But I guess it just goes to show you any business can have a go! Here’s a press release which may be of some interest.

Are you one of the many internet users who often search for the same information across a number of your favourite sites? If the answer is YES, then Gemsta can offer you a platform to create a free centralised search location to access your frequently queried resources.

Gemsta’s unique MultiSearch technology, which allows users to search multiple sites simultaneously, can be now be customised to help find anything quickly and easily from a personal choice of sites. Gemsta requires no specialist software and is accessible from anywhere online. Up to 16 sites per zone can be organised into structured grids or funky frames with added colourful backgrounds.

“It takes a matter of minutes to organise your weblife, simply register and complete a four step process using the Find Wizard,” explains Jonathan Franklin, managing director, Gemsta.com. “You can choose from over 400 sites including search engines, shopping sites and social media sites. Just select a frame, drag your chosen logos into the 16 space grid, choose a background, name your zone and you are away!” continues Jonathan.

The Find Wizard is just one part of the newly structured FIND within Gemsta.com. It joins comparison shopping, vouchers and deals, 3D shopping and wishlist – plus the comprehensive

pre-organised shopping zones and 6 web search zones. Once you’ve found FIND you’ll wonder how you ever got on without it!!

Plus coming soon – the ability to SAVE anything you FIND on the web and organise it into personalised folders, then SHARE it with a chosen few or the whole world.

Gemsta Website: http://www.gemsta.com
Gemsta Blog: http://www.gemsta.net

Comments

This nifty tool goes way beyond simply getting access to news content on The Guardian website. You can certainly do that as can anyone: The Guardian, like nearly every other newspaper, doesn’t charge for access to its content.

Where this gets interesting is that it enables you to access content from The Guardian online and re-publish it verbatim on your WordPress blog. In effect, you become an extension of The Guardian, and can value-add your own content to that of The Guardian’s that you re-publish.

Here’s an example of a story in the Guardian that I published here earlier today.

The screenshot above (click to see it larger) shows the edit post page in this blog’s admin: the page you see if you write posts directly in the blog. It’s populated with the 2000-word content of a story published in The Guardian, done automatically by the plugin’s admin page from a story that I chose from a huge list of content at The Guardian: screenshot below (click to see it larger).

The Guardian’s content is free to access and re-publish under very clear conditions: no changing any of the content including the ads. Yes, it’s ad supported.

It’s extremely easy to set up and use: once you’ve installed the plugin and obtained the required API key, you’re ready to simply choose a story, edit it if you want, and publish it in your own blog.

So how or where does this Guardian initiative fit into the overall picture of consumers paying for access to content online?

Not anywhere obvious. News and other content on The Guardian website is freely available (ie, you’re not required to register to pay any subscription fee) although you do need to register if you want to comment on anything on the site.

The Guardian is an open book, so to speak, not competing with The Times and Sunday Times paywall models; nor, for that matter those long established pay-for-access models used by the Financial Times and The Economist.

So where does it fit?

You need to think of a newspaper like The Guardian not simply as a “digital newspaper” any more. More than any other mainstream medium I can think of, The Guardian’s approach to the thorny topic of consumers paying for content has moved in a different direction, more to do with opening up the paper to the web than looking at how to monetize content by persuading people to come to your website to access that content.

That’s according to The Guardian’s Matt McAlister in an interview with GigaOm published on July 2:

[...] the rationale behind both the open platform and the WordPress plugin is the same: to allow other sites and services to make use of the newspaper’s content, and at the same time to enlist them as partners in monetizing that content by carrying advertising (The Guardian also has platform partners who share the revenue from their services with the newspaper). The paper has had thousands of developers sign up to implement the open API.

At a time when newspapers like The Times of London and the Sunday Times are implementing paywalls [...] and other newspaper, such as the New York Times, are working on their own pay restrictions, The Guardian’s move toward creating an open platform is unusual. But despite the newspaper’s losses, Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger has said that an open strategy is the key to the newspaper’s future.

More at GigaOm including a 5-minute video interview with Chris Thorpe, The Guardian’s developer advocate until the end of May.

I like the idea of what The Guardian is doing with this WordPress plugin. I can imagine using it to re-publish content from the newspaper online if that content is interesting enough that I can add some commentary or opinion to the post that would appear here.

