Problem

Consume a JSON string (such as the following) in a C# program, hopefully creating some sort of dynamic object on the fly that we can work with like any other C# object, and then doing something with the object: saving it in database, sending it elsewhere or rendering to a screen.


{"results":[
{"employeename":"name1","employeesupervisor":"supervisor1"},
{"employeename":"name2","employeesupervisor":"supervisor1"},
{"employeename":"name3","employeesupervisor":["supervisor1","supervisor2"]}
]}


Step 1 – Parse JSON, dynamically converting it into a C# object

Again, trying to get up to speed and taking the most “modern” approach by dynamically parsing without pre-defining classes or mappings. Looking at some samples, I see mention of a JsonArray type, and a JsonObject in conjunction with the newer .NET Http Client library. But, I cannot seem to use these, and am not sure if they still exist. So, I’m going to quickly switch gears and use Json.NET, since it’s essentially been the de-facto JSON parsing library for .NET applications for years, and that doesn’t seem to be any different now.

I’ve said “dynamic” many times already, and as luck would have it, .NET 4 introduced dynamic types. dynamic types bypass compile time checking. Great, that seems promising. Rick Strahl has a post where he introduces us to Json.NET’s dynamic support, using JObject and JArray

Step 2 – Do something with the C# object

So, great, we have a nice dynamic c# object, but did you notice something in that sample? The last record’s supervisor has disparate value types. This is perfectly valid JSON, per the JSON spec:

A value can be a string in double quotes, or a number, or true or false or null, or an object or an array. These structures can be nested.

Nowhere does it say that the value type has to be same for the property across all instances in an array, which if they were all the same type, we’d be done already. So, how do handle this case with our Json.NET JObject instance. As a demonstration, let’s say the requirement is to just take the first one if it’s an array.

Solution

Here’s a little program to demonstrate

Overall, the Json.NET looks like the solution we were looking for, with a concise few lines of code to parse and process the result. It took entirely too long to get to this point though, both in terms of the language and in my work to understand it today. Hopefully we’ll see more acceptance of dynamic parsing in C# and start moving more examples and codebases in that direction.

Enjoying your summer? Soaking in that Friday night feeling? Have that nagging thought in the back of your mind that you haven’t finished your PIE application for you great idea? Ah ha, I knew it. Since I’m one of the biggest procrastinators around, I feel your pain. But, wait, you say “I still have 3 10 more nights, there’s plenty of time to watch a couple shows on Hulu, get lost for a few hours reading blog posts, figuring what the heck PIE is, and maybe do a little coding, and then finish the application.” I know your tricks, that’s why I’m here to help.

All kidding aside, and even though I just moved to Colorado, I am here to help. I’ve enlisted to be a mentor in the upcoming session of PIE, joining forces with a who’s who of Portland and beyond talented technology, startup and marketing communities. Even if you don’t need my help, or if my help is no help at all, then you’ll still want to be a part of it to tap into the roster they’ve got lined up. Heck, I’m hoping I can learn a thing or two or a hundred in drafting off this group.

Let’s get to it, turn down your Spotify, Turntable, Mugasha or whatever the cool kids are listening to these days and focus.

What is PIE?

First, stuff you can read on their website, but I wanted to use the blockquote tag:

The Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) is a partnership among leading brands, technology innovators, and Wieden+Kennedy-the largest privately held advertising and communications company in the world. It serves as a hub for community, entrepreneurship, and creative thinking.
…

So, it’s an incubator, it’s an experiment, it’s got help from Wieden+Kennedy and a bunch of their clients? Yes, yes, and yes. But, I know you, you’re looking to do more research, so here you go:

• Portland Incubator Experiment, Reloaded: PIE 2.0
• PIE: From side project to startup
• WIEDEN + KENNEDY EXPLAINS PIE TO PSFK
• Filling in some more details on PIE
• Google extends its Portlandphilia to PIE, joining Coke, Target & Nike to launch business incubator

How do I apply?

Go to the website and fill out the application

When’s the application due?

August 1st August 8th (great, there goes my whole procrastinator’s angle)

What’s in it for me?

You’ll get $18,000, 3 months of office space, and access to a host of nice folks that may know a thing or two to help. Like:

• Mobile expert Jason Grigsby
• Community guru Dawn Foster
• Cloud Wizards PHPFog
• Google (more on this)
• Coke
• Target
• Nike
• Voyager Capital
• Intel Capital

What’s in it for PIE?

You’ll give PIE a 6% equity stake in your company. (source). You’ll probably need to devote yourself pretty fully to this endeavor too, time-wise, but if you’re worried about that, then, well, maybe you just keep on bootstrapping. That’s reality, hey, it’s my reality.

Of course, if your team knocks it out of the park, then PIE can keep this experiment going into the next class or further.

What if I don’t get in?

You certainly don’t need PIE’s permission to build the next big thing. Prove us all wrong and make us write a “The one that got away” post.

There’s probably a ton of applicants, why bother?
What’s the first rule of business? Show up.

You’ll never know until you try. Plus, according to Rick, the number of applicants “hasn’t been blowing the doors off.” so there goes that excuse.

When’s that application due again?

August 1st August 8th (@ 11:59 pm, I checked for ya)

But, the occasion of moving half-way across the country is enough to stir the blog into action again. This past weekend, I made the journey from Portland to Boulder, Colorado, marking the culmination of a frantic few months of tough decisions and planning. After 12 years in the Portland area, we decided it was time for a change. So, in a a quick 2-3 month time period we went from, “what if we moved?” to thinking about where we’d move to, on to packing up and hitting the road for Boulder.

The questions usually come up in the course of telling people this. Why Boulder? Why leave? The short version: sun, software, and adventure.

The longer version… Earlier this year, we adopted our son from Ethiopia, our third child and second boy. Now, I grew up in a 3 kid/2 boy household in Oregon, I’m perfectly aware of the ups and downs. But, we just couldn’t take it. The kids need to be able to go outside and move and the constant grey was no longer tolerable. Plus, we’d always lived in Oregon, save for a years of college in Washington, so the explorer aspect was definitely appealing. Finally, even as I see Portland’s tech startup scene with more spark in the last few weeks than there’s been in years, the energy of the Boulder software and startup community was unmistakably electric, so what better way to check it out than to live amongst it.

Portland still holds a special draw for us though, so one never knows where this road will lead. I’m still working for my same company in Portland, will be back in town on a somewhat regular basis, am still working with partners in Portland on my side-projects and we still own our house there. Didn’t exactly cut the cord, eh?

That will segue nicely into the next post I think…

Three apps were mentioned as ways to help boost the fans and monitor temperatures:

• smcFanControl
• iStat from iSlayer.com
• Fan Control by Lobotomo software

I installed smcFanControl and even after a day noticed pretty significant temperature reduction.

But, I was also reminded of a discussion on Stack Overflow a couple weeks back where Joel recommended an alternative approach to the heat problem, undervolting the CPU, with CoolBook.

So, there’s some options, and make sure you do some research first, wouldn’t want you doing any damage or voiding any warranties or anything.

My main point of feedback for the organizers if they read this. PLEASE PUT KEYNOTES IN THE MORNING!

All in all, WV was pretty good, though it didn’t feel as inspiring as the last couple of years. After last year, I made sure to avoid the workshops. As far as the sessions go, I was entertained and picked up some great info and good tips to follow-up on, but nothing that made me want to carve out a day or so to really think through. I can’t quite figure out why exactly, but one thing that I noticed that I didn’t read a single live-blog or blog post during the conference, it never even occurred to me. That’s a major shift from years past. Why didn’t it occur to me? Make a guess, Twitter. In years past, reading about the conference, during the conference has always kept that mind-buzz going.

Twitter is now the primary forum for conference back channel and instant recaps. Only problem was, Twitter was down for a good portion of the conference, so there was little in terms of immediate response loop. The conversation has migrated from the blogosphere to Twitter, but when Twitter is down, the conversation dies.

Here’s a quick round-up of the sessions I attended. Slide decks for at least some of these available on SlideShare. Other roundups can be found on the Silicon Florist.

RSS: Bleeding Edge Tips and Tricks
I only caught the last half, and I’ve seen Marshall talk about RSS before, but even then I still managed to pick up some new ideas, a testament to Marshall’s ability to keep finding new ways to digest more information, faster.

Drupal: This Aint Your Father’s CMS
I’ve just picked up Drupal in the last couple months for a project at Strands and this was my first opportunity to hear about it and ask questions after having actually spend considerable time working on it. I missed most of the actual presentation, but there was lots of time for q & a which was well worth it. Plus, we got to learn a little bit about OpenSourcery, which was new to me.

Going Fast on the Slow Mobile Web
Great update to Jason‘s talk in February at PDX Web Innovators. Cloud Four has been doing a lot of research on the performance capabilities of mobile phones, and a lot of that fresh new data was included here.

So You Want to Run a Startup
The startup story of SlideShare. This is my first time seeing Rashmi speak and I think it was a good session. Focus on metrics to measure success, understanding the size of your market, pros/cons of different business models, adapting plans to how the business/site/community take-off, and developing key advisors/investors. SlideShare is the poster child of web 2.0 in that it is a pure ad-based business model and its marketing strategy was to get on TechCrunch. They may just have been one of the few to succeed at that, as it they seem to growing nicely.

Star Wars Kid Is Your New Bicycle: The Changing Lives of Memes
Andy Baio’s talk attempting to identify how memes spread. This was definitely the most entertaining session, and I have to admit I hadn’t heard of a couple of the ones mentioned. But, I certainly remember Star Wars Kid and Numa Numa. Bottom line, I don’t think we can ever predict what’s going to truly go viral.

WebVisionary awards
I was excited to finally make it to an after party for WebVisions for the first time. This was a fun event and I managed to meet several tweeps for the first time. But, something that I’ve gotten used to with WebVisions, the online component of these awards is lacking (no nominees or winners listed as of now, but the lack of online presence is something that WV overall has struggled with to the point of giving up this year IMO, and this is a web conference). There was no transparency on nominees and with a couple multiple-award winners (Substance and Colour Lovers) I have to question the value of these awards. Not to take away from the winners, but with that, the apparent lack of nominees and the entry fee the awards just seemed kind of cheap. I suppose that’s why they rushed through them so fast. The ceremony itself was well done though.

WebVisions
Always one of my favorites and it’s cheap! Starts tomorrow.

Strands Portland Meet-up
Think Strands is all about Music and now Money? Think again. This meet-up will be a chance to preview the all new strands.com and meet more of the Strands team.

Portland Lunch 2.0 @ Vidoop
The Lunch 2.0 series continues at newly re-located to PDX Vidoop

Andy Baio talks side projects and acquisition at Portland Web Innovators
We’re thrilled to have Andy Baio, founder of Upcoming.org leading the discussion. Should be awesome!

It was just over 3 years ago that we started working on NetworthIQ. It was a bit of a bumpy ride. In the first couple months, I wasn’t sure if it was going to make it, but with a couple of high-profile press mentions we were off and running. The idea for NetworthIQ was pretty basic, apply the popular Web 2.0 principles of the time (social networking, public sharing, collective intelligence) and apply it to personal finance, something that hadn’t been done before. There was the occasional “this is the dumbest site ever” comment, but for the most part we always got great response and feedback from those that signed up, which was what kept me going.

Hard to believe that with the web being as global as is now, that the company that came calling was practically in your back yard. I spent two terms at OSU, and went through the disappointment of seeing my baseball career die, but now I’m back in Corvallis living out the dream. Pretty ironic. Not only that, as an active follower of the Silicon Florist and Silicon Forest, I already knew who Strands was and was following what they were doing.

So, how and why did NetworthIQ and Strands come together? Up until a few weeks ago, the face of Strands on the web was MyStrands, the social music site. It may seem odd for a personal finance site to come under that umbrella. But, now that moneyStrands has been announced, I think it starts to make a lot more sense right? Strands is starting to take the personalization and recommendation technology that they’ve built in new directions and personal finance was one of those directions. My primary job now is to channel my knowledge of the personal finance market gleaned from building NetworthIQ into the moneyStrands roadmap and keep NetworthIQ humming along.

Though it was a few months ago, it was sad to say good-bye to TransCore, I had many great opportunities to transition into software development (I started as a financial analyst) and got to work on some fun projects with great people there. But, when an opportunity to work on something that you are personally passionate about full-time and still allows you to support your family, it’s something worth making the jump for.

As for Corvallis, yes, I commute. Quite a bit different from my old commute (though I’m now even more disappointed in Oregon drivers). But, it’s only two days a week normally and the rest of time I’m up north here at home, or enjoying the quiet confines of the Sherwood public library (gotta love a city that provides free wi-fi. Even if its only downtown), or I’ve even been known to drop in on fellow web innovators and do a little co-working. I’ve also been able to make it to more events around PDX like PDX Web Innovators, Lunch 2.0, InnoTech, and BarCamp since it’s good to get out of the house a bit when working at home. However, after commuting 3 hours one day, I’m not exactly eager to make the drive into pdx proper that often, but it’s fun when I do.

Just wanted to add a personal thanks here to Todd, Jeff, and Aaron, my partners in crime at Fourio. Though we certainly had our struggles, the fact that we saw our first released product (a side-project no less) through to an exit is something to be proud of. I don’t want to make this into an academy speech, but I haven’t shared in a while, I should mention that my wife has been great through all of this, supporting my crazy/obsessive side-project turned startup dreams and for that I am extremely grateful. See honey, it wasn’t a waste of time :-).

First a picture from RubyConf held earlier this month:

Reminded me of one of Jason‘s pics from Gnomedex this summer:

I wonder how the audience pics at DevConnections (.NET conference in vegas 2 weeks ago) compare.  Now, why didn’t I buy Apple stock when I first started noticing the geeks and their MBP or PBs back then?

Digital Trends is one of the best web business stories in the Portland area. Founded just a few years ago, it has bootstrapped its way to a thriving online business focusing on consumer electronics reviews and news. Through the power networking group known as “mom’s groups,” I met Ian, the CEO, and after a few discussions about the latest TechCrunch reviews, I asked, “hey, why don’t you guys do web reviews, seems like a great fit for the current audience.” Next thing you know, I’m the one writing them.

My goals with these reviews are different than with a typical “Web 2.0 blog.” I don’t care about the latest breaking news, funding, the latest gossip, the business model, who the founders are, or anything like that. I’m only concerned with the site itself, and that’s what I focus on. How useful it is to the web audience. The site must at least be a public beta too, no private, invitation only ones. It needs to be ready for anybody to use it. The hardest part is picking, with so many sites to choose from. I make my picks on mainly a gut feel when I see the site, that “this is interesting.”

You may have also heard me rail against the Web 2.0 blogs posting so often, making it too difficult to keep up, and so my goal is to write 1 and maybe 2 a week. My inspiration comes more from the Solution Watch approach. The audience at Digital Trends is much more diverse though, so it’s fun to distill the great stuff we early adopters come across to a wider group of people.

The first batch went live a couple weeks ago. Take a look. I’d love to hear what you think, good and bad.

• Me.dium
• StreetAdvisor
• Satisfaction
• Footnote

I welcome any submissions. My email is over there in the right-hand column. I can’t promise a response, but I will promise at least a look at your site.

Local Signal
Had a couple days to myself last week and was able to wrap up a number of loose ends with Local Signal. First, I implemented session tracking, so items are bold if they are new since the last time you visited the page. Second, I fixed some bugs with the click tracking. I was using an AJAX call in the link’s onclick event, making it completely unobtrusive and not having to resort to those ugly redirect URLs. You can actually see the link when hovering over. Problem was that the AJAX handler was not getting the call in time, before the the browser followed the link. It only worked when opening a link in a new tab or window. Moving the AJAX call to the onmousedown event of the link fixed that. So, that enabled the “popular” pages to be completed. Only, nothing is really popular enough yet to be of very much use, so they’re hiding out at the moment. You can tack on “popular” as the page (in lieu of news, biz or the others) if you’re really curious.

The home page is the only outstanding item at this point before I start pimping it out to a larger audience. Content will continue to evolve as well, but it looks like there are a number of people checking the Portland news page daily, as that page along accounts for half the traffic to the site. I’m contemplating some type of local editor program to have a local representative in each city to provide the best sources and help publicize it.

