Walmart.com on open source

Matt Assay (Walmart.com runs open source) points to a Yahoo News article on Wal-Mart’s recently launched redesign with features built on top of the Open Laszlo platform.

There’s a tour of the new features or you can go directly to Toyland and start creating your wishlist by voting yes or no on the toys.
Some interesting functionality inside women’s apparel (highlighted in the tour) which hasn’t been leveraged throughout the site yet, including an add-to-cart that doesn’t interrupt the shopping flow and live color swatches.

Worth a persual even if you’d never admit to buying clothes from Walmart.

Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of Web 2.0?

Wow. It’s been a crazy couple of days in the Blogosphere.

It all began innocently enough, with a post on Lawrence Lessig’s blog: The Ethics of Web 2.0: YouTube vs. Flickr, Revver, Eyespot, blip.tv, and even Google, in which he tried to make a distinction between “fake sharing” and “true sharing.”

The basic concept was that “true sharing” sites permit “content to move as users choose” – letting users download content whole, not just view it in the context of the host site. “Fake sharing” sites, of which YouTube was the example, don’t actually enable you to download the content, only to view it. (Yes, there are firefox extensions, and greasemonkey scripts to get around it, but YouTube themselves don’t make it easy to actually download videos).

(Updated 11/17/06 – The Cease and Desist letter YouTube’s law firm sent to TechCrunch adds an interesting twist here as it puts YouTube in the position of trying to work against the widely available methods for downloading YouTube movies and retaining local, offline copies. Best way to locate alternatives? Google, which of course now owns YouTube. Will Google send itself a cease & desist letter for linking to pages of directions on how to do this?)
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When is 2.0 > 7.0?

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, there have been a couple of major releases last week and this week in the web browser world.

Internet Explorer 7.0 was officially released last week, for Windows XP (and Windows Server 2003). (Finally, tabbed browsing and RSS feeds awareness . . . ).

Today Firefox 2.0 will be released. It’s already on the download servers for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. (I’ve linked to en-us for all the above, but if you follow the download server link it is pretty simple to get other localized versions).

Now if only there were a way to push out Firefox as effectively as MS will be able to push out IE 7 under “automatic updates . . . “

Flash 9 (Beta) for Linux

The Adobe Flash 9 team has released a beta of the Flash plug-in for Linux!

Read the announcement on the Penguin.SWF blog or the release notes, or download it from here.

(Make sure what you’re downloading is the beta update – if you go off on the path to download released versions you’ll end up with Flash 7).

I’ve only tried it on a few sites I know require Flash 9, but so far it is functioning perfectly for me in Ubuntu Dapper with Firefox 1.5

Kom In I Garderoben

Sites like these make me wish I spoke Swedish.

Two excellent examples of how rich internet applications (in this case Flash based) can revolutionize the shopping/merchandising experience on the web.

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