Have you heard of the latest trend in web development? It’s called Push Button Development (PBD for short). Really! You don’t believe me?

Have you heard of cloud computing? What about Software As A Service? These are terms that many people throw around without really understanding what they mean.

Doesn’t matter what you think of Obama or how you voted in this election, you have to give it to him, he knows how to use new media to get his message across.

Paul Kontonis, CEO of For Your Imagination, was the host of The Web Series Producer’s Guide, which featured Brett Wilson from TubeMogul, Bill Cammack, Kirby Ferguson from Goodiebag and Marc Hustvedt from Tubefilter.tv. These guys know what they are talking about and hit every pain point we, as web producers,  go through on a daily basis. It is […]

Do you have an RSS feed for your web videos or podcasts? Want to make that content accessible to iPhone and iPod Touch users?

You can either go on and create your own site that is compatible with the iPhone or just head on to VenueM, a new startup that takes your RSS feed and quickly (and on the fly) converts it into an iPhone ready website.

PaidContent.org is reporting that Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, partnered with Getty Images to sell photographs from “hand selected” users of Flickr.

CNET is reporting today that YouTube will be adding pre-roll and post-roll ads to the videos that users uploads to their site.

If you are looking for someone (not something) then check out Whozat.com. The interface is pretty simple. You enter the person’s first name and last name (you can also enter a middle name and/or initial and some keywords if you want) and it will comb the following to search for that person:

Google introduced the Google Media Server, a UPnP driven application that offers a way to view any media that is indexed by the Google Desktop application on your TV or any other device.

MySpace is launching the ability for third party developers to build applications using their API. Most of the other major Social Networks have done that already, with the most famous of all being FaceBook.com.

TechCrunch reported today that Instinctiv, a new startup, launched today and simultaneously announced their first round of angel funding.

I was reading a very interesting article on TechCrunch about Facebook becoming the next Microsoft (as in OS).

My home page on my browser is set to CNN.com. I love reading their stories. So, as part of my morning routine, after getting my 1st cup of coffee, I turn on the computer and launch Safari.
A news headline catches my eye “Rotating car has no need for reverse“. […]

If you spend a lot of time on Facebook (not that I do!), you might want to think about getting compensated for it. A new application on Facebook called URTurn wants to compensate you for your time spent on social networks.

CNET News reported today that Twitter closed $15 million in series B funding with an $80 million dollar valuation and yet, has absolutely no business plan and no way of monetizing what they are doing (at least that they have made public).

If you haven’t yet checked out the social network browser Flock, you must do so immediately, especially if you are a social network junkie (or, like me, use social networks for your day to day business development).
Head on now (why are you still here?) to Flock.com and download the browser for your platform.
This browser was […]

A story in The Hollywood Reporter states that ABC.com has upgraded their video player with new features including:

• Full Screen Viewing
• Closed captioning
• Ability to send video links that can be embedded on blogs and social networks

Techcrunch.com reported today that Facebook will redesign it’s profile pages with a cleaner design.

Very interesting article in Website Magazine today about where should you place analytics code (such as Google Analytics).
Should you place it at the end of the page or at the beginning of the page?
Let’s talk about why at the beginning of the page.
If you have a slow loading page, by placing the code […]

Steven Spielberg, Harrsion Ford, George Lucas where on Seesmic promoting their new movie, Indiana Jones.

YouTube is now offering a new demographics section in their Insight analytics for YouTube. Log into YouTube.com, click on “my account” and under Performance and Data Tools, click on YouTube Insight.

There is really great company called Animoto that allows you to upload video and photographs and it will automatically create for you a very cool slide show (though it really looks more like a music video) to whatever music you give it.
It’s so cool, that it looks like the #1 Internet store in the world, […]

I ran into an amazing website called Sprout (they just got $5 million second round) which allows you to build Flash widgets easily using the sproutbuilder.com You don’t even have to create an account, you just click on “Get started” and you are off creating these widgets.

Google announced today that their Google Analytics application will now integrate with Google Audio Ads. This means you can track your Google Audio Ads and how they correlate to your web site hits.

MySpace launched their developer platform (check it out)

You have to register to build applications, but you can browser through the “Learn and Play” section without having to register first.

Microsoft Corp. made an unsolicited (yeah right) $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo today.

Basically, Yahoo is desperate and I think this is Jerry Yang’s answer to Yahoo’s problem. Have Microsoft purchase you.

Who has not watched a video on the Internet?  YouTube anyone? Sometimes I get asked what is the difference between progressive video and streaming video?

