Here are a bunch of news reports about the camp. In fact one of the mashups here is from a Google engineer and will allow lists like this, created by Google, to be placed inside other applications. Good Google, good.
Mashup Camp 2 news
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Category Archives: Google
Mashup Camp 2 – Day 2 begins
… 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.
Mashup Camp 2 – Day 1 – wait, there’s more!
The excellent unconference format makes the entire conference something of a networking session. Still, it’s great to have a few beers with folks who make the internet … so darn interesting.
I always enjoy talking with the brilliant Adam Sah who brings plenty of Google gadget enthusiasm to the mashup mix and I’m sure will have some great stuff to show us tomorrow during the last session. Also really enjoyed meeting mashup and housingmaps.com legend Paul Rademacher (whoa – not to be confused with this Paul Rademacher, who is dead).
Paul’s early mashup of Craigslist and Google maps (before there was a maps API no less!) helped usher in the notion that mashups are a very useful, great way to mix data in innovative ways. Had a great chance to talk about some travel mashing ideas with Adam and Paul. There’s a hurricane of real time road data at the transportation departments but it’s non-trivial to pull even a fraction of that in effectively. Mashups to the rescue? Maybe.
Also got to meet the famous ex-googler blogger Mark Jen who was fired by Google for … blogging! He works over at Plaxo now where he won’t get fired because … he wrote the blogging policy! Very nice and sharp guy.
Mashup University – the UI is the API. ScrAPIs
Assaf Arkin is talking about scraping content. I have mixed feelings about it since extensive scraping of our nicely hand-edited content seemed to be part of the problem with Google’s faulty indexing of Online Highways which still persists, but Web 2.0 sensibilities suggest that most content is now fair game. My new notions are that scraping, if accompanied with attribution, is OK and good for users since it helps them navigate the mess more effectively.
Assaf “Scraping is not evil”. He’s using Ruby. Ruby review: He started with Ruby a year ago and likes it. He’s reviewing example code for a scrape of EBay data.
Mashup University – Apollo Project from Abobe
A cross-OS runtime that allows devs to leverage existing skills with Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax.
This really looks promising, as it has the potential to combine a lot of disparate elements? But yikes – not out until 2007? That’s forever in Internet dog mashup years. Can’t wait to ask Adam from Google what he thinks about these developer tools.
HTML +/or FLASH +/or other stuff = Apollo applications?
Dev builds application which *works everywhere*. Kind of a Flash model BUT won’t they have to get everybody to install runtime stuff? Again, I worry about indexing. Flash remains a pesky and risky addition to any site – will Apollo aps index properly? I’d guess nobody can tell yet though it’s a great question for some of the Googlers that will be here at Mashup Camp.
Mountain View – Mashup Camp Two
Seems like a double life these days. At 1pm today I was home in Oregon painting our house, and now I’m in Mountain View, CA where the 2 day first of all time “Mashup University” begins tomorrow at the Computer Science Museum. Mashup U is followed on Wednesday and Thursday by Mashup Camp 2, the sequel to Mashup Camp back in February. Doug Gold, David Berlind, and supporters did a fantastic job in February and I’m sure this one will also be a great event.
Hats off *again* to Hotwire.com. I just booked the Homestead Mountain View, a great little studio suite with kitchen, for $47 per night, about half the rack rate. An extra 4.99 got me broadband wireless – for my entire 4 day stay! Sure beats the 10.00+ per day often charged by the fancy hotels.
The Wired 40. Yahoo as the “McDonald’s” of Cyberspace !?
Wired Magazine has named their top 40 “wired” companies. The selection sounded a bit vague and trendy to me but lists are fun. Wired says this is how they picked them:
We start by looking for the basics: strategic vision, global reach, killer technology. But that’s not enough. To land a spot on our annual Wired 40 list, a business also needs the X-factor – a hunger for new ideas and an impatience to put them into practice.
Notable points: Google at top of list, Apple second. Yahoo at number 5, the “McDonald’s of Cyberspace” (!?), Microsoft 36th.
