I have meant to post about AideRSS for months now, but I have been so busy at Suited Media gearing up for the launch of Pokerspace that I have completely disregarded this blog and its readers. Rest assured I will be able to put more time back to this blog in the coming months.

For those that are still listening, there is a something you should check out. Simply put, I am very impressed with some software, a web application, created by a small team of local professionals including a fellow UW graduate, Ilya Grigorik, the Chief Architect of AideRSS, Inc.

AideRSS may be the first tool I have found in a long while that has the potential to significantly improve on my Bloglines experiences. Bloglines has been my tool of choice for blog reading for years, but as past posts have detailed I have found some difficulties navigating and enveloping hundreds of feeds a day, many of which post a lot, some of which post rarely. I used to subscribe to almost 500 feeds, but I am now cut down to about 335.

After meeting Ilya I knew he was creating innovative and potentially important software. I met Ilya at my UW graduation ceremony a few months ago. We exchanged some of our experiences and entrepreneurial interests. Conversing with him before the ceremony confirmed my initial impressions that Ilya was a very interesting individual. We exchanged contacts and I actually added him to my LinkedIn, which is something I have never done with someone I have known for such a short time. Now, a quick glance at his LinkedIn profile shows he is linked to more than 100 very interesting people - I not surprised in the slightest.

I played with his site for a few hours one night after work and found it to be a very well designed web application. I explored the site throughly and found it be an exemplary example of modern web design. I imported my entire OPML feed of into the site and it performed flawlessly. The interface was clear and easy to follow. I especially liked the quality feedback it gives the user at the apprioriate times and places. Looking at the CSS confirmed my guess that it was a cleanly coded site. Without any hesitation I subscribed to the AideRSS blog.

I am also impressed with their technology, PostRank. In fact, I use a lot of the same ranking techniques myself and have
experience with most of the sites (Bloglines, del.icio.us, Technorati, etc.) that enable the AideRSS application. I still use a lot of these services to run what I call “tracking feeds” for myself, my company, and other key words I care about so that I can hear immediately whenever these terms are mentioned online. I used to love PubSub (if you remember of it… if not, research it). I wish it was still around. Wow, apparently it is coming back…

PubSub is undergoing redevelopment at the moment. We’ll be relaunching as PubSub 2.0 this winter with a host of exciting new features and services.

Anyways, I suggest you check out AideRSS.

Ning is a free online service for building and using social applications. I have not got the chance to play with it yet (but I will), but from what I see they have created a framework for users to build their own social applications. Very cool indeed. And, it is getting a lot of coverage on some of the blogs I read.

via TechCrunch, Om Malik’s Broadband Blog, SiliconBeat, IFTF’s Future Now

Why I blog this? This is Web2.0 all the way. Small team, innovative idea, excellent execution so far. Stay tuned to their blog for more details.

I highly recommend playing around with del.icio.us direc.tor: A High-Performance AJAX Web Service Broker.

Johnvey Hwang has created a really cool AJAX web application which builds off of del.icio.us. Essentially, it is a completely new GUI for del.icio.us written by somebody outside of del.icio.us. This is the power of web services in action. Johnvey even explains how he built this cool web application. And he has released everything using GPL and CC licenses.

Why I blog this? Needless to say, I was impressed. The web is finally moving in the right direction. Get ready for much richer web interfaces than we are used to. The del.icio.us direc.tor gets a spot on my bookmarks toolbar.

via Ajaxian.com

via IT Conversations comes a great presentation by Paul Graham about hackers.

In one of the most entertaining presentations from OSCON 2004, Paul answers the questions, what motivates great hackers? What do they need to do their jobs? How do you recognize them? How do you get them to come and work for you? And how can you become one?

I listened to the audio version of this presentation and I have to say I was impressed. It is not very often that someone understands us, let alone puts it all into words so others can try to understand us.

Why I blog this? Much of what Paul has said resonants deeply in me. Paul’s talk is highly recommended listening (or reading), especially if you would like to know more about me.

Olivier Toubia, a Ph.D. candidate at the Marketing Group (MIT) has an article (PDF) on Idea Generation, Creativity, and Incentives.

Idea generation is critical … However, there has been relatively little formal research on the underlying incentives with which to encourage participants to focus their energies on relevant and novel ideas.

This paper examines whether carefully tailored idea generation incentives can improve creative output.

Toubia used three types of incentives to trigger idea generation:

• A Flat condition where participants got $10 for showing up,
• An Own condition where participants got $3 for every idea they submitted, and
• An Impact condition where each participant got $2 for each time an idea they submitted built on one of their previous ideas.

See the sift everything experiment for a graph of the results.

Why I blog this? Because, as Jeremy says, “There is a lesson here for entrepreneurs regarding individual effort. If you can’t spend this kind of time [>20 hours], how can you hope to come up with deep, novel, thought-provoking ideas?”

iUpload Perspectives Applied (what’s this):

 Technorati Tags: Creativity, Ideas, Idea Generation, Incentives, Management Science

Only months ago, iUpload made a with a big splash at the annual DEMO conference - a leading industry conference for launching innovative technology products. At DEMO, the world was introduced to iUpload Perspectives. So, what is Perspectives and what does it have to do with blogging?

iUpload Perspectives lets you live in and communicate from one blog rather than wasting time going to different communities to submit content. You probably read your content in a single application - why not write it in single application as well.

Using iUpload Perspectives you can publish content to multiple different communities (such as Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad, Yahoo Groups, or even your own MovableType or Wordpress blogs) with ease. Or, you can choose to limit who can view your content by applying Perspectives such as the Salesforce or Plaxo Perspectives. In addition, you can add valuable, content specific Perspectives, such as a Technorati tag or the office favorite, the Google Maps Perspective. Included below is an example of the Google Map Perspective, in this case showing the location of the iUpload corporate office.

