"I love connecting with people and build a relationship with my blog readers and appreciators and so I am on twitter. Amit’s last blog post..BB Flashback Screen Recorder Now a Freeware"
- Amit Agarwal
Is the digital savior of the sagging magazine industry finally in sight? On Wednesday, Fujitsu Frontech began selling the world’s first color epaper ebook reader. Available on April 20 in Japan only, the gadget costs 99,970 yen, or more than $1000. Until now, ebooks like the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader have been limited to black and white or shades of grey, making them OK for reading plain books and newspapers that like to use stipple drawings, but not great for colorful print media such as magazines. But if color ebook readers catch on, one theory holds, magazines and other media that currently print on dead trees would have a cheap way to distribute – and charge for — the colorful content and ads that marketers will pay for. Recently, publisher Hearst said it wanted to dive further into the ebook business. Fujitsu’s color epaper technology, first unveiled in 2007, is different from the technology created by the Massachusetts-based E Ink that’s used by the Sony and Amazon. But E...
- Amit Agarwal
In exactly 14 hours, at 9 am PST, you will be able to download the Internet Explorer 8.0 browser, Microsoft’s response to Firefox, Chrome and Safari, from the company’s web site. The release is a tactical acknowledgment by Redmond, Wash.-based software giant that it’s locked in a bitter battle for market share with Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera, Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari browsers. So far it’s been on the losing side of the equation, ceding market share to its upstart rivals, all of whom are touting ease of use, simplicity, security and speed. Microsoft’s browser chief, Mike Nash, thinks the new IE 8.0 has got all that and more. While many of the new features in this browser are available to users of Safari and Firefox (via plugins), Microsoft is offering a comprehensive package — sans download — for a majority of the people that continue to patronize IE.Nash was particularly excited about the new security feature of the browser that protects browser users via a reputation system....
- Amit Agarwal
Nokia, the Finnish cell phone maker and wanna-be web power, will shut downMosh, its wildly popular service that makes it easy for people to post and share content with others. Why? Too much illegal stuff like music and pornography was being shared on the service. Nokia’s record label partners didn’t like that.
- Amit Agarwal
Later today (Tuesday) Apple will hold a press conference to unveil its upcoming iPhone 3.0 operating system and a new SDK ,or software developer kit, for the phone that is aimed at helping engineers and third parties write applications for the device. Naturally enough, speculation on the blogosphere is rife about what will be on offer. Apple notoriously stays mum on what will be coming out but here is a selection of what some people are taking guesses on what might be included and what they would like to see. Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, says he expects a cut and copy and paste function. A feature that has arguably been one of the most requested. Macworld is looking for quite a few improvements to the iPhone so I will just note a couple of them. The blog wants a new improved mail programme with a single unified inbox. Great for those with more than one e-mail account. It also wants to be able to synch notes and to-do applications and would like to see better app organisation. The...
- Amit Agarwal
One of my favorite Firefox add-ons has fancied up their landing page quite a bit this evening. It’s a good time for me to tell you how much I rely on this one little extension. Basically, it’s a bookmarklet aggregator that allows you to consolidate some of your most used Web tools into one easy button. What sites does it support? A lot:* Sure, you could just collect all your bookmarklets in a single folder on your toolbar (and even sync them using Xmarks), but it wouldn’t be as elegant. Besides, Shareaholic also shows you how many times certain pages have been shared or Dugg, something a normal bookmarklet can’t do. But as much as I love Shareaholic, I think there’s still some room for improvement:For starters, there should be a sync feature that ports your preferences across browsers.In the same vein, why not aggregate all the links you share regardless of the service you use? It could be one garage that tracks all your sharing activity. Of course, you’d need granular privacy...
