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Submission + - The psychology of banner ads

Submitted by Mr. Subliminal on Monday May 21, 2007 @02:09PM

Mr. Subliminal writes: Blinking banner ads are one of the scourges of Internet advertising, but a new study says that they are effective because repeated expsoure gives consumers a positive feeling towards a particular product — one that can vanish upon a critical reevaluation. 'Advertisers have a few things to consider. The first is that banner ads may provide a valuable function in fostering familiarity even if those that view them never click through to the source of the ads. The downside for advertisers is that any evaluation of the positive impressions that this familiarity creates, even one based on false premises, is enough to make those positive feelings vanish.'

Submission + - FoxTorrent Extension for Mozilla Firefox

Submitted by spamking on Thursday May 17, 2007 @09:13AM

spamking writes:

Linux.com has a brief overview of FoxTorrent, a BitTorrent extension for Mozilla Firefox. The review outlines the extension's basic operation and takes a look at some of its more unique features, such as the ability to stream media files as they download.

BitTorrent clients are all over the place these days. One of the newcomers, FoxTorrent, is a fully functional cross-platform Firefox BitTorrent client created by Red Swoosh, a company that is now part of Akamai. What FoxTorrent lacks in features it makes up for in simplicity.

As of this writing the current release is 1.03 (version 1.0 was released on April 26). This version fixes an issue that caused the extension not to work on Linux and OS X; I ran into this issue under Gentoo (Firefox 1.5), but everything worked fine with Ubuntu 7.04 (Firefox 2.0).

FoxTorrent works like any BitTorrent client. When it finds a torrent it starts downloading the files and displays a screen to show the user what is going on.

According to the review this client stops seeding the torrent after the download has been completed. Why waste your time developing something like this if it ultimately defeats the purpose of BitTorrent?

Submission + - Google Wins Nude Thumbnail Legal Battle

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Thursday May 17, 2007 @09:12AM

eldavojohn writes: "Google is currently fighting many fronts in its ability to show small images returned in a search from websites. Most recently, Google won the case against them in which they were displaying nude thumbnails of a photographer's work from his site. Prior to this, Google was barred from displaying copyrighted content, even when linking it to the site (owner) from its search results. The verdict: "Saying the District Court erred, the San Francisco-based appeals court ruled that Google could legally display those images under the fair use doctrine of copyright law." Huge precedence in a search engine's ability to blindly serve content safely under fair use."

Submission + - Unprecedented Region of Antarctica Melted in 2005

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Thursday May 17, 2007 @09:05AM

eldavojohn writes: "There's a lot of news surrounding a recent study that has determined in 2005 a large piece of Antarctica (the size of California) melted. According to satellite data, these melts took place further inland than expected. Thankfully, however, "The warm spell did not last long enough for the meltwater to flow into the ocean.""

Submission + - maps.live.com blows the pants of maps.google.com

Submitted by

pnutjam

on Thursday May 17, 2007 @08:51AM

pnutjam writes: "I remember the first time I saw google maps. It was spectacular the way they combined satellite imagery with maps. It was a true breakthrough, IMHO.
Well, the bar has been raise...
I'm no MS shill, but I am truly impressed by MS's new maps.live.com. They have 3d imaging with a firefox plugin, satellite images with map overlays, and best of all is their birds eye view option which really lets you get a close view of things. You can also rotate N, S, E, or W angles to view things.
I do find it interesting that they seem to intentionally pixelate some locations."

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