| Services | About BN | Clients | Projects | Widgets | Blog | Contact BN |

225 - links for 2006-05-01




224 - Learning Ruby

If I found out one thing at MindCamp this weekend, it was the sheer power and elegance of Ruby and Ruby on Rails.  The vast amount of functioanlity that is possible with such minimal coding absolutely blew my mind.

I’d been hearing about it peripherally for 6-9 months or so due to the whole Web 2.0 explosion. About 5 months ago I was at a PHP meetup which just happens to share its space with the Seattle Ruby Brigade.  One guy came over and many feathers were ruffled.  I was even more intrigued.  Since then I’d heard more and more about its power.  Now, this weekend, I saw some .rb source code for several projects and had to rub my jaw after picking it up off the ground.

So, what’s next?  Learning it of course!  I already have MySQL and Apache installed on my Powerbook (the new builds, custom buiilt - not the preinstalled ones).  I also have PHP built, but that doesn’t matter much for this learning exercise.

One of the first steps I go through when learning something new is lining up my resources.  In about 30 minutes, you’ll see today’s del.icio.us bookmarks of mine get posted to my blog by del.icio.us’ auto poster.  I have source code locations, download points, mailing lists, links, user groups, documentation, and more.

I’ll post up more entries as I go through the next steps of picking a project, designing it, coding it, etc. I’ll let you know what I like about Ruby, what is hard, what is easy.


223 - links for 2006-04-30




222 - links for 2006-04-29




221 - MindCamp 2.0 Preperation, or My Current Topics of Interest

I’ve been just a bit under the weather lately and haven’t had nearly as much time to prepare for MindCamp 2.0 as I’d hoped.  Heck, at this point, I’m just glad I feel even keeled enough to be able to make it.

So, while I have a few minutes of down time between bug fixes, I wanted to throw up a list of topics that interest me.  I may not have time to repost on the session ideas page, but I’ll try to.  At the very least this is my own mental list.

Even if you don’t have time to come, or geographically can’t, I suggest taking a bit of time to list out your own topics of interest.  Doing so here has got me thinking about all of them in a much deeper manner.

1) Auto tagging mechanisms.  Riya has done a great job at jump starting one side of this equation, but there is much more to go.  For example -  using the GPS EXIF data some cameras can embed to help auto tag photos with location data.
2) Micro tagging.  There might be a better (or existing phrase) that explains this.  Basically, it’s a way to tag tags such that they can express even more information.  For example, If I’m rating a restaurant on JudysBook, I could tag it as accessible, but then tag that tag with a rating that shows how accessible it is.  The concept isn’t limited to rating levels…
3) Content sharing and its interesting applications.  What is there on the spectrum between photos and videos that makes content interesting?
4) Social content recommendations based upon my own dataset.  For example, an app or site that takes as input my bookmarks, tagged data, OPML files, etc and kicks out recommendations to sites, media, content, etc that match profiles of other people with similar datasets.
5) Alternative data retrieval methods.  For example, I use zaptxt.com to SMS my phone when RSS feeds are updated.  I get some great deals off of Craigslist by doing this.  I know when there’s a new MacZot, I know what the new Woot! is, etc…  I have a filter that sends me information when and where I need it.  Now if I could only have a wifi enabled media player that auto updated itself with new podcasts… J
6) Taking smart playlists to the next level by allowing for smart formats.  For example, I’d love to create a “radio channel” in say iTunes that allowed me to specify that it would play a track from among my news podcasts on the 15, had say a mashup every 45 minutes, played a track from the Onion after every news cast, etc…  It’s smart playlists taken to the next level.  I think it’s possible using Mac OS X’s Automator, but I just need to create a few more iTunes actions first.  This is slowly climbing its way to the top of my must tackle list.
7) Data cleansing.  I recently used EatMyBrainz and ArtFetch for the Mac to clean up my library of horribly hacked mp3 files.  A lot of them were ripped by some of the first mp3 rippers created.  Most had no artwork, a lot were missing album, track and/or artist information.  Now, with very little interaction, almost my entire library is in a proper format with artwork.  I no longer have to try to remember exactly who sings the song “track 5″.

I guess they all in a way lead into the encompassing ideas of information storage, collaboration, and retrieval. How can I make my data more accessible to other people and myself without adding much more (if any) effort in facilitating that on any one person.  How do I automate my life and make things easier?

» » » » » » »

220 - links for 2006-04-27




219 - links for 2006-04-26




218 - Is YOUR Advertising Campaign Limited?

Are you relying on pay per click search advertising to get you to the next level?  If so, you’ll fail compared to the new round of forward thinkers.  Where are your customers?  What do they see every day?  Where do they pass?  What catpive areas can you grab eyeballs where others are not?

Last year, PokerFaceBook.com got lots of press (some bad) for their incredibly novel idea of hanging ad space signs off of Seattle homeless people’s own hand drawn signs.

Now, Hotels.nl is advertising on sheep.  Yes, ewe heard me right - sheep.  They have logo adorned blankets worn by herds along roadsides.

These two examples are but a few of the recent crop of innovative thinking in advertising.  These companies figured out places their clients would see ads and put them there.  They didn’t stay within the comfortable confies of traditional advertising.

Do you?

» » » »

217 - links for 2006-04-22




216 - links for 2006-04-16