How ironic that Attensa came up in a conversation I had today and then saw that it was named a connected innovator at this week’s SuperNova conference. Congrats Attensa! As you can see from the Web 2.0 Innovation Map, there hasn’t been a lot of action in the Portland area, yet one of the three (and yes, I know how far behind I am on the map) got this nice accolade. I consider Attensa web 2.0 for a few reasons: they’ve been on TechCrunch, they deal in RSS and aggregration and are working on solving the information overload problem. I think that’s enough to qualify them as Web 2.0, despite Craig’s seeming resistance that label (Craig, you gotta edit those posts though, it’s “flickr” not “flicker” and “The Reserve” not “The Preserve”).

Wow, as a die-hard Ducks fan, I can’t believe I’m actually thinking those words. With a win tonight finalizing their miraculous climb out of the loser’s bracket, the Oregon State Beavers have reached the final of the College World Series. Amazing is all I can say. I love college baseball, and considering OSU is the only varsity DI baseball program in the state I have been cheering for them and am excited to see them play this weekend. This is huge for baseball in the state of Oregon and the entire Northwest even. The U of O only has a club team for which I was a player/coach back in my college days, after not making the cut at OSU (and yet I’m not bitter ;-)).

Couple of interesting bits recently. First, looks like Google may be readying a CommissionJunction rival. I think that would be pretty cool. We haven’t had a lot of success with affiliate marketing on NetworthIQ (ok, actually zero success as in not a single conversion) through CJ. But, I don’t really blame that on them. It just hasn’t been a priority, so I haven’t done much research/tracking/experimenting, other than throwing a coupld LMB, ING, and Vonage ads up. However, it never hurts to have competition in the market.

Woke up this morning to quite the scare, hearing that friend and colleague Aaron, one of the four in Fourio, and his friends had been in an accident on Mt. Hood yesterday. I just talked to him and he was in good humor (I’m sure the pain medicine helped that), with a broken jaw being the most serious injury. I know Aaron and his team are very experienced climbers, and I’m sure that training helped prevent further problems.

Good to see Oregon in the news on Techdirt.  Nothing like making the state proud, eh?  I wonder if it was a Windows machine and if so, I’d be curious to know how Steve Ballmer feels now?

As part of Rails day 2006, Ray is working for the next 24 hours on Cuppin’. Looks like it’ll be a Cork’d for coffee. Good luck guys.

Update:

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

I jumped at the Google Spreadsheets launch (more here) and wanted to share my first impressions. It sure gets the closest to Excel that I’ve seen so far. I was incredibly impressed. The editing, formuals and sheets functionality is very well done. You can even change sheets with CTRL-PgDn like in Excel, although if you have mutliple tabs open in Firefox it will change the sheet in your spreadsheet and then change tabs (so if you want to use this feature, make sure you have your spreadsheet in a single tab instance of Firefox). The only thing that I couldn’t find that I use regulary in Excel, was autofill.

Back in April I posted (or more like rambled) about some parenting/family sites that were popping up. In a stroke of really, really original thought (I’m being sarcastic here), because they were using what would generally be considered a Web 2.0 approach (collaborative, social, user-generated content, etc.), I called them Family 2.0. Since that time, a blog has been started, Amiglia is using it in their title, and now cnet is running a front page story on it.

They probably don’t think they ever really went away, but Zillow and Trulia stole most of their thunder. Being that Redfin was only for Seattle, I can see why nobody ever talked much about them. These guys were the pioneers though, in merging maps, listings and recent sales data. When it came out, I was just dying for something similar for Portland. I’m a real estate, map and data junkie, so this was just awesome. I’d love to work on something like that. The local brokerages’ stuff simply cannot compete with the robustness of these new mashups. And no, this does not count. Having to sign up so you can be harassed by an broker is not the same as having an open site.

In my jump into using Web Deployment Projects with Web Application Projects I ran into an issue which is rather obvious after the fact, but thought it would be good to share for Google searchers.

When creating a new solution/project configuration (i.e. dev, test, production, etc.) in Visual Studio 2005, which is useful to do when using Web Deployment Projects, make sure you set the output path for the Web project to “/bin”. By default a new configuration gets an output path of “/bin/[configuration]”. If the web assembly is not in /bin, the aspnet compiler portion of the Web Deployment project will fail with errors like this: