Webware

If you've got an old burned CD or DVD hanging around and want to give it a more attractive home than a 100-disc spindle where it currently resides, you should check out Liquid Mongoose. It's a simple bookmarklet you can save to your browser and call up any time you want to print out a protective (and attractive) cover.

It works for both audio albums and movies as long as you're accessing their information from either Netflix or AOL Music. Once on the album or movie's page you simply click the bookmarklet, then print out the page (while making sure to keep the page scaling to 100 percent).

There is a little bit of elbow grease involved to make your printout actually useful. You can either take the easy way and cut out the square to put into a standard CD jewel case, or you can take this origami approach, which gives you a very slick envelope-like enclosure:

If you're trying to do this with a few dozen albums or movies it's clearly not the easiest way to go about it, but assuming you have a printer, some paper, and a lack of jewel cases--this is the next best thing. Coming in future versions is support for Picasa Web albums.

For some people, Web searches are second nature. They're comfortable jumping from a basic text search to using Boolean terminology to navigating a minefield of open-ended results. It's hard not to appreciates the depth of material available on the Internet, but parsing 75,000 results can be daunting to even seasoned searchers.

ChunkIt for Firefox and Internet Explorer aims to streamline your query results into a manageable list by surfacing the relevant blocks of content directly below the appropriate link. This may sound like CoolPreviews, which opens a mini-window to preview a link before you click on it, but it's far more involved.

ChunkIt drills down to relevant search terms to get you to your results faster.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

ChunkIt splits your browser tab into two vertical sections, the left side with the ChunkIt results and the right with "unchunked" returns. Clicking on the text of a ChunkIt result loads the text in the right pane, replacing the unchunked results. The terms in the chunk that match your search term are highlighted in yellow. ChunkIt also jumps directly to the relevant terms, so you don't have to scroll through a page squinting for the highlights. To make it easy to see the entire page that your result lives on, a link at the top of the pane opens it in a new tab.

Before you can use the plug-in, you must accept the EULA and choose a default search engine. Users can select from Google, Yahoo, Live Search, AOL, or Ask. After installing on three computers, one turned up an error when selecting the default engine. The plug-in then auto-detected my default engine, Google, and proceeded to function without problems.

Besides the obnoxiousness of the EULA, consider yourself warned that this is a large add-on, weighing in at more than 8MB. This could affect Firefox on slower systems. Also, to use ChunkIt requires the proprietary toolbar, which contains its own Chunkified search box and a button for re-rendering current search results through the ChunkIt engine.

ChunkIt displays original results on the right, and chunked results on the left.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The toolbar replaces an Options or Settings box. One option lets users Chunk all links on a page, another adjusts the kind of search you can execute--best match, match all, match any, or exact match. It would be useful to have the option to get rid of the toolbar and just have a ChunkIt button live next to other buttons on the toolbar, but ChunkIt has declared this to not be so--for now. As browser design becomes more streamlined and minimalist, though, hopefully this will change.

The plug-in functioned in a generally hassle-free manner, which was somewhat surprising given how intrusive it is. Just eyeballing the speed, I didn't notice much of a difference between regular search results and the same term fed through ChunkIt. Using it, too, was deceptively intuitive. From the moment I hit Enter to begin the search to the point where I found what I wanted, I never encountered a moment where the workflow was confusing or unclear--also surprising, given that most people probably wouldn't think of a split-screen interface as natural.

While the innovation is intriguing, ChunkIt will appeal most to users who need help narrowing down broad searches. On the other hand, if you're comfortable maneuvering through "the Google," or if you're on a slower machine, you'll likely find ChunkIt extraneous to your needs.

Personally, I don't see myself using it much, but your mileage may vary. Let me know what you think about ChunkIt in the comments below.

Loic Le Meur, CEO and founder of video community service Seesmic, announced publicly on Friday that the company is laying off seven people from the start-up. Citing "market conditions and the recession," Le Meur disclosed that most of the let-go staffers are "behind-the-scenes" people who were building out the service. Le Meur said, "The worst is, we love them all."

He says that "Seesmic is moving on and will continue to innovate and provide a stable platform." The company has "years ahead" of funding to keep things moving, he said.

