Though I tend to avoid Flash for several reasons, there is no doubt that this is one of the best Web technology I have seen, perhaps the only technology of it’s class. How can you ignore that when 70% of Web 2.0 users are serious fans of those video sharing sites, where Flash runs the show. Microsoft Corp, maybe annoyed by the “Adobe” chant in the Web 2.0 world, but now they’ve come up with “Silverlight” to deliver rich media applications on the Web.

Yes it may be true that 80% of computer user’s desktops are one way or another dominated by Microsoft, but when it comes to the Web, Microsoft’s plays a leading lady role at best. Perhaps going after Adobe’s biggest success “Flash”, is just a sign of Microsoft’s preparation for a Web domination campaign. Anyway “Silverlight”, is a browser plugin that will allow Web content providers/publishers to offer rich video and interactive media experiences directly within their Web sites. Wondering which browser? According to an official statement issued by Microsoft (unable to find the resource at the time of writing this post), Silverlight will be compatible with Internet explorer, Firefox and Opera initially.

Silverlight, formerly code-named WPF/E uses the same technology which leverages Vista’s new graphics framework Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). As you can guess, Microsoft’s key target audience/consumer group are content providers that want to distribute video and rich media over the Web, designers and developers who build rich media content or applications and last but not the least, end users. Until now almost all of the news sites like Cnet, ZDnet, Reuter’s etc. use Adobe’s Flash as the key technology to show interactive media/content. Microsoft’s Silverlight objective is to take away that dominance. Obviously Silverlight has the good looks and an abundance of creativity enrichment.

The coolest part of “Silverlight” is that it delivers a similar user experience on both IE 7 running on Windows Vista and Firefox running on an Apple Mac computer. This means it is OS independent (cross-platform) and more importantly, end users will not have to download different video player technologies to view online media based on what OS they are running. Well that is one feature that Adobe Flash doesn’t have.

Here are some of the cool features of Silverlight

• It supports playback of WMV files on both PC and Macintosh.
• Silverlight and HTML integrate seamlessly together. Every XAML element can be accessed or manipulated from the same client-side JavaScript that would be used to interact with any DHTML element: there are no artificial boundaries or barriers, and you can even overlay HTML elements on top of Silverlight content (simply by creating a windowless frame).
• Full runtime interactivity with Silverlight generated content. The content of the XAML file can be completely server-side generated.
• Silverlight is blindingly fast – trust me it is. You just go and play the same video with Flash and Silverlight and you will see.
• Silverlight is almost 100% upward compatible with WPF. Animation, 2D vector graphics, media, text.
• This one is the coolest of all: Simple integration with existing Web technologies and assets means Silverlight works with any back-end Web environment or technology. No “rip and replace” required. Silverlight integrates with your existing infrastructure and applications, including Apache, PHP, as well as JavaScript and XHTML on the client.

There was no indication if “Silverlight” will be able to eliminate the key accessibility issue of Flash objects that is to say the lack of device independent navigation. In Adobe Flash created objects, you can bring good looks, but you can’t bring device independent navigation/control, you need a mouse for that. I’m hoping they have an answer for this. We’ll just have to want and see the final product.

Microsoft delivered a beta of Silverlight at its MIX 2007 conference at the end of April. So have your fingers crossed and wait to see the battle of rich media content generators .

Perhaps our friends at mydeo can tell us more.

As you might have noticed, our “Listen to this post” is operational again. This audio service which is powered by Talkr, greatly relies on RSS audio feed.

Unfortunately for some reason the last few hours the audio feature was not functioning due to the application’s failure to auto refresh the feed content. But our technical team has already taken care of the feed auto refresh issue and now the “Listen to this post” is 100% operational. We apologize for the inconvenience, thank you for your patience and support.

This week and past weekend we had some interesting articles. In case you have missed them, here are the links-

• ICANN doesn’t care about child protection online
• Ireland Inc.
• Blind man wins fight to turn signals back on
• iMacro to save time and sanity!
• Lyro’s potential relies on Content Labels
• Blog Tips#2 Increase readership through subscription
• Goggle’s Voice activated search

Whether you are a fan of Google or not, you have to agree when it comes to innovation, Google knows no boundry. Google labs is the place where all the Google geeks go to try out their weird experiments before blasting it out and take the breath away from competing companies.

This last Friday (6th April,2007) , Google just gave another heart pounding blow when they announced an experiment to use speech recognition on telephones so consumers can ask for local information in short voice activated directory assistance service. This experimental product, Google Voice Local Search in short GOOG-411, is currently only available in English, in the US, for US business listings.

