How to create a vector graphic from a photo: Layers Magazine | When Vector Meets Photo.

Wow: $1M a year in Google Adsense (or why 2,739 is my favorite number) – The Jason Calacanis Weblog:

If back in September when we started playing with Google Adsense someone told me it would turn into a $1M a year business I would have laughed. A million bucks without a sales person? Give me a break!

However, yesterday we broke our $2,100 record with a $2,335 day. That’s an impressive number I know, because if we can take that number to $2,739.72 we’re at—wait for it—$1M a year.

For some perspective, take a look at some averages:

January we did $580 a day on average.
March was a $737 a day average.
May was a $1,585.57 average.

Now, before you get too excited let me tell you we’ve got 103 bloggers on the payroll and nine staffers here at Weblogs, Inc. We’re a big, little company… so to speak. Plus I gotta pay for Peter Rojas’ gadget habit (let’s just say it ain’t pretty)!

However, if you follow those numbers we tripled the average in five months or so. Not sure we can triple every five months, but I think we can get this to a $3,000 to $5,000 per day average by the end of the year.

Online News Consumers Become Own Editors – Yahoo! News

J.D. Lasica used to visit 20 to 30 Web sites for his daily fix of news. Now, he’s down to three — yet he consumes more news online than ever. Lasica is among a growing breed of information consumers who use the latest Internet technologies to completely bypass the home pages of news sites and jump directly to articles that interest them.

He can scan some 200 Web journals and traditional news sites — all without actually going out and visiting them.

Online news consumers are increasingly taking charge, getting their news a la carte from a variety of outlets. Rarely do they depend on a single news organization’s vision of the day’s top stories.

“The old idea of surfers coming to your Web site and coming to your front door, that’s going away,” said Lasica, a former editor at The Sacramento Bee. “People are going to come in through the side window, through the basement, through the attic, anyway they want to.”

Dontclick.it is an interesting UI experiment that is worth a… click. Check it out.

Speaking of neat UI stuff Rico is a set of great looking Ajax empowered UI widgets. Could come in handy.

It has an interface that’s worthy of discussion. I like the chances they are taking. Don’t agree with them all (accessing the sources list from the Start header doesn’t work for me), but still – it’s nice to see its evolution.

particletree: Kevin Hale: The Importance of RSS:

…When we launched this site, we knew that the tutorials and information we were gathering and creating were good—that they would be somewhat valuable to the web development community. The problem was that we didn’t want this useful, time-sensitive information to sit around for days (or even weeks) waiting to be picked up by search bots and then found by people accidentally or when they were desperate for a solution.

So I proposed that we turned to del.icio.us to expand our readership. Every time something went up on the site that I felt would be good enough for a wider audience, I added it to my del.icio.us account with the appropriate tags and descriptions. Our goal was to try and get a feature on del.icio.us/popular by the end of July and to our surprise, we accomplished it in less than a week. After two weeks of diligent posting and tagging, Google gave us a little over 50 referrals while del.icio.us gave us over 700.

I think the reason del.icio.us is so successful at bringing the appropriate audience to good material is because they track the changing web by using people to calculate what is essentially “page rank.� They get access to decent fuzzy logic for a fraction of the cost and the democracy of the system allows anyone to get their idea of what deserves face-time into the system almost immediately.

Basically, tagging systems are wonderful breeding grounds for the principles contained in Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. They do a great job of gathering Salesmen, Mavens and Connectors all in one place. Mavens stalk the new entries on the front page and certain tag pages to filter through the chaos and find the latest treasures. The RSS feeds act as a sort of technological bridge/pseudo-connector to get the information to the real Connectors and Salesman. From what I’ve noticed, a good idea can make it into del.icio.us/popular in about 5 days, a good Salesman/Connector/Maven like Dave Shea or Jeffrey Veen can get a good idea into del.icio.us/popular in less than two hours.

Tag mania sweeps the Web | InfoWorld | Column | 2005-07-20 | By Jon Udell:

When I first wrote about social tagging services last year, Flickr (for shared photos) and del.icio.us  (for shared bookmarks) were among a handful of tag-enriched applications. Nowadays you can’t turn around without tripping over a new one. Three newcomers are My Web 2.0, Rojo 2.0, and Swik.

…Is this a fad or a real breakthrough in information management? I say both. Tagging has attained the elusive cachet of coolness. New taggers feel an initial thrill of empowerment. Venture capitalists, sensing the buzz, are looking to amplify it.

When the novelty wears off, though, I think that tagging will have altered the information landscape in a fundamental way. Here’s an example: I’m often asked a question that begins with “Do you have any pointers to … ?” The answer to such a question is a set of URLs. Two years ago, I would have collected those URLs and transmitted them in the body of an e-mail. Nowadays I’d collect them using del.icio.us tags and send only the del.icio.us URL.

From its site:

• 5 snapping modes.
• Support for BMP, JPG, TIFF, PNG and GIF formats, with selected color depth and quality settings.
• System-wide hotkeys.
• Clipboard copy/paste.
• Printing.
• Auto-saving, auto-printing.
• Auto-start with Windows.
• Minimizing to system tray.
• An auto-extending list of fixed sizes, perfect for snapping images for icons and glyphs. 
• A zoom tool for magnifying selected parts of the screen.
• A ruler tool for measuring screen objects lengths.
• A color picker showing screen colors with separated RGB parts.
• Fast picture viewer.
• Adding frames and mouse pointer images.
• Multilevel configurable undo and redo.
• Multilingual versions.
• Configurable user interface.
• And more…

And it’s free.