WhatIs.com Editor's Award

Jul 18 2008   11:40AM GMT

Bit.ly: A better URL shortener for developers, data geeks and microbloggers

Posted by: Alexander Howard
applications, Web 2.0, programming, software, data, Technology, Web services, Internet, innovation, useful, cool, hacks, free, public domain, feeds, social bookmarking, social publishing, design, creativity, reviews, startup, resource, collaboration, community, WhatIs.com Editor's Award, code, tracking, traffic, Web analytics, tool, Web design, blogging, communications, Web applications, statistics, interface, geek

The old adage about not reinventing the wheel doesn’t quite extend to Web applications. URL shorteners may have been around for years but there is plenty of room for improvement. This list of 68 URL shorteners from Honkiat.com show both the competition in the space and the need for innovation. There’s certainly plenty of demand: TinyURL.com, for instance, which has been around since 2002, purports to receive over 1.5 billion hits a month. While that seems a little high, the emergence of character-limited microblogging platforms like Twitter and long, forgettable Web addresses spit out by content management systems has resulted in a need for effective ways to simply Web addresses.

Enter bit.ly. Bit.ly was created by Betaworks, the NY-based software concern that created Summize. Summize was recently acquired by Twitter, if you’re not following the rapidly evolving Web.20 startup space.

Dave Winer used a post announcing the launch of bit.ly on scripting.net to explain why bit.ly fills a number of other needs:

“They asked what it would take for me to use bit.ly, I said: data. I need to know how many clicks each pointer got and where the clicks came from. They gave me that, and thumbnails, permanent caching of the pages I’m pointing to (goodbye linkrot) and a lot of smart stuff going on behind the scenes that we’re not ready to talk about yet. (Though we told Marshall and he explained.) Here’s the info page for this post.

And, most important, an XML/JSON interface, so I can process all that data with my own programs. Here’s the XML readout for the shortened link to this post.”You can use your own keywords to the URL, organizing your links like tags.

Winer also notes that he’s a minority investor in the service, so while you can take his words with a grain of salt, try the service out and weigh its merits for yourself.

 I will say,  however, that bit.ly is easily the best URL shortener I’ve used to date.  It accomplishes its core mission quickly and easily, converting long URLs to short ones on the bit.ly homepage or using a bookmarklet you can drag to your Web browser’s toolbar. (It’s even kinda cute; note the blowfish mascots on the right.)

If you’re a Web developer or simply a data geek, the ability to pull all of the data about a given shortened URL through a XML or JSON interface will be quite helpful for analyzing your traffic and audience behavior.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of bit.ly’s other nifty features:

• display your 15 most recent shortened URLs below the entry field
• tracking of both clicks on shortened URLS and referring pages
• an API for creating shortened URLs from web applications, which is quite useful is you’re a Web developer
• automatic creation of thumbnail images that can be displayed on a webpage next to shortened URL

If my excitement about bit.ly doesn’t move you, Marshall Kirkpatrick has posted a glowing review of bit.ly at ReadWriteWeb that thoroughly explains why bit.ly is worth a try, along with an endorsement of bit.ly’s advanced URL tracking capabilities by Lifehacker.

If you like bit.ly, please recommend it to others. The larger the bit.ly community grows, the more effective and useful this nascent index of the Semantic Web will become. That’s because bit.ly is analyzing all of the pages that its users create shortcuts to using the Open Calais semantic analysis API from Reuters. All the data gathered is available in public RSS feeds. bit.ly is also using the MetaCarta GeoParsing API to draw geolocation data out of the database of submitted links.

Apr 23 2007   3:06PM GMT

Yahoo Pipes: Create data mashups from Web feeds using a visual editor

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Web 2.0, programming, Technology, Web services, Internet, innovation, cool, feeds, interesting, WhatIs.com Editor's Award, visual, tool, mashup, Web design, Yahoo!

What is Pipes? According to Yahoo!:

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code.

