Steve Rubel points out that Google has acquired JotSpot.
Google continues to roll on with another acquisition. It just gobbled up JotSpot. And now the wiki service will be free and integrated with the rest of Google’s suite of web-based applications.
JotSpot is a wiki hosting company that lets businesses or groups easily create collaborative web sites without dealing directly with hosting, programming, etc. This could be a nice fit for the growing Google Office that now consists of Docs (formerly Writely) and Spreadsheets (built internally, I believe). It seems possible that Picasa could have a business side to it as well by helping businesses organize and easily retrieve corporate photos. For example, I could see Neven Vision’s technology (another Google acquisition) being used to locate photos of an individual for use in a retirement party slide how.
Outside of the Office side of things, JotSpot’s technology could be used for other collaborative projects, like affinity groups, community organizing, political campaigns, genealogy, and other collaborative efforts.
CNET is reporting that Google has started cutting revenue sharing deals with video content creators:
The search company has agreed to turn over most advertising revenue generated by the latest video from Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, creators of “The Diet Coke & Mentos Experiment,” according to Peter Chane, a senior product manager for Google Video.
In exchange, Grobe and Voltz, who saw their original offering–which shows a version of Vegas’ Bellagio Fountains made of 101 2-liter bottles of Diet Coke and 523 Mentos–catch fire with video-sharing fans last summer, have agreed to let Google host their latest video, “The Diet Coke & Mentos Experiment II.”
The Mentos Experiment creators have proven that they can both draw and audience and create a tremendous viral reaction to their videos, causing dozens of inspired videographers to post their own Mentos experiments to the site.
Since Grobe and Voltz appear to have figured out how to draw an audience, it’s time to start thinking about money. Assuming they don’t want to host their vidoes themselves and sell ads against them, sites like Revver, and as of yesterday, MetaCafe, have provides revenue sharing opportunities for content. Brobe and Voltz chose Revver for their original video and have made more than $28,000 from it as of July. As of today, their top ranked Mentos experiment has been viewed 3,591,625 times on Revver.
While those are impressive numbers, it’s pretty safe to assume that Grobe and Voltz would gain a larger audience for their work if it was published to a more popular video site like YouTube or Google Video. However, before today, there was no way for amateur video creators to monetize their content on either platform. In fact, YouTube’s lax copyright control likely cost Grobe and Voltz a serious chunk of change and time dealing with pirated copies of their videos popping up on YouTube:
It took eight months for Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz to mastermind a now iconic Web video that shows them creating intricate fountains of soda by dropping 500 Mentos into 100 2-liter bottles of Diet Coke. The video became an instant hit after it was published in June on Revver, a service that shares ad revenue. Within days, bootlegs showed up on Google and YouTube. Voltz, a civil litigation lawyer, figured out the process for getting the videos removed. But as copies kept reappearing, Voltz learned that he had to keep contacting YouTube to take down each new version.
Did Google cut a deal with the Mentos guys to make up for the poor treatment they’ve received in the past?
Putting the past behind them, Grobe and Voltz’s move to Google likely makes good financial sense since Google has the largest network of online advertisers in the world, and now owns the most popular video publishing platform in the world. Putting those two together likely means more viewers at a higher CPM for future Mentos Experiments.
On October 23-25, 2006 Andrew and I attended The Ajax Experience 2006 Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. This is the second occurrence of the Conference (the first was in San Francisco in May 2006). The three day event was hosted in Boston?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s brand new and beautiful Westin Hotel and attracted more than 450 attendees. The speaker list read like the “who?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s who” of the Internet industry, including Brendan Eich (creator of Javascript), Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer (guys behind Ajaxian.com), Douglas Crockford (creator of JSON) and many others. All together more than 40 speakers shared their knowledge on topics ranging from general design concepts to specific framework and toolkit examples.
The conference started with a keynote address by Ben and Dion from Ajaxian.com, presenters of the event. They talked about what the conference would be called if the acronym “Ajax” was never coined. A few terms were thrown out, including DHTML, but if I had to suggest one more it would be “Web 2.0 Technologies.” Truly, the topics were much broader than any specific technology, toolkit or an API.
