Category: Web 2.0

If you’ve thought about travelling to the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin just over a month from today, there’s a great opportunity to bag a pair (yes – two) of tickets which kicks off in Berlin on November 5th, running to November 8th (Monday to Thursday).

The competition stipulation is that you must be an Irish blogger OR Irish-based blogger, the winner being the one with the “best suggestion for an original web applciation with an Irish focus”.

You’ve got until this Sunday, so get the thinking cap on! You’re looking at over €2,000 worth of a prize!

I say it will ‘rock’ Dublin tonight as the event (DemoBar) looks set to be a great one. There’s ten fantastic Irish companies on display tonight, beer, banter and if I was any way closer to Dublin and a little easier with my time tonight and tomorrow then I’d be there with a fine helping of bells on.

Glowday will be launching at the event and handing out a few beta invitations, as will Vinny Glennon’s JustRoutes.com. TouristR should reveal a new facelift tonight with Jan shedding some more light on the upcoming TripPlanr while Walter should be able to show off some new features for Pixenate along with the brand spanking new Pixenate Facebook application – honestly, I think I’ve waited for taxis for more time than it took the application to get online, seriously quick turnaround there!

When and Where

It all kicks off in the Ely HQ on Hanover Quay in Dublin, this evening from 6:30pm. Google Map Here. Rumour has there’s going to be around 100 people there this evening so get in while you can!

Earlier in the week I posted a preview of the ten companies showcasing their wares at DemoBar next Thursday, September 13th at the Ely HQ in Dublin. Like James, there were one or two names I wasn’t familiar with – GlowDay being one of them. I had added a note that I would amend the description with any gory details available and via Daniel Becker (Founder) comes the following…

GlowDay power embeddable surveys, from simple one question polls to complex multipage questionnaires. Surveys are delivered either as widgets or hosted pages. Survey Designers have full control of layout and presentation and can include images and videos for added impact. A survey can be shared for others to use or improve. Results can be analysed and compared to results gathered by others. Our Service is Free

GlowDay is another service that is expected to be launched at DemoBar.

Thought this one deserves a mention on the blog – Open Source Food. Now, its not food for thought in an open source programming kind of way – more along the lines of Open Source recipes, community-driven food from around the world.

I’m a massive lover of foreign foods, any country in the world, and I love spending time in the kitchen (when I have time that is), messing around with different fresh ingredients, cooking up a storm for one, two or a load of people. I’ve been doing some restaurant work of late in Kilkenny (for a client) and I’ve been slowly building a food project of my own since August 2005 (one of those serious back-burner things that should be coming to light in a month or two) but this site is a pleasure to trip around. Hell, the Gourmet Food and Wine Expo in Toronto last year was a good highlight for me.

Big full colour photos of meals prepared by community users, full ingredients, step-by-step guides and a really easy navigation (easier than getting around the kitchen or leafing through a tiny-print cookbook with fancy studio shots). How about some Japanese noodles made in China, some spring onion and ginger crabs, or a banana muffin for that morning coffee?

Give it look, try something out!

After toying around with Google Calendar for a while, I can finally say I’m loving it, especially the freedom I’m getting in integrating it with KilkennyMusic.com. Using a modified version of the gCalJSON its a breeze to pull out all the calendar details, format them however you want without the need for a WordPress plugin.

If you’re looking to integrate a calendar feed into your blog or any other web site, give gCalJSON a look, have a toy around with the script, throw in 3-4 lines of code to call it out (including your full Google calendar feed) and you’ll have your dates straight away. I’ve been doing some work on KKM over the last week, tying a few services together and adding Google calendar to back the gigs was a bit of a no-brainer.

The use of Google Calendar is perfect for KilkennyMusic.com though as the access to the calendar is shared between four of us, allowing gig and event updates by any of us from any location. Seen as we all use Google Talk to communicate during the week, everyone’s Google ID gets added to the Calendar admin (invitation) and everyone can get involved. It also helps in taking an iCal output of the calendar as well to allow us keep local copies (3/4 of us are Mac users). Allowing HTML in the gig descriptions is a bonus as well in terms of providing links to bands and venues. Just gotta get some co-ordinates in there and plot the gigs on a map and away we go.

Its damn easy to use as well if you haven’t tried it before…. give it a lash.

Jan Blanchard Podleaders Interview

Originally uploaded by kenmc

Hey Tom – it works on the video iPod. Currently watching the second video podcast from Podleaders.com featuring Jan Blanchard chatting with Tom Raftery about TouristR.com, currently in private beta for another two days or so before being launched at the end of the week at Reboot 9.0.

