bulknews.typepad.com

livedoor PICS: Flickr clone

My former employer Livedoor launched their new photo sharing service Livedoor PICS. Yeah, it's a complete clone of Flickr. It's funny that they use the same color scheme and layout, in addition to inline caption editing with prototype.js. They don't yet have friends management (they had it before the site renewal), but I can't wait when they merge the friends and profile functionality with their yet another clone site livedoor Frepa (a clone of mixi).

Well, their site is not just a clone, but has some neat features that Flickr doesn't have, e.g: Better upload progress bar, Yellow fade with script.aculo.us, Drag-and-drop album management.

Where's your Mobile URL? (Mobile Link Discovery)

Yesterday we rolled out our new TypePad relese to TypePad.jp service and at the same time, we released the new document discussing Mobile Link Discovery stuff. This is an interesting new standard, but it's not anything new but reuses HTML4 standard link tag and its @media attribute.

I've been talking with guys in Technorati, Hatena, Livedoor and FeedBurner and they're all quick to agree to make this a standard (extra thanks to Tantek and Gen-san for fixing my initial wrong specification). Now that TypePad, Hatena and Livedoor put this new metadata in our blogs and this means more than million of blogs already have this metadata. We'll see more publishers and consumers (like mobile del.icio.us and mobile Bloglines type of service) support this spec to link mobile devices appropriately, without relying on User-Agent dispatch hack!

PSP does Podcast now

Link: PSPが著作権保護動画の直接ダウンロードや再生に対応.

PSP got a new firmware 2.60, which supports RSS feed and Podcast. w00t!

Oh, but apparently it doesn't support downloading content, but streaming media files in RSS feeds. Scratch that w00t.

Web 1.0 Summit

Link: Web 1.0 Summit: My Garage, San Francisco on Flickr - Photo Sharing!.

A pic from Web 1.0 Summit. So funny!

Rails Day

Link: Rails Day 2005 - June 4th.

The Rails Day project would like to thanks the following companies for supporting this contest. Odeo, 37 Signals, The Pragmatic Programmers, Tobias Luetke, the Robot Co-op, Macromates, Ruby Central, Fingertips and Textdrive have all helped enormously.

Rails Day, to create some interesting project within 24 hours using Ruby on Rails. What about Catalyst?

Make Podcast

Link: MAKE: Blog: MAKE:DIYcast- our new audio/podcast experiment!.

The MAKE:DIYcast audio program, like the magazine, is loaded with exciting projects, hacks, science and news that help you make the most of your technology

O'Reilly MAKE started a Podcast. Must listen.

Takahashi Method

Link: 高橋メソッド.

むやみに大きな字が特徴的なプレゼン手法です。

"Takahashi Method" is a way to do a presentation with huge character fonts. Fun!

Ajax with frameworks

Perl MVC framework Catalyst is now with Ajax plugin, as well as Ruby On Rails. Ajax logic is not something that can be generalized, but building XmlHttpRequest and parsing the responseText is boring shit. So it sounds reasonable that these frameworks have a native (or plugin) support for Ajax tags.

MyBlogLog

Link: MyBlogLog.

MyBlogLog is all about tracking which of your blog's outgoing links are making readers click; in the simplest, most non-intrusive way possible.

MyBlogLog keeps track of outgoing links by catching onClick event. It's pretty interesting and useful to understand what kind of topic gathers your readers interest.

Flickr acquired by Yahoo?

Link: business2blog: Flickr, Yahoo Deal Rumored.

Rumors are flying thick and fast in Silicon Valley: Yahoo is all set to buy Ludicorp, the company behind the hot photo blogging web service Flickr, for an undisclosed amount of money.

Everybody loving photo-sharing Flickr seems to be now under the Yahoo! group. What I don't want to see is Pyra Blogger into Google again. Keeping the flickr service and brand as-is would be one of fine options for them to take.

O'Reilly Make

Link: Make Home Page.

Make brings the do-it-yourself mindset to all the technology in your life. Make is loaded with exciting projects that help you make the most of your technology at home and away from home. This is a magazine that celebrates your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will.

Make, the upcoming new Mook (Magazine + Book) from O'Reilly has opened up subscriptions. Now O'Reilly website puts an promo code for a huge discount and it can be subscribed from non-US countries like Japan with a credit card billing. I'm in doubt I can read through all the articles but I just subscribed to Make, as the price I gotta pay is something like a donation to O'Reilly.

