Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Moat: A Search Engine for Ads

Moat.com has a very interesting concept and one which I need to internalize and really think how this technology can be used outside the box. 

Moat has a proxy for attention. It can generate a heat map of where people hover their mouse over an ad, and where they click as well. What you end up with is something like the heatmap shown above for HauteLook. An image of a woman in the ad, while more attractive, turned out to be too distracting, whereas an image of a shoe results in 2.6 times more clicks on the join button. Moat offers these heatmap analytics to brand advertisers, to help them figure out which display ads are the most engaging and to give them tools to fix the ones that are not working.

Social Photo Aggregator

Pixable.com has some very interesting concepts. I would like to keep up with them and to try to understand what they are doing and what other possible things they could do. In a nutshell they are able to bring in all your photos, which could be in any social photo site, and bring in all the metadata such as tags/comments that go along with each photo.....all for the purpose of creating a photo album.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Social DIY Tinkering

Bloggers who tinker are creating interactive tutorials, descriptive videos and step-by-step series of photographs that make it easier for nontechies to go forward confidently. Dozens of do-it-yourself Web sites, like Evil Mad Scientist, AdaFruit and iFixIt, also offer tools, components and kits of their own, many aimed at beginners.

Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of Make magazine, which sells kits as well as related books and tools at the Maker Shed store on its Web site, says a new era is opening for people who want to create things. "There have always been tinkerers," he said. "But today it's a lot easier for others to join in. We've moved from the lonely tinkerer to the social tinkerer who can share ideas."

Read NYT's story Do It Yourself, or With the Help of Tinkerers Everywhere