Posts filed under: Miscellany
OSCON / DrupalCon 2005
I spent all last week in Portland attending OSCON and Drupal Con. Both events were fantastic and it was great to meet people face to face who I have only interacted with online.
There are many good summaries of the events around, but my personal favorites were the lightning talks at the second day of Drupal Con, and the ghetto style Drupal booth in main exhibition hall.
Congratulations to Kris Krug from Bryght who won the OSCON 2005 photo contest with this photo!
And then there was four: Toolsmiths, Producers, Aggregators and Filters
Chris Anderson has amended his list of long tail business ideas. To his original categories of ‘producers’, ‘aggregators’ and ‘filters’, he has now added ‘toolmakers’ . Good to know that our company Bryght has a business model now! Chris, welcome to party!
User Feedback For Web Applications
Everyone always agrees that user feedback is a good thing, but in a “Ship the product!” kind of world, it’s often left by the way side. Not so for the Robot Co-op. 43 Things, as well as 43 places have user feedback features built right into the application in an intuitive and attractive way.
It seems to work too! On his blog, Josh points to user suggestions and ideas that have already been implemented.
The effects of this are quite neat. I feel a “collective ownership” over the application that I otherwise would not have. It makes it seem as though the Robot Co-op are simply custodians of the interesting world they have created, and the community has the power to make decisions and shape the application.
Who thought user feedback could be so fun? Groundbreaking stuff…
EVDB API released!
The new API to EVDB went live about 45 minutes ago. With Upcoming.org and EVDB it’s nice to see the area of calendars and events start to gain some momentum.
Linux on your iPod
Phillip Torrone just gave a cool Gnomedex tutorial on how to install Linux on an iPod. You can get more info at the Podzilla wiki. PT mentioned a few compelling reasons to void your iPod warranty:
- Record audio at higher bit rates then the standard iPod OS
- Play back video on your iPod
- Ogg support
- Asteroids!
Now this is a Foosball table
Do you have gobs of cash burning a hole in your wallet? Do you tip the cute starbucks girl with a crisp hundred dollar bill? Have you already bought your porche? Then this is your foosball table!
Hachamovitch @ Gnomedex
The feisty IE product unit manager Dean Hachamovitch gave us the low down on the latest Longhorn build, IE 7, and how RSS will save the world. Dean talked about some of the limitations of feeds, and how extending RSS to handle lists can solve these issues in certain problem domains. The biggest news came when Microsoft announced that it is releasing its list based extensions to RSS2.0 under a creative commons license. To make it uber official Larry Lessig appeared via video to congratulate Microsoft on embracing the CC license . Microsoft and Creative Commons? Next thing we know there will be peace in the middle east and cats and dogs will be living together. Though I’m not clear if Microsoft’s extensions to RSS will compete or complement OPML.
Dean also talked about a couple of other points:
Longhorn will have a ‘common feed list’, a user level data store of feeds. This makes a lot of sense, and my only concern here is that the data is open and easily accessible. I also like the way Dean downplays the specific activity of Podcasting, instead treating it as the general activity of exchanging ‘feeds of content’.
Pre Gnomedex Activities
So all of us from Bryght met up with the fine folks at Robot Co-op. It was a great lunch, which ended in a high stakes game of credit card Russian roulette (loser pays all). After the dust settled, score ‘1’ for Bryght, 0 for Robot Co-op.
We also got a guided tour of 43places, the new Robot Co-op web app. It looks pretty slick, and seems like a nice step forward building on the success of 43things. I really dig the interfaces. These things are fun to use!
Gnomedex
It would have been a normal night in Seattle, except for 3 shady looking individuals wearing bathrobes, and the odd flying ninja dart. Let the games begin.