Banner Submissions: Updated Saturday Night!

Here are the banner submissions I have so far…it’s never too late to submit one of your own! The winning designer’s banner will be credited and given a link back to their website. Have your submissions in by the end of the week at which point I’ll post a poll so everyone can vote for their favorite! Click on the banner to see the full image. 

UPDATE! Thanks everyone for your feedback! I’m still getting submissions, so don’t vote yet! I’ll have a poll up this weekend, so please be sure to vote once all submissions are in. You can see I’ve added a few just now! 

UPDATE #2: The poll is going to have to wait until next week - I’m still getting submissions!!

NOTE: banners were removed from this post 4/13/07 for the sake of page loading! You can see the banners here.

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The latest version of Yahoo Widgets is here and I recommend the upgrade. Version 4 offers a new at-a-glance view that docks your widgets in a sidebar-type apparatus, keeping them organized on the side of your screen. Additionally, the new version promises speedier performance that uses less computer memory - definitely a case of "less is more!" If you’ve never gotten into widgets, it’s a good time to try Yahoo’s new widget engine. I’ve always found that Yahoo has the widest selection of widgets to choose from, and I can’t live without them!

Earlier this month, a Google executive confirmed that Google is indeed working on a Google-branded mobile phone. In the meantime, Google has inked deals with Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, and even Apple. The deals vary in nature in terms of software and apps that come pre-installed, some offering a wider range than others. The pre-installed software and apps may include Google search, Gmail, Blogger, Google Maps, or any combination of those. Additionally, Blackberry users, like myself, can download Google Talk for Blackberry. The real question is: are mobile users going to favor handsets simply because they come with pre-installed Google apps?

I just posted about how great the Ligit blog widget is, and it is! I removed the widget, but not because of a problem with widget itself; I removed it because of a problem with TypePad. When I was testing the widget, I discovered something odd - the search results were displaying results from blog posts I had marked as "drafts." They shouldn’t have been showing! These were posts that had once been published, but that I had since unpublished by changing their status to "draft" in TypePad. Strange.

I’ve been blogging for a few years, and when I began, I had posted some more personal content that I’ve now decided to remove. Nothing racy or weird or work-related…just personal posts about what I had done that day, in a more journal-like style. Once I decided to focus more on tech blogging, I decided these posts no longer belonged in the archives. I didn’t want to delete them, though, because it’s still nice to look back through them from time to time for nostalgia’s sake.

I started a ticket with TypePad’s support and the end result was that TypePad wrote me that "it appears that TypePad does not delete the individual archive page if you unpublish a post. We will look into changing this so that the page is removed if the post is unpublished." So, be warned anyone who is using a blog search widget on your TypePad blog!

I’m just not feeling this banner anymore. Who thinks I need a new one? I can’t afford to hire a designer and god knows, I’m a terrible designer. I  guess I could use one of the built-in templates, but that’s so boring! Or I could use my web 2.0 auto-generated logo, right? If anyone has any suggestions on how to get a new banner up there that takes absolutely no design skills, please let me know.

UPDATE: all banner submissions will be put to a vote!

Here’s the search tool I was waiting for: Lijit’s new personal network search "wijit" lets your blog readers search not only your blog archives, but also your del.icio.us or magnolia bookmarks, as well as anything that presents itself as an RSS feed like flickr, YouTube, digg, StumbleUpon, myspace, and more. TypePad users have the ability to click a button for an automatic quick-install to their blog; for everyone else, it’s cut-and-paste javascript. To see the "wijit" in action, scroll down and look on the right.

Yahoo oneSearch for Mobile became available today for mobile phones everywhere. oneSearch is Yahoo’s new mobile portal offering which aggregates Yahoo! content, including search, local, mail, messenger, flickr, news, sports, finance, entertainment, movies, and weather. With an easy-to-read, easy-to-scroll-through display, Yahoo! oneSearch wants to be your mobile homepage.

