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.

Texty Rolls Out Anticipated Updates

Texty.com Logo The easy content creation service known as Texty which I reviewed here, Simple Content Creation Using Texty, has rolled out some anticipated updates. One of those updates fixed the Google SEO problem so many users mentioned.

In each Texty edit object under “Advanced Secret Options” you can now input the URL where you plan to post your Texty. Texty claims their indexing techniques will ensure your content will be crawled by search engine spiders which was a missing feature that turned quite a few newcomers away from using the service. They have also added a privacy feature in case you wouldn’t want your content to be indexed. Before you publish your Texty Note, click the “Private” button.

New Texty Features

One of the other updates that were featured in this release is the ability to add a DIGG function to anyone of your Texty notes. This control can be found within the Advanced Options tab. I’m not sure if you’ll ever see a Texty reach the front page of DIGG but hey, it’s worth a shot.

Netscape Finalizes Changes

Netscape is reporting that they have completed their planned changes to the Netscape.com website. According to Tom Drapeau, the Propeller social news experience will not be going away. Instead, within the next few weeks, Propeller content will be seen on both the Netscape.com portal and AOL News. Netscape also goes on to apologize about the recent performance issues, assuring users that they are hard at work trying to figure those out.

Tom did give us a little bit of insight into their new social news platform:

In the near future, we will be able to share information about our new social news platform, which we are extremely excited about. It will bring together the best of all worlds: a world class design team, an advanced website platform, and a host of new and interesting ways to enjoy social news

Keep an eye on Propeller.com It will be interesting to see if this site is successful or not.

Why Reddit And Digg Are Crap

Gamma4Xray has put together a video which provides visuals explaining how we think web 2.0 works vs how web 2.0 actually works in regards to sites such as Reddit and Digg. The video does include some nice theatrical music to go along with the graphics and at the very end, Gamma asks the question, How Can We Make Web 2.0 Give Us What We Want? I was surprised that an answer to that question wasn’t given as it’s an easy answer. The answer is RSS. At any rate, watch the video and let me know what you think.

Create Your Own Twitter Shirt

Reactee.com gives users of Twitter.com the chance to design a shirt where the text can be customized to suit your purpose. The shirts are $20.00 each and come in the following colors: white, light blue, organic, pink, silver, asphalt, olive and black. T shirt sizes range from small to extra large and are made out of 100% cotton, so you may want to purchase one size bigger than you need to compensate for shrinkage.

Creating a shirt is a 6 step process. Users begin by choosing a topic for their shirt. In my case, I chose Technology. The next step is to choose a slogan. Although Reactee provides quite a few slogan templates pertaining to the category, I decided to take the custom route and created my own. “Blogging The Webolution”

The next step requires me to provide a Reactee Keyword which is used for contacting my shirt. Not sure what that means yet but I’ll look into it as I’m sure, shirts can’t talk. Next to the Reactee Keyword tab is a Twitter tab. If you have a Twitter account, this is where you put in your Twitter username. Next, we have the option of choosing an image as we all know a picture is worth a thousand words. I chose an image of the United States. The last step in the process is to provide additional text which is also optional. I selected the text template “To Subscribe” for my additional text template.

Now it’s time to activate the shirt. Apparently, this shirt is alive. If users send a text message from their phone to my Reactee TShirt, they will receive a response with my Twitter Status. After completely activating the TShirt, Reactee then gives me the option to order the shirt.

Interesting service which gives users the ability to customize their own Twitter shirts. The idea of text messaging a shirt is rather strange but whatever floats your boat I suppose. I’m thinking about purchasing the shirt I created because I sort of like the design. Tell me what you think.

Web 3.0 Dead Already?

I just finished reading a very thoughtful post written by Bill Snyder, A Preemtpive Strike: Death to Web 3.0 (and 2.0 while we’re at it). In his post, he makes quite a few valid points. One of those points is the fact that companies abroad are jumping aboard the web 2.0 bandwagon. It doesn’t matter what the company does, or what the company sells, that company needs a social network, and a Twitter user account even if they have no clear understanding as to why. As I have stated in numerous other conversations, social-networking is out of control but the good news is, the users themselves will determine which ones stay and which ones fall by the wayside.

Bill also makes another excellent point about the definition of web 2.0. Is web 2.0 one thing, or is it a series of concepts? I tend to agree with Bill in that the term describes a series of concepts. Since the web 2.0 O’Reilly definition was published, users have been coining the term Web 2.0 as a variety of different things. Whether it be the use of AJAX, website design or social-networking. Has anyone ever tried to explain what Web 2.0 is to a noob? It’s practically one of the hardest things on earth to describe because everyone has a different sense as to what it actually is.

Bill also states that Web 2.0 did not replace Web 1.0 and the web is not based on version numbers. Tim, I think your related to Bill! In any case, if you dissect a number of websites, web based applications, and quite honestly, anything that is related to web 2.0, it’s quite obvious that the web is still the web and the underlying code is still the same. So why are we still using the term web 2.0?

The whole point of defining Web 2.0 was to figure out where we are. Unfortunately for those who like buzzwords, we are everywhere. The whole point of discussing Web 3.0 is to figure out where we are going. Well, here’s the news: We’re not all going to the same place, and that is the beauty of this medium (or perhaps these mediums). The possibilities are endless and will continue to defy labels. We are just at the beginning of this “internet thing,” and what comes next is going to be many things — some will die anonymous deaths and others will change the very nature of the way we communicate.

I couldn’t agree with you more and I am definitely looking forward to what lies beyond the horizon of the web, however it will be described or defined.

Netscape To Propel New Social News Outlet

After recently announcing the death of it’s social news outlet, Netscape has announced today that they will be migrating it’s http://netscape.aol.com/ site into it’s new home http://www.propeller.com/. As Tom puts it,

It is important to us that you feel empowered to choose how you want to consume your news and participate in the community. As we mentioned in a recent post, the Netscape.com site will soon be redirected to the new Netscape portal, a more traditional and editorially-driven news experience. It’s already live, so you can check it out now if you haven’t already. You’ll notice some elements of our social news site there in short order, so that it will be easy for you to go back and forth and engage in each if you like.

So Netscape will still maintain a social news experience, except this time, it will be on it’s own domain away from Netscape.com It will be interesting to see if Propeller ends up being any more successful then it’s predecessor.

WikiPedia Hits 2 Million Pages

The most popular, sometimes controversial online encyclopedia, Wikipedia has achieved another milestone today with 2 million user generated pages. The article which lays claim to the title had something to do with El Hormiguero, which detailed a Spanish Television show which went by the same name.

To lay credence to the information in Wikipedia, most of the searches I perform in Google contain at least one or two results from Wikipedia on the front page of search results. That has to stand for something. Congratulations to WikiPedia for the milestone, here’s to 2 million more pages!

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.

TwitterAdder 20 Random Friends

For those of you having trouble finding so called ‘friends‘ on twitter, your in luck. Using TwitterAdder, you can now have 20 random people added as friends to your account.

TwitterAdder is the newest guy in the bunch to use the Twitter API. After you login to their site using your username and password, TwitterAdder then takes 20 random people and adds them to your friends list. I’m not going to give this service a try since I recently figured out how I want to use Twitter effectively. However, if you end up giving the service a try, let me know how the results turned out.

Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff

The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

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