Web Things Considered

A couple weeks back, I noticed a piece in the Biz Journal feed about a web development firm called Site9 moving its corporate headquarters to Portland. I’ve never heard of them and from what I could tell they didn’t look that big to even need a corporate headquarters. But, that’s cool to have another web shop in town, no harm there. Now, they’ve gone and raised some money. Again good for them, I’m happy to see people get a chance to build a business.

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.

Is it just me, or is Picasa’s red-eye tool amazing?  So simple, so powerful.  Even though I’ve wound up with several tools for accomplishing different tasks (viewing, storing, searching, printing, editing), when it comes to editing Picasa is a thing of beauty.

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

No, not trying to suck up, just found that it was incredibly ironic proving one of his points from the Webvisions session. The point he made was that a person will try something out if they hear about it from two unrelated sources.

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?

Today was much, much better than yesterday. I drove today, MAX was too slow yesterday. MAX can be nice if you live close to it, but Sherwood is just too far away. Great sessions throughout the day with one exception. It’s interesting going to conferences in your hometown. I think you tend to miss out on a lot of the socializing because it’s more like a day at work.

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

Speaker: Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine

• 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

With WebVisions, code camp, and OSCON all around the same time, it’s tough deciding which one to go to. It always comes down to one since getting away from work two weeks in a row would be a challenge and burning a weekend at code camp wouldn’t fly at home.

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

The PDX Web Innovators group is having a meetup this Wednesday at 7:00 (details here). With WebVisions starting on Thursday, this will be a good warm-up.

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

I’m exploring some new project ideas and was wondering if anyone knew where to get an API for music, as in I’d like to know about artists, albums, songs, etc. Kind of like an IMDB for music with an open API? And free? I haven’t found anything yet. Seems like that could be a project in of itself, but not quite what I’m looking to do.

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.