- Amit Agarwal
Nova Spivack's semantic web company Twine is developing a free service to write and host semantic ontologies; the classification trees that enable machines to put concepts in topical context. Ready to play Aristotle and create an ontology of cheese, model airplanes, global anti-hunger organizations or any other topic? What blogging was to publishing, a simple tool that made far more people able to participate; Twine's new ontology writing and hosting service could be to the act of teaching machines about new topics. Sponsor The company wouldn't let us publish the new service's name but says it is aiming for a launch date this year, as soon as a go-to-market strategy and appropriate partnerships are lined up. The ontologies created won't work only on Twine, they will be referencable by semantic apps anywhere around the web. Twine Could Surpass Delicious in a Matter of Months Twine's public product lets people bookmark items like webpages and videos into topical collections. The service...
- Amit Agarwal
Want to make a link really, really visible? One thing to keep in mind: bigger is not always better. Sometimes, really big buttons – without underlined text – look more like info banners than things to click on. Take this OpenOffice download page, for instance: I was looking for a link but the first underlined text in the content area reads “Get more platforms and languages”... not what I’m looking for. It took me another second or two to realize the big green “Download” area itself was the button, albeit the arrow in it pointed to something below the area (the arrow is a metaphor for “down-load”, but that’s a retrospective insight). Losing a second or two is nothing serious usually, but in usability land, it’s a noticeable time span... in particular as the designers of OpenOffice apparently aimed to make the link really visible. In a website or larger app, all those micro-barriers of a second or two of delays add up to a feeling of frustration you may not even be able to pinpoint to...
- Amit Agarwal
Last summer, when Apple introduced its 3G iPhone device, I brought up the issue of AT&T not being ready for the data usage brought on by the data-centric touchscreen phone. Company officials of course denied having such problems, assuring me that they were ready. Ready or not, a lot of people signed up for AT&T’s service, and many were soon disappointed by the lack of backhaul bandwidth. For me personally it got so bad, that I switched away from the iPhone (which I love, by the way) to T-Mobile’s 8900 BlackBerry and a plain old phone from Verizon. AT&T keeps denying that it has any network bandwidth problems and continued its state of denial in an article in the New York Times this past weekend. Kristin S. Rinne, senior VP of architecture and planning for AT&T, blamed the phones and the chipsets on handsets for some of the problems. Bad news for them – the article coincided with the South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival, which is attended by hordes of iPhone-totting early-adopter...
- Amit Agarwal
Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As) Length: 20 min. Last week Jane presented on Twitter to a group of business students at Brigham Young University — Provo. This podcast is a recording of her presentation. For more information (beyond the podcast), see her online handout. Twitter for Business Resources about JaneJane’s blog: http://whataboutmomblog.comJane on Twitter: http://twitter.com/whatabo... email: whataboutmom@gmail.com Blog SponsorsScriptoriumWeb Content Conference, Tampa BayDoc Train WestDoc to HelpWebworksSimplifying ComplexityWritersUA Conference
- Amit Agarwal
As a preview to one of the 3 sessions I’m speaking on at SES New York next week (March 23-27) I bring you this interview with my co-panelists Michael Gray, Sally Falkow, Michel Leconte and moderator Rebecca Lieb for the Blog and Feed SEO session. These are specific, practical questions and answers about optimizing both blogs and feeds for better search performance from some of the smartest blog and Feed SEO experts on the web. If you’re a Twitter fan, please ReTweet: 37 Tips for optimizing blogs and feeds: http://cli.gs/blogseo... share 3 practical SEO tips business blogs should implement: Rebecca Lieb: Have a content strategy, and arrange it around your topic/focus. A blog isn’t a one-off, it’s an ongoing project and you need to populate it with relevant content on an ongoing basis. Don’t forget to optimize images, video and audio files with relevant, keyword-rich metadata. They’re content, too! Don’t forget to link – outbound links beget inbound links! Michel Leconte: Here...
- Amit Agarwal
There's all sorts of search engine voodoo to bring traffic to your blog and beginning blogger can get overwhelmed quickly. Here's a quick tip that will boost your search engine juice instantly: Always Be Obvious Or to put it a bit bluntly: Stop Being Clever The one thing every study of online habits shows is that nobody has any time. I don't have the time to comprehend that your post titled with a reference to Dante's Inferno is really about how to toilet train a cat. If your post is the top five things you wished you knew before you made buttercream frosting then don't use a post title that is more about your cleverness as a writer than about what I'm about to read. If I see your post title in a Google search or a Twitter tweet I should be completely unsurprised when I click through to read it. I should know exactly what I'm getting myself into. Your post titles should jump out at the right people: 'Yes! That thing you searched for, that topic you're interested in, that idea in your...
