Saturday, December 02, 2006
Million Dollar Homepage Creator Gets Into Lottery Business
Alex Tew, the enterprising student who started Million Dollar Homepage, is at it again. Before he was selling ad pixels on his site for $1 a pixel, but this time, he is looking to charge $2 with Pixelotto. There's a twist however. Apparently, he is planning on holding a lottery where one lucky winner who clicks on the right ad will win $1 million. It's a clever way to get people to click on ads, and it might work. Although the site launches December 5, he's already sold some of his inventory as you can see in the screenshot to the left.What's interesting is that an arbitrage opportunity exists for smart advertisers who do decide to place an ad on the site. Since users have to click on every ad at least once to have a chance of winning, you're guaranteed a massive amount of traffic assuming Pixelotto takes off, which it has every chance to since $1 million is at stake, and a fair number of bloggers are writing about it. If even only a small percentage of visitors click on ads on your site, you can easily make back your original ad investment. Every user can only submit 10 entries a day, apparently, so depending on the length of the lottery, it might not be possible for a user to get through the entire ad inventory.
Tew has published this email letter about Pixelotto:
HiI have some very exciting news I’d like to share with you.
Next week, on 5th December, I am launching a new venture called ‘Pixelotto’.
It’s similar to The Million Dollar Homepage only this time I will be giving
away $1,000,000!It’s all based around pixel advertising and generating big traffic for
advertisers. Visitors play for free - all they have to do is click on the
ads for chances to win the jackpot. The more they click, the more chances
they have - and the more traffic you receive.As a valued customer of The Million Dollar Homepage, I’d like to give you an
exclusive opportunity to purchase advertising space on Pixelotto before the
site goes public. The world will be watching next week and this is your
chance to get on-board before everyone else.The following link will give you exclusive access to Pixelotto, where you
can buy ad space right now:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXx
If you have any questions don’t hesitate to e-mail me and my team at
info@pixelotto.comI look forward to welcoming you on-board for this new pixel adventure!
Cheers,
Alex Tew
Pixelotto
PixelottoPixelotto Limited is registered in England & Wales. Company no. 05972757
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Free Physics, Computer Science, Engineering, and Biology Lecture Videos
Free Science and Video Lectures Online has a huge number of links to video lectures in all areas of science (physics, mathematics, chemistry) and engineering (computer science). It's a great resource for any students who find their professors lacking in teaching ability, anyone looking to self-study like ambitious high school students or adults, or just for fun (if science is your thing). I know I used to rely a lot on external lecture notes and videos when trying to figure out problem sets or studying for finals.
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Friday, December 01, 2006
Firefox Crop Circle Seen from Space
Firefox fans at Oregon State University dreamed up the idea of creating a Firefox crop circle and completed it in August. Only now has Google Maps been updated to include it.Planned in under two weeks and completed in under 24 hours, the crop circle had a final diameter of 220 feet. We constructed the circle in an oat field near Amity, Oregon, where it was completely invisible from the road but unmistakable from the sky. Our team consisted of 12 people, mainly OSU students, and we carefully stomped down oats from 3:30pm Friday afternoon until 2:30am, putting on the finishing touches between 7:30am and 11:00am Saturday, August 12.More on the step-by-step creation of the crop circle.
To see it in more detail in Google Earth, you'll need the coordinates, (45.123785,-123.113962). An overlay for Google Earth is available here.
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Report Spam to Google with Firefox Extension
SpamReport is a Firefox extension that lets you report search engine spam to Google in two clicks. You've likely encountered these spam sites in your search results when you clicked on a promising link that led you to a site that had nothing to do with what you were searching for. Previously, to report a site, you had to fill out a form and enter the original Google query, the URL of the page where results were displayed, and the suspicious page URL. A long and tedious process that probably discouraged many users from submitting a report.Now, SpamReport fills in most of the fields for you, simplifying the process. However, I foresee this tool being used maliciously by webmasters looking to take out the competition. Adding a CAPTCHA to the form would be the easiest way to cut down on false reports.
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Line Rider Gets Updated with New Features
The amazingly popular Flash game Line Rider has been modded to become LineRider ZaDa, which includes many features that users have been clamoring for: an eraser, background lines, reverse floor function, and more. If you haven't played Line Rider before, you're missing out on a lot of fun.
