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Daylife goes 'Select' for the non-techies

Daylife, a news aggregation start-up that runs a pretty Web site but makes its money from licensing its software to clients, has launched a new product: Daylife Select. It's a tool for Web sites and online publications to add aggregated news and multimedia content (like YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, and Flickr images) from Daylife without requiring technical expertise.

With a point-and-click interface, participants can insert and place widgets, customize the theme, and even import the CSS design from their own sites. Access to Daylife Select comes along with a subscription to the company's API, which ranges from $10,… Read more

How about user-generated commercials on YouTube?

YouTube has spent years trying to figure out how to monetize its mostly amateur-quality, user-created content.

The company has turned to pre-roll and post-roll ads, but Google CEO Eric Schmidt acknowledges that the "perfect ad product for YouTube has not been invented yet."

Perhaps Google is looking to the wrong inventors.

Traditional "Madison Avenue" advertising has failed YouTube. I agree with the sentiment expressed recently on the Marcom Professional blog:

In my opinion, one of the reasons that videos spread is the homemade quality....People are advertised to thousands of times a day. We see countless … Read more

Poptub: Google tries best-of-YouTube TV show

In its latest move to bring some commercial order to the YouTube chaos, Google has begun showing a brief video show called Poptub with perky hosts, amusing videos, promotional interviews, and a prominent Pepsi sponsorship.

The show, called Poptub, is produced by Embassy Row, which is run by Who Wants to Be a Millionaire creator Michael Davies, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The shows will be distributed not just through YouTube but also through the Google Content Network, which can distribute video to Google advertising partners.

Poptub has promised advertisers 3 million views of Poptub by the end of the … Read more

Acquia backs Drupal for enterprise adoption

Drupal has always been a great open-source Web content management system. Forrester called it one of the two open-source content management systems to consider. Its biggest deficiency was arguably a lack of enterprise-class support and polish to support the project.

On Tuesday, however, Acquia, the company behind Drupal, remedied this void, launching its commercially supported distribution of Drupal and a network service to provide updates and other services around the core Drupal distribution.

Acquia is taking a page out of Red Hat's playbook, boiling down the complexity of the deep and wide Drupal community. While I like the look … Read more

Sony Ericsson opens developer contest

Sony Ericsson announced its third annual Content Awards on Thursday. Developers are invited to submit content and applications for use on Sony Ericsson devices. The company released a free SDK two weeks ago.

Sony Ericsson is asking developers to create content and applications that address three questions: How can mobile phones help us monitor our carbon footprint? How can the next generation of mobile phones make our lives less frantic? In what ways can we make our phones personal?

Entries will be judged on ease of use, entertainment factor, innovation, look and feel, and audio performance. The seven categories include … Read more

Amazon tees up content delivery service

Clarification at 8 a.m. PDT: The Amazon.com Web services blog posting was not written by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. He wrote a related blog on the subject.

Amazon.com is in the midst of creating a new content delivery service aimed at developers and businesses that it expects to launch by year's end.

According to an Amazon Web services blog posted Thursday:

This new (and as yet unnamed) service will provide you with a high performance way to distribute popular, publicly readable content to your customers all over the world, with low latency and high data transfer … Read more

Should Apple join new video ecosystem?

news analysis The digital films and TV shows available to consumers now are shackled by numerous DRM schemes. A new consortium of entertainment, software, and retail companies wants to enable consumers to download any digital media from any Web store and enjoy it on any player.

Members include Warner Bros. Entertainment, Best Buy, Toshiba, Sony, Comcast, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, NBC Universal, and Paramount Pictures. The group, called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), says its mission is to combat piracy by making the act of buying media so easy that people won't be tempted to steal.

To do that, … Read more

Violent comic book doesn't meet Apple's standards

Apple recently took an axe to Murderdrome, an electronic comic book in its App Store that the company deemed too violent.

Murderdrome, created by the United Kingdom-based Infuriouscomics, had been created especially for the iPhone. Apple turned down Infuriouscomics' application to put the comic in the App Store.

"This is due to the part of the SDK that suggests content must not offend anyone in 'Apple's reasonable' opinion," a post on the Infurious blog read. "Here at Infurious, we would love to work with Apple to ensure a content-rating system can be put in place to … Read more

Facebook's new ads: Advertisers, approach with caution

Imagine seeing an ad on Facebook for a retailer like American Apparel or Target, and clicking a button to pass a 15-percent-off discount code to someone on your friends list. For advertisers looking to tap into the power of social networks, it sounds tantalizing.

That's the thinking behind "Engagement Ads," the new "experimental" advertising technology that social network Facebook unveiled last week. With the new program, members of Facebook can leave comments on participating ads, add the brands to their list of "fan pages," and use them to send friends virtual gifts. For … Read more

Featured Freeware: WordPress

Originally intended for blogging, but customizable into just about any configuration, WordPress is the Firefox of cross-platform content management systems, including the iPhone. Extensible and proud of it, the program itself is known for having one of the simplest installations of any CMS available.

The download is a ZIP file that comes with instructions on how to install it to your server, requiring an FTP client and administrator-level rights. Documentation for the ''five-minute install'' at its Web site is extensive, clear, and concise. The WordPress support forums haven't failed me yet in answering even my most difficult questions.

Without … Read more