I know I'll be going to Hell for this but the first thought in my head after I heard the former President died was the SNL sketch where Tom Brokaw went thru various scenarios of Ford's death just in case they were needed.
Glad to see Defamer was thinking on the same wave length.
ORM with DrySQL and ActiveRecord
It's been everywhere but a look at eBay's architecture.
Bruce Tate on ChangingThePresent
err on Sessions in Rails
Network once, socialize anywhere
Taste and an example of using it.
Research papers by Jon Herlocker
More papers and resources.
It's an amazing field with tons of research available but there's still plenty to do.
Some thoughts on Yahoo and social search and social search in general.
Rick Olson shows how to use the new ActiveResource in Rails.
Some new (to me) blogs: Data Mining, On Ruby and Accidental Creative
Scoble interviewed some folks at Google.
Here's a blog dedicated to understanding Google Maps and Yahoo! Local.
del.icio.us API for URL information including tags and number of booksmarks
What If There Are No Gods and no it isn't about religion in the traditional sense but about coding.
Kevin Burton on the death of the database transaction.
Dealing with user experience issues is something which needs to be done for OpenID especially as more sites want to support yet still be in control of certain things.
OpenID podcast which walks thru enabling a site for OpenID.
What's new in search technology? and Search 2.0 - What's Next?
LinuxWorld shows 10 Web 2.0 APIs that aren't just cool but actually useful including the Google Maps API, OpenID and Open Search.
Fred Stutzman's advice to anyone building a social network site: Adopt OpenID. I couldn't agree more and hopefully will be able to show it as well.
Damien Katz points to the thesis which introduces the programming language, Erlang.
Some more thinking about following friends across walled gardens and portable social networks. The combination of OpenID and Microformats could be a very powerful one.
Marc Canter show the difference between a walled garden and cross posting.
Miss Rogue gives the Rules of Engagement.
Pete Lacey's blog is a must-read for talking about SOAP and REST.
My former co-worker, Leonard, is writing a book on REST with Sam Ruby. It will be a good one because those are two of the smartest people I know.
Some design patterns for building web APIs
How about one which tells me to stop opening so many tabs until I actually post thoughts about the ones already there? I think that could be useful, don't you?
Joe gives a great example of why clients supporting ETags are important.
From that table you can see that about three out of every four requests resulted in a 304. That represents a large savings in bandwidth and computation time and is done without turning on caching explicitly.
Great advice. Too bad I didn't read it before last night's Christmas party.
John Bell looks at some new ways of creating reviews. I think the interface for the Trusted Opinion site is very interesting. From a glance, you can gather how your opinion of something fits in with your friends and their friends.
It's always nice to see the Blackhawks get some mainsteam media love. They are the forgotten team in Chicago and hopefully Denis Savard can restore their image in Chicago since it still is a hockey town somewhere underneath those Cubs, Bears, Bulls and White Sox jerseys.
It seems that Twitter has raised its profile in the last few weeks as I've seen mentions in the LA Times and other places. Plus, you have a post about it at Creating Passionate Users. That post though isn't necessarily positive as it contents that Twitter is something else which can steal your attention.
Kellan responds with a different take and after using the service for the last week or so, I find myself agreeing more with Kellan than I do Kathy. Twitter notifications just pop up in my IM client and I can take a quick glance at them without breaking changing the focus of my time. Kellan also makes the connection to Matt Webb's Glancing idea which I think is very close to the appeal of Twitter.
BTW, I'm lucasjosh on Twitter. Feel free to add me and I'll do the same.
Enomaly Consulting has put together a good overview of what OpenID is and how it works.
Scrivs takes a look at the Suicide Girls and what other sites can learn from them.
All of the things that SG does are by no means innovative, but they are executed almost to perfection. If you want something successful you don’t have to build something new, but you do have to build something great. Most Web 2.0 sites have the first part of the equation down (*cough* copycats *cough*), it is the “great” part that they seem to forget.
