New Lopico

I don't really use this blog anymore (now at jdamer.com), but if you happen to come across it, be sure to check out the new version of Lopico. Thanks.

Make The Switch

I switched to wordpress for my new blog jdamer.com - so this is probably the end of this blog. Now that I am no longer hand-coding XML, I will likely use that blog as my sole means of blogging.

Lopromo Delay

Lopromo should have launched by now, but it is being pushed back as I am considering a few more features and methods of implementation before it is launched. The design and feel of the site is great, but I'd rather push it back than launch it in a sub-par state. Part of the problem is that it's not as mainstream friendly as I'd like it to be. It seems that too often companies in the web2.0 space are building exclusively for early adopters, which will mean many of the sites will be gone by the time the mainstream knowledge reaches that of early adopters. This is really a key to Microsoft's success that isn't often discussed, MSFT always makes products (at least thus far) that are built for the mainstream user. It gets a lot of flack from the tech community for doing this, but the strategy is much smarter than the early adopter strategy. Timing more than anything is why MSFT is a success. With that in mind Lopromo is being pushed back.

But I am working on other things for Lopico as well. I've recently begun an initiative to move to 205 cities in the next few months, I've added 10 recently and 40 more are planned. I'm also working on a few new advertising options which are unique in kind and should be very helpful from both a consumer and advertisers standpoint.

Side Note: I think that I may be dropping the other blog. I might not, but the less that I blog the less I use it so it's hard to justify.

eHub Interview

My interview for eHub was posted today. Thanks to Emily Chang for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts on Lopico and the web in general.

For eHub readers - I encourage you to leave feedback here on this blog, in your own blog, or through email to "info at lopico dot com." As I said in the interview I encourage criticism. When visiting Lopico I recommend checking out Akron to see how Lopico works when it is a little more developed. I'd also encourage you to try out Lopico Lovers and send some feedback. Lopico Lovers just launched, and I'd love to get more feedback on the user experience. Thanks in advance.

For non eHub readers - become one! eHub is a great resource which can really enrich your web experience. The web services listed on eHub are shaping the future of the web, and making it much more useful. Check it out.

The Chicken, The Egg, and AT&T

Much has been made lately of the end of the internet post. It's an interesting post, but seems to be a lot of speculation, and no one really seems to know for sure what is going on. First off, the quote from AT&T's Whiteacre is out of context, which is never very trustworthy, so keep that in mind as you read on.



The Quote:

"Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"



The way I understand it is this:

Telecoms and other ISPs have the users that Content Providers need, ISPs therefore think that they should be able to charge the CPs for access to the users. Essentially if you want our customers you're going to have to pay.



The rationale behind this is flawed however. The power is with the CPs not the ISPs. If an ISP tries to create a walled garden in which only sites that are paying the ISP get included, it will fail. If ISP1 is offering a limited selection of sites, the value of that connection is diminished. Especially, if ISP2 (say an ISP created by Google) allows access to all sites on the internet. Thus unless the ISP can establish a monopoly (which it can't) it will fail because it is offering an inferior product.



As the web stands currently ISPs (typically) are not paying content providers and content providers (typically) are not paying ISPs. This is the way it should be. Yes, ISPs do bring value to CPs in the form of users, but without the CPs the users would not want the ISPs in the first place. AT&T is having a chicken and egg problem.



This is really a failure of AT&T to understand what their consumers want, and an example of how bad ideas can be if you think about profits first and customers second - a situation that usually leads to less profits as customers move away from your services.



A side note for AT&T: how about including a web address on your hundreds of billboards, so that potential customers can find more information and you can track the success of your campaign.

IE 7 High-jacking feedburner

I downloaded IE7 Beta 2 Preview to my laptop today ( I will keep IE6 on my desktop for a while) and I must say that I like it, with one exception: it highjacks feedburner. As with this blog, many blogs allow readers to subscribe (easily) through feedburner. When you click on the feedburner counter in the right hand column you will be presented with a number of options for subscribing to this blog, unless you're using IE7. If you use IE7 you'll be prompted to add the feed to the new IE favorites manager. This is a bad idea. Granted RSS is not mainstream, (which the new IE will help) and this makes things easy, but this is too limiting. Limiting because it prevents you from easily tracking feeds across multiple computers. I'm a big fan of bloglines, mainly because I use more than one computer and like to read the same feeds on all computers. I would like to use feedburner to simply add feeds to bloglines, if I use IE7 I can't do this - I can still add feeds to bloglines, but it takes another step (or two). I now have to grab the url of the feed, go to bloglines and choose to add the feed, and finally paste the URL.
Hopefully this will be gone by the time IE7 is final.

technorati tags: IE7

Trenton, a sign of things to come.

I've added a new city to Lopico. Anyone from Trenton, NJ that would like to add their favorite local businesses to the web's most user driven local directory, can now do so.

