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.

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.

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.

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.