OpenDNS

Asides

OpenDNS is a great idea, well-executed. They took something basic and ubiquitous, DNS, and improved it by adding spell-checking and phishing protection (usability enhancements). They provide the service for free in exchange for monetizing typo search pages. The typo search pages are simple, fast, and generally useful. What I was looking for is usually the first result. There is no software to install, just two settings to change, and they provide a registration-free way to set preferences on their site. John Roberts is a friend from my CNET days and gave me a preview a few days before they launched, I've been using it full-time ever since and it has been invisible in all the right ways.

WordCamp Update

Asides, WordCamp

So 1 day after the announcement, 104 people have signed up that they're coming to WordCamp and 58 have joined the mailing list. Wow! Thank you, as this has been a huge help in determining what sort of resources we're going to need to pull this thing off. Now the big challenge is finding a venue appropiate for the event, feel free to ping me if you have any ideas.

WordCamp – WordPress Conference

WordCamp

The idea for an event for WordPress users has been bouncing around in my head for a long time, as there is a really interesting group of people around WP but we don't do nearly as many face-to-face interactions as some similar projects. A set of circumstances are coming together at the beginning of August, and I think we're going to give it a go.

August 5th, 2006 is the date, here in the lovely town of San Francisco, California. The idea is a one day BarCamp-style free conference with a party that night. There will be free BBQ for lunch, WordPress t-shirts, and a full day of both user and developer discussion. ("BarCamp-style" is a code phrase for "last minute.")

There are still a few things to figure out, such as a venue, schedule, and other little things like that. (By the way, if you can help with any of these or have event experience, please drop me a note.) But mostly I wanted to get the date out there so people could start planning for it, buy tickets if they're travelling, and let us know if there are any huge conflicts that day. (Like a national holiday or something.)

In the meantime, I've put up a quick site where you can leave your email to signup for more information or let us know you're coming. If you think you can make it, please say so as soon as possible so we can prepare for the right number of people. If you'd like to help in any way, drop me a note via email or in the comments.

Don't know if this will work or not, but it should be fun regardless. Podz is coming in all the way from England, and Donncha from Ireland. 🙂

TagJag Thoughts

Uncategorized, ,

I had a very brief comment during Chris' session "Should TagJag get funded?" On the stage with Chris and Rick Segal were two of my favorite members of the venture community, Brad Feld and Jeff Clavier. My feedback may have been phrased more negatively than I meant it to be, but what I was trying to constructively criticise is that TagJag would be a lot more unique and valuable to me if beyond merely listing the results pages of the different services it aggregates, it presented the results interesting and timesaving ways. For example: better categorization of time-based vs. authority-based sources; combining different results into a single list; de-duping and filtering results; filtering the spam that the different providers seem to be unable to catch; providing different notification thresholds and mediums beyond RSS and HTML, like email, SMS, IM. All of these would provide value to me beyond what the individual services provide, save me time, and provide something greater than the sum of its parts. tagjag freedbacking

Amazon Grocery

Asides

I don’t go to the grocery store much, and when I do it’s usually for toiletries or non-perishables, so Amazon Grocery seemed like a pretty good fit. I’m already a Prime member so everything has free shipping, and I’m pretty comfortable giving money to Amazon these days. For my first test purchase I decided to go for something bulky that would be a pain to walk several blocks with. So the first purchase was some Cottonelle toilet paper. Now there are two immediate problems: first I didn’t realize it was a four-pack. I don’t know if I have enough storage space for that much toilet paper, so I might end up giving some of it to friends. (That’s what friends are for, right?) Second I ordered it on June 18, and it still hasn’t shipped 10 days later. Good thing there was no urgency! My initial experience with Amazon Grocery has been pretty disappointing.

Bloglines DOS

Asides, Bloglines

Bloglines is DOSing blog providers. Every other major crawler implements some sort of per-resolved-IP throttle, why can’t Bloglines? Even if there were a way to opt-out of their hundreds of simultanous crawlers descending on your service, it seems to me the default behavior should be to not be harmful, and then work with large providers on a case-by-case basis to increase the concurrency of requests. We don’t have this problem with any other aggregator or crawler, hosted or non-hosted. Test: freedbacking