NetworthIQ
Despite being on auto-pilot as I worked on Local Signal, we had our 2nd biggest traffic event ever this week, adding several hundred new users. The Australian news portal news.com.au ran a great article on why and how people are using NetworthIQ to help improve their finances. The community is still growing strong and has really taken hold without me really doing anything, which is cool to see. I still have a todo list a mile long, but at least it will still be there when I come back around to building it out. In the coming weeks I really need to focus in on the revenue model beyond low paying ad networks, adsense, and link ads. That may actually involve doing some real market research and talking to people *gasp*. While I still got a kick out of seeing the traffic come, and the exposure is great, the rush was nowhere near when the NY Times article ran a couple years ago (can’t believe it’s been that long). A big reason for that is that it really only means literally a few dollars more in my pocket and I know it’s not really going to do a whole lot to put me in a place where I can work on it full-time. It needs to be where when one of those hits, it will mean significant revenue.

The site also got hit by the big Google crack-down on paid links, with our PageRank going from 5 to 3. Organic google traffic accounts for 20% of overally referrers so it’s not something to take lightly, but the drop so far has not revealed a corresponding drop in our SERP rankings.

Ignite Portland

Unless you were living under a rock, or not in Portland, it was hard to miss this week’s big event. Todd and I headed down there and I really enjoyed it. I knew 4 of the presenters, so it was cool to see them do well and I thought pretty much all of the speakers did great. It was also nice to see many familiar faces from PDXWI there. Looking forward to the next one.

The only thing I can remember disagreeing the whole night was the Les Schwab bit. I think they had good service a couple years ago, but the last few times I’ve been there, I’ve been tremendously disappointed at the service and the workmanship (I waited an hour to get a new battery, only for them to tell me it was fine, when I knew for a fact it wasn’t and had to get it replaced soon after elsewhere). I think they’re losing their way, but they have tremendous goodwill still, so it may let them thrive anyway. Despite this, I’m not disagreeing with Scott’s premise, I’d love to see more services from a gas station, but gas and tires are different animals (gas being more cost-sensitive since we buy it more frequently).

TwitterWhere

TwitterWhere is a cool new project from local Portland developer Matt King. Similar to how Local Signal tracks an assortment of feeds for a specific city to filter and discover news, events, and people, TwitterWhere tracks Twitter activity for a given location, making it easy find local breaking news and other Tweeters. (Silicon Florist and Read/Write Web coverage)

ChoiceA

ChoiceA is a new national real estate FSBO site (Silicon Florist and Read/Write Web have more).

Platial

Platial made a pretty bold move it seems in acquiring one of their direct competitors in the social mapping space who had been doing better, traffic ranking wise. Should be interesting to see what happens with the combined companies.

Continuing to fill out the local content (mainly news, biz and sports) for all the cities in Local Signal. In marketing news, the site was added to the Programmable Web mashup directory which helped drive a nice amount of users this week. There’s a great new logo, produced by Craft Is The New Black. Turns out there are brother-n-laws who are in fact good designers. It’s pretty cool to be sitting around with the family and get some real progress made on a project. Those usually don’t go together very well. Popular items coming this week I hope.

PDX Web innovators

We had a great meeting last week with Kevin, Michael, and Bryan (sp all ok?) from StepChange giving us the ins and outs of widgets, the economy around them and the development of them. Like others have commented, I thought it was one of most productive discussions yet, with the brains cranking on great new ideas. Justin has the round-up, and be sure to take a look at his excellent new design while you’re there.

Ignite Portland

The popular Ignite series is coming to Portland this month. Looks to be a fun night.

With CLIQ now in public beta, anybody can join, so get over there and sign up if you’re looking for a little bling for your blog and want to connect with other Portland bloggers.

Thanks to Rails generating an increased buzz in the .NET community about MVC, Microsoft is now going to ship its own MVC framework as an extension to ASP.NET. I’ve been doing traditional ASP.NET and ASP.NET with the Model View Presenter (MVP) pattern now for 3 years and am not a big fan of it’s workings, with viewstate, postbacks, controls and event lifecycle. Too often I find myself having to work too hard to do fit what I’m trying to do into the framework. The web is a simpler medium, and I like the software stacks that web apps are written to be simpler too. I’m looking forward to exploring this new framework more along with Rails and MonoRail.

Jump right into the Portland news to take a look.

LocalSignal is built for 3 types of uses:

1. Quickly get the latest news, event info, and social media content from around the web for your city
2. See what’s happening in a city you’re traveling or moving to
3. See who’s online around you in your city

As is my custom, I usually give a back story when launching an app (here’s Web 2.0 Innovation Map and NetworthIQ). Basically, I was subscribing to a whole bunch of Portland feeds, and it was beginning to clutter up my reader. Feed readers are great, but the more feeds you follow the more difficult it is to keep up and need arises to find faster ways to filter. Also, when I took a trip last year to San Diego, I had been looking for something like this to get an idea of what was going on down there, maybe if there were any Web 2.0 type companies or events to check out. I also like to know what’s happening in Seattle to get a feel for overall Northwest happenings, but I certainly didn’t want to subscribe to those feeds, and didn’t want to build a new page in PageFlakes/Netvibes for any city I all of a sudden cared about. Finally, I’ve met a number of great people locally here in Portland as a result of my online activities, and would like to continue that tradition by finding the local people using various social platforms.

Putting those ideas together with my increasing use of Original Signal for news scanning, and the city-based single page aggregator now known as LocalSignal was born. Originally I was just trying to filter out universal social media platforms for local content (topix, newsvine, del.icio.us, technorati, MetaFilter, Ball Hype, Upcoming). If a site had feeds and some way to filter content by tag or location, I tried to utilize it. Unfortunately, I think the vision falls short by only relying on that method. Some feeds were too stale for that fine grained of content, and some too busy to find anything useful. For that reason, I’m starting to add more locally produced content.

If you’re wondering what the heck I’m doing building another app right now, as if I have the time. Well, I wonder myself sometimes. Focus was never my strong-point. But, I like to tinker and the feed plumbing was built back in February as I was brushing up on my PHP. Todd and I discussed some organization and design ideas in Aprilish, but I still let it simmer. Some recent events have given me the motivation to bring it down from the attic and get it out the door.
There’s still a number of things to do: UI improvements, showing new items since last visit, showing popular items (determined by clicks), and of course content content content (adding, removing, ordering) for the 53 cities currently being tracked.

Here’s some additional resources about news filtering methods:

• 5 News Aggregation Methods Compared
• Tracking the web with Single Page Aggregators

I should be happier for them, more exposure for the personal finance space and all. But, I’m feeling a little down today. As is the case with Wesabe, Expensr and Geezeo, I don’t view them as a competitor. They are more traditional Personal finance managers, focusing on expense tracking and bank account aggregation. NetworthIQ looks beyond bank accounts into your whole financial picture at a simpler/higher level while adding a social support network and way for you to chronicle your financial decisions. It’s really more of a complement to any of these apps. Unfortunately though, even if we’re not competitors, NetworthIQ will be viewed in the same general realm and thus be buried further in the noise and battle for new users. This also hit home reading this month’s Money magazine article about social personal finance that ignored NetworthIQ (Jean Chatzky, what’s a guy gotta do to get on your radar?). We were the first doing anything personal finance related in Web 2.0/social software. Now, there are lots out there. One thing’s for sure, I’m going to have to pick up my game a lot more.

As a personal finance software user myself, I’m not impressed with Mint. It’s web-based and very pretty, but I’ve been using MS money for 8 years and there’s nothing in Mint that will make me switch. I’m a BIG proponent of web-based software, and Money is probably the only reason I keep Windows around (ok, I guess I need it for .NET development too, but it’s the only software app that I use on Windows). It would be great to have a web app for this, but I’m not ready to give a new web service my usernames/passwords (I gave one to test it out), and it only tracks bank and credit card accounts. It can’t track mortgages, brokerage accounts, etc, so it’s not really a “track all your accounts in one place” app. I’d still have to use Money. The weekly email summary was a neat thing I admit, but I think there’s a lot more power in a client PFM in analyzing and reporting on spending. In the end, Mint feels more like an affiliate marketing scheme than a PFM.

To win the “best presenter” award at TC40, I honestly think that’s ridiculous, but really says more to me about the conference than Mint. For two reasons. 1) If this is the best app out of the 40, I can promptly ignore the other 39. 2) This has to be one of the best funded companies there, and I don’t think companies with VC funding should be in the running for conference grants. Those should be reserved for companies still battling in the funding game.

This is interesting to me, one because I love trying collaboration tools and two, because I noted LUNARR way back last february and for the longest time, I was getting a good chunk of my paltry traffic from google searches for Toru Takasuka, the CEO. I’ve now been relegated to page 3 of the google results.

So, now that LUNARR is out, let’s look at the description from back then:

“He says he will develop a Web-based product that will allow business people to handle their computer needs, boosting productivity through collaboration. Information will be accessible via anything from a personal computer to a cell phone to a television.”

The collaboration part is definitely there, and I see some interesting things there. The whole “turn the page over” idea is kind of cool, and importing web sites to comment on was a nice touch. We’ll see how the cell phone and television part plays out.

If you want an invite, let me know.

(via)

Silicon Florist marks its first month – The best new blog around, if you live in the Portland area and are interested in web/tech, this is a must read. I left a comment about how reading Silicon Florist reminds me of the early days of TechCrunch, Read/Write Web, and Mashable when I was always anticipating the next post to see what great new stuff was coming. I’ve become a bit jaded following the general web 2.0 blogs lately, with their growing need to be businesses and post constantly, and I rarely get excited about anything that is posted there anymore, nor can I ever hope to keep up. So having a locally focused blog makes me feel so much more connected again.

Marshall leaves SplashCast to join Read/Write Web – Speaking of Read/Write Web, Portland’s most famous web guy makes the jump to one of the top Web 2.0 blogs. I love this move. Marshall’s one of the top minds on web analysis and news and it’ll be great to have him back covering the whole web again. BTW, as part of his consulting practice, he’s now offering a social media starter kit which will be great for anybody interested in learning how to corral the vast information on the web. Also, if you’re already fully up to speed on finding news and feeds, but you find too much of it, check out his post on how to read feeds more efficiently and avoid information overload.

CLIQ beta announced – Portland’s StepChange group launches a beta program for CLIQ, a new blog community widget that lets you share content from your “clique” of bloggers. If you’re interested in widgets, either developing or the bursting economy around them, Kevin from StepChange will be speaking at the October Web Innovators meeting. Also, as you can see on my site here, I’ve added a CLIQ widget that features Portland Web/Tech bloggers. If you’re interested in joining, sign up for the beta, or let me know and I’ll send you an invite to the Clique.

Portland Web Innovators on OpenID – Adam put together a great topic and place and the turnout was fantastic. OpenID has many challenges ahead to reach mass adoption, but its great to see people tackling this important area. Special thanks to Jive Software for hosting. I haven’t been as active this year in the Web Innovators but am thrilled to see it thriving now.

Advanced Operators posts its 4th topic – AdvOp is a great new community that brings bloggers/technologists (lots of Portland ones) together every week to focus on a single topic in the form of blog posts and comments. Like Silicon Florist, its another great way to get connected to those around you, and that share your interests. I haven’t participated yet, but hope to one of these weeks, and I enjoy following the threads.

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20070909.html

BTW, if you’re searching for a good name, be sure to add Bust A Name to your toolbox, I can’t say enough good things about it.

Now I just have to find that receipt. I know it’s around here somewhere.

Tags: iPhone, Apple

Kelly emailed me today and mentioned the subject so I thought it be worth a reply here.

I could go either way on this. For one, big deal if the Ducks tried to woo him, I don’t see that as an etiquette violation. Casey has built OSU into a dominant force, and maybe he’ll win another national title at OSU, but what if he were to undertake the challenge of bringing UO baseball to national prominence and succeed. Then he would prove that without a doubt he is one of the greatest coaches in Oregon sports (and college baseball) history. Nothing like cementing a legacy. He could always turn the job down if he chooses.

On the other hand, I’m perhaps one of the few people who do not like Casey. I can and do respect what he’s accomplished, but hey he didn’t let me on their team and I’ve been known to hold a grudge or two, it’s one of my weaknesses. So, to see a coach I don’t like, coaching my favorite team would not thrill me. If it turns out as reported and the Ducks start with a fresh name with Oregon roots, I think that would be outstanding.

Let Civil War rage year round now. Though since the Ducks will probably suck the first couple years, at least we’ll crush the Beavers with our competitive cheerleading team (the other sport added along with baseball, which just so happens is only the 2nd competitive cheer team in the country). On the plus side for me, whenever it comes up that I played and coached baseball at the U of O, it’ll sound a heckuva lot more impressive without knowing that it was Club Baseball.

That’s right. They want me to provide my username and password for the on-line services that may contain some of my most sensitive information, including: Gmail, Plaxo, Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL.

I can’t think of a very polite way to say “no fucking way”, so I won’t even try. There wasn’t a button for that.

Blame it on Facebook, Flixster, or whatever spam.. cough cough, I mean “viral marketing” success story there is out there that has led to this trend. I wish it would stop and I wish it would stop now. I have no problems with a service providing me some copy that I can send to my friends, or even let me put in some email addresses to send invites to. But asking for username and passwords to online email accounts is beginning to cross the line. How am I suppose to trust what you do with all of this information? I realize there is a “skip this step” in these examples, but note how small it usually is.

I admit I fell for this on Facebook and they found several people that were in my contacts, and it got me started. But that’s Facebook, one of the biggest sites on the web and they have little incentive to abuse the information. I have since wised up though and even that fact will not dupe me into falling for this again.

Here’s a quick look at some doing this in addition to facebook and spock:

Flixster

iLike

Me.dium

Unfortunately, there haven’t been many web things considered here lately. I became a father for the 2nd time in early June, which has made this a wonderful time. However, time for blogs (both reading and writing) has dwindled as I sharpen my focus on family, work, and paying side-projects (yes, July also marks the first month that I will personally make money on NetworthIQ). I can see opportunities all around these days, it’s just a matter of seizing them. That will be my goal as I enter my 30’s. Less reading and talking, more doing.

Like much of the Northwest, Sherwood is home to an array of beautiful parks and natural beauty. But the quickly growing commercial sites of Sherwood offer true insight into the town’s character: a juxtaposition of old and new, with reverence toward both the city’s historic past and its bright, expanding future. The community events calendar is always full and the town’s location makes for a fairly easy commute to nearby Portland. -A.B.

As much as I complain about living so far out, Sherwood does indeed have a nice community feel to it, the downtown/old town area has a great throwback vibe, and there are nice parks and sports facilities. I grew up in a town of only a couple thousand people, near Eugene, and that was definitely too small for me. But the 15,000 population range, while near a bigger city is an appealing mix. Plus, you can have a decent backyard. That makes it great for families.

If you don’t have a family, you would probably go crazy in this town. I’m betting there is a picture of Sherwood in the dictionary next to the definition of “suburbia.” I can’t believe the “fairly easy commute” line from the author. Say what? Personally, I think Sherwood is by far, the most difficult commute of the west-side suburbs (Sherwood, Tigard, Tualatin, Wilsonville, Beaverton, Hillsboro). There are minimal mass-transit options (nowhere near MAX, one bus running up HWY 99), and driving down Tualatin-Sherwood road to I-5 is one of the most aggravating stretches of road you will ever travel. I know a lot of people make the commute, but I would never refer to it as easy.

But, it’s great to see the city get some exposure, perhaps we’ll get some better restaurants now. One can only eat at Red Robin so many times.

Stocks of iPhones were depleted at all but two of Appleâ€s retail stores by the end of business on July 4th. Only the Shadyside (Pittsburgh) and Bridgeport Village (Portland area) stores report stock when they open Thursday, July 5th. Estimates of initial iPhone supplies by analysts range from 700,000 down to about 350,000, not including iPhones shipped to 1,800 AT&T stores.

One of my colleagues managed to flip two iPhones on eBay for a modest profit that were purchased at the Bridgeport store shortly after they were released, and without having to wait in line more than a couple minutes.

I guess I’ll know where to go next time there’s a hot Apple release. And, no I didn’t get an iPhone yet, and yes I do want one. The real web, not some crippled mobile browser, in the palm of my hand wherever I go. Sounds like a dream to me.

