Web Things Considered

The next couple weeks are going to be busy around these parts and just wanted to share some of the events I’m planning on attending.

WebVisions
Always one of my favorites and it’s cheap! Starts tomorrow.

Strands Portland Meet-up
Think Strands is all about Music and now Money? Think again. This meet-up will be a chance to preview the all new strands.com and meet more of the Strands team.

Portland Lunch 2.0 @ Vidoop
The Lunch 2.0 series continues at newly re-located to PDX Vidoop

Andy Baio talks side projects and acquisition at Portland Web Innovators
We’re thrilled to have Andy Baio, founder of Upcoming.org leading the discussion. Should be awesome!

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.

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.

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:

1. Quickly get the latest news, event info, and social media content from around the web for your city
2. See what’s happening in a city you’re traveling or moving to
3. See who’s online around you in your city

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:

• 5 News Aggregation Methods Compared
• Tracking the web with Single Page Aggregators

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.

Amazing what a couple weeks will do for a team. The Blazers won the draft lottery last night for the rights to pick first in this years NBA draft, the most highly coveted #1 pick since Lebron James a few years back. Couple that with Brandon Roy’s rookie of the year win and I’m actually excited about seeing them play next year.

It’s been years since I’ve attended or even watched a game on tv as they’ve fielded teams that were terrible on and off the court. I’m definitely not alone, as the team has suffered huge decreases in attendance and financial performance. It doesn’t take a genius to predict that with this stroke of luck, the team should now have a city starting to get behind it again.

TeamSnap, a product of Portland-based SparkPlug is the second northwest site on TechCrunch today and is enjoying a much smoother launch than TalentSpring’s. I saw TeamSnap on Mike Davidson’s blog the other day and it definitely is a good-looking site, but didn’t realize they were local. Congrats on the launch SparkPlug!

I used to play a lot of sports and do a little coaching before I got bit by the side-project entrepreneur bug, but not enough to warrant the use of TeamSnap. I don’t think it will help my golf game much either. If I start playing or coaching sports again (which I definitely want to do), I’ll have to remember to give this a shot.

The folks at Pop Art have launched a new group, PDX UX (UX = User Experience), for area designers and developers to get together (via). Looks to be heavy on Microsoft stuff. That’s not an indictment against the group (I code in .NET for a living as a matter of fact), but I do know that many developers dislike Microsoft’s proprietary ways and many designers dislike working with Microsoft technology. So, it will be interesting to see how it does. I’ll add it to the list.

One of the questions that came up during the Inventrepreneurship session (slides) at WebVisions was where to find people to help build projects. Groups like PDX Web Innovators and PDX UX, as well as any of the groups in that list is probably a good place to start.

I know it’s late notice, but this should a fun one. Adam has put together a great event, with Dietrich Ayala, a Portland-based Mozilla developer, giving a preview of Firefox 3. Thanks to ISITE for hosting too!

When it comes to web innovations, Firefox definitely fits the bill. I remember first discovering Firebird (as it was known before the name change) a few years back along with the Edit CSS plugin, and was amazed that I could edit CSS on the fly and see the changes live. Its been my browser of choice ever since. I didn’t even bother with Safari when I recently bought an iMac, took it out of the dock on the first day in fact. It’s only used for compatibility testing. The main reason I use Firefox? For the plugins. No other browser can compete with the sheer volume of useful plugins. This speaks to a compelling reason for offering an API as well, if you can get developers building cool stuff on your platform, the users will follow, and I do believe Firefox will take over IE.

I’ll be interested in the discussion around offline apps as well, one of the most mentioned features of Firefox 3. What, with the recent buzz around Adobe’s Apollo launch and then DHH’s remarks.

Come out if you can, here’s the details:

Wednesday, April 4, 2007
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Where
ISITE Design
115 NW First Avenue, Suite 500
Portland, Oregon 97209

Description
Dietrich Ayala will talk about his work with the Mozilla Corporation and what’s coming in Firefox 3.

http://www.pdxwi.com/events/4

Not really a web thing, but this is engineering/usability/design related.

There’s this crazy idea floating around that Oregonians don’t know how to drive. You hear it mentioned every once in a while, usually by someone from the busy roads of California. I admit I have seen my fair share of people going 65 in the left lane on I-5, driving along in ignorant bliss, as the lineup behind them is preparing to run them off the road. But, usually this is an occasional annoyance.

However, I’m starting to come to the conclusion that we Oregonians do indeed do not how to drive. Every day when I drive home from work, I prepare myself for the psychological torment of the Scholls Ferry merge. I work in Beaverton and live in Sherwood, so the quickest route there is to take Scholls Ferry to Roy Rogers (no, not named after THAT Roy Rogers). Scholls Ferry is bad enough with its stoplights every two car lengths, but then we hit the merge. The great traffic engineers of the city of Beaverton designed this splendid system of roads that will go along in two lanes and then merge into 1 lane about 3 feet after a stoplight. Walker Road (by Nike campus) has a lot of these as well. No, it’s not really 3 feet, but that’s pretty much how they’re treated since only the hooligans or the newbies cut ahead of the backup in the left lane by driving up the right line and merging in after the light as everyone in the left lane tries their hardest to not let them merge, cursing them vehemently.

But, are they really hooligans? Or, are they the smart ones, and the other 99% of the drivers in the left lane are the idiots. When I first encountered these things, I always patiently waited my turn and fumed at those who tried to beat the system. But, now, I’ve realized that I can cut a good 5 minutes or so off of my commute by driving up the right lane and save my sanity. It’s at the risk of inciting road-rage, I know.

The way I see it, these layouts are designed to prevent just the backup they cause by letting more cars through the lights, and letting them merge. There’s also some purpose to allow cars that are turning right before the merge to bypass the congestion, but I think the bigger issue is reducing congestion by letting more cars through. So, due to the societal norm of waiting your turn, the system backfires and the congestion remains, serving very little improvement over a single lane system.

Not a very usable design, huh? How should this be fixed so people feel free to use the right lane? Or am I cheating and need to get back in line?