JS-Kit: Web 2.0 For Lazy People

from TechCrunch by Nick Gonzalez

We first covered JS-Kit last November when we talked about their quick embed code that lets you add comments to any site where JavaScript is accepted. Since then, JS-Kit has been creating more widgets making adding user interaction to any site dead simple (2 lines of code per widget). JS-Kit has also grown from a one-man-show into a full company after adding 5 of the 12 engineers from Filmloop (which shut down earlier this year). Since then, they’ve been turning out a new widget every two weeks.

JS-Kit is growing a suite of widgets that will help site owners optimize their website content, eventually allowing website owners to easily optimize their site based on how people surf their site. Think Baynote, but for the little guys.

JS-Kit’s current widget suite consists of comments, five-star ratings, and a polling widget added this week. The new polling widget supports an unlimited number of questions, an expiration date, and only becomes visible after the site owner publishes it. Each widget has a fully customizable look through CSS and consists of two lines of code. The first line is a “div” tag brought to life by a second line of JavaScript code.

Each widget is by default differentiated by the URL of the page it is installed on, but can also be given a unique identifier by the user so that a page can have multiple instances of a widget, such as founder Lev Walkin’s photo site. JS-Kit is combating fraud by logging a combination of user cookies, IP, and user agent. The degree of this security can be throttled by the administrator. However, one major disadvantage of the JavaScript implementation is that it will not run on sites that break JavaScript code (MySpace).

Each widget also has administrative capabilities, assigned by cookie to the first computer to accesses the widget code. The administrator is able to moderate any comments that Akismet’s spam filter may miss or create new polls. JS-Kit has a user settings page that lets you view your activity across JS-Kit sites and reclaim administrator rights on a domain if you switch computers or lose the JS-Kit cookie.

To make these more than just website web 2.0 “bling”, JS-Kit is letting the widgets talk to each other. So far they’ve integrated comments and ratings into one widget that allows people to leave comments along with their individual rating, which combine on the server side into one overall rating for the object the widget is attached to. On top of these widgets, JS-Kit will be releasing a meta-widget later this week so that surfers can receive recommendations for your site’s top content (pictured right).

Comment and rating widget after the jump… (more…)

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Ten Minutes with ShoZu

from tenminut.es by Jeremy Wagstaff

What is it: ShoZu is a free service to ease uploading of video, photos and music from your cellphone to the Web. The company calls itself “a provider of mobile media exchange services” and describes its services (quite succinctly as) allowing “consumers to download and upload photos, videos, music, text and other digital content to and from the handset without the need to open a mobile browser, wait for pages to load, interrupt phone calls, start over in the event of a dropped connection, or sync to a PC.”

Exec summary: It does what it promises to do. Well.

My ten minutes: Sign up is easy and free of dodgy and misleading byways (“invite your friends! Oh, we already have!”) Once you’ve given the basics and have an account (free) you need to download the software. This is usually where things get painful, but I didn’t find them to be with ShoZu. Enter your phone number, get an SMS message with a link in it, and download it from there. The software works with most phones, although I noticed Palm OS is not supported (Windows Mobile Treos are.)

ShoZu doesn’t actually host the photos and stuff, so you need to have an account with another provider. In fact, this is a blessing: Who needs another account? It’s an impressive list of services that ShoZu works with, from Flickr to the BBC’s news photo submission service. You can configure settings with your accounts on any or all of these services, either on a computer or on your phone.

Once the software is installed on your phone, just take a photo or video and a menu pops up asking whether you want to post said multimedia work there. Say yes and off it goes in the background. The only sign that something is happening is, at least in a Nokia phone, a little arrow in the corner of the screen.

There are other parts of ShoZu worth a look. You can, for example, back up all your phone contacts securely to a website, if you like. You can add GPS tags to photos, if your phone supports it. There are things called ZuCasts which are like mini TV programs downloaded to your phone in the background.

Quibbles? Couldn’t see any easy way of adding more than one phone to an account, meaning you’d have to have more than one account. Who doesn’t have more than one phone these days? Also, I could never be quite sure on my phone what photos had actually been uploaded. I only discovered I’d backed up my contacts when I wandered around the website. Would be better to get some email notification of this, although one can subscribe to an RSS feed of everything one has uploaded.

Verdict: If you take photos on your phone and haven’t found an easy way to share them away from your computer, give it a shot.

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The two reasons people say no to your idea

from Seth's Blog by Seth Godin

"It's been done before" "It's never been done before"

Even though neither one is truthful, accurate or useful, you need to be prepared for both.

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Ramp generates electricity from cars passing over it

from Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder

Mark Frauenfelder: Here is a proposal for an energy generation system. The idea is to pump a generator when a car drives over panels attached to the generator.

I hope the people who came up with this idea realize that the energy they get from the generator will be less than the extra fuel the car must to burn to drive the generator. Link Jon-o says:

Mark mentions that this will just result in more gas being burned by cars, completely offsetting any power generated, but cars spend a lot of time *braking* as well -- if a device like this was put near the bottom of a downward slope, or somewhere else where cars need to slow down, it would be making use only of energy that would otherwise be wasted as heat in the brakes.

(Would this work for hybrid and electric cars that use regenerative braking, too? -- Mark)

Daniel says:

My first thought at seeing the title of your post on the electricity generating ramp was that it would be energy inefficient, but then I realized that if it were on a downhill where you would be breaking anyway, it doesn't matter if it slows your car down - it's a little side benefit and less wear on your breaks. Their YouTube video of it is stupid and wasteful, but the idea doesn't have to be. Also, using it as a speedbump as implied by the article is another bonus, in areas where that's necessary.

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US exposes 1000's of SSNs for years in web-accessible database

from Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin

Xeni Jardin: Tens of thousands of social security numbers belonging to Americans who received loans or financial assistance from the government were exposed for years in a publicly accessible database. Snip from New York Times article:

Officials at the Agriculture Department and the Census Bureau, which maintains the database, were evidently unaware that the Social Security numbers were accessible in the database until they were notified last week by a farmer from Illinois, who stumbled across the database on the Internet.

“I was bored, and typed the name of my farm into Google to see what was out there,” said Marsha Bergmeier, president of Mohr Family Farms in Fairmount, Ill.

The first link that appeared in the search results was for her farm’s Web site. The second was for a site that she had never heard of, FedSpending.org, which provides a searchable database of federal government expenditures. The site uses information from the Census database.

Ms. Bergmeier said she was able to identify almost 30,000 records in the database that contained Social Security numbers. “I was stunned,” she said. “The numbers were right there in plain view in this database that anyone can access.”

Link

Reader comment: Gabriela says,

I saw your post on BoingBoing about the USDA privacy breach that The New York Times reported and wanted to let you know The Sunlight Foundation just unveiled a new project -- Real Time Investigations – that also had exclusive coverage of this story and blogged about it moments before the Times piece ran.

Real Time Investigations is an open source journalism effort that reveals the behind-the-scenes research involved in petitioning the federal government to make its information more accessible to citizens, constituents and journalists. We first learned of the extraordinary privacy breach by the USDA when a user of FedSpending.org, an online database of government spending created by OMB Watch and funded by us last year, reported it to OMB Watch late last week.

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