A Web2.0 Perspective Of The World

Every now and then, something very cool passes through the noise and this is one of those things. It’s called the Web 2.0 World Mosaic created by Appappeal. The mosaic features 1001 web 2.0 company logos when hovered upon, pop out at you for a bigger version. These guys have done a good job with the mosaic and it’s pretty cool to just move the mouse cursor around to check out which logos made the cut.

web2.0

The creator of the site told me the purpose behind the mosaic is to guide visitors through the world of web 2.0 web applications. On Appappeal.com, you’ll find independent reviews of the web applications found within the mosaic along with application comparisons.

Did you see your favorite apps on the mosaic?

Yahoo Must Love WordPress

By now, you’ve probably heard or seen the mention of the new WordPress exclusive, Yahoo! Shortcuts. Yahoo shortcuts is a WordPress plugin that provides shortcuts to relevant material as you compose your blog post. Simply speaking, the Yahoo Shortcuts is an easy way to tap into the numerous sources of data that make up the Yahoo! network of websites.

There are two ways to display shortcuts to your readers. The first way shows readers certain blue dotted, underlined, terms that show the related content once the mouse cursor is hovered over them. The second way is to present the relevant content as a badge or image embedded into the actual post.

As A Link Or As A Badge

Looking at the way the relevant content is displayed reminds me a lot of how Kontera works. Kontera is a form of in text advertising. As far as I know, Yahoo is not making any money from any of the products that might be displayed on your blog.

One of the negative things about this plugin is it’s size. The plugin folder is comprised of 110 files. I suppose the reason for so many files is so the plugin can support the various shortcuts provided by Yahoo.

In concept, I think the idea works. But it’s my own opinion that these relevant images, text, financial quotes, products, ect do a good job of distracting the reader from your content. I’m one of those individuals that when I see something cool, I click on it. I keep clicking on things until I realize, how off track I’ve become. Then I go back to where I started except now, I’ve lost an hour of time. Don’t you just hate that?

One last thing I wanted to mention about the Yahoo Shortcuts. The shortcuts keep in tact the attribution information for things such as Flickr photos and you will automatically be given credit as the author of the image if it’s used inside of a blog post. If the blog author messes with the shortcut and deletes that attribution, they are actually breaking the Yahoo ShortCuts Terms Of Service and you should report them to Yahoo.

If you would like to see how the plugin works, check out this demo video that Yahoo! created. If you want to download the plugin and give it a try, download it from here.

Homework Collaboration Via Shvoong Homework

If your a student still in school, your going to like this service. Shvoong Homework provides students with the ability to organize and share homework resources.

Shvoong Homework allows students to type-up their schoolwork, keep it organized, and then share it with individuals, classmates, the entire class or no one at all, all within the confines of their online service. Shvoong claims that they have no intention on replacing the real thing whether it be text books, essays, magazines ect, but rather serve as a tool, to help students wade through the vast amount of information that is widely available at their finger tips.

ShvoongHomework In Action

Some of the noticeable features of Shvoong Homework include:

My TimeTable: Let’s students create a Timetable for their personal class schedules using an intuitive wizard. Students can indicate specific lessons, add exam schedules and attach a teacher’s name. Each Timetable is linked to Notebooks and allows Students to easily navigate between their Timetable and any particular Notebook they created. Students can even receive email alerts for upcoming assignments and exams.

My Notebook: Let’s students write-up their class notes, homework, summaries, and exam preparations. Of course the number of Notebooks students can create and the amount of content in each Notebook is unlimited.

Languages: Shvoong Homework supports an amazing 30 languages. These even include such languages as Hebrew, Hindi, Portuguese, Polish, Arabic, and Farsi.

When asked why Shvoong was created, CEO Eyal Rivlin responded with,

“We spoke to teachers who were frustrated with their students’ lack of dedication to homework. We then spoke to the kids and asked them what would make doing homework more fun. We then took all their feedbacks and created Shvoong Homework.”

“With so many distractions it’s no wonder kids don’t do as much homework as they should. We decided to revolutionize homework and make it fun. The result is Shvoong Homework.”

Shvoong Homework is Privately owned and fully funded by Avi Shaked, founder and main shareholder of 888.com.

I’ve sent in an email to Shvoong Homework wanting to know how they plan on preventing students from copying each others work over the net. Whenever I see the words Homework and Sharing in the same sentence, I think COPY. This post will be updated later today once I find out the answer.

Is Ticketapp The Twitter Yappd Killer

TicketApp compares themselves to Twitter but I’d say they are a lot more than Twitter. TicketApps is a Tumblelog, todo list, note taker, image publisher, bug tracker and so much more. While Twitter may lay claim to the word “Tweets“, Ticketapp messages or postings are simply called “Tickets” Because this new service is like so many others, there are a lot of similarities.

Like Twitter, Ticketapp offers a public timeline where users can see recent tickets. These recent tickets can contain any number of different forms of content such as images, text and links but one thing missing from the equation is the ability to publish videos.

Users can customize their profile by adding their own avatar and adding a background image to their ticket page but that’s about it in terms of customization. When are sites going to enable users to come up with their own color schemes? It can’t be that hard. One last note about customization. Ticketapp provides an option to make your tickets public or private.

How Does This Thing Work?

