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.

Doing some reading this morning lead me to this site which has a collection of 10 bits of code that you can tweet. Reading this reminded me of the 5Kb website challenge. The premise was to create a functional website in 5Kb of code. That included all images, javascript, css, html… EVERYTHING! I recall there were a number of very complex graphic manipulation tools and even a shopping cart. Today I’m building out a new design for a client and my CSS include alone is already 3,197 bytes. This got me to thinking, we need a new 5Kb website challenge.

So here it is! What can you make in 5Kb?

Rules:

• All HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Images and any initial httpRequest() content loaded at startup must be less than 5Kb
• Content loaded via AJAX (if used) must be less than 5Kb per load request. In other words, it it loads a json object that references an image, the image + json must be less than 5Kb in size.
• The site must “do” something.

Prizes

I’ll give the three (3) best entries a 512Mb Memorex Mini USB Thumb Drive. Entries must be submitted by June 16, 2008 to be eligible for a prize. Submit your site and description in the comments below.

Judging and all that good stuff is subject to participation. If we have enough entries, I’ll open it to the community - otherwise, I’ll be the judge. I’m off to get started on my (non-eligible) project.

It’s not for everyone, but the Google Image Labeler is the best tagging application I’ve ever seen. It does a great job of filtering out spam by matching you with another human being to concurrently tag items. This avoids any sort of oddities with linguistic issues such as car vs. auto because both people have to use the same lexicon. This is crowd sourcing at it’s best.

A similar system could be implemented using caching to hold submissions for sites with significantly lower traffic than Google (that’s pretty much all sites right?) Once an image is tagged by 2-3 individuals, it could be “accepted.” Determining who’s who of course becomes the challenge, but a mixture of IP, user names, session information or any other number of “fingerprint” type technologies could help narrow it down to a reasonably accurate representation. Additionally, you could expire words after a predetermined time. Additionally, the concerns of spam may be trivial since 20 character tags are hardly helpful for spammers promoting products. Of course Google’s method avoids all caching all together by only letting live posts associate with the image.

The other thing Google does is make tagging a game. While this is hardly sufficient to help people get motivated to actually use the application for long periods of time, it’s a good effort and it can be addictive. Points are awarded to folks as the complete matches, giving them little actual value beyond seeing their names on a Google top 5 leader board (if they make the cut).

Today marks a milestone for my Twitter usage. I tweeted my 1,000th tweet. What does that mean exactly, well, honestly not very much. However, as I scanned over the last 2-3 hours of tweets when I woke up this morning I noticed the increasing number of flame wars between thought leaders in technology frustrating. A feed of 20-30 tweets might contain 5-6 messages back and forth between folks who are in some sort of pissing contest about who’s right, wrong, cool or whatever.

It’s kind of sad.

As everyone struggles to really figure out how to effectively use Twitter it becomes hard to determine the best method for leveraging the technology effectively. I’ve been using it to keep up on industry insiders thoughts (which is probably why I get so much noise and childish banter in my feed). Others use it as initially intended, to tell folks what they’re doing and yet more for shameless self promotion.

I’d love to see more quality information from the industry visionaries who could all take a lesson from @jowyang and @guykawasaki and less banter about who’s right and who’s wrong. Guy and Jeremiah, and I’m sure many others, somehow keep above the fray and still add value to my Twitter experience.

GPSed is a great new GPS tool for tracking your location via your GPS enabled BlackBerry. More importantly, it scratches an itch I’ve had lately of helping me to geo-tag my photos. Flickr and Picassa are supported so that covers the majority of photo sharing apps. A little freaky perhaps is the ability to track exactly where the phone was when it last checked in. I’ll be using this when snapping photos on assorted walks around Rochester, MN providing better information for everyone to use.

I read about it first at Berry Review. This is MUCH better than the FindMe application for Facebook which uses cell towers (as best as I was able to tell) instead of the built in GPS unit to triangulate location. I could see this having huge utility for tracking down friends when your at a large venue (like a sports arena) and trying to locate your friends - although the mobile site has varied degrees of detail from the very slick Google maps interface on the full blown website.

