Web Things Considered

It seems that Jot has removed our one page PDX Web Innovators wiki (http://pdxwebinnovators.jot.com/). Why would they do such a thing? Becuase it suffered a major case of comment spam and that caused the page count to be exceeded for the free plan. Sounds reasonable? Well, I see a few problems here:

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.

How ironic that Attensa came up in a conversation I had today and then saw that it was named a connected innovator at this week’s SuperNova conference. Congrats Attensa! As you can see from the Web 2.0 Innovation Map, there hasn’t been a lot of action in the Portland area, yet one of the three (and yes, I know how far behind I am on the map) got this nice accolade. I consider Attensa web 2.0 for a few reasons: they’ve been on TechCrunch, they deal in RSS and aggregration and are working on solving the information overload problem. I think that’s enough to qualify them as Web 2.0, despite Craig’s seeming resistance that label (Craig, you gotta edit those posts though, it’s “flickr” not “flicker” and “The Reserve” not “The Preserve”).

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.

Wow, as a die-hard Ducks fan, I can’t believe I’m actually thinking those words. With a win tonight finalizing their miraculous climb out of the loser’s bracket, the Oregon State Beavers have reached the final of the College World Series. Amazing is all I can say. I love college baseball, and considering OSU is the only varsity DI baseball program in the state I have been cheering for them and am excited to see them play this weekend. This is huge for baseball in the state of Oregon and the entire Northwest even. The U of O only has a club team for which I was a player/coach back in my college days, after not making the cut at OSU (and yet I’m not bitter ).

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!

Couple of interesting bits recently. First, looks like Google may be readying a CommissionJunction rival. I think that would be pretty cool. We haven’t had a lot of success with affiliate marketing on NetworthIQ (ok, actually zero success as in not a single conversion) through CJ. But, I don’t really blame that on them. It just hasn’t been a priority, so I haven’t done much research/tracking/experimenting, other than throwing a coupld LMB, ING, and Vonage ads up. However, it never hurts to have competition in the market.

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.

Woke up this morning to quite the scare, hearing that friend and colleague Aaron, one of the four in Fourio, and his friends had been in an accident on Mt. Hood yesterday. I just talked to him and he was in good humor (I’m sure the pain medicine helped that), with a broken jaw being the most serious injury. I know Aaron and his team are very experienced climbers, and I’m sure that training helped prevent further problems.

Here’s wishing Aaron and Jeremy a speedy recovery.

Good to see Oregon in the news on Techdirt.  Nothing like making the state proud, eh?  I wonder if it was a Windows machine and if so, I’d be curious to know how Steve Ballmer feels now?

As part of Rails day 2006, Ray is working for the next 24 hours on Cuppin’. Looks like it’ll be a Cork’d for coffee. Good luck guys.

Update:

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

I jumped at the Google Spreadsheets launch (more here) and wanted to share my first impressions. It sure gets the closest to Excel that I’ve seen so far. I was incredibly impressed. The editing, formuals and sheets functionality is very well done. You can even change sheets with CTRL-PgDn like in Excel, although if you have mutliple tabs open in Firefox it will change the sheet in your spreadsheet and then change tabs (so if you want to use this feature, make sure you have your spreadsheet in a single tab instance of Firefox). The only thing that I couldn’t find that I use regulary in Excel, was autofill.

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).

Back in April I posted (or more like rambled) about some parenting/family sites that were popping up. In a stroke of really, really original thought (I’m being sarcastic here), because they were using what would generally be considered a Web 2.0 approach (collaborative, social, user-generated content, etc.), I called them Family 2.0. Since that time, a blog has been started, Amiglia is using it in their title, and now cnet is running a front page story on it.

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.