The Point (from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, apparently) is a site which aims to get collection action past the critical point when it will work. Users sign up to a pledge (dontate $10, boycott a particular store, etc) but are only committed when the required numbers of people have also signed up. That way, presumably, prospective campaigns can avoid the ignominy of being the only one with the placard.

I wonder if we could run our business like this?

• conferences only take place if the required number of people have committed to them upfront?
• newsletters only get published if there are enough subscribers already signed up?

Interesting idea…

My colleague Phil Harris points out a resource I hadn’t heard of – Office Labs’ Community Clips. The idea is that Microsoft employees and users anywhere can record simple "how to" videos which demonstrate in easy steps how to do things in the Office Suite. It’s a nice idea and could be a useful place to start the next time you can’t remember how to make a pivot table or change the master template on a PowerPoint…

The Times has launched its entire archive, dating back 200 years, in a new section of the site. There are 20m articles, ads and photographs in the archive. I particularly like the interactive timeline and the way the PDF pages are embedded into the site, and surrounded by integrated content about the major events covered. There are 150 topic pages which feature subjected like Winston Churchill, the Crimean War and Scott of the Antarctic. Great stuff.

Twello is a new service, currently in Alpha, which aims to categorise Twitter users by which sectors they are in. There are already listings for aerospace engineers, people in the oil and gas space, and in pharmaceuticals, for example. Could be an interesting resource for my more enterprising b2b publishing thought-leading colleagues….

Technorati Tags: directories, tools, twitter

Dipity is a new site which allows users to create interactive timelines on the web. The site claims there are already over 20,000 timelines available.

Technorati Tags: tools, web2

Techcrunch reports that Yahoo’s exodus of senior talent is continuing, this time with the departure of Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us which was bought in 2005.

Flickr’s founders, Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield are leaving Yahoo. The company, which has been pursued (and dropped) by Microsoft, has seen a slew of high profile defections.

Technorati Tags: yahoo

Google has extended its Trends service to include data on sites. Now you can enter domains and get back data on daily uniques (you have to sign in to get the numbers). You can compare more than one domain by adding another separated by a comma. Searchengineland has the skinny.

Technorati Tags: Google, metrics, rankings, search

Amnesty Hypercube aims to let widgets live wherever they want, according to TechCrunch. The software, available currently only the Mac (but with a Windows version promised shortly) allows conversion from desktop to web-based widgets in various formats. Is this the start of a whole interconnected ecosystem of widgets? I wonder if we can use this to free our platform widgets on EpiServer so they can live in the wild?

Technorati Tags: mac, tools, web2, widgets