It’s incredibly shocking how short some people’s memories are. In the late 1990’s the Web became inundated by frames such that content was practically inaccessible. Fast forward approximately 10 years later and we’re facing the same problem once again. In response to the surging popularity of Twitter and the need to tweet shortened URLs, Digg and others (HootSuite, Krumlr) have resurrected the sleazy technique in an attempt to take advantage of this ever growing trend. By repackaging its frame based toolbar as a social media sharing service Digg hopes to artificially inflate their own visitor statistics and steal traffic from other publishers. Read more »

Digg released their iframe based software toolbar (DiggBar) this week and I’ve been trying to educate both users and publishers as to why frames are a very bad idea. From a publisher’s standpoint, the framing of one’s website by another is considered both unethical and illegal. It effectively steals content, traffic, and potential revenue from the original content owner. From a user’s point of view, the initial attraction to these new framing toolbars (i.e. HootSuite, Krumlr, DiggBar, Facebook) is their ease of use and ability to shorten URLs for use on Twitter. Read more »

TechCrunch recently took on the challenge to build CrunchPad; a dead simple internet tablet for browsing the web, emailing, and video chatting. Their goal is to deliver a product to market under $200 to $300 that would be primarily targeted for home use. As I previously mentioned, I believe the CrunchPad will fail to be picked up by mainstream consumers in the U.S. in its current form and here’s the reasoning: Read more »

TechCrunch released a new prototype of their web tablet today called the CrunchPad. It’s much improved from the initial attempt as you can see for yourself from the video embedded below. Michael Arrington suggested in his most recent post that the goal was to produce a tablet for under $200 to $300 that sits on your lap as your watching TV and you use it for web browsing, emailing, and video chatting.

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Lately TechCrunch has been following the effects of the economic crisis on the technology sector quite closely.  Michael Arrington and his crew have been providing us with updates of the mounting numbers of tech layoffs and failing tech companies for the past month or so.  Just the other day Erick Schonfeld wrote that technology related layoffs had surged past 100,000. Read more »

It looks like Silicon Valley’s favorite tech gossip rag blog Valleywag is giving the most popular internet start-up news blog TechCrunch a real run for its money. As you can see traffic stats from Compete has Valleywag in a very close place within a difference of only ~10,000 unique visitors per month. What is more impressive however is the surge in Valleywag’s traffic that was experienced in January and overall growth for the year compared to TechCrunch (3415.3% vs. 749.8%). Given the popular stories that Valleywag has covered this month, we will likely see it overtake Techcrunch again but perhaps for good this time. After all, what’s more interesting to readers; multi-million Read more »