Portland startups, open source, and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
Here you are. Reading stuff on the web. And listening to stuff on the Web. It’s like a thing. A thing people do. But it took a while to make it possible. And to make it discoverable. And consumable. And very few individuals have been thinking about this issue—this whole Web content thing—longer than Dave Winer. Read More
Sometimes, I get so into keeping with all the awesome Portland startup news that I forget some folks are new around here.
Yes, like you, gentle reader. Welcome! It’s nice to have you here. I hope you can stay awhile. And please let me know if there is anything I can do to make your visit a better one.
So for all of the new folks—and for all of you who have been around here for awhile—I thought I’d do a little spring cleaning. And let you know all the ways that you can keep up with what’s happening here on Silicon Florist and in the Silicon Forest. Read More
[HTML2]Now, you may not realize this, but during my day job I’m constantly sifting through media reports. Gargantuan PDFs or documents that contain a series of clipped links and snippets about specific clients or subjects. The reports are unwieldy at best. And I can only imagine what kind of workload this effort creates for the agencies that compile them for me—and any number of other clients—on a daily basis.
Long story short, the whole “tracking media coverage” thing—whether for PR firms or otherwise—could use some help. And don’t even get me started on the whole social media angle.
But now, there may be hope. You see, Portland-based Iterasi might have an answer with their latest effort. Introducing PositivePress from Iterasi. Read More
Want to share the ways you consolidate different data streams to make your life better? Interested in learning more about RSS wizardry? Are your Yahoo! Pipes clogged?
Well, you’ll be glad to hear that there’s a new (or at least, resurrected) user group in Portland that will allow you to compare notes with other plumbers of your ilk: Portland Data Plumbing User Group.
Dawn Foster writes:
I’ve decided to resurrect the Portland Data Plumbing Group to give us a time and place to talk about RSS feed hacking, Yahoo Pipes, Dapper, and other related technologies.
I know! What a way to start 2009. It sounds interesting, doesn’t it?
Well, what are you waiting for? A dangling preposition? (Sorry. Grammar humor.)
Get involved by joining the Portland Data Plumbing User Group discussion and RSVP for the first event, Tuesday, January 13.
[Editor: Full disclosure, Iterasi is a client of mine, but I was not involved in this announcement.]
http://www.iterasi.net/user/siliconflorist?format=widgetN1Vancouver-based Iterasi, the service that allows you to create your own personal Wayback Machine, took a huge step forward in making its network of users more social, today, when they announced three major additions to their offering: public pages, RSS feeds, and widgets.
Josh Lowensohn at Webware broke the news:
Web page archiving tool Iterasi is getting a small but important update Tuesday morning. Users can now share their stream of archived pages with others as an RSS feed, letting anyone view their saved items either directly in their browser or in a feed-capturing tool like Google Reader or desktop e-mail clients.
In my opinion, these seemingly innocuous changes actually mark a decided change in Iterasi’s stance. With these features, Iterasi moves from being an interesting personal service toward becoming a valuable social service. And by embracing features that allow me to distribute my saved pages to a much, much wider audience, they gain the benefit of more people encountering their service.
I have found a great deal of value in being able to save pages for myself. But now that I have the option of sharing pages with folks? It opens a whole new realm of use for me. Like a more typical social bookmarking service.
Fringe benefits abound. With RSS feeds and widgets, Iterasi just increased its exposure exponentially. I’ve added the widget to this post and I’ll likely add it to the blog (once the Mac version is out and I can use the service regularly.) And, I’m adding the RSS feed to my lifestreaming services, like FriendFeed and Strands.
What’s more, by launching public pages, Iterasi has the potential to rapidly increase its online footprint for search engines and the like—like any other public-facing social network service.
Now, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. As with any new feature on a BETA product, there are some rough spots and some nice-to-haves that didn’t make the cut. There are some areas over which I would like to have control, like skinning the widget and dealing with the publishing function.
But as I’ve mentioned, I see this release as less about “features” and more about “vision.” It’s clear to me that Iterasi is taking a much more social stance. And that’s a very good thing.
To test drive the product, visit Iterasi. To see the public page in action or to get the widget code, please visit the Silicon Florist page on Iterasi.