But did you know that Portland also combines that love of soccer and love of blogging to be the home of the largest English-language World Cup soccer blog?
Now everyone knows that people in the Portland metropolitan area love the soccer. You know, the whole futbol thing? Timbers Army and whatnot? And we all know that the greater Portland area is big into the whole blogging thing.
Now we all know I’m a big fan of the niche sites. Why? Because there are any number of sites out there that focus on being everything to everyone—which makes them mean basically nothing to no one. It’s the focused sites—those sites with which we can personally identify—that hold a great deal of promise.
And nowhere do I see people in the Portland area get more niche-y than food. I mean, we like food.
I’ve seen him jump to the aid of many a desperate WordPress user. But tonight was the first time I had to call on him for a little WordPress help. Quite frankly, I don’t know what I’d be doing right now if he hadn’t. I certainly wouldn’t be writing this post. Read More
Fieldrunners has been nominated for the Best Tower Defense Game. Air Sharing has been nominated for Best File Utility App. And Stanza has been nominated for Best eBook Reader. Even better news? Your vote could help them win.
And now, someone else is recognizing that brilliance. Fieldrunners has been nominated for the Best Tower Defense Game. Air Sharing has been nominated for Best File Utility App. And Stanza has been nominated for Best eBook Reader. Even better news? Your vote could help them win. Read More
I think it’s important for startup types to hear the report, but I think it’s even more important for Greenlight Greater Portland to know that we’re listening and paying attention.
For someone who covers startups, it’s incredibly interesting to keep tabs on an economic development body—especially one that’s a startup itself—like Greenlight Greater Portland.
The social Web could provide a number of valuable interactions. Aaron Hockley was smart enough to realize this. And now he’s looking to help his photographer peers with Social Photo Talk.
You likely spend a ton of time interacting on the social Web. Using Twitter. Updating Facebook. Uploading to Flickr. Posting code to Github. Sharing presentations on Slideshare. Writing blog posts. Leaving content here and there that inspires others to comment and respond.
But, unfortunately, the vast majority of people don’t engage in—or even understand—this type of behavior.
That’s a shame. Because for many folks, the social Web could provide a number of valuable interactions. Aaron Hockley was smart enough to realize this. And now he’s looking to help his photographer peers with Social Photo Talk. Read More
I’ve been a huge fan of Yay!Monday, an inspirational collection of cool design and thought-provoking imagery that refreshes—you guessed it—every Monday. Um, yay!
But, I must admit, it left me longing for Monday on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday… well, you get the idea.
Now, the curator of Yay!Monday, Vancouver’s Chris Kalani, has launched a new site to solve that problem. Introducing Yay!Everyday.
Yay!Everyday is curated by a community of users, ensuring that there’s always something new and interesting to see. And it’s got a fresh and eclectic feel that reminds me of other amazing inspirational design sites like k10k, surfstation, and Design is Kinky. But unlike those sites, Yay!Everyday is right here in our own backyard.
It’s always great to see another combination of creativity, design, and technology in the Silicon Forest. But most of all, I’m just thrilled I don’t have to wait until Monday to get my Yay! on.
If you’re lucky enough to secure an invite code, you’ll soon be submitting creative content that is sure to inspire your peers and fans. Otherwise, spend some time flipping through the content collected by the current participants.
Even the iPhone critics have to admit that there may something to the iPhone app thing. I mean, if the results Vancouver-based Avatron Software is producing are any indication.
Last Monday at 5 PM Pacific time, Avatron released Air Sharing, a temporarily free iPhone app that lets you treat your iPhone as a wireless hard drive. Not earth shattering news, I grant you.
But fast forward to today. And as of this writing—a few minutes shy of one week—they’re approaching nearly three-quarters of a million downloads.
That’s right more than 700,000 little versions of the Avatron apps are walking around on iPhones.
“It’s just amazing,” said Dave Howell, CEO of Avatron. “It’s way beyond what we thought would happen.”
And the reviews are looking quite positive, too. Even donpdonp might be happy with this little app, considering:
Best app in the app store. It’s incredibly useful and works with my Ubuntu desktop!… This is seriously the best app around. Worked out [of] the box, almost zero config.
