Three apps were mentioned as ways to help boost the fans and monitor temperatures:

• smcFanControl
• iStat from iSlayer.com
• Fan Control by Lobotomo software

I installed smcFanControl and even after a day noticed pretty significant temperature reduction.

But, I was also reminded of a discussion on Stack Overflow a couple weeks back where Joel recommended an alternative approach to the heat problem, undervolting the CPU, with CoolBook.

So, there’s some options, and make sure you do some research first, wouldn’t want you doing any damage or voiding any warranties or anything.

This last Thursday and Friday was the annual WebVisions conference here in Portland. 2008 marks my 4th year in attendance, and I definitely look foward to it every year. You can’t beat the price, it’s one of the cheapest conferences around and with it being local, there’s really not much excuse not to come and check out at least a few sessions and a keynote. Plus it’s a great chance to catch-up with my local developer and entrepreneur friends and meet some new ones.

My main point of feedback for the organizers if they read this. PLEASE PUT KEYNOTES IN THE MORNING!

All in all, WV was pretty good, though it didn’t feel as inspiring as the last couple of years. After last year, I made sure to avoid the workshops. As far as the sessions go, I was entertained and picked up some great info and good tips to follow-up on, but nothing that made me want to carve out a day or so to really think through. I can’t quite figure out why exactly, but one thing that I noticed that I didn’t read a single live-blog or blog post during the conference, it never even occurred to me. That’s a major shift from years past. Why didn’t it occur to me? Make a guess, Twitter. In years past, reading about the conference, during the conference has always kept that mind-buzz going.

Twitter is now the primary forum for conference back channel and instant recaps. Only problem was, Twitter was down for a good portion of the conference, so there was little in terms of immediate response loop. The conversation has migrated from the blogosphere to Twitter, but when Twitter is down, the conversation dies.

Here’s a quick round-up of the sessions I attended. Slide decks for at least some of these available on SlideShare. Other roundups can be found on the Silicon Florist.

RSS: Bleeding Edge Tips and Tricks
I only caught the last half, and I’ve seen Marshall talk about RSS before, but even then I still managed to pick up some new ideas, a testament to Marshall’s ability to keep finding new ways to digest more information, faster.

Drupal: This Aint Your Father’s CMS
I’ve just picked up Drupal in the last couple months for a project at Strands and this was my first opportunity to hear about it and ask questions after having actually spend considerable time working on it. I missed most of the actual presentation, but there was lots of time for q & a which was well worth it. Plus, we got to learn a little bit about OpenSourcery, which was new to me.

Going Fast on the Slow Mobile Web
Great update to Jason’s talk in February at PDX Web Innovators. Cloud Four has been doing a lot of research on the performance capabilities of mobile phones, and a lot of that fresh new data was included here.

So You Want to Run a Startup
The startup story of SlideShare. This is my first time seeing Rashmi speak and I think it was a good session. Focus on metrics to measure success, understanding the size of your market, pros/cons of different business models, adapting plans to how the business/site/community take-off, and developing key advisors/investors. SlideShare is the poster child of web 2.0 in that it is a pure ad-based business model and its marketing strategy was to get on TechCrunch. They may just have been one of the few to succeed at that, as it they seem to growing nicely.

Star Wars Kid Is Your New Bicycle: The Changing Lives of Memes
Andy Baio’s talk attempting to identify how memes spread. This was definitely the most entertaining session, and I have to admit I hadn’t heard of a couple of the ones mentioned. But, I certainly remember Star Wars Kid and Numa Numa. Bottom line, I don’t think we can ever predict what’s going to truly go viral.

WebVisionary awards
I was excited to finally make it to an after party for WebVisions for the first time. This was a fun event and I managed to meet several tweeps for the first time. But, something that I’ve gotten used to with WebVisions, the online component of these awards is lacking (no nominees or winners listed as of now, but the lack of online presence is something that WV overall has struggled with to the point of giving up this year IMO, and this is a web conference). There was no transparency on nominees and with a couple multiple-award winners (Substance and Colour Lovers) I have to question the value of these awards. Not to take away from the winners, but with that, the apparent lack of nominees and the entry fee the awards just seemed kind of cheap. I suppose that’s why they rushed through them so fast. The ceremony itself was well done though.

