Web 2.0 Stores > Fast, Simple, Search Engine Friendly Ecommerce

Visible.net is a new provider of state-of-the-art ecommerce and online marketing services.

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On Tuesday this week the official YouTube API Blog launched with their first post. No news there yet, but is surely a good place to keep an eye on if you’re developing with their API. We have updated our YouTube API Profile to include both the blog and the YouTube API Google Group. As of today we have 116 YouTube mashups listed at PW. Clearly this is an API lots of developers have an interest in. If you have any ideas about what would make the YouTube API better, they’re inviting API feature requests here. So far developers have asked for things like the ability to add and delete videos, an API for video responses, and hooks into the player. Speaking of those additions to the YouTube API profile: we’ve been enhancing our API profiles recently with some new data. For example, two new profile fields are API Blog and API Forum. This allows you to quickly see if a given API has an associated blog and some type of newsgroup or dedicated forum. More enhancements coming soon…

Being a blogger for quite a few years I couldn’t help but read Tim O’Reilly’s post about a Code of Conduct for bloggers, following the Kathy Sierra incident that flooded TechMeme with outrage (and rightfully so) with the preposterous personal threats against Kathy. And having read and thought about it, I decided not to write about the proposed Code of Conduct because honestly I knew others would do a great job of dissecting it first. But there’s a couple of ideas that I feel are important to bring up at this point: Blogging is about community, and any community has bad seeds. This is one of the consequences of being human - you are bound to have people disagree with you, dislike your work and diss your efforts. Not being “right” for everyone is what makes you strive to become better every day. Just imagine a world where no one would voice their opinion against you - perfect, right? Wrong. This makes it easy to assert that yes, anonymous comments are wrong or to be frowned upon, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they shouldn’t be accepted. People do feel more comfortable speaking their minds about certain things if they do it anonymously - again it is only natural. There’s obviously a big line between an opinion and a threat, and here naturally common sense applies. It is the nature of the blogosphere to be “unmediated” (remember the whole “We are the media thing”?), and a Code of Conduct only serves as an excuse for traditional media to discredit both bloggers and those who read blogs. Naturally rules apply to blogs - but those should only be the rules upon which society itself is based on. The blogging community doesn’t all move in the same direction, and that’s the beauty of it. There’s no need for a formal ruleset to control the tide. This is obviously a philosophical question and not a moral question. We all understand when lines are crossed and action must be taken, but isn’t trying to regulate something that excels in (well,) entropy and unmediated growth a little too “weird”?

The AJAX Search team at Google has been creating wizards that wrap the search APIs. I placed a news bar on my own blog, and we just found a new one that displays blog search results. It is kinda crazy to be reading some page and seeing new content on a given topic show up in the bar sometimes minutes after the content has been pushed. I quickly created a blog bar for some of the frameworks: