The new found and read blog is an amazing resource for startup folk. The recent series on vesting hacks has been incredibly useful.

The site uses an innovative approach where members can suggest topics or stories, and the community votes on whether they would like to read that article. The best ideas are then turned into articles. It gives the site a real feeling of community, and makes sure that the articles are laser-focussed on the needs of that community.

Found & Read is powered by public square, Christina Wodtke's cool new CMS, which makes this kind of open-source editorial process super-easy.

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Blain's presentation on how they are scaling Twitter (with ruby) to cope with the massive levels of traffic they are experiencing was awesome!

Blain was the developer at the center of last week's big tempest in a teapot. He made some remarks in an interview that DHH took as an attack on the ability of ruby on rails to scale. The whole thing blew out of proportion but led to some good code, so all's well that ends well I guess.

For the second day in a row, a slideshow from the silicon valley ruby conference is the most popular slideshow on slideshare. Do we have a geeky audience or what? I love it!

The second annual Silicon Valley Ruby Conference is this weekend. Writeups here here, and here.

Should be a blast! Here's the upcoming page. If you're a Rubyist and you're in Silly Valley already, it would be even sillier to miss this!

Andre Charland's startup
just launched RobotReplay, which is a really cool!

It's a javascript nugget that you drop on your website. The javascript records user actions. So far pretty standard web instrumentation. But the cool thing is that it lets you watch your users actions as a movie. This is AWESOME, because it lets you gather insights about your users in a very unorganized fashion. Just drop the code into your site, and then watch movies whenever you have a spare minute.

I'm not clear on whether it ACTUALLY grabs mouse position in real time, or if it just does interpolation (you need to grab mouse position in order to be useful. Clarification from someone who knows?). And I'm not sure about what the performance implications are of this code: I'm always very careful about adding 3rd-party javascript to my site, because I've seen problems in the past (with stuff like google analytics, for example). But for a site that's in early alpha / beta / pre-techcrunch mode, this is a great way to keep an eye on what the heck people are doing when they visit your site. You can do user research, without really doing user research!

I've got it installed on my blog, and I've been enjoying watching the movies. No real insights yet (I'm at the Web 2.0 Expo, and the internet connection is dog-slow, so haven't been able to watch many users yet). But pretty neat stuff!

The internets are all atwitter about comments made by Twitter developer Alex Paynt, which seemed to partially blame Ruby / Rails for scaling problems twitter has been having.

The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that scaling
Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it. The problem
is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel
cluster, in our case) means more requests to your database. At this
point in time there’s no facility in Rails to talk to more than one
database at a time.

Kevin Burton is raising money for his new startup (tailrank) in a pretty innovative way: he's selling "golden tickets" that, besides letting you beta test his software (a "pro" account without adds for 6 months), also come with a public thank-you link on his blog. Scoble bought a ticket, and so did Dave Winer.

This is totally silly && awesome. Check out web2ornot.com. Finally we'll have at least some collective agreement as to which sites best exemplify the web 2.0 meme [via].

One thing a lot of people at Web 2.0 seems to agree with is that the tools for doing AJAX development aren't mature yet, and this makes developement more painful than it has to be. This is a market opportunity for development tools vendors. One company with an interesting approach to this space is Morfik.

Mary Meeker presented at the web 2.0 conference this morning [pdf]. Her presentation included this screenshot (click on image for a larger view).

I'm spending more time in the hallways and lest time in the lecture halls today, the second day of the Oreilly web 2.0 conference. The buzz around this space right now is heavy. Some concepts and ideas and theories that have come up in my hallway conversations, in no particular order...

SocialText: Opensourcing the whole enchilada!

Rollyo: New customized search engine

Joyent: Web-based outlook clone with microformat support

BunchBall: Hosted platform for building social applications and games with flash

RealTravel: Travel Social networking

Zimbra: Open source web-based outlook killer with incredible plugin support

ZVents: Web-based event search

KnowNow : Receive notification the second your RSS feeds update

Orb : Turn your pc into a media server

Wink : social bookmarking with search

AllPeers : toolkit for building desktop apps that run in firefox

Flock : social internet browser

The good
Yahoo is clearly focusing hard on giving publishers LOTS of control as to what kind of adds appear on their site. They talked about the ability to eliminate particular advertisers, only carry advertisements from certain categories, etc. As a content producer, this is awesome. I hate seeing adds for products that I don’t like or wouldn’t endorse on my blog.

The bad
Yahoo! 360 / YahooMyWeb2.0 are currently a data "roach motel". Data goes in but it doesn’t go out. Not very web 2.0.

The ugly
How many social networking /tagging applications does yahoo have exactly? It currently seems to be a sprawling mess. Sometimes when you try to use one, you end up using another. It's time to trim the herd and provide a killer integrated social bookmarking / networking / search application.

