My company BlogMatrix has just launched it's latest product -- Onaswarm. If you use
Facebook, Flickr, blogs and especially if you have other likeminded friends online, you should go over there and get an
account.
What does it do? Simple: it imports all your feeds -- your content -- from the services you use on the net and collects it
into a single place -- a "lifestream". If you have friends online, you can link your Onaswarm accounts together to create a
"swarm", displaying what all of you doing.
What's really neat is that you can take these pages and put it on your own blog or webpage, to create (for example) an
"active blogroll" showing what all your friends are doing, or an events calendar showing all the things you're doing.
I've just written a post over on the BlogMatrix blog on how I used Amazon S3 to serve BlogMatrix's static files (based on Adrian's original post). I've included a fairly flexible Python/S3 uploader which you can use in your own projects.
As you can tell, things have changed a little around here. What you're seeing is the "blue" version of the V10 look (we've got orange and green too, and more in the works for later) of BlogMatrix. I've converted everything over from MovableType to BlogMatrix's blogging package because, well, this is what I'm doing for a living! That said, the site will be on-and-off flaky. We're live coding the site which isn't usually the best option but it saves lot of setup time.
I’m mucking about with the DNS for the site and later on I’m hoping to move thw whole blog to the BlogMatrix CMS, so don’t be suprised in things get… odd.
Read all about it on my new “Semantic@BlogMatrix” weblog. Maps included.
I’m getting ready to head down to Mesh right now but I thought I’d take a moment to introduce the first comercial website built on the BlogMatrix platform: Get Going Canada.
Things to note that are directly related to the BlogMatrix Platform:
- all the “destinations”, ads, notes on destinations and comments are all “blog” entries in the system, tagged to create relationships (i.e. the comment is approved/not approved and belongs to this destination)
- maps (+ province), maps (+ province + theme), maps (+ full-text search), maps (+ full-text search + themes), and maps (+ destination)
- it uses “structured blogging”—add-on form elements to “normal” blog posts—to specify additional information, such as geographic location and approval workflow, for the destintaion entries
- “facets”. What are facets? Well for example on this page see how it knows that there are no Food, Rocks or Structures destinations related to this search. That’s facets. It’s subtle but it really increases the usability of the site (and it’s moderately hard to do!). Read more about facets here and here.
- it’s multi-language
- admin-wise, to the people maintaining this site, it looks like a blog—we use tags to narrow down entries into their type (English + Comments + Not Approved, for example) so it’s simple—“blog easy”—to use
- lots of great sponsors for this product: Royal Bank, Esso, Hilton, Toyota, Delta and Fairmont Hotels.
We’ve also custom coded a lot of stuff in here, such as the contest, but this builds up upon parts of the product such as our e-mail management tools.
I’ll be presenting the BlogMatrix Platform at TorDemoCamp5 tonight, if you’re downtown and are bit of a geek.
On the second day of Mashup Camp [tags, photos], anyone who wanted to had the opportunity to show off their mashups. The format for the demos was “speed hacking”, where every demoer was given a table and everyone circulated from table to table in semi-strict five minute segments.
Of special note to me were:
Chicago Crime came second place but was in some deep meaningful sense was probably the best demo there, if you believe there’s going to be or should be an “infosphere”. Although the application is kind of limited in scope, the idea that just about everything is a URI for querying the underlying database is very very powerful and this shows it off very well. Adrian‘s the big brains behind “Django”: and I look forward to meeting him again in the future, perhaps at Chicago Django Camp (hint hint). Also worth mentioning is that CC is probably the first Google Maps mashup ever created.
Podbop came in a well deserved first place, netting the winners a Mac and a fat-ass Sun T2000 server. What developers should take away from Podbop is that (1) applications should so something useful and (2) the simplest interfaces are often the best. Two thoughts: Eventful should host the best Eventful applications themselves and Popbop should make their artist DB available as an API.
TrainCheck is an interesting and simple concept: you need to no the time for the next train (or hopefully, bus)? Just text message on your mobile and the next three departure times are texted back to you. If organizations like the TTC adopted a microformat for transit schedules, rolling this app (and many others) out to many cities would be a breeze. A brief digression: the TTC won’t do it, because they’ll either give a contract to some big org like Google (they’re talking about this) or they’ll build some closed unuseful application themselves. Blech. Power to the people, baby.
Two other companies I wanted to mention. Eventful, an online repository of places and events, powers half the Popbop application. They had a really cool mashup of Eventful straight into Google Maps, where you could fly around the Earth and see what was happening where popup in real time. I also want to mention Ning, because in terms of you being able to create a mashup or social application, well, they’re probably the first place you should visit.
Mathew Ingram, Mark Evans, Michael McDerment and Robert Hyndman are organizing a “Web 2.0” conference for Toronto sometimes in May. It looks like they’re going to go for a ununconference which makes me a little sad because Mashup Camp [tags] worked and scaled. However, that conference was pretty narrowly focused and I think these guys are trying to do something more general.
