Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without

There have been numerous 2005 “best of” and 2006 “predictions” posts over the last few weeks as the year comes to an end. I’m not going to write one of those. Giving out “best of” awards seems presumptuous to me, given that I’ve been blogging all of six months. And while predictions are fun, they aren’t all that useful in the end.

What I do want to write about as I reminisce about the year ending in a couple of days are the Web 2.0 companies that I love and use every day.

I’ve tested over a thousand products this year, and have written about hundreds. And while some of the companies I write about get very positive reviews, I find that the only true test of the value of a product is its staying power: do I continue to use the product, and maybe even pay for it, as the days and months go by?

So for those of you that are curious, here is a short list of the companies that have held my attention, and that I would not choose to live without on the web:

Bloglines

I have a love/hate relationship with Bloglines, but they’ve recently improved performance dramatically, and I really like that I can see the number of subscribers for each feed. This was the hardest one to include on the list, but at the end of the day I couldn’t leave them off.

Del.icio.us

I use Del.icio.us multiple times every day to store and retrieve bookmarks. I freely admit that there are better solutions out there and I may very well switch to one of them in the near future, but you have to hand it to Del.icio.us for inventing the social bookmark phenomenon.

FeedBurner

I love the statistics Feedburner provides on feed readership and has lots of advanced features that are important to me. And despite what I’ve written in the past, I know and trust the FeedBurner team. I just wish they’d get rid of the advertisement on my feed page.

Flickr

I enjoy Flickr more and more every day. I like seeing what my friends are up to based on the photos they upload as well as getting comments from others on my pictures. And I am starting to go back and upload old sets of photos from years ago. Flickr is just perfect.

Measuremap

The Measure Map blog analytics tool created by Adaptive Path gives me incredible insight into who is looking at what on TechCrunch. They need to deal with the speed issue for larger blogs though (it takes minutes sometimes to pull up stats, or just breaks).

Memeorandum

Memeorandum is how I keep up on the blogosphere when I don’t have time to read all of my feeds. It has also changed what I blog about, and how. Memeorandum is a cultural phenomenon.

Netvibes

Yeah, there are a lot of Ajax desktops out there, but Netvibes seems to stay ahead of the pack on functionality. The flickr stuff is great. Plus, how can I not love a service that includes TechCrunch as a default feed?

Omnidrive

I’ve been waiting for something like this forever. I forsee a day when a service like Omnidrive comes packaged with a new PC, or is offered alongside web email solutions. I’ve only had it for a few days, but I’m smitten. And fair disclosure: there are some awesome competitors out there, too, that I am just starting to look at.

Pandora

I listen to Pandora whenever I write - sometimes for hours a day. I’ve discovered countless new artists from it.

Skype

What can I say? Along with Vonage, Skype keeps my phone bills down to next to nothing, and it is an integral part of my everyday business and personal life. I would trade application sharing for the new video feature in a heartbeat, however.

Technorati

I use it more than Google. No one has launched anything better, yet. And they’ve made great progress in search speed over the latter half of the year.

Wordpress

I love Wordpress. Actually, let me rephrase that statement: I love Wordpress 1.5. Version 2.0 makes me want to throw my laptop out of the window. But it is an amazing piece of software, and all of my blogs run on it.

Yahoo Maps

I use Yahoo Maps because it allows multi-point driving instructions, something none of the others offer yet. This was incredibly useful when I had to attend three or four holiday parties on the same evening.

Jon Fine tells papers to 'steal from Google'

BusinessWeek's Jon Fine urges newspapers to "steal from Google" and cut off their rival's oxygen.

Can You Spot the RFID Spychip?

Katherine Albrecht put together a fearless photo exposé on the use of RFID tracking chips at Wal-Mart, and on various products like printers and TVs. She goes on to show how customers are electronically frisked on their way out of the store. All of this is "for your protection" of course.

Seeing these sticker-RFIDs does make me take another look at the Dorkbot dude who implanted an RFID chip in his hand and wonder, why on earth didn't he simply use a sticker?

Photos of Item-Level RFID Tagging Wal-Mart Super Center, Dallas, Texas October 15, 2005 [Spychips (via Digg)]

 
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RSS Icon & The Feed Theory

What that orange icon really means and does? The unified feed theory defined by The uber geeks.

Click Fraud Competes With SPAM For Title Of "Most Heinous"

Wired: Pay-per-click is the fastest-growing segment of all advertising, reports the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Last year, Yahoo! alone ran more than 250 million individual listings, according to Michael Egan, the company's search-marketing director of content strategy. Yahoo! doesn't break out PPC earnings separately in its financial statements, but Goldman Sachs analyst Anthony Noto believes that keyword advertising accounted for about half of the company's estimated $3.7 billion in revenue for 2005. PPC is even more lucrative for Google. According to Noto, Google will end 2005 with $6.1 billion in revenue. About 99 percent of that revenue comes from keyword ads (over 56 percent from AdWords, according to the company's most recent quarterly financial statement, and 43 percent from AdSense), making Google a bigger recipient of ad dollars than any television network or newspaper chain. All of which is to say that little blue text links, a type of advertising that barely existed five years ago, are poised to become the single most important form of marketing in the US - unless click fraud ruins it.

If that occurs, the consequences will be felt throughout the Net. By splitting revenue with the sites that host the ads, search engines have become, in effect, the Internet's venture capitalists, funding the content that attracts people to the computer screen. Unlike the VCs who backed the boom-era Internet, search engines now provide revenue to thousands of wildly diverse sites at little up-front cost to them - PPC advertising is one of the few income sources available to bloggers, for instance. If rampant click fraud overwhelms the system, it will muffle the Internet's fabulous cacophony of voices.

Behind Doc Ock's Bar - the Octopus Tap

As I recall from my heady college days, having a 1-to-1 keg to tap ratio was usually a bad idea. Someone would do a kegstand and then you'd get a dollop of partially-digested Doritos on the top of the keg, leading to the dreaded party foul. The Octopus Tap hopes to change all that. It consists of up to three taps—not quite octo, but tripus would sound weird—that can squirt out the brass monkey with reckless abandon. BONUS: Frats—You can even assign different taps to the pledges and make them drink urine afore tasting the sweet nectar of barley and hops.

Product Page [OctopusTap]

NYT: Google Will Put Graphical Ads on Main Site

My, my, my.

Who's heard of KsanLab?

Me neither. But now you have.

Check out their website and this really cool "Virtual Tour" of their office, which according to their note to me, "catches the spirit of KsanLab and its people" and "demonstrates the great potential of virtual worlds to transfer both informational and emotional messages"

Now compare this experience to the corporate websites of the "other" agencies out there.

Pray tell, who would you want to do business with?

So, One Year Later, How'd I Do?

Each year I make predictions. Each year, I review them and see how I did. Then, I make some more.

Alright then. Here's my 2004 predictions post, written in late December, 2004. As much as I might wince at the one or two clunkers, I'd say I did pretty well on most. Here's running commentary on each - original in itals, my comments in bold:

1. We will have a goat rodeo of sorts in the blogging/micropublishing/RSS world as commercial interests push into what many consider a "pure medium." I've seen this movie before, and it ends OK. But it's important that the debate be full throated, and so far it looks to be shaping up that way. I'm already seeing these forces at work over at Boing Boing, and I am sure they will continue. We'll all work on figuring out ways to stick to our principles and get paid at the same time, however, I expect that things might get more contentious before they get better, and 2005 may be a more fractious year in the blogosphere as we evolve through this process.

We've sure had debates about taking advertising this past year, and we've had important folks who have sworn they'd never read a feed if it had an ad in it (update: Dave contacted me and said he does read feeds with ads in them, but sure doesn't like em..). And we've had a lot of speculation about how much blogs are worth given all those eyeballs paying attention to them. I think I got this mostly right, but the debate is not at full throat quite yet.