This is just the first of 50 new cities that I plan to add over the next few months. Up next: Allentown, PA.

technorati tags: lopico, new jersey

7 in 11

Well I wouldn't say Lopico Lovers is off to an amazing start, but it's better than not having any reviews at all. So far 7 reviews have been posted in the 11 days that Lopico Lovers has been up. I wouldn't say that this is good, but at least a few people have followed the links to review a business. Of course, this is only beginning, and for right now, Lopico Lovers is not directly accessible from every page - but if you add a business or vote for a business there is a prompt asking you to review it.

Here are a few examples (when you get to the page click on the heart):

Maumelle Barbershop in Little Rock
Papa John's Pizza in San Diego
Jimmy John's in Columbus

If you have any suggestions about how to improve the review program, I'm more than willing to listen.

But, what makes it so great?

On Lopico you could previously only do three things: 1. Find Great Businesses 2. Add businesses to Lopico Listings and 3. Vote for your favorites (because of this I often said that Lopico used the F.A.V.orite system). Now, there's a fourth: introducing "Lopico Lovers" the new way to review your favorite local businesses. Lopico lovers is distinct from other review programs in that it requires you to say why you love a certain business, and also what you think could use improvement. This feature of the Lopico Lovers program is intended to create unbiased reviews. Typically on review sites reviewers tend to give either very posotive or very negative reviews; Lopico Lovers was designed to prevent biased and unhelpful reviews.

Lopico Lovers also ranks reviews based on the reviewers knowledge of the business that they are reviewing: think of it as Reviewer Rank. This feature takes responses from reviewers to two questions to determine familiarity with a particular business. I added this feature to give more insight into the value of the review. Someone may say that a business is terrible, but if they've only been there once, maybe they just had a random bad experience.

Personally I think the voting method is the easiest way to tell wether a business is good or not, but this gives you a little more information as to why something is being voted for.

For more on Lopico Lovers and Lopico in general check here and here.

technorati tags: lopico, reviews, local

Blogging about Blogging

I now remember why I initially thought using Blogger rather than hosting my own blog was a good idea: Blogger is easy. The new blog jdamer.com is up, but not much is happening with it, because it is a little more of a pain (not much more) to blog the way I'm blogging over there. Not much of a pain, and I wouldn't mind doing it that way if I were a blogger, but I'm not. I'm a web developer that happens to blog. If blogging was my main objective I would gladly use the slightly more difficult process for the tradeoff of the increased control, but I'm not a blogger.

I never thought that I would have a site that was my own name, I always find that a little egotistical, but I chose that name because it is simple and it's not trendy. Other names that I was considering (thingsTaggedLife, dig.glicio.us, and a handful of others) all seemed a little too Web 2.0 focused, I didn't want to limit my blog in that way. Anyway, if you happen to read this blog and you don't read the new blog, remember to visit Lopico Tomorrow or Thursday, because Lopico Lovers (the new Lopico review program) should launch tomorrow.

New Blog

If you'd like - but I don't know why you would want to - you can take a sneak peak at my new blog. It is now "live" at jdamer.com. But it's not really a blog yet. For now it is a basic html document, in fact most of the links aren't even set up yet, and I've barely thought about CSS. I'm working with the open source project PowerBlog to adapt this look as my template for my new blog - it's going alright but I don't really have time to waste on this. I considered using wordpress or blogger, but I've always built sites on Windows/ASP servers so this was probably my best option for now. We'll see. The logo - if you're wondering - is actually a manipulation of the Lopico logo.

Is Wink the Answer?

In my last post: "New Service that I'd like to see in 2006," I may have overlooked Wink as the answer to this problem. Wink is ambitious, and IMHO a great idea, but needs momentum, which, judging by the amount of coverage it is receiving right now, will not be a problem. Unfortunately, momentum now is not as important as momentum once it starts working. I've been trying for a few days to sync my bookmarks from del.icio.us, and have received an error message every time.

But wink is much more than a way to track bookmarks across multiple platforms (or at least it's supposed to support multi platforms soon); it is also a whole new way to look at search. Similar to what I was thinking about in my 1st post on del.icio.us, Wink uses the power of people to create, what I believe, is a better formula for relevance than any algorithm will ever deliver. For example, if I want to find a great article on a new css trick, I will have much better luck searching del.icio.us, than I would Google. Del.icio.us, will bring up fresh results that have been tagged the most, Google will bring up champions of the SEO game, which usually means pages that have been around for awhile, that may or may not have what I'm looking for. Google's link based algorithm is great, but people are better at determining a good resource than algorithms.