You can see the new features in action below:
You can see the new features in action below:
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Download Free Movies From AOL Tomorrow
AOL Video is giving away free movies for the holidays. Thirty different movies will be available for download starting 6 am ET tomorrow. Holiday themed movies as well as non-traditional ones like Spider-man 2 are among the selections. Movies are limited to one per person, but not one per computer.
[via TechCrunch]
[via TechCrunch]
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Create PDFs From Any Program with PDFCreator
PDFCreator is an open source application that lets you create PDF files from any program that's able to print. Once you install it, you can add a document that you want to convert to PDF, and PDFCreator will open it in the appropriate program like Word for a DOC file. The file is sent to the printer where it gets intercepted by PDFCreator and converted. Note that PDFCreator is temporarily set as the default printer when you do this.Some other features:
- Security: Encrypt PDFs and protect them from being opened, printed etc.
- Send generated files via eMail
- Create more than just PDFs: PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, PCX, PS, EPS
- AutoSave files to folders and filenames based on Tags like Username, Computername, Date, Time etc.
- Merge multiple files into one PDF
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Thursday, November 30, 2006
Search for Meaning with Hakia
Hakia is another contender in the race to perfect natural language search. You can enter sentences, phrases, or keywords, and Hakia will do its best to bring up meaningful results. Something called SemanticRank is used in conjunction with more detailed index tables to make the magic happen.Search results highlight relevant sections, and curiously, also display a relevant news article in the middle of the results list. For broad topics, results are presented in categories. For the privacy conscious, they also claim not to use any tracking mechanisms like cookies. Google has been criticized for putting cookies that expire in 2038 on users' computers.
By this point, I'm sure most readers have perfected the art of searching with keywords, and searching with sentences may seem agonizingly slow and even unnatural in comparison. Still, Hakia's pitch isn't limited to parsing user queries, but also "understanding" what the words on a page mean so, theoretically, using keywords to search should still garner superior results. It'll be interested to see what they come up with when they launch in 2007.Technorati Tags:
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YouTube Gives Lessons in Crime 101
Fox News has sounded alarmist concerns about how YouTube is encouraging deliquency by giving easy access to videos with how-to lessons on criminal behavior. Unfortunately, the article was missing the actual videos about stealing cop cars, breaking into houses, and stealing coffee from the grocery store.
You can find other videos easily by entering some variant of stealing, breaking, and theft. If you find a good video, see who submitted it and track what else he or she has uploaded. Chances are it's also related to lawless behavior.
Uploader beware: police are increasingly looking at YouTube to catch offenders. It might be cool to post the video online for all your friends to see, but it's also asking to get arrested.
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You can find other videos easily by entering some variant of stealing, breaking, and theft. If you find a good video, see who submitted it and track what else he or she has uploaded. Chances are it's also related to lawless behavior.
Uploader beware: police are increasingly looking at YouTube to catch offenders. It might be cool to post the video online for all your friends to see, but it's also asking to get arrested.
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Amazon UnSpun Launches
Amazon UnSpun is like Digg for lists. You can vote up or down an item with arrow buttons (more like Reddit actually). Top lists right now include Best Programming Language where Ruby is winning handily, and Top Women You Would Leave Your Partner For where Angelina Jolie is leading.
Why is Amazon doing this? I suspect UnSpun could be used as a way to gauge where your interests lie. Amazon can already do this by keeping track of your clickstream and what products you buy while on their site, but UnSpun can give them further insight into customer wants and needs, specifically yours since you need to login to vote. This is assuming a tie-in to Amazon's bread and butter retailing services, but it could be that Amazon is further redefining itself after it's announcement that web services will soon become a major product offering.Still, UnSpun lacks a certain stickiness to keep users coming back after the initial novelty value wears off. In addition, like A9 and Askville, it just doesn't fit into the Amazon brand identity.
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Me.dium Invite Code
Me.dium is a social browsing plugin that lets you see what sites your friends are browsing via a "radar screen" display and lets you chat with them. A common example used to illustrate the concept is: Suppose you have a few restaurants to choose from, which do you pick? If you see several of your friends at the new Italian restaurant, maybe you'll be more inclined to eat there. Thus, the parallel with me.dium.I haven't had a chance to check it out yet (my invite's been sitting in my inbox for a couple weeks now), but interested readers can sign up using the invite code "smash2006".