Replay Telecorder for Skype

Link: Replay Telecorder.

This exciting new product is an Answering Machine and Phone Call Recorder for Internet Telephony (VoIP) services. Right now, Skype is the only service where the answering machine feature works, but you can record calls from any other service. Replay Telecorder is currently a FREE Beta. Replay Telecorder runs only under Windows 2000 and XP.

Replay Telecorder is a software to record the conversations using Skype, which seems to be a handy way to record intereview based Podcasts.

Rael on Amazon DevCon

Link: Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon DevCon - Rael Dornfest.

Subject is remix: beyond rip, mix, burn.

AWS blog has put up an exccellent summary of Amazon Developers Conference. Among all of them, what I've found most interesting is Rael's talk. "remix" seems like a topic of the talk, which is also gonna be a theme of the upcoming ETech this year (sessions).

P2P phishing phonecall

Link: ITmedia ライフスタイル：「P2Pを使用しているな、自宅へいくぞ」 JASRAC、確認電話に注意呼びかけ.

There're some "Phising" phone-calls that pretend to be from JASRAC that "your computer seems to use Peer-to-Peer networking software to download music in an illegal way. You should pay $5K if you don't ...".

Yahoo! acquired map company

Link: ヤフー、民事再生法を適用したアルプス社の事業を継承.

Yahoo! Japan has released their acquisition of Alps, Co.,Ltd, the map data company with a financial problem. This acquisition will allow Y! map and local service to be more extended and useful in Japan.

DVD Rental from Amazon

Link: Amazon.com--Press Releases.

Amazon.co.uk Launches New DVD Rental Service

Amazon.co.uk has launched their new online DVD rental service like Netflix in the United Kingdom. In Japan, there're two major online DVD rental services like ぽすれん by livedoor, and DISCAS by TSUTAYA. I'm wondering if Amazon Japan will  launch its counterpart Online DVD Rental service in Japan.

Last.FM as Social Software

Link: miyagawa @ Last.FM - Your personal music network - Personalised online radio station.

Here's my Last.FM home link. Last.FM is a audioscrobbler-related streaming service. It uses friend network and listening stats (provided by audioscrobbler) as its outstanding feature of social software. As Anil says and it can be clearly seen in Flickr example, social networking is a "feature", not an "application" itself.

In Japan, there're two popular Social Networking services: mixi and GREE. Now I clearly come to a conclusion that mixi is a diary-oriented (or blog shared with friends) community service with social networking as a "feature".

Netflix Gets Social

Link: Netflix Gets Social.

Netflix has added a social networking element to its online DVD-rental service with the preview launch of Netflix Friends.

Netflix added Social Software function to their DVD online rental service. You can share movie ratings and reviews with you friends.

Flickr: Photos from miyagawa

Link: Flickr: Photos from miyagawa.

I've setup a Flickr account and will put up some pics randomly from my usual life. Though I've heard of Flickr some times ago, I'm now surprised how cool its user interface and supported tools are!

MSN Messenger Beta for Japanese

Link: MSN Messenger (お試し版).

The new MSN Messenger 7.0 Beta is now up. It has lots of fascinating features like Hand-writing messages, Shaking and Winks. It also supports integration with "MSN Spaces", the MSN Blogging service. If your buddy has written up new Blog entry, it'll show up in his/her buddy icon's status with red check. Clicking it will show you summaries for the new entry, cool.

Fraunhofer IIS - Audio & Multimedia - Download

Link: Fraunhofer IIS - Audio & Multimedia - Download.

On the following pages you can download a free evaluation version of the Fraunhofer IIS MP3 Surround player and the Fraunhofer IIS MP3 Surround encoder.

Fraunhofer IIS has released demo program to evaluate MP3 SURROUND, the 5.1ch suitable MP3 extended format.

Hatena's got new board members

Link: はてな.

Hatena, one of the quickly-growing IT startup companies in Tokyo, has added their board members, Yucci and Naoya, who are both friends of mine. Congratulations to their future and hope things will be going well with Hatena itself.

gonzui: a source code search engine

Link: gonzui: a source code search engine.

gonzui is a source code search engine for accelerating open source software development. In the open source software development, programmers frequently refers to source codes written by others. Our goal is to help programmers develop programs effectively by creating a source code search engine that covers vast quantities of open source codes available on the Internet.

satoru-san's excellent work of source code search engine "gonzui" is now released. It runs as a standalone HTTP server using Ruby WebRick and uses BerkeleyDB as a backend database.

