Clicky Adds Visualization Charts And Shows You How Freemium Is Done
From CenterNetworks, popular since 3 daysWe've written about Clicky Web analytics several times including our first product review just shy of a year ago. It's my favorite medium-level analytics application on the market. Why? Speed, features, the freaking addictive real-time spy and excellent support from the one person team of Sean Hammons.Today Sean has posted about a variety of new visualization tools that Clicky now offers. Clicky has hired the team at Open Flash Chart to create even more customizations on their charting solution. Here is one basic example chart that's now possible (bar charts were available previously):The charts update on the fly and the "compare" feature is where the charting tool shows its strength. You can compare practically anything you want to see if there are [...]Go to site
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We initially reviewed comment replacement system Disqus when it launched last October. Disqus is basically a "smarter" way to handle comments on a blog, microblog or traditional Web site. Intense Debate offers something similar and launched at about the same time but Disqus clearly has the "250" force in effect.Disqus investor Fred Wilson posted an informercial for why he believes Disqus is superior to the commenting systems that blog platforms offer by default. He noted three major benefits for Disqus over the normal commenting systems:threaded discussions email replies/email replies for commenters shared profiles I assume these are his three top reasons for using Disqus. Let's take a look at his reasons with regards to what we use here on CenterNetworks which runs a basic out-of-the-box drupal setup.threaded discussions - we have that, you can click reply on any comment and it will produce a threaded discussion email replies - we have this as well, just check the box and anytime a person replies to your comment, you will receive an email notification straight away. Disqus also allows you to email a reply and it will be added to the comment thread. This is pefect for a personal blog - not crazy about it for a business blog (one that earns revenue). shared profiles - openID anyone? Drupal also supports central logins so all Drupal blogs can use the same login. Canadian blogger Mathew Ingram throws Disqus two-thumbs up and says that the email function is his favorite. He also notes spam prevention as a major factor in his decision. I would have assumed that Fred would have the same in his top 3 reasons. Comment spam freaking sucks. We are using Mollom on CN and as I've written before, it's given me back an hour a day.Disqus offers distributed moderation which means that you can select anyone who uses Disqus to help moderate your blog comments. I like this feature, especially for popular blogs/Web sites.In Fred's infomercial, he forgets to note some of the things you will be giving up when you move to Disqus. Let's take a look:Comments are no longer attached to your blog. If Disqus goes down or out of business, you are borked. (fyi, I don't expect them to go under). There's also no data portability currently so you can't take your comments with you. I asked Daniel about this last October and he said it was coming - I assume it's still coming. A privacy policy must now include the Disqus privacy policy. Will the average commenter understand that when they comment on Mathew Ingram's blog, that they are agreeing to the terms of service from Disqus? Disqus founder Daniel Ha says that they will never sell or rent the email addresses, and I completely believe him today - but what about for data collection purposes later on? Clearly Disqus is sitting on a gold mine of data. Comments are not indexed by the search engines - the code Disqus requires prevents Google from indexing the comments on your blog as part of the article. Users never need to come back to your blog to be part of the discussion - this is a personal preference in my opinion. Personal bloggers and those not "earning a living" at blogging won't care about this while those that do earn a living will. Maybe not today, but eventually they will. Where's the business plan for Disqus? Eventually they will need to generate revenue, right? My guess is that there will be some freemium model with ads/pay for premium services. Or they will take all of the comments and bundle them and sell them as aggregated research. ConclusionDisqus has moved the idea of commenting forward which is a good thing. Is the service perfect? No. Is the service the right one for some bloggers? Absolutely. I've enjoyed speaking with Daniel who is a very bright guy and I think he will continue to enhance the Disqus offering over time.The conversation about where the conversation should take place is only beginning.At the end of the day, the decision to use Disqus (or any of the other new comment replacements) is a personal preference. In my opinion, the decision rests on whether the blog is commercial or not. I still haven't seen enough reasons to switch the commenting system on CN (or any of my other sites) to Disqus.Partner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone
