Ignite Seattle: Talk Submissions Due Today

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 0

The next Ignite Seattle is August 8th at the CHAC. The evening will be a combination of Half-Baked Dotcom and Ignite talks. This time we are doing something special and we’re going to have a contest amongst the speakers. Four speakers will get a chance to do their Ignite talks at Gnomedex, Chris Pirillo’s Seattle-based event. RSVP at Upcoming.

Talks submissions are due by today. Selections will be made by Wednesday. After the jump you can see the talks so far

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Five Things You Didn't Know About Me

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 5

Allison tagged me, so here are five things you don't know about me:

1. I was born in NC, but most of the time I spent in the state I was in the womb. I grew up in South Jersey and then proceeded to live in New York, Connecticut, Boston, and San Francisco before settling in Seattle. Prior to moving to Seattle I had never spent more than a year in a single abode as an adult.


2. The first time I met Kathy Sierra I made her want a Tablet PC.


3. My first O'Reilly connection was through Nat. We met at ETech 05; I had recognized his name as being a good friend's friend. A conversation and then a friendship ensued. A year later I was interviewing with Tim at ETech 06.


4. In the 14 years that I have been devilsticking I have had at least 10 sets (currently in possession of 5 - with a new LED set ordered yesterday), been in 2 fire troupes (met my girlfriend through one of them), taught at least 5 people who stuck with it, been stopped on two occasions by cops, earned ~30 dollars, performed (with fire) at the Bumbershoot closing ceremony in 2005, performed (with fire) twice in front of the Man on the night of the burn, have devilsticked in 8 countries, and performed in one wedding (OK - it was at Burning Man, but still a wedding!). I am self-taught. I occasionally juggle.


5. I was a cook one summer at a mid-class bar & grill in Medford, New Jersey. Lucky for me there were two gourmet chefs on staff who were slumming. They took me under their respective wings, made me a lot of great meals, and gave me a good culinary foundation that I have always been thankful for. I wish I knew where they were now.

I am tagging Leo Dirac, PT, Dave McClure, Mikel Maron, and Niall Kennedy. Tell us about yourselves.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 0

Merry Christmas and happy holidays from the Radar crew. Make Media Maven Bre Pettis sends his holiday wishes via Rocketboom.

If you are feeling generous today, consider assisting WorldChanging in their bid to win Yahoo's $50,000 matching grant. From their end-of-the-year-request:

We've just learned about a huge opportunity to raise funds for Worldchanging. For it to work we need your help. Not much, just $10. Here's the deal: Yahoo! is offering a $50,000 matching grant for the nonprofit which gets the largest number of donations before the end of the year using its new "charity badges."

What matters is the number of donors, not the number of dollars. Right now, you need 80 to be in the lead, but we'd like 500 to be safe. If we're winning on Dec 31st, we think one of our major donors will step in and help us with a large donation, so we'll get the full $50K from Yahoo!

That means that what we need are numbers, even large numbers of people contributing just the minimum of $10 each (though we are a highly-effective little non-profit and would be happy to put a larger contribution to good use).

Please help us win this challenge by taking two minutes right now, clicking on the donate button in this link or in the charity badge displayed here at left , and making a contribution to Worldchanging on Network for Good (it's all safe and self-explanatory).

Linkfromdomain from Live Search

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 1

Yesterday, Live Search released a cool, new operator that allows you search based on links from a domain. This has a lot of power and is not available on Yahoo! or Google. It's good for finding content that has been linked to from a blogger or social site. Here are some examples: robot videos on youtube - site:youtube.com linkfromdomain:digg.com, PDF links on del.icio.us - linkfromdomain:icio.us pdf , or calendar links from Gigaom: linkfromdomain:gigaom.com calendar. This can be very powerful when combined their Search Macros - a user-defined and shared operator. Live Search blogger, Andy Edmonds, has more on this combo.
The Live Search blog has a pretty good explanation of how this operator interacts with its other operator linkdomain:.