This is a very cool feature that gives a nice, quick snapshot of a company. It looks like it was released in posts beginning last Wednesday. What’s especially interesting is that on the same day, Niall Kennedy’s Startup Search was released and it’s almost exactly the same thing as the TechCrunch database. Startup Search has better linkage among people and investors in addition to tracking traffic indicators, but the company profiles are nearly identical.

I wonder if Mike and Niall will work together to built a more complete database faster. Both appear to have pretty limited listings (only 47 companies on startup search and I could only find a handful on TC DB, in contrast I had over 300 on the web 2.0 map last year and that number has at least doubled by now). And hey guys, bring back an updated version of the Web 2.0 Innovation map, I still think that’s a cool way to visualize startup activity.

It’s been years since I’ve attended or even watched a game on tv as they’ve fielded teams that were terrible on and off the court. I’m definitely not alone, as the team has suffered huge decreases in attendance and financial performance. It doesn’t take a genius to predict that with this stroke of luck, the team should now have a city starting to get behind it again.

I used to play a lot of sports and do a little coaching before I got bit by the side-project entrepreneur bug, but not enough to warrant the use of TeamSnap. I don’t think it will help my golf game much either. If I start playing or coaching sports again (which I definitely want to do), I’ll have to remember to give this a shot.

First off are the 500(!) requests to urchin.js, locking up my browser. Once that is fully swallowed, you are presented with a half-empty UI. I guess there are no “Amateur Programmers” in the system? I play with the job category thingamabob and still can’t get any results. Next I try these filter widgets, and boy are they slow (this is client-side slowness, having nothing to do with the load on the site). Oh, I see that I’m “Already Logged in,” well no actually I haven’t logged in. Finally I entered some stuff to the “Get Ranked” form (I put some skills, not sure exactly what they mean by accomplishments, seems kind of vague) and hit go, and after about 30 seconds my browser finally came back to life with absolutely nothing changed on the screen. After that, I’m outta here. I can’t wait until uncov gets on this one.

User Experience is hard, I can relate with my own struggle to to create positive experiences that really get the message I’m trying to spread, across. But, simplicity can go a long way to helping that, and I would give that advice to the TalentSpring team. I think the problem is that the home page is trying to do too much with multiple kinds of filters in the browse area, the results area itself, and the “get ranked” form. But, while trying to do too much, nothing gets accomplished here, I never saw any results. Perhaps getting rid of the “Get Ranked” form and prefilling the latest resumes into the results (then the filters can be used) would be a good start. Just some thoughts.

Yahoo rolled out some updates to their Maps API on Tuesday night, but unfortunately they broke their Geocode API in the process. I know, I know, don’t rely on free APIs, nothing like a day without new users to drive that point home. In spite of knowing I shouldn’t rely on this API, I’m troubled by the way this was broken. I would expect better from Yahoo, who put a lot of resources into their developer network.

First, they didn’t version this release, it’s still “V1”. If they had bumped the version and kept the old one around, the problem could have been avoided. Secondly, it’s essentially a schema problem which are much more difficult to code around than the service being down or throwing errors. While the response still technically passes schema validation, it’s easy to see that the data is not right. Third, it is still not fixed after they’ve known about it for over a day.

Here’s the bug. Run a zip code lookup:

http://local.yahooapis.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=YahooDemo&zip=97201

this is the response:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ResultSet>
   <Result precision="zip">
      <Latitude>45.507542</Latitude>
      <Longitude>-122.689796</Longitude>
      <Address></Address>
      <City>Portland, OR  97201</City>
      <State>United States</State>
      <Zip></Zip>
      <Country>US</Country>
   </Result>
</ResultSet>
<!-- ws03.search.scd.yahoo.com compressed Thu May 17 09:55:39 PDT 2007 -->

The city, state and zip are combined into the city field while the country is put into the state field. Whoops. So the city field has to be further parsed in order to put the data in the right place. I use this service to take care of that for me, and don’t have time at the moment to do it. So, I bumped the limit on my state field in the database in order to work around this, but my geo data will be all messed up until this is fixed and then I’ll have to go back through and clean it up.

I’d argue that zip code lookups are fairly common and there should be a test case for this. Time to look at Google’s geocoder I suppose.

One of the questions that came up during the Inventrepreneurship session (slides) at WebVisions was where to find people to help build projects. Groups like PDX Web Innovators and PDX UX, as well as any of the groups in that list is probably a good place to start.

Let Go! 8 Steps to Succeeding in a Post-2.0 World

Lane Becker and Thor Muller, Satisfaction (slides)
I didn’t write down the 8 specific things, perhaps they’ll show up here, but this talk wasn’t really about presenting the 8 things, it was more a conversation about their message, “Be Like the Internet.” What does this mean? It means giving up control, opening up more, looking outside for solutions, embracing chaos, being more agile. Again, look to the wiki they setup, hopefully they’ll build it out a bit.

More:
http://www.commoncraft.com/webvision-2007-review

Social Media Strategies for your Organization? Connecting the Dots

Jeremiah Owyang (presentation) (slides)
Jeremiah discussed ways to present and implement social media strategies in organizations. The slides should sum it up well or watch the presentation. I need to try some of this stuff with my company. The Air Traffic Controller idea is a good start, though hardly anything is ever said about my company in the blogosphere (perhaps that’s as good a reason to start doing this).

More:
http://www.elainenelson.org/2007/05/04/social-media-for-cos/

Web Visions: Presentation Page Hierarchy

web application hierarchy, after lunch

Lunch

Apparently neither Jacob nor Cliff have experienced a Burgerville milkshake, unbelievable. Fortunately we survived the throng of pre-teens and made it back to the conference.

Web Application Page Hierarchy

Luke Wroblewski (slides)
Luke W. is my new design hero, I just hope to never have to pronouce his last name. Not only does he work for Yahoo!, but has his own design business, writes books/articles, and is a prodigous speaker (not always covering the same topic). His slides on Best Practices for Web Form Design are the most useful, actionable advice I have ever seen in a presentation (i.e. you can put the stuff to use immediatley). I didn’t even see that presentation, just read the slides.

So, the talk was great with some sound and straightforward advice on how to focus your pages on the things that matter. Good point about the importance of a good presentation layer, it’s not just making it pretty.

More:
http://www.elainenelson.org/2007/05/04/web-application-hierarchy-after-lunch
http://blog.vibrantjourney.com/2007/05/04/web-visions-presentation-page-hierarchy

English: Web 2.0’s Universal Language

Kevin Smokler
I left the content square-table discussion for reasons similar to Adam’s and ended up in this one. It was ok. Kevin’s a smart, energetic guy, but the topic wasn’t the most exciting to me, or maybe I was just ready to go home. The discussion was on being clear in our language and making product descriptions easier to understand (passing the mother-in-law test). RSS was a common topic; it’s so great, but a lot of people still don’t really get what it is after all these years.

More:
http://www.bitclone.com/wp/105/webvisions-2007-rockstars-of-design/

I had to jet and missed the Friday keynote, sounds like it was pretty funny. Instead I spent the next two hours in the parking lot know as I-5.

Tags: webvisions, webvisions07

AJAX Inside Out (Workshop)

Jack Herringon
Slides: http://muttmansion.com/webvisions.pdf
Code Samples: http://muttmansion.com/webvisions.tgz

Waste of time. They should give refunds for this. Not sure if it was a horrible mis-communication between WV staff and Mr. Herrington, or between WV marketing and attendees. This was a demonstration of AJAX, that’s all.

Inventrepreneurship

Paul Ingram (slides)
Very inspiring talk on ideas; where to get them, and how to bring them to life. I’ve recently begun trying some of Paul’s ideas myself in regards “private virtual parnerships,” utilizing informal collectives of people to build projects so am glad to hear others are comfortable doing this as well (as opposed to creating formal organzations/agreements and hiring employees and contractors). I loved the Segway video (a hypothetical discussion of the importance of the Segway as if all of the initial hype came true) and will have to try to find that.

More:
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?533

Social Architecture: Modeling the Next Generation

Sean Madden (slides)
Emergence, ubiquitous computing, calm technology, genetic algrorithms. Wow, this is heady stuff, and apparently this guy grew up in Tualatin, which is a stone’s throw from where I currently live. The driving point is about making systems more flexible and easier to change/evolve from the community’s use. I encourage you read the summaries below, this was one of my favorite sessions and I need to let this sink in a bit more.

More:
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?534
http://www.jasoneiseman.com/blog/?p=168

Sensory Trasformation: How to Sip from the Information Firehose (Keynote)

David Pescovitz (BoingBoing blogger among many other pursuits)
Interesting stuff on information overload, ubiquitous computing, predicting the future. I enjoyed it. I’ll have to dump all my RSS feeds one of these days and start over, one of things David does to manage overload and find new and interesting stuff.

More:
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?535
http://www.jasoneiseman.com/blog/?p=169

Tags: webvisions, webvisions07

Ahhh, conferences. If I had the time and money, I’d probably just go to conferences and classes for a career. It’s a blast to learn new things and listen to different perspectives. But, I’m practical and know that you won’t get much done if you’re only learning, so usually end up doing one or two outings a year. This is my third year at WebVisions, and I have to say, I much rather would’ve gone to Microsoft’s Mix. Ok, maybe being in Vegas has a lot to do with that preference. Local conferences aren’t always much fun, you don’t get to experience the whole thing as real life is still very present. But, with baby #2 nearing arrival, leaving town wasn’t an option.

The WebVisions lineup and sessions seem a bit weaker (IMO) than in years past, but we’ll see how how I feel afterwards. Take any of my criticisms with a grain of salt though, it would take mountains moving for me to get in front of an audience to present. I can barely ask a question without shaking.

AJAX Workshop

I was late (shocking, I know) but this turned out to be a bust. The speaker was definitely knowledgeable about the topic, pretty similar to my own level of knowledge I’d say. But, unfortunately I didn’t take my own advice about not attending technical/programming sessions at a designer’s conference. The presentation was geared at beginners and it was a “presentation,” not a workshop. I was expecting to be able to plug in the laptop and work through some examples and exercises after seeing some demos and a bit of lecutre/presentation. But instead it was just demos/presentation without the ability to reinforce what was being said through concrete exercises. You can’t learn this stuff by listening, you have to do it.

More later, the Inventrepreneurship session is shaping up nicely.

Tags: webvisions, webvisions07

With the NetworthIQ move to a new, dedicated server last month, I was able to move the log directory outside of the web root (yeah, I know, you shouldn’t have logs in your web root, but they were protected). All of a sudden, the rolling is working again, with no lost logs. I guess there’s a conflict between IIS and Log4Net somewhere, maybe someone knows the exact reason, but for now I’m happy to have it working.

Sites create an unnecessary roadblock to user adoption, and it seems to be becoming more common. The problem is, these tests can be unintelligible and a normal user can’t pass it. If you’re MySpace or Facebook and getting thousands of registrations a day, then it makes sense to worry about thwarting the bots, but until then, please dump the CAPTCHAs. Use email verification instead, which you probably do anyway, so no need to beat up your users before they’re actually users with too many tests.

Today, after 5 attempts, I failed my CAPTCHA test at fatsecret (techcrunch coverage). It looked interesting, I wanted to see how they did some things as the idea is similar, feature-wise, to what we do with personal finance on NetworthIQ. Plus, I could stand to lose a few, so maybe it could help me out. But, now we’ll never know for sure because I can’t sign up.

Given Arnoldâ€s record 2006 — the largest sum, we believe, anyone has ever earned in one year — a slap like that just might land someone in intensive care.

I am stunned.

(via Paul Kedrosky)

When it comes to web innovations, Firefox definitely fits the bill. I remember first discovering Firebird (as it was known before the name change) a few years back along with the Edit CSS plugin, and was amazed that I could edit CSS on the fly and see the changes live. Its been my browser of choice ever since. I didn’t even bother with Safari when I recently bought an iMac, took it out of the dock on the first day in fact. It’s only used for compatibility testing. The main reason I use Firefox? For the plugins. No other browser can compete with the sheer volume of useful plugins. This speaks to a compelling reason for offering an API as well, if you can get developers building cool stuff on your platform, the users will follow, and I do believe Firefox will take over IE.

I’ll be interested in the discussion around offline apps as well, one of the most mentioned features of Firefox 3. What, with the recent buzz around Adobe’s Apollo launch and then DHH’s remarks.

Come out if you can, here’s the details:

Wednesday, April 4, 2007
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Where
ISITE Design
115 NW First Avenue, Suite 500
Portland, Oregon 97209

Description
Dietrich Ayala will talk about his work with the Mozilla Corporation and whatâ€s coming in Firefox 3.

http://www.pdxwi.com/events/4

I have a hard time buying this explanation:

Today Riya is using the organic traffic to see how changes improve monetization, repeat usage, etc. The business is in “fine-tune” mode. Every change improves the lifetime value of every user and the marginal profit contribution of every dollar to be spent on marketing. We haven’t poured gasoline in the engine to accelerate the traffic. We are tuning the user experience as measured by the economics of the business.

Did Google, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, or any of the recent viral growth success stories have to “pour gasoline” by spending money on marketing? But, who knows, and at least I learned something useful about measuring. It’s not to say it won’t succeed, but given the money and hype put into it, it seems rather shaky.

There’s this crazy idea floating around that Oregonians don’t know how to drive. You hear it mentioned every once in a while, usually by someone from the busy roads of California. I admit I have seen my fair share of people going 65 in the left lane on I-5, driving along in ignorant bliss, as the lineup behind them is preparing to run them off the road. But, usually this is an occasional annoyance.

However, I’m starting to come to the conclusion that we Oregonians do indeed do not how to drive. Every day when I drive home from work, I prepare myself for the psychological torment of the Scholls Ferry merge. I work in Beaverton and live in Sherwood, so the quickest route there is to take Scholls Ferry to Roy Rogers (no, not named after THAT Roy Rogers). Scholls Ferry is bad enough with its stoplights every two car lengths, but then we hit the merge. The great traffic engineers of the city of Beaverton designed this splendid system of roads that will go along in two lanes and then merge into 1 lane about 3 feet after a stoplight. Walker Road (by Nike campus) has a lot of these as well. No, it’s not really 3 feet, but that’s pretty much how they’re treated since only the hooligans or the newbies cut ahead of the backup in the left lane by driving up the right line and merging in after the light as everyone in the left lane tries their hardest to not let them merge, cursing them vehemently.

But, are they really hooligans? Or, are they the smart ones, and the other 99% of the drivers in the left lane are the idiots. When I first encountered these things, I always patiently waited my turn and fumed at those who tried to beat the system. But, now, I’ve realized that I can cut a good 5 minutes or so off of my commute by driving up the right lane and save my sanity. It’s at the risk of inciting road-rage, I know.

The way I see it, these layouts are designed to prevent just the backup they cause by letting more cars through the lights, and letting them merge. There’s also some purpose to allow cars that are turning right before the merge to bypass the congestion, but I think the bigger issue is reducing congestion by letting more cars through. So, due to the societal norm of waiting your turn, the system backfires and the congestion remains, serving very little improvement over a single lane system.

Not a very usable design, huh? How should this be fixed so people feel free to use the right lane? Or am I cheating and need to get back in line?

I decided to start a Twitter feed for the building of NetworthIQ. Kinda like bare naked app did by blogging about the building of Amigo and what Steve Poland is doing now at Ringside Startup, only mine will be “microblogging” allowing me to make quick entries instead of long blog posts.

For some background, NetworthIQ is a bootstrapped, side-project, .NET, personal finance web app/service that launched in the summer of 2005. It currently is nearing 8000 registered users and I’ve recently re-committed myself to focusing my spare time to making it better and helping it fulfill its potential. Two new features (tips and blogs) have been launched recently and I’ve got some more cool stuff in the works.

If you’re interested in the business of web apps, or the technology of web apps (not necessarily limited to .NET, I will explore many issues) I invite you to follow the feed and participate in the discussion as I go along.

Tags: twitter

Here’s the result:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=http://www.platial.com/rss/map/1768

Platial also lets you create maps from GeoRSS, so the new Google feature doesn’t really do anything new or better, it does however make it a bit easier since I just have to enter a URL for the feed (no account required). Plus I always like playing with Google Maps and its API features and this gives me reason to learn a bit more about GeoRSS.