2. Along those lines, things will not go as swimmingly as we'd like with regard to "monetization." As the majors get into the space and start throwing around their weight and lucre, some folks will make bad decisions, and others will freeze and make no decisions at all. It will get harder to innovate before it gets easier. We'll all be surprised by the lack of what we consider "progress" in the RSS/Blogging world, and expectations of major publishing revenues will not materialize as quickly as perhaps we think they should. However, we'll in fact be making huge strides in understanding the path forward, it just won't seem like it. By the end of the year, the world will begin to realize that "blogs" are in fact an extraordinarily heterogeneous ecosystem comprised of scores, if not hundreds, of different "types" of sites.

rong>While I have not written about this much, I have to say, this is proving very, very true, in particular the parts about "it will get harder to innovate before it gets easier." Now that I'm deep into development with FM, and have been in conversation with loads of folks at partners, peers, and the Big Guys, I am convinced there is *a lot* of work left to do to create robust platforms for blog publishing. Not the publishing software, mind you, though that can always get better. But the professional tools like statistics, analytics, and monetization platforms. We're really, really early on all those fronts. One such place is RSS, where the majors have all made significant announcements, but it is entirely unclear what the business model will be for the content creators who drive value in the first place.

3. There will be two to five major new sites that emerge from "nowhere" to become major cultural influencers along the lines of the political bloggers of 2004. One of them will be sold to a major publisher/aggregator for what seems like a large sum of money, driving the abovementioned #2 and #1.

rong>Well, hello MySpace, del.icio.us, Bloglines, flickr, and on and on....

4. Meanwhile, the long tail will become the talk of the "old line" media world. To capture some of that value, we'll see a slew of deals and new publishing projects from the established brands that seek to capture the idea of community journalism, affiliate commerce sales, and collaborative content creation.

I think Chris has managed a major media coup - he owns the idea of The Long Tail in mainstream culture, and *before* his book has come out. That's the power of a good blog (and Wired, of course). Meanwhile, the scramble to get into the citizen journalism and/or "user generated content" game has grown into an all out race, and the dire predictions from all sides about how the newspaper and even the cable business are threatened or near death now come daily.

5. Google will do something major with Blogger. I really have no idea what, but it's overdue. Six Apart will grow quickly but face a crisis in its implementation as its core users demand more features that are "unbloglike" like customer databases and robust publishing support tools. This (and other things) may drive Six Apart or one of its competitors into the arms of Yahoo or AOL or even - gasp - Quark or Adobe or Marcomedia.

OK, I am simply, entirely wrong on this one. Unless you count splogs as "something major."

6. Ask will continue to consolidate traffic by buying smaller search sites.

True, but then again, I didn't predict IAC buying Ask, did I?

7. Yahoo and Google will both test systems that combine local merchant inventory information with search, so that merchants can use search as a direct sales channel. By the end of the year, there will be no question that the search companies are in direct competition with the ecommerce companies, but it won't matter - there's room for them all. Paul Ford will continue to get droves of readers to his related, and very prescient, three year old post on how Google takes over the world.

I think I nailed this one. Local merchant info is now uploadable to Google and Yahoo local, as well as Base. And when Base launched, Ford's traffic went way up, I'm told....

8. Microsoft will lose search share before they gain it back later in the year when the integration of MSN search starts to scale with new versions of Office and IE . Net net, however, MSFT will gain total in total search sessions from last year, and its technology will get much, much better.

Recent figures show that my timing was off by a bit, MSFT is losing share right now, but will gain it back soon, I'd wager. And the technology *is* getting much better.

9. Firefox will near 15% of total browser share. Firefox faithful will wonder why it's not much much higher. But MSFT will release a very good upgrade of IE, see #8.

According to the latest figures I have seen, Firefox is right at about 15% market share in the US (10% worldwide). And MSFT planned a major IE update this year, but it's late (no kidding...). IE 7 is due next quarter.

10. A third party platform player with major economies of scale (ie eBay or Amazon) will release a search related innovation that blows everyone's mind, and has everyone buzzing about how it redefines what's possible in search.

Thanks Amazon, for that Alexa move last week, you made me look damn smart, and just in time.

11. The China question will become a critical issue to the search community. Defining the China question will in itself be a major task of 2005. How do search companies go in without being "evil"? Is the tradeoff worth it?

Well, this sure came up big time for Yahoo this year, and Google and Microsoft had a major China problem, but it was about hiring, not ethics. Google opened an office and went into business. So far, no hue, no cry.

12. By the end of the year, there will be no question that search is a media business, and that the major players in search are major players in the content business.

I think I gave myself a softball on this one...it was true then, it's true now...

13. Something major will finally happen at Tivo. We all hope that it's a sale to Apple, but if it is a sale, it will more likely be to Comcast or DirecTv.

Not a sale (yet), but deals with both that helped stabilize the company and give it some lift.

14. All year, Apple will be rumored to launch a video iPod, but it won't - it's still too early. By the end of 2005, we will just be starting to see traction in the video over IP market and its connection to search. Google will introduce Video search at some point in 05, but it will stay in Labs.

Holy sh*t, I was plain wrong on Apple, but right on Google Video - and yes, it's in Labs.

15. Mobile will finally be plugged into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user and a major mobile innovation - the kind that makes us all say - Jeez that was obvious - will occur. At the core of this innovation will be the concept of search. The outlines of such an innovation: it'll be a way for mobile users to gather the unstructured data they leverage every day while talking on the phone and make it useful to their personal web (including email and RSS, in particular). And it will be a business that looks and feels like a Web 2.0 business - leveraging iterative web development practices, open APIs, and innovation in assembly - that makes the leap. (More on this when I start posting again).

rong>I think I was right in spirit - upon some reflection and with history's calm glance, this past year will go down as the year that mobile became the story on the Web. But I was ahead of the market in the rest of my prediction - this will take more time than I thought. I'm pretty sure the "Web 2.0" business I mention in the prediction exists right now, I just don't know its name, yet. Do you? Then let us know!

16. Perhaps most recklessly...I will finish my book. The reviews will be mixed, as my attempt to satisfy both the exacting audience of Searchbloggers and the more general audience of a major trade hardcover may fall flat. Many will say I tried to do too much, others that I didn't do nearly enough (how's that for airing my deepest fears in public?!). However, I'll be happy with the effort, and the book will do OK, thanks mainly to the support of this community. So, ahead of time, thanks for your support this past year. I learned more from this process than I ever thought possible, and I owe it all to you, who grace my site with your time and input.

Wow. I did finish it. And I'm pleased to say that I was largely wrong about the reviews - they've been really, really gratifying. As have sales, personal emails, my conversations with folks about the book, your kind words on this site....I'm going to have to stop now, I'm making myself all weepy. I want to do it again. Imagine that!

17. Lastly, I will be involved in starting a new business in the field of media and technology. It will start very slowly, and I'll screw up as much as I possibly can in the early stages, before imposing it on the rest of the world. Hopefully, you'll all be there to keep me honest as I try to figure out a few ideas I've been simmering for the past year or so.

I got this one right also, but I rigged that one - I knew I wanted to start FM, and now that I'm deep into it, I have to say it's just as thrilling and terrifying as the book, but more so - this time, I've got many fellow travelers, including, again, all of you. Thank you for a great year, and here's to the next one (and yes, my predictions for 2006 are coming soon....)

this same post (how I did on my 2003 predictions) from 2004

McD's Uniform Change Year's Top Story

AdAge.com published nearly 3,000 news stories and features on advertising, marketing and media topics in 2005.

"MCDONALD'S PLANS TO REINVENT EMPLOYEE UNIFORMS" is the most viewed story of the year. But you can't view it now, unless you agree to pay for it.

Swap gift cards online

Consumers are buying, selling and swapping gift certificates online this holiday season at a new rash of web sites dedicated to gift cards, the New York Times reports:

For buyers, these sites present an opportunity to pick up gift cards at savings of 10 percent to 30 percent. Almost always, they can be regiven to friends and family or redeemed for store merchandise. For traders, they can be an easy way to exchange a gift card for one from a store they prefer without the well-meaning giver ever knowing. And for sellers, they are a quick and convenient way to get cash.

If you're looking to unload or purchase a gift card, check out cardavenue.com, SwapAGift.com, GiftCardsAgain.com, or CertificateSwap.com. Can't say I've ever done this myself - how about you? Let us know in the comments or at tips at lifehacker.com.