The visual below depicts “YourSite.com” and a set of related sites. The Blue nodes represent sites with reciprocal links, while the yellow nodes are sites you link to, and the green nodes sites that link to you. Here’s how you would capture these domains with advanced syntax:

Green + Blue - > LinkDomain:YourSite.com Yellow + Blue -> LinkFromDomain:YourSite.com Green + Yellow + Blue -> LinkFromDomain:YourSite.com | LinkDomain:YourSite.com

There is one catch in the functionality. Note that I did not use my own blog (radar.oreilly.com - linkfromdomain:radar.oreilly.com)  in any examples and that i had to call del.icio.us using icio.us (linkfromdomain:del.icio.us mac).  Linkfromdomain: is not able to search based on subdomain. Thus you can search allof blogspot, but not any individual blogspot blog. The Live team is aware of this, but there is no word on where it is in the pipeline.

How Friendster Lost Its Footing

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 4

The New York Times has an article on the downfall of friendster. It traces Friendster through the fabled Google buyout offer, numerous CEOs, and dwindling traffic. In the article most of the blame is aimed at high-profile investors and board-members for not recognizing Friendster's performance issues and paying more attention to what potential competitors were doing. I was a fairly early Friendster user and I had a ton of fun at first, but I definitely stopped using the service when the performance dropped.

I have always attributed Friendster's decline to two issues. One was its performance issues (well-addressed in the article). The other was that Friendster fought its users. Its users wanted groups and Friendster tried to stop them from making it happen. In Friendster all of the nodes were people. To connect to another person it had to be through other people and their set of relationships. Some people wanted to cut through this and have nodes that represented interests, locations, or celebrities.These were known as Fakesters and were routinely deleted by Friendster for not being real human beings and for connecting formerly disparate nodes of Friendster's social network. It was a chance for Friendster to listen to their users and learn what they wanted instead of sending them off to Tribe.net, Orkut, and eventually MySpace -- all of which allowed groups from the beginning. Friendster certainly has gotten better of late, but I agree with the prinicipals in the article that its is a cautionary tale.

Google Transit Has Expanded

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 1

Google has updated their experimental Transit product to include 5 new cities. Now Seattle, Pittsburgh, Honolulu, Tampa, and Eugene, in addition to the original Portland, are available. To enable further expansion they have also published a feed specification that cities can use to share their data. I'm excited by this as I find the UI very simple to use, but when I ran the product by some fellow Seattle-ites they felt that they got better results from the local Trip Planner. I'm sure this will improve in time. WorldChanging, who helped with the product, has more.

Entrepreneurially yours

by Rael Dornfest | comments: 14

After six of the most enjoyable, educational, and rewarding years at O'Reilly, I went half-time last November to pursue one of those ideas that just wouldn't leave me alone. That idea has since blossomed into an application (edging toward product-hood) and fledgling company. And so it's time now to give it all the attention it deserves.

Leaving O'Reilly the company, however, doesn't mean leaving the O'Reilly family. I've always said that if I wandered off at some point I'd still do ETech; and that's precisely what I'll be doing. I will be chairing the program of the 2007 edition of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, as well as continuing to be part of the O'Reilly Radar. (I'll blog more about the conference shortly; the ink on the call for participation just now drying.)

As I'm now spending the lion's share of my time on my new company, we've added Brady Forrest and more recently Allison Randal to the Radar team to continue exploring new technologies and reaching out to interesting people and companies to bring them more clearly onto the O'Reilly Radar.

When I think of just what to say at this point, only one word comes to mind: Thanks. Thank you O'Reilly for making me feel at home from the moment I walked in. Thanks to all the O'Reillians who made me all the better for my stay, in particular my mentors Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty and O'Reilly Radar co-conspirators. And thanks to all of you in the noosphere who've built and thought so much for me to explore and and learn.

Entrepreneurially yours, Rael

Nat's Travels: June/July

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

I'll be in San Jose/San Francisco June 5-16, a trip built around hosting Where 2.0 on June 13-14 (I'll be at the Google geo developer day). I'll be in Chicago June 21-29 for RailsConf and Yet Another Perl Conference. Then I'll be in Portland from July 8-30 hanging out with Rael, Allison, Surj, chromatic and the other pr0tlanders, and hosting OSCON. Drop me a line if you want to get together!