The newest hot service with the Valley 250 crowd is FriendFeed. Last night on Twitter (last year's 250 service), videoblogger Robert Scoble was explaining that FriendFeed > Twitter in every single way. Apparently all of his markeitng has caused the service to go down. I repeat as of 12:20pm Eastern, FriendFeed is down. From what I can tell it's been down at least 5 hours now. When I checked Scobleizer.com at 7am this morning, his FriendFeed widget was not loading - that was my first clue that there was something off.Dave Winer is also reporting the outage via Twitter. Later on today Dave will explain why we need a distributed FriendFeed :-PHutch Carpenter wonders if the FriendFeed outage might be related to the Wordpress outage from last night. Wordpress reported that a fire broke out at one of their hosts - perhaps FriendFeed is hosted in the same location?Go spend time with mom people. And if you live outside the USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand where Mother's Day is apparently celebrated today, go check out a CN sponsor!Please report in if FriendFeed is down where you are and if so, what are you doing to fill the time?Partner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone
Wayne Sutton has created the "What Is Twitter in 140 Seconds" contest. The idea is to create a video library of Twitter users who answer the question, "What is Twitter?" There's a variety of prizes including an iPhone and an iPod. You have until June 23, 2008 to enter. Here are the rules: Create video Video must be less than 140 secs.Video must be tagged: whatistwitterSubmit video via form or hosting site.Tweet #whatistwitter along with video url Here is an example video from Tara Hunt: Partner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone
Jakob Nielsen recently published two interesting research statistics that help explain why display ads don't work.First, Jakob says we read a very small amount of the text on most pages. Apparently we only, on average, read at best 28% of the words on the page and most likely around 20% of the words.Second, in an older article from late last year, Jakob also says users avoid anything that looks like a banner. This may seem obvious, but the interesting thing to consider is that all web pages on a given site (and even across the web on different sites) are likely to have the same pattern for what looks like an ad vs what looks like content. Your eyes quickly learn that anything that is on the sides, or anything with a border around it, or anything that looks photographic is an ad.Newspapers and magazines generally do not have any such easily to discern pattern. Pages are generally laid out manually by a designer on an issue by issue basis. Smaller ads are blended in with the content, breaking columns and such so that advertising will have unavoidable and unpredictable proximity to content. Moreover, many ads take up the full page which requires at least some minimal scanning before turning the page. And because the ads are often so big, you almost can't avoid at least seeing a bit of it before turning the page.The bottom line is that users see too much stuff on the web and so they focus on very little. On top of that they have learned effective patterns for avoiding ads. And while we try to avoid ads in print, the physical size of the advertising, the unpredictable patterns, and the high degree of mixing advertising and content make pattern based ad avoidance much harder in print.In my view, the model for how we organize information on the web is fundamentally broken as it relates to siphoning off attention for advertisers. We need to inject more randomness into our designs. Indeed, the kinds of thing that Jakob Nielsen promotes as improving usability do in fact promote usability while *reducing* monetizability.Magazines and newspapers are *not at all useable*. I am often frustrated that it is very difficult to find a table of contents in a magazine, or that some pages are missing page numbers that would help me find an article. This is all on purpose!Print publications are very effective advertising platforms in large part specifically because they place "attention speedbumps" in your way. If print publications were as streamlined as websites, with ads neatly presented off to the side, ads wouldn't work there either.And so we have a decade of smart folks like Jakob teaching us exactly the right stuff to make our sites easy, but exactly the wrong strategies for making money. Amusingly, at least a part of the message is that a little disorganization is absolutely critical.This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who recently launched a new blog: Why Does Everything Suck? exploring the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet.Partner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone
Custom Communications out of the U.K. have put together a series of posts regarding the top brands on YouTube. The story isn't about how brands are embracing YouTube to effectively communicate their message. Instead the list focuses on which videos related to a brand has the most video views and how the specific video could affect the brand, both positively or negatively. Their "impact on reputation" score for each video is worth a read.Here are the top 10:Nike - "Ronaldinho: Touch of Gold" - Viewed 22,581,372 timesPepsi - "PEPSI (Britney Spears, Beyonce, Pink - We Will Rock You)" - Viewed 14,050,586 timesMcDonalds - "Fast Food Freestyle" - Viewed 11,744,399 times Coca-Cola - "Diet Coke+Mentos=Human experiment: EXTREME GRAPHIC CONTENT" - Viewed 8,583,526 timesUnilever - "Dove Evolution" - Viewed 6,727,556 timesDisney - "Internet is for Porn" - Viewed 3,278,230 timesBudweiser - "Banned Super Bowl 2007 Bud commercial" - Viewed 2,149,516 times Microsoft - "Microsoft Surface Parody" - Viewed 2,068,861 times. 3,322 commentsIKEA - "Banned Commercial - Swedish Midsummer" - Viewed 1,483,858 timesToyota - "Top Gear: Killing a Toyota Part 1" - Viewed 1,132,279 timesThe Nike commercial has over 15,000 comments. Here's the #4 video - Mentos and Coke inside a human's mouth:Partner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone