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?

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).

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.

(via)

Silicon Florist marks its first month – The best new blog around, if you live in the Portland area and are interested in web/tech, this is a must read. I left a comment about how reading Silicon Florist reminds me of the early days of TechCrunch, Read/Write Web, and Mashable when I was always anticipating the next post to see what great new stuff was coming. I’ve become a bit jaded following the general web 2.0 blogs lately, with their growing need to be businesses and post constantly, and I rarely get excited about anything that is posted there anymore, nor can I ever hope to keep up. So having a locally focused blog makes me feel so much more connected again.

Marshall leaves SplashCast to join Read/Write Web – Speaking of Read/Write Web, Portland’s most famous web guy makes the jump to one of the top Web 2.0 blogs. I love this move. Marshall’s one of the top minds on web analysis and news and it’ll be great to have him back covering the whole web again. BTW, as part of his consulting practice, he’s now offering a social media starter kit which will be great for anybody interested in learning how to corral the vast information on the web. Also, if you’re already fully up to speed on finding news and feeds, but you find too much of it, check out his post on how to read feeds more efficiently and avoid information overload.

CLIQ beta announced – Portland’s StepChange group launches a beta program for CLIQ, a new blog community widget that lets you share content from your “clique” of bloggers. If you’re interested in widgets, either developing or the bursting economy around them, Kevin from StepChange will be speaking at the October Web Innovators meeting. Also, as you can see on my site here, I’ve added a CLIQ widget that features Portland Web/Tech bloggers. If you’re interested in joining, sign up for the beta, or let me know and I’ll send you an invite to the Clique.

Portland Web Innovators on OpenID – Adam put together a great topic and place and the turnout was fantastic. OpenID has many challenges ahead to reach mass adoption, but its great to see people tackling this important area. Special thanks to Jive Software for hosting. I haven’t been as active this year in the Web Innovators but am thrilled to see it thriving now.

Advanced Operators posts its 4th topic – AdvOp is a great new community that brings bloggers/technologists (lots of Portland ones) together every week to focus on a single topic in the form of blog posts and comments. Like Silicon Florist, its another great way to get connected to those around you, and that share your interests. I haven’t participated yet, but hope to one of these weeks, and I enjoy following the threads.

BTW, if you’re searching for a good name, be sure to add Bust A Name to your toolbox, I can’t say enough good things about it.

Now I just have to find that receipt. I know it’s around here somewhere.

Tags: iPhone, Apple

Kelly emailed me today and mentioned the subject so I thought it be worth a reply here.

I could go either way on this. For one, big deal if the Ducks tried to woo him, I don’t see that as an etiquette violation. Casey has built OSU into a dominant force, and maybe he’ll win another national title at OSU, but what if he were to undertake the challenge of bringing UO baseball to national prominence and succeed. Then he would prove that without a doubt he is one of the greatest coaches in Oregon sports (and college baseball) history. Nothing like cementing a legacy. He could always turn the job down if he chooses.

On the other hand, I’m perhaps one of the few people who do not like Casey. I can and do respect what he’s accomplished, but hey he didn’t let me on their team and I’ve been known to hold a grudge or two, it’s one of my weaknesses. So, to see a coach I don’t like, coaching my favorite team would not thrill me. If it turns out as reported and the Ducks start with a fresh name with Oregon roots, I think that would be outstanding.

Let Civil War rage year round now. Though since the Ducks will probably suck the first couple years, at least we’ll crush the Beavers with our competitive cheerleading team (the other sport added along with baseball, which just so happens is only the 2nd competitive cheer team in the country). On the plus side for me, whenever it comes up that I played and coached baseball at the U of O, it’ll sound a heckuva lot more impressive without knowing that it was Club Baseball.