[code via Mu Life]
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Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Google Answers Falls Prey to the Power of Masses
Google Answers is shutting down. Powered by a group of 500 carefully screened researchers who answered questions within 24 hours for as little as $2.50, it still lagged painfully far behind Yahoo Answers, which took advantage of a community of users willing to help each other out for free. A similar model worked for Wikipedia in regards to mainstream encyclopedias.Yahoo CEO Terry Semel has described Yahoo as a social media company, and certainly Yahoo has a lot of hot properties (e.g., Flickr, del.icio.us) that utilize the power of a massive userbase to generate enormous amounts of content. Tellingly, Google has faltered in growing Orkut beyond Brazil. Its future seems to lie not in taking part in the expanding social media market, but in taking market share from Microsoft in its staple OS and office productivity arenas. Still, even though it isn't as strong in its more Web 2.0-ish offerings, Google is actually able to monetize its offerings, which many social media companies are still trying to figure out.
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Temporary Email Addresses with 10 Minute Mail
10 Minute Mail offers an interesting twist to the current array of temporary email offerings: your email address expires 10 minutes after it's assigned. Don't worry though: you can always extend it another 10 minutes by clicking a link. Interestingly, you can also reply to emails that are sent to that account.Other services offer deletion as well, but some want a donation first before letting you delete mail. 2Prong is another service worth checking out.
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Psiphon Offers Alternative to Tor for Bypassing Censorship
Psiphon is a new program developed by a team at the University of Toronto that lets users in countries that censor the web access restricted sites. The New York Times describes how it works:Psiphon is downloaded by a person in an uncensored country (psiphon.civisec.org), turning that person’s computer into an access point. Someone in a restricted-access country can then log into that computer through an encrypted connection and using it as a proxy, gain access to censored sites. The program’s designers say there is no evidence on the user’s computer of having viewed censored material once they erase their Internet history after each use.While Tor, another program that lets users bypass censorship and surf anonymously, is open to the public, Psiphon is meant to be shared by private groups that know and trust one another. A login and password are necessary to use someone else's computer as a Psiphon proxy.
Psiphon looks like an interesting, parallel effort to bypass censorship, but its very design does limit its usefulness for users who aren't fortunate enough to know the right people. Still, while Tor proxies might be common knowledge and thus easily blocked, Psiphon proxies should be more resilient to detection.
Psiphon will be available December 1.
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Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Four Reasons Why Web 2.0 Sites Go Invite-Only
It seems like every new Web 2.0 company is coming out to the public like a debutante at her ball: shyly. It might be private beta where only certain users (probably friends, family, and prominent bloggers) are invited to test drive the product, or maybe you have a waiting list collecting emails to let users in a few at a time. Given all this, I thought it might be interesting to list out a few reasons for doing invite-only.
Exclusivity: Make users feel special when they get an invite, knowing that they're one of a select few.
Steady Press: Invite bloggers, journalists, and users one group at a time to ensure that you get a steady flow of press attention. Hopefully, each wave brings ever more eager hordes of users hoping for entrance to your exclusive enclave.
Feedback: Select users tell you what's wrong. You fix it before the rest of the public finds out you have a buggy product. Slap a beta label to your logo to doubly make sure users don't expect perfection.
Viral Marketing: Give invited users invites of their own. Wouldn't you feel more inclined to test a new site out if your friend emailed you with an invite?
Anyone else want to chime in with their own reasons?
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Rootly Offers Granular News Search
Rootly lets you search the news kind of like Google News, but with more customization features. News is divided into about a hundred categories like bonds, horse racing, and web 2.0, and you can pick and choose which ones you want to see on your homepage.The search is a little slow (possibly too slow for some), but it seems to work well enough. Interestingly, blogs are prominently featured in search results. Other than that, the main draw is that you can filter news on a very granular level.
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Free Online SAT Preparation
Last week, while millions of Americans were celebrating Thanksgiving, their sons and daughters were frantically working on their college applications due in December. One thing most of them probably had in common was an SAT test prep book or course that costs anywhere from $20 to $800.
According to a study done by Consumer Reports, many online test prep sites
According to a study done by Consumer Reports, many online test prep siteshad grammatical errors, technical glitches, and aggressive advertising tactics. In many cases, it was hard to tell the difference between advertising and educational content. Students using the test prep sites reported receiving eMails from banks, military recruiters, or offers of financial aid or study aid.Apparently, free test prep site Number2.com did particularly well against its pay competitors. It offers preparation for the SAT, ACT, and GRE tests. Might be worth checking out for any worried parents or students out there, who are still awaiting their turn in the college admissions game.