There are also a couple of blogs now (main and news), which for me anyway, is a much easier way to get information these days.

Both new features are welcome additions to the site and turns it into a must have resource for local entrepreneurs.

The best use of my tax refund…

Pay off credit card

Discover your own

File income taxes | Track your Net worth

I know you want to share. Well, jump over to the head-to-head refund smackdown game that Adam and I (mostly Adam, but he’s gracious enough to say I helped :-)) just released.

Best use of Income Tax Refunds

If after doing that you feel inspired to go file your taxes, InstaFILE is there for you.

NHibernate in Action

(via Ayende)

Go Ducks!

There is definitely no lack of tools in SEO arena. But, there is also a wide range of quality in these tools. I have a couple of favorites in my toolbox including SearchStatus and SEO for Firefox. I have to say after giving the SEO Toolbar a run through, I like the tools overall, but I give it thumbs down and will not be adding this to the toolbox. Apparently I’m wrong though, because 100% of polled people can’t live without it. (note, there was 1 vote at the time of this post)

The bad: Personal data required to download

I start off by visiting the download page for the SEO Toolbar. Immediately, a prospective user is presented with a form to fill out before they can download the toolbar. Fortunately, you just have to fill out the form and not wait for an email with a link to the download as some do. So, any ol’ data will do here. When was the last time you had to enter data to download a Firefox plugin? But, that’s getting a bit ahead of ourselves because…

The bad: IE Only

Nowhere on the download page does it say what browsers are supported. There are no system requirements of any kind on the download page, and I didn’t find anything elsewhere on the site. But, eventually, after installing it, discovered this is an IE only tool. For me, if you don’t support Firefox, why bother? How many professional and aspiring SEOs use IE? With the abundance of SEO plugins for Firefox, I’m sure Firefox is the browser of choice. However, for the person in the Marketing department that’s just learning about SEO and still uses IE, this may be helpful for them. I was a good sport though and completed the install and fired it up in IE.

The not so ugly: There are some handy tools in here

Ok, we avoided getting ugly. But frankly, if I were to just come across it normally, I never would have gone further. So, let’s look at the tools provided by the SEO Toolbar.

• Web Searches – There is a nice search function where you can choose between 11 search engines. This would have been cool a couple years ago, but FF and now IE 7 have this ability with no toolbar needed.
• Ranking – This one is handy. You can visit the target site, enter a search term and then get the rankings for that search on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. My current toolset doesn’t have this at the click of a button. I also like how it shows it summarized in a popup window.
• Site Data – Three tools in this area, a keyword analyzer, a html validator, and a site analyzer tool which gives a good overall summary of the site. The html validator is worthless here, I already have tools for this in FF, but the other two are nice to have.
• Engine Data – A quick count of backlinks and page counts in the various search engines. Again, handy to have it summarized in a popup at the click of a button (as opposed to going to a 3rd party tool’s hosted tool or loading up each engine’s query page)
• Network Data – A few logistical tools, IP lookup, load time, ping, WHOIS data, and HTTP header info. Nothing here that I don’t already have quick access too with the Firefox toolset.

So, there are some helpful tools once you get going. Perhaps if they release a Firefox plugin, I would use it. But, as it stands now, I don’t see enough to make me want to use it on IE.

Please, I beg all site owners, do not use this thing.

Clearspace looks to be bringing together blogs, wikis, forums, and document sharing into a single product, perfect for teams. Clearspace reminds me a lot of SharePoint, but who likes using SharePoint? I’d love an alternative and this looks like a good one. Sharing information on teams is often a pain. I know my current team at work has come back to email again (yuck) as the primary means of cummunication, even after installing SharePoint. Email is horrible for team communication as messages are easily lost and ignored, and they are often disruptive to workflow. We occasionally use the SharePoint forums, but most of the time people have to send an email pointing to the discussion because it’s just not part of the natural communication flow yet (not entirely SharePoint’s fault).

Blogs, forums, and wikis are ideal for team communication because they can be viewed out-of-bound from your current workflow. You can view them on your own schedule and can much easily filter unwanted information. Say I find a great new tool (like Firebug), I can simply blog about it instead of emailing everybody. Plus I can have related conversations on the forum thread or blog comment thread that only involve the interested parties. The biggest weakness of SharePoint is that it lacks good tools for knowledge sharing. It’s ok for documents, lists, and some wiki-like functionality. But, I’m looking forward to seeing the blogs, blog reading, and wiki tools in Clearspace, and if they can really help facilitate discussion and knowledge sharing.

Though it’s not likely we’ll see Clearspace adoption on my team, because it’s currently so Microsoft tool focused, I’ll still be interested in trying it out for my own interest for use on side and future projects.

If you’re interested in more on collaboration suites, see the WordPress/Knownow agreement and the Intel SuiteTwo release.

So, we’re heading down the road and my wife’s trying to get the thing setup and what do you know, the damn Auto Kit is just for power, there’s no way to actually play the iPod through this thing. WTF? I had assumed incorrectly it was an FM adapter, but it’s only a power charger and amplifier. What part of “play” are they talking about? You have to buy a separate FM adapter to actually play your iPod in your car, which when you combine the Auto Kit, adds up to about the same price as the iCarPlay. Guess which one I have now? Yes, the iCarPlay. Belkin may have been trying to provide flexibility with their separate power adapter and FM transmitter (and plethora of other combinations thereof), but they ended up providing confusion and distrust. I have finally learned my lesson with Belkin and I will never buy another one of their product’s again.

We talked about APIs back at the September PDX Web Innovators meeting, and much of that was focused around building mashups off of these services. I think it will be a real bummer if this trend continues, and less mashup-friendly services are offered. I agree with Dare that a site would be stupid to restrict ways to add stuff to your site. But it also strikes me that controlling the data extraction type of API would be a first step towards limiting a site’s viral uptake (though I’m sure Google’s not too concerned with that at this point in their existence).

Personally, I really like the Yahoo set of services, that give you a choice among different output formats (XML, JSON, and PHP), thereby making it easy to use on the server and client (kind of anyway, I can test easily by typing urls in the browser, but the cross-domain AJAX issue in most cases prevents direct use on the client-side).

I can describe this new version in one word: Amazing. Firebug will make debugging your web app a joy. No matter if the problem is in the markup, script, CSS, or HTTP request/response, Firebug will help you find it. You’ll actually want to have bugs just so you can use it. Great to see it’s going to stay open source too.

There is a catch, it only lasts 4 months (treating us to a wonderful April fools). But at least it saves me from creating my own VPC hard drive and sitting through a windows install until then.

Simon Willison (malicious content)
YUI blog (spam urls)
Jack Slocum (spam urls)

I asked for Willison’s and Slocum’s to be whitelisted and the YUI blog started working this week without a request, so maybe Secure Computing updated the blacklist. Is this some conspiracy to suppress the adoption of the Yahoo User Interface Library? (only kidding)

If I had to pick only one application to have installed on my pc, it would be Firefox. I live in it for a good chunk of the day, and am extremely hesitant to install anything else (with the exception of development servers and some programming tools). That’s the power of the web, you can do almost anything in a browser now days.

So, it was with great excitement that I updated to the new Firefox release a couple weeks ago. There are definitely some great features, first and foremost is the spell-checker (getting close to saying goodbye to Word forever) and second , improved tabbing. But there was one subtle change that is a rather large blow to pop-up windows. I don’t mean pop-ups in the bad way, when used for ads. I mean when purposely used for an application, such as the one I’m currently developing where the pop-up allows the user to monitor information while still using the main application. IMO, it would be very awkward to use a div-window within the main document. So, the change?

Note the “Raise or lower windows” option in the javascript settings. You can no longer bring focus to a opened window by default. The user has to grant this permission. Fat chance of relying on a user setting. So, my workaround is to close and open the window again when trying to bring it to focus. This is doable, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to save off the coordinates of the opened window before closing it. Still some more research for that one to get a nice cross-browser solution.

Anyway, couple the focus issues with the title bar issue discovered by a co-worker, and it really seems that FF is pushing hard against pop-ups.

Wesabe is a compelling product that I myself will try out. Features such as tips and goals are nice community features that are also slated for NetworthIQ one of these years (though my vision of these is a bit different). I need to still explore the account uploaders, but this could be the best part of Wesabe These uploading features give Wesabe the potential to be a Quicken/Money killer.

To beat Quicken/Money, I believe an app has to get out of the transaction entry approach and solve the problem of tracking finances differently and bring a lot more to the table feature-wise (like with social features). Yet, most new web-based personal finance apps (PFMs) still rely on transaction entry and have no social features. The data is already out there in the banks’ databases, so why should we have to enter it again? Plus, banks are rolling out better applications all the time, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to compete directly with them. One of my top goals for NetworthIQ was to provide account aggregation but never require a user to enter a purchase/transaction manually. That’s why it’s incredibly simplified down to just entering account balances once a month (which is stretching the bounds of data entry far enough IMO, and still needs to simplified further with automation and import/export tools).

Like we’ve faced with NetworthIQ, there is hurdle to overcome for users to trust their financial data to a web-based application. This is why you probably won’t see the desktop PFMs die anytime soon. But, like with online banking, the time is coming and Wesabe should help.

• Top Web 2.0 Blogs (opml file)

If you don’t want to worry about adding subscriptions, a great resource for keeping up on Web 2.0 is the Original Signal singlegator site.

• stikkit
• stickytag
• Helipad
• nottr

As much as I want to like these tools, (especially local entry stikkit), I just can’t get behind them yet. I’ve tried using all kinds of organizational apps like Ta-da lists, wikis, Basecamp/activeCollab, all of the different start pages (google/ig, pageflakes, live.com) and their todo widgets, Google Notebook, and Microsoft OneNote among others.

But, as hard as I’ve tried, I just keep coming back to the same two tools I’ve used for a relatively long-time, Gmail (using drafts and yahoo mail before) and todo.txt files in different places (one at work, different ones at home for different projects). Using Gmail allows easy online access from anywhere when needed and the ability to upload related files, while todo.txt files are great when offline and when needing more room to process thoughts and lists. I find it requires too much effort at times to open a browser or another application. I’m reminded here of Cory Doctorow’s Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks presentation from a couple years back.

I’ll definitely try out stikkit because it looks like such an elegant UI and back-end engineering effort, but we’ll see if I stick with it (sorry, bad humor). How do you organize yourself?

Note, this is for my personal organization, when working with a team, I’d still recommend a tool like activeCollab/Basecamp or a wiki.

In looking at the source, I see they’re trying to set two things, a category to search within and the search query text. Let’s find a much simpler way to do this that still keeps the form accessible.

Like.com version (minus some layout/styling markup and all of the javascript necessary to process it):

<form class="searchform" id="form1">
    <input name="mainSearchField" id="mainSearchField" type="text"
        class="textareafont" value="" onkeypress="return searchEnter(event)">
    <a href="javascript:search()"><img src="pictures/searchbutton.gif"
        width="81" height="26" align="middle" border="0"><a>
</form>

What I would do (no javascript necessary to get the default action):

<form action="search" method="GET" class="searchform" id="form1">
    <input name="btnSearch" type="hidden" value="all">
    <input name="searchText" type="text" class="textareafont" value="">
    <input type="image" src="pictures/searchbutton.gif" width="81"
        height="26" align="middle" border="0" >
</form>

Now the form works for everybody out of the gate and a user without javascript gets a search in the “all” category. Add some javascript to set the hidden “btnSearch” field (which identifies the category) when the user clicks on one of the other categories (and optionally submits the form if there is a query already there). The requirements may be more involved, but this is my 10-minute clean up.

I’m trying to track down a good list of top PHP bloggers in order to keep up with the latest in the PHP world, something I haven’t been doing over the last year. It was a lot harder than I anticipated. But, I got lucky and found an article that listed several, then searched through del.icio.us/tag/php+blog (I dig tag combinations).

I’d love something like Share your OPML where you could upload multiple subscription lists and tag the list. Anything in the tagged list then inherits the tag and you could find the top blogs for the tag. Or if the OPML has parent outline elements (folders), the name could be used as the tag (therefore you’d have less work to do to break out your subscriptions). Google Reader has some potential here to, seeing its use of tags and the feed bundles. I wonder if they’ll expose the most popular subscriptions by tag? Anybody do anything like that already?

Any other tips for finding the top blogs on a specific topic?

I’ve gone ahead and published my .NET and PHP subscription lists (you don’t see those technologies combined together too often, now do ya?), but I’d love to see other good lists (on both technologies):

• Top .NET Blogs
• Top PHP Blogs

Digg this
Bookmark in del.icio.us

This week has seen a relative slew of new locally produced social sites to launch or that I noticed.

Gone Raw
PDX Web Innovators Ray and Kandace from Needmore Designs launched their newest creation at the Wednesday meeting, which unfortunately I skipped this month, so I didn’t get to see it there. Looks like a nice entry into the social food space and seems like a great site to help people get started and maintain when they go raw. Gone Raw follows Cuppin’ which launched earlier this summer.

Art Face Off
Social networking company for artists, curators and art lovers. (via)

12 Step Space
Recovery oriented social networking. (via)

See previous discussion of the Portland web startup scene here and here.

We’ll have to get Zack out ot the PDX Web Innovators next month.

Dilbert’s 9-point financial plan
I think this is some very sound advice. You really don’t need to get that complicated with how you manage your money.

Moneyhacks and Get Rich Slowly
J.D. started Get Rich Slowly about six months ago and has quickly risen to the top tier of the money bloggers (see pfblog.org to learn more about money blogs). He happens to be from Portland, so it’s great to see the locals doing well. He recently added another blog, moneyhacks, focused more on tools and tips. J.D. was kind enough to include NetworthIQ last week.

CRP: Personal Financial Disclosure Reports
The Center for Responsive Politics has published a fascinating look at what lawmakers are worth. Make of it what you will. But, with elections around the corner, it’s an interesting data point to consider.

Well what do you know, today I discovered OrganizedWisdom, which is a social network for health information (via Mashable). Time will tell I suppose, but maybe my idea wasn’t that bad after all, and what does that say about Cambrian House? Goes to show there’s probably always somebody out there thinking about the same thing. This also reminds of when Minti came out.

I’m adding nPost to the Portland Technology/Entrepreneur group list.

Wednesday, October 4, 2006
7:00 PM
Equator Coffee Cafe
510 SE Morrison
Portland, Oregon

Keep up to date with the PDX Web Innovators via the Google Group.

Tags: pdx portland web web2.0

Aggregators
Why search so many places, when these guys bring everything to you? And by everything, I mean everything. Of course it depends on how focused your search is, but be prepared to mine though a lot of listings.

• SimplyHired
• Indeed
• Rails Related Jobs – Ruby on Rails Specific aggregrator

Social networking
What you get when you combine social networking with a job site.

• Jobster
• Whototalkto.com

Niche job boards
Sure, they all have their own audience right? Wrong. But, hey it’s easy money so who can blame them. Seriously though, if you’re looking for full-time work in a specific industry/field, these are much more focused than the big job sites.

• 37signals Job Board – design, development, business
• CrunchBoard – design, development, business
• GigaOM Jobs – design, development, business (I’m sensing a pattern here)
• paidContent.org Jobs – mostly business
• jobs.joelonsoftware.com – Software Development
• Authentic Jobs – Web Design & Development
• Think Vitamin Job Board – Web related
• Npost – tech startup related, mostly northwest
• jobs.codebetter.com – Software/Web Development
• Venture Beat Job Board – high-end management, tech, finance ($100,000+)
• TechGigger Jobs – start-up jobs
• CSS Beauty Job Board – web design/development
• Problogger Job Board – blogging jobs
• jobs.originalsignal.com – aggregates many of these sites

Gigs
You’re a contract/freelance web professional and you want to get paid for your work? Check these out. You think TechCrunch is going to add a gig board now?

• Authentic Jobs
• 37signals
• oDesk – want to work remotely, but have big brother watch your every move? Yikes.

Matchmaking
These don’t necessarily pay, but if you’re looking for help on that hot startup idea or looking for the next Sergey & Larry to hook up with, they’re worth checking out.

• Programmer Meet Designer
• Buildv1
• Go Big Network
• OregonStartups.com – (Portland/Oregon specific)

Crowd sourcing
Have some time and want to tackle some tasks that may earn you some cash? Then crowdsourcing may be for you.