The open-source infrastructure workshop was fascinating. Open-source software development is (by now) a fairly well-understood social process. But how do you create infrastructure (servers and bandwidth) that costs real money to run, for the purpose of making a more open and remixable web? This is a business and social problem, not just a technology problem.

Lots of workshops on offer this morning: I'm in the "Business Case of AJAX" workshop. This is a topic near and dear to my heart: I've thought for some time that Macromedia's excellent value proposition work for RIAs could be repurposed wholesale.

A query on "subversion" now surfaces links for download, UML, FAQ, and project page as sub-elements of the first result. Nicely done! Google is building more useful data into each results (searches on company names now reveal the current stock price, for example), but this is the first time I've seen the most useful subsections of a site called out like that. Click on the image for a larger view.

Given that we were "camping" in a corporate office, it was really more of a geek pajama party than a "camp" (though there WAS a tent). More coverage here and here gives a really good sense of what went down. Some cool things that I saw, in no particular order...

AJAX and rich clients are indeed intimately related, contrary to what some people say. And it's not just that they sprang up at the same time, in the same companies, and are therefore associated with each other.

Stewart Butterfield brought this point home at the BayCHI Web 2.0 panel. The following is a transcription [via] from the podcast of the event:

My recent post on how web 2.0 is very open until you try to make money by remixing got some interesting responses, including an excellent comment by Paulo Eduardo Neves.

They should just put a price tag in it. Something like: if you are making money from this API, you'd have to pay US$0.0001 per access. At least somebody would be able to make a business plan before starting to code.

If Web 2.0 is all about openness, then it's time we have transparant pricing. Old school players like eBay have transparent pricing. The web 2.0 companies that talk about openness all the time owe us developers a transparent pricing model!

How about it, Technorati? Do you really want us to remix? Let us know the price tag for commercial API access before we start to code!

The BayCHI Web2.0 panel last night (see technorati tag baychi for full coverage) was as good as ever. Everyone on the panel emphasized that openness was very important, that remixing was key to the web. But what came through was that companies like technorati and flickr are very happy to let you leverage their APIs ... AS LONG AS YOU DON'T MAKE ANY MONEY.

Web 2.0 is all about remixing, not about designing. The best metaphor for web 2.0 is the DJ, not the composer. Web 2.0 is a product of remix culture.

Attention all cars. AJAX is not Web 2.0. In fact, it is in many ways in opposition to web 2.0. AJAX applications create web-pages that are less machine-readable / linkable (try bookmarking a google map). This is a mistake that I have seen some otherwise smart people making, so it's important to clear this matter up.

Clinton agrees with me

Before we get to Web 2.0., it is useful to consider what does not characterize Web 2.0. For instance, for all of the love that rich client-side AJAX applications such as Gmail have earned, that alone does not make them Web 2.0. Simply having a Flash or WML interface or a XHTML+CSS homepage is not enough to qualify. In fact, in some cases these sites actually lock in more control over the data and manage the presentation even further.

Attention is a hot topic on the internets. Most of the metadata that is used in cataloging and searching the web is very labor-intensive to create.

Google made it's first quadrillion by being the first to use the metadata inherent in hyperlinks to catalog the web. This was, of course, awesome. But the only people allowed to contribute metadata in a google-based world are web publishers.

In my last post, I provided links to a lot of well-written criticism of the “tag cloud” / folksonomy approach to organizing content. Yet it’s pretty clear that tag-based folksonomies make it easier to find certain types of information.

"Write a complete Web 2.0 app on my own" (via 43things.com)

And can you blame them? Much better to have a team on that kind of job.

Yahoo! Search blog has a nice writeup of the "recent innovations in search" panel that Rashmi organized last fortnight.

Tagging (a la del.icio.us / flickr / technorati) is a clever newish technique for empowering users to organize digital content. But alas, in the world of blogging, and in the world of the west-coast tech elite, nothing is ever just a useful, good innovation. It’s always the “new new thing”, the game-changing paradigm that will eliminate all that comes before it.

Tagging jumped the shark with Clay Shirkeys overheated “ontologies are overrated” speech at ETech 2005, and since then a host of articles challenging the idea of tags as information nirvana have emerged like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Below are some choice excerpts from the backlash.

The BayCHI panel on Search innovation was a huge success. I’ve never seen the main auditorium at PARC so full…the aisles were full of people sitting on the floor (don’t tell the fire marshal) and 30 or so people had to watch remotely from a television in the lobby.

I’ll start by summarizing the key themes that came out in the panel discussion / questions and answer session. I’ll follow up with a blow-by-blow that captures some of the specifics of the show-and-tell that each company was allowed to do.