Perspectives has been included in iUpload’s corporate blogging suite for the past few months. But now, Perspectives are available for everyone to use.

To start using iUpload Perspectives today, you have two options:

• If you do not have a blog at all, you can sign up for a free Personal Publisher account here.
• If you already have one of more blogs or communities that you would like to use with Perspectives, you do not need to use an iUpload Personal Publisher blog. You can simply use our new QuickPost tool with your existing blogs!

When you sign up for iUpload Perspectives, a link will be generated allowing you to use our new QuickPost tool as a toolbar button. The QuickPost tool allows you easy access to many of the features in Perspectives, without any hassle.

Why I blog this? I have been working at iUpload for about a month and a half now, and much of that time has been spent working on Perspectives. It feels great to be working on the cutting edge of blog software, especially since I get to work with such a solid team of people. Expect even more innovation from iUpload in the coming weeks and months.

And, I look forward to hearing any comments, suggestions, criticisms, enhancement ideas, possible Perspectives, and so on, from my wonderful readers.

The boys (and girl) at iUpload are up to something…

As you may or may not have noticed, I have not made many posts lately. But, there is a reason for the lack of content - and a damn good one at that.

I have been working on a world-class blogging application with the amazing team of entrepreneurial software developers at iUpload.

Please buckle your seat belt and remain in a seated position, while I write up some of the juicy details.

In the meantime, take a look at where my mind has been in the last little while. I just happened to have started a del.icio.us account a few weeks ago, so the links it contains are a pretty good idea what I have been up to. Or, to put it visually, here is my extisp.icio.us over the last few weeks.

Mark Fletcher is the CEO of Bloglines, and that makes him someone worth listening to. He gave a presentation, titled “From the Garage: Lessons Learned Birthing and Building Web Start-Ups”, at the recent ETech conference. Some bloggers have posted highlights from his presentation.

I found this story via ITNorthWest Voice via Andrej Gregov’s Weblog. Read Andrej’s post for the highlights.

Of course, Mark also has his own blog, wingedpig.com, where he has noted some of the coverage of his presentation. He has also put a copy of the presentation online (PPT), due to popular request.

Why I blog this? Andrej’s highlights from Mark’s presenation are solid, and while most of it was not new information to me, one particular item did catch my eye: Outsourcing small projects to eLance.com — where contractors bid for your work.

I had never heard of eLance, and had not given much consideration to using contractors during the startup phase. But during startup, I really want to keep all my dedicated employees working on the real gold of the company. I could see value in outsourcing some of the small projects that are not make-or-break, but still need to be completed.

Dave Pollard of How to Save the World is one of the best bloggers I read. In his words, his blog is about environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.

How to Save the World posts are consistently filled with insightful commentary and analysis, and he goes into far more detail than most blogs. Dave’s content grabs my attention for a sizeable percentage of his posts (i.e. he gets a click out of Bloglines to his actual site), like yesterday’s post entitled Meeting the Acute Need for Entrepreneurial Skills.

The Idea: The New Economy will have an explosive need for critical entrepreneurial skills. Universities are not equipped or inclined to provide them. You can’t learn them just by reading a book. We need to create a whole new ‘channel’ for entrepreneurial education.

Why I blog this? Many of my posts will include links to multiple blogs I am reading, but sometimes I feel the need to highlight specific bloggers who are tuned in more than most. Dave is a blogger who is changing the world with every word he writes.

Mitch Ratcliffe is the founder of a small company named Persuadio. Persuadio was recently featured in Esther Dyson’s PC Forum - one of hottest annual events in the technology and venture capital worlds. Why? Because Mitch is an entrepreneur with an innovative piece of software. His company has created a free blog social relationship exploration tool called MyDensity. MyDensity maps the first two degrees of the social network around any URL. People can use it to figure out where they are and how people find them. The basic idea is to increase understanding of how people’s sites are rising and falling in popularity and where those changes start in the market.

What we hope to let you do with our tool is let you see where [on the Web] you are compared to all of these other kinds of interests and then measure how much value is somewhere and who you need to influence in order to get people to start paying attention to you.

I found out about MyDensity thru stories Mitch is posting about his ongoing entrepreneurial experiences. See his Red Herring posts entitled We’re talking real money now (Mar. 9/05), Crunch Time (Mar. 17/05), and The extraordinary lightness of entrepreneuring (Mar. 23/05).

Also check out RatcliffeBlog, his personal blog, where he announces Persuadio LLC.

Why I blog this? Because I think he is on to something.

We need more ways to visualize the heaps of metadata the Blogosphere produces. The picture below (created about 24 hours ago) shows the results of a search for this blog. This is a young blog so I did not expect any results, but I had a few.

Searching with MyDensity returns a graph that you can dig into. Needless to say I am impressed with the application. The visual interface and navigation need work but can be upgraded later - innovative functionality comes first. When the resources are available a better visual interface can be built and MyDensity could be set to kick ass. But hey… maybe I am biased?

Why I really blog this? As you may have guessed, the primary reason for this post is to attract Mitch’s attention. I would hazard a small bet that he notices. Maybe this post will help increase Echo Generations popularity. I guess I will just have to check in from time to time using MyDensity to see if it does.

If he notices this post I wager mucho dinero that the next time I use his search engine the results for this blog will be worth posting about… again. :)

via ZDNet - Startup Persuadio visualizes opportunity in the Internet’s long tail. ZDNet also hosts an audio interview with Ratcliffe (mp3).