Active URLs (Ned Batchelder): OmniTI have done something clever with their URLS—turned them into active verbs: their testimonials are at URLs like /helps/ning, their jobs page is at /is/hiring, etc.
What’s This Fascination with Ad Networks (John Battelle): I had breakfast at ETech with jbat (who runs the Web 2.0 Summit) and got a braindump of his thinking around web-based advertising. His end-game is fantastic: brand marketing as a value-adding interactive experience on the net rather than a proliferation of small text splash. He’s beginning to blog his thoughts in the leadup to his conference on Conversational Marketing (as he calls this interactive brand marketing).
Debategraph: anyone who has tried to have a conversation online with a lot of people will welcome any attempt to bring order to the chaos. Debategraph is a wiki debate visualization tool with RSS feeds, open modification, and more.
In Japan, URLs Are Totally Out (Cabel Sasser): the founder of Panic Software talks about a trip to Japan where he realized nobody gives URLs any more, instead they show the search terms in a searchbox that will give their site. I saw this last year in New Zealand, where an airshow was advertised with huge black and white signs that just read “GOOGLE AIR SHOW”. After briefly being confused (“man, is there ANYTHING that Google isn’t doing?”) I figured it out. Only problems I can see are that you’re at the mercy of PageRank or you are committed to outspending whoever else wants to buy that keyword.
Mail Trends: utility built for GMail but extended to any IMAP-capable server that lets you graph trends and activity in your email. First step to seeing a mail program that gives us insight into our email. Next step is to have the mail reader use that insight to manage our inbox. Are you listening, Mozilla Messaging? (see also 21 ways to visualize and explore your email inbox which has a high number of spam-related visualizations but is still worth checking out)
