Category Archives: Occasional Links
Photo-sharing Lessons and Questions
“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
“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
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
Occasional Links: April 22nd, 2007
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: March 31st, 2007
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
