This is a screen shot of a very cool online game based on the refrigerator magnets you can use to spell whatever you want. The catch is that there are up to 50 people playing at a time and they keep stealing your letters! Just what I need, one more way to procrastinate.
I know I’ve said it before, but I’m continually amazed at how well blogs do on Google. Here’s another piece of anecdotal evidence.
A while ago I wrote a post titled "Pope Bracket" that then referenced and a post on David Hoggard’s blog that referenced and linked to the originator of the Pope bracket, a spoof on the NCAA bracket that someone put together during the elect-a-Pope craziness.
Well at some point today I was #2 on Google for the search term "Pope Bracket" and the search results showed "85,500." Amazing. And the only one that ranked higher is uber-blogger DailyKos. I’m dancin’ with the big boys!
Dana Blankenhorn wrote an interesting post about the dearth of entrepreneurs making hay out of all the new and developing online creations. He points out that no one is really making money on blogging yet, but they are already moving on to podcasting, open source software, etc.
My favorite piece from his article is this:
The challenge is to find ways to bring in enough advertising,
sponsorship, event, and subscriber revenue to turn hobbies into
careers. Without fertilizer, plants die, and money is fertilizer.
Volunteers will burn out without it, some quickly, some more slowly,
but all surely. Or, as entrepreneur Max Bialystock says in The Producers, "Money is Honey."
Anyone who has ever tried to build a business based on bartering services, or paying their labor with beer knows that he’s right. You truly get what you pay for.
BTW, what keeps me up at night is figuring out a way to build the next media empire with all this new stuff. I’ll keep you posted. And if you’re interested in building it along with me I’ve got a fridge full of beer in the basement…
Just found a site that has created a very simple way to share images, video or other graphics files. It’s called Grafedia and basically it works like this: You go to their site, upload an image, assign a word to it and then tell anyone you want to see the image that they can get the image by sending an email to "TheWordYouCreated@grafedia.net".
I tested it out by uploading a picture of the junk I dug out of my yard last weekend. I labeled it "lowderjunk" so you can see it by sending an email to lowderjunk@grafedia.net. ***Important*** You have to make sure you put something in the body of the message for it to work. It can be anything…letter, number, favorite cuss word, etc.
You can also use the service with a video/picture phone. Simply send the picture/video to the address you want and it is automatically posted. So if I had taken the picture of my junk with a phone I would have sent it to lowderjunk@grafedia.net and it would have been loaded in the system automatically.
I read about this site in Cool News, which is a great business/marketing email newsletter.
I’ve been reading alot about del.icio.us and honestly it took a while for me to "get it." I found this article the most helpful in explaining it and now I’m primed to give it a whirl.
Just one more way for me to avoid real work.
Link: Welcome to Eyetools.
Found this company in a MarketingSherpa case study. They bring people into their lab and ask them to look at
web pages while an eye tracking camera maps how they look at various
web pages.
While it is hard to generalize what they have found, there are some general rules of thumb for designers:
Pretty useful stuff.
I was reading my favorite tech resource, Langa List, when I came across these paragraphs in a response to a question about email security:
Email almost never goes directly from sender to recipient. Instead, it’s usually stored, albeit briefly, on at least two mail servers along the way, and maybe more; and will also pass through a large number (10-30 is common) of other computers, routers, and similar hardware along the way. US courts have recently ruled that email stored on a mail server (and that includes email passing through one mail server on its way to
another, "stored" on the intermediate server for only a fraction of a second) is not protected by wiretap laws originally designed with telephone conversations in mind. This is a brand-new ruling (about a month ago), so the ripple effects are still being sorted out, but in essence, it looks as though an email communication may be legally about the same as a conversation you have on a busy street corner: You can have
no reasonable expectation of privacy, so anyone who overhears the conversation— or reads the email— isn’t breaking any law.The original intent of this legal change was for law enforcement: Along with the provisions of the Patriot Act, the idea was to make it easier for police and government bureaucrats to look freely in places that used to require a warrant.
Regardless of how you feel about that, the unintended consequence of this may be enormous. One example: If your email no longer has any legal privacy protection, what’s to prevent an ISP from, say, selling his mail server’s backup tapes to a spammer, who could then mine the addresses *and content* for likely spam targets and topics? If your email is now no more legally protected than a conversation on a public sidewalk, I don’t know what recourse you’d have at all."
Realistically I’m less worried about the "expectation of privacy" and much more worried about "selling mail server’s backup tapes to a spammer." Someone with a mail server looking to make some quick cash selling lists to a spammer seems much more likely, and just one more straw ready to break the back of one of the great communication tools of the modern communication tools.
Link: Digital Toolbox.
What is podcasting? From ipodder.org:
"Think
how a desktop aggregator works. You subscribe to a set of feeds, and
then can easily view the new stuff from all of the feeds together, or
each feed separately.
Podcasting works the same way, with one exception. Instead of reading the new content on a computer screen, you listen to the new content on an iPod or iPod-like device."
The site is also contains a directory of podcasts.
Implications for business publishers:
Befuddled 