Web Things Considered

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.

• 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.

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.