://URLFAN - Perhaps The Best Influence Index on The Web

://URLFAN is an indexing service which ranks websites by popularity, based on blog mentions.

On Bailouts and Sports Car

Jason Calacanis doesn’t really blog anymore. However, that hasn’t stopped him from coming up with gems like this one. If you are not subscribed to Jason’s e-mail list, you really should.

Entrepreneurs’ Basic Etiquette with Potential Investors

Bernard Leong writes a good post on the basic etiquette an entrepreneur shoud have when dealing with potential investor. Main takeaway: Check your egos at the door.

Microsoft Office Autoformat

This is so true, so true…

Oran Dennison: Live Mesh + Flash == Adobe AIR

“I think this is a very cool option that highlights the fact that Microsoft designed Mesh to be an open platform with the broadest possible reach.”

Cloud Options - Amazon, Google, & Microsoft : Simpable

An excellent overview on cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, as well as some quick opinions of what each service offers.

The intersection of social media and the cloud

Google is feeling some pressure as well, as its odd messaging around a Gmail Video chat plug-in reveals. Though the company has made a big deal about only supporting open Web technologies, they have much less to say about the use of proprietary technologies in the video plug-in. Coming at the same time that CEO Eric Schmidt attacks Azure as a way “to gain enough share in cloud computing to force other people to use its standards,” the use of Flash and the reluctance to answer direct questions about it seem disingenuous, something Google has steered clear of as it builds out its own standards such as Chrome and Android.

Schmidt’s attack also suggests that Google has assessed Microsoft’s cloud effort and found it substantial enough to warrant a political rather than technical challenge.

IBM Making It Easy To Watch Women Get Naked

As millions of people get ready for Black Friday, IBM is getting ready to introduce an invention that could revolutionize the shopping experience. Oh, and also make it easy for guys to spy on undressing women.

Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Microsoft Back Into Startup Mode

Microsoft, Ozzie wrote, had to think and operate more like an Internet company and, as much as possible, like a Web startup. Consider ad-supported or subscription business models, he advised, viral distribution, and experiences that “just work.” Instead of the clunkiness that Microsoft products so often displayed, focus on being “seamless.” Bottom line: Change big-time, or else.

Microsoft to Google: Get Off of My Cloud - BusinessWeek

Corporate America is increasingly leaving computing to the experts. Why go to the trouble and expense of building and managing complex systems to handle your spiraling data-crunching needs when another company can do it for you? And who better, faster, or cheaper than Google?

That’s just the kind of conventional wisdom Debra Chrapaty wants to change. As Microsoft’s corporate vice-president for Global Foundation Services, Chrapaty wants to prove that her company is no less capable of running the sprawling data centers to offer software doled out via the Internet.

Yup, Apple’s Advertising Budget Is Bigger Than Microsoft Vista’s

Half a billion dollars on marketing. No wonder I think Apple products are so great.

Test Center review: Silverlight, for real this time | InfoWorld | Review | 2008-11-18 | By Martin Heller

In my own comparisons, Silverlight 2 outperformed any of the other RIA technologies mentioned here by a significant margin, exhibiting compute and display speeds similar to those of my previous favorite, Curl.

Is Social Media Marketing A Waste Of Time? : SEO Book.com

Let’s look at the market signals. Why is it that you pay dollars per click on Google Adwords for financial keywords, yet the same keywords on social networks are priced at five cents?

This suggests to me one of two things. Either the social networks are seriously underestimating the value of their own traffic, or most of the people on social networks aren’t interested in commercial messages.

History of Slices

Funny, irreverent, entertaining-check out the fun new features in Internet Explorer 8.

Other ways of getting my links in real time: Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious or FriendFeed.

I may leave out certain links from my feed if I feel the stories have already been covered ad nauseam this week.

An INTJ (Introversion, iNtuition, Thinking, Judging), or Scientist, is described as:

The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it - often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be pshysically hesitant to try new things.

The Scientists enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communcating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use conrete examples. Since they are extremly good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone.

This neat little toy, which I discovered via Stephan’s blog, supposedly takes your blog URL as input, loads the front page of your blog, and does some sort of text analysis on the contents. Then based on some algorithm or “classifier”, it automatically figures out what kind of personality you are.

Whatever, just read their FAQ.

Be entertained, but please don’t take the results too seriously.

