Is disqus the best option for tracking your comments?
I have been using cocomment and it has not been bad. But lately I have seen that when a page is loaded in Firefox which has the option to add comments the cocomment extension freezes Firefox till the time cocomment loads info from their database about the page. This is frustrating.
Therefore I'm going to try out Disqus and see if it can help me track my comments on the Interenet
QA is a critical comp
onent of a web design process and one of the disadvantage of using a small company is that they do not follow the QA process. There are various tools and white papers for doing QA on the Internet. However, the recommended processes take a long time and usually a small company like mine is always short of time and it is tough to introduce a QA process as it takes time to download the process and practice. After a lot of research I concluded that it is best that I define my process for QA of web pages which does not take time and is easy to implement. I studied a lot of processes which others have shared on the Internet.
The process is divided into five phases and they are
I will follow up this post with others which would have the complete process for Quality Assurance of a website. In the next post I will tell the process that I follow for doing a peer review.
Please share your suggestions if you have any as sharing knowledge is one the principle goal of this blog.
Mobile Social Networking: MySpace, Facebook, MSN the Leading Services
M:Metrics has released some data about mobile social bookmarking networks. As expected MySpace is the largest mobile network in US and UK with MSN/Windows Live Spaces a close second. About 12.3 mi
M:Metrics has released some interesting data about mobile social networking. It states that MySpace has the largest mobile network in the United States and UK, while MSN/Windows Live Spaces is preferred in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Overall 12.3 million consumers in the United States and Western Europe reported accessing a social networking site with their mobile device in the month of June 2007. 7.5 million of those were from the US, perhaps surprising given that the US is not usually considered a leader in the mobile Web space - Europe and Asia is where mobile thrives. M:Metrics didn't measure Asia's activity (which would be fascinating), but in Europe Italy had 1.3 million mobile social networking users in June, then the UK with 1.1 million, Spain with 751,000, then Germany and France. College-aged users (18-24) are the most avid users in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Mobile social networking is defined by M:Metrics as "the ability to connect to these communities with a mobile phone, allowing people to access profiles and share content while they’re on the go."
MySpace and Facebook are the top two social networking sites accessed via mobile in both the U.S. and UK. MySpace attracts 3.7 million U.S. users, while Facebook’s mobile U.S. audience is about 2 million. In the U.K. there are 440,000 mobile users for Facebook, while Facebook has about 307,000. YouTube is third in the U.S., with 901,000 mobile visitors, while Bebo is third in the UK with 288,000.
Mobile MySpace, pic by Stan
Interesting to note that content distribution with mobile operator portals is key. M:Metrics found that the top three U.S. mobile social networking sites had strong distribution - MySpace appeared in Amp’d, AT&T, Helio and Nextel. Facebook was accessible on Sprint, AT&T, Virgin and Amp’d; YouTube on Verizon (also iPhone, which wasn't measured in this survey). In the UK, MySpace has distribution on Vodafone, Bebo on 3. Only U.K. number 2 MSN Live Spaces is not offered on a mobile operator portal.
Here is the breakdown of content and apps for U.S., which seems traditional and not much to do with social networking sites (texting, ringtones, etc). It'd be interesting to check back in 6 months or so and see what impact iPhone and similar web-friendly mobile devices have on this - will we see more social networking functionality in the stats then?
Facebook Mobile pic by random0
Read/WriteWeb, has recently reviewed the top 5 online music services. The test was done by trying to find "The Velvet Undergorund" on the services. The services that have been profiled are
All up, a very solid 4.5/5 for last.fm.
Pandora
Unfortunately I can no longer access Pandora, as I reside outside the US. This is the message I was greeted with today:
"We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the U.S."
So I asked Josh Catone (who lives on the East Coast of the US) to see what The Velvet Underground resulted in on Pandora. He advised:
1. Rock & Roll by The Velvet Underground
2. No Reply by the Beatles
3. Picture Book by The Kinks
4. Tattoo by The Who
5. Lisa Says by The Velvet Underground
That's a nice, diverse selection. Not as contemporary as last.fm though, with all the Pandora selections being from the 60's and 70's. I give last.fm better marks for 'knowing' that the Velvets influenced virtually every Alt rock band of the 80's, 90's and 21st century. Still, music is timeless and the Pandora songs were all excellent too. One other thing: you'd expect more than five songs before another VU song is played.
My rating: 4/5 (I didn't penalise them for not being available outside the US, as it isn't their fault; but not having anything from the 80's onwards loses them .5 of a point).
Alas at this point my experiment started to turn to custard. On the Yahoo Music homepage, I selected "Create radio station" - which took me to their LAUNCHcast Radio service. That gave me a long list of artists to choose from. Ignoring that, I went to the bottom of the page and entered VU as my sole option. Unfortunately... I got the following "Error 5":
Not OS X?! I checked out the Help file, which stated: "Currently, we do not support LAUNCHcast Radio for Macintosh or Firefox on Windows."
