Chuggnutt!

Category: Online

  • Unfortunate ad placement on Bend.com…

    Is it just me, or does this particular ad placement on the Bend.com article pictured below seem really… I don’t know, juvenile? Not to mention, wrong.

    Thumbnail of Bend.com's unfortunate ad placement
    Click for full size

    It just hasn’t been the same since Barney left.

  • Ten rules for web startups

    Evan Williams has posted Ten Rules for Web Startups that’s sure to generate a lot of linkage and conversation. (He’s the guy that created Blogger.) Very good stuff. And laced with irony; like so:

    Get a good, non-generic name. Easier said than done, granted. But the most common mistake in naming is trying to be too descriptive, which leads to lots of hard-to-distinguish names. How many blogging companies have “blog” in their name, RSS companies “feed,” or podcasting companies “pod” or “cast”? Rarely are they the ones that stand out.

    Uhmmm… Blogger comes to mind. :)

    Combine this list with the TechCrunch wishlist that I posted about previously and things could start to get interesting.

  • The TechCrunch wishlist

    TechCrunch lists some companies they’d like to see move into the online space, kind of a wishlist of Web 2.0 technologies. The list is making the rounds on various tech blogs like it’s the Second Coming (which I can’t figure out, it’s not that revolutionary a list), and while overall it’s a decent read, I do have one point of contention:

    2. Blog/website Email Lists

    People can visit my site, and get the content via RSS, but I know of no quality service to allow people to subscribe to my site via email.

    …I want people to have the option of getting an email every post, every day, or every week.

    I also want to know that I and I alone control these email addresses so that they will not under any circumstances be misused. If I change services, I want to have an easy export feature to take these with me (OPML would be nice).

    I also want access to real time stats. The number of emails, type of subscription, how often they are opened and what things are being clicked on.

    And users need a very easy way to stop the emails.

    I’m willing to pay for this. Probably as much as $20 per month. A free version should be offered too that’s add supported and maybe doesn’t have the analytics.

    I read this and I thought, “Uh, hello? The 1990s called, and wants its listserv back.”

    Seriously, why the hell would anyone want to receive website updates via email these days? That just seems so backward-thinking.

    On the other hand, there’s a couple of the other items that I like: Portable reputations, and tailored local offers via RSS.

    And Richard MacManus follows up with a similar post, and in particular I like his first idea: more Web 2.0 products for eBooks. I’m not sure specifically what he has in mind for this, but I have some ideas. None that I’m gonna share here, though. :)

  • Dancing Transformer goodness

    I had to link to this video just because it’s so cool. (“Cool” in a geeky way.) Not because of the dancing part, but just the transforming effects are so good that if I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was for real. If ever there’s a live action Transformers movie, I’d hope it’s this good.

    Via Gadgetopia.

  • BendSearch

    Check this out: BendSearch.com. Alpine, the company I used to work for, has finally resurrected it and updated it. Good for them.

    I was responsible for a lot of the work that went into that site back in the day (this would be in 2000-2001). Oh, I’m not bragging; that was, of course, early in my career as a PHP developer, so there was a lot of ugly, bad code floating around in there, courtesy of yours truly.

    Hopefully they’ll be able to get somebody to give it the attention it deserves; it’s looking a little sparse right now but I rather like what I’m seeing.

  • Ning

    By now the geeky part of the blogosphere and, er, web-o-sphere has been rocked by the announcement of Ning two days ago. Check it out. Their one-line description reads “Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for building and using social applications.”

    What this means is they’re hosting a service/platform that allows people to build their own social software applications… things like online voting/polls, dating services, bookmarks, review sites. In theory the level of complexity in creating these ranges from point-and-click Clone-N-Theme all the way up to Advanced PHP Developer.

    Yup, PHP. It looks like they’re opening the doors to the system and letting you code the apps directly. “Uh-oh,” I thought. “I hope they have PHP sandboxed.” And sure enough, it says in the FAQ that they do. Sounds iffy to me (let’s just say I’m glad I’m not responsible for running this service!), though I’ll give them points for innovation and guts here.

    Looks like they offer up an API for their developer environment, all running under PHP 5. And from what I’ve been seeing, they’ve assembled a team of some of the top PHP people out there to put this together, so that’s impressive.

    It’s all very Web 2.0, especially with tags (and the annoying/clever convention of showing the relative popularity of various tags with different font sizes). I don’t know, it looks interesting, and it’ll be hot for awhile, but I gotta wonder just how valuable it is to have hundreds of crappy variations of “Which is cuter,” most of which were created as throwaway examples and abandoned by idly curious people (like me)…

  • Trump/Bend on Google

    It seems I am the number one search on Google for “Donald Trump Bend Oregon“. That’s awesome. I think I should win something :).

    Even more amusing is reading the comments I got on that post, with the variations on the rumor people have heard.

    How about this? Start a weblog called BendRumors.com (the domain is available! Grab it up quick!) and run just this sort of thing… (Actually, Shannon’s boy suggested something similar, doing “BendTabloid.com.” That one’s available, too.)

  • Online Bend maps

    Lately I’ve been playing around a bit with Google Earth, and correspondingly Google Maps, and it’s amazing the kinds of things you can do with it. Unfortunately, their source data for Central Oregon is less than impressive; try to zoom in too tightly and you just get pixelated blobs.

    Well, the city of Bend website has put their GIS mapping system online, you can get to it here, and it’s super-detailed (for Bend only) and largely fills that niche that’s missing from Google’s maps. It even has some of the same functionality with their layers option. The only drawback is that it only runs in Internet Explorer 5.5 or greater (and, I’m assuming, Windows).

    Still, it’s pretty sweet. I’m already thinking about how to use this data somewhere…

  • MySpace rant

    I’ve been seeing lots of referrer hits from MySpace on my site lately, so I thought it was apropos to point to this article on Kuro5hin: MySpace: A Place for Dolts. It’s just too funny not to, and it’s full of great soundbites.

    You see, when you sign up for MySpace, you instantly have your first friend. You’re immediately best buddies with the most popular person on MySpace: Tom. Now, to understand the stupidity of this, you have to understand that this is a social networking mechanism; if I’m friends with John and John is friends with Sally, then Sally is syllogistically my friend, and if I visit her profile it will tell me just that: “Sally is in your extended network”. But if EVERYONE is friends with Tom, then there might as well not be an extended network feature at all, and he is defeating the purpose of his time and his website. Basically what I’m saying is, Tom is a dumbshit.

    But there’s a reason why none of this matters. There’s a reason why he wins even though he programs in Cold Fusion (I have yet to meet someone who uses Cold Fusion and isn’t a complete moron), even though he has no sense of style or ergonomics, and even though he’s lazy as hell: he gets an enormous amount of money from the website. Movies, bands, dating services, clothing companies, non-profit organizations, and even the US Army advertises on MySpace.

    Ah, you gotta love cynical internet rants.

    See also Movable Type Rant, a pointer to another great Kuro5hin piece.

  • Never ending fall

    Check out this Flash animation. It’s creepy and compelling! It’s a mannequin falling through an infinite sky of spheres. Realistic. And you can drag the thing around with your mouse, too…

    Via Boing Boing.