Using Bonjour and the standard WebDAV interface, Air Sharing allows iPhone and iPod Touch users to mount the devices as a wireless drive on any Mac, Windows, or Linux computer; drag and drop files between the device and computers, and view documents in many common formats.
Basically, it’s like working with any other drive. Wirelessly.
But there are also some other interesting features that could extend the use of the Air Sharing app. What are those features? Well, Dave will be my guest on the next Silicon Florist podcast, so tune in to find out.
Interested in trying Air Sharing? Well, it’s free to try for one more week. After that the price will go up to $6.99.
[Full disclosure: Iterasi is a client of mine. I was aware of this feature under development, but I was not involved in this release. Quite frankly, it took me by surprise. But it makes sense that they’re pushing it while they’re down at the TechCrunch 50.]
Back when I discovered social bookmarking, the way I used the Web changed.
Okay. That may be a little hyperbolic, but there’s a lot of truth to that.
With social bookmarking, I was able to save site locations, tag them in a meaningful way, and get to them from any browser with an Internet connection.
It may not seem like a big deal now. But back then? It was “You mean my bookmarks aren’t beholden to this one browser on this one machine? Oh my. Very cool.”
But my bookmarks always suffered from a problem that I couldn’t solve with just a link.
And that was? Well, sometimes the page just changed. The story or the thing I thought was important or—worst of all—the cool design that I wanted to rip-off save for inspiration.
Screenshots were a workaround. But they were never really what I wanted.
What I wanted was to save the page.
Fast forward to today.
I’m sitting on a ton of bookmarks. I use social bookmarking sites like ma.gnolia and del.icio.us every day, if not several times a day. They have become so much a part of the way that I use the Web—and the way that I share and glean information from others—that social bookmarking would be an incredibly hard habit to break.
But I still worry about losing the page I actually wanted.
Well, now, that problem is solved thanks to still just barely Vancouver-based and ever-so-close to being Portland-based Iterasi and their new “import bookmarks” feature:
This feature imports bookmarks from Firefox, Internet Explorer, del.icio.us and/or from any app that exports to the standard bookmark export format. So you tell it where your bookmarks are, we import them and make permanent copies of the pages the bookmarks point to. No more lost articles. No more link rot. No more Error 404s. But we don’t just import them. Import Bookmarks is built on top of the iterasi Scheduler – released last month – so one-by-one you can choose to archive each bookmark once, every day, week or month, or not a all.
Now, granted, that’s not going to do much for the links that have already aged. But from now on? I can be sure that I’ll have exactly the page I wanted to save.
Saving bookmarked pages in Iterasi is great, but not using Iterasi is even better
As excited as I am about this feature to extend the use of Iterasi, there’s one thing I’m even more excited about: not having to use Iterasi.
Huh? Stick with me here.
I’ve developed a workflow for saving links and—as chagrin as I am to admit it—Iterasi isn’t part of that workflow.
It’s an afterthought. A habit I’m trying to force.
But with this feature? That problem is solved, too.
How?
Now that Iterasi can import bookmarks, I can work in my preferred social bookmarking tool and still have Iterasi saving the pages for me.
I can fly around willy nilly tagging things in del.icio.us or saving them to the Silicon Florist group on ma.gnolia. All the while, knowing that I can bring those over to Iterasi to make an archived copy.
And that’s pretty cool.
I can work where I’m comfortable working without losing the ability to save things I really want to save. And that makes this new import bookmarks feature very powerful indeed.
The feature, however, does come with a caveat:
If you have lots of bookmarks, it is best to schedule it to run when you are away from your computer. Think about it; we are feeding dozens and dozens of bookmarks down to the browser who is one-at-a-time loading, notarizing, and shipping each up to your account. In other words, we are torturing the poor browser. As you might expect, the browser can lock up under this kind of load. We find this situation to be unavoidable.
For more information and a short video on the new feature, see the Iterasi blog. Want to test drive it yourself? Download the latest version of Iterasi and then click on the “leaves” to access the feature.