That’s right. They want me to provide my username and password for the on-line services that may contain some of my most sensitive information, including: Gmail, Plaxo, Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL.

I can’t think of a very polite way to say “no fucking way”, so I won’t even try. There wasn’t a button for that.

Blame it on Facebook, Flixster, or whatever spam.. cough cough, I mean “viral marketing” success story there is out there that has led to this trend. I wish it would stop and I wish it would stop now. I have no problems with a service providing me some copy that I can send to my friends, or even let me put in some email addresses to send invites to. But asking for username and passwords to online email accounts is beginning to cross the line. How am I suppose to trust what you do with all of this information? I realize there is a “skip this step” in these examples, but note how small it usually is.

I admit I fell for this on Facebook and they found several people that were in my contacts, and it got me started. But that’s Facebook, one of the biggest sites on the web and they have little incentive to abuse the information. I have since wised up though and even that fact will not dupe me into falling for this again.

Here’s a quick look at some doing this in addition to facebook and spock:

Flixster

iLike

Me.dium

Like much of the Northwest, Sherwood is home to an array of beautiful parks and natural beauty. But the quickly growing commercial sites of Sherwood offer true insight into the town’s character: a juxtaposition of old and new, with reverence toward both the city’s historic past and its bright, expanding future. The community events calendar is always full and the town’s location makes for a fairly easy commute to nearby Portland. -A.B.

As much as I complain about living so far out, Sherwood does indeed have a nice community feel to it, the downtown/old town area has a great throwback vibe, and there are nice parks and sports facilities. I grew up in a town of only a couple thousand people, near Eugene, and that was definitely too small for me. But the 15,000 population range, while near a bigger city is an appealing mix. Plus, you can have a decent backyard. That makes it great for families.

If you don’t have a family, you would probably go crazy in this town. I’m betting there is a picture of Sherwood in the dictionary next to the definition of “suburbia.” I can’t believe the “fairly easy commute” line from the author. Say what? Personally, I think Sherwood is by far, the most difficult commute of the west-side suburbs (Sherwood, Tigard, Tualatin, Wilsonville, Beaverton, Hillsboro). There are minimal mass-transit options (nowhere near MAX, one bus running up HWY 99), and driving down Tualatin-Sherwood road to I-5 is one of the most aggravating stretches of road you will ever travel. I know a lot of people make the commute, but I would never refer to it as easy.

But, it’s great to see the city get some exposure, perhaps we’ll get some better restaurants now. One can only eat at Red Robin so many times.

Stocks of iPhones were depleted at all but two of Apple’s retail stores by the end of business on July 4th. Only the Shadyside (Pittsburgh) and Bridgeport Village (Portland area) stores report stock when they open Thursday, July 5th. Estimates of initial iPhone supplies by analysts range from 700,000 down to about 350,000, not including iPhones shipped to 1,800 AT&T stores.

One of my colleagues managed to flip two iPhones on eBay for a modest profit that were purchased at the Bridgeport store shortly after they were released, and without having to wait in line more than a couple minutes.

I guess I’ll know where to go next time there’s a hot Apple release. And, no I didn’t get an iPhone yet, and yes I do want one. The real web, not some crippled mobile browser, in the palm of my hand wherever I go. Sounds like a dream to me.

Ahhh, conferences. If I had the time and money, I’d probably just go to conferences and classes for a career. It’s a blast to learn new things and listen to different perspectives. But, I’m practical and know that you won’t get much done if you’re only learning, so usually end up doing one or two outings a year. This is my third year at WebVisions, and I have to say, I much rather would’ve gone to Microsoft’s Mix. Ok, maybe being in Vegas has a lot to do with that preference. Local conferences aren’t always much fun, you don’t get to experience the whole thing as real life is still very present. But, with baby #2 nearing arrival, leaving town wasn’t an option.

The WebVisions lineup and sessions seem a bit weaker (IMO) than in years past, but we’ll see how how I feel afterwards. Take any of my criticisms with a grain of salt though, it would take mountains moving for me to get in front of an audience to present. I can barely ask a question without shaking.

