Just had to share this with you guys because frankly it’s one of the most innovative ways of advertising I’ve seen in quite a while. Brilliant.

Thanks Iain.

I cam across a site today which I believe could potentially be the next Million Dollar Homepage, possibly in the longer term - billion.

The site is called WriteSomething and is essentially a blank white page which allows anyone (without any form of signup) to write something onto. This is what I wrote (in orange)…

…notice, however, the red. Remember this page is neverending, it will go on & on & on…and with contextual advertising & the eye drawing ‘red’ - it’s not difficult to see ads generating high click through rates. Even more so, this is the kind of page which will attract publicity, it will have mainstream media talking about it at some point or another as well as of course blogs & other sites. Also, in terms of costs, it’s not like its hosting video or audio - this is just plain text we’re talking about, so server costs are really not going to be too big of an issue.

It’s interesting, very interesting, and I for one am looking forward to seeing how this develops - assuming they can get past the spam barrier(!) :)

I just wanted to point out a wonderfully simple, eye catching ad by “New York Fries’, an um, US Canadian based company.

Great job by Toronto agency Zig & great to see that the whole ‘picture-perfect’ look is starting to feel rusty & un-sexy. On a more depressing note, it’s not good that we have got used to food becoming artificial, clogged up with who-knows-what and the fact that a company can differentiate themselves by offering ‘real food’ which is what we should have had from the start.

Anyway, here’s the ad, click for a bigger version:

Well it’s clearly been given a much needed design & UI overhaul - let’s hope the rest is equally improved.
Ah, I was looking forward to a major release of some web app this week - and it came :]

The Review:

Well, undoubtedly, it’s an improvement. I’m not sure whether it’s an improvement that makes 6-8 months of waiting worth it…but nevertheless, at least it’s not gone down the tube.

The positives:

1. Design & UI have been vastly improved. It’s much easier on the eye, feels famiiar pretty fast & navigation seems to make sense.

2. ‘Recent Bookmarks’ which allows you to literally view the last bookmarks saved in the last minute and the number that have been…that could be very counter productive :/

3. Nice navigation change, simple.

4. Top 10 tags for yourself & other users.

5. Viewing lists of bookmarks has never been easier on the eye.

6. Only four different shades of color now - in regards to how many bookmarks a link has recieved.

7. I can’t put money on this, but it did feel like it loaded faster when submitting a bookmark. And either way, felt great to look at a much cleaner submission page - although to be fair, it wasn’t awful in the last version.

8. Look up a Url - finally, it makes the ability of looking up a specific url address simple.

Negatives

1. I still don’t understand why we aren’t able to view bookmarks in exact order of popularity….

2. Del.icio.us - is gone. It’s just delicious now…Sad, but i’ll get over it.

WriteRoom is a text-editor like product by Hogbay Software designed to make sure you focus on writing. If you haven’t tried it, it’s definitely worth a shot - below is a short, albeit, half serious review of it.

Just to warn you, you may need to squint to read the text…apologies.

I ran into an issue today. I, like a number of you out there i’m sure, have a number of ical subscriptions which frankly are a must to have by my side (i.e. on my iphone) during my day.

Unfortunately, at this moment in time, mobile me doesn’t sync with calendar subscriptions…which is a pain & NEEDS to be fixed by Apple…

After a number of different attempts, I found a solution.

This is the process & it involves google calendar & busysync (although spanning sync should work too).

1. Get the url of the calendar you are trying to subscribe to. It usually is in the form of webcal://www.randomurl.com/user/feeds/ical/333242380e2

2. Create a new calendar by url. See the image below.

3. Next, insert the url into field available but remember to change the first part of the url from webcal:// to http://.

4. Repeat steps 2 & 3 for all the calendar subscriptions you have/need.

5. Next up go get busy sync or spanning sync and follow the instructions to install & sync the relevant calendars (which are now on google calendar) with the calendars on your ical.

Now, all your subscriptions act as normal calendars on ical.

The downsides:

a. It’s a hack & not something which considering we pay for mobile me - we should have to do.
b. Google calendar does not sync immediately therefore there’s a delay of which how long, I can’t say.

Other than that - you’re all set.