• CambrianHouse

Green Jobs
This category isn’t really tech/web2.0 specific, but if you’re as concerned about the environment as Al Gore is, then this could be your ticket to doing something about it.

• Green Dream Jobs
• TreeHugger Jobs

Managing your search
We wouldn’t be truly Web 2.0 without something to manage all of this, what with the todo managers, time trackers, etc. growing like weeds.

• Isabont

What did I miss? Add other job sites/board that you like?

Digg this
Bookmark in del.icio.us

Tags: jobs jobboard web2.0

Now, they had a little help from a disputed onside kick. Well, as there usually is, there’s more to the story about why the play was not overruled by the replay official (sorry for the annoying oregon live survey, they really need to get rid of that). Turns out the replay official may have got the video late, didn’t have the same angles as ABC did, and was being pressured to make a call. In such situations, the replay official goes with the call on the field. Seems logical to me. Sure, if it happened to my team, I’d be pissed. Still, I’m not going to feel guilty about this win, because Oklahoma choked at the end giving up those two touchdowns and geting the kick blocked. They still had plenty of opportunity to win the game even with the bad call.

But, to me, the most interesting thing from that article was that the replay offical is paid $400 a game. So, you spend all this money implementing replay, for which decisions can mean millions of dollars in bowl revenue, and you pay $400? Something doesn’t seem right about that.

Also, related to the topic of making a service better through their API, check out Moo.com, which for $20 will make a set of minicards from your Flickr photos. I’d say that’s a good use of an API.

Today, I was taken completely aback because the company began implementing a major internet filtering policy, and I mean major. I’m still investigating the full scope, but here’s a taste:

• YouTube, blocked.
• MySpace (and pretty much any other social networking site out there), blocked.
• Odeo, blocked.
• Upcoming.org, blocked.
• iTunes (at least podcasts), blocked.
• Any type of streaming (flash audio/video, QuickTime, etc.), blocked.

Now for the good news. Apparently, straight mp3 files are fine to download, RSS feeds and BlogLines is safe, and for those interested in the social networking scene, the pets are still ok.

I’m sure the guys at TechDirt would have something insightful to say about this, linking to studies showing how internet use is not that big of a deal and actually helps employees be more productive. Unfortunately, the company is entitled to do whatever it wants, and if it feels it needs to do this to save bandwidth, protect its systems, and maintain efficient work flow, well they have the right. I just won’t get to send around any of funny YouTube videos, listen to internet radio, watch movie trailers, check out the latest in social media (I’m thinking the company doesn’t have much of interest in understanding or using social media), or easily listen to podcasts. And like with any filtering technology, it will block something that would help me perform my job better, and then I’ll have to submit a request to unblock it or just go without it. Not the end of the world, but still, it will be an inconvenience.

Why post this then? Well, it got me thinking, and I don’t claim this to terribly insightful, that maybe the whole Net Neutrality debate is not the biggest danger to the internet. Maybe when companies and schools start following this example and shutting their employees and students out (as the government is already working on), and since I’m guessing that’s where a lot of people use the internet most, that will be a huge hit to many web sites and communities? I’m thinking that wouldn’t be a good thing. What do you think?

Update
Added upcoming.org to the list. I can’t believe they blocked that one. Ridiculous.

Tags: youtube myspace filtering itunes

To keep up to date with the group, use our ultra-modern web 2.0 discussion software over at Google Groups:
http://groups.google.com/group/pdxwebInnovators

Here are some related API resources if you feel like studying up:

• ProgrammableWeb (discussion and api/mashup listings)
• How to Add an API to your Web Service (howto)
• APIFinder (listing)
• How To Provide A Web API (another howto)

Admittedly, Microsoft has executed unoriginality better than anyone in history and better than the current crop of Web 2.0 startups, especially since they have paying customers. But, my point is you don’t have to be original to be successful, and Web 2.0 founders will find their way with experimenting with these features. We should all think hard about the value of adding these types of features and strive to come up with innovative stuff, but it’s certainly not sad or depressing to see people give entrepreneurship a go.

Now, I’m not a Netflix user, so I imagine there’s something like this built-in to it? I know Blockbuster online had this, but who uses them (other than for the free trial anyway). And, of course there’s also IMDB which has some ability to make lists of movies.

As far as Movietally goes, I dig the basic idea, and see some potential there to be an extremely sticky and fun site. But, there needs to be a lot more data to seed the system. There is a very small amount of movies in there, requiring users to build the database. It would be a whole lot nicer if the data was already in there (movies, directors, actors, acresses, etc) making the search more effective and decreasing the amount of work a user has to do. Perhaps using IMDB data which is available (but maybe not free) would be good start. There are continuing rumors of an IMDB API too, and Movietally would be an excellent use case for it. But, who knows where that’s at? The tagging approach is ok, but tag suggestions (what other tags have people used) on the add page would be helpful. I wouldn’t mind seeing clean urls too, making it easily hackable.

Other reviews:
PostBubble sinks MovieTally, with a focus on the movie review aspect, which I barely took notice of in my first pass. Though the reviews could be valuable long-term, I looked at it as solving my problem with remembering what I’ve watched and hopefully finding some related movies to check out, which while minor, is still a pain-point.

Update
MovieTally got written up by TechCrunch this week. Turns out it was built by a 15-year old. Nice work.

Tags: movietally imdb api

I think it’s awesome they’re doing so well. But, there needs to be some sense talked into those coaches, letting a 13 year old throw 115 pitches or whatever it was in Monday’s game. Yeah, Jace Frye is a great pitcher, it would just be shame to see his arm finished before he even gets to high school. I can understand this being a once in a lifetime opportunity, and doing what you gotta do to win, but a line needs to be drawn somewhere.

BTW, did you see that 13 year-old from Saudi Arabia who was 6’8″? Unbelieveable!

Update
Looks like it was just an eBay technicality that forced them to re-list, here’s the current auction.

Tags: web2.0 kiko

Also interesting to note that the UserPlane (company acquired by AOL last week) fouders are from Oregon. Glad to see the local connection.

Tags: startup entrepreneur

Tags: cambrianhouse crowdsourcing

NetworthIQ is at 441, pretty much right in the middle.

I’m intrigued because I’ve got a few ideas kicking around and figure it’s worth a shot to see if they can be developed through Cambrian House where otherwise they would languish in my project queue probably never to see the light of day. I submitted one idea and it’s currently pending, so I’ll update its progress here as the experiment progresses.

For freelancers (designers and developers), I also see this as a cool way to perhaps pick up some work. But, I believe it’s way too early to tell how lucrative this all will be.

Tags: cambrianhouse crowdsourcing

With all of these Web 2.0 sites coming out, it’s easy for them to fade away and get lost in the noise. When the founders realize that they’re spending all their time on something that isn’t meeting their goals and expectations (whether monetary or something else), they’ll try to sell it and find something better to spend their time on. Why do I think this? Because I’ve had these thoughts about NetworthIQ, and I’m sure there are hundreds of others who have considered it as well. It’s business. Fortunately, I’m not competing against Google and I still have a lot to do before I reach that point.

But, before we get all sensationalistic and start saying this is the start of Crash 2.0, let’s take a step back. The high number of new startups/sites shouldn’t be considered a bad thing that we become too cynical about. If these entrepreneurs succeed, awesome. If not, think of all that’s being learned. Whether it’s gaining skills and experience in software development, or business, these experiences can only make us stronger (as a friend told me, it’s “skill-building”). Nobody is getting hurt, and the good ones will rise above the noise. The Web is not going away. Just be careful, as Rick Segal mentions, not to forget about your day job too soon.

I say ignore all this “bubble 2.0” talk. Investors should be smart enough to identify good risks (note the word “risk”), it’s their job, and there will not be a dot.com public market crash this time because the overwhelming majority of these companies will not go public.

(more on the Kiko blog and of course TechCrunch also weighs in)

Now, it’s not a complete clone with features such as writeboards (use writely) and time-tracking not there (a feature which I’ve yet to look at in basecamp), and I think basecamp feels a little smoother and more polished. But, I can sacrifice these if it means it’s FREE! (assuming you already have a hosting account or server). Check out Slacker Manager for more detailed comparison of the two

Now, here’s the thing, I’ve read comments defending the Basecamp business model, saying how activeCollab won’t make an impact because it’s not hosted and you have to install it. Well, in my opinion, with the one-click install path, it’s easier to get activeCollab up and running than signing-up for Basecamp. Plus you’ll have a full-fledged hosting account (which you can run other apps on), all for less than a Basecamp account. Finally, for the concerned corporate people, you can keep the app (and the data) behind the firewall.

As a side note, I feel myself tiring of 37signals. I generally like their apps and message (I bought the 10 seat Getting Real to share with co-workers) and I’ve been inspired in many ways by them. But, I thought this post was complete bullshit. I mean, it’s a freakin’ magazine cover. Misleading? Sure, but aren’t most? That’s how they get people to buy them. 37signals gets lots of press, but as soon as a Web 2.0ish article appears that doesn’t include them and includes companies not following their mantra of no VC, they have to get all pissy. Let the guys enjoy their press. Digg may not sell for $200 million now, but it’s surely big enough to make Rose a lot of money someday.

Tags: basecamp activecollab 37signals

Still far short of the NY Times, but I’m not complaining

This year we headed off to see some friends in northern Idaho, outside of Sandpoint. It’s a beautiful area, and I’d recommend visiting if you ever get the chance. With the lakes and mountains it really is a outdoorsman’s playground. We stayed for a couple nights up at Schweitzer and were able to take a lift up to the top and hike down. Too bad for the smoke coming over from various fires, because there was a bad haze that reduced visibility. I imagine when it’s clear, you can see forever. Speaking of forever, while driving from Tri-Cities to Spokane, is it just me, or is it impossible to tell where the earth ends and the sky begins? It’s just so vast. A good reminder of how small our little spot on earth is.

I have to also say that the drive along the Gorge (between Boardman and Hood River) is one of the most calming drives out there. The fact that I can say that while traveling with a 19-month old who has been in a car seat for 8 hours says a lot (there were enough choo choos to keep her entertained). With the river and the rolling hills, it’s pretty cool. Lots of wind surfers and kite boarders out on the water. I wonder if Rick Strahl was out there.

So, now I’m back on the grid and checking out everything that I’ve missed over the last few days. Looks like AOL made quite the mistake and Digg’s creator is rich (or is he?) according to Business Week. Anything else I miss?

But, a couple of things struck me as a bit off. I don’t really understand this software they need money to develop. Pre-built, pluggable modules? Seems like a tough market, as “automatic integration” into an existing website is a pipe dream (though many businesses could very well like to learn this the hard way) and using them to build a site from the ground up is a questionable approach. For proprietary, little-used technology, it would be difficult to find somebody to maintain your site, but I guess Site9, like any good drug dealer (I mean web agency) will surely maintain it for you.

Then they go and try to attach themselves to web 2.0:

“The Web site design and Web 2.0 software development firm”

Hmmm, ok, if you say so. Seems like a questionable use of Web 2.0 that contributes to its derision in cynic circles. Finally there’s this:

“Next-generation features like social networking, podcasting, video-on-demand, RSS feeds, AJAX interfaces and blogs are integrated into the tool.”

A little buzzword happy are we? I mean, c’mon where are the tags? And the APIs? And mashups? How can you be a Web 2.0 software development company without those?

I wish them luck, but I think their marketing needs some tuning. But, who knows, maybe it works, cuz it got me to blog about it.

If you’re looking for a powerful, light-weight image management tool, check out my colleague Jesse‘s clickHappy.

On Thursday night I was catching up on my Wired reading while taking MAX home. Flipping through, I caught a bit about a band called Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, but didn’t really think anything more of it. They’re apparently some hot new myspace/web band, but I’m afraid to say I must be so old and out of it that I had no idea. Then Friday, while listening to the music panel at Webvisions, they mentioned this band like 10 times. They said they weren’t very good, but something about the power of MySpace/internet is making them famous without the help of a label. Any ideas what I’m listening to at the moment?

It was a hot one in Portland, but you’d never know being in the convention center. Did you know there are two (not one, but two) Starbucks in the convention center? I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising though. They were already getting setup for OSCON too. Here’s my review of the day’s events:

• Designing for Community Interation
  • (notes) This and Mullenweg’s were my favorite sessions. I actually was looking forward to Dan’s session (Bulletproof web design), but thought this one would be better for me since I’ve seen Dan’s slides and can use the book. Mike was one of the first people I read when I discovered blogs a couple years ago, and this was my first chance to hear him speak.
• The Evolution of the Music Industry
  • I think this was probably the least attended session of the conference. Too bad though, because it was really interesting talking about how the web (with MySpace a common thread), p2p, and other technologies are really changing the way music is produced, distributed and consumed. The long-tail really comes into play with the decrease of the mega-hits and the rise of more bands with fragmenting audiences (or niches) and the “explosion of choice”.
• Design Panel
  • (Brian’s notes, and more notes) I expected this one to be packed, and it was. Good session all around. I’m not a designer, but I do a lot of site deveopment/construction using web-standards (I’m very anal about markup). I appreciate good-design and like to be reminded about why it’s important and all of the aspects that go into design. Some light moments with a copywriter in the audience pitching her services not once, but twice. But, it was a woman at a predominantly male event, so all is forgiven.
• Beyond Just Content: Websites as Interactive Applications
  • Waste of time. I wasted 30 minutes at this damn thing and all we got was a history of the internet and communication and (gasp) html forms. I passed up part of a keynote for this? I had thought this was going to be one of the better sessions to apply to my day job, talking about wikis, forums, blogs, etc. I’ll never know, because I left to catch the second half of Luke William’s keynote.
• Keynote: The Naked Interface – Liberating Brain, Body and Digital Interactions
  • Ahh, this is a presentation. Even though I was in the overflow room, it was still cool. I’ll link to some notes when I find some, it was too dark to take any. But, in general it reminded me a lot of BJ Fogg’s presentation last year, as far as making things simpler (wine bottles don’t prompt you to upgrade). Though this was more abstract.
• Scaling for Your First 100k Users
  • (Brian O’s notes, notes, and more notes) Great session, almost as good as Mike D’s. I can see why Scoble likes Matt so much. The guy’s extremely bright and it’s obvious that he’s going to make things happen in this industry whatever he works on. He just started programming when he began on WordPress and the platform rocks. Here I am a .Net dev primarily, but I love WordPress. It’s just so simple and clean. There’s a lot to be said for not devolving into a super complex object oriented architechture that tries to do much (ahem Community Server, DNN, SharePoint?). I think there’s great opportunity with WordPress MU in the corporate space. If someone packaged a nice web-based feed reader along with WordPress MU on an appliance, I think you could sell that to companies as an “instant internal blog server,” nodbody would have to install a thing on their desktop for reading feeds and every employee could have their own blog.
  • As Adam points out, it wasn’t really about the technical part of scaling, more about how to grow your product. However, there were a couple of technical points brought up in the Q&A.
  1. No use of session state, all session-related/auth stuff is in a cookie. This reduces the complexity of adding web nodes.
  2. start with 2 db servers, figuring out how to partition data up front because going from two to three and more is much easier than one to two. Also rather than one $150/month server, get 2 $75/month servers.
  3. WordPress.com uses Round-robin DNS, no load balancing.
  4. if you have a lot of tables (wordpress.com has into the millions, with a separate set of tables for each user) use ISAM because InnoDB claims a bit of a memory every time a table is opened, that is never released.
• Keynote: The Dawning of the Age of Experience
  • (scroll down here for notes, Brian O’s notes) Jared’s the anti-designer. Never designed a web site and it’s his life goal to not do so. Usability/research guy. Extremely funny though and a great speaker. I was sad I had to duck out early.

That’s all. If you’d like to continue the discussion in the Portland area, check out the PDX Web Innovators group. We love talking about this stuff when we get together.

