I spent the last few days among webmasters at the PubCon conference, where most conversations were focused on marketing yourself online to humans and search engines. The 2000 attendees focused on ranking themselves as high as possible in search engine result pages and driving site traffic. Methods of achieving these goals cover a full spectrum of white hat to black. Social networking and crowdsourcing sites are new focuses of the search engine marketing sector, taking advantage of loose editing and account creation restrictions to boost a site’s visibility. Social networking and e-commerce Should every item in your product catalog have…
Category Archives: Software
EmTrace WidgetStation
A Korean company specializing in smartphone development is releasing a hardware device next year focused on widgets. The WidgetStation from Emtrace Technologies has both a mono and color LCD and receives content update over Ethernet and/or USB connections. It’s a mini computer with an ARM processor, NAND flash memory for local storage, and RAM. The mono LCD is designed for long-term display items such as a clock or weather while the color LCD displays built-in and customizable content from the Internet or your desktop, including support for audio playback. Emtrace’s past developing for smartphones in a mobile-heavy culture such…
Google Personalized Homepage for your domain
Users of Google Apps for Your Domain can now add a homepage with a custom set of configured gadgets for their users. The new feature lets companies configure mail messages, calendar data, specialized web feeds, and more as their employees’ portal to the web. The group customization feature was previously only available to large partnerships such as Dell and Gateway. The Apps for Your Domain program launched in August and includes custom branded and custom addressable access to Google Mail, Talk, Calendar, webpage creation, and now your own start page to bring it all together. The Google search box…
Speaking at PubCon on Tuesday
I’ll be in Las Vegas early next week speaking at PubCon on feed syndication best practices. The session takes place from 10:15-11:30 a.m. on Tuesday if you are attending the search conference. I have not been to Las Vegas in a few years so I’ll be checking out new pieces of grandeur at the Wynn, new Caesars Palace, Treasure Island, etc. Hopefully there will be lots of search geeks in attendance leading to interesting conversations….
Fox Interactive should host a MySpace conference
Yesterday’s Widgets Live! conference provided an overview of an industry but I think there is enough interest in the social networking space to warrant a separate conference. I think Fox Interactive Media and Adobe should partner to create a MySpace conference in the first quarter of 2007 focused on integrating your content, brand, or products on MySpace. The event would cover topics such as the development of widgets, the right and wrong way to engage a social media community, help create new SpringWidgets and outline ways to work with Fox Interactive Media for continued success. There are currently lots of…
Widgets Live! timeline
I received a few e-mails this morning from people interested in how Widgets Live! came together. Yep, the event really was planned in about a month, from site selection to the actual day-long event. In this post I’ll outline how Widgets Live! grew from an idea to an in-person event. July 12 Coming up short on ideas for my weekly podcast with Om Malik, I suggested we talk about widgets and how they are changing web publishing. I had been playing around with widgets as a form of web feed syndication, specifically thinking of performance on Live.com and other views…
Widgets Live! wrap-up
Yesterday’s Widgets Live! conference was a success! Over 200 people involved in the widget ecosystem came together to discuss the current state of the industry, show off their work, meet new people, and learn new things. There were two big takeaways for attendees: we’re just getting started and the widget world is a bit too fractured. Highlights from the day Arlo Rose talked about getting a call from a friend at Apple after a meeting discussion “steamrolling” his product and small company, Konfabulator. Apple later released Dashboard. Fox Interactive Media launched Spring Widgets, a new desktop and web-based widget hybrid….
Parakey: A new startup by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt
The latest issue of IEEE Spectrum features Blake Ross on the cover and a few details about his new startup Parakey cofounded with Joe Hewitt. The desktop application is described as a personal organization, editing, and sharing application. It’s designed to make the life easier for less technical users who would like to save, modify, and share information without too much hassle. (via Matt Mullenweg) Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt have worked together in the past on the Firefox browser, breaking away from the application suite that was Mozilla Seamonkey and blazing a new path. At first there were…
The current state of audio search
Online audio is definitely on an upswing, fueled by the iPod revolution, improved online playback, and broadband penetration. Audio search is keeping up with demand for new content, thanks in part to national security spending in the Cold War and beyond. In this post I will outline the current state of audio search, and how machines make sense of spoken word, progressing from easy to difficult. First, let’s define the space. I’m interested how a search engine might index content with non-professionally produced metadata. The President’s weekly radio address contains a full transcript. Music catalogs are available for purchase from…
Widgets Live! conference in San Francisco on November 6
The first ever conference dedicated to widgets, gadgets, and modules will take place on Monday, November 6, in San Francisco. The one-day conference will capture and summarize the emerging widget economy and allow developers, business leaders, and content producers to collaborate and better understand how they might participate in syndication at the edge of the network. A small web loosely joined. I am organizing a conference named Widgets Live! next month in partnership with Om Malik to capture the emerging webspace of widgets. There’s so much happening in the fast-moving widget space right now it’s a bit difficult to keep…