The information was presented in a number of 90 minute technical sessions. The sessions were accessible through 6 parallel tracks. Every hour and a half we would pick a different presentation to attend. The format also allowed for short breaks between presentations, which was perfect for connecting with speakers and vendors. Everyone was extremely receptive and welcoming. It was great to catch up with Aaron Gustafson and ask him about future emerging technologies or grab lunch with Alex Russell and get more information about Dojo, an Open Source toolkit or find out about the Ajax application server from Helmi’s VP, Kevin Deutsch.
For us, the best times were the Expert Panel Discussions. These fun, daily closing events pit the industry experts and product vendors against the audience in a barrage of questions. Imagine the main guys from Mozilla and Microsoft IE sitting at the same table answering questions about security, functionality and compatibility. My personal favorite “panel expert” was Doug Crockford, currently with Yahoo Corp. Doug, “The man that requires no introduction,” is extremely knowledgeable and equally opinionated. This, combined with controversial questions, proved to be quite entertaining.
Overall, the conference was amazing - one of the most informative and eye opening experiences that a web technologist can have. The awesome organization and the beautiful venue made the three-day learning event even more exciting. The choice of subjects were well rounded, and catered to both beginners and experts. Another major part of this experience was connecting with other industry professionals. We met many people who are working on similar projects, using different tools and technologies. The ability to see different approaches to solving the same problem was priceless.
A word to the future attendees:
The conference is pretty intense and will keep you busy from 7:30am to 9:00pm (yes, you get food in the middle). The 90 minute sessions are all business, but won’t teach you the entire subject matter, as one should expect. I suggest coming prepared and with topics researched. You can also email the speakers to find out more about the topics covered. This will help you select appropriate sessions based on your level of expertise.
That’s it! I know you will have fun and learn A LOT. See you at the next Ajax Experience 2007 Conference.
On October 23-25, 2006 Andrew and I attended The Ajax Experience 2006 Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. This is the second occurrence of the Conference (the first was in San Francisco in May 2006). The three day event was hosted in Boston?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s brand new and beautiful Westin Hotel and attracted more than 450 attendees. The speaker list read like the “who?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s who” of the Internet industry, including Brendan Eich (creator of Javascript), Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer (guys behind Ajaxian.com), Douglas Crockford (creator of JSON) and many others. All together more than 40 speakers shared their knowledge on topics ranging from general design concepts to specific framework and toolkit examples.
The conference started with a keynote address by Ben and Dion from Ajaxian.com, presenters of the event. They talked about what the conference would be called if the acronym “Ajax” was never coined. A few terms were thrown out, including DHTML, but if I had to suggest one more it would be “Web 2.0 Technologies.” Truly, the topics were much broader than any specific technology, toolkit or an API.
The information was presented in a number of 90 minute technical sessions. The sessions were accessible through 6 parallel tracks. Every hour and a half we would pick a different presentation to attend. The format also allowed for short breaks between presentations, which was perfect for connecting with speakers and vendors. Everyone was extremely receptive and welcoming. It was great to catch up with Aaron Gustafson and ask him about future emerging technologies or grab lunch with Alex Russell and get more information about Dojo, an Open Source toolkit or find out about the Ajax application server from Helmi’s VP, Kevin Deutsch.
For us, the best times were the Expert Panel Discussions. These fun, daily closing events pit the industry experts and product vendors against the audience in a barrage of questions. Imagine the main guys from Mozilla and Microsoft IE sitting at the same table answering questions about security, functionality and compatibility. My personal favorite “panel expert” was Doug Crockford, currently with Yahoo Corp. Doug, “The man that requires no introduction,” is extremely knowledgeable and equally opinionated. This, combined with controversial questions, proved to be quite entertaining.
Overall, the conference was amazing - one of the most informative and eye opening experiences that a web technologist can have. The awesome organization and the beautiful venue made the three-day learning event even more exciting. The choice of subjects were well rounded, and catered to both beginners and experts. Another major part of this experience was connecting with other industry professionals. We met many people who are working on similar projects, using different tools and technologies. The ability to see different approaches to solving the same problem was priceless.
A word to the future attendees:
The conference is pretty intense and will keep you busy from 7:30am to 9:00pm (yes, you get food in the middle). The 90 minute sessions are all business, but won’t teach you the entire subject matter, as one should expect. I suggest coming prepared and with topics researched. You can also email the speakers to find out more about the topics covered. This will help you select appropriate sessions based on your level of expertise.
That’s it! I know you will have fun and learn A LOT. See you at the next Ajax Experience 2007 Conference.
