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Wednesday, December 28, 2005
scanR - Mobile Scan, Copy, Fax
More on the paperless office. scanR let's you capture documents and/or whiteboard shots with your camera phone, and then returns them to you as PDF files via e-mail or as a fax image. The company's before/after photos are impressive. You need a 1 megapixel camera to play. [via Rob May]scanR - Mobile Scan, Copy, Fax
scanR helps you capture and share documents and whiteboards. scanR uses advanced imaging technologies to convert pictures into readable PDF files and faxes. Good camera phones can take decent photos of babies, pets and sunsets, but are not designed for scanning. scanR is an innovative service that turns your camera phone into a scanner, copier and fax.
Posted by: 
Terry Frazier at 10:58 AM
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Categories: Automation, Productivity, Technology
Terry Frazier at 10:58 AM
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Monday, December 5, 2005
Automating the International Affiliate Sale
This morning Matt Mower sent a link to Toronto-based programmer Scott Ambler's site, where Scott has created an Amazon Affiliate page with links for US, UK, CAN, AUS, and JP geographies. Matt has bought a few books from recommendations here, but has never purchased via my Amazon links becasuse they are US-based and he is in the UK. Matt thought Scott's setup was good and recommended I do something similar so he could purchase via here in the future. He went on to say:
It also occurs to me that, with one of those things that can look you up via your IP address, you could dynamically generate a link to the correct associates site (US/UK/etc...) without needing to provide a whole bunch o'links (but obviously providing fall-back to a page with all of them in case it goes wrong).This seems like a good idea but I don't know anything about it - how difficult is it, are there existing tools, etc. An inquiry to AJAX and Remote Scripting guru Brent Ashley on the feasibility of Matt's suggestion led to hostip.info which has some interesting examples of what can be done with ip lookups. Below I've pasted in a snippet of code that should (if all goes well) display the national flag of an individual page viewer.
If there is a zooming map and a flag above this worked, if not it didn't. I can't see the HTML in Qumana so I don't know how this will be formatted. But it seems to me that using an ip lookup service such as hostip.info combined with a little server-side scripting one could do what Matt suggests. I don't know how useful it would be. Probably not very for any one individual - I've sold a whopping 10 books through Amazon since October 1, generating roughly $10 in affiliate fees. Can't imagine that would be much higher if I'd had CAN/UK affiliate links available. But then again...
Technorati Tags : marketing
Posted by: Terry Frazier at 2:18 PM
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Categories: Automation, Books
Terry Frazier at 2:18 PM
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Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Can We Get Socially ORL?
Radio Userland product manager Steve Kirks proposes a new nickname for this weeks geek topic, OPML Reading Lists. I know lots of people hate OPML because Dave Winer thought of it, but I like it (Id love to see a real outliner for windoze that used it) and I like the idea of a standard way of publishing reading lists.
Nick Bradbury of FeedDemon/TypeStyle/NewsGator fame explains a little more what ORL is about:OPML Reading Lists need a nickname
OPML reading lists (an OPML file containing links to selected XML syndication feeds) are the hot topic this month and personally, I'm tired of typing all of those letters. So, in the grandest tradition of the blogosphere, let's find a good way to shorten those words. I'm proposing ORL pronounced "oral". Usage: Person A: "I need new stuff to read. Got any recommendations?" Person B: "Download this "orl" file into your aggregator?" Person A: "What's an aggregator?" Person B: "<SIGH>" ORL isn't the prettiest name, but if I pick something, someone else might make a better stab at it. I'm going to start tagging these types of post with ORL, too.
Then I read where the indomitable Judith Meskill at the Social Software Weblog has finally, unbelievably, indisputably had enough of entering all her stuff into all these different services (I actually felt this way the second time I did it. Judith must have done it hundreds of times.)In a nutshell, the idea is that you'd subscribe to an OPML document which contains a list of feeds that someone is reading, some organization is recommending, or some service has generated (such as "Top 100" list). Changes to the source OPML document would be synchronized, so that you're automatically subscribed to feeds added to the reading list. Likewise, you'd be unsubscribed from feeds removed from the original OPML.
So I have to ask, isn't there a path here for ORL to capture a "lifestream" that populates all these things and just fills them in as we hop from one container service to another? Now, I know we have FOAF and LOAF and RDF and BFD and whatever, but theyre all so freakin complicated I cant deal with them. OPML I get maybe because it gets rendered as a human-readable outline but I get it. I dont know how this stuff works so maybe its all just so-o-o-o-o-o much more complicated than someone like me can grasp. But Id be happy for people to tell me why ORL cant begin to do what Ive described.Swagroll lists and shares your stuff again
I caught a glimpse of Swagroll last week and saw it again on Emily Changs excellent eHub list of Web 2.0 apps and figured Id mention it here. Why didnt I mention it last week? Well... Im of the same mind as Stowe Boyd -why do I feel like Im doing a lot of work Ive already done elsewhere? Add books, music, movies, and more to your own swagroll - my god, do I have to? Again? Didnt we do this already with Delicious Monster? Havent I done this in iTunes? Havent I done this on Amazon? On All Consuming? On Netflix? I have zero desire to do any of it all over again. Zero. [...]
Posted by: Terry Frazier at 10:53 AM
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Categories: Automation, Collaboration, RSS
Terry Frazier at 10:53 AM
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