- Amit Agarwal
I didn't make any blog posts on Thursday, after a full Wednesday which included a visit to Google headquarters to meet with the Google Reader team. And even though I made a few posts on Friday, the first day of the SXSW conference, many people still think I'm on a temporary hiatus, thanks to a tag-team failure between FeedBurner and Blogger, who have significantly impacted many users by zeroing out their feeds, stopping their posts from getting out of their domain. It looks like I should have spent more time in Mountain View after chatting up the Reader team, to see just what the heck is going on elsewhere on campus. As the resurgent Kent Newsome of Newsome.org noted today, in his post, "FeedBurner & Blogger Conspire to Assassinate My Joy", the XML file that Blogger generates to distribute RSS feeds was completely wiped out - and I have been impacted as well. No matter if I had 20 or 2,000 posts historically, the file reports it has zero kilobytes, and no amount of trouble-shooting...
- Amit Agarwal
Slashdot points us to the rather unfortunate news that Amazon has sent a DMCA takedown notice to MobileRead, concerning a link that site had to a small piece of software that would allow ebooks purchased elsewhere (other than Amazon) to work on the Kindle. There are a number of issues here, all of which seem troubling. First, MobileRead never hosted the software in question, but merely had links to the tool and some instructions. Such a takedown is only supposed to be used for sites that actually have the infringing material. However, thanks to the wonderful chilling effects of the DMCA, MobileRead removed the links. Second, it's not at all clear how this script violates the DMCA. It doesn't remove copy protection at all. It just serves to open up the device for other eBooks to be used on the device. All too often we've been seeing the DMCA used in cases like this, where companies are treating the DMCA's anti-circumvention clauses to mean that they can stop just about any script they...
- Amit Agarwal
Your guide to the most useful bookmarklets for all popular web browsers including Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, IE and Opera. Bookmark this on Delicious - Saved by labnol to bookmarkletsbookmarkletchromegooglesafariopera - More about this bookmark
- Amit Agarwal
After reading the TechCrunch article today, I wanted to shed some light on the Technorati part of the equation. While it's true that the online conversation extends through platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the fluctuations in Technorati Authority are primarily due to improvements we've made to our data. We have cleaned up our data set and there is definitely an impact on Technorati Authority numbers for many bloggers. We've seen some blogs drop in Authority and others rise. Last year, we saw a major proliferation of spam blogs (splogs) - which tend to link to well known blogs to drive traffic and to disguise themselves. Since July, we've been putting major effort into purging splogs from our index and we continue to fight the onslaught every day. As we remove bad data and spam, authority numbers shift. Furthermore, as we continue to move our focus toward conversation and attention, links in blog posts become much more meaningful to the conversation than sidebar links. Just looking...
- Amit Agarwal
For the past two weeks, the market share of US Internet visits to Gmail has been higher than visits to YouTube. Previously, YouTube consistently ranked 10th among all websites by market share of visits until the week ending Jan. 10, 2009, where Gmail moved up one rank to reach #10. The websites have been swapping positions regularly ever since. Among a custom category of all Google properties, Gmail ranked 2nd behind Google for the week ending Mar. 7th, 2009. Both websites are receiving more visits than one year ago, with a bigger increase in the growth of visits to Gmail. The market share of visits to Gmail has increased 70% for the week ending March 7, 2009 as compared to the same week last year. Visits to YouTube also increased 16% during the same time frame. Gmail’s top 3 sources of traffic were Google, Facebook, and Yahoo! Mail, totaling 58% in February 2009. Google accounts for the largest share of upstream traffic at 49%, which has increased 10% from February of last year....
- Amit Agarwal
"Here’s another interesting chart by Nick Bilton of NYT that visualizes the number of links on the homepages of popular websites. http://www.nickbilton.com/98/"
- Amit Agarwal