I ran the test for my own blog twice - once this afternoon, and once tonight. The results I got were different (I got ISTJ in the afternoon), although nothing has change on my blog. Go figure.

Just for fun, I also tried the following URLs:

My Twitter page: ISTJ

My blog’s About page: ISTP

OK… looks like we can all agree that I’m introverted and thoughtful.

The Wind Cries Cloud Computing

An interesting analogy comparing the recording industry with the cloud computing industry. A thoughtful read. 

Google Lively Is Dead-ly - ReadWriteWeb

In an economic environment where a number of companies are stumbling, it’s important to remember that sometimes even Google makes bad decisions. Such would be the case with Lively, a browser-based virtual world environment - and purported Second Life killer - that Google launched this summer to great fanfare.

Etherpad Shows Google Docs How It’s Done

A team of ex-Googlers, with backing from Y Combinator, the Friendfeed founders and others, have created what might be both the ugliest and most useful group productivity app we’ve seen.

Seadragon Ajax : Microsoft Live Labs

Seadragon, implemented as the Deep Zoom feature of Silverlight, allows you to do that. But what if you’re not using the Silverlight platform? That’s what Seadragon Ajax is for.

Metacafe Bets Its Future On The Power Of Wikis

Put simply, WikiCafe is everything you’ve come to learn to love about Wikipedia but attuned to video. It is a collaborative video metadata editing tool built on top of WikiMedia, the Wiki platform originally written for Wikipedia. Its purpose is to foster collaboration and aggregation of standardized, categorized knowledge on a single “document”-in this case a video.

Microsoft Vista Emails: No Scandal Here

Those who were hoping for the discovery of super-scandalous emails showing that Microsoft lied about Vista’s capabilities, however, will so far be disappointed.

Putting Flash on iPhone is Easy. Here’s How:

Can’t say that I agree with the author’s conclusions, but an interesting point of view, nevertheless.

It’s Official. Facebook Is Running A Protection Racket On App Developers

So how do you get into the Verified App category? You pay. $375. Well, you have to pass those tests, but then you pay… But unless you pay that $375, you ain’t getting the badge.

And then you pay again. Each year. The Verified designation is good for just twelve months.

There’s a word for this kind of system. I just can’t remember what it is. Oh yeah. Protection Racket.

yax-958 One party good, two parties bad

“As long as the People’s Action Party (PAP) changes itself and continues to provide clean and good government…” the Straits Times reported Lee Hsien Loong as saying. But what if they don’t? How do Singaporeans then get the good government they want from another party in the absence of a two-party democracy?

Update on Silverlight 2 - and a glimpse of Silverlight 3 - ScottGu’s Blog

Over the last 4 weeks, the final release of Silverlight 2 has been downloaded and installed on more than 100 million consumer machines. It has also recently been published to corporate administrators via the Microsoft SMS and Microsoft Update programs to enable them to automatically deploy across enterprises. Over 1 in 4 computers on the Internet now have some version of Silverlight installed.

Introducing: The Common Craft Explainer Network

Brought to you from the folks who did the highly popular series of “In Plain English” explanatory videos. The basic idea is anyone looking for custom video producers will be pointed to the Explainer Network members. However, these members pay a fee to be listed in the Network.

Jinni Helps You Pick The Perfect Flick

The site has created what it calls “The Movie Genome” - a database of movies tagged by a team of humans aided by a computer algorithm, with attributes spanning fifty categories. The database is reminiscent of Pandora’s Music Genome Project (which is also sorted by human professionals), though it is significantly smaller at this point.

Hulu Profitable? Please

Perhaps Hulu is losing less money than YouTube. Hulu has fewer than 1/10th as many users as YouTube and serves an even smaller fraction of streams, so that is entirely possible. But by that measure, most companies are more successful than YouTube.

Speaking of the Great Depression . . .

Those chat boxes once commonplace on a computer desktop amid documents, Web browsers, and spreadsheets are giving way to a new breed of user-friendly, real-time conversation tools that Internet companies hope will keep users engaged with their content - and the advertising that appears alongside it.

The end of instant messaging (as we know it) - Digital Life

Those chat boxes once commonplace on a computer desktop amid documents, Web browsers, and spreadsheets are giving way to a new breed of user-friendly, real-time conversation tools that Internet companies hope will keep users engaged with their content - and the advertising that appears alongside it.

