Aggregator of RSS feeds concerning web accessibility

A friend of mine was asked to produce some videos and screencasts to explain YQL to non-technical people and asked me to give her a definition. Here’s what I came up with:

What is YQL and what is it good for ?

The Internet as we see it (web sites, games, videos) is only a shop window to the thing that really drives it: data. All the things you see are based on information one provider offers another provider. Even you are a data provider – if you comment on a video on YouTube or you add a person to a photo on Facebook you create a data set. All this data is made available behind the scenes to different people – this could be developers in the same company or partners or – for example in the case of the Yahoo Developer Network – other developers.

The information comes in different formats. For example the photos on http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/cat are available in “JSON” format at http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=cat&lang=en-us&format=json.

To you this might look like nothing much but developers have a lot of fun with this information. It gets especially interesting when you mix and match different information sources to get a new picture. You can for example map the news onto the world to give them geographical context.

All of this sharing of information follows certain conventions much like normal conversation does. You need to ask the right question to the right person in the right format to get the correct information back. In the case of data on the Internet this gets even more confusing as all the data providers speak different languages and give you information back in formats that you might not understand. Imagine going shopping for clothes and each shop assistant speaks a different language and each shop has different size charts for the same type of clothing.

In normal communication amongst people with different languages we have translators – sometimes even simultaneous ones. And this is what YQL is. YQL is a simple to understand language to allow you to get information from any source on the web and gives it back to you in a language you understand. Every resource on the web can get a simple name and developers can call this name up to get to the data it offers. So for example getting photos from flickr becomes

select * from flickr.photos.search where text='cat'

Translating a text to French becomes

select * from google.translate where q='hubcap' and target='fr'

You can also mix and match different sources, for example you can get the latest headlines from yahoo’s top stories and translate them to French:

select * from google.translate where target='fr' and q in (
 select title from rss where url='http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories'
)

This language is very close to another language called SQL which is the standard for accessing information in databases. So, in essence, YQL turns the internet into a massive database where developers can access information and remix it to make it easier for end users to see relationships between different pieces of information or even develop interfaces that make it possible for users to get access to the information.

For example this great lecture on YouTube can be listened to by blind users using the EasyYouTube interface that uses YQL to get to the information of the video.

YQL can be accessed on a pure programmatic level but the easiest way to get a glimpse of its translation and access powers is to use the console.

YQL is a great communicator - it allows you to speak to all kind of data sources in the right language, ask the right questions for you, find the right internal phone numbers to get to even other resources needed to get to a certain piece of information and give back to you only what you asked for and not a whole mass of information you will never need. And it is amazingly fast in doing so as Yahoo built it to deal with exactly the same problem of data communication inside the company.

Communicating via email in a direct, intimate and informal way remains one of the best ways to market and promote your content, services and products online. This is why the most effective online businesses still rely on crafting quality newsletters and email updates to keep their fans and customers updated, entertained and happy. In this MasterNewMedia guide you will find the best free email newsletter distribution and mailing services available out there, as well as complementary information to help you identify and select your ideal one. Photo credit: Alex Kalmbach Email newsletter distribution services are very easy to use, because, if you already know how to use email, you already know most of what you will need to prepare an effective email newsletter. What is new is that through your email newsletter you need to keep writing and sharing in the same way you did with your email friends and contacts, and not as if you were publishing an international magazine. You need to be personal, intimate and you need to always offer great value. Not just promotion for your content or products. That doesn't cut it. You need to meet the needs of your audience and find a writing style that will make your fans read your newsletter as if it were from a true friend. Here are two interesting statistical figures that should help you realize the importance that marketers and retailers still attribute to email newsletters for online direct marketing purposes:

• 88% of retailers listed email as a high priority for the year, largely to retain customers. - Forrester Research and Shop.org "Retailing Online 2009: Marketing Report"
• 89% of retailers cited email as the most mentioned successful tactic overall. - Forrester Research and Shop.org "Retailing Online 2009: Marketing Report"

As long as you have understood how critical is today to have a "conversation" with your audience, the reasons why email newsletters are such a great way to keep in touch with it should be pretty clear. But, how do you go about selecting an email newsletter distribution service and what features and traits do characterize these offerings? Generally, these newsletter distribution services are characterized by this set of basic features:

• List Management: You can create mailing lists to organize contacts who will receive your newsletter and you can also handle subscribes and unsubscribes.
• Scheduling: You can schedule precise times and dates when your newsletter will be sent.
• Autoresponders: You can design a set of email content templates which are automatically sent when your subscribers perform specific actions. For example, if a reader subscribes to your newsletter, she will receive a "Thank you" email in return, or an email which introduces her to your latest story and offerings.
• Support: You receive assistance in the form of tutorials or support forums, to learn how to manage your email marketing campaigns efficiently, and oftentimes the service you choose will even share with you how to maximize your efforts when planning your email campaign.

While these are just some of the basic features that all free email newsletter distribution services support, there are more specific features that really differentiate some of these services from the others. To help you identify the best free email newsletter distribution service for your needs, I have setup here below a set of comparative tables and individual reviews to help you check and identify your ideal online event management tool. Here are the specific selection criteria used to compare these different services:

• Mailing list import: Upload of an existing mailing list to the selected email newsletter distribution service.
• HTML + text: Type of newsletter you can send: plain text or HTML-rich message.
• Max No. of subscribers: Limit of subscribers that the selected service will handle inside your mailing list.
• Max. No. of newsletters: Maximum number of newsletters you can send per month or per day.
• Embed sign-up form: Custom registration form that you can place on your web site to help readers subscribe to your newsletter.
• Analytics: Reports and statistics about the performance of your HTML newsletter. Subscribes, unsubscribes, opened emails, etc.
• Pre-made templates: Readily-available templates that you can use to style your newsletter.

Here all the details:

Free Email Newsletter Distribution and Mailing Services - Comparative Tables

Free Email Newsletter Distribution and Mailing Services

1. MailChimp

   MailChimp is an online service that will allow you to create and manage mailing lists to send a newsletter. With the free account you can handle up to 500 subscribers and send up to 3000 emails per month. If you already have a mailing list, you can import it into MailChimp. The newsletter can either be created in plain text or HTML format. To get started quickly, you have a large set of 101 free readily-available email templates or, if you prefer, you can design and upload your own code. To collect readers to your newsletter, you can also embed a sign-up form on your website which will be completely managed by MailChimp. A facility to convert the RSS feed of your blog or website into a newsletter is also available. Other features include autoresponders, audience segmentation tools to target your newsletter to selected groups of recipients, Google Analytics integration, spam filter, and much more.
   http://www.mailchimp.com/
   
   
   
   
   
   

2. ContactPro

   ContactPro provides an online newsletter distribution service to create, manage and send email newsletters. With the free account of ContactPro you can manage up to 100 subscribers and unlimited newsletters per day. The import feature allows you to add an existing mailing list you already have and start from there. You can write your newsletters either in plain text or using HTML code. ContactPro is also able to track and monitor your emails to report how many have opened and read your newsletter, how many have subscribed / unsubscribed and other relevant information for your marketing campaign. Pre-made newsletter templates are available to help you style your message, but you can always use your own layout. You can also create custom embeddable sign-up forms to allow readers to subscribe on your web site pages. ContactPro uses a spam filter to help you test your newsletter before sending, so you can be pretty sure that your e.mails will reach the inbox of your recipients without being inadvertently dumped inside the spam folder.
   http://www.contactpro.com/
   
   
   
   
   
   

3. Bravenet Mailing List Manager

   Bravenet Mailing List Manager is a free online service to create, handle and send email newsletters. You can manage up to 500 subscribers and send one newsletter per day. You can freely import your existing mailing lists from another service or software. To compose your newsletter you can either choose to use plain text or HTML. To style your newsletter, there are several readily-available templates you can choose from. HTML newsletters will also be tracked by Bravenet so you can monitor who opened your email, who subscribed, who unsubscribed, etc. Other features include: ban an IP address, create a thank you page, create a goodbye page and much more. To facilitate new readers to subscribe to your newsletter, you can embed a sign-up form on your website, which is completely hosted and managed by Bravenet.
   http://www.bravenet.com/webtools/elist/
   