Unlike Yappd or Twitter but similar to Tumblr, The TicketApp text editor gives users the ability to post quotes, images, links, and snippets of code by allowing these specific html tags to be used. I must admit, typing in HTML code is annoying and these tags should be substituted with buttons that perform these functions automatically for highlighted text. These tags are generally allowed on numerous blogs within their respected commenting areas so it’s interesting to see a service pick up on the notion of Twitter and provide this additional functionality. One other thing that is worth mentioning is that there is no character limit. You can go way beyond 140 characters if you choose to do so.

Will this service take off?

It’s hard to say. It’s nice to see a time line which isn’t merely all text but, Twitter is well established and so are the likes of Tumblr and Jaiku. The notion of having a service which is a clone of another is quickly wearing off and it’s really starting to drive many people up the wall. Perhaps with a few more UI changes, a publicly released API for third party support, and more options for user customization, this service may stand a chance to gain an acceptable userbase.

If you end up creating an account and giving it a try, please report back to us with your feedback and give us your opinion.

Kontactr Adds Pop Up Feature

Kontactr, the service that gives users an very easy way to provide a contact form on your site for readers to contact you and in which I covered here, Easy To Use Contact Forms Via Kontactr has added a new feature called Kontactr Pop Up or KPU. KPU trys to make it easier for your readers to contact you by opening up a contact form without having to load another page.

KPU comes in three flavors, text link, small button or a larger contact button. Whenever a user clicks on one of these new links, the background of the webpage turns dark and a contact form appears on your screen. This means that, users won’t be required to load a separate web page to view your contact form. This should decrease the load on your server as that is one less page that has to be processed.

The popup contains everything that the original form has with the exception of the an additional command to close the popup window which can be initiated by pressing ESC on your keyboard.

What’s nice about this new option is that, bloggers that use Kontactr now have an option to provide a contact link directly within a post. This means that readers will be able to click on a link within an article to contact you without having to perform any extra steps, such as browsing to the static location of your form which in my case, is found at the top of this site.

As with the majority of things on the web these days, this popup will not work if you have Javascript disabled in your browser. So keep that in mind if it does not work.

NetWebApp Web 2.0 Directory

From the guys who brought you WebScriptLabs comes NetWebApp. NetWebApp is a web 2.0 sites and services directory with style.

NetWebApp features a clean, crisp design which makes browsing around the directory a breeze. Entries are organized by category, with each category being accessed via the top of the page. Each entry in the directory contains a link to the site or service in question, tags, a user based rating system, date the entry was posted, and a small description. Entry pages also contain a comment form for users to discuss the site or service mentioned on that page.

This is what the site looks like

One of the cool things about directories such as this one is that, if they are updated on a regular basis, their Latest Apps RSS Feed becomes a valuable source of keeping you up to date with what’s new. If your keeping tabs on the bleeding edge, make sure you subscribe to feeds that contain information such as the latest entries into the directory.

Easy To Use Contact Forms Via Kontactr

One thing that every website should have is a contact form. Leaving yourself open to communication is one of the best things you can do when running a website. WordPress and other solutions don’t provide a contact form out of the box , which is why Kontactr comes in real handy.

Synopses:

Kontactr is a free service that does one thing, and does it well, and that is, providing users an easy to use contact form that can be placed anywhere on your site simply by copying and then pasting the code. Using Kontactr only consists of three steps with the third step being optional.

Create an Account
You will have your own contact form once you have created your account.

Post the Link
Start giving your contact form’s link to people instead of you email address.

More Tools
Login to your account for buttons, widgets and more…

Kontactr’s forms contain the following features:

CAPTCHA Protection

Customizable code for Embedding the form

Codes for Buttons and Links to your form

The Review:

After you login to your account with Kontactr, you’ll be taken to your profile which contains a link to your Kontactr form page. For example, here is a link to my contact page http://kontactr.com/user/Jeffro2pt0 You have two choices. You can either point users to your contact form on the Kontactr site, or you can embed the form onto your own site.

There are a few ways in which you can embed the Kontactr service into your site. The first way is by embedding a widget which contains the appropriate code for your form. Using this method allows you the most control over the look and feel of your contact form. Another way to implement Kontactr is by using the Ajax powered widget. The embed code for the Ajax widget is only 3 lines and it provides the fancy web 2.0 effects that we have come to love. *The only downside to using the Ajax powered widget is that it doesn’t allow you to control any of the text or layout of the form.

If you don’t feel like embedding code into your site’s template, you have a choice of using three different links which will point to your contact form. Two of the links are graphical buttons while the last one is a textual link.

When you receive an email from Kontactr, the subject line will read Kontactr: (Subject that the user put in) This is how you can differentiate between normal emails and emails sent through the Kontactr service. One of the best features of Kontactr is the ability to use the same form link on multiple sites. If you decide to use the form on multiple sites, you’ll be glad to know that the Referrer url will be added to the footer of each email. This allows you to figure out which site and which form was used.

I can’t tell you how effective their CAPTCHA technique is since I have only used the service for a few days but I have yet to receive any spam through my own contact form. Those who are blind will not be able to use this service as it doesn’t provide an audio version of the CAPTCHA images. On a side note, the CAPTCHA images are CASE-SENSITIVE so be sure to remember than when your using one of these forms.

Final Thoughts

All in all, I have to say that using Kontactr is a piece of cake. I don’t know how much simpler they could of made the service without actually doing everything for you. I am currently using Kontactr for my contact form and if you want to see a live example, check out https://jeffc.me/contact-me/ Go ahead and send a message to me if you’d like, perhaps commenting on this article or the service itself. If your in need of a contact form, yet you don’t want to upload specific plugins or files to generate one, this is the service you need to use!

Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff

The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

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