vividcontext.com

Yelp is the fun and easy way to find, review and talk about what’s great (and not so great) in your world. Bostonians already know that asking friends is the best way to find restaurants, dentists, hairstylists, and anything local. About 1.5 Million people come to Yelp each month to make recommendations and share reviews.

In a story about local open source magazines, Wired said, “…There are already some strong players in the community-generated directory space, Yelp.com being the best.” With Yelp you get a city guide that taps into the community’s voice and reveals honest and current insights on local businesses and services on everything from martinis to mechanics.

Yelp is word of mouth marketing - amplified. Savvy local marketers now have a great channel to effectively target local consumers. Yelp is already running in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, New York, Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, Washington DC, Austin, Atlanta with more destinations on the way.

Another interesting development is the release of mobil.yelp.com. Now when you leave dinner with some friends and need a nice nearby bar/ lounge to sit, chat and digest. Yelp Mobile now gives you the best nail salons, shoe repair shops, taquerias and everything else local, whenever and wherever you need it.

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When I first started “designing” websites, everything was text-based.

Eventually, there were browsers that could display graphics, but it wasn’t until Netscape came along when the phrase “Web Design” took on a whole new meaning. I couldn’t view the webpage on a Mac in the beta version of Netscape, and I couldn’t create graphics in Windows 3.11. So in those days, I fired up my Mac to create the graphics and used a PC to view what I created.

The old <img> tag that we used back then to embed images into a web page, hasn’t really changed in over a decade. Well, history may have just been rewritten.

Wecome to “Image2.0″

This morning, the smart people at AdBrite launched “BritePic“, which adds more functionality to embeded image than you ever could before. All you do is change the embed code, and it will allow you to add a caption, a watermark, zoom, share and other features. If that’s not cool enough, you can also add an advertisement to the photo if you want. So, replace the <img> tag with some javascript and when the user hits your page, they will have a whole new user experience!

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Jib Jab The creators of “This Land” have created a new video called, “The News,” (embedded below). The new video premiered last night at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner. I did not find this video to be nearly as funny as their previous creations. They spoofed on several people, which is great, but none of the characters said anything. Bring back the impersonations! The most memorable parts of their previous videos are when the characters say little one liners in the middle of the song.

Speaking of speaking, I especially didn’t like that they didn’t use their trademarked clunky moving chin for the characters when they were singing. In this video, the heads were completely cut in half and didn’t look nearly as good.

I recommend looking at their previous masterpieces! All of their original videos are available on the Jib Jab website. I just watched the year in review called, “Nuckin’ Futs“, which was pretty funny. (notice the clunky moving chins)

The business of Jib Jab is growing. They raised a series A round of funding from Jon Flint at Polaris and they have added an interesting new element to their site called “Joke Box”. Instead of only videos coming from their own creativity, they are becoming more of a repository for all types of humor-related media - created by other people. Good social move!

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With PayPerPost, bloggers get paid by site owners to blog. They earn money to write about web sites, products, services, and companies and earn cash for providing their opinion and valuable feedback to advertisers.

This brings up an ethical question about the honesty of an opinion when people are being paid to say it. In order to solve the trust problem, PayPerPost created “Badges” which is intended to provide transparency and full disclosure.

A new service BegForPost takes on the ethical question of services like PayPerPost that has advertisers paying bloggers to write about their products. BegForPost does not have the ethical baggage that PayPerPost must carry. There’s no payment, no conflicts of interest, only begging for coverage.

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Google clearly and directly recommends not to use programs like WebPostion Gold to submit pages or check rankings because, “Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service”.

Someone recently asked me what Google’s actual terms are regarding SEO software. This is a quote from Google’s terms:

No Automated Querying
You may not send automated queries of any sort to Google’s system without express permission in advance from Google. Note that “sending automated queries” includes, among other things: using any software which sends queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage “ranks” on Google for various queries;

So there you have it. Using any software like WebPositon Gold to send queries definitely violates the Google rules. Be very careful! From what I have read, getting back into Google is very difficult. Do a search in Goolge for “site:www.webpositiongold.com” or “site:www.webposition.com” and you’ll see that both of their Websites have been DE-LISTED. That must be why they had to buy all those pay-per-click ads.

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Later this morning Twitter will release a new API that opens a lot of doors. Users can send a direct message to a username which is just a name for a web service like weather.com. For example, there could be a Twitter username “weather”, which you could send a Twitter message of “d weather 02048″ by text, web, or IM. The Twitter username “weather” could get this message via the new API, run a process on a web server to retrieve the current weather forecast for 02048, and send that as a direct message back to you that goes like this: “d VividContext Currently: Sunny, 45F. Tomorrow’s Forecast: AM Sun/PM Clouds. High: 55 Low: 42″).

Or there could be a username “score”, which you could send “d score Redsox”, to immediately request the score of the Redsox game. Or another example could be “d 411 DunkinDonuts 02048″ to retrieve the phone number of the closest cup of your favorite coffee in zip code 02048. This functionality may open opportunities for business to get results from Twitter tweets.

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