Online Photo Processor

You heard about human-powered search engine (人肉搜索) a lot, but now you have to put another word into your pocket - human-powered photo processor (人肉图片处理器?).

Tucia (吐司网) is exactly what I'm talking about, a human-powered photo processor based on Web 2.0 spirit.

First of all, it's free! (well, I'm talking about the basis service, if you want a Pro account, you gotta pay for it. And their international service is also priced. ) The whole idea behind Tucia is simple. You submit your photos at Tucia along with a bunch of elaborate requests, and your submissions will then be processed by graphic experts from all over China. I highly recommend you go take a shot at Tucia to experiece the real magic of graphic processing.

Today, we see more and more burgeoning sites that tried to take advantage of Web 2.0 to create a blue ocean gain preliminary successes on this newly-discovered business model. But it's just the beginning, even more ideas are busily in preparation for action in the upcoming future.

Before & After Tucia (click to enlarge)

Online T-shirt Showcase

Superficially, UNIWoW(优物) is an ordinary retailer of T-shirt, but deep down, it's a bridge between tee designers and potential buyers. The site boasts a special slogan 'unique stuff for every 24 hours' and had never failed to act it out since its inception.

It is distinct from MYTshirt and Threadless. While the latter two were trying to sell tees designed by you and me, UNIWoW had successfully gathered a group of elite designers and turned their designs directly into products, as quickly as it can, and on a 24 hours basis. At the same time, designers at UNIWoW benefit from their artistic acts, they would be rewarded 10 RMB for each designed tee sold. And don't be surprised when you see the tees sold there are reasonably priced. =)

Browser Recording - ScreenCastle

You should take a serious look at ScreenCastle, a Java-powered handy online recording tool. The homepage of ScreenCastle cannot be more simple and impressive, a whopping red button stands out on the right with no other visual frition.

Upon clicking the red jumbo, a pop-up menu will appear and recording is immediately on its way. (BTW: audio is nicely supported) In addition, ScreenCastle offers you a wide range of sharing codes to make sharing your video a piece of cake. I should say you can really count on this service to record some on-screen tutorial or introduction and then spread them over internet. Enjoy browser recording!

Why Happy Farm Addictive?

No matter how you slice it, a simple game, known as Happy Farm, which simulates the whole process of running a farm, has quickly taken hold on many SNS(Social Networking Services) sites. Since its debut, the game has effectively absorbed a group of loyal gamers who tirelessly visited and took care of "their farms" on a regular basis. Most of the gamers even paid visits to their virtual farms more frequently than to loo. In fact, to some gaming loyalists, they were engaging in some kind of business instead of simply playing an online Flash game.

I think one feature of the game could help explain the absorption, which I personally call "limited playability". Online games with this feature don't offer you an unlimited satisfaction, instead, your content is accomplished piecemeal. You are not supposed to play the game through at one go but required to come back every so often in order to continue your game play.

I found recently many games had started to tap into this characteristic and had surprisingly scored well. Spending a lot of time at one go on any given game would bore even a hardcore player quickly, however, spending like 5%-10% of your time every day on a game is traditionally defined as fun!

It is not hard to guess that limited playability, a new big idea from the game industry, would soon serve as powerful ammunition to gamers across the globe. Just brace yourself.

Is Digg Stealing Traffic?

The guy behind Digg is apparently running some tricks. Now on the Digg homepage, you see all links are shortened, like this one http://digg.com/d1p5OI. Trimmed link is admirable as now everyone is using twitter, with no more than 130 characters allowed for each message. Shortened link is a way to make link sharing possible when your words are legally truncated.

But here comes the tricky part: when you click on those shortened links on Digg, they do NOT redirect you to the original URL, tricky? Digg, in fact, wants to keep your traffic forever! Unless you bother to click the "X" button on the top right. (would you really bother?)

Hmm... Time wouldn't be long before Comscore blowing her top for this foxy trafic stealing scheme.

