The glowing apple is becoming ubiquitous. Is this indicative of the conference experience these days?
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?
I’ve got a new moonlighting gig, to go along with my own projects. I’m writing web reviews for Digital Trends. I didn’t really see this one coming but the opportunity seemed like an excellent one, so I’m giving it my best shot.
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.
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.
When there’s some down time it’s nice to get a post out and then not worry about keeping up with the latest goings-on throughout the week so much here. I’ve pretty much gone the Twitter route for a lot of stuff I may have tried to turn into a post before. You can follow me there if you’re so inclined.
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).
Web 2.0 activity in Portland is still a big interest area for me and a number of Portland sites popped up this week. Seems things are really getting going around here.
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.
Local Signal
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.
As the CLIQ leader for the Portland Web/Tech group, it appears that it is my responsibility to keep the CLIQ relevant. So, I have booted a couple of blogs that were definitely not Portland Web/Tech focused. I will restrain myself from abusing my power by booting those with more views than me ;-).
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.
Interesting how software design repeats itself so much as different groups discover old patterns and make them new again to a whole segment of developers. I’ve been developing for about 8 years, only a fraction in the history of software, but already I’m looking at repeating myself. I’m reading today about the ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller) announcement from this past weekend. I think it was a little over 3 years ago now that, in my day job, I left Java for .NET. For the bulk of my Java days I was doing MVC development with a custom IBM framework (which I wasn’t too fond of) and with Spring (which I had a lot more fun with). I consider myself pretty agnostic with software, I’m not religiously tied with any group, but I made the switch to .NET because I wanted to write web apps, and .NET was the direction my company’s technology roadmap was going, leaving Java mostly behind as a web front-end.
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.
Thanks for all that voted in my “name this app” poll. LocalSignal.com won by an 8 to 6 margin over SocialMetro.com. I’m going to trust the voters on this one and go with it. It’s also time to announce the preview, since Silicon Florist and Metroblogging Portland have already covered it. Yes, I know it’s aesthetically challenged (though it’s much better than the first preview thanks to Matt at CouldBe Studios who hacked up my css), but I would love to hear feedback on the idea, content, and if you feel so inspired, design ideas.
Jump right into the Portland news to take a look.
LocalSignal is built for 3 types of uses:
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:
Mint finally launched yesterday at the TechCrunch40 conference. Congratulations Mint! I had been referring to Mint as the great vaporware of personal finance apps. They first started promoting it back in March, and was beginning to think it would never launch. 6 months later they have a public beta out (I believe they actually started working on it on December ‘05). Good to see there is something there after all, so I guess I have to stop calling it vaporware. Their blog has been great, even inspiring one of NetworthIQ’s new features, but hopefully for $5 million in VC money, we can get something better than a blog.
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.
Portland company LUNARR, cut through the TechCrunch40 noise nicely this morning with their release. Silicon Florist has a good roundup.
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.