Tags: webvisions, webvisions06

• Lot’s of stuff about Newsvine and news sites, how design can enhance your product/community.
• News moving from pyramid to hourglass (comments being the bottom portion).
• Identify interaction goals (comments, stories, posts, etc.)
• Funny (but slightly controversial) riff on PeopleAggregrator and how horrible the design is and even though Marc is a smart guy, everybody is blowing it off because of the bad design.
• Cork’d good because you learn about wine from common people/friends rather than wine afficianados. Not a myspace for wine drinkers because the focus is on talking about wine.
• Friendster is only a social network, there’s nothing else to do (LinkedIn like it).
• Flickr a photo site and a social network, it could exist without the social network. It’s a great place to “be a picture” (quote from Caterina?)
• Concentrate on product first, then social features.
• Active users vs. passive users, most (90%) are passive, get them to come back again and again.
• Users need to hear about something from two unrelated places to try it.
• Post-registration, let the user do more before throwing the registration wall.
• Only collect as much information as you need
• Give people something to do immediatly after registering
• 3 strategies (real information like banks require, anonymous, and pseudo-anonymity). Recommends pseudo-anonymity, because even though anonymous can be successful (nichen? paradox) because registration can keep out good posters, people get less out of being anonymous. People are looking to build up a reputation. “Anonymous can’t counter sanity.”
• Critique of fellow Seattle company Judy’s Book, and how it’s bad to give users a 0 “trust score” when they first sign up (telling a new user they’re bad). General discussion of repuation building.
• Users are not stupid, just efficient (Veen quote)
• Users confuse freedom of speech with membership (newsvine has a code of honor and rating system for comments)
• Platform mostly open-source (PHP) but using SQL Server because the open-source db market still needs work.
• Companies have inquired about buying Newsvine technology.

Tags: webvisions, webvisions06

I’ve never gone to OSCON and last year was my first year at WebVisions. Though slanted mostly towards designers, there’s still enough for developers, marketers, entrepreneurs, etc. and I enjoyed it a lot. Plus, even though I’m a developer primarily, my entrepreneurial leanings lead me to like the web/community/marketing discussions much more than discussions about the details of Ruby or open source software. Though there’s definitely crossover in both conferences.

Anyway, WebVisions was the choice again this year and today was the first day. I attended the “becoming a professional blogger” session in the morning which was pretty good (Jeremiah has some notes, Brian does too). Took the rest of the morning off because NetworthIQ was down and I was trying to get a release out for it at the same time (what do you think of the new look?). Plus, they added more workshops to the conference this year and there was only one set of sessions for the conference-only attendees which meant overcrowded rooms if you could get in at all.  Went to lunch with some fellow pdxwi guys.
For the afternoon, I went to the following sessions:

• Let Go, Jump In: Community Marketing Strategies for Empowered Customers
  • Good session (notes here). Picked up some good tips for adding community features to sites. Was sad to miss the “Designing for social sharing” session though.
• Ruby on Rails
  • Disappointing. I think I’m going to finally use rails on my next project, so was hoping to maybe pick some good stuff up. The llor.nu game looks pretty cool, but I didn’t learn anything in this session. The rails screencast teaches more IMO. That’ll teach me to go to a dev/tech session at a designer’s conference.
• The AJAX Experience
  • (Alexei has notes) I think Dave and eBA (now Nitobi) are some of the strongest AJAX guys out there, their stuff is sweet. This session was focused on where/how to use AJAX as opposed to the technical details, along with the challenges and opportunities with it. Good session. Hope somebody took good notes, my laptop was dead.

Tags: webvisions, webvisions06

We’d welcome any of the out of towners coming in Wednesday evening. The Rose & Raindrop is not far from the Convention Center area.  PDX Web Innovators is essentially a group of web enthusiasts (developers, designers, entrepreneurs, project managers, etc.) who get together and talk about what’s going on with the web these days. People like Adam, Jacob, Ray & Kandace, Kelly, myself and many others have come out to the early meetups.

Hope to see you there.

Many people I read are coming to Portland this week, so I’ll invite a few by linking to them. There are lots of great people coming, so all are invited, these are just the ones on my blogroll.

• Dave Johnson
• Dan Cederholm
• Mike Davidson
• Bill Scott
• Brian Oberkirch
• Dan Saffer

There are a couple sites like allmusic and discogs that have pretty extensive databases but no open api. How do sites like last.fm, mystrands, Mercora, and Audiri get their data? From Muze? That looks spendy.

Update
The MusicBrainz database looks like a good place to start. I’d still like to see if there are others that I’m missing though.

Update 2
Rhapsody has some web services, these might be helpful.

Update 3
Thanks to the power of del.icio.us (which is becoming a very effective search tool), I found this list of music related web services.

1. The fact that it was so easily comment spammed
2. The fact that comments are considered pages in their plans
3. I could find no way to mass delete comments and I was not about to delete several hundred of them by hand.
4. I replied to their automated warning (automated, but the from address was apparetnly an actual person, Michael Lee – mike@jot.com) about this issue and never got a response.

Even though this was just a temporary home until the group can build something, I am not happy with this outcome. Go use a competitor like PBWiki if you’re looking for a free hosted wiki.

Tags: wiki jot jotspot

Congratuations to the OSU Beavers, the 2006 NCAA Division I baseball champions.  Facing elimination 6 times in Omaha, the Beavs won all 6.  Unbelievable.  Oregonians everywhere, no matter a Duck or Beaver, are celebrating this tremendous accomplishment.

Some other good news too. One of the other three Portland Web 2.0 companies on the map, Platial looks like they had a good week at Where 2.0 last week and have been getting some GREAT press. Cuppin’ did aweome in the RailsDay competition and I’ll have to add it the map. I’m continuing to push Fourio / NetworthIQ as well, though there is much to be done there, and was even sourced in a recent analyst report on Family 2.0 sites. Pretty cool, but I’m not going to spend $700 just to see my name ;-).

So how is the Portland scene these days? I found it interesting that Paul Graham mentioned Portland as a possible next Silicon Valley, yet Idaho is beating us, there are only three flags on the Web2.0 map, and the Silicon Forest is struggling. Obviously there is a lot of work to do to meet that standard. Open Source is big here with the OSDL and Linus in town. But, where are the Internet startups? Is it the supposed anti-business environment in the city and state? Is it the struggles of the state education system? Is it the fact that the biggest city in the state does not have the premier university? Is it the local angel and VC market? All issues I’ve heard mentioned by local entreprenuers, journalists and investors. Is this something a half billion dollars in faculty hirings going to solve (refer to Graham’s essay)? Well, I don’t see that happening. But, if we can get a good cycle of successful entrepreneurs investing in other entrepreneurs like you see in Seattle and SV and continue to push the education angle, then I think you can start something. It’s a chicken and the egg dilemma, isn’t it.

Maybe Oregon will get a team again someday and we’ll have Civil War in baseball. But, until then I’ll be cheering for the Beavs in the springtime. Come fall, the gloves are off.

Good luck in Omaha Beavs!

Then we finally learned what Amigo is all about. Adsense for newsletters. Pretty simple, but one of those ideas that strike you as “hey, that’s pretty cool, hasn’t somebody done that already?” I’ll try to give it shot, especially now that we have over 1000 subscribers to our newsletter. Maybe this will be the motivation I need to actually send a newsletter consistently.

Here’s wishing Aaron and Jeremy a speedy recovery.

Update:

This site is up and running now at cuppin.com.  Go check it out.

Google’s office suite is rounding into good form. I’m now using Gmail, Google Calendar, and Spreadsheets. I’m sure I’ll use writely as well when the need arises (currently just have one document in Writeboard in Basecamp’s free plan).

Now, how do I say this without sounding petty…. I was essentially the first to publicly spot the trend, nearly two months ago, so it seems like cnet should have tossed a little credit this way (and an upcoming report on the same topic will be doing so). Rachel did in her blog intro, and I appreciate that. It’s disappointing that cnet offers no source and practically claims it as their own idea. Maybe I should’ve trademarked the term (inside joke for followers of the recent Web 2.0 controversy). Anyway, just remember, you heard it here first.

Anyway, I see that Redfin is in the news again with a recent funding and plans to expand to other markets. They’re also expanding their services, including representing buyers and refunding 2/3 of the buyer’s broker’s commision. Wow! That’s huge. We just bought a house without a broker and got the whole commision reduced off the price, so I know how helpful this is.
Oh, and I loved this quote from TechCrunch:

(and that is based on relatively low Seattle home prices)

Are you joking? Now, I know Mr. Arrington lives in a very high priced area, and that’s where he’s getting the relative from. But relative nationally, Seattle is one of the most expensive places to live (Adam, great data master, correct me if I’m wrong) and I bet that most people in that area would get a good laugh out of that.

When creating a new solution/project configuration (i.e. dev, test, production, etc.) in Visual Studio 2005, which is useful to do when using Web Deployment Projects, make sure you set the output path for the Web project to “/bin”. By default a new configuration gets an output path of “/bin/[configuration]”. If the web assembly is not in /bin, the aspnet compiler portion of the Web Deployment project will fail with errors like this:

error ASPPARSE: Could not load type ‘code behind class’

This seemed like a good topic to get me back into the blogging spirit. Since I’m working on a Web 2.0 app (NetworthIQ) using the Microsoft platform, I’ve got some thoughts on the subject.

1. Free Developer Tools.

Over the last month I’ve been migrating NetworthIQ from 1.1 to 2.0 using the Express editions. We signed up for the Empower program thinking it was the greatest thing ever. All the Microsoft software you want for a few hundred bucks a year. How can you beat that? Well, you know what they say, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The catch is you have to build an installable application, then make an effort to get certfied by Microsoft, among other requirements. A public web site, even one you charge for doesn’t make the cut. We could build an installable client app or something to satisfy the requirements, but that’s too much of a distraction, and frankly, after spending the last 18 months doing it at my day job, I don’t like (building or using even) installed apps very much. Now, since we’re disciplined about separating work from side-company, we need to use our own tools. Free is about all we can justify right now, so the express versions fit the bill perfectly.

Going from full Visual Studio to express isn’t the most fun, but it’s a workable solution short of switching platforms. My issues with it are:

• Being limited to a single web site solution sucks. we have to run two IDEs, using VC# express for our non web code (domain, data layers, etc.). App_Code was just too full and I didn’t see an easy way to embed NHibernate xml files into the generated assembly.
• The debugging is a pain since you can’t just attach to a process.
• The publishing options are lacking and the Web Deployment Projects don’t support express. However, we still have the power of MsBuild, so that one’s not too big of a deal.

However, I am really enjoying ASP.NET 2.0, and am starting to become really productive with it (it helps that I’m now doing it at the full-time job as well). VWD Express satisfies me enough for now. Plus, based on what I’ve used for PHP development it’s pretty darn good (I don’t know enough about developing/debugging tools for Rails to comment at this time).

2. Free Database

I haven’t spent a lot of time with SQL Express, but I am happy it’s free and it’s definitely aimed at MySQL. Competition is a good thing.

3. Microsoft Atlas makes AJAX easier.

I spent some time with Atlas at work over the last few weeks, developing a proof of concept app for the project I’m on. I wasn’t too impressed. To me, it’s buggy, bloated, and poorly documented. But, I do like the Web Service proxying that makes it easy to get data back and forth. I know it’s a long way from release, but for me, it’s not usable yet.

4. Microsoft doesnâ€t HAVE to get ALL of your business.

I don’t see many if any LAMP shops using Atlas.

5. Microsoft solutions can scale.

It’s definitely reassuring to know MySpace is using .NET. But, why does it look like they’re still using ColdFusion? Are all 1.5 billion page views on .NET?

6. Microsoft pricing is flexible.

This will be the breaking point for us I think. If and when we have to start scaling, are we going to want to pay the Microsoft tax for Windows and possibly SQL Server licenses? It remains to be seen, but there’s a reason we’re playing with Rails.

7. Ray Ozzie

Not a factor for me. Maybe I’m ignorant, but I haven’t even bothered learning about SSE and Live Clipboard. Should I?

8. Robert Scoble

I like Robert and have read him for a long time. He even posted about NetworthIQ. I agree that he’s doing a lot of good for Microsoft.

9. Being based on the Microsoft platform doesnâ€t limit your acquisition options.

Glad to know :-). But seriously, I wouldn’t pick a technology for this reason. Pick something that you can build a great product with, FAST.

10. Microsoft wants to be a part of the community

Ok.

11. Microsoft employees arenâ€t evil.

I’m definitely not a rah-rah Microsoft developer. I hate IE (ok hate is a strong word, perhaps saying I prefer firefox is better), and most of the Live.com stuff is crap. But, I like ASP.NET and I know there are people working hard there and reaching out to be better. Scott Guthrie comes to mind as someone doing great work for ASP.NET.

12. Microsoft has good development resources

For getting up and running this is pretty true. However, there are ongoing wars between the RAD (everything’s declarative) camp and the non RADs. Just hope you don’t get caught between the two when trying to figure out a good solution to a particular problem.

13. Microsoft speeds web application development

Ahh yes, this is the clincher for me (for now). Sometimes ASP.NET can be terribly frustrating and feels like it’s getting in the way when you want to do something simple. It produces crappy markup at times that is difficult to control, and you have to constantly be aware of ViewState (page size) issues. But, in the end, once you get up to speed, it’s a nice framework.

In the local reviews race, it looks like Zipingo is trailing badly. Yelp, Insider Pages, and Judy’s book look to be going strong except for a recent drop-off for Judy’s book.

Anyway, I mention Trixie Tracker, because I’ve been following Family 2.0 applications like Trixie Tracker, Minti, Amiglia, and Families.com. I’ve had similar ideas in these areas, so it’s been interesting seeing them pop up.

Trixe Tracker attemtps to solve a piece of what I thought was missing in the existing apps; baby tools (tracking, sharing). You probably figured I’m big into tracking, being that’s what NetworthIQ is all about. Trixie Tracker doesn’t take care of it all though, I think there’s still some good opportunities in this area. But, Trixie Tracker appears to be a very useful app focused in on babies eating, sleeping, and you know what else schedules. The graphs and charts look very cool. I think it’s a bit too spendy (personally, I’d consider say a $20 annual subscription), but I respect them for charging off the bat for it. I’ve come to the conclusion (excuse me for stating the obvious) that if you’re going to bootstrap, charging is the best way to go. You may get away with a freemium business model, which is where we’re heading with NetworthIQ, but a pure ad-based revenue model will be a tough climb (NetworthIQ was never intended to be a pure ad-based model, but that’s all we have at the moment).

I enjoyed the launch post, this hits a bit close to home:

“It’s really hard to do anything else when you’re taking care of a baby/child/toddler”

and

“I could reliably count on writing about 3 or 4 lines of code a week.”

I know the feeling well, as idiot me managed to wait until we had a baby to get inspired enough to start building something. The absolute worst. timing. ever.

They even use a pretty similar “Track. Share. ….” slogan I coined for NetworthIQ. Just a coincidence? Who knows, I’m either flattered or know there’s somebody who thinks like I do. Either way is fine with me.

Update

Missed Cingo and MyHomePoint the first time around. Both are trying to provide tools to keep families organized. I’ll have to check these out a little more. For myself, I might really like them as I’m still trying to nail down a calendar app (even though there’s no shortage of them). But I’d have a hard time convincing my wife to keep it updated.

Update 2

TechCrunch has word about another parenting site in the works, Maya’s Mom.

Update 3

JotSpot has released JotSpot Family Site, which looks to be an easy way to get a family web site going, complete with a calendar, blogs, maps, etc. (via MOMB). They make no mention of ‘Wikis’ which is a smart move as I’d guess that a large percentage of people know what one is.

Update 4

A couple new ones to mention:

• MothersClick – I’ll indulge with a link even though they issued a press release mother’s day weekend when the app isn’t even available yet. I thought that was a bit tacky.
• Ookles – Billed as Flickr+YouTube+Riya for parents. The current intro page is incredibly annoying though. They’ve got a long way to go.

Update 5

Rachel Cook from Minti has started a blog, family2point0, to track these apps. Look there for new stuff.

