Reuters reports that AOL announced today that they will be purchasing Weblogs for US$25 mm. Weblogs is one of the early blog consortia and is home to many of the most popular blogs on the net including Joystiq and one of my personal favorites, engadget. AOL continues to flail about after their almost suicidal decision to abandon expanding into broadband services. At least they have since attempted to reinvent themselves as a destination portal to compete with MSN, Yahoo and Google. I can’t help but believe that though the blogs will certainly generate some traffic and they are picking up some influential and respected bloggers in the bargain, this is still a case of too little too late. is it just me or are we about to witness what archeologists call a mass extinction event amongst older technology companies that have lost their way. Stay tuned…
AOL to buy Weblogs
Creativepro reviews Dreamweaver 8
creativepro.com has an extensive review of the new version of Dreamweaver. They rate it very highly for it’s enhanced CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and XML (Xtensible Markup Language) capabilities, its improved ease of use and background file transfer capabilities.
WWIII - Google vs Microsoft?
Palo Alto neighbors and fellow Stanford “graduates” Google and Sun Microsystem have announced an alliance that will allow users to run spreadsheets and word processing right from the Google toolbar. There seems to be a sharp division of opinion between old school stalwarts like Forbes who are pooh poo’ing it as a non event and others perhaps a bit better informed like InfoWorld that see it as having far reaching implications. I cast my lot with the latter.
Picture this: you are working on a spreadsheet and you type
Earthlink granted license to build Philly municipal wi-fi net
The city fathers of Philadelphia have thumbed their noses at the telcos by selecting Earthlink to deploy a low cost wi-fi network that will completely blanket 135 square miles of the city. Red Herring reports that Earthlink beat Hewlett-Packard to snag the contract. There is definitely heavy momentum this week building on the side of municipalities as on Monday San Francisco announced that twenty-four providers had answered his call for proposals including -ahem- Google.
Google, of course, is bringing their unique intelligence and business model to the project by offering their own secure client, free universal access (free access is capped at 300kbps), partnerships with ISPs to provide full speed access, and the future implementation of location based advertising.
Streaming video web ads interrupted by users
I don’t know about you, but there is nothing I find more annoying than the streaming video banner ad that starts without my permission. Online Media Daily reports today on a study conducted by Klipmart that on average, a web user will watch a streaming video ad for 21 seconds. Their conclusion is that aon online thirty second streaming spot is effective because of the high average watch time. I on the other hand, think that the user interface on these things is usually so poor that it takes me on average 20 seconds to find the damn close button. My suggestion if you want to increase the effectiveness of your video ads is follow these simple and mostly obvious rules:
- Never, ever just start playing the video with sound full on. There is no easier way to get somebody pissed off at your brand.
- Make the controls obvious please.
- Ensure the content is relevant to the site