On October 23-25, 2006 Andrew and I attended The Ajax Experience 2006 Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. This is the second occurrence of the Conference (the first was in San Francisco in May 2006). The three day event was hosted in Boston?¢Ç«®Ç—¢s brand new and beautiful Westin Hotel and attracted more than 450 attendees. The speaker list read like the “who?¢Ç«®Ç—¢s who” of the Internet industry, including Brendan Eich (creator of Javascript), Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer (guys behind Ajaxian.com), Douglas Crockford (creator of JSON) and many others. All together more than 40 speakers shared their knowledge on topics ranging from general design concepts to specific framework and toolkit examples.
The conference started with a keynote address by Ben and Dion from Ajaxian.com, presenters of the event. They talked about what the conference would be called if the acronym “Ajax” was never coined. A few terms were thrown out, including DHTML, but if I had to suggest one more it would be “Web 2.0 Technologies.” Truly, the topics were much broader than any specific technology, toolkit or an API.
The information was presented in a number of 90 minute technical sessions. The sessions were accessible through 6 parallel tracks. Every hour and a half we would pick a different presentation to attend. The format also allowed for short breaks between presentations, which was perfect for connecting with speakers and vendors. Everyone was extremely receptive and welcoming. It was great to catch up with Aaron Gustafson and ask him about future emerging technologies or grab lunch with Alex Russell and get more information about Dojo, an Open Source toolkit or find out about the Ajax application server from Helmi’s VP, Kevin Deutsch.
For us, the best times were the Expert Panel Discussions. These fun, daily closing events pit the industry experts and product vendors against the audience in a barrage of questions. Imagine the main guys from Mozilla and Microsoft IE sitting at the same table answering questions about security, functionality and compatibility. My personal favorite “panel expert” was Doug Crockford, currently with Yahoo Corp. Doug, “The man that requires no introduction,” is extremely knowledgeable and equally opinionated. This, combined with controversial questions, proved to be quite entertaining.
Overall, the conference was amazing - one of the most informative and eye opening experiences that a web technologist can have. The awesome organization and the beautiful venue made the three-day learning event even more exciting. The choice of subjects were well rounded, and catered to both beginners and experts. Another major part of this experience was connecting with other industry professionals. We met many people who are working on similar projects, using different tools and technologies. The ability to see different approaches to solving the same problem was priceless.
A word to the future attendees:
The conference is pretty intense and will keep you busy from 7:30am to 9:00pm (yes, you get food in the middle). The 90 minute sessions are all business, but won’t teach you the entire subject matter, as one should expect. I suggest coming prepared and with topics researched. You can also email the speakers to find out more about the topics covered. This will help you select appropriate sessions based on your level of expertise.
That’s it! I know you will have fun and learn A LOT. See you at the next Ajax Experience 2007 Conference.
-
“The way I see it, most HD Radios seem to pretty expensive ($150+) and I’m not seeing much of a benefit. Therefore, I ask you (my technically minded often leading edge readers): Am I missing something?”
Jeremy Zawodny is sick of, “sharing.” By “sharing,” Zawodny is referring to the questionably helpful “Share This” type links sites provide in an effort to get you to email content to your friends:
“Why is it that almost nobody can think of a way to represent “email this to a friend” without using the word “share”? I seem to run into “share” links all over the freaking place. Sometimes the single word “share” is the link. That?¢Ç«®Ç—¢s’ really descriptive, guys. Good design.
And they seem to be placed on the sites under the assumption that I’m too stupid to send email (to the people I presumably email frequently already) with a URL in it (see above list). Thanks for the confidence boost.”
He makes a good point. The terminology used to represent this common task is all over the map, and so is the functionality of that link, from launching email applications to taking people to online forms. Personally, I’m a copy/paste the URL kind of guy for the reason Zawodny explains at the end of his post:
“Before you accuse me of over-estimating how “easy” it is to copy and paste, consider this: None of those email forms have any knowledge of my address book anyway. So I’ve gotta either remember and correctly type a bunch of my friends’ email addresses in order to use them–or I have to, you guessed it, copy and paste them from my address book. Back to square one, huh?”
Exactly. My contact’s email addresses are in my email application, so it’s easier for me to copy the URL of the page I want to share into a new email, then address it to whomever I want to sent it to. That’s much easier than remembering email addresses, typing them correctly, and figuring out how I’m supposed to delimit email address entries from one form to the next (does this one require commas or semi-colons?).