Dear Social Media: Don’t Tell Me What to Be Offended By

One mother’s take on the Motrin fiasco: “I’m absolutely fine with the idea that the advertisement may not have offended you, or that you disagree with my analysis of the PR storm Johnson & Johnson is dealing with over it. But you can just shut right up if you plan to tell me I’m wrong.”

DECONSTRUCTING THE FINANCIAL CRISIS (so far)

An excellent attempt by Bill Werner at creating a timeline of the current economic crisis.

Other ways of getting my links in real time: Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious or FriendFeed.

I may leave out certain links from my feed if I feel the stories have already been covered ad nauseam this week.

James Governor’s Monkchips 15 Ways I Am Wrong About Enterprise Cloud Computing

… whatever else the cloud is, it should not just be an excuse to try and rewarm technology that has already failed in the marketplace. It should not be an excuse to sell a new complexity.

Adobe’s CEO Underestimating Microsoft’s Ability To Compete With Flash | The Business Of Online Video

Comments from a meeting last week with journalists at Adobe’s headquarters indicate that Adobe’s CEO, Shantanu Narayen, thinks Adobe has already won the online video platform battle and that Flash can survive any threat from Microsoft. That’s a dangerous assumption to make and underestimating Microsoft’s ability to challenge any company, in the long run, is never a good idea.

Will There Ever Be a Google OS?

Let Andrew Morton, lead developer of the Linux kernel and a Google employee since 2006, answer the question for us.

Sweeping Changes At Live.com: It’s A Social Network!

“The result is an impressive personal productivity suite that makes me almost wish I wasn’t solely a Mac user.” — Michael Arrington

gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”: blue monster: why social objects are the future of marketing

As a marketing blogger, I get asked a lot, “What is the future of marketing?”

I always answer the same: “The Blue Monster”.

What’s The Blue Monster?

A Blue Monster is a Social Object that articulates a Purpose-Idea.

What’s a Social Object? What’s a Purpose-Idea?

Sit yourself down, pour yourself another glass of whisky. This might take a while to explain…

Microsoft not against open source

“Open source is not a product but an approach to software development,” said Matthew Hardman, platform strategy manager at Microsoft Singapore. “Microsoft does not compete with open source, just as Nike does not compete with running.”

Google acting more like Microsoft everyday : Rants and Ramblings of an Entrepreneur

Big greed tends to take down big companies and it’s just common sense that Google should not be able to tell all of us how to run our sites if we want to be listed in their index and then claim it’s their right, it’s their index. That’s fine if GOOGLE wasn’t accountable for 67% of my traffic and then cut me off at the knees for no reason and with no explanation.

Other ways of getting my links in real time: Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious or FriendFeed.

What are you upset about? This is an expat site for the Singapore expat community to discuss matters of common interest. It is not for “journalists” to try find people to do their research for them, especially for stories that will increase local heart-landers’ negative feelings and disdain for the foreign talents who actually drive this economy. (emphasis mine)

This was posted by a dude named Kubes.SG in a series of responses to a journalist’s request to comment on how the current economy is making life difficult for expats.

Wow. Is this guy for real?

I work with expats everyday for the past four years, and pretty much all of the expats that I’ve encountered so far in Singapore have been nice, humble and pleasant people.

So although I’m inclined to think that Mr. Kubes’ opinion is of the minority, it’s still disturbing to think that there may be a segment of the expat community here who are egotistical enough to think that they are indispensable to the Singaporean economy, and local “heart-landers” somehow need to be protected and fed propaganda from our “nation-building press” so we can feel much better about ourselves being inferior to the “rich Ang-Mohs”.

Yes, I took some liberties with words, but do read the forum thread for yourself, and see if you walked away with the same feeling I described above.

Anyway, that is just wrong on so many levels.

Here are some questions I would ask:

1. Do well-compensated foreign talent really play that much of a bigger role in driving the Singaporean economy than Singaporean heartlanders?
2. If that is true, do Singapreans feel inferior to foreign talent because of this, and therefore feel disdain towards foreigners?
3. And if that is true, does the Singapore government (by proxy through the media) feel it’s in the country’s best interest to continue encouraging negative feelings in Singaporeans towards foreign talent?