Yahoo to Measure Online and Offline Ad Effectiveness

Yahoo on Friday launched an analytics service that allows advertising on Yahoo sites to not only measure the performance of their online ads but also compare them with their radio, TV and print...

Test Drive an AJAX RSS Reader

Backbase has a whole bunch of AJAX web applications that you can test drive. One notable entry here is their RSS Reader. It's muy slick! Plus you can download the source code of this application and install it on your own server. While you're on the Backbase site take a look at the AJAXy front end they tacked on to Yahoo! Search. You can really get a good sense for how AJAX technologies are revolutionizing the web as we know it.

Technorati Tags: Ajax, Backbase, Web2, Web 2.0, Yahoo

AOL-Google-Microsoft: The Deal Dance History in Links

: We covered every little turn in this story....the history of the story through links (reverse chronological order), below:
-- AOLGoogle: Some Details Of the Deal
-- More On AOL-Google
-- Report: AOL, Google Now In Exclusive Talks
-- Case: No Return To AOL
-- Time Warner Round-Up: Case React; AOL Impact; Talk, Talk, Talk
-- TW-AOL Merger Architect And Beneficiary Steve Case Urges Breakup; Wants To Free AOL
-- Google Still in Running For AOL; Comcast In Separate Deal Talks
-- AOL Nearing Tie-Up With MSFT On Ad Sales: WSJ
-- AOL May Not Sell Stake; Partnership Only
-- Yahoo Decides To Sit out Of AOL Race; Exclusive Negotiation Period Nearing
-- Microsoft Ahead in AOL-Wooing Game
-- AOL Talks Continuing With MSFT and Google
-- AOL-?: The Best Option Could Be No Sale For Now
-- Yahoo Joins AOL Chase; Regulatory Issues Likely
-- Google, Comcast Mulling Stake in AOL
-- AOL-MSN Start Talking Again On Combining
-- Why MSN Should Merge With AOL (and Why Google and Yahoo Have Little to Fear)
-- Why Comcast Should Acquire AOL
-- MSN-AOL: Deal Could Take Many Forms If It Happens At All
-- AOL-Microsoft: Will Cash-Rich Google Make A Play?
-- AOL-MSFT Talks: MSN Has Given Up On Portal?
-- AOL-Microsoft Talks: Google's Exposure To It
-- More On AOL-MSN Talks: Centered Around Paid Search
-- Speculation Frenzy: MSN-AOL In Co-op Talks, Not Buyout?
-- Report: Microsoft Talking To TW About Combining AOL And MSN

Banner Ad Blog

There are plenty of resources out there for showcasing various ad creative..except for the humble banner ad and annuals don't quite cut it.. so where's a creative to get his interactive creative inspiration from? Try BannerBlog They're also looking to recruit editors from Asia and the United States, why not submit your work

Google releases GTalk API, Puts Gun To Skype’s Head

Google has just released a set of components called Libjingle that allow third party applications to interact with Google Talk. The components, which include some source code, are being released under a very liberal license allowing for free incorporation into commercial and non-commercial software.

We are releasing this source code as part of our ongoing commitment to promoting consumer choice and interoperability in Internet-based real-time-communications. The Google source code is made available under a Berkeley-style license, which means you are free to incorporate it into commercial and non-commercial software and distribute it.

In addition to enabling interoperability with Google Talk, there are several general purpose components in the library such as the P2P stack which can be used to build a variety of communication and collaboration applications. We are eager to see the many innovative applications the community will build with this technology.

Below is a summary of the individual components of the library. You can use any or all of these components.

* base - Low-level portable utility functions.
* p2p - The p2p stack, including base p2p functionality and client hooks into XMPP.
* session - Phone call signaling.
* third_party - Non-Google components required for some functionality.
* xmllite - XML parser.
* xmpp - XMPP engine.

Google has done a great job with spurring Google Maps mashups - some people claim hundreds of thousands of third party applications. This code release is even more important and is a huge end around Skype. In fact, Google has basically put a gun to Skype’s head and demanded they now release their API as well.

Skype allows integration with the Skype client. What Google has done goes far beyond this, allowing integration with the Google Talk’s VOIP network.

Here’s an example of a potential mashup - putting google map location information in the same application as google talk, allowing mapping of everyone in the conversation (Gizmo does this). See local businesses and people and add them to the conversation.

Tags: gtalk, google, googletalk, skype, voip, techcrunch, web2.0, web+2.0

Partner Events Generate Word of Mouth

Google generated a swirl of buzz in October when they invited their business partners to a partner event that was closed to the public. The reality is that these partner events, or client summits as they are sometimes referred, can be a great way to inspire word of mouth. Bringing your company's core constituencies together to rally the troops and make them feel special is how you get people talking.

The software industry has been doing this for years. Microsoft hosts hundreds of events for their key developers and vendors, AOL holds partner events in Virginia for their Shopping Channel clients, and eBay has their eBay Live meeting for their best sellers.

Read the MediaPost article
(free registration required)

A la carte

I didn’t know that FoodTV has a web-only show.

Alienware Gets Smart with the Area 51 m5500

When shopping for a new laptop, one of the most difficult decisions is choosing between a graphical powerhouse or one that's more battery-efficient. Alienware makes that decision easier by releasing a laptop with changeable graphics cards. Sitting at home wanting to frag some kids in Quake 4? Just use the Nvidia graphics. But if you're looking for longer battery life, a flip of a switch and a reboot converts the laptop over to Intel graphics that are more battery-friendly. This laptop comes with the same high-end specs that you've come to expect from Alienware, and it only weighs in at six pounds. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Dell!

Alienware Area-51 m5500 [Digital Media Thoughts]

Sirius starts hyping Howard Stern

Filed under: Campaign Launch, Radio

Sirius has begun the major push to promote Howard Sterns immenent move from terrestrial to satellite radio. Because he's still an employee of Infinity Broadcasting, though, none of the ads to date can or do show his face. Instead there are a series of TV spots, billboard and newspapers ads that all play to Stern's existing fan base. The TV commercial, for instance, shows a man who, after his wife gives him a Sirius radio, decides not to divorce her. Sirius also sent a couple of emails to Stern's fans with exclusive content on the web, such as a inside look at the new studio hosted by a woman who I'm sure had plentiful..umm..talents. Getting Stern's fans to subscribe to Sirius in order to stay with him could be a serious (heh) coup for the satellite radio provider as it looks to increase it's subscriber base. Of course this major campaign - along with the huge salary it's paying Stern - could backfire on Sirius if the famously moody talk show host/carnival barker becomes displeased. Then they could have a $100 million dollar a year four year old on their hands. 

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Projected Starbucks ad raises questions

Filed under: Viral, Outdoor

Is the projecting of an image onto a building legal or illegal in New York City? That's what some people are asking after a giant Starbucks logo was projected onto the exterior of Grand Central Station yesterday by marketing firm Nevermind. They had been hired by Weiden & Kennedy on behalf of Starbucks to provide some guerilla marketing support for the coffeehouse. The image was projected onto Grand Central and other buildings in New York from a van across the street. People who came up to the van to see what was going on were given Starbucks gift cards. But since they were ostensibly using other people's property (OPP) the legal issues are a little fuzzy. While the Grand Central owners say they would have asked the van to move along it appears there are only restrictions on solid structures being erected, so Starbucks and its surrogates appear to be in the clear on this one.

But let's look at this from a marketing perspective. The ad was eye-catching, innovative and, if people became engaged enough by it to inquire about it at the van they were rewarded with a brand-appropriate prize. If they were moved to dial the phone number that appeared in the ad/image they heard a jingle that went along with the image. So they got something tangible and something (probably) humorous. I think that's fantastic work on the part of Nevermind to move people to action and get them to interact with the brand a bit.

 

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PS3 Still Launching Spring 2006

We've heard rumours of a delayed PS3 launch, but Sony is still promising Spring as its release target. Seems the next-generation DVD format war has been at the center of delay theories.

"The PS3 was touted as being the first high volume Blu-ray player. You want to have an installed base of players if you put out the movies," said Richard Doherty, analyst with Envisioneering, an industry research firm.