Markus is one insightful Canadian Web Guy
One of the great things about the internet business space is how one person can build an empire with the same revenues / impact / influence as a very large company.
Markus is such a fellow and I’m glad to see he’s blogging about his ongoing adventures creating and running one of the top dating sites in the world – PlentyofFish.com. Markus provides a lot of detail and insight into how he created the site almost as a lark and now effectively competes with major corporations in the social network/dating space.
With 200 Million page views monthly and climbing, Markus really knows his stuff. One observation he makes I’m still trying to digest suggests that eventually *only* small companies will rule the internet due to their much greater flexibility and effeciency. Yahoo, Google, MSN are betting billions that they’ll maintain the huge stakes in the online world rather than small niche companies. Frankly, I’m guessing there is room for everybody in the expanding online business space.
Google Sitemaps. My good news and my bad news.
Elite SEO Dave Naylor was complaining a bit about Google Sitemaps and I've also been unconvinced that sitemaps really does help straighten out ranking confusion. According to Google Sitemaps my old-and-in-need-of-great-repair Airport Directory has some incredibly impressive sitemaps stats (e.g. Sitemaps says I'm number ONE for term "hotels")
Term | Rank
| 1. hotels in new york | 1 | |
| 2. airport codes | 1 | |
| 3. ord | 1 | |
| 4. washington dc | 1 | |
| 5. international airports | 1 | |
| 6. hotels | 1 | |
| 7. ord ohare | 1 | |
| 8. chicago | 1 | |
| 9. houston airport | 1 | |
| 10. airport city codes | 1 | |
| 11. airport maps | 1 | |
| 12. charlotte nc airport | 1 | |
| 13. john wayne airport | 1 | |
| 14. orlando | 1 | |
| 15. las | 1 | |
| 16. airline codes | 1 | |
| 17. city codes | 1 | |
| 18. major airports | 1 | |
| 19. salt lake city airport parking | 1 |
Unfortunately QuickAid.com does not rank for any of these terms. In fact I'm under some form of downranking that means I get little Google traffic at all despite the fact I'm one of the most linked to Airport sites on the web.
I've seen this type of bizarre sitemaps stat for some time so I'm not sure what's going on, though I do have some framed content and this could reflect the rank of sites appearing in the frames.
The good news is that my NMOHWY.com experiment has been languishing but it may be because I failed to load the sitemap when I moved to new server over a month ago. I just loaded it now so hopefully my new pages at NMohwy.com will get indexed soon rather than Google showing the old supplemental pages, using old cache dates of June 2005 and similar.
Yahoo 2.0 Trumps Google 2.0 …. again.
As Jeremy has noted, microformats are slowly but profoundly moving the web to the open, data rich, info cornucopia we’ve all been dreaming about. Yahoo is clearly the leader as “Web 2.0 Stylist” and one wonders if Google is going to be left wondering what hit them as developers and users move increasingly towards the simple but data rich environments Yahoo’s been creating for some time.
I’m beginning to wonder if Yahoo’s challenge in increasing market share, and thus stock price, is counterintuitive. Yahoo has effectively matched Google in search quality and has created a LOT of excellent applications and rich APIs while Google has simply stuck to a few great basics like gmail and search.
Perhaps the choice is simply overwhelming people who are thus choosing to stick with Google’s search interface (still simpler than Yahoo’s). Malcolm Gladwell has noted that when presented with too many purchase options people actually may choose fewer items than if presented with a smaller number of options. Could Yahoo’s problem be that they simply are doing too GOOD of a job ushering in Web 2.0 ?
Update: When Jeremy over at Yahoo took me to task on this post I realized I’d not expressed myself clearly and it looked like I was talking about a search comparison. (I’m leaving the post intact since he references it with a lot of comments.) I was not talking about Yahoo vs Google in search as much as Yahoo vs Google in the many other 2.0 projects like Flickr, APIs, and social networking features where I think Yahoo is beating out Google but not getting enough credit for seeing the future of the internet more clearly than most.
Joe Duck 