Microformats
Posted on 29. May, 2007 by Dean Whitney in archive and has 0 Comments
A new brand of standards are appearing called microformats. Some examples include: Votelinks, NoFollow, hCard, hCalendar, podcasting, blogchalking, xfn, RelLicense, RelTag xFolk, and online news. Microformats.org provides the following overview of microformats.
About Microformats
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).
Sudoku 2.0
Posted on 23. May, 2007 by Dean Whitney in archive and has 0 Comments
I found this cool Sodoku widget from Sudoku Park on Widgetbox. You can play billions (so they say) of Sudoku puzzles online from easy to evil and its all free. Sudoku solver, print sudoku ebook. also supplies Sudoku puzzles for newspapers, magazines, Sudoku books and websites.
For full features visit http://www.sudokupark.com
The Break Up
Posted on 22. May, 2007 by Dean Whitney in archive and has 0 Comments
A colleague pointed out to me (thanks Sean!) this brilliant web vignette from Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions in Europe. This makes a brilliant statement about the evolution of marketing in general but is also a brilliant lesson in Web 2.0. Bravo!
Micro-Loans 2.0
Posted on 21. May, 2007 by Dean Whitney in archive and has 0 Comments
Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for his Grameen Bank for pioneering a new category of banking known as micro-credit, which grants small loans to poor people who have no collateral and who do not qualify for conventional bank loans.
The program has enabled millions of Bangladeshis, almost all women, to buy everything from cows to cell phones in order to start and run their own businesses. Similar micro-credit projects have helped millions around the world lift themselves out of poverty.
Based on that principle Kiva.org, a social lending site, lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.
Google Analytics Redesign
Posted on 18. May, 2007 by Dean Whitney in archive and has 0 Comments
Google has launched a newly version of Google Analytics (GA). Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that a webmaster can optimize their AdWords advertisement and marketing campaigns through the use of GA’s analysis of where the visitors came from, how long they stayed on the website and their geographical position.
What Has Changed and What is New
- An entirely new reporting interface
- New date range selector
- Custom dashboards
- Emailed reports
- Sticky URLs (you can now use use your Back button!)
- PDF Report Export with Vector Graphics
Spotplex
Posted on 17. May, 2007 by Dean Whitney in archive and has 0 Comments
Spotplex provides Internet users with real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count. In other words, you can find what is the hot news today, this week, or this month in real time at Spotplex. This is not a list of articles people recommended or voted for, but a list of articles read most in a given timeframe.
Bloggers can track and analyze their blog traffic with a simple Spotplex code or widget. Not just how many people visit the blog, they can even find which articles people read most and how many people read them. Whenever an article of the blog is read, it will show up at Spotplex in real-time and get noticed by Spotplex users.
What’s most appealing about Spotplex is built with Ajax and Flash and provides a great Web 2.0 experience. I still haven’t been able to get it to work on my blog – but the UI is so cool I keep trying.
meebo rooms
Posted on 15. May, 2007 by Dean Whitney in archive and has 0 Comments
Meebo just released a cool new feature called meebo rooms. Sandy from Meebo calls it “chat rooms on steroids”. Meebo rooms have a built in feature that enables you to create a room, add it to you buddylist (to receive notifications even when you’re not in the room), you can even embed the room on your personal profiles and websites, just like meebo me!
A very cool feature of meebo rooms – unlike the traditional chat rooms is media. Meebo has partnered with media outlets to provide a player component in the room so you can enjoy videos while chatting. Partners include Blip.tv, Capitol Music Group’s Capitol Records , Virgin Records, CNET, CollegeHumor, Flixster, GameTrailers.com, Jive Records, NBC Universal, Pop Sugar, Popular Mechanics, RockYou, Veoh, Us Weekly’s Us TV, and VIBE Magazine.
Meebo has integrated some unobtrusive video advertisements and a sign-off ad into the rooms - I was wondering if they’d ever find a way to generate revenue.
Using Ajax to Declutter Pages
Posted on 10. May, 2007 by Dean Whitney in archive and has 0 Comments
With Web 2.0 there’s so many ‘ Long Tail’ possibilities for content that you can result in too many visual elements on the screen. Print, email, bookmarks, comments, trackbacks, tags and metadata. Applying Ajax creatively can allow for a much more focused experience.
Social bookmarking sites are popular these days, allowing alternative (to email) ways to share content. You could potentially display dozens of icons to sites like del.icio.us., digg, furl, Newsvine etc. Scroll to the bottom of the and see how the “Share this” icon reveals a bunch of social bookmarking icons, and email tab. Other tabs could be ‘blog this’ or ‘get code’… Nice way to add a lot of functionality without cluttering the page.
Thanks to Alex King for the ‘Share This’ plug-in for Wordpress.
Disney XD Beta: Social Network for Tweens
Posted on 04. May, 2007 by Dean Whitney in archive and has 0 Comments
Disney lauched yesterday Disney Extreme Digital (XD), a social networking site for tweens built around popular Disney content.
This ‘MySpace-like’ site allows users to register and create profiles, customize the experience and interact via chat and message boards.
What’s unique is the parental controls. Parents are required to create accounts linked to their children’s. Parents can control chats, discussions, and file uploads. This is a great concept, time will tell how this impacts member aquistion.
Disney really pushes the experience to the limit – the site is built entirely in Flash with lots of rich graphics, animation and moving transitions, quite the opposite of the MySpace experience. The site includes games, videos, music and special channels build around shows, movies and characters.
It will be interesting to watch how these more targets, content focused social media destinations will fare against those that just provide tools for people to connect.
OpenMass – Government 2.0
Posted on 02. May, 2007 by Dean Whitney in archive and has 0 Comments
OpenMass.org brings together official government data, news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what is going on in the Massachusetts Legislature.
The site mashes a few api’s including one call “Follow the Money“, a database of US campaign contributions.
From their site: Money in state politics plays a pivotal role in shaping public policy in individual states and across the nation. The nonpartisan Institute on Money in State Politics tracks contributions in all 50 states and makes this data easily searchable online…The Institute collects campaign-finance data for state-level candidates, party committees and ballot-measure committees in all 50 states. Each two-year election cycle, data-acquisition specialists compile more than 90,000 disclosure reports from more than 16,000 candidates in the states and process more than 3.2 million records of contribution information.
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