But fear not, a spokesman from Sony is saying it needs the earlier launch to stay competitive with the already-shipping Xbox 360.

Sony says PS3 still on track for spring launch [News.com]

Noel Gallagher backtalks Jack White for Coke song

As we all know Jack White from the White Stripes has written a song for Coke - Rumor Mill- Jack White to write next Hilltop song? - which some think makes Jack a sellout. Some say so louder than others, like Noel Gallagher who is quoted in Brandrepublic saying that Jack "ceases to be in the club" and that he "looks like Zorro on doughnuts" to boot. Noel has made insulting other stars an art form and it is the PR tool that serves to get his unibrow in the papers again whenever interest about him wanes... In this case though, perhaps he should have kept mum.... (quicktime inside)

Download of the Day: Firetune Firefox optimizer

Optimize your Firefox install for your computer and 'net connection with the free FireTune 'fox tweaker.

Got a slow computer on a fast connection? A fast computer on a slow connection? Choose your computing situation and FireTune does all the work for you, using previously-mentioned manual Firefox configuration tweaks.

[FireTune is] based on a collection of popular and well working optimization settings used and tested by the experts. Usually you have to optimize Firefox manually, which can be time consuming and difficult for the novice user. FireTune helps you here - it includes all the performance optimizations. The only thing you must do is: make your selection. FireTune does the work for you.

I just used it and maybe it's because I want it so bad, but things do seem faster. FireTune doesn't modify the Firefox installation files, just the configuration, which can easily be rolled back. Make sure you backup your configuration before doing anything. A little MozBackup before you start tuning couldn't hurt, either. FireTune is a free download, Windows only.

Boltfolio media sharing

My alma mater* Bolt.com just launched Boltfolio, web-based media storage and sharing.

Clearly influenced by Flickr (and who hasn't been), the neat thing about Boltfolio is that all your media types - photos, videos, audio and blog entries - are stored in one place. Surf everyone's media by tag or search by keyword, make contacts, set your blog posts to public or private, and get RSS feeds of every media type by user. Your Boltfolio account upload allowance is only 100MB - definitely limiting, especially when video is involved. Bolt.com proper is a teen community site, but Boltfolio aims for the more grownup set. However, Boltfolio's tag cloud reveals a lot of crossover.

* Disclosure: I was a developer at Bolt for over 3 happy years in a past life. - Gina

Bottles impossibly filled with impossible objects

Cory Doctorow: Harry Eng, a former minister and elementary school teacher, makes these "impossible bottles" that are filled with objects that have been carefully squeezed through the necks of the bottles and arranged with tweezers and surgical haemostats. Link (via Neatorama)

Update: Derrick sez, "Technically, Harry Eng _made_ these objects; he passed away in 1996. However, other puzzle designers around the world have kept the tradition alive. See some of the entries at John Rausch's Puzzle World."

Yahoo Combines Australian Business With Seven Network; To Change Name to Yahoo7

: Yahoo has combined its Australian business with local media company Seven Network...the two companies will combine their respective online, mobile and IPTV businesses in Australia and New Zealand. In some senses, it is a deal on the lines of Yahoo's China deal, though on a much smaller scale and of course different deal structure. But this seems the first time that the combination company might have another company's name along with Yahoo name. The new site is Yahoo.com.au, to be launched in January.
The details:
-- The two companies will form a new 50-50 holding company that will own Yahoo Australia & NZ.
-- Seven and Yahoo will each hold three of the six board seats in the entity.
-- Combining Yahoo's search and communications service with Seven's media and entertainment content and marketing capabilities.
-- Yahoo Australia & NZ and Seven will be combining their online teams and are expected to launch a new name and an online presence in late January.
-- Seven will also contribute $7.5 million to match Yahoo's existing development capital in the business, offline promotion through the Seven Network and Pacific Magazines, as well as Seven's 33 percent stake in mobile solutions provider m.Net Corporation.
-- Advertisers will also be able to purchase combined offline and online sponsorships across Yahoo Australia & NZ, the Seven Network and Pacific Magazines.
-- Joint portal will not be exclusive to Seven broadcast and publishing content-- aims to get more content.
A PDF presentation about the merger is here. A video teaser ad about the combination is here

EA's Buyout Of Jamdat: Our Coverage

: Really, why go anywhere else...we've done the hard work for you, on our sister site MocoNews.net:
-- EA-JMDT: Data On Deck Placement Etc
-- EA-JMDT: Big Cashout For Apax, Benchmark
-- EA’s Build Vs Buy Decision
-- A Brief History Of Jamdat
-- EA-JMDT Conf Call: Five Reasons Why EA Bought It
-- EA-JMDT: Some Thoughts
-- EA-JMDT: Jamdat CFO’s Presentation At UBS Conference This Morning
-- BREAKING: EA To Acquire Jamdat For $680 Million

Profound insight from LinkedIn

"People you know are not connected...

Xbox 360 Media Center Update

Google Video to Become a Content Marketplace?

Pete Cashmore found word that Google may be trying to build a marketplace on Google Video where consumer-generated videos can be bought, sold and licensed. As I've said, this is just one part of Google's efforts to be the Long Tail's best friend.

Technorati Tags: Long Tail, Google, Video

Paramount site-targeting AdSense publishers

In a recent BusinessWeek article, "Grabbing The Grassroots" (BusinessWeek, November 21, 2005), David Kiley profiled Paramount Pictures' use of site targeting to reach a specific and relevant audience for three of their films: Hustle & Flow, Four Brothers and Aeon Flux.

Site targeting allowed Paramount to find many smaller, niche sites with users who they felt would have a particular interest in the films. Kiley describes these as "specialized networks of what are often small online sites and blogs," and notes that such sites "increasingly [soak] up Net surfers' attention," -- which means it's more possible than ever to reach an increasingly fragmented audience.

"With Hustle & Flow, Paramount had the ideal test case for this kind of advertising," Kiley explained. "The film is about an aspiring rap singer, specifically a performer of 'crunk,' 'a Dixie-originated hip-hop genre marked by lurching beats and bellowed choruses. Hustle & Flow was a blowout hit at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, but Paramount couldn't count on that industry buzz making it to the grass roots of crunk enthusiasts the movie studio wanted to reach."

By plugging terms like 'crunk', 'Memphis', and the names of some of the movie's stars into Google's Site Tool (a tool that automatically returns a list of sites related specific topics or categories), Paramount was able to identify and advertise on 170 different niche sites.

As the Hustle & Flow example demonstrates, when advertisers want to reach the audience that's most receptive to their message, they're interested in targeting not just the big sites, but content-rich smaller sites as well. To make it easier for advertisers to target ads to smaller sites, AdSense has added features like Onsite Advertiser Sign-up.

Thanks to all our publishers in the AdSense network for creating the kind of content that makes this type of targeted-reach possible for those of us on the advertising side.

Posted by Bismarck - AdWords Product Marketing

Google's butt-ugly interface design

Google's butt-ugly interface design: As Google moves into different, more complicated application services, particularly those with a desktop component, its weakness in interface design will hinder its ambitions.

Born On Mac Date?

Not sure exactly why you'd need this, but in case you were dying to know when and where your Mac or iPod were built, the CoconutIdentityCard is an application that gives you that information instantly. It currently only works with Mac OS X 10.4 and up, though it should also run on upcoming Intel-based Macs as well. For the iPod info, just plug it in to your computer while the app is running, and voila. Oh, it doesn't work with the iPod Shuffle, by the way. Guess nobody really cares where or when they're born.

coconutIdentityCard tells When and Where your Mac / iPod was born [New Launches]

'Podcast' Is Word of the Year

"Podcast" - both portmanteau (combining "iPod" and "broadcasting") and misnomer (neither iPod nor broadcasting is necessary) - was selected as the Word of the Year by the New Oxford American...

Could ads finally come to Google News?

