Ajax Blog

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Source: Signal vs. Noise
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Let’s say someone’s in the market for a laptop case. What do you recommend? Link it up.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/link_it_up_laptop_case.php

Photo sales site SpyMedia relaunched this morning with two major new features. The San Jose company has since late last year let photographers sell their news photos to media companies or other interested buyers. Today the site has added a slideshow widget and a bounty system to let buyers offer money for photos they would like to purchase.

Here’s a heart breaker; remember when we reported several weeks ago about the new MySpace security measure that disables outbound links from Flash widgets? SpyMedia is a great example of a company investing resources in a MySpace strategy that now, on launch, is no where near as viable as it was when the idea was hatched.

The SpyStream, or widgetized slideshow, is an interesting test case. Users who display the slideshow will be able to play their photos, their friends’ photos, their designated favorites or all photos tagged as aimed at a bounty of interest.

Company President Bryan Quinn told me that there are many widget features the company had planned that are now impossible or much more difficult since MySpace has leveraged Flash9 to block outgoing links. You can’t purchase SpyMedia photos with one click from a MySpace display anymore. The company had planned to offer revenue sharing for MySpace users who display SpyMedia images. Images can no longer be flagged as inappropriate with one click, making display of all items tagged with a bounty much less appealing. SpyMedia in MySpace is now largely a one-way phenomenon.

Quinn said he felt sorry for other companies whose entire model was based on clicking back from flash widgets but that SpyMedia would use water marks and other means of letting viewers know what URL to visit on the SpyMedia site.

SpyMedia’s whole model may not be shot, but it looks like the company’s new MySpace strategy is dead on arrival today. Every startup I talk to with a MySpace widget strategy (more than I can count) admits that the new MySpace code is a problem. Most underplay it, but the ability to click back to your site is what makes a widget play make business sense. There are certainly work arounds, like adding a text link below the Flash object - but as SpyMedia demonstrates there is still a major loss of functionality.

The widget will still work on other blogs, but as Quinn told me, MySpace is the gorilla and everybody wants to be where they gorilla is. Pete Cashmore of Mashable has been working with SpyMedia and he told me that though he considers the MySpace Flash issue to be a minor problem, he also encouraged the company to make a push into as many other social media sharing sites as possible.

In ways similar to SmugMug for stock photos or the forthcoming NewsAssingment.net for news text reporting, SpyMedia is a very cool idea. Will bounties for multimedia be a viable strategy for a small startup? How big an impact will it make that their primary tool for entering the giant market of MySpace has had the legs kicked out from under it? Only time will tell.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/7696272/

The IE 7 team just let us know that IE7 is to be distributed via Automatic Updates!:

As we get close to the final availability of Internet Explorer 7, I want to provide an update on our distribution plans. To help our customers become more secure and up-to-date, we will distribute IE7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates (AU) shortly after the final version is released for Windows XP, planned for the fourth quarter of this year.

This doesn’t mean that the old IE’s will disappear in short order, but it nice to see that we may see a quicker uptake to IE 7 than past releases.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ie-7-distrubted-in-windows-update

G24 brings you the latest stories from the Guardian in PDF format — updated throughout the day.

Tickspot offers days as tabs.

Aaron writes in: “I got an email from workopolis (we’ve posted jobs there in the past). I wanted to unsubscribe, and clicked the link in the email and faced this choice (remember, in my brain I want to cancel my subscription).”

Got an interesting screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Send the image and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/screens_around_town_g24_tickspot_workopolis.php

Two Time Warner sites are making serious moves into online video. CNN is expected to formally launch today a system for collecting user generated content, with video at the center of its strategy. The basics are already up at CNN Exchange. The system will be powered by Blip.tv - quite a deal to land for them. A CNet story this weekend said that war footage from Lebanon found on YouTube was a big part of the inspiration for Exchange, but you have to assume this has been in the works for some time. CNN Exchange will of course be about submission more than upload or sharing; I’ll be curious to see what percentage of submitted videos appear on the site. CNN will retain non-exclusive ownership of the submitted content and does not appear to plan compensation for content providers.

In related news the New York Times reported this morning that AOL, where many services will become free on Wednesday, will launch a video service on Friday. Commercial free downloads-to-own will start at $1.99 and various free offerings will join AOL’s video search for content across the web.

Since CNN and AOL are Time Warner companies so one question seems to be whether any cross pollination in video strategy will go on.

Another question worth asking though is: does this mean certain death for the countless video sharing and downloading startups coming online? Probably not. Each will have its own unique feel, likely all with far less editorial control than these two big players.

In the end the dichotomy remains the same: try to get past the corporate editors and into big media in exchange for massive exposure or on the other hand try to create something compelling that will go viral across countless other channels.