Thus the evolution of the web continues, but is it an evolution or a devolution? It seems that more and more evolution in terms of the web means relying on humans rather than machines to determine what is important. Sites such as digg, del.icio.us, lopico, judy's book, and amazon's mechanical turk, are all aimed in some way at tapping humans rather than machines as a resource for determining relevance or for answering questions.

Perhaps this is what web2.0 really means, the building of an entirely new information retrevial system based on humans and social interaction. Old methods are new again.

New service that I'd like to see in 2006

Other than my new site (which I am working very hard on, and really think will be great) the web service that I'd like to see most in 2006, is a bookmark tracking aggregator.

Every few days I check the number of times that Lopico has been bookmarked on del.icio.us, and sometimes Furl, but there are also a handful of other bookmarking sites such as yahoo myweb 2.0, de.lirio.us, clipmarks, and simpy. Del.icio.us is the most important for now, but to truly use bookmarking as a tracking tool I'd like to be able to see data from all of the sites compiled onto one page. Sort of like clusty meets social bookmarking.

Will it happen? Who knows, but if it does I'm sure I won't be the only one using it.


Technorati Tags:
bookmarking
del.icio.us
Web Services
lopico

New RSS / XML Logo

The RSS standard logo: Mozilla started it, Microsoft has said it will adopt it, and now the rest of the world should soon follow suit.

I joined in today by creating a new rss logo for Lopico as well as the new site and new blog that I am working on. I modified the logo slightly to keep the XML abbreviation for the benefit of those not yet familiar with the logo.

If you want, you can grab the logo that I created, or go to feedicons.com

Blogatus - A Blogger's Hiatus

I haven't been blogging much lately, well I've been blogging my usual amount after a heightened amount of blogging, and there are good reasons. First I'm working on a lot of great things right now that are consuming the majority of my time.

Some things that I'm working on:
I've discovered a way to make Lopico up to 10x faster and I am implementing the changes.

I'm finalizing some last (but important) details for Lopico Lovers

The majority of my time is being spent on my new site, which I am extremely excited about. The knowledge that I have gained over the past year is really helping me create a great new site. When this is launched it will give you some insight into what Lopico might look like in the future.

Lastly, it is the holiday season so I've been making a little more time for things tagged life.

What's been pushed back:
As much as I hate to say it, the mobile version of Lopico has been pushed back. I really like my mobile version, because it focuses on high level takeaways. Google Local Mobile is cool, but the prac app is lacking. When someone is using there phone to find a business they (for now) most likely just want the number and address. Why not the other features? 1. rates for Internet access via phone and 2. screen sizes and mobile browsers make it tough for most to really enjoy the Google Local Mobile features. That said, I think that if there is a Google Phone in the future it will be amazing.

My new blog is being pushed back, I don't really have time to design it or blog, so there's no point in me rushing to get it up.

----------
Side notes: I used Gmail to create this post. Flock is great for blogging and probably my prefered app, but Gmail is convenient for me while I'm at my other job (another reason things are moving slowly). GMail mobile is awesome - sorry blackberry.

Final Flock Beta Review

This will be my last post about Flock until it is released. I've had some fun with Flock with but now I've pretty much switched back to firefox full time. It's an interesting concept, but not one with mainstream appeal. Nothing wrong with being niche.

Overall Strengths:
1. The blogging is great, especially the ease of tagging. Maybe it's pure coincidence, but my "web 2.0 picks" blog was by far one of my most read of all time, tagging may have played a role in this.
2. It's essentially a skinned firefox, so if you like firefox you should like most of what Flock is about
3. I enjoy the integration with del.icio.us, but prefer the del.icio.us extension for firefox.
4. Web Standards support
5. Clucene, the open source search engine that searches your history as you type into the search box, is a nice feature for quick access to places you've been.

Weaknesses
1. Although it was on my strengths list the del.icio.us integration is also part of why I am sticking with Firefox as my primary browser. I don't like the fact that you cannot (or at least it's not obvious how to) bookmark sites outside of del.icio.us. This probably is not a problem for most, but as a web developer there are times that I release features or even entire sites that I don't want the public to have access to yet, being able to bookmark these things out of del.icio.us would be a big plus.
2. Feed Aggregation. It's sort of a pain if you like to control what feeds you read when. I really prefer Firefox's live bookmark. I like it better than Opera's feed reader, but I think it needs some work.
3. On the subject of feeds, Flock should join in with Microsoft and Mozilla and use the standard RSS button. I think the uniformity will be helpful to users, a consistent user experience lets users know what they're getting.

Overall, I think that Flock asks you to give up too much control of how you like to use your browser in exchange for some cool features that you could get elsewhere. Good concept, and I really like the design of it, but let me do things my way.

I think that it will get better.

Side notes:
I have purchased a new domain and hosting plan for my new blog, so this space will soon be disappearing.
"Lopico Lovers" - my review program - is set to launch in the next couple of weeks.
I did my first podcast yesterday, it's available on odeo, and not very good or interesting.
I've been noticing a large amount of traffic coming from my "web 2.0 picks" posting, I'll probably set up a cleaned up version to go along with the launch of the new blog.

Links from this post:
Odeo
Del.icio.us
Flock
Firefox
Clucene
Opera
Internet Explorer
Why are the links down here instead of inline? It's a new idea I'm trying out, comment if you like it or hate it, thanks.

Lopico on Your Site

I just noticed that Yelp added a feature that allows businesses to put a Yelp link on their site. The link displays the businesses current star rating (which if you've read my posts in the past you know I'm not a fan of) and the number of reviews on Yelp for that business. Why am I blogging about this? Well, I've been thinking about doing something similar with Lopico, but also very different. I recently released a button that anyone can place on their site, and gave directions for how to modify it so that it can be linked to the page where a business is listed, but I want to do more in the area of syndication. One idea that I've been kicking around is allowing votes to come to Lopico from other sites. I think that this is possibly a good idea, but it has high potential for compromised results. I've thought of a number of ways to tackle this problem, and you may see something happen with this in the future. Of course with the review program set to launch in the next couple of weeks (or maybe after the first of the year) there will be another new dynamic added to Lopico that I may consider syndicating.

For now if you want Lopico on your site you'll have to settle for this button

What else are you going to call it?

I just checked out the flock blog aggregate for the first time in a while, and one thing that I was surprised to see was a post scorning the name web 2.0. Not because the name web 2.0 is a fan favorite that no one scorns, but because another Flock blog has a graphic on the bottom that says "take back web 2.0." Clearly not intended to be taken as more than a play on Firefox's take back the web, but if you're going to advocate the "buzz word" in one place, don't bash it in another.

The name Web 2.0 is not the best and some use it just to try to generate buzz or to look hipper than they are. But, what else are you going to call it? Overall it describes a distinct movement in the web in which users are switching from using the web passively to using it interactively. With such a sea change, I see no reason why web 2.0 is not a suitable name.

The real problem is the number of attributes that people try to throw in to determine if a site is web 2.0 or not. This is where I tune out. Too many try to limit what web 2.0 is by saying that it is AJAX or Folksonomy or any other limited category that excludes a bunch of great new sites. I especially dislike anyone that tries to say which technology is driving web 2.0. The only one that I would say actually drives web 2.0 is high speed internet. It's not that most of these sites couldn't have existed before or that new tech is revolutionary, it's that dial up wouldn't support it.

All that a site needs to be web 2.0 is creativity. User input and independence help.

Still in Flock, still not checking the spelling.

technorati tags: web2.0

Name this blog

One last note, I hate the new name of my blog, and seem to be stuck in trying to come up with a great name for my blog. I'm looking for one that is not a registered domain as I plan on moving out of blooger. Any Ideas?

Still using Flock and posting much more.
Sometimes I feel like I am talking to my self in a socially acceptable manner when I blog. I'm guessing that I will not get any responses.

Web 2.0 Picks

Del.icio.us just got picked up by Yahoo! and it really was my second favorite web 2.0 site, but there are many more great sites that people should try. This is just a short list of sites that I like, and most likely there are more I am forgetting:

These are in no particular order:

1. eHub - have to start here because this is the place where I picked most of these from
2. Odeo - best place for podcasting, I use it mainly to stream podcasts.
3. Last.fm - not necessarily my favorite site, but I would definitely like it more if I had more time, you can look me up on Last.fm my login is jfromak, and yes I do like Wolf Parade that much
4. YouSendIt - Send huge files over the net
5. AllYourWords - Cool concept, but I think it's a dangerous playground for spammers
6. Springdoo - send email through voice. Something I've wanted for awhile.
7. Judy's Book - Yeah it competes with Lopico, but I like it (they have way more money).
8. Squidoo - Seth Godin doesn't like Akron, so I don't like him, but I agree that this type of niche search is the future of the net. Not sure that this is exactly what I'm thinking of but it's a start.
9. Meebo - AIM always seems to act up on my pcs, I now use Meebo with no problems.
10. Ning - I don't use it, but I like the idea and I'm looking forward to the apps people create.
11. Digg - I might not be a geek if it weren't for Digg.
12. Flock - still a little hesitant, but liking it more.
13. Netvibes - Great alternative to a big 3 homepage.
14. Cityfeeds - Good idea, needs more cities.
    
15. Riffs - Pretty cool app, but no clear sense of focus.
16. Instant Domain Search - I just like playing with this.
17. Lopico - well of course.

I'm sure there are more, but try these out if you haven't already. For more subscribe to eHub's feed.

technorati tags: ehub, odeo, last.fm, yousendit, sethgodin, lopico, web2.0, digg, meebo, ning, squidoo, netvibes