It’s not clear to me yet how the monetization aspect works – do I get a cut of revenue from clicks on the ads? – but I’m happy to go along with publishing for the time being. After all, I benefit too by having some great content from a reliable and trusted source to share from this blog.

So from a content publisher’s point of view, instead of trying to bring consumers to your content, you enable your content to go to consumers via outlets other than your own.

Maybe there’s room for every idea that gives people what they want (compelling content)  and that they might be willing pay for, one way or another, so that content publishers get what they want (revenue).

It could be that simple.

Comments

Dave’s Answer:

I’ve always wondered about sales people who drive so much, actually. I certainly enjoy long drives, and have taken many of them, but they’re still far between and I can go for many months without being in the car for more than an hour. Sounds like you don’t have that luxury!

It’s also cool that you have realized that your iPhone is a quite functional iPod alternative and is a simple and portable tool for carrying and listening to audiobooks. I do the same at the gym, actually, and it lets me listen to the same audio book in my car if I want too.

But buying an audiobook on the phone? Yeah, there’s a pretty simple way to do that.

Here’s what I did recently when I decided to relisten to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a classic sort of “hippie” book from the mid 70s.

The app you want to use is iTunes: it’s a pretty purple icon on your iPhone. Find it and tap on it. First thing you’ll see is new music:

See the “More” option on the lower right corner? That’s what you want to tap on. Now, surprise, there’s more than just music and video in the iTunes store:

You can guess, but I’ll say it: tap on “Audiobooks” and you’ll see what’s popular:

That’s actually not what I want, though, I just wanted to show you it was there. What I want is the search feature, which can be found along the bottom row too. Tap on it and enter a few words that describe the title you seek:

Hmmm… two matches for the same audio book? A bit of research shows that one is unabridged and the other is abridged (or shortened). Since the abridged version is still over six hours long, that’s the one for me:

In case you’ve never purchased something from iTunes before, you tap on the price and it changes to a buy button:

Yup, tap on the buy button and you’re purchasing the audiobook.

Well, once you verify your identity:

Oh, and just about every audio book you check out is going to have this problem:

No worries, however, because next time you successfully connect to a wifi network (like at a café or client’s office) it’ll automatically download the audio book.

Once that’s happened, go to “iTunes” (probably along the bottom of your iPhone screen, it’s a cheery orange icon), again tap on the “More” button on the bottom right, and:

Oddly similar. Go figure. Tap on “Audiobooks” and…

Ahhh, there it is. Mission accomplished. Audio book found, acquired, downloaded and ready to enjoy, all without ever touching a computer.

Good luck and let us know what kind of audiobooks you enjoy too!

Comments

Dave’s Answer:

There is indeed a good solution and it’s one that involves software from Google, but it’s not part of Gmail itself. In the never-ending race to compete with office software applications (e.g., against Microsoft Office, the killer suite of MS Word, MS Excel and MS PowerPoint), Google has been slowly but surely buying up innovative startups and tightly integrating quite a few different utilities to create Google Docs.

Most people think of Google Docs because of its ability to replace MS Word and let you do word processing right within a Web browser, with your document living in the so-called cloud rather than on your disk or trapped on your computer. It lets you do that, and nicely, but there’s quite a bit more that you can do with Google Docs once you sign up for an account.

I’m involved with the Modern Media Man Summit and we’re using Google Docs extensively for our document and data management tasks, including having Google Docs, by way of a form, manage the entire speaker submission process.

Let me show you how to set up a basic data input form and you’ll see that it lets you quickly and easily create just the kind of form you seek.

One caveat before we start, however: it works, and it’s pretty easy, but Google Docs is also quite crude in terms of customization options and I am hoping it’ll be rewritten to offer greater flexibility. No word on that yet, however.

First things first. Log in to Google Docs, then on the top left, look for the “Create new” button:

Choose a new Form and it pops up an untitled template:

Start by giving your form a title and adding some basic explanatory text. I’ll use this:

Not too complicated, but the fun part starts after this: the second section of the form template is an input prompt skeleton and it’s up to us to define it, label it, and configure it for our needs. For this form, I’ll ask users for their name, zip code and favorite movie, then add a set of radio buttons that let them indicate whether they most recently saw the film in the theater, on TV, on a pay channel, on a DVD or on a Blu-Ray disk.

