Read more about Brad Pitt at Kosmix

Comments

Comments are a great way to interact with visitors of your website. This can be particularly valuable for companies promoting products and services, to hear what users have to say. Commenting systems often require a database, especially if you plan to have across several pages. However, small businesses host their websites without having database access and neither do they have the technical expertise to devote to creating such commenting systems. That is when third party commenting system prove to be very useful. Here is a list that I found so far, please comment and add some of your own:

Website: DISQU

Disqus offers a javascript embed or blog plug-in (Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, MovableType) that enhances a blog’s comments and integrates it with a fully moderated community forum, hosted at exampleforum.disqus.com. Disqus’s service adds threads, comment/user ratings, spam control, and user identities for each commenter. The system can either...

IntenseDebate comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website.

Facebook Comments

http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=198

Kosmix in BBC World News!!

Recently BBC crew was in office. BBC in UK covered us in November but this coverage went live on television across the world. People in India confirmed that they saw it as well. On a personal note: I (rather my back) was streamed as well. Here are my favorite frames from the video. Click the image to see the video online.

How to get ActiveScaffold to work on Windows

ActiveScaffold is a great development and quite popular.. However, when you follow the exact instructions as listed on the getting started guide the plug in simply does not work. Trust me follow this link and you will get the these errors:

C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.2.2/lib/active_support/core_ext/module/aliasing.rb:33:in `alias_method': undefined method `find_full_template_path' for class `ActionView::Base' (NameError) from C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.2.2/lib/active_support/core_ext/module/aliasing.rb:33:in `alias_method_chain' from D:/Work/Project/test/test/vendor/plugins/active_scaffold/lib/extensions/generic_view_paths.rb:33 from C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require' from C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require' from C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.2.2/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:153:in `require' from C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.2.2/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:521:in `new_constants_in' from C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.2.2/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:153:in `require' from D:/Work/Project/test/test/vendor/plugins/active_scaffold/environment.rb:63 ... 31 levels... from C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-2.2.2/lib/commands/server.rb:49 from C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require' from C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require' from script/server:3

I wasted many hours trying to find a way to fix this error. It is amazing that the main site has no mention of this! However, let me come to the main point i.e. the solution. Follow these steps to make it work on Windows:

1. Install Cygwin. Please make sure you install GIT as part of the setup options. Its under devlp.
2. Run the Cygwin bat file and on the command prompt enter
   git clone git:://github.com/activescaffold/active_scaffold.git

3. All the files should be downloaded to /home/user/active_scaffold/
4. Copy the files from there to c:\ruby\yourapp\vendors\plugin\active_scaffold. If there is an existing directory by the same name then DELETE it first.

You are done!

Step 1 and 2 are Windows specific, however you dont need them if the OS you have already has git installed.

Hope all this helps.

Kosmix.com Beta Live and $20 million more in the bank

Kosmix.com launched today with great fanfare from the press. The company also raised $20 million more from Time Warner which brings the total funding to $55 million. See below my list of media publications I have been tracking.


Kosmix: Your Guide to the Web from Kosmix on Vimeo.

Besides having passionately worked on the product I am also an avid user. So here I want to share why I feel Kosmix is truly adding value.

I think it all comes down to the second click. Here is an interesting article on "The Fight for the second click". I feel Kosmix helps make a more informed second click and thus helps in reducing them. How?

Let's go to the homepage. I see a hot topic "Eric Shinseki" that I have no clue about, but curious to know more. At this point I would urge the user to open two windows : one a google result and the other a kosmix topic page. So clearly Google provides some good links but they are not organized and each requires a second click. However with the "At a glance" module at Kosmix I quickly get a summary of the topic. Images even remind me that I have seen him in the news on CNN and that is precisely what is organized below. As I scan down I see blogs, opinions and discussions and just reading through the headlines I get a sense of why he is a hot topic. Scanning this page helps me make a more informed second click. In this case I clicked on a video to watch him talk. On Google I would have to click the image tab, video tab, etc. to see what other relevant information existed on this topic. So a value Kosmix brings to me is that it better understands my search term, organizes the web with a 360 topic view which helps me make an informed second click.

A second core value Kosmix brings is that it helps me explore and expand. So I can discover aspects of the topic which I would not have imagined looking for. It can also help me navigate to topics related to what I am reading. Check these topics out to see what I mean

2008 olympics (i would have never found the olympics medal tally elsewhere, and remember even if it showed up on Google it would a click away, while at Kosmix its right there)
xbox 360 (Here i expanded my second click because in the realted in Kosmos I see list of games for xbox 360 and I can quickly navigate to Halo 3 to check out some hot games before buying this unit)

I would really encourage the reader to try and experience this for himself.

I know its a hard to switch search habits but with Kosmix the transition is not painful because Kosmix does not replace search, it rather consumes it. So if Kosmix.com does not understand your query well it will show Google search results so that the user experience is not compromised.

Here is a list of coverage that I have been tracking:

CNet

BusinessWeek

PaidContent

Guardian

TechCrunch

TechMeme

AltSearchEngines

GigaOm

VentureBeat:

PE Hub:

Disclosure: I work at Kosmix, however the views expressed here are purely mine.

Need for Speed

I have always wondered how Google decided on 10 for the number of results they show on the first page. Contrary to intuition, it was not driven by paradox of choice but speed instead. 10 results were half a second faster than 30. Speed (a.k.a. Latency) is the time between an action and its response. It has been an important contributer to Google's success. It also helped put Google Maps on the map. Powered by Ajax, Google Maps, provided instant gratification, unheard of in web applications. Speed has also been the secret sauce behind many innovate user interfaces (PicLens, SearchMe, etc.). I love it, when some sites have started giving instant feedback, when creating a new login, if the user-id is already taken or the password is weak. The flip side is also true. Users are sensitive to slow applications. Glue, a recent search innovation by Yahoo, got some media coverage, and already got some user comments pick up on its speed. Simply tells how sensitive users have gotten to speed. But then there are applications to which we are more tolerant. Content sites belong to that group. We are still alright if they take longer to load but we want applications such as search and maps to be instantaneous. Why is that so? I would suggest our need for speed is a function of the frequency of interaction and usage. Wikipedia articles are mainly consumed not interacted with but search is an iterative process.

So what does speed mean to sites that thrive on user-generated content? I think there is something deep here. Instant feedback boosts learning. Instant feedback can motivate users to contribute more and improve quality. Won't you love if you got a response to your question in no time? Won't you want to post to such a forum more often? Surprisingly, no Q&A site I know, measures the average time between a question and its answer and then advertises this information to end-users. Measuring for speed is the first step towards optimizing it. Its only then you will search creative ways to increase speed. If the size of each transaction is reduced the number of transactions can go up. Not only will you increase more contributions from the same user but increase the number of users who contribute. Did micro-blogging succeed because its easily available or by reducing the size of the posts they were able to increase the frequency and the number of posts? Instant feedback also is a driver of quality. If my blog had many readers, I would be more driven towards high-quality posts. Instant feedback can take many forms, a simple vote counter, nevertheless, finding creative ways to increase speed in user-generated content applications can be very rewarding.