It’s pretty insulting to think that there are actually some people that believe the answers to the above questions are all “Yes”.

It’s a shame, really. Perhaps this all could of been avoided if the government didn’t openly sing the praises of foreign talent so much during the past few years. Or even stop the prevalent use of the term “foreign talent”, which according to Mr. Biao, has contributed to demoralizing Singaporeans and over-qualifying foreigners.

If you constantly tell your firstborn son how much better his adopted sister is, naturally he will start hating his sister. Start showering the adopted sister with love, toys and perks that the son doesn’t have, and naturally she will develop an ego and a superiority complex.

What do you think? Is the foreign talent vs. heartlander dynamic really more pervasive than we think?

The 22 Step Social Media Marketing Plan

As corporate adoption of social media emerges, there’s nothing wrong with learning lessons from others and making them your own. Here’s a 22 step social media plan.

Yahoo faces the long, slow goodbye - Jerry Yang, perhaps a shorter one | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Yahoo’s failure to tie up an ad deal with Google may be the last straw. Prepare for a slow drift into insignificance.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Why Google Forked OpenID and Other Stories

Recently I’ve seen OpenID geeks berating large vendors like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google for the way they’ve incorrectly implemented OpenID. Looking at these situations it has become clear that the problem OpenID solves is actually different from the problem these companies are trying to solve.

Brad Abrams : .NET Framework 4 Poster

We created a very cool poster that shows off the new stuff in .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and .NET Framework 4.

The Canadian Press: Knives come out for Sarah Palin; McCain aides tell tales of an ill-informed diva

Less than 24 hours after McCain lost the presidential election to Democrat Barack Obama, those close to him apparently wasted no time burning up the phone lines to dish the dirt on Palin, the Alaska governor who portrayed herself as a sensible hockey Mom when she was chosen the Arizona senator’s running mate in late August.

Microsoft’s Silverlight heats up fight for online video players - USATODAY.com

“There’s no question this is the biggest threat to Adobe in years,” says Michael Olson, an analyst at Piper Jaffray. “But the market for online video is massive. There’s room for both Silverlight and Flash.”

Microsoft’s BizSpark initiative offers free servers and software to startups VentureBeat

With the negligible cost, BizSpark presents a pretty irresistible offer to startups, especially in tough economic times…

Google Pulls The Plug On Yahoo Advertising Deal

After vowing repeatedly to go through with its search advertising deal with Yahoo no matter what the Justice Department does, Google reversed course today and pulled the plug on the deal.

Other ways of getting my links in real time: Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious or FriendFeed.

More Wordless Wednesday

Source: Usingmac.com

In this blog entry, I won’t be giving a play-by-play of what happened throughout the day, because of three reasons:

1. I arrived at around noon, thus missing out on the sessions in the morning.
2. The event has already been covered wonderfully by our tireless and dedicated livebloggers Claudia and DK. (Bravo!)
3. It’s 4:00 am in the morning and I really need to get some sleep soon…

Instead, I’m just going to share some key takeaways and observations I had from attending the event.

On the Use of Social Media

DMFest was organized by the Digital Media Chapter of the Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF). Thus, it was not surprising to see the DMFest organizers leverage social media and interactive media for both the marketing of the event, as well as the execution of the event.

On the DMFest home page are prominent links to the DMFest Twitter feed and Facebook group. The organizers also invited many local bloggers (who were credentialed as media) to cover the event. Besides Claudia and DK, Walter Lim, BL, Shalabh Pandey, Andrew Peters, and Shunjie also wrote about the event. (Shunjie was also on th Web 2.0 panel with me).

From my experience, IT events in Singapore are either very corporate (a.k.a. “enterprisey”), with very little social media coverage, or very “social media-ish”, with very little corporate representation.

Therefore, it was refreshing for me to finally see an event where although it is corporate-driven at the core, yet it still manages to bring in and involve the social media community.

Kudos to the organizers for making an enterprise event into something more cool - and the involvement of social and interactive media certainly has a lot to do with that.

(BTW, I thought the use of an interactive monitor during the event sessions was also an excellent touch. Controlled by Bill Claxton, the interactive monitor showed related articles, Wikipedia definitions, the DMFest live twitter feed, and other interesting in-context information while the speakers were presenting. Brilliant.)

On Contextual Video Advertising

Folks, this is going to be pretty big, pretty soon.