Here is a quick look at the “Share This” choices made by a few popular sites:
TreeHugger
GigaOM
Engadget
YouTube
Converstations
Yahoo
One way to make the forms more useful would be to integrate them with popular email applications. Google could integrate Gmail with YouTube, making your address book available for sharing.
We’ve thought about this for Technology Evangelist and current take two approaches.
1. Provide email friendly URLs that are under 80 characters long for easy copy/paste emailing. We’ve found that URLs longer than that tend to break when they wrap, causing disappointment for recipients of shared links.
2. Provide an “Email This Post” link at the bottom of each post. It clearly states what it does, opens a window to fill in sender information, and for those who want to be power users, integration with popular email applications including Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and Plaxo can be done.
Unfortunately for Zawodny, I think we’re going to see a lot more “Share This” links on the web moving forward due to the move away from easily emailable HTML pages to AJAXified browsing states that have to be converted into an email friendly link for sharing.
Back in February, Ben and I were whining about the poor job Amazon does differentiating between products available for free shipping through Amazon Prime and those that are not. As far as we can tell, it largely breaks down based on who’s shipping the product: products coming directly from Amazon qualify while those from 3rd parties do not.
Six months have passed and Amazon hasn’t gotten around to fixing what we consider to be a problem, but someone else has. Jacob Vogelstein created a new product search for Amazon that searches for only NEW products available from Amazon that qualify for Prime and/or SuperSaver shipping called iSearchBetter.com.
Here is an example of when this is particularly useful. Check out the search results for [timex ironman 53151]:
Amazon provides three different prices, shipping costs, and suppliers of the exact same watch: One has free shipping, one can ship for free if it’s part of a larger total order size, and the other costs just under $5 to ship.
Compare that to iSearchBetter.com’s results for the same search:
iSearchBetter did indeed search better by filtering out the non-Prime eligible products.
The search interface is a little clunky, requiring users to pick an appropriate category before running a search. Some categories are empty and it’s not clear whether this means nothing on Amazon in that category qualifies for free shipping or if there’s a glitch on iSearchBetter.
Back in February, Ben and I were whining about the poor job Amazon does differentiating between products available for free shipping through Amazon Prime and those that are not. As far as we can tell, it largely breaks down based on who’s shipping the product: products coming directly from Amazon qualify while those from 3rd parties do not.
Six months have passed and Amazon hasn’t gotten around to fixing what we consider to be a problem, but someone else has. Jacob Vogelstein created a new product search for Amazon that searches for only NEW products available from Amazon that qualify for Prime and/or SuperSaver shipping called iSearchBetter.com.
Here is an example of when this is particularly useful. Check out the search results for [timex ironman 53151]:
Amazon provides three different prices, shipping costs, and suppliers of the exact same watch: One has free shipping, one can ship for free if it’s part of a larger total order size, and the other costs just under $5 to ship.
Compare that to iSearchBetter.com’s results for the same search:
iSearchBetter did indeed search better by filtering out the non-Prime eligible products.
The search interface is a little clunky, requiring users to pick an appropriate category before running a search. Some categories are empty and it’s not clear whether this means nothing on Amazon in that category qualifies for free shipping or if there’s a glitch on iSearchBetter.
Back in February, Ben and I were whining about the poor job Amazon does differentiating between products available for free shipping through Amazon Prime and those that are not. As far as we can tell, it largely breaks down based on who’s shipping the product: products coming directly from Amazon qualify while those from 3rd parties do not.
Six months have passed and Amazon hasn’t gotten around to fixing what we consider to be a problem, but someone else has. Jacob Vogelstein created a new product search for Amazon that searches for only NEW products available from Amazon that qualify for Prime and/or SuperSaver shipping called iSearchBetter.com.
Here is an example of when this is particularly useful. Check out the search results for [timex ironman 53151]:
Amazon provides three different prices, shipping costs, and suppliers of the exact same watch: One has free shipping, one can ship for free if it’s part of a larger total order size, and the other costs just under $5 to ship.
Compare that to iSearchBetter.com’s results for the same search:
iSearchBetter did indeed search better by filtering out the non-Prime eligible products.
The search interface is a little clunky, requiring users to pick an appropriate category before running a search. Some categories are empty and it’s not clear whether this means nothing on Amazon in that category qualifies for free shipping or if there’s a glitch on iSearchBetter.
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