Blog archives for July, 2006

$100,000 a month off MySpace layouts

The general wisdom in the Webmaster world (gained from a namesake forum and others) is that MySpace resource sites are bandwidth-hungry but profit-lacking. The teens develop ad blindness and therefore the quantity of clicks deteriorates. Washington Post on MSNBC provides a different insight:

David Miles Jr. and Kato Leonard, two 20-year-olds in Louisville, say they collect $100,000 a month from their year-old site, Freeweblayouts.net, which gives away designs that people can use on MySpace social-networking pages.

Marc Smith on NetScan, AURA, Snarf

Marc Smith of Microsoft Research gave a great talk today regarding the digital tracks that individuals are leaving online, and the research that has been done by Smith’s team at Microsoft.

NetScan analyzes the Usenet postings with the goal of deducing the users’ roles. NetScan can figure out who among the group are the active participants, who is adding value to the group by being an answerer, and who is being a spammer, posting frequently, but not on topic. The interesting thing about Smith’s project is that it’s content-independent, i.e. it analyzes the threads, not the actual postings, and therefore could be applied to any Usenet group out there. Looking at the home page for the product, the top Usenet groups by the number of postings are political, and Marc demoed the differences in threads between technical and political groups. While technical groups tend to have a small amount of experts who reply to everybody’s questions, but rarely ask any themselves, the political groups tend to self-organize around oldtimers who discuss every new political development, with occasional newbie jumping into the discussion.

The AURA project allows Smith to carry a smartphone with a built in barcode reader to auto-generate a personal portal of items he’s seen and considered buying. The idea of building product-centered portal combined with personalization has quite a few interesting possibilities for innovation. For one, you can tell the smartphone your diet needs, which are sometimes related to religion, and therefore get information on whether the surveyed product is Kosher, Vegan, low-carb, Atkins-compliant, etc. If I am planning to work on my cholesterol, and therefore need a diet low in saturated fat and high in omega oils, then such a device would quickly allow me to scan the product shelf in the grocery store to choose the right cereal. Second, a product-centered portal would contain reviews and recommendations from the people I trust. Here’s, for example, a review of the Absolut Book. Third, virtually every store out there becomes a physical Amazon storefront - you check out the product, then conduct an instant shopping search, and (most likely) buy it on Amazon.

SNARF is a pretty cool research project from Microsoft that analyzes your Outlook e-mail to find out the relationships of people who are important to you, and separate those letters from the list subscriptions and other not so important messages. Another idea is to seed SNARF with pre-existing information, such as the corporate org chart, so that the e-mail from your immediate bosses and coworkers get prioritized, as opposed to the discussions within other groups, on which you’re CC’ed just out of general interest or your past involvements in the project.

Overall, Microsoft is doing heavy research in social networking area, trying to help users deal with information availability, analyze large amounts of data and make better decisions while dealing with tons of input.

XM Sportscaster reviewed by NYT

The New York Times runs a short review of XM Sportscaster, a new portable XM Satellite radio unit that can be moved from one car to another.

Unlike most satellite receivers, this unit is not meant to be permanently installed in a car. Instead, it comes with a magnetic rooftop antenna and a power source that plugs into a cigarette lighter. It links to the car’s audio system either through a built-in FM radio transmitter or a supplied cassette adapter. That allows users to move the radio to rental cars or other vehicles without bringing a professional installer into the picture.

The price is quoted at $60, but Amazon sells it for $39.99 with free shipping, so it seems like a pretty low-cost way to enter satellite radio world.

Reid Hoffman on venture capital

Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn spoke at Yahoo! today. Several memorable quotes include advice on dealing with venture capitalists: 10% of VCs bring money and add value, 20% of VCs bring money, but are neutral as far as adding value to the company, 70% bring money but add negative value. Also, don’t jump in bed with VC until you’ve had two Powerpoint pitches and a dinner.

Phishing simplified with AJAX

Virtual Karma points at one not quite pleasant feature of asynchronous JavaScript, and if you liked Gmail’s auto-save, you’ll like the ability of a phishing site to save the form data half-way through the process.

So you click on the link, go to a Web site that supposedly represents the bank, halfway through you realize this is not a real Bank web site, since your bank never used tripod.com as its hosting provider, and then you’re ready to close the window… Ooops! The data, whatever was entered, has been carefully auto-saved onto the remote server.

The paranoid solution would be to turn off JavaScript for every site out there and allow it for the ones that require it and won’t work otherwise. No wonder NoScript is one of the most popular extensions out there.