If you’re a particular flavor of Alpha geek, the concept of “pipes” is nothing new. In fact, naming this project “Pipes” was a deliberate nod to the Unix programmers that, over the years, have done extraordinarily clever things by connecting simple utilities together using pipes built on the command line.

So the concept of pipes has been out there for years — but creating a fluid, visual and (mostly) non-technical interface that enables non-coders to create mashups of sites like Craigslist and Google Maps may be. Tim O’Reilly certainly thinks so. He posted that Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is “a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.”

Yahoo!’s Jeremy Zawodney believes that Pipes ” will unlock the data web.” Six Apart’s Anil Dash writes that Pipes “lets users with a relatively low degree of technological expertise combine structured sources of web data such as feeds.”

How user-friendly do you think it is? Try it out and let us know about your experiment in the comments.

Apr 17 2007   9:54PM GMT

Lighthouse: A free on-demand software development management system

Posted by: Alexander Howard
programming, collaboration, freeware, Development, WhatIs.com Editor's Award, code

Artifact Software has released a new tool that they’re calling “Lighthouse.” Lighthouse is a free, on-demand software development management (SDM) system built specifically for the software development industry.

Lighthouse features a personalized real-time dashboard that displays reports from project management tools, allowing developers and project managers alike to properly manage internal and external expectations of timelines for deliverables, measure productivity and provide greater transparency into the development process, identifying potential roadblocks in the process.

Apr 16 2007   2:01PM GMT

Squarespace: A CMS and online publishing platform with unusually good design principles

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Web services, AJAX, design, creativity, WhatIs.com Editor's Award, Web design, CMS, blogging

What’s more than a blog and less than a Web site? A Squarespace, apparently. According to Caroline McCarthy at Webware.com, Squarespaces are what result when users of a content management system (CMS) developed by a Manhattan startup located in the heart of Silicon Alley use it as a platform for online publishing.

The Wall Street Journal Online thinks that “This is the kind of software the internet has been crying out for.”

What do users get for their money that isn’t available for free elsewhere? A robust CMS, an elegant user interface, beautiful template design and AJAX-enhanced click-and-drag functionality, in both case significant improvements to what Blogger (and certainly MySpace) currently offer, though Wordpress and Movable Type are worth considering for this sort of thing as well.

Potential users of Squarespace include small businesses, entrepeneurs, political campaign, educators and anyone else willing to pay $7 to $17 per month, as you’ll see in this gallery of featured users.

You can learn more at Squarespace.com and see a great example of the software in action at the Modern Girls Kitchen.

Apr 16 2007   11:35AM GMT

Blue Dot: Social bookmarking and social networking

Posted by: Alexander Howard
social bookmarking, WhatIs.com Editor's Award, social networking

Blue Dot is a combination of a social bookmarking and social networking service. If you’ve wondered what “Dot this” means on a Web page, this is it.

Blue Dot has received quite favorable coverage from both TechCrunch and Robert Scoble at PodTech, due at least in part to its ease of use, as you don’t have to sign in or register to use it immediately.

It’s possible to import your del.icio.us bookmarks (check out this post on the Blue Dot blog), choose which bookmarks to make public or private and use a widget to syndicate the feed for your bookmarks, all within a smooth, relatively attractive user interface.

Dot this, anyone?

Apr 16 2007   11:15AM GMT

CSSZengarden: Making the Web more beautiful through demonstrations of CSS template design

Posted by: Alexander Howard
WhatIs.com Editor's Award, howto, CSS, Web design

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) make changes to styles across an entire Web site much easier - and ensure that content displays beautifully on multiple platforms and Web browsers. Or at least, it can if the CSS is implemented correctly and your visitors aren’t using an old version of Internet Explorer. If you’re interested in seeing all that CSS can do, start with CSSZengarden. You’ll find both gorgeous design and direction on how to achieve similar results in your own design and development.

Apr 12 2007   1:18PM GMT

Project Gutenberg: More than 19,000 free ebooks from the public domain

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Database, free, public domain, copyright, downloads, collaboration, WhatIs.com Editor's Award, ebooks, information, literature

Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart founded Project Gutenberg when he was granted an account with $100,000,000 of computer time in 1971 by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois.