AJAX Workshop

I was late (shocking, I know) but this turned out to be a bust. The speaker was definitely knowledgeable about the topic, pretty similar to my own level of knowledge I’d say. But, unfortunately I didn’t take my own advice about not attending technical/programming sessions at a designer’s conference. The presentation was geared at beginners and it was a “presentation,” not a workshop. I was expecting to be able to plug in the laptop and work through some examples and exercises after seeing some demos and a bit of lecutre/presentation. But instead it was just demos/presentation without the ability to reinforce what was being said through concrete exercises. You can’t learn this stuff by listening, you have to do it.

More later, the Inventrepreneurship session is shaping up nicely.

Tags: webvisions, webvisions07

Given Arnold’s record 2006 — the largest sum, we believe, anyone has ever earned in one year — a slap like that just might land someone in intensive care.

I am stunned.

(via Paul Kedrosky)

The best use of my tax refund…

Pay off credit card

Discover your own

File income taxes | Track your Net worth

I know you want to share. Well, jump over to the head-to-head refund smackdown game that Adam and I (mostly Adam, but he’s gracious enough to say I helped ) just released.

Best use of Income Tax Refunds

If after doing that you feel inspired to go file your taxes, InstaFILE is there for you.

NHibernate in Action

(via Ayende)

Go Ducks!

So, we’re heading down the road and my wife’s trying to get the thing setup and what do you know, the damn Auto Kit is just for power, there’s no way to actually play the iPod through this thing. WTF? I had assumed incorrectly it was an FM adapter, but it’s only a power charger and amplifier. What part of “play” are they talking about? You have to buy a separate FM adapter to actually play your iPod in your car, which when you combine the Auto Kit, adds up to about the same price as the iCarPlay. Guess which one I have now? Yes, the iCarPlay. Belkin may have been trying to provide flexibility with their separate power adapter and FM transmitter (and plethora of other combinations thereof), but they ended up providing confusion and distrust. I have finally learned my lesson with Belkin and I will never buy another one of their product’s again.

Now, they had a little help from a disputed onside kick. Well, as there usually is, there’s more to the story about why the play was not overruled by the replay official (sorry for the annoying oregon live survey, they really need to get rid of that). Turns out the replay official may have got the video late, didn’t have the same angles as ABC did, and was being pressured to make a call. In such situations, the replay official goes with the call on the field. Seems logical to me. Sure, if it happened to my team, I’d be pissed. Still, I’m not going to feel guilty about this win, because Oklahoma choked at the end giving up those two touchdowns and geting the kick blocked. They still had plenty of opportunity to win the game even with the bad call.

But, to me, the most interesting thing from that article was that the replay offical is paid $400 a game. So, you spend all this money implementing replay, for which decisions can mean millions of dollars in bowl revenue, and you pay $400? Something doesn’t seem right about that.

Also, related to the topic of making a service better through their API, check out Moo.com, which for $20 will make a set of minicards from your Flickr photos. I’d say that’s a good use of an API.

Today, I was taken completely aback because the company began implementing a major internet filtering policy, and I mean major. I’m still investigating the full scope, but here’s a taste:

• YouTube, blocked.
• MySpace (and pretty much any other social networking site out there), blocked.
• Odeo, blocked.
• Upcoming.org, blocked.
• iTunes (at least podcasts), blocked.
• Any type of streaming (flash audio/video, QuickTime, etc.), blocked.

Now for the good news. Apparently, straight mp3 files are fine to download, RSS feeds and BlogLines is safe, and for those interested in the social networking scene, the pets are still ok.

I’m sure the guys at TechDirt would have something insightful to say about this, linking to studies showing how internet use is not that big of a deal and actually helps employees be more productive. Unfortunately, the company is entitled to do whatever it wants, and if it feels it needs to do this to save bandwidth, protect its systems, and maintain efficient work flow, well they have the right. I just won’t get to send around any of funny YouTube videos, listen to internet radio, watch movie trailers, check out the latest in social media (I’m thinking the company doesn’t have much of interest in understanding or using social media), or easily listen to podcasts. And like with any filtering technology, it will block something that would help me perform my job better, and then I’ll have to submit a request to unblock it or just go without it. Not the end of the world, but still, it will be an inconvenience.

