The Benefits of Lifestreaming in Plain English [ November 20th, 2008 ] Posted in » Software, Techology

Lifestreaming, as you probably know, is all about sharing your daily activities (both in the online and offline world) with friends and family. (See how to create a Lifestream with Google Reader).

You upload a picture on the web, you change your current geographic location on the phone, you favorite some videos on YouTube, you comment on your cousin’s picture, you change your status in messenger.. all these events are captured and show up in your "lifestream" in reverse chronological order.

 

Sounds simple but in case you need help in explaining the whole concept of lifestreaming to someone who is very new, show them the video above.

Microsoft will soon be adding lifestreaming capabilities into Windows Live and they recently hired the Common Craft guys to do a video that helps explain the whole concept in plain English. The video obviously talks only about Windows Live products but the concepts can easily be applied outside Live as well.

Related posts:

  1. Common Craft Video: LinkedIn in Simple English
  2. Web Search 101 for Dummies - New Common Craft Video
  3. Men and Women Strip To Protest Global Warming

The Benefits of Lifestreaming in Plain English - Digital Inspiration

Google Web Search May Get RSS Feeds via Google Alerts

alerts I was reading this story in WSJ by Katherine Boehret where she compares the various "email alert" services available on the web particularly Google Alerts, Alerts.com and Yotify.

The story may be slightly old (it was published on October 1) but is worth revisiting because it hints at an upcoming feature in Google Alerts and this is support for RSS feeds. Katherine says:

"I’ve used Google Alerts as a way of keeping track of myself online. If my name is mentioned in a blog or if this column appears on the Web, such as on the site of a newspaper that syndicates it, a Google Alert sends me an email about it. ..In about a month, Google will begin delivering these alerts to users via feeds, as well as emails."

Now Google Alerts lets your track News, Blogs, Web Search and couple of other Google service via email alerts. Since content indexed by Google News and Google Blogs is already available in feeds, this may be a hint that we have soon have RSS feeds for Google Search results as well just like Live Search and Yahoo Search.

Related: Google Alerts Tutorial

Google Web Search May Get RSS Feeds via Google Alerts - Digital Inspiration

October 7th, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Create a Back Up of your Tumblr Blog

tumblrUnlike WordPress or Blogger, Tumblr does not have an official export feature yet, so moving your Tumblr blog to a different blogging platform or taking a backup of the entire blog is rather difficult.

Enter Tumble-log Backup – it’s an online tool that will backup all your Tumblr posts into a single HTML file. You only need to give your tumblr blog name and Tumble-log Backup tool will do the rest.

backup tumblr blogs
Tumblr Backup will save all text, photos, audio and video codes.

Since the backup tool doesn’t require a password, you may use it to save an offline copy of virtually any public tumblr blog. And  it also works with tumblr micro-blogs that are self-hosted on custom domains like xzy.com instead of xyz.tumblr.com.

Related: Backup Blogger Blogs with Comments

Create a Back Up of your Tumblr Blog - Digital Inspiration

October 7th, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Add Clickable Links In YouTube Videos Without Using Annotations

youtube links While it is possible to add hyperlinks on YouTube videos via the built-in annotations feature, the only problem is that you cannot link to external websites from YouTube videos – that links should either point to a video hosted on YouTube or to a video search page that’s again on YouTube.

This may be a problem especially for content publishers as cannot provide a "click here to read more" kind of link in the video where visitors may click to read the related story.

The problem however gets solved with LinkedTube, an online tool that lets you add hover buttons and links on YouTube videos while you embed them in web pages. Hover your mouse over the following YouTube to see LinkedTube in action.

Regular YouTube Video Video with Links

LinkedTube is actually a Flash widget that adds links and other sharing options to the standard YouTube video player. You could make it point to your own website or even sites like eBay in case you have uploaded a promo video to YouTube.

Also see: Most Useful YouTube Tools

Add Clickable Links In YouTube Videos Without Using Annotations - Digital Inspiration

October 7th, 2008 | Leave a Comment

RSS.com Domain Up for Grabs

It looks as if the current economy crisis has had no effect on the web domain business.

RSS.com, a parked web domain, is up for sale in an online auction but don’t get too excited because the starting bid for this auction is at least $750k.

This will be an interesting one to watch because unlike sites like sex.com or utube.com who get lot of traffic due to their names or because of misspellings, nobody is actually visiting rss.com.