Filed under: Online, Search

There's some thinking out loud going on regarding the future and viability of ads being integrated in Google News. It's one of the few services offered by Google that does not include some version of AdWords (just it and Google Talk come to mind) and could potentially be a huge source of income. That being said there are some problems. First and foremost, there are so many company names and keywords on a Google News page at any given time that a traditional contextual ad placement would almost be impossible to produce. Secondly, as the story notes, people looking for news bring with them a different mindset than someone just running a search. But the possiblity does exist for paid placement. The question is how and where would those ads look and go? The Google News homepage is pretty full and doesn't leave a lot of white space left over. I'd speculate that, if they actually did add ads they would be placed below each topic/section. Imagine a small ad box placed at the bottom of the Sci/Tech section. It's long been speculated that Google News would only emerge from perpetual beta status once they figured out a way to monetize it. That time could be coming soon. 

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MIT grad: "I needed help setting up my home network"

MIT grad and former Apple executive Don Norman recently said that instead of hooking up his own home network, he hired someone to do it for him.

His point, of course, is that home networking is so difficult fewer people do it. I know many Lifehacker readers are the tech support in the lives of their friends and families, so I'd venture to guess you've set up a network or two yourself - goodness knows I have. (Hi Mom! Hi Sis! Hi downstairs neighbor!). However, it wasn't until after my sysadmin friend showed me the ins and outs of a router that I ventured down the path.

Do you have a home network? You set it up yourself? How did it go? Let us know in the comments or at tips at lifehacker.com.

Make your own PDF notepaper

Lifehacker reader Michael Botsko publishes a web service which creates personalized PDF notepaper to print out and take on your way to meetings at work.

The template includes your name, number, the date, project name and splits the page into two sections: one for notes (with lines) and the other for action items with due dates. Optional punchholes make binderizing all your notes for an ongoing project easy. Neat idea for cube warriors who need some note-taking guidance and an easy way to capture action items in the conference room.

Xeni interviews Steven Soderbergh in WIRED

Xeni Jardin: For this month's Wired Magazine, I interviewed director Steven Soderbergh about copyright, remix, and why his new movie Bubble will be released by Mark Cuban/Todd Wagner's 2929 Entertainment on DVD, cable, and in theaters all at once.

# Should hardware manufacturers be obligated to build copy protection into their devices?

Soderbergh: It's a tricky question. I don't think somebody who creates something should have their rights violated. Yet we have a culture in which creating something like [Danger Mouse's] The Grey Album can get you thrown in jail. That's sad. It's an astonishing, amazing piece of work that should be heard.

# Have you thought about making a mash-up?

S: I have ideas like that - video mash-ups. Some of them I've done privately. But there's no way for them to be seen legally. I wish we could come up with a system that allowed someone to do a Grey Album without having to pay millions of dollars for music rights. A system in which rights holders share profits of a new piece of work and people can access it without breaking the law.

# Give me one idea for a video mash-up.

S: I was channel surfing the other night and Gus Van Sant's Psycho was on. It would be fascinating to do a mash-up of Gus' version with Hitchcock's version, because the whole thing with Gus' version was that he duplicated the original shot by shot.

# I'd watch that!

S: Yeah! So right now, I could do that at home and give it to a friend, just as something for them to watch on a Friday night. But we don't live in a world where that can be made commercially available. So it goes underground. And underground is just a sexier word for illegal. It's frustrating.

ice"

Reader comment: Jared Nielsen says,

The artist Andrew Neumann created a mash-up of van Sant's and Hitchcock's psycho, mixed in real time with software he wrote. Here's a link to his bio at Bitforms gallery.

NYT’s David Carr fires up Oscars blog

For those of you who can’t get enough David Carr, the New York Times media reporter now has his own short-term blog, The Carpetbagger, focusing on the ins and outs of Oscar season. Carr began the blog this morning and,...

Honda's impossible dream

Filed under: Viral, Online

Both Ad Hunt and Ad Blather linked to this viral for Honda, created by Wieden + Kennedy. It has a nice uplifting feel to it, and it's especially "uplifting" at the end. I thought it was pretty good, though I couldn't shake what one person wrote in Ad Blather's comments that it was an example of a huge budget put behind a kind of mediocre idea. That's fair enough, since the concept itself isn't exactly earth-shattering. Still, I think it works in the execution. The end of the spot leads you to Honda UK's Power of Dreams site. 

 

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NBC Joins iTunes

NBC shows now for sale on iTunes as Apple says it has sold 3 million videos in first two months. That's nice. But what's up with video blogs at iTunes?

Hey CBS News: Free the Stern tape

Here’s a suggestion to my friends at CBSNews.com and 60 Minutes (you know who you are, Dick and Larry):

Take the outtakes from the very good 60 Minutes story on Howard Stern and put them online. Good on you for putting up the segment itself. But Howard’s huge audience wants more.

Howard talked this morning about asking 60 Minutes for the video to put it on his pay-per-view channel. Thanks to damned Cablevision, I don’t have that yet.

But if you took all that material — more of the Howard interview, his trip to Roosevelt, interviews with the staff, scenes from the studio and office — and put it all up in separate chunks with permalinks to each, you’d get incredible traffic. Howard said this morning that 60 Minutes on Sunday got 17.5 million viewers, up from 10ish million usually (please comment and correct those figures if they’re off). And you can bet that the age demographic took a pleasant dive that day.

So you can attract that large and young audience to CBSNews.com if you’ll offer more of Howard. You’d also find yourself getting tons of links; you’d be in the conversation.

Now if you really wanted to be revolutionary and modern, you could take all those segments and put them up in downloadable form so people could remix their own segments on Howard. But I don’t want to push it too far. We’ll get there.

Imperfect cookies for imperfect people

Filed under: Funny, Television

It's amazing what we'll put up with when we're in love with someone. Their poor taste in clothes, their horrible taste in books and movies, the fact that we have to sometimes listen to what they have to say.... This ad for Maryland Cookies, which features a woman high kicking her man in the face as they walk down the street illustrates that these particular cookies may be imperfect, but you love them anyway. Of course, as a guy, I think my reaction wouldn't be "Why is she kicking me in the face?" but rather "Dang, she's really flexible." The spot's perhaps a little odd to be funny, but the point is still made. The ad was found over at visit4info.

 

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Adobe Melds Macromedia Into Product Offering With New Bundles

For you creative types, Adobe has launched three new product bundles that combine Adobe Creative Suite 2 and Adobe video tools with the just-released Macromedia Flash Professional 8 and Macromedia Studio 8 software. Adobe acquired the Macromedia product line...

Competing with Google

Umair Haque writes:

One way to qwn Google is through connected consumption. Google has proven time and time again that it doesn't have a real competence in community. Most of it's community-based initiatives are also-rans (Orkut, News, etc).

re huge sources of value creation in a post-network economy - especially when they scale. That is, they realize increasing returns via viral and network economies of scale. So, for example, rather than Yahoo (etc) trying to roll it's own communities, a much smarter play would be to begin acquiring vertical communities and build nonlinear returns to scale, because each acquisition price won't reflect network benefits.

Vertical communities create value in two ways. First, they're hyperefficient attention allocators. Second, that's because they've built huge knowledge pools about their verticals. Check out Basenotes for a quick example. The trick is that few of them realize much value now, because their networks haven't reached scale.

But the economics are clear: both of these sources of value creation are deeply disruptive to traditional consumer-facing industries. Where newspapers are today because of micromedia and ambient media, so tomorrow most consumer-facing industries will be because of communities - think magazines, department stores, and other mass players. And that means that a community roll-up player can exert huge market power over complementors - like Google - because it will own the edge of the value chain.

Patton Oswalt on the happy holly jolly joy of Christmas!

Xeni Jardin: Snip:

If you come a-caroling to my house, you're going to get yanked inside, strapped to a bed of pine trees, and force-fed a gallon of hot wassail while I recite the screenplay to IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. We'll laugh and laugh and scream and you'll be so bursting with Christmas cheer you'll beg me to scamper off and find a linoleum knife.

"You've got to help me share all this Christmas cheer with the rest of the world!" you'll gurgle. Then I'm going to cut you open and make entrail angels all over the floor!