I’ve been experimenting with Twitter for just over 4 months now, using it in my personal and professional life. There seems to be a large and still growing developer community building up around it churning out great applications, including one I heard about (via @purplecar on twitter of course). The application by tweetclouds.com aims to create a tag cloud (much like the one on this and many other blogs) from your tweets; you can see mine here in all it’s glory.

If you’re on twitter, follow me - I’d love to hear from folks who are experimenting with new ways of extending twitter.

Some other interesting tools include Twitter Stats, which received some coverage on TechCrunch in January.

Quite possibly my favorite is TwitterVision, a nice mashup leveraging the public tweet stream and google maps to visualize the public feed. Incidentally David Troy (the author) has also created FlickrVision, basically the same app but using photos instead.

There’s also Twitterholic a top 100 twitter user board, Twubble a great way to find people you might be interested in following (recently featured on FaceReviews), Twitterverse another cloud app but for the entire twitter universe and if your totally lost as to why anyone uses twitter, I recommend the Twitter in Plain English video by CommonCraft.

If I’m missing a way cool web based app, please let me know in the comments below. I’ll save desktop applications for another post, there certainly are plenty of those too!

I’m not sure when my love affair with Rackspace ended. Perhaps it was when we were brushed off as a client or when they began having catastrophic problems with their data centers. Either way, I thought it was funny when I saw an email today that they now have a corporate blog. I’ve been critical of Rackspace before and just wanted to highlight this additional failure of them as a company. With the astronomical fees they charge for server hosting, you would think they could have hired a PR firm a long time ago to tell them to get involved with their customers. This just seems like another last ditch effort to bring themselves into a web 2.0 culture that’s ready to move into new directions. They even have a token welcome to our blog entry from February. Someone please provide them some assistance with URL rewriting. The real test will be to see if they delete this trackback or are actually open to feedback and criticism on their blog.

Some folks may be asking why I don’t unsubscribe from their mailing lists… quite simply, I enjoy having fodder for these occasional rants.

Recently I had the opportunity to purge over 15 years of saved papers, files, magazines and other junk. With the family out of town for a few days I sat down with the goal of getting myself inline with GTD and purging the backlog of files. I had made an attempt about 6 years ago, thinning out old bank statements, but now it was time to get serious. With all of my necessary organization items at hand I started going through the files, sorting them into 2 boxes: one to shred and another to recycle. After many hours of processing all of this backlog, I ended up with a box 16″x16″x16″ (~41lbs.) of potentially sensitive papers.

I own a light weight shredder that will process 5 or 6 sheets at a time without much effort, but I didn’t want to dedicate an entire day or more to feeding paper and emptying the impossibly small receptacle that it’s attached to. I began the quest for a shredding service online by filling out 3 different forms for local shred on site services. Only one bothered to email me back (although another did put me on their email SPAM list) with a proposal. They actually recommended their ship and shred service as it would cost about 1/2 as much as the on-site document destruction process. With no other alternatives easily at hand, I opted to give it a try. I filled out the online form, provided some information about the contents of the box and where I live - the whole process only took about 10 minutes at the end of which I had a FedEx label to ship the box to St. Paul, MN about an hour away. The entire charge was right around $45 and was good for up to 65lbs.

I then used FedEx’s online tool to schedule a pickup for the package and 24 hours later it was gone. Checking the rates with FedEx’s site, the shipping costs for the box was around $15 (if I had shipped it with my corporate account) so the shredding portion fills out the rest at $30. Of course they’re saving a few bucks because the box is lighter and they presumably have worked out a better rate with FedEx - but I digress. This is considerably cheaper than even hiring someone at $5/hr to feed the paper into my shredder for me (which may or may not have gotten done in the 9 hours that would have paid for). According to the site, once it’s all done I’ll get a certificate of destruction that I can print from the website. Good to know if your a small business needing to purge some documents in compliance with federal law. As I see it, it saved me countless hours of shredding and I’ll use them again if I have a large quantity of documents to shred.