Contextual video advertising is essentially this: As a user is watching video content online, the user is presented with unobtrusive ads which directly relate to the content which the user is watching at that moment.

For example, suppose you were watching a soap opera online, and suddenly in the scene a Mercedes-Benz car pulls up to one of the characters. At that moment, a small unobtrusive ad for Mercedes-Benz may appear which the user can click on to get more information about that particular car.

Here is a visualization of what I just described:

Contextual advertising for Mercedes-Benz appears when a Mercedes-Benz car appears in the video

Mercedes-Benz ad which appears if the user wants more information, while allowing the user to still watch the original video undisturbed.

(I encountered a small glitch when I showed the above demo of contextual video advertising during DMFest, so these are the screen shots! )

Contextual video advertising is very powerful, since it can present itself to the users in a way that lets the users think that it is a value-added service instead of something that takes away from their video watching experience. My demo, which was a MOBTV mock up built on Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, demonstrates precise contextual video advertising which works brilliantly together with in-video product placement.

Coincidentally, both Stefano (from Adobe Ultimate Video FX) and myself talked about contextual video advertising during DMFest. Adobe’s approach, however is to use sound-recognition technology (from Adobe Soundbooth?) to determine the video content in order to serve relevant ads. (Blinkx, one of the companies mentioned during DMFest also has similar technology, I believe.)

Regardless of the approach, contextual video advertising is definitely something game-changing which we should keep a lookout for in the next six to twelve months.

More Wordless Wednesday

Source: Yeah Oops!

What really stands out is the three spikes in traffic I received in the past three months. Let’s take a deeper look, shall we…

The Mini Spike (Left Side)

On July 12, I attended the E27 Unconference event, and promptly blogged about it on July 14. This brought in 83 unique visiters for me the next day, a then record-high. This blog post was also my most commented post ever, with 23 comments. Of course, a bunch of those comments were from me responding to people, but who’s counting anyways.

Anyway, for that post, I linked to all of the other blog entries I could find which talked about the event, and pretty much everyone reciprocated with a back link as well. Thanks to this post, I was able to interact with a few bloggers online for the first time, including the always interesting Claudia.

This post also got me a then-high 18 “pongs” on Singapore blog aggregator Ping.sg.

The “M” Spike (Middle)

On September 2, the Google Chrome comic was leaked, and I promptly blogged about the impending release of the Google Chrome web browser. Again, I linked to all of the existing blog coverage of Chrome I could find, including the official Google blog.

This brought in a new record-high 136 unique visitors the next day, mostly thanks to search engine queries for “Google Chrome” as well as traffic from the Google blog.

After a day or two of downtime, I blogged again about Chrome, but this time on my experiences using Chrome once I had a chance to download it and play around with it for a bit. Again, I linked to the official Google blog, and I was able to top my previous record by registering 138 unique visiters on September 5.

The Ping.sg community was less than thrilled though, with neither blog post registering more than 4 “pongs”.

The Big A%$ Spike (Right Side)

I attended a party during F1 weekend, and promptly blogged about it. In my opinion, this was a pretty crappy post, with not much content in it. But it did have a few photos of scantily-dressed lingerie models who were at the party. I also diligently labeled my post as “NSFW“.

The result was a new record-high 283 unique visitors to my blog on September 29, and over 500 visits over the next five day period.

The Ping.sg community particularly liked the post, giving me a ridiculous 43 “pongs”  and placing me at the pole position of the daily leader board for the first (and likely last) time.

However, only one guy left a comment.

My Key Takeaways

1. If you want people to read your blog, always blog about something topical- i.e. posts that have to be read right now. You don’t necessarily have to break the news, but ride on the second wave of readers by offering a deeper analysis beyond what is superficially covered by the first wave of “news breakers”.
2. Link to as much of the first wave coverage as possible, without making your blog entry look like an annoying link blog. Try to link to the central news source (e.g. official Google blog for Google Chrome) if possible, especially if they are high-volume blogs.
3. Events are usually topical and good to blog about, since people will either a) miss the event and want to read about it, or b) attended the event and want to see if their mugshot appears on any blogger’s photos.
4. When all else fails and you still can’t get readership, blog about girls, parties, upskirts, celebrities, and sex. And don’t forget to label your post as “NSFW”.