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“But the telcos want to create a tiered system that would leave them free to price the market well out of reach for your favorite website, be it porn or politics, forcing that site off the super-Tollway and into the Internet equivalent of I-5 at rush hour
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“Sen. Ted Stevens (yes, THAT Sen. Stevens) is trying to pull a fast one, and get a cloture vote on net neutrality before Congress is scheduled to recess this week.”
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“Velux has developed electrochromic glass that darkens instantly when you flip a switch. Available now with additional sizes to be offered later this year, the glass works by applying an electric current to its special layers, which then turn dark, blocki
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Google’s search engine optimization liason, Matt Cutts, puts Google Video to work to answer some popular SEO questions.
This is the sixth in a 435-part series (give or take) on sources of syndicatable content for websites. Sites covered in this series offer tools to publish content from their site onto your own site.
Blog Headlines Using Feedburner BuzzBoost
Feedburner’s BuzzBoost feature allows you to syndicate blog headlines onto web sites using a simple JavaScript code snippet. Pasting the BuzzBoost code into your site’s template will create a new Headlines section with the latest posts from the blog of your choice. Here is what Technology Evangelist’s headlines look like using BuzzBoost:
To try this out, click the BuzzBoost tab under the Publicize section of your FeedBurner account.
Syndicate Technology Evangelist
You can syndicate Technology Evangelist headlines onto your site using our Feedburner BuzzBoost code. Instructions and feed code can be found here.
BusinessWeek is reporting that YouTube is facing its first copyright lawsuit. Surprisingly, it comes from a person who covered the Los Angeles riots fourteen years ago rather than the MPAA or RIAA:
NO CLEAR BOUNDARIES. Tur’s lawsuit shows the fine line that YouTube is walking as it attempts to build its business model. Tur is suing because his videos of the riot and other events were uploaded without his permission. Although lawyers agree that YouTube should be protected by copyright law as long as it responds to content owners’ requests to take down their works, it entered uncharted territory when it recently began adding ads next to search results.The law prohibits a site from benefiting financially from infringement, but the company argues that it’s protected since it doesn’t sell ads against individual videos. Still, the courts haven’t set clear boundaries. “There has to be some way to make money with advertising that doesn’t deprive you of the safe harbor. But where that line is, no one really knows,” says Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
It’s a great article outlining the copyright challenges faced by video hosting sites like YouTube and copyright holders who’s content ends up on video sites - often without their permission.
And who knew you could make $30,000 dropping Mentos in Diet Coke?
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“Mocked by comedian Jon Stewart for calling the Internet a bunch of tubes, U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens said on Thursday he is open to going on Stewart’s popular “Daily Show” for a rebuttal.”
Amazon’s associates program offers web site publishers a fairly quick and easy way to generate some extra income from product recommendations. Currently, the program pays commissions starting at 4% (or as Amazon says, “up to 8.5%”) on sales generated from traffic you refer through an affiliate link. The cool thing is you get commissions on the entire sale, so even if you refer someone to a $2.99 box of cereal (good stuff) you’ll earn commissions on the entire order.
Not surprisingly, people tend to click (and buy) most often on links that are relevant to the topic of the page they’re reading. So is there a way to automatically present links that are relevant to the page? Here are three ways it can be done.
1. Use your site’s tagging system to generate relevant recommendations. Amazon’s “Recommended Product Links” ad format allows you to select a keyword and/or category, then let Amazon serve appropriate product recommendations onto your site. The nice thing about this is Amazon will keep their ad current, so you won’t find yourself advertising products that are out of stock or no longer produced.
One trick I use on this site is to dynamically serve category names into Amazon’s ad code to create relevant book recommendations near the end of each category page. For example, the bottom of our VoIP category page includes the following copy and advertising:
I figure if someone has reached the bottom of that page, they’re ready for their next move. In this case, I’ve given them the option of visiting VoIP information at del.icio.us, Technorati, or Google News along with six book recommendations from Amazon. The Amazon links are dynamically generated based on the category.
To do this, pick the ad format you’d like to use on Amazon Associates, enter a keyword, then generate the code. Before including it in your site, swap out the keyword with the code used to generate categories.
2. Use Omakase Links. Amazon has a new ad format in beta that will generate product recommendations on the fly for any web page. Similar to Google AdSense, it takes a look at the content of a page, then serves up relevant ads. But rather than being ads for other web sites, they’re product recommendations from Amazon’s extensive catalog.
3. Use an Ad Rotation Script. Chris Garrett over at Performancing recently published a tutorial on how you can auto-rotate the keyword variable in your Amazon ad code using PHP. This seems like a good choice if you want to limit your advertising to a group of product choices you’ve deemed relevant to your audience.
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Nice tip that makes it easier to gmail something you find interesting.
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Helpful tutorials to learn Ajax.
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“I am writing this as a partial documentation of my trials and tribulations with hopes of aiding all Linux noobs on the steps necessary to create a basic Linux, Apache2, MySQL5 and PHP5 system with FTP.”
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“Rasmus Lerdorf led OSCON attendees through a series of optimizations for modern web applications using PHP at O’Reilly’s Open Source conference today.”
