4utoday News

I recently outlined why I’m sick of the ‘ROI in web 2.0′ discussion. To be specific, the debate as to whether there is one at all. In that post, I gave examples of how naysayers reacted to social media tools in the past - and how they were left in the dust of those who experimented with these web 2.0 tools. So, where do these naysayers come from? Why is there a resistance to web 2.0? In this post I’ll explain how to sell social media to those people and/or your boss! Sponsor This is a guest post by DJ Francis, founder and author of OnlineMarketerBlog.com Your Responsibility Seth Godin says it’s not because your boss is stupid. It’s not that your boss is ignorant of ...

OpenID adoption has been lopsided. Getting sites to offer OpenIDs has been relatively popular. Google, Yahoo!, MySpace, and countless others provide OpenID addresses for their users. Even AOL users have an OpenID. Far less popular? Allowing users to access their accounts on those services with an OpenID. But JanRain is hoping to change that with the release of RPX, a new subscription-based service that simplifies implementing OpenID. RPX promises to result in more OpenID login opportunities on the Web - and a revenue stream for JanRain. Sponsor JanRain has been involved in OpenID development since 2005. During that time, it has received a wealth feedback on OpenID implementations. Earlier this year, that feedback motivated JanRain to simplify the usability of OpenID logins for users. Now, they’re turning that same “ease of use” attention to the sites that want to implement OpenID. The result of that effort? RPX, which provides plug-and-play OpenID ...

Admit it. You don’t always read the EULAs when you install software on your computer. You just click “I Agree.” The same goes for the web. Most of us don’t read the privacy policies that accompany our favorite web sites and services (myself included, apparently). But our failure to do so has some researchers suggesting that it’s time the Federal Government got involved. According to these researchers, today’s privacy policies are long and hard to read. Instead, they think it may be time for the FTC to step in and read the privacy policies for us. Sponsor Might Be Time For The FTC, Says Researchers A new report by Carnegie Mellon University, authored by Aleecia McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor, states that online privacy policies take an average of 10 minutes to read. If every U.S. web user read the privacy policy at every site they went to, the time spent reading privacy policies would total 44.3 billion hours per ...

YouTube is not exactly known for the depth of discourse in its comments. A few days ago, Randall Munroes’s popular web comic XKCD suggested that Google should add an audio preview for all comments, so that commenters might realize how inane some of their comments really are. Now, Google has implemented exactly this feature: audio previews for YouTube comments. While the XKCD comic recommended that commenters would have to listen to a comment before posting, however, these audio previews are entirely optional. Sponsor The audio previews are actually quite impressive and can handle even relatively complex words well (think ‘autohagiography’ or ’schadenfreude’). You can try it out for yourself on any YouTube video. This is clearly a project that Google had been working on before it released this fun, but relatively useless feature on YouTube. Right now, audio previews are restricted to the first 150 characters of a comment, but we envision that Google was working on this ...

Mixx, the social news site that competes directly with Digg, just celebrated its first birthday by announcing that traffic to its site has grown rapidly over the last few months and that it now attracts more than 4 million unique visitors a month. These numbers are even more impressive if you consider that Mixx only had about 1 million unique in May. Sponsor This June, we criticized Mixx for apparently not being able to convert its partnerships with large sites like CNN, the New York Times, NPR, Slate, Reuters, and USAToday into real usage numbers. Since then, Mixx has added a number of new features, including Mixx Communities, but most importantly, it seems the size of the Mixx community itself has reached a tipping point. In its anniversary blog post, Mixx diplomatically attributes its growth to all the “fabulous, intelligent and wonderful Mixxers,” but it is also clear that Mixx’s strategy of partnering with large content ...

Trapster is a new mobile application that lets you see and share the location of speed traps right on your mobile phone or GPS device. Once installed, the app uses a combination of your device’s internal GPS capabilities, geocoding techniques, and voice transcription to alert you in real-time to any reported speed traps in your area. Of course we know we’re not supposed to be speeding in the first place, but a little heads up never hurt anyone. Besides, who can afford a ticket these days? Sponsor I actually got to see Trapster in action at this year’s DEMO conference when I met with CEO Pete Tenereillo, a conference attendee. He had the app running on his iPhone at the time before it was made publicly available in the App Store. There was a genuine air of excitement as people crowded around him to get a better look at Trapster in action. The app doesn’t just run on iPhones, though. ...

The media world is changing and its jobs are changing too. The rise of the blogger is an often-told story, but are the lucky few bloggers who do it for a living well paid? We did a survey to find out. We asked 20 top-tier tech bloggers and social media consultants to tell us how much they get paid, by the post, by the hour or by the month - however their rates are set. Half of them told us, on the condition that we wouldn’t disclose who they were or where they worked. Sponsor The end result is an anecdotal overview of what some of the top tech bloggers and social media consultants are making. These aren’t the founders of big blogs, these are their employees and people who get work writing, doing trainings or consulting for tech companies. There are a handful of people in tech blogging that make even more than ...

Shortcuts for commonly performed functions are beautiful things and we just found a great Firefox extension that’s going to save us a lot of time. It’s called UrlbarExt and it puts six little gray icons on the right side of your address bar. What do those buttons do? They perform in one click some common functions that would otherwise take several keystrokes. Adam Pash over at Lifehacker unearthed this extension for a post about three as-yet unapproved (”experimental”) Firefox plug-ins. We didn’t find the other two Pash highlighted especially inspiring, but UrlbarExt rocks. Here’s what it does. Sponsor Copy the URL you’re on to the clip board. A whole lot faster than click, drag to highlight, right click, select “copy link to clipboard.” A lot faster. Create an instant TinyURL link in the address bar. Super fast and smooth. We do wish this button used our favorite ...

In our search for that rare beast - the profitable VC backed venture - I interviewed Eileen Gittins, the CEO of Blurb. Blurb does Print On Demand publishing for both consumer and professional markets. They compete with Lulu, which announced today that it is “laying off 24 workers at its North Carolina plant because of the slowing economy”. That is 25% of their workforce and includes their President. Eileen and I both had the same reaction: “you mean you only just learned that hard times are coming?!”. Sponsor Where Were The Alarm Bells When We Needed Them? Seeing the Blogosphere afire with tales of crisis in start-up land, with emails going from the wise investors to their portfolio companies, makes me think: no duh! Driving with your eye only on the rear view mirror is not smart. I hate to say “I told you so” but some times I cannot help myself. We have been banging this drum for ...

Has anyone here used or is using hostonnet? are there any problems with their Getting Support. Link to the original site