Four short links: 3 Sep 2010 – Design Principles, Mario AI, Open Source Wave, and 3D Google Earth Sound

Arranging Things: The Rhetoric of Object Placement (Amazon) -- [...] the underlying principles that govern how Western designers arrange things in three-dimensional compositions. Inspired by Greek and Roman notions of rhetoric [...] Koren elucidates the elements of arranging rhetoric that all designers instinctively use in everything from floral compositions to interior decorating. (via Elaine Wherry) 2010 Mario AI Championship...

Google Launches Stats for Blogger

Google has launched Stats for Blogger, a Blogger feature that was previously available in the experimental version of Blogger, Blogger in Draft. The feaure is fairly self-explanatory in that it provides Blogger users with stats about their blogs.

More specifically, Stats for Blogger provides stats like real-time tracking of each time your blog is viewed, and insights about your audience, such as top search keywords, countries, browsers, etc. The user interface comes with easy-to-read graphs and charts.

Stats for Blogger actually has some improvements over the Blogger in Draft version. For example, it includes self-view exclusion - it will exclude your own pageviews if you turn that option on. It also has more effective bot traffic filtering.

"We've extended our list of known 'bots' (the non-human visitors, such as crawlers), another measure to provide more accurate pageviews from real visitors," says Blogger's Chang Kim.

There are also now rate-limiting visit counts from the same user and internationalization - availability in over 40 languages.

Four short links: 30 August 2010 – H.264 Patents, Pakistan Flood Crowdsourcing, YouTube to MP3, Bloom Filter Tips

Free as in Smokescreen (Mike Shaver) -- H.264, one of the ways video can be delivered in HTML5, is covered by patents. This prevents Mozilla from shipping an H.264 player, which fragments web video. The MPEG LA group who manage the patents for H.264 did a great piece of PR bullshit, saying "this will be permanently royalty-free to consumers"....

How to Subscribe to An RSS Feed

There are generally two different kinds of tools that allow visitors to subscribe to RSS feeds. These tools are known as aggregators, or RSS news readers. As the content of an RSS feed changes, the RSS reader/aggregator will update itself automatically and display the new RSS feed items.

There are two types of aggregators -- desktop aggregators, and web-based aggregators...

How to Subscribe to an RSS Feed

Four short links: 27 August 2010 – Audio API, Book Search Helps Publishers (Gasp!), Tracking Antiquities, Guaranteeing Diversity Fail

Working Audio Data Demos -- the new Firefox has a very sweet audio data API and some nifty demos like delay pedals, a beat detector (YouTube) and a JavaScript text-to-speech generator. (via jamesaduncan on Twitter) Estimating the Economic Impact of Mass Digitization Projects on Copyright Holders: Evidence from the Google Book Search Litigation -- [T]he revenues and profits of...

NewsBasis Aims to Be Basis for News-Maker, News-Breaker Relationships

In a nutshell, NewsBasis is a site where journalists and bloggers can find sources, while experts and companies can find journalists and bloggers to write about them in their articles.

WebProNews had a conversation with NewsBasis Founder and CEO Darryl Siry (who also happens to be a contributor to Wired, and was formerly CMO of Tesla Motors) about how the site has performed since launching at the beginning of the month.

"Initial participation was well beyond what I had been planning for, which is a good thing, but keep in mind I am not fully satisfied until we are used by all folks in the media industry on both sides of the table," Siry tells us.

We asked about participation from both journalists and experts. "The participation on the company rep side is a good mix of companies, PR agencies, independent professionals, academic institutions and non-profits," he says. "On the journalist side you also see a broad range of participation, from bloggers to regional newspapers to major news organizations."

Perusing article topic requests on NewsBasis, one can find various familiar names and publications. That's got to be encouraging for the company.

"Of course, there are more experts/companies using the service than journalists, but that’s what I would expect as that reflects the industry," he continues. "There are many more people seeking attention of reporters than there are reporters, and it is important to have deep inventory of experts and sources."

I don't think he'll get many arguments from reporters there.

Siry certainly knows how the game is played, as he has written not only for Wired, but for other publications like VentureBeat and Business Insider. Combine that with marketing gigs he has held in the past. He's clearly played on both sides of the ball.

As user experience plays greatly into the success of any product, we also asked for plans about upcoming features.

"We are balancing customer acquisition activities with our pace of product development," Siry tells us. "There are lots of great features and tweaks that we have been working through and as the product gets better I expect that we will see more users come on to the system. We have features already built in to the system that we haven't really promoted because you can only say so much in a marketing message, so part of my challenge is to educate existing customers about how full featured we are."

"For example, we have built in real time news alerts that work quite well and we also have a robust annotation and sharing system that can be used by journalists for online research," he explains.

Of course, users can always keep abreast of the latest NewsBasis happenings on the company blog, which has provided numerous updates since the early August launch of NewsBasis.

Journalists, bloggers, and brands all potentially have a lot to gain from a system like NewsBasis. At this point, it's just a matter of attracting the users, and getting them to stick with it. This appears to be the main area of focus for the company at the moment. In fact, Siry emailed me personally to let me know that I hadn't activated my account after initially signing up, weeks ago. It worked. I logged in that day. 

YouTube Adds Free Grindhouse Movie Section, Featuring Slashers, Zombies & Extreme Chickfights

Click here to view the embedded video.

YouTube has introduced a new YouTube Movies section, which offers about 400 free full-length films.

If you’re looking for YouTube to offer an alternative to Netflix or Blockbuster, this ain’t it.

On the other hand, if you want to take a trip back to the 70’s drive-in grindhouse, you have hit the motherlode!

The selection includes classics like Cheerleader Zombies, above, and Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Other grindhouse classics include Blood Sucking Babes From Burbank, Dorm Of The Dead, Satan’s School For Girls, The Corpse Grinder, Extreme Chickfights and the zombie underground fighting film, Fist of the Vampire.

Making the Most Out of Your Podcast

Mention podcasting and the image of someone sitting in their basement with a computer and microphone, dreaming of becoming a professional DJ, is what comes to mind for many.  It may surprise you to learn that this emerging technology is actually becoming a mainstream marketing and communication tool for businesses, with the potential to make significant contributions to the bottom line.  

Podcasting is simply the act of making radio-quality audio programs available for download through an RSS feed to a computer, MP3 player or other portable media device.  Listeners need only subscribe to a podcast once; afterwards, new content is automatically delivered to them as soon as it becomes available.

complete article

Podcasts A Love Story

Podcasts are, simply, amazing. This coolest of innovations supply an infinite source of information on any topic you can think of. Anyone, anywhere, has the means to put together their own custom-configured radio station. How awesome is that?

Included in the podcast package comes inspiration, awe and respect for all the pioneers out there who spent and continue to spend hours each week, putting together enough material for a single podcast.

Pocasts A Love Story

10 Steps to Get the Click

There are a number of steps a webmaster can take to encourage visitors to click on a link or graphic located on their website. The following steps will help get the click...

10 Steps to Get the Click

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