Why the Newspapers Still Don't Get It - re:Linking

from CenterNetworks - by Allen Stern

This morning I was pointed to an article on the Washington Post about travel. If you want to find it, you can go to the Washington Post site and look around. I am sure you will find it eventually. Maybe, maybe not. Click here, click there, search, and perhaps you will find the article called "Web Travel Resources, Part I". Wouldn't it be easier if I just linked to it?

Yet in the article, the authors names about 20 Web sites without one link. You as the reader are forced to copy and paste and hope that the site is name.com and not getname.com, haveaname.com or any other variant. Why wouldn't they want to link? This is the same issue with almost every newspaper Web site. Rarely a link within a story to the relevant sites. Bloggers are quoted everyday on the New York Times site but they won't link to the blog.

The newspaper sites still don't get how to join the conversation. It starts with something as simple as a link to the sites and blogs who provided the content. In this case, the links should be provided to the travel sites that are mentioned. To steal a word from Uncov, FAIL.

Yet, they are willing to slap a link on the word "Apple" to their stock page. Is it desperation to hold on to the visitor?

Of course many of the big bloggers seem to have adopted similar out-linking policies. More to come about that later. Check out our previous Washington Post coverage including a video review of their new social site.

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Zlio Readies New Version

from CenterNetworks - by Allen Stern

Online store creator Zlio is in the beginning stages of launching their Version 3 of their application. When we interviewed founder Jeremie Berrebi he described Zlio as, " Zlio helps you start your own online shop in 5 minutes! Even if you don't have anything to sell! Zlio offers you to choose from an exhaustive catalogue of thousands of products and arrange your own ZlioShop without programming anything!"

Check out the Zlio blog for more details on the upcoming release which appears to launch "soon". They are using the strategy of sharing bits and bits before the full launch. This can have positive and negative buzz effects. If they keep it to a short duration and deliver on the dates they promise, it's positive. If they miss dates, and/or keep the game going for a long period, their shopkeepers might become frustrated.

The first piece of the upgrade is the management interface split between store promotion and store management. Here is an example of the updated version:

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Miro kicks Joost's ass

Augustine says: I love Miro too and love the content from Nature, National Geographic, and TedTalks. I would be proud to contribute the  http://footagesandbox.com/    visual search interface (currently demo-ing YouTube API) and additional AJAX or UI engineering time to support this worthy project to keep Miro growing and innovating.

from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

The Participatory Culture Foundation has published a compelling chart comparing the free, open Miro video player to Joost, a closed and proprietary system that's crippled with DRM and only carries content from those few producers lucky enough to get a deal with Joost. By contrast, Miro has done extensive outreach to indie creators, has no privacy-invading tracking of your viewing habits, delivers HD video, and is built on free software and open standards.

Using Miro is as easy as using a TiVo. Download the free software, pick the channels you want (over 2,500 of them at present, and anyone can publish new channels), and Miro will subscribe to your favorite net-shows, checking their RSS feeds for new episodes and downloading them with BitTorrent, so that the folks who make your shows don't go bankrupt on bandwidth bills. As a bonus, BitTorrent means that the more popular a show gets, the faster you'll get it -- no more sites being clobbered because too many people are using them at once. It doesn't matter what video format the shows are in, because Miro includes VLC, the open video player that can play pretty much every file-format on the net.

Miro is produced by a nonprofit, the Participatory Culture Foundation, who pay a staff of 11 (mostly hackers) to continuously improve and enhance the free/open Miro codebase. Miro is available for the Mac, Windows and Linux, with all versions being released simultaneously.

I'm proud to volunteer on the Foundation's board, and delighted to see how well we stack up against Joost, a company with more than 100 employees and a gigantic marketing budget (Miro's marketing budget is zero). Joost is a pretty nightmarish vision for the future of Internet video: a DRM-crippled, locked up future where video producers and viewers are beholden to a single company that chooses what does and does not get shown. This is the Internet, after all, not cable TV. Let's keep it that way! Link, Link to download today's new Public Release 3 of the Miro software for Mac, Windows and Linux

(Disclosure: I am proud to volunteer on the Board of Directors for the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation, which produces Miro)

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Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro quietly updated

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

Filed under: Laptops

The rumors were rampant about the pending upgrade; now the deal is done. The Apple MacBook has finally moved to the Santa Rosa architecture with a healthy GMA X3100 video bump from the lethargic GMA 950 of yore. Available now starting at $1,099 for the 13-inch, 80GB, 2GHz white model on up to $1,499 for the 160GB, 2.2GHz black variety of hard-posing laptop.

Update: The MacBook Pro can now be configured with an optional 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo for a $250 premium over the previous 2.4GHz flag-ship configuration.

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Privacy Groups Mull 'Do Not Track' List for Internet

from Slashdot by Zonk

Technical Writing Geek writes with a Reuters story about a collection of privacy groups looking to set up a 'Do Not Track' list online, similar to the 'Do Not Call' list meant to dissuade telemarketing. "Computer users should be notified when their Web surfing is tracked by online advertisers and Web publishers, argue the Consumer Federation of America, the World Privacy Forum and the Center for Democracy and Technology, among other groups in a coalition promoting the idea. Rather than burying privacy policies in fine print, companies should also disclose them more fully and provide easier ways to opt out, the groups said. The organizations submitted the proposals to the Federal Trade Commission, ahead of the consumer watchdog agency's workshop on Nov. 1-2 to study the increasing use of tracking technology to target online ads.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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