsAddress object has slightly different information from the address data that the ClientLocation API returns. NOTE: I would love to see this just called ‘address’ to help the shim.

To give you control when you need it, you can ask the navigator.geolocation object what type it is. navigator.geolocation.type will be null if it is native, but ‘Gears’ or ‘ClientLocation’ if a shim kicks in. You can also check navigator.geolocation.shim to see if it is augmented code.

Implementation

There is some fun implementation code in there if you poke around. For example, for the ClientLocation API, when you make a call, it will be added to a queue if the Google Loader hasn’t fully loaded yet, and it will kick off that call when finished. Dealing with dynamically creating <script src> as a loading mechanism sure is fun!

I like the idea of jumping straight to the W3C standard and updating the shim as the APIs change. That way, when browsers catch up, the code will still work using the native APIs and you don’t have to change a thing.

I also hope that we get general reverse geocoding in place, which would enable me to even take the native “standard” and strap on useful address info to the bare bones lat/long.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/375251577/navigatorgeolocation-using-the-w3c-geolocation-api-today

I’ve been poking around a lot of architects’ web sites lately and I’m thoroughly surprised at how bad they are. It seems almost without fail that they are either blowing my browser window up full size, asking me to read light grey 9px text, overflowing with obfuscatory flashterbation, teasing me with custom designed scrollbars that don’t behave as you’d expect, or asking me to evaluate their work based on postage stamp sized photographs. It really feels like 1998. I see I’m not alone in this observation.

Architects have so much to gain from the web. Big huge photographs of their work, clear statements of who they are and what they believe in, easily linkable and sharable portfolio pages, daily links of interest.

As it stands today, if you want to show someone an interesting piece of work you usually have to give them a step-by-step guide on how to get there: First go to the home page, wait for the countdown timer to expire, then hover over the logo, then grab a magnifying glass, then squint, then click the 4th tiny icon on the left (I can’t really tell what it is), then use that custom scrollbar that looks like an elevator, then take a screenshot, then pull that screenshot into Photoshop, then zoom in about 8 times so it’s all nice and big on your screen, then take about 10 steps back from your computer, then look.

I’m only half kidding.

Come on, architects, get with it! Anyone got any links to a great architect’s site that bucks this trend?

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1219-architects-1998-called-and-it-wants-its-web-sites-back

John has announced the Firebug 1.2 final release. As well as just supporting Firefox 3, there are some quality improvements:

The Script panel (the JavaScript debugger), the Net panel (network monitoring), and Console panel have all seen considerable updates. They’re all much more performant and have a huge number of bug fixes.

Specifically the Console panel has seen a number of security improvements. We’ll be discussing the specific nature of these changes once everyone has had enough time to upgrade to Firebug 1.2.

A list of all the bug fixes can be found in the full release notes.

Who enabled me?

Taking in to consideration the above performance points (namely the fact that enabling the Console, Script, or Net panels have the potential to incur a global overhead on all browser tabs) a feature was added to help you minimize your use of the panels in errant tabs.

If you position your mouse over the Firebug icon, in the Firefox tray, a tooltip will pop up telling you two things: The version of Firebug that you’re using and which tabs have some Firebug panels enabled in them.

It should be noted that the Firebug will be a gray color if no tabs currently have a Firebug panel enabled at all.

Using the above tooltip you can now go in and selectively disable any panel usage that you are no longer utilizing.

Suspend/Resume Firebug.

Of course, when using the above tooltip (or seeing that the Firebug icon is lit up), you’ll just want to suspend all use of Firebug panels straight out without having to poke-around each individual tab.

A new Suspend/Resume menu option has been added that will suspend/resume all active panels. This is a one-click way to keep Firebug in check.

Suspend/Resume Firebug.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/375205349/firebug-12-the-final-release-is-out-there