Techpaulogy

Marketing in CAPTCHAs

Jean-Yves Stervinou suggested a very interesting new way to generate ad impressions to VERY attentive users: ads in CAPTCHAs. With a little design work, these might even be able to scramble the text with a company's colors? Here are his examples:

(Note: Seth Godin proposed the idea first, but JYS gave visual examples.)

coComment Integrated for Conversation Tracking

coComment conversation tracking now fully integrated on this blog to ensure proper tracking for visitors. If you don't use this tool, then by all means -- get on the bandwagon!

Happy New Year from Techpauology

Here's to wishing everyone a stellar 2007. May all your ideas turn to gold and may your friends and family prosper. I'm excited to see what the new years brings us, undoubtedly some break-throughs in social media as data gets more and more structured, open, and funtional.

Tools and Websites for Mobile Phones

Finally, Google Maps is available on my Treo mobile phone! Before now, I had to rely on the handy work of dedicated Palm users who put together hacks like KMaps. Now, I'm inspired to write about some of the best tools I use on the mobile web via my cell phone:

• Google Maps - now full features are available on most mobile phones (Treo specifically), including local search and traffic reports. Very slick. You most definitely need to use this.
• Bloglines Mobile - my preferred rss feed reader / aggregator, and the great thing is that you can specify which feeds appear on your phone so as not to overwhelm it. For example, I don't have a lot of my work-related feeds (client alerts, market research, etc.) sync to my cell phone, only the stuff that makes a good read while I'm on the run.
• Yelp Mobile - being new to Portland, Yelp is a good source of food and entertainment reviews, now available on the go. Yelp is a Web-2.0-y social approach to sites like CitySearch, with lots of local tips on what to do and where to do it.
• Skweezer - shrinks down web pages for use on your mobile phone. Good for browsing sites that aren't mobile ready (or on the .mobi TLD -- side note: is that ever going to take off?). Though, a new development I just found is Google's version, which also has the added benefit of running javascript before serving the page to your smartphone... it's looks to be in dev mode though, there's been no word from the big G about it really.
• Mobilicio.us - a mobile version of del.icio.us (and Magnolia, simpy, etc.) so you can keep your bookmarks handy. Especially useful if you setup certain tags for this purpose. And, it uses the Google page "mobilizer" mentioned above to serve up the pages. Sweet.

Speaking of del.icio.us, I'll continue to update this list under my "mobile" tag -- keep checking back. Happy mobile surfing.