SkipScreen Firefox Add-on

If you are a Firefox user, you should plug SkipScreen into your browser. What kind of screens do this freebie help you skip? Unexaggeratedly speaking, all the clicking and waiting on sites like RapidShare, Zshare, MegaUpload... and the like will be a thing of the past... Your downloads shall start instantly without any boring countdown from this day forth.

Still not satisfied? Come on man! It's free!

Check Backlink at Your Pleasure

The buzzword now is SEO(Search Engine Optimization), and one of the conventionally believed method out there is called Link Building.

Most of the SEOers start their link building project by doing backlink research. There are plenty of paid services out there helping you map out link portfolio, be it yours or anyone else, but most of them are not on the cheap side.

Below are two handy tools enough to get you started on your backlink research.

If you want to get a picture of your own link portfolio, Google Webmaster Tools is your friend.

If your target is someone else, Yahoo's Site Explorer is definitely a good starting point.

Sometimes the quality-cost trade-off theory doe NOT work in cyberspace. As a marketer, don't forget to make good use of what is available FREE. =)

What Cannot be Copied

One of my former colleagues brought up a discussion topic, a topic that has been discussing for ages by countless marketers -- what idea is impossible/hard to copy?

My own take on this topic is simple -- people. People says "great minds think alike", but in reality, no mind thinks alike. We are unique indeed. You can physically clone a person, but never mentally or psychologically.

For example, can you copy Stephen Chow or Dayo Wong? It seems outright impossible, at least the history has failed to present us a proof of any successful clone.

So if your idea centers on people, you are, technically speaking, half anti-copy.

Agree or not? Please share your thoughts on the comment box.

Malware is Widespread

Let's face the music! More than 97% of all e-mails sent over the net are unwanted, according to a Microsoft security report. This picture will further numb your mind.

However, we can still have some good news out of these bad news. As in China, a majority of malicious softwares were targeting your web browser configuration, while in Brazil, most of the malwares were directly aiming at your bank accounts. Take some solace now? =)

Also something worth your heed in the report is what it termed scareware, fake security programs which falsely tell people they need to install software which does nothing other than attempt to steal personal details from users' PC.

People! Stay smart in this virus world!

How to Display (Neatly) HTML/Javascript Source Code on Your Blog

Well, if you are a lazy bug and don't want to spend time on configuring your blogsphere, resort to HTML Encoder to save you the hard labor of encoding. The encoder can help you achieve that in a split second!

But, HTML Encoder is not the protagonist today. We want something advanced, don't we? I assume your answer is a definite YES. So today I'm going to introduce you SyntaxHighlighter, which makes posting code snippets online easier and also have all the codes look pretty and tidy. It's a big helper to developer/coder, if not to an amateurish blogger.

To use SyntaxHighlighter, however, you need to do some configuration first... I'm not going to spend my time further down the road, click HERE for a thorough usage tutorial.

Brooks' law

Brooks' Law stated adding manpower to a late software project makes it later, and the bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

Explanations

One reason for the seeming contradiction is that software projects are complex engineering endeavors, and new workers on the project must first become educated in the work that has preceded them; this education requires diverting the resources already working on the project, temporarily diminishing their productivity while the new workers are not yet contributing meaningfully. Each new worker typically must "ramp up" in this way with not only one, but multiple engineers who must educate the new worker in their area of expertise in the code base, day by day.

Another significant reason is the communication overheads increase as the number of people increase. The number of different communication channels goes up as the square of the number of people; double the number of people and you get four times as many different conversations. Everyone working on the same thing needs to keep in sync, so as you add more and more people, they spend more and more time trying to find out and keep up with what everyone else is doing.

Music with Impulsive and Contemplative Buyer

More psychology is going on. I stumbled upon a study related to purchasing impulse while on the job. Though the study was kinda old, published in Nov. 2005, it didn't dampen the significant result of the psychological work, which pointed to people being affected when shopping with the background music on. The study was hosted in a brick-and-mortar store, however, the upshot has meaningful indication for online businesses alike. Background music, according to the 2005 study, enhanced buying impulse of impulsive buyers, but was effectless to contemplative shoppers.

