Stickies (and similar notes-based organizational tools) are all the rage these days with 3 4 recent product launches:
As much as I want to like these tools, (especially local entry stikkit), I just can’t get behind them yet. I’ve tried using all kinds of organizational apps like Ta-da lists, wikis, Basecamp/activeCollab, all of the different start pages (google/ig, pageflakes, live.com) and their todo widgets, Google Notebook, and Microsoft OneNote among others.
Turn off javascript and try to do a search on the newly launched Like.com (Scoble and TechCrunch have more on the release). What do you get? Nothing. This is a move sure to fire up accessibility advocates everywhere. You may say “But who really ever turns off javascript?”, well I say why on earth do you need to write a series of javascript functions, have 15 javascript file includes, and wire up event handlers to submit your search form? Why not keep it simple and let HTML and HTTP do a little work for you?
How do you discover new blogs/feeds? The question becomes especially interesting when you want to start studying a new subject area. I checked out Share Your OPML, which certainly seems useful, but that only seems to be helpful for finding the most popular blogs overall or new blogs related to things you already have in your subscription list, not really helpful for finding the top blogs in a new subject area. I suppose Top 10 sources could be helpful too, but I didn’t see anything that helped me. I need to look at it a little further though.
I’ve got such a backlog of half-written posts, who knows when they’ll ever get completed. Does every blogger have long list of partially completed stuff? Here’s a quick link list though.
This week has seen a relative slew of new locally produced social sites to launch or that I noticed.
PDX Web Innovators Ray and Kandace from Needmore Designs launched their newest creation at the Wednesday meeting, which unfortunately I skipped this month, so I didn’t get to see it there. Looks like a nice entry into the social food space and seems like a great site to help people get started and maintain when they go raw. Gone Raw follows Cuppin’ which launched earlier this summer.
It’s rare that I get to use the Portland and Web 2.0 categories on this blog, so this is big news. The newest Portland Web 2.0 startup, stikkit, will be publicly unveiling at the Web 2.0 conference (via evhead). Looks like a lot of familiar names behind this project, so it should be interesting. Good luck guys.
See previous discussion of the Portland web startup scene here and here.
Not just rich people buy Playstations and Xbox’s
This is just ridiculous. It sickens me to see people advocating the use of credit to buy these types of things. If you need credit to buy a HDTV and gaming system, then you don’t need a HDTV and gaming system. Use cash or save for it. Period.
Zack Jenks, a portland web developer, is chronicling his experience building a web business. Much like the Carsons’ Bare Naked App, Zach shares his status and frustrations as the site comes together. Being in a similar situation, I always appreciate getting a window into another devrepreneur’s mind, so this should be interesting to keep an eye on.
We’ll have to get Zack out ot the PDX Web Innovators next month.
I haven’t been keeping up with the money blogs very well lately, but I did catch a couple of personal finance bits of note lately.
Dilbert’s 9-point financial plan
I think this is some very sound advice. You really don’t need to get that complicated with how you manage your money.
Moneyhacks and Get Rich Slowly
J.D. started Get Rich Slowly about six months ago and has quickly risen to the top tier of the money bloggers (see pfblog.org to learn more about money blogs). He happens to be from Portland, so it’s great to see the locals doing well. He recently added another blog, moneyhacks, focused more on tools and tips. J.D. was kind enough to include NetworthIQ last week.
Last month I mentioned Cambrian House as a place to share business ideas and possibly have them devloped by a crowdsourced team. The idea I submitted there was a social network for health type thing and it got shot down pretty good unfortunately. The idea was in the middle of my idea list, and it was more an experiment with Cambrian House, but I still thought it wasn’t that bad.
Well what do you know, today I discovered OrganizedWisdom, which is a social network for health information (via Mashable). Time will tell I suppose, but maybe my idea wasn’t that bad after all, and what does that say about Cambrian House? Goes to show there’s probably always somebody out there thinking about the same thing. This also reminds of when Minti came out.
nPost.com is coming to town again next week with their second Portland networking event. I went to the first one in August and had a good time. This is a general entrepreneur event, along the lines of an OEF event, but with a youger crowd. Their site is also a great resource for entrepreneurs, featuring many great interviews and a northwest focused job board.
I’m adding nPost to the Portland Technology/Entrepreneur group list.