I can tell you, this certainly beats the T-Mobile tzones homepage; but it’s not enough to beat a cell phone carrier’s homepage — Yahoo wants to beat Google to be mobile users’ homepage of choice. Prominently displayed on the oneSearch internet website is a link that begs you to "dare to compare" their mobile search to that of Google. Surprisingly, this doesn’t link to a half-hearted web page of bullet points or an "Us" vs "Them" chart. Oh no. The link actually takes you to a 21-page PDF of search comparisons with screenshots of both Google and Yahoo search results. "Dare to Compare" makes its point - the Yahoo results are everything mobile search is meant to be - and that’s something coming from this Google girl. I’m heading to m.yahoo.com now.

Yes, I know I just posted about Twitter, but wow…I really joined at the right time! Twitter is blowing up! Everyone is talking about Twitter. A sampling:

• Twitter went down today, and "twitter down" posts skyrocketed.
• Scoble notes that with Twitter down, geek productivity went up; he speculates that Twitter will soon be on the corporate block list .
• Twitter gets press coverage & is the talk of SXSW
• Chris Pirillo tweets about a new service urlTea…which is just like TinyURL, but made for Twitter’ers
• Twitterholic is born; are you in the top 100?
• Leo reminds us that you can’t call Twitter’ers "twits" - that’s taken; but "tweeters" is okay
• Twittervision - real-time Twitter
• Twitterami - Twitter maps mashup
• Jason Calcanis: "90% of my blogging is now on Twitter"
• TwitterBuzz - top Twitter topics
• Twitterrific -Twitter app for Mac

Yes, we’ve all become obsessed.

Side note to tweeters - although I like the personal snippets of your daily life, could you not tweet the start and completion of each meal, the time you leave for work, the time you get to work, etc.? You might be a little too obsessed.

Although I’ve been registered for a while, I hadn’t started using Twitter until recently, and now I’m starting to really enjoy it. In case you haven’t heard, Twitter is an online "community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?" You answer this question on your phone, via IM, or on the twitter website. At first, I didn’t think I would find this useful because..well…I was afraid that it would be a bunch of annoying messages (on twitter, these are called "tweets") that were the tweeted equivalent of IM status messages ("watching tv," "out to lunch", etc.). What I discovered, though, is that there are some good twitter’ers (not a real word…yet!) that continually post interesting information among their more personal updates. Tiny URLs abound with links to interesting stories on the web that may have not been "blog-worthy", but are worthy nonetheless. Following these people on twitter makes the twitter service very useful as a source of breaking news. For a quick list of twitter’ers to follow, check out MG Siegler’s blog post: "Twitter: Who To Follow."

See you on Twitter!

It was bound to happen. YouTube has been sued by Viacom for one billion dollars. The charges? Why, "massive" copyright infringement, of course. The old-school studios are never going to see YouTube or its clones as free promotion for the media they sell; it’s just "infringement" to them. It’s only been six months since Google’s much-discussed $1.65 billion purchase of the video-sharing website — not really enough time to develop and put in place any sort of automated system for removing infringing videos. However, Google has made some great strides in doing just that. In fact, Google offered its partners access to tools that help identify and remove infringing materials from the YouTube website. By necessity, this has to be a collaborative effort from both parties since it’s hard to build tools to search and remove videos when you don’t know what it is you’re looking for. Undoubtedly, a difficult process, but if anyone could do it, Google could. Is this not a "reasonable effort" on Google’s part to address the problem? It’s not as if they’re simply thumbing their nose at the issue!

It could be that Viacom isn’t just looking for compensation…perhaps they’re trying to take on the legality of the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Safe harbor is provided to limit liability if a company makes a reasonable effort to remove the copyrighted materials from the site. But what constitutes reasonable effort? It seems as if Viacom wants the courts to decide…to spell it out in black and white. If that’s the case, then Viacom may have gambled by initiating such a precedent-setting lawsuit. Google isn’t going to roll over on this one and they certainly have the money to fight back. Bringing the legality of the DMCA into the court system may indeed change the law, but not necessarily in Viacom’s favor.

In the meantime, where does that leave us, the lowly content-grazers? With lots and lots of user-gen. Oh yes, we will now see the true traffic-driving power of the "cat video." (What? You don’t visit YouTube for the cat videos? Uh-oh…)