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Free Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 Downloads
Microsoft is moving aggressively to counter the threat of online substitutes to its bread-and-butter OS and office productivity suite by offering free full licenses to Windows Vista Business and Microsoft Office Professional 2007. The idea is that the two work together synergistically, so the program is called the Power of Together. Given the growing popularity of webtops like Goowy and online office suites like Google Docs and Spreadsheets, it's clear that Microsoft's absolute domination of the business world is coming to an end.To get your license, you have to complete three webcasts (watch, answer questions, and give personal information) for each license. It's limited to US residents, and you'll need to be running IE6 or 7.
Power of Together
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Monday, November 27, 2006
How to View Live Webcams and Security Camera Footage with Google
There are literally thousands of webcams and security cameras that broadcast images of offices, parks, street corners, and other public and private areas over the Internet. Since many cameras use known protocols to transmit live video streams over the web, it's quite easy to search for publicly accessible webcams. Sometime, it's even possible to control the cameras online.
The following Fox News footage discusses how to hack into security cameras.
The following Fox News footage discusses how to hack into security cameras.
Break.com Pays $400 for Videos
Break.com, a racier video-sharing site than YouTube, has begun to offer $400 for user-submitted videos with payouts for original short files reaching $2000. To get paid, your video has to be featured on their homepage, and they claim to have paid out $300,000 so far. Other sites like the Metacafe with its Producer awards and Revver have also tried to attract content by paying users.Although it seems like a shortsighted way to become the next video-sharing site worth a YouTube-like valuation, it may be the only way for these sites to get enough users and original content to get noticed. Sharing videos depends on users' desire to get attention, and right now, YouTube is the best site to post a video to with over 100 million videos streamed every day. Change the motivation to money, and desire for fame drops out of the equation, leaving the cold equations of cash.
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Inside the World of Gold Farming: Playing Games for Money
Gold farming, which is defined as gathering items of value in a virtual world in order to resell them, may represent the next phase of blue collar labor. According to a forthcoming documentary, half a million Chinese make a living of about $100 a month playing games like World of Warcraft. Interestingly, these laborers don't get the lion's share from the sale of WoW gold: most of it goes to brokers like IGE that interface with would-be gamers in rich countries that don't want to or don't have the time to "legitimately" gain items in a virtual world.Clips from the documentary can be found on MTV and YouTube and show glimpses inside the world of gold farming, giving a rare look at actual gold farming operations. While World of Warcraft actively discourages gold farming by shutting down accounts and banning IP addresses, other virtual worlds like Second Life encourage users to profit from their online gaming.
A thriving virtual economy exists in Second Life, which faces its share of challenges, but it seems like a different approach is being taken: yes, fun is emphasized, but economic incentives are also offered. World of Warcraft is game-based: getting to the next level is seen as a display of skill and shouldn't be diluted by being able to "cheat" by buying gold from gold farmers. Broader-based virtual worlds aren't defined as games, and so aren't subject to the same norms.
[via GigaOm]
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Sunday, November 26, 2006
How to Bypass Microsoft's Zune Music Sharing DRM
Microsoft has in its wisdom decided to make it so that every song that you send from one Zune to another becomes unplayable after either three plays or three days. It's called the Zune Wi-Fi sharing feature, but it's really an anti-sharing restriction. This is a major inconvenience especially if you want to share your own music (say, if you're a band looking to virally spread your songs).To bypass this DRM restriction, you need to enable hard drive mode for your Zune and rename your music files to JPG's, which the Zune does not implement DRM for.
First change the registry settings to enable hard drive mode, making sure that the Zune is disconnected and software isn't running. Two ways: one easy and one hard. The hard way:
- Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\ControlSet001\Enum\USB\
- Search for “PortableDeviceNameSpace”. This should be contained in the Vid_####&Pid_####\########_-_########_-_########_-_########\Device Parameters within the above …\USB\ The ##’s listed here will be numbers and letters specific to your Zune
- Change the following values:
- EnableLegacySupport to 1
- PortableDeviceNameSpaceExcludeFromShell to 0
- ShowInShell to 1
Then rename whatever files you want to send to have a ".jpg" extension. You also need a real JPG file.
Now, take your Zune and send the folder containing these files to your buddy along with a real photo. If you only send a fake photo, an error is thrown. The last step is to have your friend sync the Zune with their computer, open the "containing folder" where the files were downloaded, and rename the files back to their correct extension.
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