Taming the Beast has a nice primer on HTTP 301 redirects. I spent some time this morning cleaning up AF-Design’s internal issues after reading over the HubSpot Website Grader report. If you manage a website and haven’t already done so - consider running the free report. It takes only a few minutes to generate and read and most problems can be fixed in only a few additional minutes. You can get a handy dynamic badge too, which you can put on your internal monitoring tools to keep tabs on things.

Website Grader Score Badge Screenshot

The real takeaway on this article for me was swapping all references of www.af-design.com to just af-design.com. WordPress was already handling this for all blog entries, but the remaining sections of the site were still being referenced with the “www.” prefix. The additional lines for the .htaccess file are provided below for reference.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.af-design.com [NC]            
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://af-design.com/$1 [L,R=301]

NewsGang posted this tonight, it’s been picked up on CrunchGear as well - the long awaited Silverlight Watch Instantly, available to PC’s for a long time, is now in beta!

Thanks Netflix!

– Update: 9:10pm

Apparently Netflix has been harder at work than I had realized! Netflix will be offering TiVo subscribers access in December - W00t! Amazon may have gotten there first, but the UnBox - Video on Demand offering hasn’t impressed me.

The amount of data available of publicly online is astounding. The US Government has done a pretty good job of providing detailed data to it’s citizens on pretty much anything they keep tabs on. The census data immediately comes to mind, but there is much much more if you take the time to look for it. I stumbled across the USASearch.gov search engine while looking for some population data for cities. The search engine is not as accurate as Google unless you know the government lingo for your data, but it’s pretty good. I suspect there’s a data set there somewhere that would enhance any businesses results and the only cost to you is figuring out how it applies to what you do.

I’ve been doing some research over the last few days and have found that niche search is far from solved. Many market verticals are lacking an effective aggregator for timely content. The tools everyone needs are known, but they haven’t been implemented. Instead of true solutions, we find scraping sites that just suck in content and spit it out un-validated, unverified and unorganized. Because of the high costs of building robust tools, what results is a poor, incomplete collection of information, which quickly becomes stale.

That coupled with inaccurate supporting information, primarily due to high data-set costs, provides a less than desirable experience for users. Mahalo saw this in the generalized search market and put into place human editors who comb the internet looking for the best information and vetting user submissions. The result are guides of information that are informative and helpful.

How long will it be before we see Mahalo style sites targeting niche verticals? Who out there is working on a white label Mahalo which can be reused in these smaller markets?

I originally wondered about what was happening to Photosynth back in May and now it looks as if Microsoft has officially launched it and is having some success too. I am very excited about this and it’s possible impacts on virtual reality. What a cool way to go see things that were formerly too difficult or expensive to get to! Kudos to Microsoft on their success. Unfortunately it’s still just Windows, and I’m unable to access it via Parallels on the Mac. According to the satisfaction.com support forums, VMWare’s current beta works.

Every now and then you just need a spinning, sliding, blinking graphic to show people stuff really is happening - and besides in the ajax driven web 2.0 world, if you don’t have one, you might be dead in the water! I’ve stumbled across loadinfo.net each and every time I’ve needed one. What really makes this site useful, is the ability to tweak the colors of the spinners to meet your needs. Thanks!

Over the weekend I assisted with the launch of a new movie review blog, JohnnyVengeance.com. It promises to provide fresh insight, reviews and a little bit of irreverance while covering all the goodness that is Hollywood. Take a look at the reviews of Tropic Thunder and Mirrors, happy viewing.

Recently I was helping a friend get his new movie review blog started and decided to review a few monetizing strategies. The offering from Amazon struck me as interesting and so I have posted it here for everyone to see. This item in particular is a great widget because it puts content that I couldn’t otherwise create directly into my site. It becomes a value add for me, the publisher, because I get a very rich experience for my users, that I can tailor to meet my content needs, while Amazon gets potential sales leads. Of course I get a kickback too…

Amazon also offers more traditional banner size advertising, product links and other integration points. Check them out as a possible option for monetizing your site.

Panoramio beat Microsoft to the punch. Techcrunch has an article on the software so I won’t steam their thunder. Executive version; they’ve launched a new featured called “Look Around” which gives users the ability to scan through popular locations and see the area from different angles etc. Does this sound like Photosynth? That’s because it’s the same idea. This example from the top of the Empire State Building in NY is really cool. It’s way cool because it works now - and it works on a Mac.

I recently stumbled across Quantcast - a metrics tool. It provides more detailed information about visitor demographics than Alexa or Compete. It’s lacking otherwise in comparison tools - leaving it to the observer to draw their own conclusions. However, it’s a nice tool to add to an arsenal for reporting. The screenshot below is from Facebook, which ranks 16th overall on Quantcast but reaching 7th on Alexa.

As with most of these advanced analytics tools, smaller sites which make up the majority of the internet are lacking information, so all numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. They do however provide a good indicator of trends and should be used as such.