Category: Links

Calley Nye writes “Vidoop, a startup that replaces usernames and passwords with image grids, partnered with AOL to provide its OpenID users with an extra layer of security. This delivers Vidoop a potential user base of about 100 million users.”

Via TannerVision “Remember the Rohrshach tests, where a psychiatrist shows a patient an inkblot and asks them to say the first thing that comes to their mind? I think the Failwhale could be like that. Let’s try it. Look at the picture below and make a note of your initial reaction. Then scroll to the bottom and I’ll analyze your reaction to diagnose you.”

From the Django site “We’ll be holding a Django development sprint at Vidoop in Portland, Oregon on August 22, 2008 from 9am to 6pm. This sprint will be focused on cleaning up rc1 and getting either an rc2 out or a 1.0 final. More details will be posted here and announced on django-dev as we get closer to the time of the sprint.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes “If you’re looking to engage in online conversations with a wide variety of people in different circumstances, it’s important to recognize that the playing field is not level. Though blogging software lowered the technical barriers to participation, there remain substantial political and cultural issues that complicate adoption of these kinds of technologies by people with particular life experiences.”

Via the Concrete5 blog “And it is strongly encouraged that you upgrade. Note: When you upgrade, please make sure to follow the instructions here. Read on to learn more about what’s changed in this version.”

Peat Bakke writes “Holy crap. Every week there’s a miniature gold rush when a new microblogging site is released. Twitter proved the market, and the concept is so simple that anyone with an elementary web development education can put up their own site. And, apparently they are.”

Nate Westheimer writes “I’d like to pose a challenge to all entrepreneurs or established companies who are looking to increase their distribution (and business) in the digital media world. I’m friendly advising someone/company that has legal access to over 750,000 US Internet users and we are trying to come up with new ways to monetize the audience.”

Portland’s toonlet is on track to crack the 10,000 comic barrier (not including replies). Who will post the 10,000th strip? Maybe you.

Via the ENTP blog “The excellent Evan Henshaw-Plath, a longtime friend and cabooser, has joined ENTP as our latest Ruby and Rails coder. Evan worked at famed early rails adopters Odeo, and most recently was instrumental in the Yahoo BrickHouse’s Fire Eagle geo platform.”

From the Beer and Blog… err blog “Today is iPhone Friday and most people will be enamored with their new shiny phones or making statements about how they don’t want a stupid iPhone anyway *ahem* @harrisja. Since we don’t plan to steal the iPhone’s thunder, we’re going to do today what Beer and Blog started out doing—bloggers helping bloggers over beers! “

Nate Angell (@xolotl) was recently a guest on Cami Kaos’ (@camikaos) and Doctor Normal’s (@drnormal) Strange Love (Tech edition) podcast. Say Cami “Join us as we chat with Nate Angell Better known as @xolotl. Later on we’re joined by a barely wakeful @steveswrong. I would tell you more but I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise… Okay, just one little thing: While Dr. Normal edited and listened through this episode I had to go downstairs (twice) to tell him to quiet down because he was laughing so loudly….”

Matt King writes “Do you live in Portland? Do you ride the bus? Need to know when the next bus is going to arrive at your stop? Have an iPhone? Then I have an app for YOU!”

From the COWPU blog “A big COWPU ‘thanks!!’ to Ryan Stevens for his presentation about Cloud Computing at the last meeting. If you missed the meeting, or want to refresh your memory, Ryan was kind enough to upload his slides here.”

Kevin Tate writes “Over the past few months, we’ve had the pleasure of working with SightSpeed, a great team whose Video Chat service has recently been awarded a CODiE for ‘Best Communication Solution’ and selected to power Dell’s Video Chat.”

From the ExpressionEngine blog “Its time for a little fun with video! We’re adding a new video section to the ExpressionEngine Showcase. If you use ExpressionEngine in your business, organization or for personal use, we want to hear why, and we want to see your face and hear your voice when you tell us! Smile big, take a deep breath, and in 2 minutes or less, tell us why you choose ExpressionEngine. We’ll add your video and a link back to your website.”

