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MOD Systems coverage in the Seattle Times

This article talks about the product I am working on, and the company I work for. We have developed systems for the retail sale of digital media. Specifically, burning custom CDs in coffee shops.

Update: There is also an article in the Seattle PI

Deep Thoughts from Dave Winer

In celebration of the launch of Share your OPML, here are some gems from Dave Winer at last week's Seattle Mind Camp:

• All communities grind to a halt eventually
• Blogging doesn't come to a halt
• You can't get users to do anything - it's pointless
• You have to become a user and do it
• RSS will never achieve 100% adoption
• unless we make it not about subscribing

That last point makes me think immediately of Lookmarks, and a couple of my loyal users who don't use RSS feeds. Lookmarks should recommend posts from feeds based on your bookmarks.

I haven't added any major features to Lookmarks in about a year. I have been watching from the sidelines as others implemented open search, recommending aggregators, and social search engines. I would like to build all of this into Lookmarks, but I want to get the mix just right.

Back to OPML, did you know that the structure of OPML allows you to delegate sections of your taxonomy to other OPML files (maintained by other people?)

Blog Carnivals

I have been blogging since 2003, but I hadn't discovered the concept of a "Blog Carnival" until this evening.

Carnivals are a technique for showcasing your blog. Most carnivals occur once a week. People who want to participate in the carnival send links to the carnival host, and he or she formats them all into a blog article. The organizer of the carnival tells people where it will be, and they all flock to the host's page and follow the links to the articles submitted. The host gets a big traffic spike and the participants get smaller spikes. Sometimes, the host or the participants find themselves added to a visitor's blogroll. Most carnivals are organized around a topic. - ConservativeCat

I discovered blog carnivals in a post by Steve Pavlina on how to build traffic to your blog (and ultimately earn more money). Of course, I immediately envisioned a Web site to co-ordinate the carnivals, but it looks like these guys have it covered.

So - should Lookmarks hold a "great links" carnival? Or, HelpShare host an "Experts making money" carnival?

I'm paying attention to Alex Barnet...

Because he is looking out for my data. I attended Alex's session on "attention" at MindCamp. I will send you off to his blog to read more about the concept of attention. It is a meme I've been keeping on the radar, and I think is about to become important. I doubt that Web sites will interoperate to exchange attention data. However, I do sense that the users of social applications will begin to want their data back.

As Alex hit on, my tags and preferences make up my online identity. Not to mention a large accumulation of effort. Applying an OPML file as a filter on sites like Findory and Megite amounts to portable personalization. Hearing Alex talk to Dave Winer, I had a vision for a new tag/OPML service, which I will elaborate on soon.

Tags

According to Technorati:

Nearly half (47%) of all blog posts have an author-generated category or set of tags associated with the post.

This is impressive to me. Tags are the defacto interop organization mechanism of the Web. Of course, Blogger doesn't implement them - so I can tag this post.

Mologo - The Geographic Web is here!

Mologo: "Share your location in real-time

Mologogo is a free service that will track a friend's GPS-enabled cell phone from another phone or on the web."

Wow, this looks great. You can view a map on the phone, and also track the phone remotely on the web. All for $99.

Decompressing from Seattle MindCamp 2.0

I am going to convert these raw notes into Lookmarks and a better blog post later. For now, I just want to get my notes online.

1. LinkMapping - SEO technique

2. Mint - Good blog stats

3. Web Measurement Hacks - Good book recommended by Larry Sivitz of SearchWrite

4. Your credit/debit card history - as recorded by your bank, quicken, or MS Money would be an excellent source of restaurant recommendation data.

5. BillMonk - young guys here on Capital Hill building a successful site using Ruby and a datacenter in their closet. My takeaway: they are solving the marketing problem by treating their users right.

5a. I've travelled to several Islamic countries, but I didn't realize that philosophically, muslims are opposed to charging or paying interest.

6. Alexander Castro, the founder of Pluggd slammed angel investor groups such as the Alliance of Angels, and the Zeno society for giving entrepeneurs the run around, and not coming through with investment money.

7. After talking to a one-time competitor of ours from back in 2000, I realized that questions are a commodity much like search queries. This is food for thought as I design a question collector for HelpShare.

8. Sounds like the book the "Tipping Point" may be interesting. From what I overheard, I may be a "Maven".

9. When asked "When you are shopping for a new gadget, how do you select the best one?" one guy answered - "I just choose a site with a good return policy, use my credit card and buy all the gadgets that I am considering. I return all but the best one."

10. What if email (or a universal editor) was your interface to the web, and Web appications collected data from your central store, rather than the other way round? See also CleverSafe.org.

11. A health specific search engine - Healia is launching soon.

More later.

One Red Paper Clip

The next internet-enabled success story. This guy is blogging his progress trading up from one red paper clip. Currently he's traded up to a recording contract.

OneRedPaperClip.blogspot.com

I finally played XBOX 360 tonight

Oh yeah, and T.A. and I were guests on the The Chris Pirillo Show. It was Webcast live earlier this evening, and should be available for download via the site and as a podcast from iTunes in the next week or so. We talked about how HelpShare is a smarter way to get answers. Specifically, I put out a call for feedback on the HelpShare API.

It was also fun to see Pirillo world Headquarters including:

* A shockingly complete set of darth vader action figures.
* Some very high fiber o's
* A stack of tantalizingly unopened XBOX 360s.

Visual Studio VSCache Problem

I have been fighting this issue off an on for a couple of days. One of my web projects suddenly stopped loading. Visual Studio would only give me "Unable to get the project file from the web server." I found the answer this morning - delete the contents of the VSCache directory - from Shane in Milton Keynes.

SitePoint Forums - View Single Post - Unable to get the project file from the Web server.