Warren Ellis)

Lean XHTML and Precise CSS

Paul often tells me the CSS I write tends to look like complicated C code, and for the most part, I'd agree. The stylesheets I usually produce rely almost exclusively on descendant selectors which let me pinpoint <div>'s, headings, and other tags in a very precise manner for styling. In this entry I'll talk about my theories behind XHTML and CSS code, practices I feel are better than others, and my thoughts on image replacement.

CSS Examples & Structure

Check out the Business Logs CSS file million.css, the Gigaom.com style.css, or the 9rules.com homepage stylesheet gameover.css.

One thing you'll notice off the bat is the way I organize my stylesheets — I normally group styles by what they apply to rather than where they apply it visually. For example, at the top of my stylesheets I keep all structural elements together in a catch-all titled "Body and Box-like elements" which usually holds IDs that I reserve for structural elements since they appear only once on the page. Rules like #frame, #sidebar, and #footer will go here. Under those are all my heading styles (H1-H6), then all paragraph styles, then link styles, lists (including navigation), and so on. Compare this to how my friend Dan writes his style sheets; he normally groups styles by where the style is going (top section styles, sidebar styles, content styles, footer styles) rather than the type of style it is. Neither style of coding is "the right way", they're just two different ways of looking at a site's design and structure. I personally think that the reason I write mine that way is because of all my experience with real programming (Java, C, PHP, Perl) so my way of organizing CSS files just seems more logical in my brain. Who knows.

I've been writing CSS commercially now for a shade under three years, and once you have a few thousand lines of CSS under your belt you tend to develop patterns that make it easier and faster to get work done. One of the patterns that I use that helps me immensely is the indentation of CSS rules based on their parent/child relationship. Here's an example from the 9rules CSS:

#frontpageads ul {
    display: block;
    margin: 24px 0 16px 0;
    _margin-top: 12px; /* Double margin bug, IE6 */
    padding: 0;
    list-style: none; }

    #frontpageads ul li {
        height: 75px;
        margin: 0 16px 8px 8px;
        padding: 0; }

        #frontpageads ul li a {
            border: 0 !important; }

See the pattern? The #frontpageads ul rule is the parent and start of the unordered list style, then the child element is the #frontpageads ul li which is next (indented one level), and then the #frontpageads ul li a style is last which is the child of the list item. The indenting of child rules helps set up a visual hierarchy which is really handy when you're dealing with 1000-line CSS files since they can get unruly pretty quickly. On a normal site, I might have numerous navigation or list styles: one for the top navigation, one for a secondary nav, a sidebar list (say, categories on a weblog), and then a normal list style for content. That's four different unordered list styles, all with the same ul -› li -› a code progression needed to style all parts of the list. The indenting is really handy because I can identify each list style block visually without having to look closer at the name of the rule. This helps me jump directly to a code block without having to waste time to see where one block starts and another begins.

Make Your XHTML Lean

The very first thing I do after I have the visual design of a page mocked up (in Photoshop, OmniGraffle, etc.) is jump into the XHTML. I have the visual design open in one part of the screen, and TextMate open in another so I can look at the design while I write the most semantic XHTML I can muster. I always write the XHTML/CSS for my own designs because I can just look at it and see the XHTML/CSS in my head. I can see how the structure will be laid out, which areas will be blocked off, how navigation will be coded, etc. A few weeks back my girlfriend said that in the middle of the night I was talking in my sleep, saying things like "H5 and H6!" after a long day of CSS coding, I mean how lame can ya get :)

One of the hallmarks of CSS-based design, to me, is the separation of design from content. In my HTML files you will never, ever find an <image> tag that links to something that is used for the design of the page rather than the actual content. Images that build the design structure of the page are meant to be contained in the CSS file as background-images, not as images in the HTML itself. If you keep all the design in the CSS file and all the structural markup and content in the HTML, the project will be much better off and Jeffrey Zeldman will smile down upon you.

In order to have background-images as design elements in your CSS, you'll probably need to use some form of image replacement. Image replacement, for those who aren't accustomed to the term, is the method that moves the text that would normally show up in an element's display out of the way so that element's background-image can show through. The advantage is that you can use regular HTML tags like H1 to give semantic meaning to things like logos, where before you would just drop an HTML image tag in there and call it a day. By still using the H1 for the logo, you are giving meaning to the ordinarily meaningless image, and you can keep all the design in the CSS and not muddy up your HTML with image tags.

A few years ago I wrote about the technique I used for image replacement by way of a negative text-indent (which instead of indenting it to the right, it indents it way off screen so it's not visible any more.) This technique is the one I use every single day, and I'll go ahead and recommend it to newer CSS coders because it's very simple to implement and doesn't require extraneous HTML tags to function. I won't get into the details of it here, but if you jump over to the 9rules CSS or Om's CSS, and do a find for "text-indent" you can check out the code in action. Many other designers use this technique as well (Doug Bowman rocks it) so it's not just me saying this because I'm biased :)

Round Up

These are just a few of the CSS tips I have, and I'm sure our readers have a bunch more, so feel free to share them.

Small vs. Big is no contest.

My partner and I just made a business call on one of the largest marketers in the country. We had 15 minutes scheduled to show them why we should be considered as an alternative to their conglomerate “agency of record.” Two hours later we left with smiles on our faces. It seems they saw all of the advantages of what their large agency provides without all of the baggage.

The reaction by this and other large-budget advertisers we contact is no surprise to us. The small agency is coming into its own with as increasing numbers of large marketers shift, or even eliminate, their relationships with the holding company behemoth agencies that have dominated the industry for the last two decades.

I can understand why so many creatives are bailing out of these constricting bureaucracies to open their own small shops. It’s a trend we’re going to be seeing a lot more of in this new age in which creative ideas are all that really matter. So in the future the golden child of advertising will be the small agency. Selling the benefits of taking business to a small agency is fairly easy for large company marketing directors. Why? Let me count the ways.

1. Small agencies are small and nimble enough to respond rapidly to the real needs of a marketer in a business world that now operates on Internet time. They can move sideways quickly and often break the “rules” in a manner that advances the brand’s interests.

2. Savvy clients can appreciative of an effort that breaks the rules and provides them with a new edge. They recognize the real value of good work.

3. Politics in small agencies are minimal and eat up far smaller amounts of energy and focus. This invisible reality directly serves the client’s interests.

4. Small projects from big name clients are adrenaline boosts for small agency personnel. They give special attention and enthusiasm because it offers them the chance to spread their wings and fly with something that has national brand name recognition.

5. Large agencies move slowly. Small agencies move fast.
These assignments are usually under-the-radar and don’t have layers of approval that large clients typically have to contend with. When the large, agency-of-record gets a job of any kind the efficiency opportunities go down the tube.

6. Small agencies have less to lose when we offer edgy thinking. Great advertising only happens when you take risks. When you have to answer to fickle stockholders you’re not going to be in a risk-taking mood. Small agencies don’t have to deal with a holding company that has no experience in advertising and doesn’t care to learn.

The new world for large advertisers is one of choice. Advertising agencies have finally embraced this reality. In fact to recover some of their lost revenue some larger agencies have started small agencies to siphon their client’s smaller projects to. Of course I would encourage their clients to select a small agency that doesn’t have an umbilical cord. Namely us.

Time Warner Close TO AOL Decision

: Nothing new on this, really, but just that Dick Parsons, CEO of Time Warner, is close to making a decision about the future of AOL, and that could prove pivotal to the media group's share price as it faces a battle for board control.
He has to choose between Microsoft and Google...he has still not determined whether to sell a stake in AOL or whether to pursue a partnership with Microsoft or Google that does not include giving up a share in AOL.
If Parsons can make a deal that pushes TW's share price decisively above $18, it would remove some of the pressure from the rebel Carl Icahn group...

Ian MacKaye's bakery

In an old interview with Salon, Ian MacKaye, Fugazi frontman and co-owner of Dischord Records, talked about running his label like a bakery.

American business at this point is really about developing an idea, making it profitable, selling it while it’s profitable and then getting out or diversifying. It’s just about sucking everything up. My idea was: Enjoy baking, sell your bread, people like it, sell more. Keep the bakery going because you’re making good food and people are happy.