From the JanRain blog “Although the number of sites accepting OpenID is still a small fraction of the web, the trend here is obvious.”

From the Legion of Tech blog “Mark founded and manages the Ubuntu Foundation, which aims to produce a high quality desktop and server operating system that is freely available all over the world.”

The first in a series of conversations with the Portland creative community to help each other understand how we can be more inclusive, collaborative and effective. We have been inspired by Portland’s creative technology community (Legion of Tech and Silicon Florist to name a few) to help facilitate an environment where we share ideas and create a place that draws the best talent and the best clients to Portland to get the best creative work possible.

Amber Case writes “Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo. Our first episode will discuss the concepts of Supermodernism, Non-Space and Cyborg Anthropology.”

Via the Clicky blog “Sorry everyone, our original July Insanity post was just too complicated and confusing, so we’re making it much simpler. We want you to help us promote Clicky, and in exchange, we’re giving away 100 free 1 year premium accounts, and also 50% affiliate commissions for the entire month of July.”

Aaron Hockley writes “I’m ready to move to Identi.ca. The big thing missing for me is… you. A lot of the PDX scene has joined (and added me… if you haven’t, I’m aaron on Identi.ca) but it seems folks are still posting mainly on Twitter. Join me in making the move.” [Editor: And I’m over there, too, as turoczy.]

Dawn Foster writes “It looks like a few of us are starting to play with Identi.ca. It’s just like Twitter, but without the community and without any real tools to support it 🙂 Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to track @replies. I’ve put together a quick Yahoo pipe that will catch at least some of your replies. This is highly experimental (pre-alpha stage maybe). Welcome to the Identi.ca Reply Sniffer Pipe.”

Where will Charlene Li be during her last days with Forrester? Right here in Portland at the Internet Strategy Forum Summit. Charlene writes “My last day with Forrester will be July 18th, a day that I look forward to with anticipation for the adventures that lay ahead, but also with sadness for the colleagues that I’ll leave behind. I’ll leave my good-byes until then, but please know that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the conversation that we’ve had on this blog over the past almost-four years.”

From the Office Snapshots blog “Hidden behind an unassuming green door in Portland, Oregon is Vidoop’s office: a nice, open, well-lit office space. Awesomely, the office also contains two of my favorite workplace features: red brick walls and plenty of food. Now if only they had a dog, they’d deserve all five stars.”

Beer and Blog takes the 4th off. “Please take this 4th of July to spend with your friends and family. You can still enjoy beer and maybe even blog, but you should def watch something blow up. It’s the American way.”

Dawn Foster is a consummate note-taker and queen of the wrap-up. Here’s her take on Gary Vaynerchuk’s talk on July 1 at W+K, “Tonight is the first in what will hopefully be a series of guest speakers for Legion of Talk, a Legion of Tech. event. Gary V. is in town for his book tour at Powells, and we were lucky enough to snag him to talk to us about how he has used social media to grow his family wine business.”

From the Cartosoft blog “We are happy to announce that mapdango can now be integrated with iGoogle and other Google web pages as a Google Gadget.”

Via Needmore Notes “OregonBusiness magazine features Gone Raw in their July cover story: 10 Coolest Tech Startups You’ve Never Heard Of. Take a look and Meet some of the coolest startups running around Silicon Forest today. You’ll find us there, along with a handy drink-finding site (so useful in these hot, hot days in Portland), among others.”

From the Portland Mercury “Hallelujah, and whoop-dee-doo! The Mercury has a brand new sexified website, with all sorts of new toys for YOU to enjoy! Surf around and check out these great new features…”

Carolynn Duncan writes “Did I mention how much I like Portland? Well, maybe it’s partly because things are hopping in the startup community, and I had the opportunity to meet with some great people this week, including…”

Chris Anderson writes “I’ve been working (along with some friends from the CouchDB-PDX group) to enhance CouchDB with the ability to run functions at query time, and return arbitrary JSON or text. You could use this to put a little server smarts into an otherwise mostly client-based application…. Everything is extremely beta right now (I just finished writing code 5 minutes ago) and the API’s could change a little as we write some applications using the development framework Greg’s cooking up.”