We have an “intranet” web site (called SheaTV) in our company where we centralize all of our media assets (videos, podcasts, training on demand videos, etc.). From there, our users can easily find what they want to watch (or listen to) by searching through a variety of subjects.

So I took the plunge and migrated my ColdFusion MX 7 server into Adobe ColdFusion 8. Below, I’ve detailed the steps I took.

I did not uninstall MX 7 prior to installing 8 (this is the developer version since I did this first on my local machine before doing development and/or production to make sure that all of our websites work ok with version 8…I highly recommend you do the same.)

After downloading the developer version from Adobe.com, I went ahead and double clicked ColdFusion-8-win.exe. I then followed the wizard.

Shut down all CFMX 7 services, especially Verify, if you have any collections that need to be transferred over to version 8.
Make sure you have installed JDK 1.6 or above.
Splash screen - Choose language and click OK.
Introduction - Click next.
License Agreement - Accept and click next.
Configure Installer - Enter Serial #, select trial, or select developer edition and click next.

Wow! I can’t belive Coldfusion is in version 8 (and this version comes from Adobe).

I remember when I first used ColdFusion it came with O’Reilly’s Website web server (this is a long time ago). It was known as DBML back then. Before version 1. Then I went through version 1.5, 2, 3, 3.01, 3.11, 4, 4.01, 5, 6, 7 and now 8 (I skipped a few of the .01 and other updates in between).

The product started with Allaire (the original Allaire brothers created it), then it was purchased by Macromedia, and finally, of course, by Adobe (as part of the entire Macromedia merger with Adobe)

For those of you that don’t know ColdFusion, it’s a back end scripting language to create dynamic websites. If you heard of ASP.net (from Microsoft), then think of it as that, except, 10,000 times better (do you think I’m a ColdFusion fan?).

Here is a cool site I learned about when I attended the Adobe CS3 Conference:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/communityengine/index.cfm?event=homepage&productId=1&loc=en_US

This is the CSS Advisor site, where you can learn about all things “CSS”. For those of you who have no clue what CSS is, let me give you a quick explanation.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and it’s used in conjunction with HTML to create websites. With CSS you create the “look and feel” of your site and with HTML, you define your content (or display it). That way, you can keep the look and feel separate from the content of your site, which in turn, allows you to easily change and update how your site looks without having to redesign the content as well.

Adobe has announced seven upcoming online seminars (eSeminars) pertaining to PHP, Flex and Flex 3.0 development.

Flex for Java Developers (3 seminars dates)
Flex For PHP Developers (2 seminar dates)
Buzzword - Raising the RIA Bar with Rick Treitman
Flex 3 Beta Sneak Peak
For more information on these seminars, visit Adobe at

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=462539&loc=en_us

What a fantastic conference! The Adobe CS3 conference was a two day (June 19 and June 20) networking, product immersion and just plain old fun “experience” for only $199; can’t beat that!

That price not only included a bunch of classes and networking opportunities, but also a fantastic dinner on the first day (I mean shrimp, prime rib, Chinese food and even an open hosted bar).

There were plenty of networking opportunities as well, including the lunches and dinners, the get-togethers after the days ended and a bird-of-a-feather meeting.

Pre-conference Sessions
The conference started with a “Pre-Conference Session”. There were 5 sessions to choose from, including Rich Internet Application for Developers, Video, Management/IT, Photographers and Print Service Providers.

As a company, you need to think of your online marketing efforts (aka emarketing) as “expanding the reach of your web presence” beyond your website. In order to do this, you, as a business owner, marketing person, or whatever your title is, need to see the entire Internet “as your web site” and need to start crafting and forming your message wherever you are mentioned online.There are many avenues that you can use on the Web to “craft” that message and help extend the reach beyond your web site. Below is just a sample of ideas that you can use to help bring in more traffic to your site, but think of this is as just the “tip of the iceberg”. I’m sure there are plenty of ideas / sites I neglected to mention here due to time, space and/or not knowing about it.

Google is your best friend. Research, research, research and read lots!

Good luck on your eMarketing endeavors.

BLOGS:
Blogs are extremely hot and are great for building trust with your prospects and customers. There are many companies that have blogs that talk about their products, tips and tricks, etc. You can start an “expert blog”, that is, experts within your organization that would like to blog about your industry, be it commentary, news, tips and tricks, etc. All of this information would be indexed by search engines and make your company and website come up in the rankings. All the blogs could end up pointing to your company web sites.

Social Networks are taking off and I’m not just talking about MySpace, Facebook and the 10 billion other that are out there.

Oh no, I’m talking about businesses realizing the power of social networks, both as a marketing tool, as an SEO helper and also as a brand extension.