While Tom mentions that the video has been optimised for the iPod, you’ll have to convert the download yourself in order to get it into iTunes (download available as .FLV). I used iSquint for my conversion which dumps the FLV out to MP4 and automatically inserts it into your iTunes video library. A quick sync and you’re set to go.

I will say that its a great improvement on the first video podcast, the interview appears much more natural with the ‘over the shoulder’ look; the camera has been locked down for the demo; the branding works well on the screen and isn’t overly intrusive and it is much more enjoyable to watch as a whole.

One thing I might watch out for (and I’m particular about my own podcasts) is the sound quality – some clip mics, or a boom mic or a cheap wireless kit could do well at capturing sound rather than relying on the camera’s internal mic.

Other than that I say kudos on the second video podcast.

This is one sale that I’m happy to see anyway, the two providers a perfect marriage in integrating FeedBurner’s statistics and feed management with the likes of Google Adwords, Google AdSense and Google’s Analytics. I had mentioned earlier in the week that the sale was rumoured to be going ahead, as first mentioned by Sam Sethi at Vecosys.

Spotted the news breaking this morning though on TechCrunch that the deal has been agreed and looks to be in the region of US$100m which represents a great result for a company going into their fourth year who’ve taken US$10m in capital funding over two rounds two years ago.

FeedBurner really is a quality service and my first port of call when setting up a blog, happy to say I’ve got it managing 26 of feeds from across my own blogs and blogs that I’m managing for one or two other people. I like the stats, like the control over my feeds, republish-ability, friendliness to podcasts – the whole lot. Couple that with the statistics provided by Analytics plus the likelihood of additional revenue generation through your RSS feeds and the whole package looks to be onto a winner from the get go.

Tip of the hat to FeedBurner, hopefully it brings about an improvement in everything as opposed to dropping any parts of the service but I guess we’ll have two weeks or so to wait and see what happens.

Looks like the work has paid off for Conor O’Neill and co., LouderVoice has moved out of the private beta stage and been opened up to the world for scrutiny (and use). I’ve got two reviews (here and here) at my LouderVoice review blog which were posted during the beta phase.

Have to say, much rather the final homepage design as opposed to the pre-launch stage. Quite warm and inviting indeed as Paul Watson puts it. The site has plenty of details on what exactly LouderVoice is, so now that its open, why not pop along and register? Posting your review is a breeze, you can also publish to your own blog, grab a Firefox plugin, WordPress plugin… endless possibilities thought out.

No doubt there’ll be a plethora of blogging coverage to come from interested parties, thought I’d fire in my two cent…

A few tweaks to come but I’m impressed anyway and thats all that matters? Right? Make up your own mind…

Ok, now I’ve got to get in and check out Joost – anyone have a spare invitation? Reason for this now piquing my interest (taking ‘pique’ courtesy of Conor O’Neill), is that the NHL have announced a partnership with Joost for coverage of the Stanley Cup Final, with the season now currently in the playoff stages.

I did have a look at some of what Joost had to offer a few months ago but if one can get free hockey, without having to fork out a monthly sub to the North American Sports Network or get a Chorus or Sky connection into the house then I’ve gotta see it.

So I ask, anyone have a spare Joost invite for a blogger with a love for ice hockey? If you do and would like to leave a comment, that would be mighty fine 🙂

With a few hours time on my hands at the weekend, I’ve finally splashed for the Flickr Pro account. At US$24.95 it seems like a fine price but why, Flickr, why don’t you print photos for Ireland eh? Mind you, I did make use of that Photobox offer this week and bagged myself 58 prints that should be due today or Monday (I’m guessing).

In fairness though it’s bloody high time I organised my photos, or at least have them online (those that do and don’t make the photoblog) to have them shared with the family and friends. I’ve had the Flickr account since college but it has only been the last six months or so that I started to make use of it (somewhere in advance of Barcamp Waterford) but combining that and the Flickr uploader I’ve got on the Mac, I’ve been delighted with the service to date.

All I need do now is sift through the 30,000 odd photos sitting across two machines and see what I can get online….

As another possible alternative for the now dead Techcrunch UK (if you’re not already reading the terrific Vecosys), Techscape has launched with a strong focus on tracking Web 2.0 developments in the UK. In fairness, the blog launched back in November but I’ve only discovered it today and have to say, its impressive. Friendly layout, good content, a good read.

