Pingdom Goes Free (For 1 Site)

Pingdom Goes Free (For 1 Site): "

Pingdom (from Sweden) is a neat website uptime monitoring service. Up until now, if you registered an account with them you had to pay for it after the initial trial ended, or else lose your Pingdom service. Now, they say they start offering an account that won’t time out... the only difference to a full, paid account being that you can only track a single website.

OpenID: the unseen branded revenue opportunity

OpenID: the unseen branded revenue opportunity: "
But today I came across a truly inspirational approach to brand-mediated identity that portends great potential for OpenID and for brands generally — especially those with eager and adoring fans:


What better way to both support Creative Commons and show off your patronage than by identifying yourself across the web with your very own unique, secure, privacy-protecting creativecommons.net OpenID (just like Zach Beauvais)?
For a mere $50 minimum donation ($25 for students), you can own a limited edition URL and profile from Creative Commons that identifies you to the world and provides a compelling revenue opportunity for the non-profit foundation.
While companies like SAP become OpenID providers for pedestrian reasons like simplifying authentication across their many different distributed web properties, Creative Commons is redistributing the brand equity and social capital their members have accrued over the last several years by letting people show and verify their affiliation to the organization.
With this simple example, we can start to see the symbiosis of making an intentional choice about identity: Creative Commons finds a new revenue opportunity and members of the community have a way to express their affiliation and promote the brand. This is exactly the kind of thing that I could see the NYTimes doing for its writers (as an extension to its Times People platform) — providing them both a home on the web and a way to validate their association with a more well-known entity. This of course is just a small experiment for Creative Commons — but a very exciting one in terms of what it means for identity on the web."

WebRSS : Create RSS Feeds, Publish News Feeds, Display RSS Feeds on Your Website

WebRSS : Create RSS Feeds, Publish News Feeds, Display RSS Feeds on Your Website

Software Pricing: Are We Doing It Wrong?

Software Pricing: Are We Doing It Wrong?:

"What I think isn't well understood here is that low prices can be a force multiplier all out of proportion to the absolute reduction in price. Valve software has been aggressively experimenting in this area; consider the example of the game Left 4 Dead:

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell announced during a DICE keynote today that last weekend's half-price sale of Left 4 Dead resulted in a 3000% increase in sales of the game, posting overall sales (in dollar amount) that beat the title's original launch performance.

It's sobering to think that cutting the price in half, months later, made more money for Valve in total than launching the game at its original $49.95 price point. (And, incidentally, that's the price I paid for it. No worries, I got my fifty bucks worth of gameplay out of this excellent game months ago.)
The experiments didn't end there. Observe the utterly non-linear scale at work as the price of software is experimentally reduced even further on their Steam network:

The massive Steam holiday sale was also a big win for Valve and its partners. The following holiday sales data was released, showing the sales breakdown organized by price reduction:

• 10% sale = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
  
• 25% sale = 245% increase in sales
  
• 50% sale = 320% increase in sales
  
• 75% sale = 1470% increase in sales
  

Note that these are total dollar sale amounts! Let's use some fake numbers to illustrate how dramatic the difference really is. Let's say our hypothetical game costs $40, and we sold 100 copies of it at that price."

Timefire: On Reducing the Size of Compressed Javascript (by up to 20%)

Timefire: On Reducing the Size of Compressed Javascript (by up to 20%): "That leaves us with the built in GZIP compression that most web browsers include support for. The question is, can we improve compression while remaining compatible with the browser's decoder? There is an existing example of improving GZIP by injecting a reversible transform: bzip2 and the Burrows-Wheeler Transform.

Which brings up an interesting idea, can we do something like BWT's sort but for Javascript, in a way that doesn't require an extra pass to 'undo' the sorting?"

Bugs in IE8's Lookahead Downloader

EricLaw's IEInternals : Bugs in IE8's Lookahead Downloader: "Unfortunately, since shipping IE8, we've discovered two problems in the lookahead downloader code that cause Internet Explorer to make speculative requests for incorrect URLs."

HTML�5 differences from HTML�4

HTML�5 differences from HTML�4: "The style element has a new scoped attribute which can be used to enable scoped style sheets. Style rules within such a style element only apply to the local tree."

Underused Features of HTML

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/123092/underused-features-of-html

Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess

Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess: "Newmark's claim of almost total disinterest in wealth dovetails with the way craigslist does business. Besides offering nearly all of its features for free, it scorns advertising, refuses investment, ignores design, and does not innovate. Ordinarily, a company that showed such complete disdain for the normal rules of business would be vulnerable to competition, but craigslist has no serious rivals. The glory of the site is its size and its price. But seen from another angle, craigslist is one of the strangest monopolies in history, where customers are locked in by fees set at zero and where the ambiance of neglect is not a way to extract more profit but the expression of a worldview."

Ron Talks About Building a Video Site for Kids... and Clashing With the Laws of YouTube

Clashing With the Laws of YouTube:

Ron explains: “This is a visualization of the first 5,000 videos submitted to Totlol. Bright Red = removed from YouTube. Pink = no longer API Player accessible. Purple = Good.” The oldest video is shown at the top left, time progresses downwards. “Generally speaking, red appears over time as videos are taken down (obviously). It is reasonable to assume that earlier submissions were probably easier to find as they were on average more ’established’ in YouTube, hence they apparently were also less likely to be removed.”

Fonts available for @font-face embedding - Webfonts.info

Fonts available for @font-face embedding - Webfonts.info

Web fonts and standards

Web fonts and standards: "

As far back as 1998, CSS2 provided a way to link to real fonts from your style sheet:

  @font-face {
font-family: 'Watusi';
src: url('http://www.example.com/fonts/watusi.ttf')
format('truetype');
}

h1 {
font-family: 'Watusi', sans-serif;
}

Instead of static pictures of fonts, linked font files can be retrieved from the web and used to display HTML text. And not just for headlines, but for body copy, too. It’s brilliant! It’s magnificent! There are just two problems...

jsLinb UI Builder

jsLinb UI Builder

Delphi/Visual Basic-style designer for Javascript.

Coding A HTML 5 Layout From Scratch | How-To, Tutorials | Smashing Magazine

Coding A HTML 5 Layout From Scratch | How-To, Tutorials | Smashing Magazine This is a really great article with practical details on how to implement solid HTML5 and CSS3 features in websites that are viewable in today's browsers and still gracefully degrade all the way back to IE6.

Solid stuff. Good.

On2 Flix Cloud | On-Demand Video Transcoding Powered by On2 Flix Engine and Zencoder

On2 Flix Cloud | On-Demand Video Transcoding Powered by On2 Flix Engine and Zencoder: "On2 Flix Cloud is a web-based transcoding service that reduces the cost and complexity of converting digital video for the web, IPTV, HD and devices."

Ajaxian � Google buying On2; New twist in the hope for Open Video

Ajaxian � Google buying On2; New twist in the hope for Open Video

"This could be huge for the Open Video movement. It all depends on what Google does with the codecs going forward (and the deal going through of course)."

"Back in 2001, On2 made waves by releasing their VP3 compression technology to the open-source community, including their patents on the technology. The technology lives on in the form of (Ogg) Theora. You can find more information about this here"

google-acquires-video-compression-technology-company-on2-for-106-million

A short history of btrfs

A short history of btrfs [LWN.net]: "Btrfs will be the default file system on Linux within two years."