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)

Local Signal

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.

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.

Interesting how software design repeats itself so much as different groups discover old patterns and make them new again to a whole segment of developers. I’ve been developing for about 8 years, only a fraction in the history of software, but already I’m looking at repeating myself. I’m reading today about the ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller) announcement from this past weekend. I think it was a little over 3 years ago now that, in my day job, I left Java for .NET. For the bulk of my Java days I was doing MVC development with a custom IBM framework (which I wasn’t too fond of) and with Spring (which I had a lot more fun with). I consider myself pretty agnostic with software, I’m not religiously tied with any group, but I made the switch to .NET because I wanted to write web apps, and .NET was the direction my company’s technology roadmap was going, leaving Java mostly behind as a web front-end.

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.

Mint finally launched yesterday at the TechCrunch40 conference. Congratulations Mint! I had been referring to Mint as the great vaporware of personal finance apps. They first started promoting it back in March, and was beginning to think it would never launch. 6 months later they have a public beta out (I believe they actually started working on it on December ’05). Good to see there is something there after all, so I guess I have to stop calling it vaporware. Their blog has been great, even inspiring one of NetworthIQ’s new features, but hopefully for $5 million in VC money, we can get something better than a blog.

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.

I’m not afraid to admit that I’m Richard Simmons. Don’t want to pull a muscle now.

(via)

It’s Friday already, here’s some news to note from the past week or so.

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.

The debate about “Web 2.0” has been played out probably thousands of times before in the echo chamber, but it’s now gone mainstream, with a touch of humor:

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20070909.html