Archive for: November 19, 2007

Amid a variety of recently announced advertising schemes from social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, AOL is appealing to our online ADD with the launch of online tickers ads.

Rather than including a 15- or 30-second video advertisement before a video begins, a small banner ad will pop up below content on AOL Premium Video about 10 seconds after the video starts. Interested? Click on the link and get more information. Couldn't care less? Leave it alone and it will disappear after a few seconds.

An example can be seen on this music video clip from Rihanna.

Advertisers can purchase video ticker ads for music video, TV, or news video content, according to an AOL spokeswoman. The provider is not currently offering dayparting, or targeted ads that depend on the time of day, or frequency capping, which shuts off ads after a certain number of hits or views, but "we're focused on working with advertisers to figure out the right solution for them," the spokeswoman said.

With the exception of the occasionally freaky or bizarre TV commercial, I hit the fast-forward button on my DVR the second my favorite shows fade to commercial, and I'm no less attentive to Internet advertisements. The video ticker approach, therefore, might be an easier way to attract viewers' attention, though it will have to be a pretty enticing 15-second interruption to win my click.

In just four days, the crazy shopping scene we know as Black Friday will be here. Hundreds of electronics will be marked down to amazing prices, and shoppers will be scooping them up as fast as they can.

To prepare you for your holiday shopping spree, I compiled a helpful list of the 10 Best Black Friday ad sites. One that I visit every year is Bfads.net (Black Friday Ads). Its ad scans can be downloaded in ZIP or PDF format from an array of retailers, such as Best Buy and Costco. Click on a store and view a page that compares the best, worst, and most rated deals of the season by users. There's a page to view store hours, as well as the ability to create a shopping list of products by creating a free account.

Wal-Mart and Amazon will also have their own special pages dedicated to Black Friday sales. So read up before you're headed into the madness at PCMag.com.

E-mail attachments and shady downloads from file-sharing services aren't the only ways to let viruses and other malware onto your computer. Most anti-virus applications will catch potential threats as soon as they land on your system or when you try to open them, but what if you're threatened by spyware or another form of malware that most security suites don't check for? Enter VirusTotal, a service that allows you to upload a file and have it scanned for viruses immediately.

There are a number of ways that malware can get onto your system with or without your consent. What about the pirated software you got from the "computer guy" who lives down the hall, and the archive of party photos your friend just transferred to you over IM? Most security suites will scan those files as soon as you try to open them or run them, but some security apps don't look for certain types of malware. Worse, most people who do have security software on their systems don't keep it up to date, which is almost as bad as not having anything installed at all. If you're looking at a file or a disc that you just got from a friend and you want to know if it's safe, VirusTotal might be able to help.

VirusTotal is a free online virus-scanning service provided by Hispasec Systems (based in Spain). If you have a file that you think is suspicious, browse to it, upload it to the site, watch the scan progress, and instantly get feedback as to whether the ...

What's missing from today's video sharing sites? Togetherness. Sure, you can comment and chat back and forth, but don't you want that community experience of watching the same video at the same time as your buds? Problem solved! SeeToo is a service coming soon that will let you stream a video direct from your computer to any other--and the person on the other end gets to see the video in an easy-to-view Flash video, as though it were on YouTube. But it's not. It's not even permanently stored at the URL a viewer visits. Nothing is stored by SeeToo at all.

The viewer and the video owner both watch the video play at the same time, and a little chat window underneath allows them to comment. SeeToo thinks this is a great solution for those people with extremely long and/or large files, the kind YouTube might not even allow with its size limits.

You, as the video owner, have to download and install a utility that runs in the background. It loads the SeeToo page, where you then pick a video to share. The video is is transcoded to Flash on the fly. The Invite Buddy link lets you copy a link to the clipboard to send via IM, or to send a link via email.

Then you wait for the viewer to click the link. If they don't, you're left twiddling your thumbs. It's not really something you'd use unless you're well aware that someone is waiting to see the video with you. Arguably, it's best used if you're on the phone with someone.

It might seem ...

Every now and again you find yourself stuck with a file that's just too large to e-mail but too small to package up and post on the Web, or to be worth using an in-group file sharing system such as Pando or Tubes. Maybe you're working from home on a PowerPoint presentation for a big meeting, or you're a photographer who needs to get raw photos from one computer to another for editing. FileURLs is a new service that wants to make it easy by giving you a custom URL that you can give to anyone for your uploaded files.

The largest file you can upload to FileURLs is 250MB, so don't expect it to be the ideal service for sharing your movie collection with your friends. That's fine, since the service is ideal for sharing documents and archives of files, as opposed to raw media that might get you in trouble with the authorities. There are no social aspects to the service either, meaning you can't see what other people have uploaded.

The service is incredibly simple: You browse to the file you want to share, select how long you want the file to live on FileURLs' servers (maximum is 7 days), and upload it. You can choose to make the file password protected if you want added security. You can watch the file progress as it's uploaded to FileURLs, and once the upload is complete, the service returns a custom URL that you can send to anyone who needs to ...

Our Brian Heater was impressed with classifieds aggregator Oodle at its debut, and even more impressed when the site added Oodle Index, which does the math and displays graphs showing you how many cars of the model you were searching for are available in your area at specified price ranges. Today, Oodle is launching a redesign with still more conveniences. Sadly, although the site aggregates over 80,000 sources of local classifieds, it still doesn't include the biggie—Craigslist.org

First and foremost among the site's changes are a new My Oodle personal start page, where your classified searches are updated with new finds. These are most useful for non-spur-of-the-moment purchases such as cars or apartments, but it could also be just the thing for that perfect Edwardian wine coaster you've been waiting years to buy. In the more likely cases of cars and houses, Oodle can not only alert you with an email when an opportunity of interest arises but can even predict how many of your desiderata will come on sale each week. The site's listing details page for a reasonably priced 2005 Honda Accord, for example, indicates that "a listing like this shows up every 3 days.

Other benefits of the site, which its makers vaunt as surpassing Craigslist, are its fraud- and spam-prevention capabilities. The site can automatically detect patterns that indicate a listing is a scam, as happened with an ad for cute Yorkshire Terriers that was making the rounds online. Oodle claims that with its service you also avoid what happens on Craigslist, where you'll see the same advertisement for the same item but with different subject lines ...

If you've searched far and wide for the theme song to "Knight Rider" or want to hear Stewie from "Family Guy" say, "Victory is mine!" because it makes you smile, head over to Soundboard.com. Most "soundboards" on the Web are flash apps dedicated to a specific television show, movie, or character, where you can play listen to memorable quotes or moments. At Soundboard.com, you can find thousands of soundboards from television shows, movies, entire podcasts, and even video games. And if you have your own sounds, you can make your own soundboard.

Soundboard.com sports almost 5,500 soundboards and over 70,000 sounds, so you'll probably find the sound clip that you're looking for. You can search for a character, a specific theme song, or a keyword right from the front page, or browse the soundboard categories. The service has soundboards for music and movies as expected, but also has historical sound bytes, celebrity quotes, recorded prank phone calls, and more.

One cool feature of Soundboard.com is that you can sign up for an account (free) and upload your own tracks and sound recordings to create your own soundboard. The site has templates for soundboards that look much like stand-alone media players, so you can play or pause long audio clips, or fast-forward to the good parts. Once you've created your soundboard, the service will host it and give you the embed code you need to post it on your own blog or Web site, or even in your MySpace or Facebook profile.

If you like, you can add your soundboard to the site's Board ...

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