At which point I gave up on Yahoo Music. Rating: 0/5 for extreme compatibility incompetence.
I opened my iTunes app and clicked 'Radio'. However, there is no way to enter an artist or search for one. It is a straight list of radio stations. A great selection though, so Apple gets points for that. But when you think online radio these days, it's recommendation and personalization services like last.fm and Pandora that are pushing the boundaries.
So my rating for iTunes music streaming: 2.5/5 (basic and comprehensive in music types, but not innovative).
Rhapsody has a nice "listen FREE" search option at the top of its homepage, an excellent way to entice people to sign up for its premium service. I typed in "The Velvet Underground" and it took me to a useful bio page. At the bottom of that page I saw a link for The Velvet Underground Channel. Licking my lips, I tried to click on it. And again. And again!! But it was non-clickable for me. Why? Because the service is unavailable outside the US.
Such a promising service, but (as with Pandora) it shows what a legal minefield the online music world is currently - due to the record companies. It defeats the purpose of the World Wide Web if people outside the US can't use it. So I'll reluctantly pass on a rating for Rhapsody (and I didn't want to bother Josh a second time).
I also checked out FineTune and Last365, but neither offered much in the way of Velvet Underground personalization. So for me, it's no contest - last.fm wins, mostly because I can actually access it! But also it does deliver slightly better results than Pandora. I used to use Pandora a lot, back when it was available to me; and found then that last.fm was slightly more diverse and less likely to repeat songs. So last.fm has consistently been the leader in music streaming of the web 2.0 variety (i.e. with recommendations and personalization).
I think Apple could be more innovative with iTunes. You only need to look at The Filter, a playlist service we reviewed earlier this week, to see how iTunes data can be personalized.
And for the love of Lou, I hope that Pandora and Rhapsody can route around those damn record companies soon. I do hate it when Web innovation is blocked due to legal issues.
What do you think? Do the above 5 deliver with your favorite band?
Lou Reed pic by ptufts, at Web 2.0 Summit 2006
Six Apart annouced the commercial release of Movable Type 4 after releasing it as a beta two months back. Boing Boing and Read/WriteWeb would be the early adaptors of MT4.
The open source would be launched in the third quater of this year and then it would be a good competitor to Wordpress. Anil Dash at Movable type feels that they can now match feature for feature with wordpress.
MT4 boasts over 50 new features and "a completely redesigned user interface", which includes a more advanced WYSIWYG editor and a system dashboard with dynamic graphic display. MT4 is also pushing itself as "a social media platform", which allows users to turn their audiences into communities. In effect this means that readers can become members of a website, with rights to post alongside authors - including sharing photos, videos, and audio. There is also a new ratings framework.
[via Read/WriteWeb]
Bolt.com is no longer accessable. Bolt.com was an online video site. The word is that Bolt.com settle with Universal a law suit and as a consequence also shut down their website.
The message on the website reads
"Please be advised that the operations of Bolt, Inc. and Bolt.com have ceased. Net Revolution, Inc. and Bolt, Inc. have executed an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors effective as of August 14, 2007. Please direct any creditor related questions or comments to the Assignee's office to the attention of:
Development Specialists, Inc.
345 California Street
Suite 1150
San Francisco, California 94104-2664
Att: George E. Shoup, III
Email: gshoup@dsi.bizThe Notice of Assignment will be mailed to all known creditors in the near future. If you are interested in acquiring this site or other assets of Bolt or Net Revolution please contact, gshoup@dsi.biz."
This move, it seems, would have tragic ramifications for small online video sharing websites. Though bigger players like Youtube.com have the backing to fight with the bigger entertaiment companies but be ready to hear about shutting down of smaller video websites.
PubMatic, is a new service that helps web site publishers run the highest paying ads from top ad networks. It is a limited beta launch and PubMatic takes an algorithmic approach to determining which ads will pay publisher's the most.
For now, PubMatic works with Google Adsense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, ValueClick, and Komli. The public beta is available for the first 100 publishers on the first serve basis.
When you first log in to PubMatic you're greeted by a simple dashboard that displays your most recent earnings statistics. The information is broken down by ad network, and includes the number of impressions, clicks, revenue, and eCPM from each network, for each day. A screenshot of pubmatic is here
There is a also a Yahoo Widget available screenshot of which is below.
I think the application is worth a shot - first to see whether you get lucky and two to derive more income from your website or blog.
The tool analyses your disk drives and collects several statistics
which you can view as overview charts and details tables.
This is ad- and nag-free uncrippled binary multi-platform software
that is free of charge and that never expires.
