OK, for the benefit of the few who read THIS blog I thought I’d throw out a list of the “A list blogs” that are read by …. more people than you can shake a stick at.

Interestingly I’m thinking Blogs are quite DEficient as a conversational medium because you’ve got the blog OWNER in control and the commenters in a very weak position. Tim Berners Lee, who invented the internet even before Al Gore, wanted a “two way conversation”. We are NOT there yet and I think a sort of wikified blogging niche mashup forum environment, where people with similar interest sets will come together in unstructured but highly motivating and unstructured but facilitating and enabling ways, will eventually rule the internet.

I hope so and in fact will work towards this goal in the travel space.

From TECHNORATI: Top 100 blogs

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Mashup Party … at the GooglePlex. MashupCamp ended on a high note with an invite from Google’s Adam Sah (who works on the Google Home page API) to head over to Google for a party. I’d been there in July for the Google Dance but this time enjoyed a tour of the main building. I’m always so impressed by the dedication of the Google engineers to quality, their company, and innovation on the internet, and tasty snacks.

I’m still digesting the overwhelming amount of information at MashupCamp. Congratulations to PodBop.org the winner and chicagocrime.org the runner up. Clear is this – Mashups are going to fuel a LOT of innovation and it’s happening VERY fast.

Day ONE of Mashup Camp has ended with Yahoo Martinis at the Computer Museum. They were great but I’d have to give Microsoft the kudo of the day for hosting an espresso coffee bar for the duration of the conference – outstanding and the only way I could prepare my brain to absorb the number of companies, mashups, ideas, and APIs flooding this infospace.

This open conference format is very nice. It only took about 30 minutes for the group to pull together an excellent agenda that certainly was comparable to what I’ve seen at other conferences, and tended to involved the audience to a much greater degree. As organizers Gold and Berlin indicated (and we all have noted) the coffee breaks and bar time are often the most productive part of a conference, so why not build the conference around this and the participants rather than hope to anticipate what they’ll need/want/listen to.

I’d have pix if my Treo was synching, which it’s NOT….

For details on the sessions go HERE

I can’t get over how hard the big guys are working to feed handy APIs to developers at no charge and with little obligation. In the session I’m sitting in right now, led by A9 search which has basically turned over the search key to the vault to developers. Good for them. Disruptive and destabilizing = more fun, opportunity, and innovation.

I get the feeling from developers that people are tired of the current broad, scattered search model. A9’s suggesting, I think very correctly, that the future is in vertical search where specialists in various niches use open search models.

Kudos to all associated with Mashup Camp here in (chilly) Mountain View CA. This “unconference” has a lot of the normal conference perks but has brought a lot more attendee input to the table by using the “open conference” format. This morning attendees proposed sessions and there was no shortage of great ideas and themes. I’m sitting in the “Monetization” session now enjoying a spirited discussion of how/what/when can you monetize the mashups and how this may impact your relationship to the API providers, many of whom are represented in this session.

Programmable Web is a great resource for more information about Mashups and at the link has a GREAT summary of APIs available to mashup developers.

I’m very anxious to get going on my own mashup which is fairly simple but I think will be helpful and popular as part of my growing Highways.TV / Highways.com project. I’m taking the camera images from Caltrans and some other sources and mapping them to CA roadways along with weather information. Caltrans does this for some districts but not others, and confusingly Caltrans cams are sorted by district rather than roads. Districts may have some bureaucratic logic but travelers are not necessarily going to confine their interest in that fashion. Oregon’s TripCheck system is a much stronger presentation of cam info than Caltrans’. Weatherbonk is doing a nice job integrating weather, maps, and some cam info but they are really short on traffic cams and the site seems to be clunky and slow in the display – though I’m not clear if they are simply suffering from popularity and can upgrade to speed things up or if the mashup itself is burdened by too many calls out to the data sources. I’m noting that Caltrans real time TV cams are hard to get to display and the lag time is so great even on a fast connection that it’s not a very useful feature even when it does display.