TBS to air Funniest Commercials of the Year

Filed under: Television

Many thanks to AdJab reader Seth for telling us about Funniest Commercials of the Year 2005, which will air on TBS December 28 at 8 p.m. Central. The special will be hosted by comedian/actor Kevin Nealon. You can go to their Web site now and vote for your favorite. I think my favorite is the Toyota Vios "Bait" commercial. I won't ruin it for you if you haven't seen it, but it has a nice "what the hell was that?" twist in the end. Then there's the Dr. Pepper commercial. Eh, not so funny.

 

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The March of Progress

I don't usually ascribe any kind of emotion to corporations, so I was surprised that visiting the Macromedia homepage this morning made me sad. "Formerly Macromedia" indeed. But, it seems like it's only 10% cloud and 90% silver lining, because a quick scan of the new bios reveals that Kevin Lynch is in charge of PDF and Reader in addition to retaining his leadership on Flash. Given that PDF's always been something of a pain in the ass, despite its usefulness, and that Reader's user experience has been inconsistent, this could be fantastic news for all of us who love the web and use it all the time.

Now just give me something more reasonable than these huge, monolithic bundles full of redundant functionality. I know it's just a quick first step, but I wanna know which tools to bet on!

RSS Firm Attensa Gets $9 Million Funding

: Attensa, a Portland, OR-based RSS network and delivery firm, has received $9 million in second round funding from RSS Investors, a fund focused on information aggregation and other web technologies. Also investing was existing investor SmartForest Ventures. The new funding brings the total investment to date to $12 million.
This is the first investment from RSS Investors, which aims to raise $100 million to invest in companies that are developing new web technologies.
The capital will be used to fund development of the Attensa RSS product line including Web-based RSS reader/aggregator infrastructure, RSS clients for PCs and mobile devices, and servers supporting RSS applications in the enterprise.
More details in the company release here...
Related:
-- RSS Venture Starts With $20 Million; Plans To Raise -- And Invest -- $100 Million
-- More On New RSS VC Fund - And It's Not Party Time

Why Can't We “Claim” Wikipedia Articles?

Responding to recent criticism, Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales told CNET that to avoid future problems, the open source encyclopedia will bar anonymous users from creating new articles; only registered members will be able to do so. Anonymous users will still be able to edit articles. More importantly, Wales said he's not sure how to approach the question of whether people should be allowed to post on subjects in which they have a personal interest.

Here's an idea. Individuals and companies should have the right to “claim” articles that are entirely about them. Right now, if I am a podcaster, I can “claim” my channel on Odeo. If I am blogger, I can “claim” my feed on Feedster. If there's an article about me or my company on Wikipedia, there should be a mechanism that allows me to do the same on Wikipedia.

Now claiming an article on Wikipedia, if that feature were available, doesn't mean the subject would own it. However, it could allow people to have a more prominent say in what they feel is accurate in an entry that's about them and what isn't. Wikipedia is now growing into a cultural force, whether it likes it or not. With this comes some responsibility to put systems in place that help those who question it's accuracy have a more “visible” say in response to what the masses are saying, while being careful not to override it.

UPDATE: Wikipedia already has these boxes on its talk pages that indicate when a subject has edited their article. This is similar to “claiming.” They should be on the article pages too.

Technorati Tags: Wikipedia

Apple Plans to Pwn Your Living Room

Apple’s Macworld Expo is one month away and already there’s a gathering buzz about the company’s digital media ambitions. Alongside oft-reported rumors of the Mac mini transforming into a media hub like never before seen, there are suggestions that Apple is preparing to take a commanding lead in the digital home entertainment industry. Rumblings include making an expanded amount of digital content, including TV shows and feature-length, available as an on-demand service of sorts. Deals with big time Hollywood companies, including NBC and CBS, are also rumored, making this all a distinct possibility in just one month’s time. Coupled with the new Mac mini, you could be watching the latest episode of The West Wing, or whatever else Apple gets its hands on, on your nice HDTV that Santa just brought.

Road to Expo: Apple's new media experience coming soon [Think Secret]

Caffeine for a better memory?

Some time ago we offered up some tips on ridding yourself of coffee and caffeine. While that still might be a good idea, it turns out that a cuppa joe before a meeting can help memory-wise.

Apparently functional magnetic resonance imaging scans performed on the brains of 15 subjects who had just consumed caffeine equal to that found in two cups of coffee, showed increased activity in the frontal lobe where the working memory is located, and in the anterior cingulum that controls attention.

Maybe the key to caffeine is timing and moderation?

Ft. Collins Residents Find Something To Be Uptight About

Spike Jones at Brains On Fire points to this twisted identity story from Fort Collins, CO.

The owners of the Drunken Monkey are considering changing the controversial name of their bar - and they want the community to help.

The Old Town bar, 151 S. College Ave., is named for a Kung Fu movie and decorated like a beach cabana - complete with an outdoor deck, swings hanging from the ceiling and a tree house.

The idea for the contest came from Carey Hewitt, owner of The Cupboard in Old Town, who has objected to the Drunken Monkey's name since it opened in early October.

Hewitt, who has owned The Cupboard for 33 years, also led the opposition against the Purple Martini, a Denver-based bar that leased a space and wanted to open in Old Town. A liquor license for the bar was denied last week after two days of public testimony.

Since it opened a couple of months ago, its name has created a storm of controversy among Old Town business owners and residents who say they’re embarrassed to take visitors through downtown.

Chip Steiner, executive director of the Downtown Development Authority, thinks changing the bar’s name is a terrific idea. He thinks the Drunken Monkey is a degrading name that does nothing to help the downtown area.

“It’s very damaging to the downtown image and its reputation,” Steiner said. “It’s just a bad, bad name.”

ogle_ad_map_zH8WvKvzBZjB3TTz99wUGfgSObY_">

The Museum of Modern Betas

The MoMB is “a site dedicated to listing web-based applications on a beta trip.” Thank you for pointing out the ridiculous on a daily basis. 400 and counting.

The Good Gift Seeker

Need help with the Christmas gifts? HBO has a nice idea to help you out and, of course, increase the sales of its Series on DVD. Have a look at www.goodgiftseeker.com. You can find the perfect gift for someone (mom,...

Voila! TiVo Transformed into Online Portal

TiVo's rapid transformation into a media/communications portal continues with its announcement of new online services that extend its reach into e-commerce - in this case, t-commerce - MediaPost...

Google School: Filter adult content with safesearch

For my mother-in-law who was searching for the Dick's Sporting Goods web site last week at the office: to filter out adult web sites from Google search results, use the safesearch operator.

So a search for Dick's (whose web site, unsurprisingly, is NOT dicks.com), Google up:

safesearch: Dick's Sporting Goods

And before I sink to the level of unfunny crude jokes, I'll do us both a favor and press "Publish."

MSNBC Launches NBA Rookie Blog

MSNBC has launched a blog written by NBA rookie Nate Robinson, who plays for the New York Knicks. The blog has comments turned on and so far it seems active. Nice idea. Hey Calacanis, how come you didn't think of this? Mark, hope this doesn't mean that the Knicks will open a bigger lead on your team - at least in the  conversation standings.

Technorati Tags: Basketball, NBA

Getting Sirius

I was scanning up my new Sirius radio dial last night, past channels for oldies of every decade, fifteen rock channels all devoted to tastes younger than mine, five electronic and dance channels (I paused on the disco channel, called The Strobe), the seven hip-hop/R&B channels (Classic soul agreed with me), the five country channels (I liked the Bluegrass one), three Christian, five jazz & blues, two standards, three classical, four Latin & International, two Howard Stern channels (keeping the seat warm for The King of All Media's arrival in January), and then...

Steve Gillmor. wtf!

There was the voice of our Gang Leader Himself, on a channel (#103) called Sirius Stars. In the dark I could swear the name of the show was "Attention Deficit". It said "Attention (something... ah: 'Tech). Whatever the case, it had mine. I had to get out of the car and run an errand, though; so I missed the show.

Then I was listening again last night and heard Mike Vizard (get a blog, Mike, so we can link to you) interviewing Dick Hardt of Sxip. The title of the channel was now "Adam Curry's Podshow", I think. Though, obviously, Adam wasn't on it.