So what you need to do is dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone. You can either ask for a local business by name or type (for example Gas Station, Bar, Super Market, Dry cleaner etc.), you can even have the details sent to you via SMS. All of these are free, where conventional 411 calls in US cost $1 and higher. Google doesn’t charge users for the toll-free call or for connecting the caller to the business. Regular phone charges may apply, depending on the user’s telephone service provider.

The GOOG-411 isn’t full proof. Google already said it is seeking to fine-tune the computerized system to improve how the service recognizes users’ requests. They also mentioned that this service may not be available all the time and may not work for all users. Well off course, that is the reason GOOG-411 is still under Graduate in Google Labs.

Over time, the voice quality is likely to improve as Google roll it out for rest of the major business playgrounds, such as UK, Ireland (ok it’s not that big), France, Germany, Australia, Hong kong and Japan. This Voice activated search works a lot like conventional Google search on the net, the difference is instead of typing the keywords users are saying the keywords. From a business perspective, Google’s experiment will attract a lot of attention. Why? well, naturally because of the cost effectiveness. Don’t expect it to be ad free though, in the near future ads will roll in, that’s for sure.

Experts are predicting this might be Google’s response to last week’s Microsoft Corp. acquisition of voice search firm Tellme Networks Inc. The deal valued at more than $800 million.

In my last “Blog tips” post, I discussed how to make it easy for readers to find the content they’re looking for. This time I’m going to talk about how to substantially increase your readership and more importantly, how to keep readers informed or interested, to ensure they continue to come back.

Making it easy for readers to learn about updates to your blog is vital. Subscription is the most compelling method to gain readers and retain them. There are more than 22 million blogs tracked by technorati so competition for readership is buoyant. What’s the point in providing quality content that’s hard to subscribe to and difficult to navigate. Chances are, someone else is providing similar content with user friendly subscription and navigation. So, improving the user experience by providing a friendly navigation and easy subscription method makes your readers feel that you care.

Its not rocket science, a few tweaks here and there in your blog template code is enough. Naturally, if you run out of fuel and need specific help, just post a comment and I’ll help you out.

Allow readers to subscribe to comments

Some readers may only be interested in the ongoing discussion of a specific post, rather than the whole blog. This is especially true when they’ve posted a comment themselves and wish to be updated when others respond.

There are two popular methods to enable comments subscription; comment feed and email subscription. Personally I prefer using both methods at the same time, as that gives readers a choice.

By automatically emailing people who comment on a blog post when someone else has added a comment after them, you are significantly increasing the possibility of them coming back to post more comments. In turn, this increases the possibility of them becoming more active on the blog to possibly even become a member of your community.

Method one: Via comment feed Adding an RSS feed to your posts is very simple. WordPress already has a global comment feed present, which you might have noticed if you installed a new theme. You can access this by placing the following tag in your sidebar (sidebar.php) or footer(footer.php).

<?php bloginfo(‘comments_rss2_url’); ?>

But for showing RSS feed of a specific post and let readers subscribe you need a different function, actually a WP template tag.

<?php comments_rss_link(‘text’, ‘file’); ?>

The “text” parameter represents the anchor text to display the comment’s RSS feed and “file” parameter represents the file the link points to. The default is ‘wp-commentsrss2.php’. Better to leave the file part at the default if you are not playing with your feed core file.

Place the code below in your themes comment section header (usually comments.php) just bellow the #postcomment call (as shown in the image). Replace the Anchor Text to suit your test.

<?php comments_rss_link(‘Anchor Text‘); ?>

Method Two: email subscription

Via email subscription, your readers can be notified by email when a current discussion has been updated (someone leaves a new comment to which they may wish to respond). The advantage of adding this feature to your blog is that you are giving your readers an update alert even when they are away from their feed readers, through email which can easily be accessed via phone or PDA.

The easiest way to to add this feature is using a plugin (Subscribe to Comments). Alternatively you can implement it with a few tweaks in the comment form (Moderate PHP and SQL knowledge necessary).

Place this code snippet just bellow your comment form (comments.php) function call. Note that the classes can be configured in CSS. You can customize it further by adding subscription management, auto subscription (off course all in PHP).