   
   
   
   
   

4. Comm100 Newsletter

   Com100 Newsletter is an online open-source newsletter service that you can use for email marketing purposes. Completely free to use, Comm100 Newsletter allows you to handle unlimited subscribers and to send unlimited newsletters per day. The import function allows you to manage existing mailing lists you have. Each email newsletter can either be written in plain text or HTML. HTML newsletters can also be monitored and tracked to know who opens your email, when, who unsubscribes, etc. Pre-made templates are also available to help you style your newsletter. To allow readers to sign up for your newsletter subscribers, Com100 provides you with a simple-to-use embeddable sign-up form, which you can place on your web site pages.
   http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/
   
   
   
   
   
   

5. YourMailingListProvider

   YourMailingListProvider is a free online newsletter distribution service. The service allows you to create your newsletter, manage up to 1000 subscribers and send a maximum of one newsletter per day. You can decide to create plain text newsletters or HTML-rich emails, also taking advantage of a set of pre-made templates. Features to import a mailing list and to monitor the performance of your newsletter are not available, nor an embeddable sign-up form for your web site readers.
   http://www.yourmailinglistprovider.com/

Originally prepared by Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, and first published on February 8th, 2010 as "Email Newsletter Distribution And Mailing Services: Guide To The Best Free Online Solutions".

Shownotes

Enjoy this podcast of the Wednesday evening gathering meeting of the 2010 National Federation of the Blind Washington Seminar, where you may hear me make a fool of myself by trying to badly sing along to the old Federation songs I once knew years ago.

Download and Listen

What future and opportunities for online news? "After more than five years of Wikipedia building both its content and its brand as a "go-to" source for freshly updated topic-oriented content that dominates search engine results, it dawns on some folks in the news business that perhaps there is a business model in there somewhere." Photo credit: juliengron Content media expert, and Content Nation author John Blossom, analyzes AP recent moves and where the opportunities to change the course of things of online news may actually be.

"What is needed... for professional news organizations to succeed in online content licensing is a system that encourages the distribution of their content through the most efficient and popular channels available at any given moment. Instead of fighting your audience, empower and encourage your audiences to be distributors of your content - and help them to profit from it as well."

Two are in fact John Blossom's key strategic suggestions in this opinion article:

1. To leverage the reach and viral communication and distribution power of users instead of old, expensive and proprietary news distribution systems.
2. To understand the value of news curation and newsmastering.

"...the news of today - and tomorrow - needs to collect the best content from whatever source..." You can have some exclusive content, to be sure, but exclusivity alone cannot power success. This can be seen clearly in how information providers in the financial industry are required to aggregate content from as many different sources as possible to help information-hungry decision makers."

Here all the details:

Darn, Why Did They Think of It First? News Media Companies Adapt To Online Value Points

by John Blossom

The AP Strategy For Premium Packaging of Online News Content

I have to chuckle a bit at the recent Poynter Online email interview with Wikimedia Foundation's Jimmy Wales, in which he discusses an internal memo gleaned from Associated Press (PDF) by Nieman Journalism Lab. The AP memo, entitled "Protect, Point, Pay - An Associated Press Plan for Reclaiming News Content Online", covers a lot of ground already familiar to those following AP's efforts to put in premium packaging for news content. However, in addition to conjuring up long-standing concerns about Google and other major search engines as competitive forces, the memo also highlights AP's concern about the millions of topic-oriented pages in Wikipedia that are capturing traffic when people search for breaking news. At last the light bulb begins to go off in some minds that perhaps the issue is not so much search engines but that search engines are directing people towards the most popular destinations for specific topics. Hmm, perhaps this might have something to do with... the quality of the content that they find there?

Maybe There Is a Business Model In Freshly Updated Topic-Oriented Content?

The AP memo points out that Wikipedia articles are rich with links and structured content that drive people to other trusted information sources, a concept that the memo suggests could be adopted by the AP for its own content. As Wales points out wryly, though, "Creating authoritative canonical pages based on the latest from the AP sounds like a good idea they should have implemented years ago." In other words, after more than five years of Wikipedia building both its content and its brand as a "go-to" source for freshly updated topic-oriented content that dominates search engine results, it dawns on some folks in the news business that perhaps there is a business model in there somewhere.

