This a very simple plugin for Safari that makes full screen slideshows from folders on Flickr and most of the other major photo sites. Nicely implemented and a great use of screen space.
Looks like Slashdot is doing something about getting their ass handed to them from Digg. Now, according to our pals with dubious numbers at Alexa, Digg has well surpassed Slashdot in terms of reach, rank and pageviews. This isn’t news. Even if Digg had not expanded beyond its tech crowd, Digg was growing at a rate that outclassed Slashdot in every way.
Slashdot Firehose
Slashdot has launched a editorial voting system called Firehose to “allow users to assist the Slashdot editors in the story selection process.” It’s a straight up copy of Digg, but Slashdot is not giving up ultimate editorial control of their home page.
I haven’t seen it before, so I can only guess that it just launched and it seems to only be launched to logged in users.
Somehow, I don’t think that this will get new users on Slashdot, but allowing users to vote on stories certainly will make editorial decisions a little easier.
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Darfur Wall
There were a lot of good speakers and 5 minute presentations at last night’s Ignite Seattle, but one that stuck with me in particular was Jonah Burke’s Darfur Wall project.
From O’Reilly Radar:
Jonah Burke left Microsoft to found the The Darfur Wall with his father and brother a couple of weeks ago. If you’re not aware Darfur is in a crisis. The Burkes have created a novel website for collecting money. There are 400,000 subdued numbers on the site; each time a dollar is donated a new number is lit. All of the monies go to Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and others. In just 21 days, they have raised $5052 from 445 donors. Buying a number is fast and easy; consider it. (Blog).
When I look for donations to make during the holiday season, I always try to look for both local and global causes. In some ways, this accomplishes both. Helping someone locally who is trying to affect change globally seems like a perfect mix.
Jonah – I didn’t get to meet you last night, but I really appreciate the work you are doing to help this troubled region.
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Zillow – Make Me Move
Zillow unveils its latest feature tonight, Make Me Move.
The idea is pretty simple, set a price that you would be willing to sell your house for and wait for the offers to come in. Ok, this is a bit gimmicky, but fun nevertheless.
Of course, this is a pretty good way to get people to give Zillow a little more info about your home.
But at least I can finally move my house down the hill where it belongs.
Moving is a pain in the butt, but we all have our price.
TechCrunch has more on Z’s other new features, the Real Estate Wiki and free listings for agents and sellers.
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How to rig Digg
CNET reports this morning about how internet marketers are “planting stories, paying people to promote items, and otherwise trying to manipulate rankings on Digg and other so-called social media sites like Reddit and Delicious to drum up more links to their Web sites and thus more business.”
Thanks for giving away all my secrets, CNET.
Seriously, though, there are certainly good ways and bad ways to use social media to market goods and services. This CNET article goes over the bad ways.
Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells are coming to town! In the last several months, I’ve gotten to know these guys fairly well and enjoyed our “big picture” discussions of the web and social media in particular.
Here’s a blurb from their site that best describes Social Media Club.
Social Media Club is being organized for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media. This is the beginning of a global conversation about building an organization and community where diverse groups of people who care about social media can come together to discover, connect, share, and learn.
As someone who has been working in social media for a while, I’m planning on attending. Hope to see you there.
Date – Wednesday, December 6
Time – 6:30-8:00 pm
Location – Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, 4408 Delridge Way SW, Seattle
Social Media Club
Register
Details on Upcoming.org
In the last few months, I’ve become more and more disgruntled with my cable service. The cost is high and I simply don’t watch enough television to justify the price. The video quality is poor and the DVR makes me not want to watch television. The selection of video on demand and movies on the “movie” channels are so poor that we also subscribe to Netflix to supplement our entertainment “needs.”
I looked hard at our television viewing habits and realized that most of the tv programming we watch is freely available over the air. There are some exceptions but by and large our “regularly scheduled programming” comes from the big networks. The value proposition is just not there.
While we do receive HD signals from our provider and that provider is increasing the amount of HD channels on the network, by and large, HD content comes from the major networks. Standard definition, or SD content is so compressed, legitimate download sources are starting to look better.
Crappy picture, lack of selection and high costs leave me with two options.
- I could sit and complain about it.
- Or, I could ditch cable.
Given all that, we decided to ditch cable and launch this blog to tell you about it.
If you’d like to know more about my little experiment, head on over to Ditching Cable, where I’ll be showing folks how easy it is to get rid of your cable subscription. It’s a little raw right now, but I’ll be spending some of my time fixing it up in the next few weeks.
Categories
My Jellyfish addiction
So, I’ve thought a lot about how gaming mechanisms can make sites more fun to use and my friends at Jellyfish.com have made a very addictive experience.
Jellyfish is yet another comparison shopping site, like Shopping.com, Epinions, NexTag, Yahoo! Shopping, Froogle, yadda, yadda, but they have a few twists up their sleeve. First, they incorporate cash back on most, if not all purchases made through the site. While most of the time, these are small percentages, they do add up.
The far more interesting feature, however, is Smack Shopping. Essentially, Smack Shopping is Woot! meets reverse eBay. Every day at 11 am EST, Smack Shopping offers up a limited quantity of a product, like an iPod or Zune. As time progresses, the price of the product decreases until they sell out.
Prisoner’s Dilemma
Naturally, some products sell more quickly than others, but so far many products have sold for almost 1/2 off their retail price. So, why don’t people wait longer for the value to go to zero? Theoretically, users could wait it out and get products for free. Fortunately for Jellyfish, most products have a value to people that is a lot higher than zero.
This is classic prisoner’s dilemma, which Wikipedia defines as “a type of non-zero-sum game in which two players can “cooperate” with or “defect” (i.e. betray) the other player.” This is frequently used by policeman to get one criminal to rat out their partner. If no one says anything, both prisoners could walk free. If they both talk, they both go to prison. In Jellyfish’s case, there are more players than products, so it certainly takes advantage of people’s inherent self interest.
The first hit is free
Ultimately, as a bargain shopper, I’m completely addicted. In theory, the more people that go to the site, the less likely products will be heavily discounted. So get out there folks and do your holiday shopping Smack-style :-).
Make my addiction go away.
It’s a Wiki, but Pretty
Wetpaint lands a deal American Express to help power their Executive Travel SkyGuide. The article sites Wetpaint’s leadership in the areas of ease of use and its general lack of ugliness.
Flickr’s Camera Finder
Looking for the perfect camera this holiday season? Let the wisdom of crowds decide for you! Instead of reading reviews, Flickr has exposed the most popular cameras being used by Flickrites. Being a bit of a gadget nerd, I’ve often wondered why Flickr had not created this before.
Yahoo! acquired Bix
Ok, this is a little old, but Yahoo! has added the contest creation site, Bix to their stable of social media properties. This is a fun site that should fit in well with the rest of Yahoo’s social media acquisitions.
I’m planning on having a post up later today with my first take on Amazon’s new service, Askville, but if you would like a preview of the service, I’ve got several invites for the taking. Email me at randy at stewtopia.com if you want one.