Author Archives: JoeDuck

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About JoeDuck

Internet Travel Guy, Father of 2, small town Oregon life. BS Botany from UW Madison Wisconsin, MS Social Sciences from Southern Oregon. Top interests outside of my family's well being are: Internet Technology, Online Travel, Globalization, China, Table Tennis, Real Estate, The Singularity.

MFR Medford Airport has Free WIFI.

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Here I am waiting for the PDX flight and thanks to some clever visionary I’ve got a good wireless connection that is …. free.     Free wireless airports = pure goodness.  $9.95  wireless Airports = bad badness.

I guess I should thank *myself* and SOVA since we pushed so hard for this when we installed the byways and travel touch kiosk travel info system here a few years ago, but mostly I credit the MFR Airport’s great directory Bern for seeing the need and benefits, and Hunter Communications for setting up the system.

Bound for BWI and on to Virginia

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The house is 99.5% painted and looking really nice.    We even got to some of the spots I missed ten years ago during house paint number one.   4 colors…fancy!

Off to the Virginia Reunion tomorrow with mom.    MFR to PDX to ORD to BWI.    Thanks to hotwire.com I got great deals on rental car (200 for 8 days) and hotel (Ramada near Airport for 55+tax).    I’m so pleased with hotwire results over the past few weeks of travel I think I may shift my booking sites over to them, though it’s not clear to me that most people are comfortable booking without knowing the hotel or even the exact location.   I’m finding that since motels are clustered together anyway you are likely to get a desirable location as I did in Silicon Valley and tomorrow near BWI.

Mashup Camp 2 Roundup

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I wanted to throw out some closure items for the Mashup Camp 2 experience, which indeed is a bit like a disney theme ride through Web 2.0 land.   Doug and Dave did a fantastic job pulling together hundreds of folks and making it all come together in the unconference format.

Lots of good notes on sessions:
Wiki details for most mashup camp sessions

Mashup Blog

Programmable Web

For me a key question remains “Can great mashups become great businesses?”.     I think I’m inclined to agree with Peter Rip, a Venture Capitalist who has been to both camps and discussed the major challenges facing new companies that depend on other company’s technology and data.     Mashups can be a great value add to an existing company but it’s not clear that a mashup website alone can become a thriving online business.

That said, mashups are certainly destabilizing.   Their importance could be in shaping the way the web moves forward.   That’s more than enough to make mashups a significant online force of change.

PS Microsoft:   Thanks for all that free espresso.   It just … wore … off…..

House Painting

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We are almost done painting our house and most of the neighbor report it’s looking good to them.

We’ve gotten fancier than last time with 4 colors, the last two just for highlights. I’d started this because I thought we might be selling the place to buy the Nut Ranch – a cool old historic place just out of town, but I’m no longer enamored with that house.

Mashup Camp 2 – and THE WINNER IS …. WeatherBonk!

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The wooden nickels are getting counted and the top number will determine the winner of the 5000 top prize here at Mashup Camp. I voted for WeatherBonk this time which is a very good mashup of NOAA, traffic, and many other feeds over Google maps. David Schorr had a good stack of nickels last time I passed that table. But I have a hunch Frucall may win – it’s a very usable and clever mashup as well.

The format here is such that the “simple to grasp” mashups may have an advantage over the more complex ones. PodBop, the last winner, carried this simplicity advantage.

David Berlind is keeping us in suspense … thanking the great sponsors of this event.

….now final ungiven nickels are getting distributed to the mashup people …

Here are some counts:

LoveCrunch 7+2?
Frucall 8
Jeff’s picture captcha 24 – this could be the winner?
Yobie Goodstorm
Bart with TrainCheck 8+1?
David WeatherBonk 21+1
Jeff with Elephant Drive 20
Cameron Jones, Public Radio Travel Planner – 2
Kurt? music/pix mash…. 2
Foto Tiger 5
Mark with SecretPrices – 13+1
Kung Gao, Frappr – 2
Chad MileGuru – 13
Tom TIKI mash 3?
Mindjet 3
411Synch 2 (surprising – this was GREAT!)
Dave StrikeIron – was not soliciting nickels -1

PubWalk -13
Eric Small Town Guides – ?
RealestateFu – Greg from FrozenBear.com 0 (!) This was a superb mash…what’s going on?

Wait – we may have a TIE! ?? Redistribution is happening….

It’s a tie between WeatherBonk and Mecommerce…(who also had the picture captcha )

The tie has been broken by voting by people moving across the room and it’s David Schorr’s WeatherBonk.

Mashup Camp 2 – Cassie and Drew

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The youngest attendees are getting interviewed by David, who points out that they are the builders of the future….of mashups and the web.

Drew Dara-Abrams is a PhD student at UC Santa Barbara and sister Cassie, at age 16, led some sessions on social networking. She skipped High School (spending a week there) and goes to college now. Drew counsels the next breed of mashups to “think things through” a bit more. Good advice for all of us.

Mashup Camp 2 – Google Gadgets

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Adam’s talking about Google Gadgets and how powerful they are as a mini content distributor. They are easy to create and are attaining huge usage worldwide. Adam and his team have done a super job of making this fast, easy, and fun. Good google! This is dynamite stuff, and in typical Google fashion they have made it easy, fun, and open.

The Gadget directory is algorithmically generated so the most popular gadgets tend to rise to the top as they are selected by users. Don’t be evil helps define decisions virtuously rather than GoogleOptimizably. Engineering constraints trump marketing ones.

GoogleModules.com and hotmodules.com (these are NOT Google sites) are good sources of inspiration and gadgets.

Translation is easy by having a few lines translated, the upload as a country specific gadget.

Top author? 16 year old Caleb from Arkansas. Countdown gadget is his top and he has several.

Design: Minimize brand unless you are really big where it’s a value adding feature.

Hyperlink at bottom for more info

Hyperlink in title

Promote gadget on your own site (add-to-google button)

Mashup Camp 2 – Day 2 begins

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… Mashup Thursday begins with MSN sponsored coffee, for which they deserve major caffienated credit.    Part of the interesting buzz here (and I htink at MIX) is how good the LIVE people are and how different LIVE at MS is from the “old” MS culture which has a reputation for slow development and cumbersome approaches.    Maybe it’s the coffee?

HERE  is a list of today’s schedule here at Mashup Camp 2.  Great to see more from Yahoo and Google today.