CNN is likely to never allow unmediated upload of content on to its site because it’s such an uncomfortable position to be in from a branding perspective for companies born in the media-as-gatekeeper era. It’s hard to imagine CNN letting in enough video to offer site visitors the kind of endless clicking around that YouTube offers. Not to mention that talking dogs aren’t going to make it to CNN.

I imagine that the glut of video services online is a much bigger barrier to effective entry than is the launch of services by these big players. These will probably always be two very different sorts of site.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/7667692/

On the Web 2.0 Journal today, there’s a new article from Ajit Jaokar asking for a real definition of what “mobile web 2.0″ really means.

I see Web 2.0 as the Intelligent web or ‘Harnessing Collective Intelligence.’ Mobile Web 2.0 extends the principle of ‘Harnessing Collective Intelligence’ to restricted devices. The seemingly simple idea of extending Web 2.0 to mobile Web 2.0 has many facets.

He lists out these facets - restricted devices, building for these devices, and what characteristics can be learned from them. He defines restricted devices in several ways including having one or more of these characteristics - easily carried, battery driven, limited input means, but not wearable.

He gives the iPod as a reference to show a good web/local PC model for mobile devices, a PC-powered interface to provide mobile content to a portable, easy to use device. This is more of a static idea than most think of when they think “mobile web 2.0″. More often, they think of methods to use things such as Ajax in a cellphone’s web browser. He suggests, though, that this is not “mobile web 2.0″ - it lacks the user generated compontent.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/what-is-mobile-web-20

Alexander Netkachev shows, in this new post on his site, how to create an Ajax-based login page with the help of the Dojo library and a new offering from Zend - the Zend Framework. The Zend Framework is a MVC-based framework written in PHP.

A few days ago I understood the right usage of the framework. Frankly speaking, it does not help with creating Web forms—it has no high-level complex components like TDataGrid in PRADO or even Repeater in ASP.NET. And what I understood is that it is not Zend Framework’s business how developers are creating their forms and here is a reason for this: modern pages are created with a lot of JavaScript and, I believe, are created with client-side components, not server-side.

He set this mission before himself - to create a lightweight Ajax form combining Dojo and the Zend Framework in the easiest way possible.

He assumes you already have both libraries installed (both relatively simple to get working) and gets straight to the code. First off is the creation of the view for the login form itself, the place where the Dojo toolkit is included and the Javascript functionality lives - as well as the simple login form. Next up is the controller for the PHP side, with three actions - a default action, one to perform the login, and the other to show a success message. Finally, there’s the Dojo javascript to make the request to the backend and the PHP script to validate if the username and password are correct.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/creating-an-ajax-login-page-with-dojozend-framework

I’ve gone back and forth on Inform.com in the past (we also covered them here). They are a massively funded New York startup that launched an inferior news product late last year. Since then, they’ve made real efforts to shake things up. Their newest product, Inform Publisher Services, is aimed at big web publishers, and is designed to help them increase page views by adding relevant links to other, hopefully related, content in their archives.

The new service automatically creates links in existing articles, which link to a results page containing relevant content from the site as well as from the web, including blogs and audio/video content. It’s currently live on NewsOK.com, an Oklahoma newspaper site. To see it in action, see this article and click on one of the links within the text. I clicked on “State Department” in the second paragraph, which brought up this results page.

Frankly, I didn’t see a lot of relevant content.

Inform Publisher Services is entirely automated, and I’m sure they’ll tweak the algorithm over time to make it better. But with all the new links in the articles, it seems that readers will quickly tire of seeing a results page with barely-related content put in front of them.

Eric Schonfeld at Business 2.0 wrote a very long post on the new product tonight, suggesting that this will give pubishers the edge they need to compete with Digg and Google in the war for reader attention. I don’t see the logical connection that he sees, but the company has convinced six partners to launch with this soon: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, The New York Sun, NewsOK.com (Web site for The Oklahoman newspaper and News9, KWTV CBS Affiliate), The Huffington Post, The Deal LLC, and NameMedia. If Inform does a good job of creating more page views for these companies, they’ll keep this business and add more partners over time.

See our posts on Blogburst, another company offering services to media publishers. In the case of Blogburst, they are offering to syndicate vetted blog content to these sites at a much cheaper price than they pay for other content.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/7556549/

If you liked Battleship in Ajax, you’ll love this. Toronto, Canada based gpokr is a multiplayer no limit Texas Holdem game developed with Ajax technologies. The site, which was created by Ryan Dewsbury, also has real time chat among all players in a game. The site does not use real money, and Ryan says he has no plans to change that.

gpokr was written with Java, and uses the Google Web Toolkit for its client-side Ajax (the toolkit lessens the burden of building client-side javascript by interpreting server-side java into javascript)

Also check out Mark Roth’s Ajax hangman game, which was also created using the Google Web Toolkit. Both are discussed on the Web Toolkit blog, here.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/7539553/