<form action=”http://<?php echo $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . wp_specialchars($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>” method=”post”> <input type=”hidden” name=”comment_subscribe” value=”comment_subscribe” /> <input type=”hidden” name=”postid” value=”<?php echo $id; ?>” /> <input type=”hidden” name=”comment_ref” value=”<?php echo urlencode(‘http://’ . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . wp_specialchars($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])); ?>” /> <p class=”subscribe_comments”> <?php _e(‘Subscribe without commenting’, ‘subscribe_comments’); ?> <br /> <label for=”subscribe_email”><?php _e(‘E-Mail:’, ‘subscribe_comments’); ?> <input type=”text” name=”email” id=”subscribe_email” size=”22″ value=”<?php echo $user_email; ?>” /></label> <input type=”submit” name=”submit” value=”<?php _e(‘Subscribe’, ‘subscribe_comments’); ?>” /> </p> </form>

Go the extra mile – Subscribe to categories

This is a very simple yet highly adorable feature you can offer to your readers. You may write about lot of things in your blog but that doesn’t mean your readers are interested in everything you have to talk about, that’s why you sort them into categories. Now if you can offer your readers the ability to subscribe to specific categories, it would be wonderful, don’t you agree? The method is simple, as WP already has a template tag ready to take care of it.

<?php wp_list_categories(‘arguments’); ?> [for WordPress 2.1 and above] <?php wp_list_cats(‘arguments’); ?> [Prior to WordPress 2.1]

These two functions work almost the same, they dynamically list categories available to your blog. There are two ways you can let your readers subscribe to categories.

By showing a text RSS link beside category name-

<?phpwp_list_categories(‘orderby=name&feed=RSS’); ?> [for WordPress 2.1 and above]

<?phpwp_list_cats(‘orderby=name&feed=RSS’); ?> [Prior to WordPress 2.1]

By showing RSS feed image link beside category name-

<?phpwp_list_categories(‘orderby=name&feed_image=/files/rss.gif‘); ?> [for WordPress 2.1 and above]

<?phpwp_list_categories(‘orderby=name&feed_image=/files/rss.gif‘); ?> [Prior to WordPress 2.1]

For feed images do not forget to replace /files/rss.gif with your own feed image location. You have to place these codes to your sidebar template (usually sidebar.php) above </div>.

Good luck and give me a shout if you need a hand with anything.

In this Web 2.0 era almost every day we see some new entrepreneur coming up with new products and services on the net. Naturally some are good and some aren’t. It is also true to say that some entrepreneurs do come up with simple yet effective ideas. I consider Lyro (lee-ro) to be one of those ideas, but under the premise that it changes a few things.

Lyro is a service introduced by Workforce LLC. So what is Lyro all about? In general, Lyro offer you nothing but an online digital business card. This business card can contain all the necessary details needed for your primary business contact details. The only detail it doesn’t display online is your email address. This stops the possibility of getting spammed from abusers of the service.

The business card page comes with a secure messaging system, so people can get in contact with you. The only thing I didn’t like is the anonymity of the massage, I prefer to know who is sending me messages. According to our CEO, Paul Walsh, this could breach marketing best practices, at least in the UK.

So what is the difference between Lyro and any other Web site where you can store your contact details? For example MSN and Yahoo allows you to store your contact details and people can contact you without knowing your mail address. I think the main differentiator is the ability to search. Yahoo and MSN profiles aren’t searchable on the Web; on the other hand Lyro’s business cards are discoverable via mainstream search engines and from within it’s own site. Every word in your business card is a keyword.

At this moment Lyro business cards are stored in a sub-domain of Lyro. You can choose the name; even change it at anytime (subject to availability). Lyro promise to introduce the following features shortly:

• Uploading a profile photo
• Customizable card
• Lyro badge

Honestly speaking, there is nothing so special about Lyro at this moment. But considering its potential with the proper use of Content labels, I have to say it has the potential to be something special – you could couple the business cards with Segala’s intention to introduce identity for companies online using Content Labels. With the use of FOAF profiles you could network friends of friends to build a powerful network. The combination of Content Labels and FOAF profiles would enable trust for people who make recommendations about friends.

So, Lyro is pretty simple as it stands today, but it could be a nice interface to company’s and individual’s identities online when coupled with Content Labels. Otherwise it will sadly be just another Web site that collects contact details for people.

Just three hours ago, WordPress issued two security updates for it’s currently mantained branches(2.0 & 2.1). WordPress 2.1.3 is the latest upgrade for the WP 2.1 series and 2.0.10 is for WP 2.0 series. Consider it a highly recomended as of these are securty upgrades. I am sure you don’t want someone mess around with your blog .

Both releases contain fixes for several publicly known minor XSS issues, one major XML-RPC issue (This is the serious one, which might give attackers control of your blog). WordPress promises that this time they are aggressively monitoring all downloads for any changes or modifications. I truly hope the previous scenario won’t be repeated.

So what are you waiting for head up to WordPress dowanload site and do the upgrades. After all “safety first”, isn’t it?