We've written about Clicky Web analytics several times including our first product review just shy of a year ago. It's my favorite medium-level analytics application on the market. Why? Speed, features, the freaking addictive real-time spy and excellent support from the one person team of Sean Hammons.Today Sean has posted about a variety of new visualization tools that Clicky now offers. Clicky has hired the team at Open Flash Chart to create even more customizations on their charting solution. Here is one basic example chart that's now possible (bar charts were available previously):
The charts update on the fly and the "compare" feature is where the charting tool shows its strength. You can compare practically anything you want to see if there are correlations between the data. Sean has created an example displaying social media inbound traffic vs. bounce rate - perfect for checking how many Digg'rs come back a second time. The comparison possibilities are endless - I already have a list of charts to create.In the title of this column, I included, "Clicky...Shows You How Freemium Is Done." Freemium means that the service offers a free version and then premium upgrades. I said this because these new charting features are free through this Sunday and then they move to the pro account (paid). Sean gives you the first crack rock free, gets you hooked so you keep coming back to him to buy more crack. I've written before that too many startups who employ the Freemium model give away too much for free and customers never have a reason to upgrade. But giving a taste of premium features every now and again makes perfect sense for trial.In case you are interested, we are currently running the following analytical tools on CN:ClickyGoogle AnalyticsMintExtremeTrackingA homegrown proprietary analytics toolOn the CN job board, Clicky is currently seeking a Web developer.Partner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone
Partner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone
Yesterday we posted an interview with Allon Bloch of Wix. Allon describes Wix as, "Wix is a web-top publishing platform. We believe it could become the platform people use when they want to publish something online, whether it's a business site, a family site, widget, flyer, blog etc."Today we are back with invites to the private beta! If you would like one, just complete the form in the Wix widget below. Free MySpace Comments - Wix.comPartner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone
We originally profiled Iterasi back in January when they launched at DEMO. The name Iterasi comes from the Portugese from iteration. The idea of the service is simple: save pages in their exact state for later use. The example is easy: you do a search on a site with an embedded Google map. You want to save the state of the Google map but currently if you favorite the page, you lose the actual map locations in the results. Iterasi saves the exact state of the page making it easy to come back to. It's not saving the live page, rather the current page at the time of the save.The saved page is called a "notarization" and monetization comes from very specific ad targeting since the page is saved. They have also released a new widget. The widget gives people the ability to use iterasi to embed clickable thumbnail images of the pages they are saving.The other announcement the company is making is Alex Williams is joining the team as the Director of Product Marketing. Alex most recently worked for SplashCast Media.If you would like access to the public beta, sign up here.Partner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone
Burst Media continues their YAAN (yet another ad network) rollout today with the launch of the Trendsetters vertical ad network. This follows the moms ad network, food ad network, early adopters ad network, and the family travelers ad network. Does there come a point when there are so many ad networks that it spreads the company so thin and makes it difficult to sell across all of these new networks?Burst describes today's new ad network, "Advertisers can use the Burst Trendsetters Network to target influencers of new trends, many of whom use the Internet as their primary information source to research brands, and who very often act as brand advocates to their peers." The Burst Trendsetters Network includes users ages 15-34 and includes 100 websites that reach 7 million unique visitors and delivers more than 51 million web impressions.We are part of the early adopters ad network but so far no campaigns have come our way. I've moved most of our inventory to Tribal Fusion as they seem to be the best of the remnant compaign providers. I want Burst to succeed - I almost feel like after being with them for 10 years that I have a vested interest (yet of cours no financial interest). As I've written so many times before, Burst is still stuck in 1998.Partner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone
Currently the only search that Facebook offers globally is a search within Facebook itself. Greg Sterling is wondering if Facebook should add the Microsoft Live Search to the site. The idea makes sense seeing as Microsoft has $240 million invested into the social network. It's certainly a question of when not if.Bebo is currently using Yahoo (who knows if that will change now that AOL owns the social network) and Google has MySpace all locked up.Sterling notes, 'Adding a Live Search box (and related search ads) would boost not only the utility of the Facebook site but monetization as well. It would also give Microsoft a "back door" way to expose millions of users to Live Search.'Live Search integration would potentially keep users within the Facebook framework for at least one additional monetizable click. Getting wild for a minute, could Facebook create the next Wikipedia?The only reason not to would be if Zuck and pals don't think the Live Search is up to par with the other search offerings. Things that make you go hmm!