Seesmic also owns the Twitter and Friendfeed client Twhirl.

Le Meur's style of announcing this change in his company is unusually open, but it is likely the beginning of a series of similar announcements, some more public than others, about restructuring and retrenchment in start-ups. The founder of a different four-person company, whom I met with Friday, told me he had just cut salaries at his company in order to stretch the company's "runway" of survivability on the money it currently has in the bank.

See Le Meur's confessional video on the topic, below:

Tough times. Tough decisions.also read my blog post http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2008/10/tough-times-tou.html

Now showing on YouTube: Star Trek.

(Credit: Google)

Google's YouTube has begun testing a dramatic departure in content and advertising, adding 15 50-minute TV episodes from Star Trek, Beverly Hills 90210, and MacGyver and with prominent new ads.

"We are starting to test full-length programming on YouTube, beginning with some fan favorites requested by you," Google said on its YouTube blog on Friday.

It's an experiment in video display and advertising, too, with ads for Research in Motion's BlackBerry and Intel's Centrino chip technology showing prominently on the videos I watched. The TV shows are preceded by a 15-second pre-roll ad, and YouTube will show mid-roll and post-roll ads as well, according to the blog posting. "As we test this new format, we also want to ensure that our partners have more options when it comes to advertising on their full-length TV shows," Google said.

The shows also feature new display possibilities that set off the ads--no doubt the "in-chrome ads" that Chief Executive Eric Schmidt referred to earlier this year when discussing the high priority of making more money from YouTube. A new "theater view" sports bright ads against an otherwise darker screen, wrapping the video in deep red faux curtains. And the "lights-out" mode retains the traditional YouTube interface, but with the darker screen and relatively bright ad.

The TV shows are all from CBS, which owns CNET News.

The content is tagged with a new film strip icon to indicate that it's different from conventional YouTube videos. The icon shows in search results, too.

Update 3:23 p.m. PDT: YouTube's long-form move has been expected for months, and now Google will begin to see how well viewers take to the idea.

Milking more money from YouTube has been a top priority for Google this year, and the new content and ads clearly are a part of that. They also show the increasing sophistication of Google's relationships with studios, which with the exception of litigant Viacom, have been warming to YouTube in some cases.

Schmidt has said the right way to pair advertising with YouTube's vast and fast-growing video collection is the "holy grail."

YouTube features 'theater mode' that lends prominence to the video and the ads.

(Credit: CNET News)

AOL's Edwin Aoki

(Credit: ZDNet UK)

Edwin Aoki is a technology fellow at AOL, and an alumnus of Apple and of Netscape, where he worked on enterprise products as well as the Communicator browser.

On Thursday, Aoki spoke at the Future Of Web Apps conference in London, alongside figures such as Digg's Kevin Rose and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. He urged developers to create applications out of passion and for the community, rather than just doing it for money.

ZDNet.co.uk spoke to Aoki just after his speech, to talk about the impact Web applications have had in the enterprise and what trends are emerging.

In the speech you just gave, you suggested that developers should develop applications out of passion, rather than for money. Is this not an idea that is more applicable to the consumer, rather than the enterprise, developer community?

Aoki: Folks have been able to take whatever their passion or their expertise is and apply the technology to writing that, or to disseminating that, through whatever organization their interest is in. We see that a lot in nonprofits, but we also see that a lot in the enterprise.

Wikis are a great example of a technology that often comes in because some folks inside the enterprise want a more efficient way of spreading knowledge and information, and all of a sudden it becomes this great corporate resource. Messaging is another example of something that, we found at our AIM network, often starts with people wanting to have a better way to communicate inside the enterprise. They bring that in, and all of a sudden they find it's a way they can communicate not only inside the intranet, but also with customers and suppliers as well.

I think it is one of these things where the ubiquity and the low cost and the ease of deployment of these technologies really is the supreme environment where you can bring that into an enterprise, just as you can bring that to consumers or even a non-profit.

Those are examples where a trend started in the consumer sector and moved into the enterprise. Is that going to continue?

