Sitemaps Made Easy

Generate sitemaps easily with XML-Sitemaps.com

If you’ve got a web presence and would like to help your visitors navigate it more easily – but don’t have the time or the expertise to make a sitemap – then XML-Sitemaps.com is for you.

All you need is your URL and XML-Sitemaps will generate a sitemap for up to 500 pages of your site (more than that, and you’ll need to explore the paid options). Different types of sitemaps are available: HTML, XML (Google Sitemaps compliant), ROR, and plain text.

technorati tags:Lifehacker, WendyBoswell, XML, Sitemaps

Tabblo & Wiki Sitting On A Tree

Wiki your photo posters with Tabblo

Photo site Tabblo made a number of upgrades today to their service that now combines a wiki ethos with a design tool based on general rules of good layout. Tabblo isn’t a traditional photo sharing site; instead of competing with sites you’re probably familiar with, Tabblo makes it easy to import your photos from places like Flickr (and iPhoto or Picasa) and then lets you arrange those photos with text to make large collage-like posters, called Tabblos, to print.

As of today, Tabblo designers can give permission to other users to not just view and comment on a Tabblo, but to make their own changes to it as well. A sports team Tabblo could be customized by each parent, for example, to easily put their child’s picture in the center of the poster but maintain the same design as the whole team’s posters. It’s like a wiki for visual design, with the original templates preserved.

The template design function in Tabblo is quite usable. It’s in dHTML, not ajax or flash, there’s a zoom, pan and crop function and several other ways you can alter the presentation. It’s interesting to try out and see how the real-time size transformation happens for example. Fidelity to original dimensions is generally good, but not in all cases (my dog there got a bit elongated to fit into the Tabblo). All of this could still produce some very ugly layout but the site offers another service to help. They’ve come up with a list of good design rules and created a button to suggest alternate designs for your Tabblo. You can click through as many suggestions as you’d like and now can go back and undo as many as you’d like as well. Similar to the way fully free-form writing and other types of media creation is being tempered through forms of external, expert control in places like Wikipedia – Tabblo offers total design control to users but also provides some guidance if desired.

The end results are very nice looking sets of images. Accounts at Tabblo are free and the company derives revenue from printing Tabblos as posters and soon as cards and photo books. The posters are really the best format for the site’s products.

There may be far fewer people who want to print posters of their photos arranged nicely with text than there are people who want to put their photos online for sharing, but just like OneTrueMedia is monetizing DVDs burned from photos and video and any number of sites are making self publishing of books easy – it may well be that Tabblo’s goal of being “the print button for the internet” is a viable one. Whether or not that’s the case – it sure is fun to use.

technorati tags:Techcrunch, Tabblo, Wiki, Photo, Sharing, Poster

Now NBC Goes NBBC

Determined to not stand on the sidelines while Apple made its anticipated video announcement, NBC chose today to launch their new video aggregation service called the National Broadband Company, or NBBC.com. It’s a marketplace for short form videos that the company’s 230 affiliate stations and other media partners can go to and find video to post on their own sites. Advertising revenue will be split between the people who made the video, the people who publish it on their own sites and NBBC. Publishers could take many forms beyond local TV stations; RSS vendor Newsgator, for example, has announced that it will participate and deliver NBBC videos as well. Other partners include Break.com, About.com and CNet.

Distribution partners will be able to select either a full NBBC video player, a particular topical channel to display or individual video files for their sites. Ads will appear pre-roll with companion banner ads at first and as longer videos are included, mid roll and other types of advertising will appear. The players can be customized extensively – a plain version appears at right.

NBBC says that while everyone is getting into video, not everyone knows how to get that video into local markets. It’s network of affiliate TV stations and their accompanying websites will help them do just that, they believe. I expect this means the anemic state of video on many local news websites will change, but also that there will be increasing commercial pressure for such sites to offer ad driven syndicated video content instead of locally produced or citizen reporter type video.

From iTunes to CNN taking on user generated video content to users of video sharing sites going pro – it feels like the impact on video of ubiquitous broadband and affordable video cameras is just beginning to hit.

technorati tags:Techcrunch, NBC, Broadband, NBBC, Video, Aggregator

So Said Steve Jobs

His Steveness says:

• 75 movies are available to download now from iTunes, at an initial cost of $12.99 for the first week and $14.99 after that. Preordered titles will be $12.99 and older movies will be $9.99.
• Future releases will be available the same day that DVDs are released.
• Dowloads will take about 30 minutes but can be watched during file transfer.
• Image resolution is 640 x 480.
• The movies will be available only in the US until 2007.
• DRM for movies is the same as it has been for iTunes TV shows.
• A wireless set top box for TV, tentatively called iTV, will launch in the first quarter of 2007. It will be half the size of a Mac Mini, it will include USB, ethernet, 802.11b/g, component video, optical audio and HDMI. It will be controlled by the Apple remote.
• iPod announcements included $4 games for the iPod, longer battery life and brighter screens and an 80GB model with prices starting at $249.
• The new Nanos will come in 5 new colors, have a 24 hour battery life and up to 8GB capacity.
• The Shuffle has been completely redesigned, now comes with an aluminum case and costs $79.

For more details check out CrunchGear’s live coverage of the event. Will Apple be able to add more movies to its iTunes store or will the studios continue to wrestle over the details? That’s one of the biggest questions that remains. The early history of video on demand is being formed as we speak.

technorati tags:Apple, Showtime, iTunes, SteveJobs