Pointers

Links to interesting destinations

Friday, August 03, 2007

Pointers: 08/03/07

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I’ve noted in a number of posts that the reason businesses should jump into Second Life is that the web at large is going to evolve into a 3D world. I’ve also noted that several business publications have made the same prediction. The current issue of BusinessWeek features a two-page spread on the subject. From BusinessWeek.

Second Life has had the 3D social world pretty much to itself, but that could change as Multiverse launches. Based on the way Multiverse works, it could become (or serve as the model for) the platform that trasforms the web into a 3D environment. From BoingBoing.

Plaxo is launching a social network meant to go head-to-head with Facebook. (Doesn’t anybody talk about MySpace any more?) From News.com.

The Annenberg School of Communications’ Online Journalism Review has an article detailing steps for conducting your own web usability test. The story is here.

I’ve caught the local news channel reporting on a study claiming that fumes produced by laser printers can be worse than smoking cigarettes. HP—which bore the brunt of the study’s focus—responded, and the response is analyzed by the guys at ZDNet. This is also an example of transparency—the public scrutiny of a company’s response to criticism. Read the analysis.

A lot of us who blog have stumbled upon our own posts on blogs that are riddled with Google ads. In my case, this is a direct violation of my Creative Commons license. There are people trying to do something about these content scrapers. From the New York Times.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Pointers (4-12-06)

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P Q Media has released a study that suggests ad spending for RSS feeds, blogs, and podcasts will reach about $50 million this year. While that’s a fraction of a drop of the total spent on advertising, it does represent a nearly 150% increase over spending on these media last year. Most of the ad dollars are going to blogs, according to the study.

If Hollywood can do it, anybody can. Here’s an item Blogspottingabout a movie production that was managed using a JotSpot wiki. Incidentally, Neville and I (and our agent) are using JotSpot to write our podcasting book.

Headline of the week. Maybe the month. Maybe the year.

Robin Good, over at Master New Media, has a terrific list of innovative uses of RSS

Working with NewsGator, Newsweek has launched a proprietary, branded RSS news reader. The My Newsweek RSS News & Information reader.

This is cool. FilmLoop has a free utility that lets you add scrolling photo loops to your blogs and web pages. Hat tip to Guy Kawasaki, who has a great example on his blog.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Pointers (2-28-06)

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So your IT department is resisting blogs and wikis on the intranet? Maybe they’ll warm up to the idea if they derive some genuine value from these tools themselves. Nothing like enlightened self-interest to helpl clear a path. Linux Journal has a piece spelling out all the ways IT departments can benefit from blogs and wikis.

Speaking of wikis, Information Week talks about the various uses of wikis as a workplace tool.

PC World‘s Australia edition explains why companies without blogs are missing out on important customer insights.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Pointers (2-2-06)

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A graphic designer has taken a stab at redesigning the spartan Google homepage. He explains his redesign in detail, and the result has its merits.

A column in the Online Journalism Review offers up six ways to improve Wikipedia.

Here’s breaking news: If somebody in your company puts something on a web page, it can be found by a search engine. Dell Computers was shocked by the revelation.

Some remarkably stupid ideas are coming out of the newspaper business, which is already on the ropes. Despite the fact that search engines drive traffic to their sites they would otherwise never get, they want the search engines to pay them. However much they’re paying for whatever it is they’re smoking, it’s worth it.

Jakob Nielsen’s research supports the notion that investing in intranet improvements results in reduced costs and higher employee productivity.

Monday, January 23, 2006

Pointers (01-23-06)

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Wired magazine ponders whether Howard Stern might not have been better off switching to a podcast instead of satellite radio. After all, he said it wasn’t about the money, but rather the freedom to speak his mind. Of course, half a billion dollars is a pretty good incentive for going the second-best route.

What does the pharmaceutical industry need to do in order to rehabilitate its image, which could wind up ranking somewhere below tobacco companies? BusinessWeek explores the PR issues facing the pharma biz in the post-Vioxx and Celebrex era.

The Poughkeepsie Journal offers two articles on IBM—one dealing with employee blogs and the other with employee podcasts.

The Salt Lake Tribune offers up an intriguing piece about the use of blogs and podcasts to provide coverage of festivals. The item focuses on the Sundance Film Festival.

Richard Edelman focuses on the latest case of a PR agency paying for placement and calls for “CEOs of PR firms (tl) sign onto a code of proper behavior, that forbids payments to reporters, that mandates transparency on arrangements with third party experts and that bars a media company from having a licensed PR firm in the family.” Good idea, of course, but these scandals just keep happening.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Pointers (1-11-06)

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Another podcasting transcription service has sprung up, this one called Casting Words. The service uses a network of human transcribers (no voice-to-text software) and promises a quick turnaround at 42-cents (US) per minute. The idea behind podcast transcription is to get podcast content into the realm of content you can search via Google and other search engines. As Podzinger and other search engines that allow you to search audio directly improve, they’re likely to be integrated into the general search engines rendering the need for transcriptions obsolete. For now, though, it’s not a bad idea.

First there as the Million Dollar Homepage, where any advertiser could buy pixels and fill them with graphics that linked to their sites. A similar idea just launched with Pixels That Rock, which takes the Million Dollar Homepage concept and applies is solely to indie musicians. Today, TechCrunch reports that a new site has launched called 1000 Tags. Rather than fill pixels, the concept site will sell you one of its, well, 1,000 tags. The site is described as the first “commercial tag cloud.” TechCrunch says, “You can purchase a tag, pay by the character and font size, and hope that a lot of traffic to your site is the result.” You have to wonder how many of these concept sites can succeed before the novelty wears off and you realize you’re just looking at advertisements.

Another great mashup using Google Maps has launched with PackageMapper.com. Enter the tracking code, select from FedEx, UPS, or the US Postal Service, and see the route of your package on a Google Map.

RSS has found its way into your living room. The eStarling WiFi picture frame will take an RSS feed from Flickr and display photos from the photo-sharing service. That’s very cool. From Engadget.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Pointers (1-10-06)

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Lawrence Lessig (constitutional law professor, author, blogger, Creative Commons innovator) has produced a downloadable version of a presentation he created to address the fair use implications of the Google Books project. His blog addresses how he created what turned out to be an 85 MB file (available as a BitTorrent seed). The presentation includes the slides and Lessig’s voice.

A couple RSS notes:

• FeedMail Now! is a new service that lets you use RSS as a means of communicating with friends and co-workers via RSS feeds instead of email. The press release claims, “FeedMail Now! turns an RSS feed reader into an electronic mailbox. Users of the service can send and receive feedmail messages without the fear of spam or phishing.” The tutorial makes it look easy, although everyone you want to contact needs to subscribe to your mailbox feed. Still, they can reply to your messages just as in email. The service is 99-cents per month.
  
• FeedForAll a wizard-like app that lets you create RSS feeds, has introduced FutureRSS, “a PHP script that converts an RSS feed into HTML and displays only the current RSS feed’s items. The FutureRSS script allows webmasters to pre-plan an RSS feed’s items and prepare them in advance,” according to the press release. It’s available free for registered FeedForAll users.
  
• Online travel service Orbitz has opened an RSS feed that lets you get information on travel deals.

I don’t usually join in the “look who’s blogging” conversations, since 20-million-plus blogs and a blogosphere doubling every five months means we’d be adding to the list daily, which is a real yawner. But when the International Herald Tribune starts blogging, I figure it’s a big enough deal to mention here.