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This screen shows topical clouds taken from twitter accounts of several social media influencers. Shown here are Tara Hunt (missrogue), Chris Brogan, Adrian Chan (gravity7 -- the parser apparently doesn't like alphanumerical names), Dave Winer, Stowe Boyd, Michael Arrington, Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, and Brian Solis.(note I worked myself in there? crafty eh? I'm not really an influencer, of course, so I put myself in there as a proxy control group.)You'll need to hit each of these and pop them to full size to be able to read them. If you do, you'll probably wonder as I did what, if anything, this tells us. These are cloud views, and could be provided by tweetclouds, but I found it handy to be able to lay them side by side, and to be able to flip each window over and change parameters (eg. date range). And they're updated in real time, so they refresh every few minutes or so.The value proposition here is that influencers influence while talking, and for those of us on twitter, this means talking in 140 character posts. I had to stare at these for half an hour before I began to see things. (my screensaver kicks in at 30 mins. just kidding). You can click the words to read the posts that included them. I started counting how many were in each (this has to be done manually, so it would be great to see a post number on rollover.)First of all, the tags include any post from the user as well as posts to or in which the user is @named -- so while Dave Winer showed 124 posts for comcast, not all were from him. Likewise, I noticed that Arrington was the only one "reading" -- but it turned out that the term was used in posts in which other twitter users said they were reading techchrunch (not in fact that they were reading arrington's tweets, but techcrunch articles).With the influencer value proposition still in mind, I tried to read between the lines, or through the gaps, and what struck me first was that in the combination of words shown for each twitterer, one could make out three kinds of conversation: every self-referential talk (apropo the invitation that still begs participation on twitter.com: "What are you doing?"); exchanges with other twitterers; and references to companies, activities, sites (urls).From stylistic differences in terms that convey everyday experience, you can make out some of the personality of each twitterer. This is even more clear in the 1 and 3 day views than in the 30 day views (yes, that's thirty days -- more than other twitter search clients). These influencers vary in their personability, enthusiasm, self-disclosure, and vary also in how personal or impersonal they come across. Tara comes across as friendly, Jeremiah as professional, arrington as a journalist, brogan as interested. While I follow these folks daily, I purposely did not read their twitter archives -- so that I'd be reading as much from terms shown as possible.As you close down the time frame, terms that are surfaced shift to the present. No surprise there. Interestingly, heuer maintains a more regular repertoire (see how his terms are fewer and larger). Most influencer show a fairly flat conversation space -- that is, few words really stand out during the 3 day snapshot view. Solis gets credit for "thanks", which stands out and makes sense given what he does -- PR. Solis gives and gets a lot of gratitude. Tara uses the most expressive and emotive terms, suggesting that she tweets more about how she is feeling. Winer clearly had something up with comcast (the heavy throughput problem), and heuer, solis, jeremiah and myself reference "social media" quite a bit -- if one were pushing social media, we'd be good targets as we speak it already.Down at the one day level, it's easy to see who addresses other twitterers, and is in (public) conversation with them, and who doesn't. One also gets a sense of the day's topics. Solis' topics change significantly between the one and 3 day view. Heuer's remain for the most part the same -- however, he might not have twittered much during the one day time period, and I didn't check.In moving now from everyday conversation to topical conversation, we can look again for influence. Influencer, influencer on the wall, who's the most influential of them all? These cloud views don't account for reputation score, or use a