WiredPen

Archive for March 2008

Google Docs Goes Offline

Posted by: kegill on: 31 March 2008

From Techmeme via Twitter: Google is rolling out (ie, not everyone can get it immediately) Google Gears, which is a first-step in offline use:
You’ll know you have the feature when you see a little “offline” menu item in the upper right of your document window in Google Docs… The feature’s first-use case is, “I’m [...]

UK Government On Twitter

Posted by: kegill on: 28 March 2008

Poynter’s Paul Bradshaw reports that the UK Government has set up a Twitter account and is using Twitter like a wire service with Twitterfeed. From NowPublic last summer, Here’s How Reporters Use Twitter.

Comcast Drops BitTorrent Block

Posted by: kegill on: 28 March 2008

Salon writer Farhad Manjoo reports that Comcast and BitTorrent have hammered out an agreement: “Comcast will now slow down access for people consuming the most network bandwidth, and will no longer delay specific applications (such as BitTorrent).”
Imagine if Comcast decided to slow down Firefox for everyone because some of its users download far more Web [...]

This Is Just Wrong

Posted by: kegill on: 27 March 2008

The temperature in Seattle suburbs has been 32-ish at least three days this week. And when I opened up gmail a few moments ago, I was greeted with this headline:

I Can’t Believe I’m Writing This: Snow Is Possible Friday

Eeek!
I spoke on the phone this evening with a friend from middle Georgia (the state) … who [...]

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Online Photo Editing: The War Begins

Posted by: kegill on: 27 March 2008

Adobe has decided to tackle services like Splashup and Flickr/Picnik head-on and also take a side-swipe at Picasa. The new “product” is an online photo editor and storage site called Adobe Photoshop Express. I don’t know if the site is hosed or Mac-unfriendly, but neither the test-drive nor sign-up applications currently work with Mac Firefox [...]

New Forms of Fiction

Posted by: kegill on: 26 March 2008

Three Minds reminds us that Penguin Books UK “has challenged some of its top authors to create new forms of story – designed specially for the internet.” Tag line: Six authors, six stories, six weeks. The first installment, created in partnership with Six to Start, launched last week and incorporates Google maps. (Thanks, Meg!)

Ad Dollars Continue Online Shift

Posted by: kegill on: 26 March 2008

PQ Media believes that “non-traditional” advertising expenditures in 18 “emerging” markets will reach $160.8 billion in 2012. The category includes “online videos, store-based TV screens, sponsored events, TV and movie product placements, cellphones, video games and digital video recorders.”
According to their research, the category “online search’ will grown to $26.1 billion and “e-direct marketing” [...]

Why Do We STILL Have Ugly URLs?

Posted by: kegill on: 24 March 2008

Look at this (asp) monstrosity!!
http://www.jhm.org/ME2/Sites/dirmod.asp?sid=&type=
gen&mod=Core+Pages&gid=A6CD4967199A42D9B65B1B08851C402B&SiteID=
8112722C039B4E508F0AB8552B898895
Who spec’d this site? Oh wait, that assumes someone knew what they were doing and didn’t simply leave all decisions to programmers.
When I worked at Boeing 10 years ago, we developed a simple system to “marry” human-readable URLs (in this case, something like http://www.jhm.org/about/pastor_hagee.html) to the database gibberish reflected above. TEN [...]

A Critique of Corporate Blogs

Posted by: kegill on: 23 March 2008

Boston Business Journal (no by-line) opines that business blogs are “dying off” and then proceeds to provide a few anecdotes based on Boston-area corporate blogs.
What the BizJournal — and maybe some corporations — fail to understand is that you can’t just “add a blog” to your website and expect miracles of any sort: community, conversation, [...]

Business Collaboration Webware

Posted by: kegill on: 23 March 2008

cNet highlights four Web 2.0 business collaboration tools: Blist online database (Seattle-base — check it out!), Cozimo for image and video collaborative annotation, LiquidPlanner for project management (my students recently used WetPaint, another local startup, for a small project) and SlideShare (I required my undergraduate students to use SlideShare winter quarter).
Of these four, I use [...]


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