setting up a spam website

Just came across RSS revolution, a tool which allows you to build your own spammy website - remember, this site you came across with only aggregate content, google adsense all over the place, and which makes you wonder why search engines still list this type of sites on the top of their results - RSS revolution allows you to build one yourself!

Note: An other one suggested by Seo Blackhat - geckotribe

Bar Camp - Attending!

Moved up to the attendees list!

selling your site on ebay

It is sometimes difficult to value a site, which has no revenue modele (and quite a few "WEB2.0" are in this situation!). kiko.com has decide to try ebay out.

What is kiko? an online calendar - who is behind kiko? probably a bunch of student who have decided to build this as a project during their spared time. at least I hope so. This type of web features are made available through Google accounts, which consolidates with all their other features, and it doesn't really make sense to set up a bbusiness on developing such a product.

The guardian mentions that it is all Google's fault, hinting that Kiko have been put out of business because of the internet giant. But without a revenue model, there is no business plan, and therefore no business at all - so how can one be put out of business if the business doesn't exist in first place?

accessibility tools

A good list of accessibility tools to build forms, select, etc .. excellent resource:
http://accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/

online word processor

Writely is up and running again - after being bought by Google in March, the site was down for a while -

After giving the ability to share spreadsheets online, Google is now adding word processing to their online assets -

Google accounts are not consolidated yet with Writely, and I will probably wait until they do so before starting actively using it for biz projects.

but it looks more and more like Google is smoothly developing an online desktop application.

Web 2.0 sites ranking

A good list of WEB2.0 sites ranked using Alexa engine:
http://www.alexaholic.com/sethgodin

412 of them are under the 100 000 mark

Web Design Meetup August

Simon made an excellent presentation about the Yahoo UI library, and Nik later on run made a presentation in his own style about Flex2, providing some insight into the actual way of coding Rich Internet Applications with flash, talking a bit about accessibility and showing off the stunning effects you can achieve.

The evening was great, a shame the projector was still not working!

browe from your mobile or dial 118118

PriceRunner.com has partnered with 118118 to provide with comparison shopping services over the phone -

You are in a shop, and want to check the price of an item, in order to avoid being ripped off? just dial 118 118, and they will run a query on Pricerunner.com on your behalf, and provide you with a list of prices for the item.

I think that's a great idea - browsing these types of sites on your mobile can be a very cumbersome experience. So it makes complete sense to combine the two services to provide with a better solution.

I guess next stage is for 118118 to partner with other sites. For instance, book your taxi online - yo call 118118, provide with your credit cards details, and they book a taxi for you - hassle free, an other great service they could provide. http://www.london-taxi.co.uk/ could do if the site was providing with an easy to use interface, which is definitely not the case - there is a business opportunity here.

Microsoft Adcenter live in the UK

Microsoft adCenter is now live in the UK.
adcenter.microsoft.co.uk

We are running an account on behalf of a client, and all I can say is that the feed is the best one after Adwords - allows negative keywords, Sub categories, and broad & exact match.

Just one important thing missing though, an API!

The Flyer wall

The Flyer wall is an excellent idea, inspired from the million dollars homepage.

Paul dixon has designed it, and I may drop him a line to get a Jazar Flyer pinned on the wall!

Spam Look

MSN Dude (MSN search rep) tossed a new SEO jargon "spam look" on webmasterworld

Search engines keep fighting spam websites - These websites can rarely be mistaken, and once you land on the page, you know that you have been fooled.

Search Engines such as MSN need to come up with new ways of assessing the quality of a site, and identify "spammers". that's probably why MSN dude is calling out for feedbacks: Ok, you can spot spam website with 100% accuracy, but how do you come to this conclusion, and what are the indicators you have used to visually assess the site.

Interviewing a Software Project manager

After reading this post from Craig Fitzpatrick (devshop), I took a deep breath and tried to work out our success rate regarding Internet projects.

First thing first - what is a success project? Accroding the criteria I choose, it can vary from 30% to 70%:
30%: about 1 project out of 3 is a commercial success. Which means that return on investment is exceeding expectation
70%: about 70% of our clients are happy with the projects we deliver - I would even say 95% of external clients(I should say 100% really, but we have had a couple of painful experience at the start. These clients came back to us later with new project s though, so it was not that bad!), 25% including internal projects or joint venture projects. The good thing with experience is that you learn how to detect the wrong signal earlier, and decide on not commiting yourself to project which are doomed to failure.

An other post from the same blog illustrates the "features race" issue, I love it!

Google code repository

Google has recently launched Google code , providing with free repository for open source applications. And this was for us a good opportunity to release our CMS officially as open source.

Well, still loads of things to do before officially releasing it officially - or in other words, this is a beta version of the beta version - or a beta draft of the alpha version:

1) We have rolled back to an old version, stripping most of the modules out. The idea is to create a branch specific to open source - the code is clumsy, no comments, we had not moved yet to xml - we have put a lot of efforts since in improving this side of the code, but I think it would be interesting to see if developers can suggest other ways of improving the code. That's the reason why we have decided to roll back to an early stage version, taking the risk to get booed..
2) Create a blog or wiki?
3) Create download & documentation pages on our own server.
4) moving from VSS to subversion internally

Any way, we have done the first step - it was done in ~2h, but it took us 8 months since we first had the idea to release our CMS under open source licence - wel, it's done, let's see how it goes now!

New stars from online social networks

A very good article about new Moguls of New Media - the article describes how Christine Dolce's profile raised to stardom thanks to myspace.

Modern Design or RIAs

I was posting recently about modern design, Yahoo UI Library, and how static html pages are being replaced by rich and dynamic UI thanks to techno such as Ajax.

this article develop on RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) which is the ability to integrate this into a development framework. And big names (not only Yahoo, but also Adobe, microsoft, tibco, etc .. ) are investing on RIA components, environments, or extensions to Integrated Development Environment (IDE) suites.

It really becomes exciting - I attended a geek's diner a while ago about the future of CSS, and it sounded a bit gloomy - but the comeback of javascript really sexy things up now, and it becomes fun again to design front end!