conversational index (such as suggested by stowe). They account for numbers of follows/followers, and because there's no metric for page view in twitter, don't account for impact.So the terms, while shown in the same font size, can't give us comparative topical influence. They more simply show us what these influencers tend to talk about. Because tinyurls are captured only as words, and not parsed, we're not able to see what these users have posted links to. But we can see who does post links. Few of the social media company names, applications (facebook and twitter excepted), or buzzwords appear here. That's not surprising, given that these users maintain their own blogs, belong to a high number of social networks, and are regular face to face contact. Much of what surfaces in the social media space, therefore, might not make it into these conversation clouds verbatim.(What does surface is often in the tinyurl). However, these are just my interpretations. (For example, stowe, deborahcrooks, and I just had a guitar/singing jam session at my place, but the words "jam" "guitar" "session" etc passed below the radar, or were the subject of direct messages. This begs the question of private and public conversations, and a lot of value is passed through back channels.)Note that a view of influencers in popular TV, movies, dvd rentals, bands, cars, celebrities, etc, might show very different results. Influencers who don't make regular face to face contact should produce more explicit topical references in their twitter conversations. In fact a quick survey of Lost fans and Lost tweets showed a great deal of detail right after last week's (awesome) episode. Lost fans can use a shorthand, insider references to theories, and so on. Highly coded 140 character conversations take an insider's knowledge to understand. While radian6 did surface "OMG," I'm guessing that some social media analysts might have missed "OMG" as a term of extreme enthusiasm and brand affinity (! -- not to mention WTF!!!).I skipped over my second observation -- references to other twitterers -- because it's fairly straightforward. It would be cool if these were denoted in the tag clouds by use of color. Speaking of color, it would be cool also if rolling over one word would highlight the same word in other profiles. Widgets don't talk to each other, however.There's one powerful dimension of this that I've not yet brought up, and that's the real-time updates radian6 provides to each window. I could see using this for clients. In fact by keeping lists of topical or domain influencers, together with their blogs, one could provide a client with intra-day monitoring. Each widget can be exported as a graphic or as xml, and emailed from within the application, with notes. This would be perfect for real-time tracking -- say of events, breaking news, product launches, pr, marketing or advertising campaigns.It would be great to see this with cross references and relationships (a social graph) built in. One might then get a better sense of the overall conversation space. This approach looked at individual influencers -- a topic approach requires setting up widgets by keywords, and results vary immensely by the correlation of search terms to tweets. I'm sure I've missed quite a lot, but this post is already far too long.Thanks for your attention!Just some arbitrarily chosen terms, with number of tweets returned for each (written to, by, or citing that user):user: techcrunchyes 10reading 12user: chrisbroganthanks 22talking 9user: missroguebook 9 awesome 10whuffie 5user: davewinercomcast 124 timesthanks 8user: jowyangthanks 6agree 6user: briansolisthanks 6user: stoweboyddinner 5 wine 3tuning 3interesting 3Partner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone
Mentos, the freshmaker, is back on the scene after all of those great Mentos in the Coke videos. This time, Mentos has created a new social media campaign that brings interactivity to a whole new level. The site is based in Italy and the terms note that you must be over 18 to play.The site is called the Mentos Kiss Cam. When you enter you select whether you would like to kiss a man or a woman. Make sure you have a webcam connected before you start. If you don't, there is a demo video to show you how it works. Is this a waste of corporate funds or a great social media idea? I will suggest it's the former.