What Are People Willing To Pay?

Layer in the growth of online portals that are aggregating links to top topics content more effectively, and one wonders just what people are going to be willing to pay for those carefully designed hNews objects that AP is hoping to use to "reclaim" the news business. The answer to that wondering seems to come in part from a recent study on consumer attitudes towards premium news content by the Boston Group highlighted in The New York Times. The study indicates that fewer than half in the U.S. are willing to pay for news content online and that of those who would be willing to pay the preferred tariff weighs in at about $3 a month. This seems to line up with long-time assertions by Journalism Online's Gordon Crovitz, who claims that premium news sites can expect to be able to charge for about ten percent of their online content. I have noted oftentimes that a system for managing access to paid content is long overdue, but news organizations should take a hint from the payments being extracted from iPhone apps and recognize that online markets reward functionality and community input that meets personal needs more than it does deathless prose and a good network of inside contacts.

Possible Obstacles and Issues

A topic-oriented web site for news content sponsored by AP would be a good idea, but one wonders whether AP or any other news organization is up to the task of building both the content and the brand necessary to contend in search engine wars for their audience's attention. At the same time, AP's emphasis on "protective" content packaging as a means to establish fair licensing of AP content seems to miss the real revenue opportunity available to AP and other news organizations. When a publishing-enabled global audience is your most effective distribution mechanism, a strategy of "joint supplier negotiation" suggested by the AP memo is not likely to succeed.

Encourage Distribution and Support Revenue Sharing

What is needed for AP and other professional news organizations to succeed in online content licensing is a system that encourages the distribution of their content through the most efficient and popular channels available at any given moment. Instead of fighting your audience, empower and encourage your audiences to be distributors of your content - and help them to profit from it as well. Highly automated content licensing with a billing mechanism akin to mobile phone usage units - and that can help individuals to profit from AP content when it is appropriate - is the key to this concept, and should be the cornerstone of AP's premium content strategy. With such a scheme in place, AP's members can focus on beating the competition at their own game by becoming the most effective agnostic aggregators of news content in any given market.

Give People What They Want

Yes, news organizations will continue to staff up with their own editorial resources, but the news of today - and tomorrow - needs to collect the best content from whatever source that it comes from more effectively than the competition. You can have some exclusive content, to be sure, but exclusivity alone cannot power success. This can be seen clearly in how information providers in the financial industry are required to aggregate content from as many different sources as possible to help information-hungry decision makers. Over time you may develop unique assets, but the fundamental game is giving people what they want, where they want it, when they want it. If you yell at your markets for wanting to play a different game, do not be surprised by the blank stares that you get before they go to pay attention to people who listen more effectively.

Recommendations To AP

I do hope for the sake of professional news producers that AP does come up with an effective content distribution strategy, and there are some hopeful outlines in the AP memo to that effect. But the largest thing that needs to change in the AP strategy is their attitude, which still treats the web as an object of fear and scorn. More than 1.4 billion people around the world seem to feel otherwise about electronic content, people who both consume and contribute value to the news gathering and distribution process. It is time for the AP to recognize that their mission needs to embrace those 1.4 billion people more effectively if they are to value their brand and their content enough to consider seriously the prospect of regular payments for it.

Originally written by John Blossom for Shore, and first published on November 16th, 2009 as Darn, Why Did They Think of It First? News Media Companies Adapt To Online Value Points

About John Blossom John Blossom's career spans more than twenty years of marketing, research, product management and development in advanced information and media venues, including major financial publishers and financial services companies, as well as earlier experience in broadcast media. Mr. Blossom founded Shore Communications Inc. in 1997, specializing in research and advisory services and strategic marketing consulting for publishers and consumers of content services. John Blossom is also the author of Content Nation a great book about "Surviving and Thriving as Social Media Changes Our Work, Our Lives, and Our Future".