Google’s index has more than 4 billion pages related to "rss" but the domain rss.com is nowhere in the top 100 results despite such a good name. No wonder, this site gets no more than 700 unique visitors a day.

The domain rss.com is probably a good fit for groups that are maintaining the RSS specification or for companies who are in business of building tools related to RSS technologies like Newsgator or Google (they have FeedBurner) but let’s see if anyone is willing to pay such a heavy premium.

If you were given a chance to grab rss.com for free, what you do with the domain?


What is RSS? Credit: Common Craft

RSS.com Domain Up for Grabs - Digital Inspiration

October 7th, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Implement AdSense Revenue Sharing on a Multi-Author Blog

adsense group blogs Let’s assume that you are the administrator of a team blog that has multiple guest authors.

The revenue sharing arrangement is such that all writers get to keep a fixed percentage of the actual AdSense revenue generated from articles that they have written.

This arrangement, from the perspective of team members, maybe better than dividing AdSense revenue based on pageviews because the author is getting exactly what he earned. You can have less number of pageviews but if the CPM of your niche is high, it kind of balances out.

Now to put such a thing in place, you have two options – either ask all the authors to open separate AdSense accounts and send you their ad tags or better still, you can have just use one AdSense account (your own) and create separate channels for all authors. Let’s see how:

adsense-channels 

Say your blog (hosted on WordPress or Blogger) has three authors – Sam, Peter and Matt. Go to your AdSense dashboard and create three separate custom channels – give each channel a name that matches with the name of author.

Now create three different ad units (of the same format) but assign a different channel to each of them. You can follow a naming convention like Leaderboard_Peter, Leaderboard_Sam, etc.

adsense-manage

Get the AdSense code corresponding to the AdSense channel you just created and it will look something like this.


<script type="text/javascript"><!--
  google_ad_client = "pub-xyz";  /* Leaderboard - Peter */
  google_ad_slot = "123789";
  google_ad_width = 728;
  google_ad_height = 90;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
 src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>

The code will be exactly similar for all other ad units (per author) with one exception – the value of google_ad_slot will vary depending on the author and this is something that will help us determine the exact AdSense earnings of different authors.

To get the author name of a post on WordPress or Blogger, you can use the following code:

  • Old Classic Blogger: <$BlogItemAuthorNickname$>
  • New Blogger: <data:post.author/>
  • WordPress Blogs: <?php get_the_author(); ?> – you may even consider suing get_the_author_login();

Now all you need to do is write a simple piece of JavaScript code that maps the author name and google_ad_slot values correctly. Here’s an example with WordPress:

<?php function get_ad_codes($author) {
 if($author == 'peter')
   return '123789';
 elseif ($author=='sam')
   return '987878';
 else // default, no author found
   return '964743';
} ?>

Now the AdSense code in your WordPress blog template will be something like this:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
  google_ad_client = "pub-xyz";
  google_ad_slot = "<?php echo get_ad_codes(get_the_author());?>";
  google_ad_width = 728;
  google_ad_height = 90;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
 src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>

Blogger Templates support only JavaScript (no PHP) so you’ll have to slightly modify the code above to make it work with Blogger.

When the payment cycles is near, group the AdSense report by channels and there you’ve the exact earning data per author.

The upcoming AdSense reports in Analytics will tell you the earnings per URL but you’ll still need a different mechanism (like the one above) to find revenue per author.

Implement AdSense Revenue Sharing on a Multi-Author Blog - Digital Inspiration

October 7th, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Gmail Goggles: No More Drunk Emailing on Friday Nights

gmail delay mails
This email won’t leave your Gmail outbox unless you solve that Maths problem.

Gmail Labs today released an interesting feature to prevent you from sending mails that may you may regret later. It does so by asking you to confirm whether you really want to send that email.

So if you’re writing a mail late on a Friday night, when you may not be as sober as you would like yourself to be, you can get GMail to ask you a few math problems before the message leave your Gmail outbox.

You can enable this via the "Labs" tab on the Gmail "Settings" page. By default, the Mail Goggles feature of Gmail become active late night on the weekend, but you can set it to other times as well from Settings –> General.

select safe times

Related: Prevent Gmail from Marking Emails as Spam

Gmail Goggles: No More Drunk Emailing on Friday Nights - Digital Inspiration

October 7th, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Powered by WordPress | Technology n Money | Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).