Aoki: I think that enterprise software is a slightly different beast. I used to do some of that in my time at Netscape and typically they have fairly long sales cycles, they're centrally administered, they are deployed by an enterprise IT department on behalf of a company, and a lot of those folks are starting to embrace those technologies and bring that in on a corporate level as well.

But I think the rapidity of adoption really does start with individuals. It may start from a consumer focus, and it may start from more of a professional focus, but the common thread is that it does tend to start with a person or a small team or a department that is really interested in deploying that technology.

How much do you think the global financial crisis is going to hit the developer community?

Aoki: We're already starting to see, in some sense, the capital markets and some of the venture funding start to be more cautious. Certainly in (Silicon) Valley, there is still an outgrowth of the lessons learned during the first dot-com bust. People are being a lot more cautious. They're scrutinizing the balance sheet a little bit more; they're looking more for those revenue ideas.

At the same time, a lot of the things I was talking about are fueled really not out of money, and they don't cost that much money to start. Both within AOL and with a number of the folks here at the conference, they just start something on a weekend. And they say well, they'd love to just try out how that works. And they find that it's an idea that catches on, and it's an idea that resonates with people, and all of a sudden they're writing something that is larger than they imagined it would be.

We had products that were launched that way in AOL, from the initiative of an individual engineer. We've had enterprise initiatives that have launched that way, because somebody said there's got to be a better way to...whatever.

Such as?

Aoki: Well, I mentioned wikis earlier. Our internal wiki was started by one of our engineers as a way to incorporate a more decentralized approach to documenting the kinds of things that we do. It's been completely embraced by the organization--hundreds of thousands of pages--and it's now an IT-supported function. We have an internal search agent that goes through our intranet that helps aggregate and organize all the information from our myriad sites--that was an employee-started function.

A lot of these things start off as an idea and all of a sudden the organization realizes, hey, this is really helping, this is a great productivity boost. How can we bring this in, how can we help manage that, how can we incorporate it into our corporate systems and bring that into our security and enterprise policies in a way that's not going to stifle that innovation, but in a way that's going to help it grow and help nurture that.

A lot of organizations have been very cool on social-networking sites such as Facebook. How will social networking win over the enterprise crowd, given that many such sites don't yet have the perceived longevity of instant-messaging applications?

Aoki: Social networking--whether it's Facebook or LinkedIn or any specific instance of it--the notion of the social network is going to stick around. You mentioned instant messaging and, if you reduce that back to its bare bones, you have a social graph, that's just graphed through that buddy list there. And that morphed into the Facebooks and LinkedIns of the world, where you're able to check that and see that a little more transparently. That will morph into something else again, I'm sure, as our understanding of those technologies matures.

So it's there. It's something that's part of that. IBM did a study, again looking at wikis in particular, in terms of the number of people that contribute to a wiki and the number of people that are really involved in that. You can trace domain knowledge through that, by looking at who it is contributing to an area, who the comments are coming from, where the edits are going. Wikipedia has a similar phenomenon on the global consumer web.

But again, that also forms a sort of social network, because you're able to understand who your domain experts are in a particular area. If you feed that out onto a graph, you have some additional metadata on your organization there.

So I do think that those kinds of things will evolve organically out of the way technology is used, and frankly I don't think that we know how that will manifest.

A number of organizations have tried to have these social networks on the intranet, creating internal social networks. I don't know that that works unless you have a very large organization, because the value of a social network is in being able to tease out some of these relationships that aren't necessarily obvious. If you have 25 people and know what everybody does and what their skills are, a social network isn't going to layer a whole lot more on top of that.

But for larger enterprises or geographically distributed enterprises, they can have a lot of opportunities where that network is able to expose information that's not necessarily obvious. And I think that IT organizations will realize that and understand that there's value there.

Perhaps one reason instant messaging became more acceptable in organizations was that the networks became interoperable. But this is still not the case with social networking. How important do you think interoperability and the portability of personal data between sites will be? We haven't yet seen the fruits of initiatives such as OpenSocial, for instance.

Aoki: Not yet, but these things take time. There's been a number of folks who have been working very hard on data-portability standards and protocols. Obviously there's that balance between what you want to expose and (conceal), and there are privacy concerns about that, making sure that we have iron-clad authentication and authorization that goes with that.