It’s looking like this experiment has run its course. Glad I tried it, but it’s clearly not providing much in the way of that amorphous “value.” Please don’t post any additional gigs. I’ll remove it once this gig times out.

Betsy Richter writes “But if I need to find a WiFi node that also has pie? Is open 24 hours? Located near the place I’m going to be tonight? Or has a way to send my search via text message? I’m going to be using WiFiPDX from now on.”

From the hypocritical blog (my personal blog) “There’s only one problem: Twitter track has been broken for quite some time. And it’s showing absolutely no sign of being repaired anytime soon. But, I’ve come up with a workaround that’s helping me compensate for the lack of track. So I thought I’d share the hack. (I’m a poet.)”

Via the SplashCast blog “SplashCast currently owns the top 12 of 20 most recently popular music applications on MySpace. Other than the Coldplay and LilWayne apps, SplashCast apps have more installs than any other artist-specific apps in the entire MySpace platform.”

Mike Rogoway writes “The Personal Telco Project, perhaps reinvigorated by the collapse of Portland’s citywide Wi-Fi project, is more active than I’ve seen it in months at breaking out new wireless initiatives.”

Scott Kveton pointed out the fake Twitter status blog. If you’re a Twitter user, you’ll get the joke. Unfortunately.

Mugasha, a product of the recent Portland Startup Weekend, continues to make strides. I just noticed that they have officially launched their blog.

Via the MetroSEEQ blog “After nearly 3 weeks of launching metroseeq, I’ve received significant input on site usability. Therefore, I’ve decided to redesign with the objective to help users to find nearby businesses that have promotions quickly. This came as a natural evolution of the site as it was first designed to show off the pageless progressive search algorithm, but more people seems to be more interested in finding deals so thats’ what I’ll deliver and improve upon.”

Kyle Meyer writes “You have so much going for you; you upload my files after every compulsive save, automatically. You organize my mess of websites into a visual metaphor that works impeccably well. You even house all the documentation I could ever need—right in that one gorgeous app. You’re even from my hometown of Portland, Oregon! I live right down the street from you, in fact. And yet, there’s a fundamental flaw that keeps me from purchasing and using Coda. I need Ctrl+Shift+W, Mr Panic. I want to love you, but I need your help.”

Chris Messina of Vidoop shares his thoughts on BarCamp, coworking, DiSo and open source in this presentation from Reboot 10.

From Harvard Business “Everyone seems to want an answer to the question ‘When will Web 2.0 startups start making money?’ The implication is that unless we can answer the question, the ‘bubble’ of Web 2.0 will burst and all of us who believe in this stuff will be revealed as fantasists. The fact is, it’s incredibly hard to make money as a Web 2.0 startup aimed at consumers.”

From Fast Company Buzz “And since Fast Company Buzz is all about finding out whose doing what and what’s working, I talked with the CEOs of two companies that are riding the bubble all the way to the bank. Michael Berkley CEO of SplashCast Media, a company that distributes branded content channels in social networks, explained how his company creates effective and profitable advertising on Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook. Mike said, ‘If you want to advertise to the social media crowd you need to make sure you do a couple of things…'”

Jason Harris writes “Techmeme is, by and large, a fantastic way to stay up on the present buzz occurring in the tech blogosphere. However, I’m confused at how the system works so I’m hoping to shed some light on the subject with this post and the conversation that ensues. In talking to other blogging friends, I’m not the only one who is curious about this subject.”

Will writes “Last Wednesday, we took Lighthouse offline to deploy some bug fixes and give it some serious feature love. Our original intention was to blog about the new features the next morning so that users would wake up to something pretty cool, but we got a little sidetracked tweaking some last minute details. Now we owe our users a blog post, so without further ado…”

Via the Clicky blog “When we introduced the new line graphs, one key feature of Clicky was removed because it was quite challenging to implement in this new flash software, and we didn’t want major differences between the two different views. Also, I was feeling lazy.”