Where 2.0: Early Registration Ends

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

Brady and I have been feverishly pulling together the Where 2.0 program and we're finally done: every timeslot has someone on it. We're waiting on a few people to confirm, but if you haven't checked out the schedule lately then you should do so now. Today's the last day of early registration, and thus your last chance to get $300 off the standard registration price of $1495. Watch this space as we write up the interesting companies, characters, and technology we found as we built the schedule ...

Hello From The New Guy

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 9

I'm Brady Forrest, the new guy at O'Reilly Radar. My first task is working with Nat to Co-Chair Where 2.0. My first appearance will be at next week's SDForum's Search SIG on Mapping. Come on by Tuesday night as I discuss the state of Mapping with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask. It'll be great to meet you.

I used to work on Live Search where I was one of the organizers of the Search Champs program among other things. I came over to MS with the acquisition of MongoMusic (which became MSN Music). Previous to my forays on the Internet I worked in the Supply Chain Management industry.

I live in Seattle and when I'm not building cars for Burning man or filming Angel parodies, I hike and devilstick.

ETech Sold Out

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

Heads up for all of you who put off registering for ETech until the last minute: the last minute was officially earlier today (how to avoid missing ETech '07: register earlier next year). We're now at capacity and can't take any more registrations. Those of you who did make it, I'll see you there next week ...

ETech 06 Call for Participation

by Rael Dornfest | comments: 1

The Call for Participation for the 2006 edition of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference [aka ETech] is open. I'll be blogging more about and around the conference as we build it over the coming months.

We're five years into the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, covering peer-to-peer networks to person-to-person mobile messaging, web services to weblogs, big screen digital media to small screen mobile gaming, hardware hacking to content remixing. We've hacked, blogged, ripped, remixed, tracked back, and tagged to the nth. And as ETech marches on, the stuff of which it is made shows no sign of abating: bandwidth continues to broaden, cycles are going spare, storage grows ever larger and cheaper, and content keeps pouring from the firehose.

This year's challenge is not about generating digital data--we have more than enough already. It's time to do something with that data. As organic creatures with fallible and finite perception systems, complex desires, and an ever-decreasing amount of time, how do we visualize the data, filter it, remix it, and access it in ways meaningful to us? The opportunity created by the massive data web is one of social good, of personal benefit, and of business advantage.

Any Mobile Carriers Out There?

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

I'm having a hard time making contacts at the carriers, and the ever-lovely Russell Beattie suggested asking on the blog. Genius! Any readers from T-Mobile, Cingular, Verizon, Nextel, etc.? I'd love to make contact with you, if you are: <gnat AT oreilly.com>. Thanks!

New way of doing the Radar Books page, or The Backpack API

by Rael Dornfest | comments: 4

In the emerging tradition of constructing the O'Reilly Radar blog out of a growing number of loosely-coupled building blocks, we're rolling out our new Books page, built on the backs of Amazon Web Services and the Backpack API -- launched today.

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Administrivia: Search and ye shall find

by Rael Dornfest | comments: 0

The O'Reilly Radar is now full-text searchable.

Rael's del.icio.us posts

by Rael Dornfest | comments: 0

While O'Reilly Radar does siphon off our collective del.icio.us brief posts, they're just a small subset of what I routinely post to my del.icio.us. Bear in mind that I use del.icio.us as my preferred bookmarking tool, for both personal and professional bits (although the difference to all but me isn't particularly discernable ;-).

Administrivia: Tags, del.icio.us, tags

by Rael Dornfest | comments: 6

We've added a couple-three features here at the O'Reilly Radar blog:

• The del.icio.us entries interleaved with our local blog entries are now also inlined in our outgoing RSS and Atom feeds -- a nice surprise for those of you reading Radar remotely and wondering, "What del.icio.us entries?"
• The tags we assign to our blog entries are also reflected in our feeds and tag hyperlinks are now assigned rel="tag" attributes so you'll find our subject matter better indexed by Technorati. You can also, of course, browse our tags directly.
• Interleaved del.icio.us entries now have their tags linked to the appropriate page on del.icio.us proper.
• (Oh, and Trackbacks are now working as expected.)