Sandy Boosts Local Online News Brands | Digital – Advertising Age

AOL-owned Patch, which operates roughly 860 sites across the country but has high penetrations in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, reported its highest-ever traffic day Monday — page views were up 88% from the previous highest day. The Daily Voice, a competing network with 53 sites in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts, said traffic Monday was two times higher than normal.

via Sandy Boosts Local Online News Brands | Digital – Advertising Age.

20 experiential web design trends for 2012 | Econsultancy

Web design by its very nature continues to evolve, as it must, to make the most of modern browsers and the likes of HTML5, CSS3 and JQuery, and to provide a wonderful user experience for tablet and smartphone owners.

Nowadays there is plenty of opportunity to stand out from the crowd, by being ahead of the curve, or by embracing new techniques that can help you to improve the performance of your website.

via 20 experiential web design trends for 2012 | Econsultancy.

ESTA The downside of a new passport

The downside of a new passport 🙁

What should I do if the information on my passport has changed?If you obtain a new passport or there is a change to your passport information, you must apply for a new travel authorization and pay the associated fees. See What information can I update? for a full listing of information that can be changed after submission of your application.

via ESTA Screen Level Online Help.

How Zappos’ User Agreement Failed In Court and Left Zappos Legally Naked (Forbes Cross-Post)

In January, Zappos (part of $AMZN) announced a massive data security breach affecting 24 million consumers.  As typically happens in these situations, plaintiffs’ class action lawyers swarmed over Zappos for the breach, filing dozens of lawsuits.  Zappos tried to send the lawsuits to arbitration based on an arbitration clause in its user agreement.  Recently, a federal court struck down Zappos.com’s user agreement, denying Zappos’ arbitration request.  This is an unfortunate ruling for Zappos, because its contract–now dead–would have been quite helpful in combating this high-profile and potentially very expensive data security breach lawsuit.   More importantly, the mistakes Zappos made in its user agreement–though common throughout the Internet–are completely and easily avoidable.  This post will make some suggestions for how to avoid Zappos’ fate.

via Technology & Marketing Law Blog: How Zappos’ User Agreement Failed In Court and Left Zappos Legally Naked (Forbes Cross-Post).

American Apparel causes Twitter outrage with ‘Hurricane Sandy Sale’ | The Wall Blog

When will brands ever learn? Do people not use the internet and read stuff? When it comes to social media we are now at a point when we have a fat pile of case files detailing how various brands have failed at social media, but this does not apparently stop other brands copying these mistakes over and over again.

This time around it is the turn of American Apparel. It has had the bright idea of rolling out a “Hurricane Sandy Sale” ad and as you might guess has sparked something of a Twitter backlash and ensured its brand will forever be linked with the words “social media fail”.

via American Apparel causes Twitter outrage with ‘Hurricane Sandy Sale’ | The Wall Blog.

Yahoo! will! ignore! ‘Do! Not! Track!’ from! IE10! • The Register

Yahoo! has announced that it will ignore the default “Do Not Track” (DNT) signal broadcast by Microsoft Internet Explorer 10, on grounds that it does not accurately reflect user intent.

“Recently, Microsoft unilaterally decided to turn on DNT in Internet Explorer 10 by default, rather than at users’ direction,” a Yahoo! spokesperson said in a statement on Friday. “In our view, this degrades the experience for the majority of users and makes it hard to deliver on our value proposition to them.”

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), browser vendors, and other industry bodies have been collaborating on DNT as a means to allow web users to opt out of certain kinds of behavior-tracking by websites and ad networks.

via Yahoo! will! ignore! ‘Do! Not! Track!’ from! IE10! • The Register.

Belkin WeMo Switch – Apple Store (UK)

Okay I totally want to upgrade our remote lights to iPhone remote lights. #firstworldproblems

The Belkin WeMo Switch and the free WeMo app work together to let you turn electronics on or off from your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch wherever you are. No matter if it’s a lamp, a fan, or a stereo, you can activate it or put it on a schedule. WeMo uses your home Wi-Fi network, and also operates over mobile Internet – so you can control things even when you’re travelling. WeMo is completely modular, allowing you to control as much or as little of your house as you like. All it requires is that your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch is running iOS 5 or later.

via Belkin WeMo Switch – Apple Store (UK).

‘Password’ Tops List of Worst Passwords of 2012 [VIDEO]

1. password (unchanged)

2. 123456 (unchanged)

3. 12345678 (unchanged)

4. abc123 (up 1)

5. qwerty (down 1)

6. monkey (unchanged)

7. letmein (up 1)

8. dragon (up 2)

9. 111111 (up 3)

10. baseball (up 1)

11. iloveyou (up 2)

12. trustno1 (down 3)

13. 1234567 (down 6)

14. sunshine (up 1)

15. master (down 1)

16. 123123 (up 4)

17. welcome (new)

18. shadow (up 1)

19. ashley (down 3)

20. football (up 5)

21. jesus (new)

22. michael (up 2)

23. ninja (new)

24. mustang (new)

25. password1 (new)

via ‘Password’ Tops List of Worst Passwords of 2012 [VIDEO].