We talk a lot about data portability and its need, and it's clearly an important aspect for the industry, but it's easy to overlook how deep that rabbit-hole goes sometimes. In order to have good data portability, you need to have strong authorization. In order to have that, you need to have a strong notion of authentication, and in order to have strong authentication, you need to have identity management that everybody agrees on. These are frankly initiatives that people have been working on for the best part of the last decade.

I think that it will come--it's really important--but really what we're starting to see is the depth of how much there is to solve.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Click here for ongoing coverage from CNET News, 'Tough times for tech'

It's a 3-day weekend for some of us (thanks Columbus!), and oil is now under $80 a barrel. In other words, it's the perfect time for a road trip. If you're thinking about organizing an impromptu meet-up with far away friends, organizing a Craigslist buy, or just need to find a fair location for a child custody swap, you should check out MeetWays, a service that helps you find the a perfect mid-point.

Setting up a trip is very simple, you just plug in your address and the other person's and it picks the nearest freeway or main-road friendly midpoint. That way one person doesn't have to drive farther than the other, and there's no need for a calculator to do the math.

Besides finding the proper town for you to stop in, you can also have the service narrow down what types of places you'd like to meet. The entire system is built off of Google Maps, so you can dig a little deeper to get directions and reviews. It's also worth noting it's U.S. only for now.

[via Lifehacker]

MeetWays figures out a good midpoint between two locations and lets you search for local businesses there.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Uncov, which had a brief life as a an anti-booster blog about tech start-ups from April 2007 to January 2008, reemerged this week with fresh content, the same you-all-suck style, and a new model for producing content. The timing is obviously right--with tech in free-fall, why not join the fray and kick it when it's down? Uncov can be a cathartic reading experience. Or it might just annoy you. I find it entertaining.

Uncov creator Ted Dziuba has a day job and says he doesn't have the time to produce the snark on a daily basis, so he's added a "peanut gallery" feature to the site. Users who register at Uncov can write their own posts; everyone can read these submissions in the site's sidebar. The stories Dziuba likes get "promoted" to the main blog stream. In other words, Dziuba is embracing the citizen journalism model. Surely that begs to be mocked, but I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

The site reminds us of F***edCompany.com, Philip Kaplan's site that chronicled the bonehead moves of dot-coms in the last bubble. It was angry and mean-spirited, to put it mildly. And like Valleywag is today, people in the tech economy read it obsessively. F***edCompany (our style guide prohibits me from actually spelling it) got so nasty, personal, and frighteningly vicious, in fact, that it earned the honor of being the only industry site that CNET employees could not access from inside the CNET company network.

Previously: Web 2.oh no

Updated on 10/10/08 at 11:35 a.m. PST with more details about beginning a voice search on Nokia devices.

You can now speak your search into Yahoo's search widget for Nokia start screens.

(Credit: Yahoo Inc.)

Voice-responsive search has been available from Yahoo's OneSearch 2.0 application for select BlackBerry phones since this last April, but until this week only a few of you could to try it out.

On Thursday, Yahoo slipped voice recognition into the OneSearch 2.0 home-screen shortcut--available for a smattering of Nokia Series 60 phones--and in the Yahoo! Go 3.0 files for select BlackBerry, Nokia Series 40, and Nokia Series 60 models, such as the BlackBerry Curve and high-end Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones. Those using older versions of either of these apps will have to download them anew to get the chatty update.

Operating the voice search is simple--on BlackBerry, just hold down on the green 'talk' button and speak your search term. OneSearch will start scouring Yahoo's database for answers as soon as you let go. Nokia owners can hit the pencil key to get going. Those without pencil keys will launch tier search by pressing the right shortcut key (labeled Y! OneSearch) and speaking or typing into the search box that appears.

Although voice-recognition technology is constantly improving as a whole, many voice searches I've tried using various applications have fallen flat. It helps to launch uncomplicated searches in quieter areas. I've experienced my share of success, but have also had to punch in search terms or edit them in the search field when the speech recognition software bungled a command or when the search engines didn't return the results I had in mind. Still, it's good to have options, and as the technology improves, voice searches will save plenty of typing time and hassle.

