Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Aviary, aka a.viary, a suite of Web 2.0 office and graphic design products, has the most beautiful front page that I’ve seen in a very long time. It features a simple flash panel with overlapping layers that zoom in perspective with the motion of your mouse. You absolutely need to see it if you already haven’t:

Here is a little sample of the kind of “photoshops” their editor can do:

For those of you new to this blog, this was not created in Photoshop. It was created in Aviary, a suite of online web applications.

For more, you should check out their blog, which features additional demos. The company is in direct competition with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo online applications, Adobe, the makers of Photoshop, Flash, Flex and other web and image editing software, as well as Apple’s video editing software and other startups in the web application toolkits game, like the infamous Zoho.

Robert Scoble (<3): social tools like twitter bring out our worst. After all, heckling is magnified when you can do it in a small group instead of alone.

Techcrunch has a hilarious exchange of fire between Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg and Six Apart’s evangelist Anil Dash over the relative merits of Wordpress and MovableType:

Anil Dash: “WordPress 2.5 is about to be released, and we wanted to encourage WordPress users to upgrade. To Movable Type.”

Matt Mullenweg: “Six apart is getting desperate, and dirty.”

Anil Dash: “Desperation is resorting to name-calling and slander instead of substance — if there’s a factual error, i’m glad to fix it.”

I’ve written before about how I personally prefer Wordpress to Movable Type because it offers me an unprecedented open source experience, tons of community support, and easy hackability. It’s also pretty damn fast, so I don’t worry about my server crashing or overloading.

However, it’s also totally ok in the competitive marketplace of free blogging software for one manufacturer to directly tote its own features in comparison to another piece of software. What’s wrong with saying that Movable Type has features x, y, and z that Wordpress is still dreaming of?

Update: Mullenweg, of Wordpress, has followed up his Twitter with a post Wordpress Is Open Source, in which he says “I had held off criticizing [MovableType and Six Apart] after they went OS and before they decided to start an all-out confrontation because that’s not generally what OS projects do to each other.”

Since Techcrunch just mentioned Yieldbuild, a company I love, in YieldBuild Raises $6 Million Series B For Optimizing Ads, I figure that now is a good time to throw in my two bits. If you don’t know, Yieldbuild is the internet’s premier advertising optimization tool, boosting webmaster CPM and CTR. Crunch says it uses computer algorithms to automatically optimize your site’s ad spots with the most profitable combination of ad layout, style, and network. The system continually tests alternative configurations of layouts, networks, and color, looking for the highest performing ones.”

Does it really work? Check out this chart:

The answer is simply yes–it improved CPM on my blog network by 21%. If you discount revenue from other blogs, this one went from 1.51 CPM to 2.51 CPM, an increase of 66% just due to using Yieldbuild. Now that I have a fulltime job, I don’t have time to bang out optimized advertising solutions. If you’re like this, why not let Yieldbuild do it for you?

The Techmeme page for iPhone new isn’t as bad this time. If you look an archive you’ll see it’s taken over with news about the iPhone 2.0 and SDK, but not too badly:

Yes, it was much worse a year ago, when the iPhone was first announced at Macworld by Steve Jobs. There, the Techmeme page got extremely long, and covered in Apple news.