From the blog…

…it isn’t all about UK start ups (you have the superb Vecosys for that) and it isn’t just reviews of social networking sites either. Instead, TechScape will being you interviews with the main movers in the UK’s web 2.0 world, reviews of the key new projects, plenty of mobile news and views and daily round ups and comment on the big stories…

Interested? Give Techscape a whirl…

VentureBeat this morning takes a look at some of the names around the ‘web 2.0’ industry that are now starting to crumble and fall including FilmLoop.com who raised $7m last year in funding only to lay off the majority of its work force recently. Jobster.com cut its entire sales staff and support staff. OnStartups.com has a nice piece too on the Lessons From The Death Of A Web 2.0 Startup.

After the massive rise in the use of the term last year and the explosion in new lines of web services, is the bubble already starting to burst? Or were these people simply too late to the game with nothing additional and innovative to add?

Has anyone had any difficulties in installing PeopleAggregator on their own hosting? I sat through it last night and had one or two troubles…

• Bootstrap install downloaded but never completed
• Broken links in installation
• Local config files never created
• Made my own config files, overall installation just shows a white screen

That and everything is a repeated 403 error, I just don’t have permissions to view files on my own hosting. Anyone who has tried an install of PeopleAggregator on a linux hosting plan I’d love to hear from you…

Update: Repeated the same process this morning but changed the name of the directory I was installing to from ‘bands’ to ‘pa’. Surprise surprise it worked first time for me, no questions asked (bar adding PEAR DB to the structure)

A text message at half eleven at night to tell me that Google just acquired Youtube. Last week it was just a rumour, now its a US$1.65 billion reality.

Guess its one thing that Google, with all their millions, couldn’t make on their own. Will this mark an end to Google Video? Who knows! Techcrunch has a great report on it, including mentioning that Yahoo were involved in the bidding war right until the closing stages.

The deal itself will be closed soon enough but represents Google’s largest ever acquisition and considering the age of Youtube it is an absolute phenomenon that the company went for this much money.

The acquisition combines one of the largest and fastest growing online video entertainment communities with Google’s expertise in organizing information and creating new models for advertising on the Internet. The combined companies will focus on providing a better, more comprehensive experience for users interested in uploading, watching and sharing videos, and will offer new opportunities for professional content owners to distribute their work to reach a vast new audience.

“The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. “Our companies share similar values; we both always put our users first and are committed to innovating to improve their experience. Together, we are natural partners to offer a compelling media entertainment service to users, content owners and advertisers.”

No sign of a name change, Google stating that Youtube will retain “distinct brand identity, strengthening and complementing Google’s own fast-growing video business”. Full details are available from the official Google press release.

I hit Flickr this afternoon as part of another job and noticed that their logo (pictured right) has gone from Flickr Beta to Flickr Gamma… Are we now moving out of the stage of beta web 2.0 services? Can we expect to see gMail Gamma? Or Gamma Mail as it might become known? Anyone aware of the recent change….?

Update / Answer : “Ages ago”. Cheers Robin 😉

Google News picked it up straight out of Ireland’s Silicon Republic as John Kennedy writes how there’s 2.0 sides to every story, following on from the IT@Cork vs O’Reilly debate starting breaking last week….

Genius title!

Joe Drumgoole has kindly made available on his blog the presentation material from the recent Web 2.0 meet in DCU including presentations by Tablane, Nooked, Sxoop and speakers Jeff Clavier, Marc Canter and all others involved.

You may pick them up right here…

DigForIt is on sale…. on eBay no less. I’m not overly worried since I still only turn up number 3 on their search rankings (drawing references from Google, MSN and Yahoo). Must really work on turning up the search engine heat on my own sites.

Anyway, DigForIt is a meta search engine, catering for searches on news items, images, audio, video, blogs, jobs and more. It is an AJAX-style web application that retrieves web results and suggestions as-you-type. Begin typing in search results and automatically you will receive suggestions based on the letters you have entered. (Learn a bit more).

Via Techcrunch, the auction is live on eBay and can be found here. Interesting to keep an eye on it to see how much a service like DigForIt goes for.

Caught this one yesterday and it amuses me…. Yes folks, you can now get web two certified! If you’ve got rounded corners on your site, have a blog, or maybe stuck in a CC license, or talk about anything mobile then you might just be Web 2.0 certifiable and never knew it!

What people get away with….