Technical Details

A great list from Guy Kawasaki if your building a website or service.

Worth the read, there is probably something in here for every site to learn from.

I'll just list the headings:

1. Enforced immediate registration.
2. The long URL
3. Windows that don’t generate URLs
4. The unsearchable web site
5. Sites without Digg, del.icio.us, and Fark bookmarks
6. Limiting contact to email
7. Lack of feeds and email lists
8. Requirement to re-type email addresses
9. User names cannot contain the “@” character
10. Case sensitive user names and passwords
11. Friction-full commenting
12. Unreadable confirmation codes
13. Emails without signatures
14. Supporting only Windows Internet Explorer

I have to say, Mashup Camp 3 was awesome, intense and exhausting.

First I'd like to thank the organizers Doug Gold and David Berlind and all the other people that helped to make the camp a great success, also the sponsors who made the camp possible and had some cool swag on hand: Yahoo!, AOL, Sun, Intel, Microsoft, Adobe, eventful, Kapow, IBM, autodesk.

This was my first unconference and it was probably the best conference I've ever been to.

One of the features of mashup camp is something called speed geeking, which is demonstrating your mashup every 5 minutes for an hour and a half, like speed dating, except your demoing for groups of people. There are two of these 90 minute sessions over the two days and it was intense. 20+ demos going on in the same room, the sound is deafening as everyone is speaking at the same time. By the end of the session your voice is giving out and frankly your exhausted from the torrent of questions, but it is a great way to hone your demo and pitch and the feedback is immediate.

The hotel which is called hotel@mit and is the kind of place to embrace your inner nerd, since the theme of the hotel is engineering and science, which is pretty unusual, even the bed spreads had  equations on them.

From TechCrunch:

Avvenu has a new product that allows you to listen to your iTunes music connection from any web browser on a Windows PC, Mac, or Windows Mobile 5 smartphone. MobileCrunch covered an early version of the product that only worked on Windows Mobile phones here.

The base computer storing the music must be a Windows PC. As long as that base PC is powered on and online, your entire iTunes music library will stream to the browser on the remote computer, and playlists will also be available. Avvenu also allows users to store up to 250 songs on their servers, allowing you to play those songs remotely without your base PC online (this is getting into a legal gray area).

This might be pretty easy to do with rTunes, maybe a possible new feature once I finish the Apple port.

Holy smoke, Nortel has it's first blog, and one of the first big Canadian companies to start blogging at the corporate level, they even allow comments, cool.

http://blogs.nortel.com/

Via Maggie Fox

This was on Micro Persuasion today Forrester Creates a Model to Measure Blogging ROI

The highlights from Steve:

In Forrester’s interviews, the most frequently mentioned benefits of corporate blogging were: greater brand visibility in mainstream media on the Web, word of mouth, improved brand perception, instantaneous consumer feedback, increased sales efficiency and fewer "customer service-driven PR blowups."

Those are some pretty persuasive points, we haven't read the report yet, but for Enterprise 2.0 bent companies it's probably worth the $379.00

This is the summary of the report:

Many large companies stand on the brink of blogging, yet they are unwilling to take the plunge. Others, having dove in early, now face the challenge of managing existing blogs without the ability to show that they effectively support business goals. While blogging's value can't be measured precisely, marketers will find that calculating the ROI is easier than it looks. Following a three-step process, marketers can create a concrete picture of the key benefits, costs, and risks that blogging presents and understand how they are likely to impact business goals. This, in turn, enables marketers to answer the key questions, such as whether to blog or not to blog, or to make smart choices about an existing blog.

A New York Times piece Blogging for Property Sales discusses how blogging is now augmenting the existing well developed world of on-line real estate.

Increasing numbers of potential buyers and investors are exchanging information in online forums, downloading video and audio reports and reading blogs for property news and opinion.

Web activity by international real estate professionals and laymen started picking up only last year. Sam Taliaferro, an American developer in Panama, now spends three hours a day on a half-dozen blogs that range from events in his development to general investment trends and life in the country.

Very interesting, this is a very good fit for the BlogMatrix engine.

I upgraded to Komodo 4.0 last night and I'm quite happy.

It imported my current projects flawlessly, picked up all my settings no problemo.

So far it seems faster/smoother, the new project view of files is better, as it highlights files that don't exist so I could easily clean up my project as a number of files had been deleted in the last 3 months. The auto complete is better for python, but as always is hampered/frustrated by the nature of the language (more on this some other day)

Some of the new features look interesting: HTTP Inspector, JavaScript Debugging, VI Emulation and DOM viewer. I still use VI a lot, and as nice as using a graphical editor, every once and a while having VI commands would come in very handy, so hopefully no more editor swapping.

The "Find in files" feature is much improved, they now start giving results back quickly as opposed to the monolithic find all the files first and then search of 3.5.

They've improved the "find all files" bug I and many others reported in 3.5, but there are still problems, bug ID: 45636

I just saw this head line on Ars Technica: Windows Genuine Advantage falsely accuses millions

Windows Genuine Advantage is a controversy wrapped in an enigma buried inside a migraine headache. Or at least that's what it is for the millions of users who have been falsely identified as software pirates as a result of WGA's attempt to root out piracy.

Since July 2005, one in five computers running Windows have failed so-called Windows Genuine Advantage tests according to data from Microsoft. More than 22 percent of over 500 million systems that were subjected to the browser-based validation scheme were identified as invalid copies of Windows.

I'd like to add my own 2 cents, one of the biggest problems with WGA is that if you're building a brand new machine in a post service pack 2 world, you can't update any of your Microsoft packages like Direct X (to name one) with out registering your machine, which means if I later run into some incompatible driver down the road in my install, I'm hosed and I can't wipe the machine and reinstall the OS from scratch and start again, a real bummer. I'm hoping I'm wrong about that, but I've not found anything on the web about how to reinstall a registered copy of windows from scratch. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is for me, I've run into situations in the past where drivers (ATI and Roxio) conflicted on XP and I was forced to reinstall the OS 3 times to find the magic sequence that worked, fun wow, fortunately this was prior to SP2.

WGA also destroys the 30 day trial for Windows XP, since you can't update any Microsoft software, MS is right on top of that marketing opportunity.

I'd love to be wrong about all of the above, so please let me know.

The WGA FAQ, not very helpful as is to be expected…

Guy Kawasaki has a great post about if your startup should create a plan first or later and some tips on what you business plan should contain. Great advice.

Our recent trip to Mashup Camp 3 helped us immensely in honing our pitch via Speed Geeking (which is like boot camp for your pitch/demo)

Guy's key points…

• Perfect your pitch, then write your plan.

• Use the business-plan exercise as a way to get your team on the same page.

• Keep it short: ten to twenty pages.

• Spend no more than two weeks writing it.

• Don’t get obsessed with with details in your financial forecast because it should be one page long.

Is a Business Plan Necessary?

Coming Soon: The Death of the Web Page

Things are changing, evolving, and what has been the web page for over ten years is probably going away on certain sites. Do I think that the web page as we've known it is gone forever? Not right now, no, and probably not for quite a while. The more important change that needs to occur is this: it's not the page that matters; it's the presentation and how people interact with that presentation that needs to be your focus.

This is certainly something we've been working hard at making a reality, and with some of our latest features targeted at businesses that want a better friendlier web site, we have the solution. Further, not only will your web site be as dynamic as a blog, but you'll be able to manage your data in a structured fashion and then publish it to aggregaters like Eventful.com, Upcoming.org, Google Base, Blue Dot and many more.

See more at the official BlogMatrix.com blog