ITMedia and @IT tie-up

Link: ITmedia Information：Press Releases：ソフトバンク・アイティメディアとアットマーク・アイティ合併に合意.

ITmedia and @IT, both successful news media in Japan, have agreed about their union as "ITmedia, Inc.".

Yahoo! Search at Webmaster World 2004

Link: Yahoo! Search blog: Vegas Baby!.

Yahoo! Searchblog has put up some useful links to resources for Yahoo! Search at Webmaster World 2004, including Technical presentations of some Yahoo! Services.

Yahoo! testing i-mode bot?

Link: YappoLogs: Yahoo!本店でiモード用ロボット開発中?. (Japanese)

Yahoo! seems to test i-mode web crawler, faking their User-Agent as something like "DoCoMo/1.0/SO502i (yahoo-inc.com)".

TrackBack and Pingback supported by CNET News.com

TrackBack and Pingback supported by CNET News.com | CNET News.com

CNET News.com is pleased to introduce support for TrackBack and Pingback as additional tools to help readers follow the flow of interactive content. Anyone linking to a CNET News.com story who sends the proper notification will get a link back in return.

CNET News.com has now supported Trackback and Pingback as a feedback collection protocol. CNET Japan, its Japanese counterpart has been supporting Trackback since a year ago.

Amazon Japan provides Barcode scanner

Link: アマゾン、モバイルサービスの強化でバーコードでの商品検索が可能に - CNET Japan. (Japanese)

Amazon.co.jp has improved their "Amazon Anywhere" program, a mobile website available in Japan for mobile phone devices. The most interesting feature it provides is "Amazon Scan Search", which allows you to scan barcode of any products with your mobile phone to buy them on Amazon.co.jp.

Yahoo gets smarter guys

Link: Russell will be Yahooing Soon (Jeremy Zawodny's blog).
Link: Jeremy Cole will be Yahooing Soon too! (Jeremy Zawodny's blog).

Yahoo! recently acquired Russel and Jeremy Cole with their emerging needs for MySQL and RSS Content Syndication stuff. As Jeremy notes, it shows how blogging can help to get smarter guys.

GREE becomes Business Corporation

GREE　Blog: グリー株式会社 会社設立について

GREE, one of the most successful Social Networking website in Japan, now becomes business corporation "GREE, Inc". What surprises me most is, it's now funded by Rakuten. I'm excited to see what this collaboration will bring to Social Software world in Japan.

Tab browser "Sleipnir" Source code stolen

Link: スラッシュドット ジャパン | Sleipnir作者、開発マシンが盗難に遭う

Sleipnir, Japanese most popular tab-based web browser's source code is now stolen. Sleipnir is freely available but is not an open source software. Its author's laptop PC is stolen, which means its all source code is lost.

Skype API COM Wrapper

Skype API COM Wrapper

The SkypeAPI COM wrapper is an ActiveX "layer" around the Skype API (documentation here). It's designed to make it simpler for COM-client development environments (VB, .NET, etc.) to communicate with Skype

Skype API COM wrapper is now on Geocities free space. I'm not sure this project has something to do with Qzoxy's Skype API project. The document says that this library is made by some company called RapidText ,Inc.

Skype API COM wrapper

QZoxy Software Inc.

The SKYPE COM API is a simple COM object that enables you to add SKYPE functionality to a variety of applications (Websites, Outlook contacts, ASP Pages, .Net applications).

QZoxy released Skype COM API wrapper, which allows non-C++ developers easily to hack around Skype API in Windows Scripting Host environment. It seems that as of this moment an API doc in PDF is only available.

Gmail offers free POP3 access

Gmail offers free POPs | CNET News.com

Google on Wednesday threw another bone to customers of Gmail, its free Web-based e-mail service. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company now allows people to download e-mail from any third-party account or forward their Gmail for free, or what's called POP (Post Office Protocol) access.

Gmail now offers POP3. Considering how gmail is innovative in its user experience and remote usability, I think it should now offer IMAP rather than POP. Quick web search reveals that sourceforge project gmailproxy develops gmail proxy that supports SMTP, POP3 and IMAP4.