Photo credits: The AP Strategy For Premium Packaging of Online News Content - Tom Schmucker Maybe There Is a Business Model In Freshly Updated Topic-Oriented Content? - adistock What Are People Willing To Pay? - pablo631 Possible Obstacles and Issues - pmtavares Encourage Distribution and Support Revenue Sharing - adistock Give People What They Want - james steidl Recommendations To AP - Silvia Bukovac

So, i think it’ll be fun to post some photos as the storm progresses.  Who knows, this could be the biggest snow Baltimore has ever seen.  Enjoy.  Have photos to add? Send them on over!

For some additional fun, watch a couple of my friends and their driving adventure!

One of the things I love about my company is that you are perfectly allowed in Yahoo to give “Fire and Brimstone” talks to rally your colleagues. It is a very open company and if you can back up criticism with proof and offer solutions people are happy to listen to you.

Last Thursday I took the opportunity of being in the Silicon Valley to give a talk about giving technology to the world, pointing out mistakes we made in explaining our services and APIs, what works well and how some competitors do a great job at explaining complex technology in an easy to understand fashion.

It was a great opportunity to explain the concepts of developer evangelism to an internal audience who hadn’t yet read anything about the matter of seeing developers as an audience.

Check the slides on SlideShare and the audio on archive.org:

Listen to the Audio of the talk on archive.org:

• Giving Technology to the World – MP3 46MB
• Giving Technology to the World – OGG 37MB

Do you know any great API sandboxes and documentation? I’d be happy to have more positive examples!

Any bright people that would like to solve it? This advertisement says it all.

Recently, I came across [Fred Daoud's] blog post where he gave a demo of Maven and Basic JPA persistence and I thought it might be cool to take his example and simplify its syntax using Groovy.

Unix programs are beautiful and universally compatible. You can chain them to accomplish incredible tasks. Let's do some automated refactoring such as renaming php classes and methods without IDEs, using only sed, find and grep, plus your version control system of choice. You do not have to edit many hundred files by hand, and these tools should be available in every Linux distribution and maybe also on Mac Os X.

With the announcement of the closure of kenai.com, I’ve decided to move my open-source projects to GitHub. Here's why I chose it.

We’ve put together this review of open source project management apps based on our ten years of experience designing and building web sites and web-based applications.

According to its homepage, CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API. That is a boring bunch of words. Here is why it is interesting.

Picky about font, esp. the programming font.The fonts available on windows are still OK but if you using Linux desktop the font's selection is limited and crave for better free fonts.Don't worry you are in for a treat. These mono spaced fonts look great on any OS. Check it out.

Last year sometime, I heard Jim Highsmith do a talk on replacing the traditional project management iron triangle with a new 'agile triangle' that is based not on time, cost, and scope... but instead, based on value, quality, and constraints (time, cost, and scope). This is a concept Jim introduced in the latest release of his book Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products. Something in the idea has been bugging me a little, so when I read Isreal Gat's post this morning, discussing ways to use Jim's agile triangle, it got me thinking.

Jonathan Schwartz, the now former Sun CEO, tweeted a haiku for his last day on the job. The creator of PHP had a lot more to say about Facebook's HipHop runtime though.

Over the past few days I was going through the Zend Framework reference docs and I found myself pleasantly surprised with all that the latest version of this web application framework provides. My first thought was to just acknowledge the speed in which PHP as a technology has been maturing. Out of the many new features, what stood out for me was the ease with which Zend Framework and PHPUnit complement and work with each other.

Determining the make of the client browser is an important component of web application development, especially if you care about browser specific adjustments & fixes. It's a rather simple thing to do, and here's how...

In this article, we are going to look at a myth that I feel is floating around in the design community. I am going to make an effort at debunking that myth, and by extension underline what I feel is the absolute most important tool of any designer. You don't want to miss this one.

Ultimately most complexity in software comes not from the requirements, the business logic, or even the underlying systems. Most complexity comes out of a poorly considered and managed architecture, and this is commonly seen in tightly coupled systems that rapidly degrade into Big Balls of Mud.

I've been doing iPhone development for about a year now and have used the delegation pattern many times. Specifically with regards to UITableViews and object serialization (NSCoding, NSCopying). Wikipedia has a great write up on the delegation pattern as well as examples in a few languages like Java, C++ and even Objective-C. The problem is that these examples, for me, don't express how powerful and how easy they are to implement and use.