The Project Gutenberg Philosophy is “to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search.”

Only books that have entered the public domain are entered into the database of 19,000 titles, of which nearly 2 million are downloaded every month. That means the database is full of the classics of Western literature, with names like Twain, Doyle, Shakespeare, Dickens, Kleiser, Poe, Wells, Austen and Verne dominating the top 10 most downloaded list.

Apr 12 2007   12:52PM GMT

Pandora: An online music discovery platform from the Music Genome Project

Posted by: Alexander Howard
media, new media, free, WhatIs.com Editor's Award, music, streaming, songs, predictive, personalization

Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help users find and enjoy music. It’s powered by the Music Genome Project, one of the most comprehensive analyses of music ever undertaken.

According to Tom Westergren, the founder of the project, the analytical engine that drives the service was created by “assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it’s about what each individual song sounds like.”

After you’ve clicked over to the Web site, all you have to do is enter a few of your favorite songs or artists and Pandora launches “a streaming station to explore that part of the music universe.” The more you listen, the more accurate Pandora becomes in predicting which other artists and tracks will be within your boundaries of taste, much as speech recognition software becomes more accurate with greater use.

Apr 11 2007   10:54AM GMT

Craigslist.org: Online urban community networking

Posted by: Alexander Howard
free, forum, community, advertising, marketplace, listings, social, discussion board, jobs, WhatIs.com Editor's Award

Craigslist just keeps expanding, bringing its transformative mix of forums, apartment and job listings, want ads and personals to many more communities. Craigslist now offers listings for jobs, housing, goods, services, romance, local activities, advice and much more for 450 cities worldwide, all community moderated, and, astoundingly, largely free. Has your city — or country — been listed yet? If so, keep an eye on your local newspaper, as the free and fluid online marketplace for classifieds and apartment listings that Craigslist provides are a primary driver behind the financial woes of traditional newsprint journalism.

Craigslist was founded in early 1995, by Craig Newmark, in San Francisco, CA. According to Craigslist, the networks of sites receive over 5 billion page views a month, serving more than 15 million users during that span month. In fact, Craigslist users self-publish 14 million new classified ads each month, to go with more than 750,000 new job listings each month and more than 50 million user postings in 100 topical forums.

All of that is managed by 23 Craigslist employees working out of a Cictorian house in the Inner Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco. The site supports those modest operations by charging below-market fees for job ads in 7 cities and for broker apartment listings in NYC. By doing so, Craigslist may now be the leading classifieds service in any medium.

We’ve certainly found great deals on apartments, event tickets, used electronics and all manner of other good, along with thoroughly outrageous personal ads and even a new friend or two. In fact, this editor found a job, a large CRT TV on the cheap and a new place to live this year though “CL.”

Apr 10 2007   11:54AM GMT

Welcome to the new version of Our Latest Discovery, the WhatIs.com editorial blog!

Posted by: Alexander Howard
WhatIs.com, WhatIs.com Editor's Award

Hello, world! This is the inaugural post in our first “official” blog. If you’re not sure what that is, make sure to read our definition for blog. Unofficially, of course, we’ve been blogging over at Blogger, in one form or another, for years. With the help of some talented folks on the back end, we’ll now be posting on WhatIs.com, using Wordpress MU. Check back frequently to find new posts from Alex, Ivy and Peggy on the things that amuse, enlighten and educate us on the wide world of IT, the blogosphere and the Internet.

Along with highlighting Web sites and software that have landed a WhatIs.com Editor’s Award, you can expect some additional commentary about new definitions or podcasts from WhatIs.com, interactive learning features or particularly insightful posts from blogs on our sister sites within the TechTarget network, many of which are listed on our blogroll. This will also be the venue for you to share your comments and questions whenever you feel inspired.

Our first sixty posts or so will reintroduce the discoveries we’ve made over the past year (helpfully tagged rediscovery), in each case providing an update to our original comment. After that, we’re off to the races. Ready…set….blog!