You can download the OneSearch 2.0 with a voice start-screen widget for select Nokia Series 60 phones by navigating to m.yahoo.com/shortcut from a PC or phone. The new version of Yahoo Go 3.0 (technically 3.0.4.6), which includes the voice-supporting Yahoo OneSearch widget, can be found for some Nokia and BlackBerry models at get.go.yahoo.com from a PC or the phone's native browser.

LocalReuse lets you browse free things up for grabs in your area.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

You might remember Gigoit, a service we covered early last year. Much like Freecycle it's set up to let you get rid of, and browse through other people's, junk. The site is littered with things like old lawn mowers, television sets, and anything else that was once useful and is now taking up space.

Up until now the only way to get the directory was to go through the site or use the service's Facebook app; however, there's a new iPhone app called LocalReuse that lets you see which of these items is nearby based on where you are.

To get started you just plug in your ZIP code and how far you're willing to schlep to pick things up. There wasn't anything within 10 miles of my house, so I had to expand my coverage area. Half the fun is just perusing what other people have laying around, which is made even better with small photo previews. (See the photo to the right.)

Once you've found something you like you can call "dibs" which kicks you off to the item's page on Gigoit.org. It's not the ideal way to do things, but it's a much simpler affair than trying to navigate Gigoit's site in Safari.

A few improvements would really make this application shine. In future versions I'd like to see it make more use of the device's hardware to include things like posting new items using the camera, or using the geo-positioning to figure out where you are instead of requiring you to enter in ZIP codes. Likewise, there's currently no tie-in with Gigoit accounts, which would help facilitate messaging other people without having to leave the application. In the meantime, it's still a handy app to hold onto, if only to check a city's junk scene while traveling.

Zoho Mail, out of private beta testing, works on the Apple iPhone.

(Credit: Zoho)

Zoho made some significant changes to a core part of its cloud-based application suite Friday: its online mail application now works offline and with Apple's iPhone, and the beta test is now publicly available.

The offline and mobile features are major areas of development for Web-based applications, and cloud computing advocates including Zoho, Yahoo, and Google are racing to build in those features. Offline access helps ameliorate Web-based applications' limitations when no network is available, and mobile access helps fulfill one of the big promised advantages of Web applications: access your documents any time you do have network access.

Offline access, which in Zoho's case is enabled with Google's Gears technology, lets people read and write mail in the browser even when not connected to the network. "Zoho Mail automatically detects your connectivity and switches to online/offline modes seamlessly. While offline, you can respond to your emails as you would normally. When you go back online these emails will be sent out from your outbox," the company said Friday in an announcement.

Easier said than done, perhaps: I just got an indefinite "Loading..." message in both Google Chrome and in Gears-enabled Firefox when trying to access my mail after I shut off my network.

(Update 10:30 a.m. PDT: I thought I'd gone through the offline settings properly, but evidently I hadn't. It does in fact work, mostly, caching messages on my PC and automatically adapting according to whether there's a network. I could write new mails, though Zoho Mail only saves them to the draft folder instead of queuing them up to be sent. And when I tried to reply to an e-mail, I got the error message, "Sorry, this feature is not supported while you are offline!")

And mobile support, while difficult given the primitive state of most mobile devices' Web browsers, can also help when people don't have access to a PC or a Wi-Fi network. "We do plan to support other mobile devices soon," Zoho said. The application worked fine on my iPhone.

Zoho Mail can be accessed with other e-mail clients using the POP (Post Office Protocol) today; the more powerful IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) support is "coming soon."

It has no storage limits or ads. Users can opt to organize mail with either labels, a la Gmail, or Folders, a la Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. And back-and-forth exchanges can be viewed either with Outlook's conventional style or Gmail's conversation view. Also adopted are some Outlook keyboard shortcuts, such as Control-Enter to send a message. The application worked for me, though I missed Yahoo Mail's drag-and-drop abilities and Gmail's stand-out filtering options.

People who sign up for the e-mail get a "username@zoho.com" e-mail address. And through the AdventNet subsidiary's business offering, customers can use Zoho Mail with their own domain.

Zoho's Web-based e-mail client uses Google's Gears to enable offline access to messages. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: CNET News)