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Free Forum HostingEasy to get started - Free, hosted, and just a few clicks away. Save time moderating with our community tools and anti-spam support. Self promotion - Automatic email notifications and newsletters to your members. Provide a better experience for your community members. Start a forum CSS Message Box collectionMessage boxes are useful elements to display status messages after or during a specific user request. Some days ago I wrote this post
about how to implement a nice Ajax chains of effects (fade in, delay,
fade out) for a common message box using mootools. Today I want to
share with you a collection of some simple CSS styles you can apply to
your message boxes (clean, solid, iconized, alternated rounded borders, tooltip).  I added also a link to download a beautiful icon pack to use in your projects to design custom message box or other graphic elements.  Download message box collection source codeSource 40+ Tooltips Scripts With AJAX, JavaScript & CSS
The Power of Being InfluencedDecember 30th, 2007 Network theory reveals the best way to spread ideas
Sometimes an idea spreads through society like a newly-mutated cold virus zooming through a class of first-graders. Other times, a good idea never seems to take hold. What makes the difference? Scientists want to know, and marketers want to know even more, since they make their living spreading ideas about their products. A key reason some ideas are so successful, conventional wisdom has held, is that a few highly influential people espouse them. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell wrote that what he calls "social epidemics" are "driven by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people." Those exceptional people tend to be experts on a subject who love to talk. Such people can convince dozens of others of their opinions. An excellent sales strategy, then, would be to find those few critical people, persuade them of the value of your product, and leave it to them to convince others. It's a compelling idea, but does it really work? Social network theorists Duncan J. Watts of Columbia University and Peter Sheridan Dodds of the University of Vermont in Burlington decided to put the notion to a test. What they found is a disappointment for "viral marketers" who specialize in selling products by influencing influential people. The researchers started with a basic premise: When many of your friends believe something, you're more likely to believe it, too. How many friends it takes to persuade you depends on your personality. Watts and Dodds developed models in which each individual in a network would adopt a particular idea if some percentage of the individuals connected to it had already adopted it. In the models, that percentage varied from one individual to another, so some individuals were easily influenced while others were more resistant. Next, Watts and Dodds had to decide on the shape of the network: how many connections each individual would have and to whom. Unfortunately, it's hard to determine in the real world who influences whom, so no one knows much about the properties of the networks that people form as they influence one another. Therefore, the researchers couldn't create a perfect network that closely mimics the real world. Instead, they decided to create a variety of different types of networks to see how ideas spread through each of them. The researchers compared how far an idea would spread depending on whether it started with a random individual or with an influential individual who was connected to a lot of other individuals. They found that highly influential individuals usually spread ideas more widely, but not very much more widely. For example, if an individual had three times as many connections as the average person, ideas espoused by that individual almost always spread substantially less than three times as far as the ideas of an average individual. Sometimes, the researchers found, the difference wasn't even measurable. In a few networks, ideas espoused by influential individuals spread much further than those of average folk, but those types of networks were not common and not likely to be similar to the real world, the team reported in the December Journal of Consumer Research. More important than the influencers, the researchers found, were the influenced. Once an idea spread to a critical mass of easily influenced individuals, it took hold and continued to spread to other easily influenced individuals. In some networks, it was far easier to get an idea established this way than in others. The entire structure of the network mattered, not just the few influential people. Dodds compares the spread of ideas to the spread of a forest fire. When a fire turns into a conflagration, no one says that it was because the spark that began it was so potent. "If it had been raining," Dodds says, "that same match wouldn't have had an effect." Instead, a fire takes off because of the properties of the larger forest environment: the dryness, the density, the wind, the temperature. The upshot of the study, Dodds says, is that "in the end, you don't have control over how people spread your message." The best way to increase the odds of person-to-person transmission of an idea is to make it a good idea and to give it "social worth," he says. "Some things are just fun to talk about." Why beautiful people have more daughters October 23, 2007 on 1:41 pm | In General Interest, Psychology, Science
The
title of this post is the name of a book on “evolutionary psychology”
written by two scientists trying to explain a lot of human behavior on
the basis of evolutionary principles last seen in action during the
stone age. This interview with one of the authors is rather interesting. The following excerpt explains the title of the book: The basic idea is this: Whenever parents have genetic traits they can pass on to their children that are more valuable for boys than for girls, then they have more sons than daughters. Conversely, whenever parents have genetic traits they can pass on to their children that are more valuable for girls than for boys, then they have more daughters than sons. Physical attractiveness — being beautiful — is good for both boys and girls, but it’s much more advantageous for girls. Physical attractiveness of a woman is one of the most important considerations for men when they select both long-term and short-term mates, but a man’s physical attractiveness is important for women only when she’s looking for short-term mates. Women like to have affairs with good-looking men, but they don’t necessarily want to marry them, unless of course they are also rich and powerful.[...] Source July, 2008 Web Apps for Dieting & Getting in ShapeCalorie Counters
Calorie-Count.com - Helps you count calories, even on your cell phone. Also offers tests to help you learn about your food and your own habits. CalorieLab.com - Has the calorie values of over 70,000 items and 500 different restaurant menus. CalorieLookup.com - Has the calorie information on many popular foods and their counterparts from major food chains. MyFoodDiary.com - Subscription based service that has a 50,000 item food database to help you keep track of your diet, as well as the usual weight loss and exercise logs.
TheDailyPlate.com - Helps you count calories, track your intake, and plan your meals. Diet Finders & Reviews
DietsInReview.com - Detailed reviews of hundreds of diets, broken down by different lifestyles. [...] Full article: http://mashable.com/2008/07/08/dieting-web-apps/ July, 2008 Google Docs Adds Over 300 New TemplatesBy Merlin Mann
on working
My favorites are in the eclectic “Miscellaneous” section, where you’ll find templates for athletes, parents, wedding or event planners, wine nerds, screenwriters — even “animal guardians”. Cool new resource and a neat idea. Yet another reason for MS Office to keep an eye on its dwindling lunch. I’m looking forward to spending some time with these, because I’m a huge GDocs nerd. Can’t wait until you can edit Google Documents via your iPhone. That’s when the game really changes. Technology Review on Web 2.0 By Christopher Herot As MIT's Technology Review completes its transformation from a sleepy alumni magazine to "The Authority on the Future of Technology" it devotes the entire June/July Issue to the topic to "The Next Bubble? - The Future of Web 2.0." The cover photo (at right) shows Leah Culver, co-founder of Pounce, blowing up a bubble. You need to turn to page 35 to see the result. Editor-in-chief and Publisher Jason Pontin recalls his experience as editor of Red Herring which in the first six months 0f 2000 had 500,000 readers and $100 million in revenues and was out of business the following year He sees a similar enthusiasm today for companies with unproven business models, but more than the potential loss of capital he fears for the future disappointment of the entrepreneurs who put their hearts, souls, and considerable time into the ventures which will not survive the inevitable correction. Still, he recognizes that speculative manias are an inescapable feature of entrepreneurial capitalism and in fact were responsible for the investments in many businesses, such as transportation and the Internet, that influence us today.
[...] Technology Review : http://www.technologyreview.com/
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