Ready?

For this first question, we’ve indicated that the prompt should be “What’s your name?” and that the resultant information should be text (that is, an open text field where they can type in anything) and that it’s a required question: the form cannot be submitted without the user adding something here, though there’s no way to know if it’s really their name or “john doe” or something.

For the second question, we want to ask for their zip code. Same basic thing. To add a second question to the form, however, I’ll need to use another text field because there’s no “numbers only” field or really any method of form validation…

Click on “Text”, enter a prompt, click on the little “done” button, and now you suddenly realize a bit of a weirdness about Google Docs form creation:

Where do you go from here? You have to keep using “Add Item”, but before we do, there’s an unused question that’s crept into the mix, “Sample Question 2″. To delete it before we proceed, you need to move your cursor over the right side of the question area, at which point a few buttons magically appear:

Click on the tiny trashcan and the question vanishes from your form. Now click on “Add Item” again to add the question about favorite movie.

Now we want to select “Choose from a list” for the radio buttons (“radio buttons” is the HTML designer name for the element where you have more than one option, but can only choose one of them, just like radio stations on a car stereo). Choose it and the result is a bit different:

The options we want to list are “Movie Theater”, “Blu-Ray DVD”, “Regular DVD”, “Cable Movie Channel” and “Broadcast TV”, so I add those, one at a time:

It seems like there’s an extra option, but you’ll see, it magically vanishes once we’re done editing.

The next step, now that we have the fields we want, is to pick a nice theme so that it’s a bit less boring. On the top there’s a button “Theme: Plain”. Click on it and you’ll see the set of themes available to make the form a bit more interesting:

There are lots more, but I like “Finance Chart” so I’ll click on it. Google Docs now shows me a preview of how that’s going to look:

Looks good. Click on “Apply” and you’ve set a theme for your form. Nice!

You can see the form as a standalone URL — and share this URL with friends and colleagues, if you want — on the dark bar at the very bottom of the screen:

Since you want to email it, however, let’s do that instead. On the top there’s a button “Email this form”. Click on it and you’ll be prompted for some addresses:

For a lot of email systems, however, the result isn’t quite what we’d hope:

Still works, but what I like about Google Docs Form capability is that you can embed the form on a page with an IFRAME tag. I’ll show you, I’ll actually embed the live form here on this blog post!

To do that, on the top bar, click on “More actions” and choose “Embed”:

The result is a single line of code:

I’ll actually paste it in here so you can see what happens:

That’s all there is to it. Try entering the info and clicking submit. Thanks! You’ve just added your movie to the list. Notice that we never moved to a second page: it all transpires neatly within the embedded area.

Now, between all these different options, I hope you can figure out a fast and easy way to create a Web-base form and make your life easier!

Comments

Dave’s Answer:

Nice job. Many people who shop online forget that modern sites like Amazon.com not only keep track of what you buy but in what you look at too. I know this first-hand because if I look for a gift for someone or, worse, I buy something for one of my kids, suddenly I’m inundated with recommendations of similar products even though I don’t actually have any interest in those additional products. This is worse if two of you share an account, as it sounds like you might do: if your spouse is into NASCAR and you’re into quilting, well, you can see where those recent searches can be pretty far off base.

Fortunately, Amazon must have received a fair amount of feedback about this feature so they not only let you disable it, but they let you remove specific entries from the recent search list on a case-by-case basis too.

To modify it, you need to go to the Amazon.com site and log in with your account credentials. Probably that latter step is unnecessary and when you look on the top left it says something like:

What you want is on the top right, actually:

Click on “Your Account” and you’ll see a vast number of options. Scroll down to find the “Personalization” section:

Click on “View and edit your browsing history”, as you can see I’ve already done (which is why my text link is brown, not blue):

As you can see, it shows a list of your recently viewed items. Here you can see the Mac Mini I’d been checking out. To the right is the key element, the “Delete this item” link. Find the gift possibilities you’d been examining and delete them here and your spouse will never know what you were doing on Amazon.com!

If you’d rather just disable the feature forever, back on the Personalization section there’s another link “Your Browsing History Settings”. Click on it and you’ll go to another page with a big yellow button:

Click on that and you’ll never have to worry about Amazon.com tracking this information. Helpful, eh?

Comments