Here’s a blurb:
We’re hoping to capture the same kind of enthusiasm, spirit and interactivity as other conferences and local events such as BarCamp and TorCamp. To make sure the conference flows with conversation and ideas, it would be great if the community can help us with suggestions about ideas/topics they would like to see on the schedule, tips on what worked well at other events, and some of the pitfalls we need to avoid.
My only early suggestion is to come up with a name ASAP so people can tag it!
One of the first things I saw at Mashup Camp [tags, photos] was this poster:
At first, I was a little confused about what taxonomy to place this under. Is it Totally Gay or New Hippy Fascist? As it turns out, it probably should be filed under Kinda Useful. What they’re really saying is that at an unconference, people shouldn’t feel socially bad about walking out of sessions if they’re getting nothing from it and session chairs shouldn’t take it personally if people get up and walk out.
Here’s a few photos of me at Mashup Camp [tags, photos]. These were taken at Mary Hodder’s ”video mashup” session:
The funny thing (in retrospect) is that Mary didn’t care for Flash Video very much as a format (for very good reasons I’ll admit) but I’m looking more closely at that product now because it may indeed actually be an application enabler for the types of things we were talking about—the ability to tag interior portions of a video. I was talking later on that evening to Sara Spalding of Adobe Labs and she’s promised to hook me up with some Flash Video people so I may have something more intelligent to say about this later.
I’m back from California and Mashup Camp [tags, photos]. I just want to bitch about a few things:
- noise abatement laws make it very incovenient to fly from SFO to Toronto. You cannot leave SFO between (basically) 4 in the afternoon and 10 PM at night because you would land in Toronto between 12 and 6 AM. For the business traveller, this means you’re pretty well stuck on the red eye. Blech.
- Henry’s High Life doesn’t make a great rib anymore. The love just isn’t there.
- Californians have no idea how to drive.
- The Palo Alto Sheraton is too expensive for the quality of the room they’re giving you (I may just stay at the airport Westin next time).
- You’d think for all the money Google has, they’d do something innovative with their buildings. I did a brief tour and I’m sorry: it looks like a modern geek-factory distopia to me. Wow, you didn’t put in ceiling tiles! How clever. (On the other hand, two big monitors per-developer rocks).
- Oh sure, have Demo Camp on the same day.
That’s all the negatives. All the positives may take a couple of hours to type in: Mashup Camp was the best conference I ever attended.
I’m off to Palo Alto Mountain View this afternoon to attend Mashup Camp, have a few meetings, shake some hands, etc.. I’ll be back Wednesday morning.
Fred Wilson writes:
If you don’t get this, do yourself a favor and go do a search on SNL on google video, youtube, myspace video, or anywhere else that video content is aggregated on the web. You’ll find a bunch of Saturday Night Live skits that have been uploaded by internet users who wanted to share them with their friends. I did the same with the Steve Jobs SNL skit on this blog last year.
NBC needs to make SNL available on the web wherever people want to get it. And they need to microchunk the shows down to the skit level. And monetize it with ads or subscriptions or both. Because if they don’t others will and are already doing it.
I just booked my tickets for Mashup Camp in Mountain View, California on the 20th and 21st of February. Mashups are about combining content from different sources to create new applications (e.g. Google Maps + LCBO = The Ontario Beer Hunter).
I’m hoping to meet some of the big brains of the mashup world, talk about JAHAH and a new application I’m developing using that and the BlogMatrix platform and microformats.
Tagged: jahah, microformats, blogmatrix, mashup camp.
60Gb iPod Video in black. This is a work related purchase; I would have preferred to wait for another 12 to 18 months to buy my second iPod.
I was just mulling over whether I should add trackback to the next version of BlogMatrix. I guess not. This blog got rid of them months ago.
Here’s the press release for our latest updates to BlogMatrix:
August 24, 2005 – Toronto – BlogMatrix is pleased to announce version 6 of our blogging platform. “The new look and feel is friendlier and the functionality is richer,” states David Janes, founder of BlogMatrix. “The user experience should be second to none for podcasters, videocasters and bloggers in general.”
New features include a tagging directory for podcasts, iTunes publishing, support for many established standards including XHTML, Yahoo’s Media RSS and microformats, and “ping” support for popular podcast and blogging directories.
“For the subscriber, the new features will make it easier to organize media files and to get them out to your desired audience, whether that is a select group or the public at large,” says Janes. “The end user benefit is in the ease of subscription, download and search.”
BlogMatrix has been in an extensive free trial period to better understand our subscriber’s needs and behaviours. Based on our research, the new billing process is unique and offers one of the best values in the industry with rates from free to less than 1 dollar a day. Rates are based only on active storage used; there is no charge for bandwidth.
Our payment plans are as follows:
* free: 15 Mb active (maximum of 4 uploads per day)
* 15 cents/day: 100 Mb active – less than $5/month
* 30 cents/day: 250 Mb active – about $9/month
* 60 cents/day: 525 Mb active – about $18/month
* 90 cents/day: 800 Mb active – less than $28/month
There is no restriction on the number or total amount of podcasts and videocasts that users may store in their account; however, only those files falling within their active quota will be served. Further details on pricing are available at www.blogmatrix.com.
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