It was just a matter of time. My Treo 600 finally died after a long life of good work. Um, long may not be the best description since a previous Treo 600 became dead to me when it stopped syncing but it was still a good run compared to the half dozen Treo 300 models I went through (kept breaking the flipping lid off).
What should I do now? Should I take Ben’s advice and upgrade to the Treo 700p, pick up a Treo 650 for around $280 on Ebay, or look at the Windows options including the PPC-6700 and Treo 700w?
At this point, I’m leaning toward the 700p over the 650 because I really want the EVDO web access. The Windows devices have EVDO as well, but I’m not a fan of the PPC-6700’s two-handed operation (how and I supposed to surf the web while holding my wife’s purse at the mall?) and the Treo 700w’s interface seems to call for more trips to the stylus than the 700p.
Frankly, none of the smartphones I’m familiar with are perfect. To me, perfect means as reliable as my thermostat, which keeps my home comfortable day after day with no fiddeling, reboots, or attention of any kind. It just works as expected. Do I expect this level of reliability from my smartphone? No. I’ve grown to accept the occasional dropped call and sudden unexpected reboots.
What smartphone would you recommend or warn me against?
Yesterday, Skype released version 1.5beta for the Macintosh bringing Mac users long-awaited video support. Today, SightSpeed is scheduled to release version 5.0 which should bring us inbound and outbound PSTN calls as well as TV tuner support. While both of these offerings are great, they are both still missing some key features that would help bring them into mass adoption.
In the Technology Evangelist office, the statement that ‘Skype is the clear winner in VoIP’ has been heard more than once. I’m not sure I agree with that quite yet. Skype is a great consumer-to-consumer (C2C) application, but it falls down in business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) applications. When you make a call to a business today, you’re offered with a series of options to choose from: you may be put on hold, you may be transferred to a different person, you may be routed to a call hunt group for support and any message you leave could be e-mailed to the end user. None of these options are natively supported in Skype, SightSpeed, iChat, MSN Messenger, AIM or Yahoo Messenger. While a few of the players may have some plugins to get them partial support of one or two options listed above, none offer everything.
Why is this important? There will be a couple of key players in the VoIP arena – right now I see those as Skype and Vonage (when users talk about VoIP, they usually seem to mean either Skype or Vonage, therefore in my mind that makes them the key players). The problem is that businesses cannot adopt these services as their default communications method because they are too primitive. If I’m a Skype user, chances are I cannot Skype-to-Skype a user at Widgets-R-Us. I would have to Skype-Out to get to the company’s phone system. If a VoIP company wants to truly rule the entire market, they need to incorporate business class rules while still being consumer friendly. Until then, we will be left with the hybrid system we see in place now. Since businesses are not on Skype’s VoIP network, consumers will make calls to a business using Skype’s PSTN feature called SkypeOut which defeats part of the purpose of Skype in the first place. While the business may be on an enterprise VoIP system, such as Cisco Call Manager, the call is not native to one VoIP provider, it must jump around.
Imagine a VoIP service that offers everything a small to medium sized business (SMB) needs, as well as being so easy to use any consumer could grab on to it. Consumer use for voice, video and chat would be completely free. Business use, which gets them the ability to park calls, transfer, hold, etc., would be an up-sell, but would still be far cheaper than a traditional PBX system. This would create the perfect synergy for mass adoption. Consumers would use the product to talk to family and friends, as well as conduct business when needed. Businesses would use the product because consumers are on it. Businesses would use it to talk to other businesses since now other businesses are on this too. It’s a snowball effect that sounds easy on paper, but in reality is quite difficult to do. Getting users to accept the service, to reach critical mass, is the hardest part of this offering. Skype has this critical mass, but is missing key features needed for true mass adoption. I’m not even sure Skype is worried about this vision. Once Skype was purchased by eBay their worries of B2B/B2C went out the window. Skype is a pure C2C company now, and that opens the door for someone else to come in and take their place.
My wish list for the ultimate communications package is much longer than what is listed above. I would like to see help desk plug-ins for support, PBX integration as well as an open API that allows software and hardware vendors to directly integrate into their product. What other features would you like to see in your VoIP offering? Do you feel that Skype has already won the market or is it too early to tell? Share your thoughts in the comments.
A reporter interviewing me for an upcoming story on YouTube mentioned that I should check out the Titanic 2 video on YouTube. Hilarious:
Thanks for the rec.
Imagine how hard it would have been to make this if the creator actually got rights to all of the content used in this work. Could it be done?
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Johnny is a 22 year old Internet nerd. He works as a programmer with some megacorp, went straight from the computer labs in college to the cubicle farm. He needs to get out more and he needs a girlfriend.
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“He’s launching the latest version of JotSpot Wiki 2.0?¢Ç«®Çƒ˙combining the wiki collaboration foundation with pre-defined page types that provide productivity application functionality?¢Ç«®Çƒ˙to bring wikis into the mainstream.”
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Geek activism has not taken off yet, but it should. With the gamers recognizing the need for a louder voice, EFF gaining momentum and Linux taking on the mainstream on the one hand and recent severe losses in privacy, freedom of speech and intellectual pr
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“The software giant will launch a hardware device and accompanying software products under the ‘Zune’ brand. Microsoft did not give out any further details.”
