You've probably seen lots of services that put pop up windows on top of links in web pages - usually for advertising and often in unhelpful places on the page. Could something like that be done well, though? Serial entrepreneur Craig Barnes believes it can be, and he's been working on it for more than 9 years.
Barnes says his new service Panels.net gets reader engagement numbers above 10% - an astonishing number in advertising. He says that's because his Panels are genuinely useful. At first blush they strike us as a little awkward but the potential here is big. Well selected, up-to-the-minute info about any link we see online sounds like a great idea - if it works.
Today marks the second annual "Blue Beanie Day," an international online event in support of web design standards and accessibility. Participants post photos of themselves wearing blue beanies, or stocking caps, to their various online accounts in honor of web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman. Zeldman's blue beanie dominated the photo on the cover of his widely loved 2003 book, Designing With Web Standards.
We're big fans of web standards here at ReadWriteWeb and we'll tell you why.
Apple has always been very protective over their proprietary software. The company doesn't want anything but iTunes to control an iPod - and for good reason, too. The iTunes Store is a money-making machine with over 65 million active customers helping the company sell billions of songs, videos, and apps. Despite iTunes' popularity, however, there are still those out there who would rather run their own software.
The transfer of human intelligence to the machine is something the internet makes easy to do. With reCAPTCHA, we keep spammers at bay while helping digitize old books, Amazon's Mechanical Turk lets us crowdsource small tasks to a dynamic human workforce available on demand, and Google Image Labeler makes the tedious task of tagging fun. Now Yahoo is trying to tap into that human machine through their new VideoTagGame, a game that encourages participants to tag sections within a video for better retrieval.
Editor's note: we're currently running a series of posts from our long-term sponsors, focused on use cases and business advice. We hope you find these posts useful and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.
Use of hosted software as a service (SaaS) is growing like crazy, and most products are constantly evolving. What is the best strategy for a tech startup: share its product road map (i.e. its development plans) with the outside world, or keep its cards close to the chest?
Celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November, Thanksgiving is considered an important day by most Americans; a time to take stock of all the things we are thankful for.
So it's a good time to take a quick look at some fun facts and trivia surrounding Thanksgiving. Please enjoy.
5 years ago, before this blog was a media business, I participated in NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. It's an annual creative writing project, in which participants try to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I did it in November 2003 and documented it in ReadWriteWeb. While the resulting work of art was very average, and thankfully long ago purged from the RWW server, I had a lot of fun writing the book and discovered some new things about myself.
In this post I check back in with the NaNoWriMo website to see what's changed over the years; and how much social web technology it's now using.
One year ago link shortening service TinyURL experienced an extended period of down time and we argued that the outage illustrated serious risks associated with the service. One year later, the landscape doesn't look any less bleak. A search of the web turns up complaint after complaint after complaint about TinyURL being down and links being broken - apparently for at least a day or two every month.
People should stop using TinyURL! In the following post we'll list a few reasons why this is important and point you towards some of the best alternative link shorteners.
Every year IBM releases a "Next Five in Five" list, a list of innovations that "have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years". This is the third such list, and it mentions a "Talking Web" among the 5 items. You will talk to the Web and the Web will talk back, according to IBM. In the future "you will be able to surf the Internet, hands-free, by using your voice - therefore eliminating the need for visuals or keypads."
In fact this is already starting to happen, as recent iPhone releases from Google and Say Where show.
One of the common complaints about the Apple iPhone - beyond the inability to cut and paste - has been that such a powerful communications platform is sorely lacking in one particular respect: instant messaging.
But Apple's shortcoming in terms of a universal IM client is the iPhone development community's gain. And any number of folks are rushing to fill that void. One recently released mobile IM client appears to have a fighting chance: Nimbuzz.
