Photo-sharing Lessons and Questions
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“Photos: private or public? SmugMug adds a third option.”:http://www.breakitdownblog.com/2007/05/27/smugmug-rolls-out-islands-feature/ – Riyad Kalla at The “Break It Down” Blog has written a review of a new feature on the photo-sharing site SmugMug, a paid-account-only photo sharing site that many view as an alternative to “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com or “Zooomr”:http://www.zoomr.com (which plans on launching Zooomr Mark III shortly after 10 PM EST tonight). SmugMug users were complaining that they weren’t always comfortable with absolutely anyone being able to access their photos, but at the same time didn’t want to limit their audience to only the people they had already given a password too. SmugMug … [Read the rest »]

Local Video Opportunities
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“60% Watch Video Online”:http://www.kelseygroup.com/press/pr070524.asp, “70% Surf for Local Shopping”:http://www.kelseygroup.com/press/pr050322.asp – Two reports from the Kelsey Group that combine to prove once again how important the web is becoming at every level of business: home, local, national, or global. In this case, as the effectiveness of TV advertising “declines”:http://adage.com/abstract.php?article_id=110899[Reg. Req.], local businesses would be better suited by improving their online presence. Online video could replace commercials for local businesses, not only making it cheaper for them to advertise, but also making it more effective for consumers and businesses alike, as they discover the power of conversations that the Internet makes possible. … [Read the rest »]

Occasional Links: May 24th, 2007
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CAPTCHA with social entrepreneurship twist: reCAPTCHA – This service provides the usual CAPTCHA spam-protection, but adds on it by putting two words in the image instead of just one. One is a word the computer already knows, and the other is a word from a book being digitized. So while your visitors are helping you prevent spam, they’re taking an extra 1.5 seconds to help bring books into the digital age.

Luis von Ahn and myself estimated that about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day. Assuming that each CAPTCHA takes 10 seconds to solve, this is over 160,000 human

… [Read the rest »]

Occasional Links: May 22nd, 2007
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“Adobe says YouTube generation their next customers”:http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9721659-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20 – Vindicating my “previous suggestion”:http://jayneely.com/2007/03/28/a-profitable-partnership-how-youtube-can-re-revolutionize-personal-publishing that Google-owned YouTube form a partnership with Adobe, the CEO of Adobe Systems himself identified YouTube users as potential customers.

“Google Trends is a new measure of search popularity”:http://www.google.com/trends – In what’s certain to become an essential tool for people looking for problems to solve, markets to serve, and the effect of press on their popularity, this new tool by Google is a super-charged version of their old “Zeitgeist”:http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html. You enter a search term, and Trends shows you the rise and fall of that search term’s usage and … [Read the rest »]

Occasional Links: May 21, 2007
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“Facebook Adding Open Platform”:http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-facebook-moving-to-an-open-platform-strategy/ – PaidContent has the essential summary of the biggest social networking “news”:http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB117971397890009177-wjdKPmjAqS_9ZZbwiRp_CoSqvwQ_20070620.html?mod=fpa_editors_picks since MySpace’s acquisition. By letting other sites leverage the Facebook network, Facebook substantially increases the value of using it instead of another network. We can also expect to see some much more useful services than what can be accomplished with just an API (which are still pretty nifty, as my friend Adam “has shown”:http://mashable.com/2007/05/02/10-awesome-things-built-on-the-facebook-api/ at Mashable).

“Rental Car Company Adds In-Car Wireless”:http://www.betanews.com/article/Avis_to_Make_InCar_Internet_Available/1179764008 – I’m starting to follow the rise of mobile internet access in a context outside of cell phone usage. While _that_ mobile … [Read the rest »]

Occasional Links: April 22nd, 2007
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Digg API Contest – As you may have already heard, Digg announced their new API on Thursday, and they’ve immediately launched a contest to get people using it right away. Digg clearly knows their target audience of programmers, as can be seen by the products included in the prize packs they’re offering.

All of the top 10 finalists will get prizes, with a Grand Prize featuring a Falcon Northwest gaming PC, the full catalog of EA PC games, and the Adobe CS3 Master Collection.

Emphasis mine. The total approximate dollar value of the Grand Prize: $8,000 dollars. Second Place: … [Read the rest »]

Occasional Links: April 18th, 2007
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I’m happy to say I’ve gotten a job, and unhappy to say that these past few weeks it has sucked away virtually all of my free-time. I’m in the process of transitioning to a part-time position, but until then I’m unable to work on feature-length entries for longer than an hour at a time, making it difficult to really get into a workflow. This will hopefully be remedied soon, and until then, I’ll keep links coming to keep you interested.

Google Presentations – Nathan Weinberg at the Web 2.0 Expo brought to my attention a demo of the TonicPoint presentations … [Read the rest »]

Occasional Links: April 4th, 2007
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Because this week’s feature requires more research, I’m using the opportunity to return to my originally planned update schedule, weekly on Mondays rather than Wednesdays. In the meantime, this edition of Occasional Links provides some insight into an upcoming feature about the place of ‘Old Media’ in a ‘New Media’ world. While others are predicting the death of newspapers, magazines, books, and all other kinds of print content, I believe that the right kind of printed word will survive for decades to come. Read through some of the following links, and feel free to share your own thoughts on the … [Read the rest »]

Occasional Links: March 31st, 2007
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Chris DiBona’s response to News Corp/NBC YouTube competitor. This past week’s feature was originally going to be about why I think News Corp and NBC’s efforts to build a YouTube competitor will fail. But I’d much rather stay positive, bring new ideas to the table, and focus on making an existing product better. And the great thing about blogs is that if I’m not covering it, someone else is. Chris DiBona with the key point:

The managers, the lawyers, the executives, the ops people, the accountants, the lawyers, the programmers, the lawyers, the qa teams, the lawyers, the secops

… [Read the rest »]
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