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. 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:

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.

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.

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.

It seems that Jot has removed our one page PDX Web Innovators wiki (http://pdxwebinnovators.jot.com/). Why would they do such a thing? Becuase it suffered a major case of comment spam and that caused the page count to be exceeded for the free plan. Sounds reasonable? Well, I see a few problems here:

1. The fact that it was so easily comment spammed
2. The fact that comments are considered pages in their plans
3. I could find no way to mass delete comments and I was not about to delete several hundred of them by hand.
4. I replied to their automated warning (automated, but the from address was apparetnly an actual person, Michael Lee – mike@jot.com) about this issue and never got a response.

Even though this was just a temporary home until the group can build something, I am not happy with this outcome. Go use a competitor like PBWiki if you’re looking for a free hosted wiki.

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.