Content and publishing

New Zooomr to permit photo sales--once debugged

The Zooomr photo-sharing site plans major changes, including the ability to let members sell their photos, but the upgrade process has been rocky.

Photo-sharing sites have added features such as tagging, commentary, ranking and printing. But adding the ability to sell photos injects a little profit motive in the business as well. It also puts the site in more direct competition with stock-photo sales sites such as Getty Images subsidiary iStockphoto.

Zooomr will keep 10 percent of revenue from photo sales, the company said on its blog, letting users keep 90 percent. For comparison, iStockphoto keeps 80 percent, unless users … Read more

Justin.tv goes live

Justin.tv-- the live helmet-video blogging site we wrote about last month--went live this morning. The site combines a live video feed, public chat room, and head blogger Justin Kan's daily schedule--which loosely resembles a content programming guide. Entertaining bits of content are archived for later viewing, complete with a blog post with context for what's going on. The entire production is run through Kan's backpack, which holds a laptop hooked up to an EV-DO card.

Chatters can discuss what's happening on the show with other viewers (using Lingr, the live updating chat service … Read more

Socializr is like Evite with wit

Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams has released a new Web site in "gamma" called Socializr.

Friendster, which just patented another networking technology to bolster profitability, is credited with sparking the social-networking craze among Internet users.

Abrams' Socializr, meanwhile, offers online tools for event planning. Users can send personal messages or invitations, post public invites or notes on forums, design invitations and upload photos for albums, in addition to creating personal or company profiles.

The site has been in private testing since September 2006 and went live on Friday, according to Socializr spokesperson Toni Graham.

Socializr, it seems, is very … Read more

When phishers attack blog sites

Phishers appear to be planting malicious exploit code on various sites in the hopes that you'll stumble upon them through keyword searches. Yesterday, security vendor Fortinet reported that certain Blogger.com sites appear to be hosting malicious content, and we speculated that the pages had been compromised using cross-site scripting attacks.

Today Google, which owns Blogger.com, said in a statement to CNET that the example sites cited by Fortinet appear to be "deliberately set up to promote phishing, which is against our terms of service."

Indeed, in reviewing the example we visited yesterday, there are numerous … Read more

Friendster lands a third patent

In another attempt to bolster its profitability, pioneering social-networking site Friendster said Thursday it has received its third U.S. patent in the past nine months.

Officially awarded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on March 6, Patent No. 7,188,153 B2 covers "System and Method for Managing Connections in an Online Social Network."

The San Francisco-based outfit's first patent, granted in July 2006, covers "A System, Method and Apparatus for Connecting Users in an Online Computer System Based on Their Relationships within Social Networks." It landed a second patent in October … Read more

Make your own hipster clothing with InnerTee

At South by Southwest, I met the guys from InnerTee, a custom T-shirt-making company. Other custom apparel operations, like Cafe Press, GoodStorm, and Zazzle are great sites for creating schwag--apparel using your own logos and slogans. But on InnerTee, you can only select from the painfully hip artwork already on the site. Baseline apparel prices on InnerTee are decent, but you pay for each art element you want to include on your item.

For example, my masterpiece, Monster Whisperer, started with a $12 T-shirt. But the five design elements I added to it racked the price up to $22. At … Read more

Blogger.com targeted by online criminals

A few weeks ago, casual surfers to the official Super Bowl XLI site were exposed to malicious exploits, not by design but rather because vandals attempted to poison a legitimate Web experience. The process is called cross-site scripting, where vandals add a snippet of malicious code to a site's URL. If the site is vulnerable to such an attack (and many sites are), the code is accepted by the Web server and added to the display page. Future visitors to the site will then download the malicious code along with the page they intended to view.

Now, security vendor … Read more

Time Trumpet weirds me out

Time Trumpet was the winner for film and TV in this year's South By Southwest Interactive Web Awards this past Sunday (see our coverage here). The site contains a number of faux-futurecentric video clips with historical satire about politics, current events, and celebrities. What's neat is the somewhat experimental interface that blends various media in partial 3D, similar to Universe which we took a look at yesterday. You can sort through it all by episode or subject, and each clip will organize itself into a neat, swirling vortex. It's total eye candy.

Most of the clips about … Read more

Widgipedia: Wikipedia for widgets?

There are a lot of widgets out there. So many, in fact, that sorting through them can be absolutely daunting. Joining the fray of sites that attempt to solve this problem is Widgipedia, a site that catalogs and hosts widgets, both Web-based and downloads. We've covered competitor Widgetbox several times, and the two sites are quite similar. Where Widgipedia differs is in mixing up widgets that run on different platforms: those that run right in your browser and ones you download for various engines such as Mac OS X's Dashboard and Yahoo Widgets. The result is a diverse … Read more