Blogging

Greasemonkey, a Firefox customization tool popular among high-powered Web surfers, is coming to Google Chrome browser.

Aaron Boodman, a Greasemonkey author and a Google programmer who’s active in the Gears project, contributed Greasemonkey support to Chrome, and the Google Operating System blog picked up on the change.

At this stage, enabling Greasemonkey requires people to use a cutting-edge developer version of the open-source browser and to launch it with a “–enable-greasemonkey” option set.

Greasemonkey lets people run scripts that modify Web page appearance. For example, back when Google’s Gmail service lacked a “delete” button, people could add one by installing the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox then downloading a particular customization script.

Google wants to improve the Greasemonkey support, for example by confining particular Greasemonkey scripts to particular Web pages and letting the browser update its scripts as it’s running.

See the rest here:
Tweaker alert: Greasemonkey coming to Chrome

WideOrbit, a software developer that manages advertising sales for over 1,000 TV stations, radio stations, cable networks, and stadiums, announced that it raised $9.5 million of Series D funding in a round that was led by MayField Ventures. But according to the company, it’s hoping for an additional $800,000 before it closes the round.

Although advertising is expected to slow over the coming months amid economic troubles, WideOrbit’s ability to raise its latest round of funding may suggest that some venture capitalists don’t necessarily trust that it will be so bad. But with a set of solutions that aim at maximizing an advertising campaign’s effectiveness online, while minimizing expenses, WideOrbit’s solutions aren’t unique. And in a time of economic uncertainty, that may not be enough for it to compete on the same level as competitors like the Harris Corporation or any other advertising optimization companies that try to help companies improve their advertising campaigns.

Thanks to its latest round, WideOrbit has now raised $30 million in funding since its inception.

Read more:
WideOrbit secures $9.5 million in funding

There is a new service currently in beta that lets you update twitter with videos. Twiddeo was originally a proof of concept created by vSocial but they received such great positive feedback that they tweaked it and are releasing it as it’s own service. Twiddeo combines Twitter along with vSocials own video player […]

Continued here:
Expanding twitter with video

Of the 20 or so demos set out to bake in the afternoon soon on the August Capital patio for the TechCrunch party Friday, my award for the most interesting goes to Plista, a social recommendation service that follows what you like and don’t across sites.

Plista currently uses a Greasemonkey script. Once you install it, when you go to a site in the Plista system - CEO Domink Matyka told me there are about 30 so far - you’ll find the page has new Plista pieces on it: A rating box on each element at the least, and possibly more content additions too.

Plista adds rating features and feedback to sevaral sites.

(Credit: Plista)

By way of example, Matyka showed me Plista working with IMDB. I could rate movies on the site, and once I did, the service would show me other things it thought I would like based on the preferences of other people who liked what I did. What’s cool about Plista is that the recommendation engine works across sites, so it’ll recommend (in theory) books on Amazon based on movies you’ve rated on IMDB. And - also cool - it shows you your ad-hoc network of Plista members who have compatible tastes, so you can explore their recommendations.

Think of it as Aggregate Knowledge meets MyBlogLog meest Sphere, with a dash of Matchmine (review).

I like the concept, and I like how easy it is for site managers to implement the system: They don’t have to do anything. Plista does the lifting.

Unfortunately, I don’t get how this service is going win wide adoption. There’s a chicken-and-egg problem, for one: Getting a site Plista-enabled is a manual process, and while Plista can create the scripts for major sites, it can’t reach into the long tail to code them all. Plista will need site owners to do some work themselves. And there’s the egg: You can’t use Plista unless you have Greasemonkey installed. While it’s a popular engine for browser modification scripts, it’s not a mainstream add-on, so the potential audience is limited. And who wants to bother coding a site for such a small number of users?

Worse, many of the most important sites that Plista would work on - blogs, commerce sites, and databases - already have their own rating systems that Plista would compete with. I don’t see Amazon or Netflix adopting this system, for example.

I still like the concept here. Plista lets you rate products and content, gives you a lot in return for your rating activity, and it makes all your rating data yours; it doesn’t lock it away deep in some secret database on the sites you visit.

Plista does have a fighting chance, I believe, if it drops the Greasemonkey tactic and instead focuses on developing a way for retailers and content managers can port their rating data to the service, in return for cross-site recommendations and the affiliate revenues that would come with them.

Plista isn’t available yet, but you can sign up for the beta on the site.

More here:
Plista: Ad-hoc social networks for product recommendations