Two cameras I have my eye on
I have a Sony DSC-W1 and have really enjoyed it: it’s incredibly easy-to-use. So now that I’m thinking about expanding, I’m wondering if I’d like to leave the Sony world.
I’d hate to have to know 2 or 3 camera operating systems and modes of operation - which I’d have to do if I bought from a different company.
I’ve got my eye on the DSC-T30 for myself: ultra-portable, but still fairly good quality. I’ve had my eye on the T series for a long time, and would love this camera for an everyday, always on me camera.
And I’m wondering about the DSC-H5 for Teresa, my wife, and our home and family shots. 
It’s going to be better indoors with less red eye because of the larger flash that’s more separate from the lense, and the 12X optical zoom is very enticing.
Free web 2.0 business idea
OK.
You want to be cool. You want to be an entrepreneur. And you want to start a shiny new web 2.0 company. Here’s an idea for you:
You 2.0. Or myspy.
I can’t decide which name I like better. But here’s the idea in four words: persistent painless personal history.
Got that?
The idea’s free. If you do it, let me know. I’d love to help in any way I can. But I’m not doing it myself, for a perfectly valid reason that might stop you too.
Here’s the idea
The business is simple: build a Firefox plugin and an Internet Explorer toolbar that do nothing but report what websites you’re visiting to a server. That builds a list of sites that you’ve visited.
That’s basically it. A few details:
- You can go back to see the sites you’ve visited in the past
- Others can see what sites you’ve been to
- You can display the sites you’ve visited as a feed to your blog
- You can search your visited sites
- You can search all the sites that people have visited
- You can see popular sites displayed on the home page
Over time, you build in more cool features by spidering and auto-tagging pages that people are visiting, and building pretty (but oh-so-useful) tag clouds on users’ home pages.
Pretty cool, huh? Neat for an individual, and cool because a community could develop around it. As digital becomes a huge part of our identities (Flickr, blogs, MySpace, etc.), wouldn’t you want painless personal history?
There’s only that one problem I mentioned earlier. Actually, there’s two:
1: Filthy lucre, or lack thereof
I can’t figure out how to monetize it. And without monetizing it, it would just be a cool project that, if it got popular, would bog down under its own weight of server and bandwidth costs.
In other words, I’m not convinced AdSense would cover the bills.
2: Competitors
There are three or four potential competitors that could totally and completely kill it:
- Alexa
- Mozilla
- Microsoft
All four of these already have or very easily could have toolbars that install and essentially phone home on every click. That done, the rest is easy. And for Alexa and/or Google, it would be right up their alley.
Tempting
Still, it’s tempting. You 2.0. Myspy. Persistent painless personal history. Inherently social.
Spyware where the spy-er and the spy-ee are the same person.
I like it!
Full disclosure: I ran this idea past Guy Kawasaki, and while he thought it was cool too … also did not see a viable business model. He’s a pretty clueful guy. But if you decide to prove us wrong and try to make it work: go for it!
Google summer of code
Congratulations Rastin Mehr on being named a project mentor for Joomla’s entrants in the Google Summer of Code.
Rastin is a good friend and colleague, and will be a great mentor.
Tutorial on web search (!!!)
While I was doing some education/technology research today, I ran across a tutorial for Finding Information on the Internet.
9 major sections, 5-6 subsections, and a whole page of “things you need to know before starting.”
I find it incredibly how educators can be so incredibly … ummm … how can I say “stupid” nicely? They seem to think that learning something requires exhaustive dissection of the thing to be learned, categorization, and step-by-careful-linear-step progression through a series of stages.
How adult of them.
Here’s my tutorial on web search:
- Go to Google
- Type something and hit enter
- That’s it
Oh, there’s more to learn. And people learn more as they go. And there’s different places to find different kinds of information.
But the key is starting, and learning while you are doing. Why don’t teachers see that?
Refreshing honesty: the best thing about blogging
John Gruber at Daring Fireball is taking the plunge: testing out the blogging-is-my-job waters. As I was reading about that, I happened to click on his colophon, to read these delightful words:
If Daring Fireball looks like shit in your browser, you’re using a shitty browser that doesn’t support web standards. Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 5, I’m looking in your direction. If you complain about this, I will laugh at you, because I do not care.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the point is that they’re real.
Most businesses and marketers could learn a lot from this type of plainspoken openness. Yes, you’ll lose customers. But you’ll also gain some.
And how is being vanilla working for you right now?
Gabrielle and the Chronicles of Narnia
Since both Aidan and Ethan were doing podcasts tonight (Aidan on his third birthday, and Ethan on his favorite games, Gabrielle could not possibly survive the night without doing her own.
So we did.
And here are Gabrielle’s thoughts on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which we watched tonight on DVD:
Ethan: favorite games
Since Aidan just did a podcast about the presents he received for his third birthday, Ethan wanted to do one too.
So we did a podcast together of his favorite games … one card game (Skip-Bo), and one computer game (Nanosaur 2).
Voila:
Aidan: third birthday
Aidan and I do a podcast about the presents he received for his birthday …
Why I use Flickr
(As promised here.)
Sidewalk: cool, simple forms
This is a test of Sidewalk. Sidewalk lets you create web forms very, very simply, and stick them on your website without any application development whatsoever - and very little technical ability or knowledge at all.
Here’s my first test … tell me something that’s cool:
The best thing about this is not that anyone can do it. (OK, maybe it is.)
But the second best thing is that I don’t have to get a developer to build something. Two minutes with this tool saves me getting a developer to build something … and saves that developer an hour of his time.
The other reason that this kind of service is really, really important, is that every company or group that has a website occasionally has the need for some totally out-of-the-box wild blue-sky widget on their site. The CEO wants to check if people who buy green widgets like salted herring, or something like that.
Well, in a traditional development world, that’s somehow got to be fit into a site or application data model. It never will. And it never should.
And now, it never has to.
Credit:
I saw it first on Emily Chang’s eHub blog.
[ update May 1 ]
Two other players in a similar space: Wyacracker, and The Form Assembly. Cool thing about Form Assembly is that you can also do file uploads.
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About
Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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