Well-known designer Derek Powazek over the weekend launched his latest project, Pixish, a design marketplace where people can post open calls for submissions for design elements or photography. Designers can then submit work to the assignment, as they're called on the site, and other designers vote for the best. The assignment's originator picks the winner (or winners) and doles out the promised compensation.
Publicly-traded TheStreet.com, a serious investment and business news site that was started by CNBC's Jim Cramer in 1996, yesterday launched a new site MainStreet.com. The site has the stated goal of writing about stories where "life and money intersect," and though it covers politics, and general news, the site is mostly dominated by celebrity news and gossip. Which MainStreet.com unfortunately manages to make feel even more trashy.
Interesting video presentation from Kevin Marks, Google's main evangelist for the OpenSocial project. Marks explains more about the theory behind OpenSocial, in what he calls "the social cloud". This seems to be a variation of the Social Graph concept, which Alex Iskold analyzed for ReadWriteWeb last September. See also Sarah Perez's post today on a new search engine called Delver, which "leverages the social graph to map out a user's social connections."
We're seeing more and more products that utilize the social graph, and so Marks' explanation is a useful primer on the concepts behind them.
Our first daily Comments Competition winner is Dan from BlogMinistry, who left this comment on Josh Catone's post CNN to Launch Completely User Generated News Site. Congratulations Dan, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their SmartLink Widgets.
Here is Dan's comment, with some great advice for big media companies using web 2.0 technologies...
Creative Commons announced tonight that in partnership with Public.Resource.Org and with legal representation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it has purchased and has now made available at no charge the equivalent of nearly two million pages of legal documents. If printed and piled on top of each other, the documents would make a stack of books 348 feet tall. Included are all U.S. Supreme Court decisions and all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 on.
Though these texts have always technically been in the public domain, the organizations had to purchase the electronic version from a private company that had compiled it. Now available at this link, they have also been converted to XHMTL so that anyone can develop user interfaces and search engines against the information.
Feng-GUI is an interesting heatmap creation service. Unlike click-based heatmaps from Crazy Egg, FuseStats, and others, Feng-GUI creates heatmaps based on where it thinks the human eye would most likely be attracted. Eye tracking is something that designers have long used to measure the effectiveness of advertising, or design more usable web sites (among other commercial applications). But Feng-GUI doesn't use real eye tracking, which would require that humans look at each object being measured and would hardly scale very well. Instead, the site uses an algorithm that attempts to guess what a real human would be most likely to look at.
The basic concept of location-based mobile phone messaging is that you can send a text message to someone's cell phone and they will receive the SMS message only when they enter into the exact location you specify. How can this be useful? Let's say you're up really late working and you want your co-worker to pick up some donuts in the morning on their way to the office.
Using a service called JotYou, you can send a message to your friend's cell phone and have them receive it just before they get to the donut shop.
Significant delays in the delivery of email messages to Gmail users are being widely reported with no apparent response from Google. As an increasing number of people choose to forward their email to and from Gmail, these delays present a real problem - enough business decisions are made based on email threads that delays of 9 to 12 hours for delivery could be a deal breaker for some users.
Google announced two weeks ago the availability of an official Gmail Help Discussion Group. A search through that group shows repeated reports of delays and no one from Google appears to be engaged in these discussions.
We've been writing a lot about the trend of media companies paying more attention to citizen journalism and amateur reporting tools. Perhaps no mainstream media outlet has done more to push citizen journalism into the spotlight over the past year than CNN. In August 2006, they launched the user generated content-focused i-Report feature on their web site, which has since attracted over 100,000 submissions from users, and last summer they held the first of two CNN-YouTube presidential debates, in which questions were submitted via YouTube. CNN is about to take their participation in amateur news reporting a big step forward with the planned launch of iReport.com, an entire portal dedicated to completely user generated news content.
Long before Apple’s iPhone, another Silicon Valley-based company pioneered the consumer-friendly smart phone. That company was Danger Inc. best known for its T-mobile branded Sidekick (the Paris Hilton smart phone of choice) and its user friendly mobile OS and Internet applications.
As of today, Danger is no more. Instead, the company is being gobbled up by Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division, responsible for overseeing the Zune, XBox, Windows Mobile and Microsoft TV product lines.