What’s more powerful then your own customers talking about your product, both good and bad. So NBC.com is jumping on the Social Networking bandwagon.

Check out www.nbc.com/Social_Networking/

They are centralizing all “user generated” content into this area, including blogs, groups, message boards, etc.

Ladies and gentelmen, this is the future of YOUR marketing in YOUR company. Embrace it now. Jump on it now. Or you will be left behind and then you’ll have to play catch up.

So, I was telling my wife the other day that I would love to just be able to record my thoughts and ideas as I’m driving so that I don’t forget them later. She recommended a tape recorder. I asked her “What is that?” and moved on.

Fast forward to the next day, I’m surfing the web and I came across a cool site call Jott at jott.com. The basic concept of Jott is to capture your thoughts via your cell phone through a toll free number. The captured voice message is emailed to your Jott Inbox and to your regular email inbox and also are transcribed by someone so you get both a voice mail and text message of that voice mail.

Well, if that was not enough (which it is for me), you can also create “groups” of people in your Jott account. So for example, you are a marketing department VP and want to quickly communicate some new campaign you are going to run to your entire team. You set up a Jott account. Your team mates set up a Jott account and you add them to your “Marketing” group.

Ok, so at first, I thought what a stupid idea, a site where you just log in and answer one question and one question only, “What are you doing now?”. How lame! Well, 1 week later and 100 entries later, I’m pretty much addicted to it.

And I have friends that follow me and “What I’m doing now.” Oh yeah, I also follow other people. I’m a loser right? Wrong!

Social Networking is the hottest thing on the Web now. Why? Because we are social beings. We need contact, physical, emotional and, yes, virtual!

So why is Twitter so popular? Curiosity perhaps? I want to know what you are doing all day every day. Sure. But there is another take to Social Networking and to Twitter itself that lots of people are overlooking, the ability to use it for business!

Ok, so I don’t get easily excited about a new website offering a new web service (well, I do, I’m a geek), but this one, I have to admit, is pretty awesome.

GrandCentral.com is a new website (well, new to me at least) that let’s you choose a local phone # as your “main phone” that people can call. You can then forward any of those calls to your cell phone, home phone, work phone, etc. all at the same time, so you can choose where you want to pick up the phone.

So for example, let’s say someone is calling you via the GrandCentral phone # you gave out and you are just about to walk out. Both your home and cell phone will ring (assuming you’ve set up both as your forward phone). You can just pick up the cell phone and keep heading out.

But then you realize that

Ok, so I have to admit it, I’m lazy. I could get on the Internet and search for a phone # when I want the number to my local Pizza Hut…or I could go “old school” and use the yellow pages…But no. I dial 411 (”phone information” for those reading this article that are from another country).

The problem with 411 is that they charge you. I think it’s up to like $1.25 now, especially if you are dialing 411 from your cell phone.

If only I could harness the power of Google Local on my phone by dialing a phone number, say 1-800-GOOG-411 and just telling Google what phone number I’m looking for. Ah, wouldn’t that be nice. And I would not want to talk to a person. I’d want this entire process to be automated.

Not too much information about it yet, however, Adobe announced in NAB that they will release an “offline” Flash video player (e.g. like Windows Media or Quicktime) that will allow you to watch Flash videos (.flv’s) offline, just like you do today with Windows Media and Quicktime players.

The video will support live streaming, progressive downloads and protected (read “DRM”) videos. It will also support full screen mode.

Adobe wants to take over desktop application development, not just web development. Their forey into this arena is called Apollo. What is Apollo? Apollo is a runtime you have to install on your computer that is cross platform.

Think of Apollo just like .Net, except it runs on multiple platforms (Mac, Windows and Linux) and instead of you using VB.Net or C# to write applications, you would use what you already know and love (that is if you are a web developer), web technologies such as Flash, AJAX, HTML, Javascript, Flex, etc.

What’s very cool about this is that you can code applications for the web that can go offline and be used offline in a desktop setting across platforms.

I was checking out Apollo today in the Adobe Labs (I’ll talk about Apollo in another Blog entry in the very near future…for now, if you want to know what it is, visit http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/). Anyhow, they have an area for galleries. I was checking it out and ran into this really cool site called Your Minis.

This site steals the idea of Apple widgets (accessed through your dashboard in Mac OS) and it puts it on the web, in your web browser.

What you can do with this site is amazing. Once you sign up (it’s free), you can then create your “start page” and add widgets to that page. These widgets where created using Adobe’s Apollo development environment, with the final output being good old Flash, which makes it compatible with any browser out there that supports Flash (like 95% of them do!)