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."

JavaScript-based Amazon Web Services Simple Monthly Calculator

Amazon Web Services Simple Monthly Calculator

Video Interactivity, Video Monetization, Video Analytics, Content Management

Video Interactivity, Video Monetization, Video Analytics, Content Management

$99 month 10,000 views

$199 month 50,000 views

$399 month 100,000 views

or per GB transferred charges

http://www.veeple.com/pricingplans.php

What is eZs3 and What Does it Do?

What is eZs3 and What Does it Do?:

"Although Amazon provided a fantastic service, S3 was very difficult to use for the vast majority of people who are online today.

A number of tools were available to web users that allowed them to easily transfer their files to Amazon S3.

But what then?

How do you get the media files onto your website?

Enter eZs3!

eZs3 is a service which allows you to fully manage your own S3 account, including uploading and downloading files and folders, and creating players and wrappers that you can easily use to embed media files on your website."

How To Stream Amazon S3 Video On Your Website | Internet Marketing��Internet Marketing

How To Stream Amazon S3 Video On Your Website

I needed a replacement Video providerSince Google Video stopped allowing uploads I needed to find a better way to get externally hosted videos onto my site.

Many people use Amazon S3Amazon S3 is a natural choice because it is super robust and very cheap. The only downside is that it is not very easy to make players. Storage and strength is the main benefit.I did some researchI decided to research my options and thought it was worth sharing my results. Here is a summary of what I was trying to achieve.

Why Standards Fail – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

Why Standards Fail – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

Back in 2000, CSS co-creator Bert Bos set out to explain the W3C’s design principles—“to make explicit what the developers in the various W3C working groups mean when they invoke words like efficiency, maintainability, accessibility, extensibility, learnability, simplicity, [and] longevity..."

2.2 billion people will be online by 2013 – Tech Products & Geek News | Geek.com

2.2 billion people will be online by 2013 – Tech Products & Geek News | Geek.com: "In under five years time the global population of the Internet will have gone well past the 2 billion mark and be heading towards 2.2 billion according to Forrester Research. That’s an overall increase of 45%.

That growth rate is due mainly to new Internet users from Asia; with China accounting for 17% of the overall online population. Africa and the Middle East users will also rise dramatically and end up accounting for 13% of the population.

Closer to home the U.S. will see Internet penetration increase to 82% (73% today) and both the U.S. and Wetsern Europe will grow their overall population by a maximum of 3% due mainly to those areas already having a high level of Internet users (saturation)."

Web fonts now (how we’re doing with that) – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

Web fonts now (how we’re doing with that) – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report: "Thus, as we consider integrating real fonts into our designs, we must navigate between browsers that support @font-face now (Safari), those that will do so soon (Opera, Chrome, Firefox), and the one that possibly never will (IE, with a dwindling but still overwhelming market share).

The person who figures out a designer-friendly solution to all this will either be hailed as a hero/heroine or get rich. Meanwhile, near-complete solutions of varying implementation difficulty exist. Read on:"

A List Apart: Articles: Introduction to RDFa

A List Apart: Articles: Introduction to RDFa: "RDFa (“Resource Description Framework in attributes”) is having its five minutes of fame: Google is beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes websites, using the parsed data to enhance the display of search results with “rich snippets.” Yahoo!, meanwhile, has been processing RDFa for about a year. With these two giants of search on the same trajectory, a new kind of web is closer than ever before."

Part 2: Introduction to RDFa II

Firefox 3 High CPU Use? Try This Fix. | GMG

Firefox 3 High CPU Use? Try This Fix. | GMG

BBC NEWS | Technology | Internet overhaul wins approval

BBC NEWS | Technology | Internet overhaul wins approval: "The net's regulator, Icann, voted unanimously to relax the strict rules on so-called 'top-level' domain names, such as .com or .uk.
The decision means that companies could turn brands into web addresses, while individuals could use their names.
A second proposal, to introduce domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts, was also approved."

Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

Finally after years of rumour, Google launches its own operating system

"Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.
Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform."

Designing a blog with html5 | HTML5 Doctor

Designing a blog with html5 | HTML5 Doctor

John Resig says:

If there was ever a time to start playing around with the jump to HTML 5, now would be it. Since HTML 5 is a superset of the features provided by HTML 4 and XHTML 1 it ends up being surprisingly easy to 'upgrade': Just start by swapping out your current (X)HTML Doctype for the HTML 5 Doctype:

Here's a practical article on how to start from HTML5 Doctor, a new blog dedicated to the new web.

XHTML 2 language dumped in favor of HTML 5

XHTML 2 language dumped in favor of HTML 5: "The XHTML 2 Working Group charter, scheduled to expire at the end of 2009, will not be renewed. �By discontinuing the XHTML 2 working group and increasing resources in the HTML 5 Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate progress of HTML 5 and clarify the organization's position regarding the future HTML."