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Support this crowdfunding project

• Spot.us seeks donations for election project — Spot.us is seeking a freelance journalist to do some fact checking for it during the upcoming election season. But being that it’s a community-funded venture, they need your help. People in San Francisco: toss a few dollars their way to help this community journalism project get off the ground. It could be our/your/journalism’s future.
• Yahoo developer divines Web 3.0 future — He sees it as desktop apps, an extension of the current AJAX experience. Tim Berners-Lee sees it as the semantic Web. No doubt both will be strong components of the continuing metamorphosis of the Web.
• Yahoo giving coupons to replace dead DRM tracks — As mentioned before, Yahoo’s DRM-based music service is dead. Originally the search company suggested music users burn all their tracks onto CDs and copy them to their computers. Now it’s offering free replacement downloads via Rhapsody.
• Cheap usability testing software — Usability software Silverback is only $50 and comes with a 30-day trial. It allows you to record your test subjects as they navigate about your site. Usability testing is a science upon itself and requires very specific techniques. Still may be worth using after reading up on the volumnious subject.

Before the plows come

Editor’s note: I like to sneak around places I shouldn’t, especially old buildings. Here is one of my latest, yet unfortunately infrequent, adventures.

A few months ago, Sara the girlfriend and I ventured over to her grandma’s childhood home and neighborhood to take pictures before it is bulldozed by Youngstown 2010, the former steel giant’s 21st century urban renewal plan.

Her grandma grew up on the city’s east side, actually in the southeastern corner in a neighborhood called Campbell (but pronounced “Camel” — don’t ask.) For those of you unfamiliar with Y-town geography, the city itself stretches farther north/south than east/west along the Mahoning River. Her grandma’s house was maybe two blocks away from the steel mills, so it looked something like this …

… 60 or 70 years ago. Most days the pollution wasn’t too bad, but if the wind blew the wrong way, women had to run out and grab their laundry so their linens wouldn’t turn black. Continue reading »

AP goes mobile with investment

• AP puts money into Verve — Verve provides mobile services for news companies. I don’t get why media firms wouldn’t just bring this in-house, although a third-party platform may be useful, like Brightcove is for video, etc. This alone will not save newspapers.
• Webcasts are boring — I’m glad I’m not the only one not on the newspaper Webcast bandwagon.
• China now largest user of Web — The behemoth grows larger and the implications are huge. With more users, China may slowly push how the Web grows, albeit behind a big stone wall.
• MPAA to create online guide for legit places to download movies Industry research indicates many struggle with differentiating legitimate sources from illegal ones. The more tech savvy of us “scoff,” but it is plausible.
• Yahoo to reimburse users for DRM-protected music — somehow — Another DRM scheme fails
• College textbooks being pirated Quote the NYT: “THE e-book is wrapped with digital rights management, which, history indicates, will be broken sooner or later…”

Google Analytics opt out

Update (July 30, 2008): It works.

I use Google Analytics to track the traffic on this site and a couple others. Because I like to tweak, my tweak-then-page-reloads often show up in the reports.

I think I found a way to exclude myself from the numbers by using a cookie and filter. I’ll have to give the numbers a look over in a few days to see if this works.