• Moved web hosting to Dreamhost. I got a screaming deal, like $20 for 12 months of hosting. I’ve got a number of domain names I can play around with, so the unlimited domain capability is great. There was a bit of trouble with the permalinks, but managed to get it fixed pretty quickly. I had been running on a Windows/IIS host. But running PHP apps on a Windows host always seems to be a pain. For my ASP.net experiments, I’ll just use our Fourio account.
• Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2. After Josh mentioned how easy it was, I figured I shouldn’t wait any longer. I had to wait until after moving hosts, as trying to move hosts and upgrade all in one would have been a recipe for frustration. One great thing now is that apparently WordPress 2 now handles /index.php/ style permalinks and the non /index.php/ style at the same time. This is great since I can use the latter going forward, but still have my old links work (and I don’t have to fight with mod_rewrite).
• Redirected local feed to FeedBurner. For some reason, Bloglines is convinced my feed lives on the site, even though the alternate url and feed links both point to the feedburner feed. Plus, even if you manually enter the feedburner feed in bloglines, it changes it to the local feed here, which just seemed downright odd. I submitted a ticket, but they never fixed this. So, it was time to force the issue by just re-directing the feed. I used Steve Smith’s WordPress plugin, and eventually got it working. There was confusion around how to get WordPress to automatically update the .htaccess file, and it took an hour or so of messing around with it to get it working.  Chris Pederick’s User Agent Switcher firefox extension was a big help in testing this, since the rewrite rule serves the feed to FeedBurner and re-directs everyone else to the FeedFurner feed.  (this is why I’m a big FireFox fan, there are so many useful extensions)
• Added the recent entries listing in the sidebar. Fortunately, this one was easy. I think it’s nice when you can get a quick look at what an author writes about. I’m surprised this isn’t included by default in most wordpress themes/templates.

Hopefully, that’s enough blog work for now. Time to get back to work on more important things.

The Top 100 – a list of the 100 most popular betas (and alphas, and pre-betas, …) based on the number of how many bookmarks there are in del.icio.us; this list will be updated biweekly, and

The Hot 100 – which is a kind of mini-zeitgeist and displays the most popular betas (and alphas, and pre-betas, …) based on how many bookmarks there have been added within the last 7 days; this list will be updated every Sunday.

“I don’t write much real-world code. But automated testing is key. Period.”

So, he’s an “Expert,” but doesn’t write much real-world code? Should we be looking elsewhere for ASP.NET 2.0 books? I generally like to learn from someone who has been there, done that. Since I don’t like Wrox books much (too big and disjointed usually), I’ve avoided their book. Hopefully, Fritz Onion’s book will be out sooner rather than later.

But, say I want to find the best calendar app with reviews, ratings, a screenshot, in a easy to navigate list. Where do I go to get that info?

I’d say the Web 2.0 Awards is pretty close to the answer to that question. The Web 2.0 awards is a beautiful list that has rated, ranked, and awarded the best of Web 2.0 sites across many categories.

Of course I also like it because NetworthIQ got an honorable mention in the “Business, Money, and eCommerce” category going up against some pretty big competition.

The other lists I mentioned before are still great going forward to keep an eye on new stuff and there’s still room for the versiontracker.com type site with more user opinions, and tracking new features. But, we have to stop and admire the Web 2.0 awards for a while. Well done.

Thanks to the incompetence of Verizon (we notified them a month ago of the date we were moving in), I’ve had no DSL in the new house and won’t until early next week. Tell me why the baby bells are allowed to merge back together? So they can abuse their customers even more. I’ll definitely be switching to Comcast for internet, especially with the deal at Comcast Offers. I’ve always done DSL in the past because it was cheaper, but with that deal, it equals out over a year. Plus, Comcast’s service has always been pretty good.

What else have we learned with this move? Nobody is never on time. Cleaners at the new house were an hour late on move day. Movers (had some larger items moved on Monday) were over an hour late. The post office is completely confused, with one person telling us it will be 7-10 days before we get mail at the new address, but then after catching the mailwoman today, she informed us that she was holding our mail already and waiting for us to come to the post office for a key. Would’ve been nice if someone told us that.

But on a brighter note, the Fourio team and family members were great and the bulk of the move went pretty fast on Saturday. You never realize how much stuff you have until you move. Hopefully we won’t have to move for another 5 years at least.

Unlike other organizations, Starve Ups membership is only open to the founders, management and core team members of idea, emerging and established stage companies. This unique approach, which eliminates investors, consultants, vendors and service providers allows Starve Ups to encourage full disclosure among its members.

I need to check it out a bit more and see if it complements the PDX Web Innovators and OEF events.

Tags: portland pdx entrepreneur starveups

(via CrunchNotes)

• PDX Web Innovators (cross between developers, designers, entrepreneurs)
• DevgroupNW (design focused)
• PDX UX (cross between designers and developers)
• SAO – Software Association of Oregon
• OEF – Oregon Entrepreneurs Forum
• IPN – Internet Professionals Northwest (now part of SAO)
• PADNUG – .Net User Group
• PDX CFUG – ColdFusion User Group
• PJUG – Java User Group
• POSSE – Portland Open Source Software Entrepreneurs
• PDX.rb – Portland Ruby Brigade
• PDXPHP – PHP User Group
• Internet Strategy Forum
• CHIFOO
• pdxMindShare
• OregonStartups.com – Great collection of resources for local entrepreneurs
• Starve Ups
• Northwest Entrepreneur Network
• nPost.com

There are others like Mac, Linux and PC user groups, Podcasting Meetups, Entrepreneur (general) meetups, but these are the main ones I’ve come across. What others do people know of or enjoy?

Tags: pdx portland

Tags: pdx portland

In the days of MySpace and Facebook, making it easier to find you, I’d be extra careful if I were an athlete. You’re conversations might not be too private. Poor guy.

Whether or not we get to that point though, it’s still a lot of fun hanging out with other web people. For people who follow the web all the time, it’s not everyday that you meet people that read the some stuff you do and share the same ideas. Just to run down who was there:

• Adam
• George
• Ray
• Will
• Greg
• Kyle
• Kandace
• Marcus
• Jacob
• myself

Maybe it’s not that surprising, but just about everybody had their own web shops. The discussions were a great mix of design, programming, blogs, podcasts, business. I’ll try to remember some of conversations:

Rails was a big topic. I hadn’t even realized Portland was such a leader in Rails development (With the O’Reilly Rails book author in Portland and his company Planet Argon being a big Rails shop), and I pride myself on knowing a lot of stuff.

Ray and Kandace talked a bit about their web-based, hosted CMS package, Ladybug. Sounds like a great tool for Flash (and non-Flash) sites. I believe we have our first presenter for next month.

Marcus shared some his experiences with software in the Music business and Tables Turned, his team’s initiative to let podcasters legally play music. Billboard wrote it up, and it sounds like it’s getting some great traction among the labels.

Jacob talked about his work in design (you have to check out the design on BePrivy), email marketing and learning Rails. I wrote about email newsletters before, so you’ll have to let me know how far off-base I am.

Adam and I discussed his work on Best Places, and some of the issues they were working out, including the transition to ASP.NET 2.0, something I’ve been spending a lot of time on lately. Adam has a lot of biz ideas going too, including the just released onBlOCK spam fighting service.

There was some interesting talk about business models, design, and adsense and how ugly sites seem to do so well. Scoble’s post on anti-marketing design is an interesting follow-up on that topic.

I talked a bit on NetworthIQ (shocking I know): specifically about funding options, APIs, Quicken integration, and growth of the site.

I missed the topics from the other end of the table, so feel free to join the converstation with your own writeups.

So, where is this going to go? Sounds like everybody was up for getting some space and a projector for next month. Definitely keep the social aspect, but add a presenter or two. We can take that conversation over to the google group.

Thanks for coming everybody and we’ll see you next month.

Tags: pdxwi, pdx, portland

• Acquirit -Agricultue technology/software
• IterationZero – agile software development tools
• DOCUMAX Enterprises – Accounts Payable technology
• ParaMedia – “iTunes for print media” was the analogy used (comic books was the prime example)
• iKnoodle – Ad toolbar that benefits charities

Unbelievable, only 2 of these companies have a web site? I know they’re not exactly web companies, but sheesh, what year is this? How am I supposed to learn more about the company? Even if you’re early stage, it seems like a site would be a good idea. Throw a blog up at least.

Anyway, they all got some good questions from the judges and the audience. IterationZero got the most pushback, mostly because the pitch gave some pretty big numbers (i.e. 84% of software projects fail) but I think there are some good ideas there. Their angle is to help companies adapt agile methodolgies more gradually, by identifying the areas of agile most likely to succeed and starting with the easy ones. There’s a lot of talk about the dangers of “building to flip” in the web 2.0 world. That’s their business model, get something out and get bought by the IBM’s of the world.

I don’t know much about agriculture or Accounts Payable tools. But, both seemed like viable ideas. I’m not sure about the ad toolbar. I think I’d rather just write a check to a charity rather than suffer through intersital ads. But, who knows. The “iTunes for print media” idea seems like it could have many large competitors in no time flat, but if they can be first, all the power to them.

It was a good experience to go. I think it’s something we’ll aim to do with Fourio/NetworthIQ, perhaps for next month if we can get on the list. Although public speaking and I don’t exactly get along too well. So, Todd may get the call ;-).

Technorati Tags: portland, pdx, oef, entrepreneur

Mike has some interesting comments about walled gardens. In general, I don’t tend to buy his argument about aggregating content from blogs and not forcing people to enter content on the site. I think it’s a nice addition to be able to do so, but it’s not essential at this point (early in a product’s lifespan, the internet as a whole doesn’t really get it). It does get me thinking about NetworthIQ and our other projects and how we should reach out beyond our walls.

Mike, just so you know, NetworthIQ has all kinds of RSS feeds. We’re not perfect yet as far as getting data in and out, but I do agree that RSS is a good first step.

Well, a few ideas were:

• Social Parenting: Minti was launched this week, pretty darn close to what I had in mind, but there’s some other aspects that it still doesn’t quite hit (my vague way of saying, there’s still some opportunity here, but probably will just mean sending some ideas to Clay and team).
• CRM in the spirit of 37signals apps: I guess the guys at 37signals thought the same thing, and being that they are 37signals, I think they’ve got the “in the spirt of” part down.
• Blog Network: Ok, this was probably obvious to everybody because there are a lot of them now. But, I think there’s still some opportunity for location centric blog networks, a real citizen journalism alternative to the local newspaper with subjects including local news, sports, business, gossip, etc. Put all this easily accessible in one place.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I wouldn’t want to give everything away, but it’s interesting to see others come up with similar ideas.

We’re looking to get a first meeting setup sometime in March.

Fresh off the buzz of the Innovation Map, we turn our attention back now to NetworthIQ. This is an exciting time at NetworthIQ headquarters (virtual headquarters that is) as this week’s issue of Business Week features an article (free right now) on personal finance blogs and NetworthIQ is mentioned. Needless to say, the rest of the Fourio team and I are pretty happy to get this level of exposure. First the NY Times and now Business Week. Two big wins with barely a penny spent on marketing (ok I ran a couple of Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing experiments). Maybe there’s something to this viral marketing thing.

It’s really funny too, because I was heading on a vacation to Sunriver (central Oregon) when the NY Times article ran and I’m heading back to Sunriver tomorrow for the weekend. I should really get to Sunriver more often if this keeps happening.

Update:
The article is free right now, though I don’t know for how long that usually lasts:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_10/b3974111.htm

One of the companies that had escaped my radar was Platial, a company right here in Portland doing some exciting things with maps. Platial is billed as a collaborative atlas. You can create maps of places meaningful to you, share them, tag them, and connect with other users. I really dig the combination of a map visual with a storytelling aspect that goes along with it. It’s understanable that they’re flying under most radars, the site is in its very early beta stages (launched in December, just hit 1000 users yesterday). I imagine the buzz level will be escalating before long.

So, anyway, after hearing from one of their developers, I put them on the map and got a note from one of the founders, Di-Ann Eisnor. Being the budding entrepreneur, I took the opportunity to do a little networking and so yesterday I went to visit Di-
Ann and the rest of the Platial team. They really have some extremely bright people, which when it comes down to it, usually determines the success of a company. I had a great time learning about what they’re doing and sharing a bit about what we’re doing. It’s fun finding people that are passionate about the same things you are (and hold that thought for a later post, Adam DuVander and I are thinking of something for Portland to make this a more common occurence). I anticipate big things from Platial and am looking forward to seeing what’s coming. Thanks for letting me stop by.

The irony though is that they had actually started a Web 2.0 map (seen here) about the same time I started mine. If their map had taken off before I finished mine, I never would have had this opportunity. Goes to show, the release early motto can pay dividends. I’m also now intrigued about integrating my map more with Platial.

Tags: platial geo maps

1) The domain name is terrible (as mentioned previously).

2) The masked URLs are lame. Use some unobtrusive javascript or something to track clicks if you must. But, I’d really like to see the real link in the anchor tag, so I can easily right click and copy the url (should I want to). This is too obtrusive.

3) Build a firefox extension. Bookmarklets are ok, but an extension with quick access to adding, viewing, viewing popular, viewing tags, etc. makes it much easier to use a social bookmarking site.

So, it’s back to delicious for now, but if they keep at it, I’ll try it again later on.

Update
I emailed them this same feedback and I got a response back from Todd Sieling, the product manager. Sounds like the domain name is here to stay. But, they may be open to changing the re-direct urls into something a little less obtrusive. Todd also reports that an API is on the way which may spur more tools/extensions.

Thought #1
Dang, Zillow.com (previously discussed here) sure shot to the top. Have you seen their numbers? I’m impressed. Looks like they came through that inital rough patch with barely a scratch. I hear about them everywhere it seems. Newspaper, local news, co-workers, in-laws. I’ll have more to say about the response to Zillow.com in the real estate community in a future post.

Thought #2
Ma.gnolia.com came out of beta the other day. Another social bookmarking tool with a funny domain name. C’mon people, if you want to break out of the techie/early adopter crowd, stop with these funky punctuated domain names. I’m always surprised how programmed most people are to type “www.whatever.com” (they always seem to start with the www, even if you don’t say it) and it is hard to get them out of this groove. So, make it easy on them. How difficult is it going to be for me to tell somebody, “check out magnolia,” and they go to magnolia.com, which is apparently part of Exxon/Mobil. Must be an another oil conspiracy. At least del.icio.us bought the real thing. (somebody else discussed this recently, but I can’t remember who/where)

The reviews are mixed, though I am seeing enough positive response to give it a shot myself. Zeldman’s team did the design, so it’ll be worth it just to check out their work. But, can you believe it took six people to do the UI? Crazy. I thought that was a joke the first time I read it. I’m all for great design, usability and clean markup, but that seems like a bit much. I hope Gnolia got a good deal.

Maybe it’s just because I made one myself and tend to notice these things more now, but it seems there are an over abundance of web 2.0 tracking sites popping up. However, there is still not a clear winner when it comes to providing a way of finding the best of the new online services. This weekend Pete Cashmore launched his Weblist blog which adds detailed reviews and user ratings to the mix. Another one that’s gaining steam is this list on listible which actually started back in January. The diggwatch blog has added a list, based on the Web 2.0 logo mashup. All of these go along with the previous set:

Web 2.0 Blogs (news/reviews/analysis):

• TechCrunch
• Read/Write Web
• WebWare
• CenterNetworks
• Web 2.0 Explorer
• Solution Watch
• Mashable
• Outside the Valley
• Uncov
• Startup Squad
• alarm:clock
• PostBubble
• TechCrush (dead)
• Web 2.0 Central (appears dead)

Web 2.0 Listings

• Web 2.0 Innovation Map
• eHub
• Museum of Modern Betas
• Startup Search
• All Things Web 2.0
• Web 2.0 List
• KillerStartups
• Web 2.0 Directory
• 2.0websites.com
• BuzzShout
• NEO Binaries
• koolWEB 2.0
• web 2.0 slides
• Seth Godin’s Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List
• Go2Web20.net
• Complete List of Web 2.0 Applications
• Weblist (appears dead)
• Web 2.0 logos and links (dead)
• categoriz (dead)

Best of lists:

• Web 2.0 Awards
• Best of the Best Web 2.0 Web Sites
• Top 10 Innovative Web 2.0 Applications of 2005
• The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005
• More Great Web 2.0 Software

These all serve their purpose in one way or another . Mostly, they are best suited for promotion and demonstrating the explosion of internet services along with keeping early adopters in the loop of new stuff. But, say I want to find the best calendar app with reviews, ratings, a screenshot, in a easy to navigate list. Where do I go to get that info? Seth Godin tells us categories matter, yet only eHub and Hinchcliffe’s lists (which aren’t perpetually updated) have some sort of categorization.

