Best theatrics: Soocial.com

Founder Stefan Fountain made the conference’s most entertaining presentation. His style was relaxed and funny but slightly intense at the same time. His theme was how much trouble he had getting his mom’s phone number into his new mobile phone. His product is going to solve this problem for him and everyone else: “Enough about my mom, let’s talk about your mom.” My own contact list is a fragmented mess and if he solves it elegantly, he’s on to something.

Most informing: Simon Willison

I’ve been meaning to look into what exactly openId is and how it works. Simon saved me the trouble. Very interesting.

Most surprising: Rasmus Lehrdorf

Why should a talk by the creator of a programming language I don’t like interest me? Sure, Rasmus is a hero and PHP is used to run a large chunk of the web, but PHP causes pain while Rails is sweet. Rasmus’s talk turned out to be both entertaining and thought provoking. Why haven’t I heard of Valgrind until now? Note to self: Always show up to talks by superhackers.

There was lots more of juicy stuff in the conference. Digg’s Kevin Rose and Last.fm’s Matthew Ogle and Anil Bawa-Cavia had some thought provoking stuff to say and the Last.fm guys presented an interesting hack I might blog more on later.

In short: Good stuff.

Techcrunch reports that Digg.com suffered at least two hours of downtime yesterday. Today, Digg’s response was extremely sluggish and according to my browser (see screenshot on the right), the bottleneck was a server called hitbox.com, which seems to belong to WebSideStory, a company that provides visitor analytics among other services.

I’m currently using Google’s Analytics service to analyze user traffic on various sites, am experimenting with using Photobucket to serve up the images on this blog and rely on Snap.com to give link previews.

More and more blogs and sites are relying on these kind of backend mash-ups. Digg’s problem with their analytics provider highlights the risk of outsourcing too many features of a business critical site to outside parties.

ps. When I was trying to find the Techcrunch post regarding Digg, I was held up by… you guessed it: The Google Analytics server.

Update: In an interview on TalkCrunch, the Digg team gives an obvious explanation to outsourcing their analytics. Because their business model relies on ads, their customers have to get a third party to tell them how much traffic the site actually gets.

I’ve just enabled link previews from Snap via a wordpress plugin. When the mouse hovers over a link on this blog, an image preview is shown. This is one of the better browsing experience enhancements I’ve seen in a while.

The fact that they have a link to their site on every preview is a clever and powerful viral marketing technique.

In the US, the telecoms have been lobbying for congress to pass a bill that would allow them to charge extra fees to guarantee that certain Web sites run faster than others instead of treating all packets of Web information the same regardless of their content.

This bill now seems to have fizzled out according to the Save the Internet Blog: “Huge Victory for Real People as Telco Bill Dies“.

Obviously, the Save the Internet blog is not the most neutral of sources on Net Neutrality, but the demise of this bill seems nevertheless to be fortunate for the web’s future.

At the very least, net neutrality levels the playing field for small Internet start-ups that don’t have big bucks to pay the telco’s to ensure that their data packets are equal to Google’s.

Business Week has some of the most interesting podcasts around. Their cover story podcast is often quite entertaining especially since the host, Business Week’s executive editor John Byrne, has a sceptical and humorous interviewing technique.

Another BW offering is the CEO’s guide to technology which featured a Tim O’Reilly interview earlier this summer. Tim is quite candid regarding the “web 2.0″ buzzword and he makes some interesting points regarding the tech industry.

Moving from business to technology, another podcast I recently discovered is The Linux Action Show. These guys are of the pragmatic school of Linux (as opposed to the more ideological one) and are defectors from OS X.

Other interesting podcasts include the various BBC offerings (most notably Digital Planet, In Business and Melvin Bragg’s In Our Time) and finally IT Conversations.

Developing Rails applications with Eclipse running on a laptop with 512 Mb RAM means that being economical with processing power and memory is crucial.

Just over two decades ago John Gage coined Sun Microsystem’s slogan “The network is the computer”. Only recently has this become a reality to some extent on a consumer level and thanks to various web services, saving RAM and CPU cycles by outsourcing them to the network has become possible.

The above screenshot shows four programs running in KDE’s system tray. Starting from the left they are: a calendar program (KOrganizer), an instant messaging client (Kopete), an RSS feed monitor (Akregator) and a gmail inbox monitor (KCheckGmail).

Until recently, I was running Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client instead of the GMail notifier. Thanks to Google and the authors of KCheckGmail, I can halve the memory allocated to email by shutting Thunderbird down and turning to KCheckGmail, which does nothing but check my email and send me to GMail.com when I want to read or reply.

The other applications mentioned are still running locally, not on the network.

Google is a pioneering force in providing open and reliable APIs for programmers to access their databases. An obvious motive for this is to have people stop using whatever office tools they currently use and outsource more to the network, i.e. Google.

A KCheckGmail equivalent for Google’s blogreader and calendar would provide the means to outsource even more of our office tools and it is only a matter of time until someone writes them.