How frustrated are you when you have to reboot your PC in the middle of the day? A full shutdown and reboot cycle can take a several minutes – instead of staring at your screen watching the icons flicker to life, the hourglass grind away, etc., why not capture a few minutes of productivity? You’ll spend less time thinking evil thoughts about Bill Gates, and you’ll get a mood boost from being productive!
Jul 272007
Jul 272007
A survey of technical professionals shows a startling level of reliance on Web communities by IT professionals. The report from King Research includes these key findings:
Jul 232007
A few months ago, we began testing the interactive blog rating widget from RateItAll (see Beyond Web 2.0 – Interactive Rating Widget). At the time, this widget was in closed beta. Now, RateItAll is opening things up with a more flexible widget design (more sizes and colors). As before, this is a truly interactive widget – it lives on your blog, but lets your visitors update your blog’s ratings and reviews at RateItAll, along with displaying these on your site. It even lets new RIA users register from within the widget without ever leaving your site. Here’s an example:
Continue reading »
What happens to communities when they get popular? They get targeted by spammers, malcontents, and vandals. MySpace has done an amazing flip, moving from one of TIME’s 50 Coolest Sites in 2006 to one of their Five Worst in 2007:
Jul 172007
My fellow FutureLab blogger, danah boyd, wrote an interesting and controversial essay about the social network migration of high school students: Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace. (Boyd blogs at Many-to-Many and Apophenia about social networking and related topics.) She sums up her point:
Jul 102007
Even stupid criminals know how to use Google, according to a report from Colorado Springs: Continue reading »
Jul 102007
The pageview is officially on its way out the door as a web site performance metric – Nielsen is dropping page view measurement in its Web traffic reporting. Instead, they will report the time visitors spend at sites. Continue reading »
Jul 092007
Way back in March, I evaluated an XV6700 smart phone from Verizon. I liked it almost enough to keep it – I liked its screen better than its pancake-style competitors, I was starting to get used to the slideout keyboard, and I was able to get its “unsupported” laptop tethering capability to work. I was able to connect to the Internet at decent speeds everywhere I went, including airports, offices, hotels, etc. I avoided having to connect to both free and paid WiFi hotspots with their attendant security risks. The only thing that kept me from keeping the XV6700 was the supposedly imminent release of the XV6800, which is sleeker and lighter, has more memory, comes with Windows Mobile 6, and has other improved features. At the time, photos of the XV6800 had already been making the rounds of tech blogs, and I was reluctant to stick with the 6700 and find it obsoleted after getting only a few days into a two-year contract.
Jul 062007
Facebook is seeing massive traffic growth, according to a press release from Comscore, Facebook Sees Flood Of New Traffic From Teenagers And Adults. Unique visitors hit 26.6 million in May, 2007, up 89% vs. the same month in 2006. Pageviews in the same period hit almost 16 billion, up 143%. The big driving factor is open registration. Originally, Facebook was restricted to college students; their decision to open registration cause the biggest jump in age sectors not previously able to register: 25 to 34 year-olds were up 181%, while 12 to 17 year-olds were up 149%.
Jul 052007
vBulletin users may have been caught off guard by a July4th announcement that Jelsoft Enterprises Limited, the maker of the popular forum software, has been acquired by Internet Brands, Inc. Many of the Web’s largest forum communities, not to mention thousands of smaller ones, rely on vBulletin as their software engine. The forum post by James Limm, Managing Director, notes,