As a webmaster, I will never stop peeking into behaviors of online customers in different age grounps. It's high time to test the music idea. Whether a snatch of slow-tempo pop music will really do the trick, the a/b test system will soon tell!

Real-Life Testimonials

Now customers are way sharper and cannier than years ago. You can no longer fool them by some fake or informal testimonial like before, as they have outgrown all of those tricks.

So it's now time to come to realize that textual testimonial couldn't make it anymore. However, this Pennsylvania-based lawn care company has displayed a juicy real-life testimonial panel in an impressive way. Now close your eyes, and take a few minutes to think of real-life testimonials in your business, and leverage them cordially to fascinate your potential prospects.

Bluekai is Growing

In an age of reduction and bankruptcy, it is uncommon to see a skyrocketing company. Bluekai, a previously unheard company, has secretively shot to fame these days in a seemingly doubtful business model.

The company, with only 13 staffers, doesn't sell any physical products. Its main staple is what it called 'intent data'. Bluekai collected customer intention from websites around the world and then organized, aggregated or disaggregated the messy data accordingly. After an in-house processing, they will start to match these customer intentions with marketers. It looks like that Bluekai is selling privacy data, right? Bluekai didn't deny, but added that they sold the privacy data in a friendly way. Furthermore, there is also an opt-out system at hand for consumers to tick on/off their privacy info at any time.

Bluekai is acting against other IT companies if we take a closer look at its business model. While most of the IT firms are trying to expand and aggregate, Bluekai is disaggregating himself into a very little service piece. Disaggregation is one way to survive in this tough economic time. I'm sure, before long, disaggregation will be all the rage.

How to Add Background Music to Your Blog

As you know, I'm a Blogger.com user. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't provide us with an easy way to add background music. So how to embed some best-loved music in your blog? It's actually quite simple to do this, and read on to see various methods you can use.

In this post, I'll concentrate on actually embedding the music, rather than adding widgets such as Last.fm playlists.

The easiest method of adding background sound is to include a line like this in your blog template, just after the opening tag.

[bgsound src="http://yoursite.com/yoursound.mp3" loop=infinite]

Note: you need to replace "[" and "]" with "<" and ">" respectively to make the code work.

where the URL is that of the background music you wish to use. This method works perfectly well, but visitors to your site will not be able to switch the music off if it becomes distracting.

So instead, you may prefer to use another method instead, which is compatible with all browsers. This is achieved by including the following code somewhere in your template.

[embed width="200" src="http://yoursite.com/yourmusic.mp3" autostart="false" loop="false" height="50"][/embed]

You can change some of the variables to suit your needs:

• autostart: set to "true" to make the music begin as soon as the page is loaded, or "false" to ensure the user has to press the play icon.
  
• loop: set to "true" to have the music play over and over, or "false" so that it plays only once.
  
• height: if this is set to "40", only the play options will be visible. You can make this larger if you prefer, in which case blank space will be visible.

Ok, the how-to is done, and now it should be "problemless" for you to add music to your blog. Let's rock the blog!

Undo Send

Oops, hitting the "Send" button too soon? Give yourself a grace period of a few seconds to cancel sending, then edit your message before sending again.

This is a new feature available in Gmail Labs, a small leap forward, so to speak. I found it functioning very well based on some preliminary tests. Now we are granted the power to virtually "eat words" by undoing rash messages. Nice move!

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

This diagram shows Maslow's hierarchy of needs(马斯洛需求层次理论), represented as a pyramid with the more basic needs at the bottom.

Have you reached the summit? If not, push yourself harder!

New Blog Launched

This is a blog for internet lore only. =)

Come on guys! Share and exchange internet lore or experiences of online marketing for the most cost-efficient approach to prosperity.