Monday, February 27, 2006

Content Wars?

The Googlization of media seems to be accelerating. Not content to be the king of search, Google is reaching into radio, television and print. They are starting their own Internet-payment service that will compete with eBay’s PayPal. They are testing a service that could compete with eBay itself and other etailers. They are taking on the web design market. They are raising the ire of some authors, publishers and libraries with their plans to digitize pages in copyrighted books, and offer those pages as results in search content.

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Sunday, February 26, 2006

Quimble: Add Polls to Your Site Easily

Every so often Sundog gets a client wanting to add a poll to their site for one reason or another. Sometimes we’ve rolled one ourselves or in a few cases have tried using a 3rd party solution that’s given us so-so results.

Quimble is one of the better poll providers I’ve come across so far and for those of you keeping score is another web2.0 application built using Ruby on Rails. Polls can be shared or private and can be posted directly on your own site or have it displayed on Quimble (or both I assume). You’re given a variety of ways to display your poll and can even style it to your liking if you choose the CSS route. Polls are easy to create and as far as I could tell there is no limit to the number of answers per poll or the number of polls you can have.

I created my own poll in a matter of minutes including the time it took to set up my account, you can view it after the jump.

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1,000,000,000 Songs Sold on iTunes Graphed

Somebody took the time to make a graph of the number of songs purchased from iTunes since its launch in May of 2003. It seems like so much longer ago that the iTunes store began stealing money from my wallet, the fact that over a billion songs have been sold in that amount of time is crazy. Crazier still is the fact that 500 million of them were sold in the last seven months. That works out to be 71 million songs a month that people are paying money for — 71 million songs is a lot of songs.

There are still people who complain about Apple’s DRM (digital rights management) but I don’t think the average person really cares when you look at the numbers. The people that do care likely wouldn’t pay for music even if was sold DRM-free like a Yahoo executive just dared to suggest.

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Friday, February 24, 2006

Help Dress Kevin

Kevin McCormick needs wardrobe help. From you.

The Forum reported on McCormick’s site that allows visitors to vote on outfits for the 22-year-old from Hoboken, N.J. You can dress him for work, the gym or a night out. On Thursday evening, the focus was dressing Kevin for his interview on the CBS Early Show.

McCormick’s site has been featured on Yahoo!, CNN Headline News and scores of other outlets.

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Of Olympians and Creatives

Admittedly, I’m hooked on the Olympics. Always have been; always will be. Give me one personal achievement wish in life and it would be an easy choice: an Olympic medal. I watch these Olympians and marvel at their skill, determination, and perseverance. They raise the bar. They redefine benchmarks. They seem to have an ability to shut out the world and focus inwardly on a deep wellspring of talent, confidence and possibilities. I am also reminded as I watch these Olympians how similar they are to people I work around each and every day. These are people I call the “creatives.”

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