I remembered Adam talking about getting on Sirius back last Summer or something, but I kinda forgot about it after my 15 minutes or less of daily podcast listening began spreading across the other 5 zillion 'casts out there.

Anyway, I bit the silo and bought into the Sirius thing, mostly because I wanted to test reception and stuff in the house we're building. Also because reception of regular radio in the new place will be even worse than it is here, thanks to stone walls and a copper roof.

We got a Sportster Replay, which is a receiver-diaplay that works in a car kit, a home kit and a boom box. The unit came with the car kit. The home kit and the boom box were extra. There are big rebates and promotions on all of them.

In the car, the kit attaches by suction cup to the windshield, and gets power from the lighter. In my old Subaru, the only way to play is through the FM radio, and for that the Sportster Replay comes with a transmitter that lets you choose any frequency on the FM band, including the only one with nothing on it: 87.9. For that alone I love the thing. That frequency will get some interference from (and give some to) local stations on 88.1; but otherwise, it's the one frequency that all the little accessory FM transmitters should automatically provide, but none do. Not that I've seen, anyway. All car receivers can get 87.9, and the only station in the country on that channel is 10-watt KSFH from St. Francis High in Mountain View, CA. It has about the same coverage as a bullhorn. Outside of Mountain View, the coast is clear.

The sound is good too; although some channels seem to have that highly compressed sound that seems to be coming through a vacuum cleaner hose. The highs have this funny ringing edge to them. But that's in the car, where trees and bridges often cause drop-outs. The most common words on the display are "acquiring signal".

At home, the sound is pretty good. I'm guessing most of the music channels are about what you get from 128kb mp3s. But it might be better in some cases. I haven't listened enough yet to tell. The sound of the Sirius music stations on DishTV is quite good, and I suppose this is about the same.

The UI of the Sportster Relay isn't bad, as these kinds of things go. It's better than the average aftermarket car radio (featuring, for example, a real knob for tuning, rather than buttons); but not as easy to use as the average GM factory rental car radio (which is, believe it or not, my gold standard for obvious and convenient functionality in car radios).

One possibly cool thing: the kid can sit in the back seat and operate the radio with a remote control we're sure to lose.

It would be nice if there were a way to power the unit off 12 volts of batteries without putting them in a big old boom box. But, considering the need to put the antenna outside, the boom box is kind of a convenient way to wrap 25 feet of cable around something that hides it. The 'box is in fact pretty cleverly designed. The sound is good, but not as good as I'd expected. Nice features are audio-out jacks for headphones and left/right channels.

Big plusses: NPR (3 channels of programming from the network) and lots of sports, including ESPN radio channels and up to three simultaneous NBA games, where the radio displays the live score.

And, of course, Howard Stern, when he arrives. Like Jeff Jarvis, I'm a fan. What I've heard of Howard 100 so far has been pretty funny.

Now, the downside.

I don't care how many channels you put on a service like Sirius'; they all come from one company, and sound like it.

You know the kind of food you get in Universal Citywalk, or Disneyland, or Busch Gardens? Even if it's from some outside chain, there something homogenous about it. Something totally corporatized.

My kid likes Sirius' 50s and 60s channels, but gets bored with them because they play the same 200 songs or so, over and over, just like terrestrial stations like KRTH/101.1 in Los Angeles do. Sure, they swap a few out every few weeks, but the selection gets pretty monotonous. We also notice the same thing on the holiday music channel and Margaritaville, which used to be called Vacation. If they're trying to be different than ordinary radio, why not play more of the whole repertoire in each channel's genre?

The silo'd nature of the whole thing galls me. The antenna wiring is "special" (and different than what the XM satellite radios use). The radios come only from Sirius. Though they might not be able to get anybody else to make radios to their liking. Not sure.

The website is atrocious. It has annoying flash bullshit on the index page (which has a URL longer than the location bar), and navigation ranging from confusing to opaque. Signing up and getting the service activated was an ordeal. For awhile it looked like we were going to have to do it on the phone.

And how about working some podcasts on the thing? How about some RSS to notify listeners when something's coming up? How about company blogs?

Anyway, we'll see how it goes. The weekend's coming up and I'll be driving around some, so I'll get more of a chance to listen.

The bottom line question: how will it mix, or compete with, podcasts? Right now my choice for that is two silos: Sirius and an iPod, which is actually the hardware end of the iTunes silo. I think the Sirius will win the convenience war more often because it's better integrated with the car, and radiates on 87.9.

Both, I've found, are dangerous to operate while driving. Ya kinda hafta pull over, especially with the iPod.

Any way you slice it, we've got a long way to go.

The 14-speed Blender

My wife purchased a new blender for us this evening (our old one being well on its way to that blender paradise in the sky). It’s certainly an attractive little thing, but what’s up with 14 speeds? Our old one had 14 speeds, too. When is it that critical that you rev your blender so precisely? And who decides that “shred” is more intense than “blend”, but not so powerful as “chop”? I think I only ever used two (or possibly three) of the settings on our old blender.

Flavor Flav, taste expert

Filed under: Funny, Online, Television

If we were going to do a regular "Commercials We Love" category here at AdJab, it would clearly be overflowing. As an example of said enamorment (is that even a word?), I present to you Miller Lite's "Taste Expert" advertisement starring none other than Flavor Flav, who Public Enemy fans will appreciate. This whole shebang is part of the larger Taste Trial campaign, where Miller continues to state that Bud Light has changed its product in order to stay in the game.

It truly doesn't get any funnier than this, especially when you see that the lawyer repping Miller Lite is wearing jeans and a sportcoat, and that the judge is clearly on Miller's side. Wash down your viewing of "Taste Expert" with "Twist Off" and you'll get what I mean.
 

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Don't change, sue

I continue to be puzzled by the car industry's ongoing fight against better mileage (Bennington Banner - Headlines.) Imagine how moribund the computer industry would be if processors never got faster. You'd only buy a new computer when your old one got too dusty.

If mileage requirements went up, people wouldn't buy FEWER cars. They'd buy more cars, more often. Yes, there's no question that short-sighted consumers are regularly seduced by low initial prices or big car styling and buy a car that costs them a lot more in the long run. But if mileage standards go up, those cars cease to be an option. What happens instead is that there's movement, always a car a little better as they march to the standard, which gives you a reason to upgrade.

The result would be a race to make better and better cars (and to buy cars that are cheaper and cheaper to operate.) If the cars are cheaper to run, then, over time, people will actually be willing to pay more for them, won't they?

If I were a big company CEO facing such an incredible level of uncertainty about the key input to my product (the price of gas), why wouldn't this be a great way to simultaneously level the playing field (ten years from now, which is plenty of time to get ready).

It's like the cigarette companies. Think about how much they would have pocketed in profits if they had supported a ban on advertising ten years ago. Billions and billions of dollars...

In the face of change, reactionary stuck companies don't look to marketing or innovation. They sue.

David Byrne gets RIAA warning

Cory Doctorow: David Byrne -- ex-Talking Head and odd music impressario -- has been targetted by the RIAA for streaming a radio station that played too much Missy Elliot (the RIAA's approved blanket license for Internet prohibits playing more than four tracks by an artist in a three-hour period). Byrne write eloquently about the hassle of not being able to share the music he loves with his listeners:

In my case the law forbids streaming "radio" that features more than 4 tracks by any one artist in a three-hour period. My guess is that they may have confused streaming with downloading -- in the same way that people often confuse downloading with file sharing. They are afraid that even if it's not downloadable somehow if a fan knows there will be 3 Missy songs at a given time they can prepare their gear and tape them. The assumption being that sale is lost. [I've been informed that the fear is less sensible than that -- it is that if you know you can hear a specific artist whenever you want, then the reasoning is you would never buy their records.]

Back in the day I used my boom box to tape things off the radio all the time -- that's how I found out about music I didn't know about, and eventually I not only bought those records, but ended up promoting them, too. Which made a fair amount of money for some record labels -- but not for me. Not complaining, though.

nks, Rosco!)