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Partner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone
Last year I wrote an article about what I'd like to see in the perfect video system - combining online and traditional TV. Services like Joost and Hulu are making strides towards perfection but are still a long way off. Today Sezmi has launched what they are calling "TV 2.0" and a complete solution (why they would jam 2.0 on there is beyond me A&R Edelman should be shot). The feature list is quite impressive including:
delivering everything video in one package - traditional tv, cable, premium channels along with Internet videothe interface is seamless between Internet video and tv and recorded showsremote control that can be personalized for each person in the familysocial networking aspects - friends, share playlists and rate shows with the community providing feedbackTo be honest, it's almost like Sezmi looked at my post and made that exact device. The big piece they are missing is the ability to watch whatever I want from where I want when I want. Pricing information was not provided. It does look like this isn't a box you can buy off the shelf, Sezmi will need to partner with local cable and Internet video providers to get it working. I am excited to see the Sezmi device enter the marketPartner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone
Matt Dickman has put together a good overview of how Google touches him from the minute he wakes up until the minute he goes to bed. Matt begins by noting that his post the year prior about the same topic was one of his popular ever. Our post about "My Life Without Google" is one of our most popular of all time as well.From mobile to YouTube to online purchases to billboards on the highway, Matt's day touches nearly all of the aspects of what Google offers. Here are a few of the good bits:5:15am: Ugh. The day starts to my blaring clock radio. There is an ad running that Google has sold through ClearChannel.9:00am: I surf my favorite blogs, most of them have Google AdWords placed on them even in the feeds. I am reading those feeds with Google Reader.10:00am: Finally! I am free from...damn...it's another Google SMS alert on my phone. No peace. (from the toilet!)3:45pm: Just in surfing the web I come across 2 or 3 major sites that run Google for searching site content. MySpace is one of those.Though Matt misses a whole bunch of Google services... here are a few:Did any of his phone calls come in from GrandCentral?What about feeds - how many aren't served by FeedBurner?And probably the one he overlooked the most - Google Analytics - how many sites that he visited during the day aren't running Google Analytics?What other ways does Google touch us behind-the-scenes that Matt may have missed? Leave them in the comments.Partner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone
Godiva Chocolatier is announcing the launch of their mobile application today. This is very exciting. Imagine sitting in a park with your loved one, deciding you have a chocolate craving and being able to jump onto the Godiva mobile site and in 7-10 days your chocolate arrives. By then, your craving is gone.Apparently the application only works on Blackberry devices (hello iPhone/Windows Mobile?) but does feature large product images and descriptions. I just don't see the need to purchase chocolate on a mobile. There is one part of the application that makes sense - a Godiva store locator that uses GPS to locate you and the store nearest to you. Now if the mobile application tied into the local store and allowed me to order locally and have the order delivered to me, that'd be hot.Partner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone
Playboy is announcing today the launch of an online search for the best video submissions from hopeful Playboy models. YouTube is acting as the video host for this exciting competition. From what I can gather, this is the first time YouTube is being used to host a contest that will eventually lead to nudity. Is this too far for YouTube to go in terms of the family-friendly view the public holds for YouTube? The prizes include a trip to Los Angeles, a spread on playboy.com, and a "chance" at being a playmate. I put quotes around chance as the site clearly states that this is not a guarantee even though the marketing suggests that it is. The contest details are here and the YouTube channel is available for your entries. One interesting bit from the FAQ: What role will the YouTube community have on this search?We are counting on the democracy of the YouTube community to help lift the best videos to the top, based on most-viewed, highest-rated, etc. That's not to say that Playboy's editors won't have their own ideas about which ones are best; our editors will have the final word, but we definitely have our eye on what the community thinks. Of course, per the YouTube TOS, no nudity is allowed in these demo videos. I've embedded an instructional video in case you would like to submit an entry into the Playboy contest. The video is safe for work if you are allowed to view a woman in a bikini/covering her assets. ON a related topic, Playboy is seeking a vice president of content. Partner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone
Yahoo has launched their local search into India this week into four major cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai. The local search in India works very much like the local search in the U.S. To be honest, I don't use Yahoo Local - I've been more of a Yelp'er or lately also searching via address using Google Maps. Though playing with Yahoo Local this morning, it's pretty robust. I like how it aggregates reviews from across the Web in addition to those from Yahoo Local, offers an interactive map and a variety of alternative suggestions for other topics in the location I am in. I don't see anything very innovative, the information is just presented in a very usable format.On a more serious note, It appears that Yahoo Local India is easily hackable by injecting script code into a review and you can do basically anything from that point. Sridhar was able to create an iframe with Google in the body (see the screenshot below). He also notes that anything way more malicious could also be injected.I tested this hack on the U.S. version of Yahoo Local and was unable to reproduce the security issue. When I entered any script code and clicked submit, the system removed the code within the script tags and prompted me to add more content.I have submitted a ticket to Yahoo to get them to fix this.
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