There's a paper out which looks at the privacy concerns of using something like the Nike+iPod kit. This kit is supposed to help you manage your workouts, instead it can be used to track you because of the RFID chip inside. The chip is unique to the kit. Crazy stuff. via Identity Woman.
Brian Dennis recently looked at web crawlers.
Some great links to papers and ideas, especially the idea of a personal crawler, something which would live on your desktop and crawl things you were interested in. Tie something like that into filtering and recommendations and you could have something very cool.
Andy Grove recently introduced a new line of thinking in regards to products and competition, the Creosote Conundrum.
The Creosote is a bush, living in the desert. It generally will be the biggest plant because it does everything in its power to gain all of the water. Moving this comparison to companies, the Creosote Conundrum happens when one project becomes successful, it will do whatever it can to have all the resources, all the attention, etc.
It's one thing for this to happen in the desert but quite another when it happens in your business. The danger of having one product that takes everything away from other products is that a mindset sets in that nothing can be done without first wondering what the impact will be on the popular product. New ideas can't occur in this environment because many times, those ideas will be so unrelated to the popular product that to wonder what the impact will be misses the point.
Miss Rogue offers hope to the hopeless romantic, have more balance between the romanticism and pragmatism.
Being a romantic keeps your head in the clouds, looking at the possibilities, wondering why everyone else can't see the same things. Being pragmatic looks at where you are and makes decision accordingly. Having one dominate the other can lead to frustration. This is advice for life and as well as the building of a new application.
So, in essence, web apps need to be both romantic and pragmatic when launching into the world. Go ahead and imagine the possibilities: all of them, without getting stuck to one particular notion - what we've learnt being part of startups is that no matter what you imagine, something else will come along and surprise you. However, understand that launching with romantic notions will leave you disappointed (and your visitors). It is best to start with something non-romantic, even boring - pragmatic. Solve something. Try something. Do it well. Invest a great deal of time into watching where it goes. Make it extensible. Create an API and see what others do with it.
Great list. I've seen three of them and will be seeing The Good German when it comes out. I love the homage to Casablanca in the poster. via kottke
Chris Messina is searching for the Noah's Ark of Syndicated Content. The problem as many are mentioning is that there are too many feeds for individuals to keep track of if they still want to have a life or at least get something done.
I couldn't agree more. I have anywhere between 120 and 150 feeds at any one time. I use our RSS reader which uses the River of News style display. I think that helps somewhat though when it's been a few days since the last check, it can feel just as overwhelming as the three-pane aggregators.
I don't have an answer to the problem though nor does anyone else that I've seen. I do think the solution lies more with the post level as opposed to the feed level. By focusing on the post, you can get to information that you need at that moment as opposed to wading through three or four posts by an author when you really just wanted the one you've seen being linked to.
Perhaps the reader could be indexing each post and start seeing which ones are added to your favorites or which ones are saved. I know a bigger problem for me than reading good posts is opening numerous tabs for later use and then I never get around to it. I don't want to shut the tabs because I might post about them or discuss them. Some server which kept those indexed and could be including in my searching or know that I was looking for something particular could be very beneficial to today's information junkie.
Bookslut gives its list. I feel ashamed I haven't read any of the books mentioned though. Ugh. via Kottke.
Ask.com launched AskCity yesterday and so far it is getting some good buzz. It's geared towards Local search and it integrates various other search engines within the IAC empire, things like CitySearch and TicketMaster. When doing a local search, it will also display reviews from CitySearch or perhaps give you a chance to buy tickets to an event being held at the location.
This integration is interesting because it gives people the chance to do something following a search. Many times I feel like I'm just being sent off to a location unknown after searching for something. Obviously this is the purpose of the engines but having the integration with other properties can be very useful for users.
John Battelle and Om Malik each spoke with Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com. The interviews cover the same ground but are both worth the read.
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