Why post this then? Well, it got me thinking, and I don’t claim this to terribly insightful, that maybe the whole Net Neutrality debate is not the biggest danger to the internet. Maybe when companies and schools start following this example and shutting their employees and students out (as the government is already working on), and since I’m guessing that’s where a lot of people use the internet most, that will be a huge hit to many web sites and communities? I’m thinking that wouldn’t be a good thing. What do you think?

Update
Added upcoming.org to the list. I can’t believe they blocked that one. Ridiculous.

Tags: youtube myspace filtering itunes

I think it’s awesome they’re doing so well. But, there needs to be some sense talked into those coaches, letting a 13 year old throw 115 pitches or whatever it was in Monday’s game. Yeah, Jace Frye is a great pitcher, it would just be shame to see his arm finished before he even gets to high school. I can understand this being a once in a lifetime opportunity, and doing what you gotta do to win, but a line needs to be drawn somewhere.

BTW, did you see that 13 year-old from Saudi Arabia who was 6′8″? Unbelieveable!

NetworthIQ is at 441, pretty much right in the middle.

This year we headed off to see some friends in northern Idaho, outside of Sandpoint. It’s a beautiful area, and I’d recommend visiting if you ever get the chance. With the lakes and mountains it really is a outdoorsman’s playground. We stayed for a couple nights up at Schweitzer and were able to take a lift up to the top and hike down. Too bad for the smoke coming over from various fires, because there was a bad haze that reduced visibility. I imagine when it’s clear, you can see forever. Speaking of forever, while driving from Tri-Cities to Spokane, is it just me, or is it impossible to tell where the earth ends and the sky begins? It’s just so vast. A good reminder of how small our little spot on earth is.

I have to also say that the drive along the Gorge (between Boardman and Hood River) is one of the most calming drives out there. The fact that I can say that while traveling with a 19-month old who has been in a car seat for 8 hours says a lot (there were enough choo choos to keep her entertained). With the river and the rolling hills, it’s pretty cool. Lots of wind surfers and kite boarders out on the water. I wonder if Rick Strahl was out there.

So, now I’m back on the grid and checking out everything that I’ve missed over the last few days. Looks like AOL made quite the mistake and Digg’s creator is rich (or is he?) according to Business Week. Anything else I miss?

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

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?

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

• 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

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

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

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.

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.

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!

Update:

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

Thanks to the incompetence of Verizon (we notified them a month ago of the date we were moving in), I’ve had no DSL in the new house and won’t until early next week. Tell me why the baby bells are allowed to merge back together? So they can abuse their customers even more. I’ll definitely be switching to Comcast for internet, especially with the deal at Comcast Offers. I’ve always done DSL in the past because it was cheaper, but with that deal, it equals out over a year. Plus, Comcast’s service has always been pretty good.

What else have we learned with this move? Nobody is never on time. Cleaners at the new house were an hour late on move day. Movers (had some larger items moved on Monday) were over an hour late. The post office is completely confused, with one person telling us it will be 7-10 days before we get mail at the new address, but then after catching the mailwoman today, she informed us that she was holding our mail already and waiting for us to come to the post office for a key. Would’ve been nice if someone told us that.

But on a brighter note, the Fourio team and family members were great and the bulk of the move went pretty fast on Saturday. You never realize how much stuff you have until you move. Hopefully we won’t have to move for another 5 years at least.

(via CrunchNotes)

In the days of MySpace and Facebook, making it easier to find you, I’d be extra careful if I were an athlete. You’re conversations might not be too private. Poor guy.

• Absolutely, Power Corrupts (via Kottke)
• Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep (recommended by a friend and also is on Kottke’s list)

I think I’m going to have read Moneyball soon, even if a little late.