The blog format of TechCrunch, WebList, Web 2.0 Explorer, and Solution Watch is great for an initial review, but breaks down quickly when it comes to trying to scan hundreds of applications. TechCrunch does try to solve this with the occaisonal rollup of a segment. eHub is more concise and has categories, but lacks reviews and ratings. The innovation map lacks descriptions, categories and ratings. The listible list is also concise and has a rating feature, but lacks reviews, categories and editorial control, so at some point it will probably become worthless.

One of the commenters on Pete’s Weblist introduction mentioned a versiontracker.com type site. That’s exactly right. What we need is something like Programmable Web’s api and mashup databases. These have a nice concise listing, with descriptions, creator, tags/categories, popularity, ratings. Take this and add a TechCrunch/SW/Weblist style review, screenshot, and comments to the detail page. Expose an RSS feed and a simple API to enable mashups like the innovation map. Then you’d have something great. That would really help people discover Web 2.0 apps of interest.

Since Weblist has ratings, it’s probably closest. Add a rollup page like Programmable Web’s, track click-thrus for popularity, and add tags and you would pretty much be there. Hopefully somebody will build this. If you’re looking to promote something or yourself, this would be a great way to do it. If not, I’ll add this to my todo list, but I really do need to focus on my other projects, so don’t tempt me.

Fourio, the name, was created by Todd almost two years ago now. He put it in the header of our team blog, and at first the response, to Todd’s dismay, was a bit underwhelmed. I thought it was the name of the WordPress theme. But, after hearing that it was the company name, I was like, “hey, that’s pretty cool.” Very unique and appropriate. The name sums up the fact that there were four of us (then three, now four again), taking ideas (input) and creating apps (output). Back then, there was a lot of input, but not much output, as is often the case when building stuff outside of your day job. With NetworthIQ and the Innovation Map, the output finally started to pick up and with the next project moving towards a prototype, we’re downright sprinting right now ;-). So, that’s how we came to be known as Fourio.

“He says he will develop a Web-based product that will allow business people to handle their computer needs, boosting productivity through collaboration. Information will be accessible via anything from a personal computer to a cell phone to a television.”

Hmmm, can’t get much vague than that. But, based on his track record with Cybozu and its groupware, it will be interesting to see what the result is. It’s Good to see some things happening in Portland. As you can see from the Innovation Map, we’ve got a lot of room for growth.

Tags: Lunarr Portland groupware

Zillow promises to be able value your home for you, which is an interesting idea. I’m in the middle of buying and selling a house so I was really excited to try it out. I managed to get in to value my house and Zillow valued it about 10% under what we just sold it for. But, considering the market these days, I don’t think that’s too terrible. With the lack of comps for our neighborhood, I doubt an agent would have done much better (we sold by owner). I didn’t get a chance to value the house I’m buying, but hopefully will soon, if they can come back online.

I will definitely keep an eye on it, though, because this would be a great tool for NetworthIQ users to be able to value their real estate. I wonder if Zillow will have an API at some point we could tie into?

Update
It’s back up now. The house we’re buying comes up less than 1% under what we paid. Not bad. According to Zillow we’re selling for 10% more than our house is worth and buying for 1% more than the house is worth. Aren’t we the dealmakers (of course it never feels like it when you’re paying as much as houses cost these days)

Tags: zillow

• SF Bay Area Tech Companies
• European Web 2.0 map
• A Web 2.0 meme map

In the O’Reilly Post, PJ from Wayfaring makes a comment about creating maps like ours there. For some reason, none of my comments went through (I got in the blog itself, but I can’t get a comment through?). So, responding here, I hadn’t really considered using another site, as I wanted to funnel buzz through Fourio and our projects. Plus with so many points, using Wayfaring would have been very painful (I didn’t see any bulk create functionality, but maybe I missed it?). But as you can see, someone else did.

Wayfaring’s interface is well done. I especially like the tooltips and zoom for each point. Going forward, the Innovation map will probably evolve into more of a community created resource as to minimize maintenance. Something to think about.

(via Russell Beattie)

For anybody reading this that has or is going to submit…. please include an address or a lat/long (just a url, or a url and a city doesn’t cut it). This is a location based map after all and at this point, with the large number of submissions to go through, I’m not going to be to very willing to track down your location. I beg you to make it easy for me.

One thing I didn’t anticipate, was the suddenness of becoming a Web 2.0 gatekeeper. Determining which applications meet some generally accepted criteria of web 2.0 is a big judgement call, and one I’ll be wrestling with a bit as this fills out. The web 2.0 debate is already pretty hot and I don’t wish the map to be an example for the critics/cynics to point at (any more than they already are of course :-)).

Stay tuned, there may be some big twists ahead.

Made the Digg front page and del.icio.us/popular page for the first time! (we got close to the del.icio.us/popular page for NetworthIQ).

But even more exciting was that Tim O’Reilly (yes the one who publishes all those books on your bookshelf at work), who helped define the Web 2.0 movement, posted:

“It is indeed interesting. A lot of apps I haven’t followed (and missing a lot that I have) so I can’t speak to how thoroughly it covers Web 2.0 as I think of it. (There are a lot of different aspects to Web 2.0, so this is going to be hard to do.) But it’s really interesting to see how many of the apps Ryan has selected are not in Silicon Valley.”

The other big piece of news was that Google itself mentioned the site at the JP Morgan and Connector Group Showcase last night (podcast available). That’s pretty cool, considering the presenters and attendees. (if any of those influencers and/or investors would like to know about what else we’re up to at Fourio, please contact me)

Feel free to follow along with news/reviews/comments with these links:
del.icio.us bookmarks
digg.com/links/Web_2.0_Innovation_Map
del.icio.us/url/02fd90592645b39be9052955c9e7f9cb

Dion Hinchcliffe says:

“Visually shows where Web 2.0 development creativity is actually happening, using the latest Web 2.0 software lists. A pretty cool data point.”

Google Maps Mania posted its review:

“Ryan Williams has put together a great new Google Maps mashup called ‘The Web 2.0 Innovation Map'”

Emily Chang added it to eHub and is going to let me see the entire feed. This will make the next step, adding brief descriptions to the listings so much easier.

The Innovation Insider looks at some of the distribution.

The biggest news so far though is that the map made the del.icio.us/popular page.

Be sure to digg it if you get a chance: http://digg.com/links/Web_2.0_Innovation_Map.

Not a bad first day.

I’ve taken 200 applications, tracked down their addresses, geocoded them, and placed them on the map. With some help from Todd on the design, this map was put together in the last week. It was much more work than I thought it would be to track down the addresses. Without a good (open/free/structured) WHOIS API, most of the address lookups were manual. And don’t get me started on sites not listing a contact address. Fortunately, my geocoder app worked great, so getting lats/longs was fairly painless. Then it was just a matter of exporting the Excel data to a JavaScript array and hooking it up to the map.

On a side note, I’m not here to debate the “Web 2.0” term. For this application, Web 2.0 is simply defined by the explosion of internet applications that have come out over the last year or so. I’ve used other people’s lists to compile the apps to be mapped.

The map isn’t completely finished (what web application ever is?). I’d like to add descriptions, include company information, and maybe add a little thumbnail of the site. But, I like to release early and see what kind of interest there is before investing too much time. Any feedback is appreciated.

If anybody knows of a good source for WHOIS data, or has a well structured (XML preferably) list of web apps with the name, url, and brief description (along the lines of an API for eHub or TechCrunch), please let me know.

Thanks to Adam Trachtenberg’s eBay Motors & Google Maps mashup for being a great example of how to do a mashup. It’s one of my favorites as far as implementation goes and was a big inspiration for the innovation map.

Update:
I see that TechCrunch has added an OPML file, which is a very big help. The one problem is that it points to the TechCrunch post. If there was something similar that pointed to the actual site’s URL, that would be awesome.

(via Startup Fever, another new to me resource)

Subscribed to both.

• Absolutely, Power Corrupts (via Kottke)
• Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep (recommended by a friend and also is on Kottke’s list)

I think I’m going to have read Moneyball soon, even if a little late.

I ended up trying Favorites out just for grins. Man, what a pain. First I had to install the MSN toolbar (another disappointing MS tool) and jump through some other hoops. Then, to use it, you have to keep an explorer bar open, which I don’t like doing. Then you have competing favorites tools (builtin and Windows Live) that aren’t connected at all, which is kind of weird. All in all, a frustrating experience and one I wouldn’t recommend to anyone else.

Update
It must be contagious. Salesforce.com has also had issues .

Update 2
Fortunately, Bloglines came back up fine. Though, I’d have to disagree with Michael Arrington about their service. It’s not very fast. They still haven’t fixed the problem with subscribing to the Feedburner feed for this site and getting the wordpress feed on my server instead, and I’ve heard nothing back in over a week since they turned the issue over to their engineers. However, Bloglines is still the best online reader that I’ve tried so far, so I’m sticking with it for now.

But, there was one glaring omission. NetworthIQ was missing from the list :-).

• Basecamp (already using)
• Confluence
• Central Desktop
• Jotspot [Hosted]
• Social Text [Hosted]
• Stikipad [Hosted]
• WikiSpaces [Hosted]
• PBwiki [Hosted]
• Zimbra
• Perspective [.Net]
• FlexWiki [.Net]
• MediaWiki [PHP]
• DokuWiki [PHP]
• TikiWiki [PHP]
• PmWiki [PHP]
• Twiki [Perl]
• Kwiki [Perl]
• trac [Python]
• Zwiki [Python]

Update:
WikiMatrix looks at these too.

• Kiko
• CalendarHub
• Planzo
• Hula
• Trumba
• Zimbra
• AirSet
• 30 boxes
• HipCal
• SpongeCell

Update
TechCrunch takes a look at these too.

Final Update

Not much need for this list anymore.  Google Calendar wins.  I generally root for the small guy, but it just didn’t work out this time.

I hate sounding so negative all the time about Microsoft stuff, as I’m currently working with the .Net technology stack. So, I’m going to try to find some positive Microsoft stuff to talk about as well. I don’t have anything against Microsoft really, but the other guys are just doing a better job right now. I can tell you that Windows Live Mail is still better than Verizon’s webmail product. See, positive already.

I think someone needs to educate whomever developed this flash movie. Get a clue! For a site that very easily could have site-impaired users, using alternate browsers, it’s unacceptable. Not to mention the search engine traffic they’re missing out on with this design. I don’t even want to think about how much the clinic paid for this site.

Start by reading more of Molly, Andy Clarke, and spending some time at the W3C’s web accessibility site.

So anyway, I was reading over at Dare’s blog about the release of Windows Live Favorites and the associated toolbar. I thought it might be interesting to try out. But, it’s entirely IE specific. Bleh. Considering this “Live” strategy is about hosted services, I see no reason, other than the fact that Microsoft makes IE, to not support other browsers. I only use IE when I have to to test sites, so this is certainly no reason to switch back. I’ll stick with del.icio.us and the firefox extension for now.

Just to recap online bookmark services/tools that I’ve tried or attempted to try:

• Del.icio.us with FireFox extension: Thumbs up.
• Flock (which integrates with Del.icio.us): Thumbs down.
• Windows Live Favorites: Thumbs down.

I haven’t tried any of the other Del.icio.us-alikes, like Furl, My Web, etc. Does anybody prefer one of these or a different service that works well with FireFox? I’d be curious to take a look.

I just hope Yahoo doesn’t screw up any account mergers with del.icio.us like they did with Flickr. I still can’t get the my old Flickr account back (and the images in it) months after they forced the accounts to move over.

Overall, I was pretty impressed, I could see this being a very useful tool to figure out approximate routes. Considering that most public agencies probably don’t have top-notch web talent like Google does, this could be very helpful. The specifics were a bit disappointing though.

I routed my commute to work, which only has bus service, no MAX. I have taken the bus a few times, so I know it takes about 20-30 minutes (never any traffic). Google says 19 minutes in transit, pretty close. But, it got the bus stop stop wrong, saying I’d have to walk 13 minutes to get on the bus where it suggested, when really it takes about 2 minutes. I’m not against walking or anything, but no need to brave the cold this time of year more than I have to.

I’m no email newsletter expert. I’ve written a total of two so far for NetworthIQ , but I can tell you I’ve learned a lot from those two times and it’s really made me consider the newsletters I read and what makes them effective.

1) Opt in is the only way
This goes without saying, but if you offer a newsletter subscription as part of a site registration, make the newsletter optional and leave it unchecked by default.

2) Use a good tool or service
I’ve spent (wasted is maybe a better term) a good deal of time researching various newsletter products and services. I examined the following options:

• Listserv setup with host ISP. Low-cost approach, but there was no way to mass import subscribers.
• Open source. The best I could come up with was PHPList, which I tried unsuccessfully to get running on a WIMP host (Windows, IIS, MySql, PHP). I’m sure I could have got it to run, but I had spent too much time already, and from I saw it looked to be overly complex for what we needed. Interesting that with PHP scripts, it’s always so much easier to find something open source. I couldn’t find any open source .Net newsletter products out there (at least unless you wanted to use DotNetNuke).
• Commercial Packaged Applications. I didn’t look too far down this road, as my budget is limited, and if I was going to pay, I might as well go with a hosted solution so I don’t have to worry about installing anything.
• Google Groups. I saw this suggested by Nick Denton in his startup kit. It’s definitely the cheapest hosted solution, but I was concerned that the service sent confirmation emails when I tested adding subscribers. This seemed like it would be a little disconcerting to users that they were signed up for some Google service without knowing about it. So, I scratched that idea. I think they’d be great for cheap internal list management though.
• Build. I haven’t ruled out building something simple ourselves, especially so that I can store archives. But, at this point, I’d rather not take the time to learn the intricacies of sending bulk email, what with ISP support and CAN-SPAM regulations. I think this is something that’s better to buy than build, but I reserve the right to change my mind.
• Campaign Monitor. There is an endless list of outsourced email providers, but most of them were prohibitively expensive for us and our needs (monthly email to 500 subscribers and growing). I’ve used Campaign Monitor both times and have to say it was one of the best web application experiences I’ve ever had. It was so simple and the app provided valuable help and insight where needed. I felt it was reasonably priced.

3) Write an interesting subject line
This is rather obvious once you think about it, but I learned it the hard way and still see other newsletters with poor subject lines. Having “Company/Product Newsletter #1” as the subject is not very effective. Give a good tease or lead-in, entice the user to open it. Otherwise they’ll go right on by it in their inbox.

My first newsletter subject was “NetworthIQ Newsletter #1,” and the response generated from it was so quiet, you could hear a pin drop. Now with newsletter #2, I had “NetworthIQ Newsletter – Net Worth Stats Released.” Newsletter #2 featured similar content as #1, but I highlighted the Net Worth Statistics we had just released in the subject. The response was overwhelmingly better. Referrers lit up with email clients.

4) Keep it short
There’s a lot of noise out there these days. Between reading blogs, emails, etc., people just don’t have time to read a bunch of copy. Include short snippets and link to your site to provide more detail. Provide as many calls to action in the fewest words you possibly can.

5) Stick with text, don’t bother with HTML
If you follow #4, there’s really no reason to have HTML. It just adds complexity. Most HTML newsletters utilize images extensively, but in case you haven’t noticed, Outlook 2003 and Google Mail both disable images by default. Why bother dealing with this? Need a link? Well, most email clients turn a textual URL into a link anyway. Keep it simple and keep it text. Besides, what are most blogs syndicated as? Text. I’d argue that’s what makes them successful since it cuts out the crap and gets right to the guts. Now in the event that you want to do some tracking and place a web bug, HTML is probably fine. Just stay away from images.

What do you think? What’s effective for your newsletters?

Additional tips you may find useful:

• http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2005/11/html_email_desi.html
• http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020930.html

I used WordPress for a project over a year ago, and had no complaints about it. But, that was before I started blogging publicly, so it’s interesting to see it again. Blogger has a better entry interface and better template editing (one file, as opposed to a number of files in WordPress), but WordPress still feels like a much more robust blog system with comment feeds, trackbacks, categories and plugins.

The final task will be to select a different theme.

Update
I’m using the Almost Spring theme now. It’s very clean, and has the sidebar on the post page, which was missing from the default. I know it’s still a pretty common one, but it’s a step up from the default one, uniqueness-wise.