B. Mann Consulting

Upcoming has a way to *reconfigure* your event feed. Here's a link directly to the pipes page for this feed.

On the fly remapping and merging of arbitrary structured data coming out of feeds? So, um, wow.

And yes, Not For Humans™. But still, deeply cool.

My buddy chrys pinged me about a sponsorship opportunity in Europe. The 2007 Europe Photoblogger Meetup is happening in Berlin, September 7th to 9th, and the organizers are still looking for sponsors. Paging Yahoo Europe, or perhaps most especially the fine folks at Flickr, you might want to jump on this one.

I won't be making it to this, but I am looking forward to DrupalCon Barcelona, which takes place later in September. I have some ideas brewing on putting together an Enterprise Lounge concept to talk about Drupal...

So, my phone was ringing off the hook this morning with people wanting feedback on the announcement that Microsoft Canada is opening a software development center here in Vancouver.

What's my reaction? It's great! Microsoft Canada has been taking some interesting steps lately, like hiring David Crow, who kick started the Toronto tech scene over the past few years. It was great to catch up with him at the Microsoft Expression launch event I attended a couple of weeks back.

Yahoo missed the chance to have an engineering team here when they moved the entire Flickr team down to San Francisco (the last big tech acquisition here in town, rumoured to be around $40M). Google has spoken with some local universities, but they tend to be computer science snobs, so they went for the more well known Waterloo (also to keep an eye on RIM, which being in the mobile space is going to become increasingly important).

I see the Microsoft lab here in Vancouver as an increasing acknowledgment that "stuff is happening" here. We've got a unique mix of creative and tech people, big companies and start ups, and world events like the 2010 Olympics that are going to put us at center stage.

So...Yahoo and Google...when are the labs coming to town? And, unlike Microsoft who are rumoured to be going to boring Burnaby or Richmond -- stick a center downtown somewhere. Gastown and Yaletown still have lots of room for you!

If you tune to Global TV for the noon show, I may be on there. I've also briefly talked to Business News Network, so we'll see if that's a go for the evening slot. Busy day....

Update: I got a small clip on Global TV in the noon show, which re-aired at 5pm and 6pm. I didn't manage to get the digital version of that clip, I'll update again if I can get a copy. I did end up getting interviewed by Howard Green from BNN (was formally Report on Business TV). It was myself and Bernie Magnan, Chief Economist for the Vancouver Board of Trade. The clip was up about an hour after the show, and I managed to find this direct link to the episode. I'm about 5 - 7 minutes in, and unfortunately it will only play on Windows as far as I can see.

All I can say is....whew!

The response to the OSCMS Summit this year has been simply overwhelming. OK, OK, maybe we could have predicted that making it a) free and b) in Silicon Valley and c) on the Yahoo Campus would drive attendance, but...

...well, I'm overwhelmed. And the conference is, too, which is why I've been basically radio silent about it on the blog here: we've been full for weeks, and madly scrambling to see about staying in Yahoo's good graces so we could fit a few more people into nooks and crannies. Promoting it more was the last thing we needed to do because of our space constraints.

I want to specifically thank Bradley Greenwood for taking point inside Yahoo, and to the twin 'bots, Jeff Robbins and Angie Byron, for website and schedule wrangling and working through all the details from the outside. 

I'm really looking forward to learning more from the collection of Open Source CMS projects that will be attending. I *still* would like to see broader participation, but of course this time around we were slammed for space from day one. And, really, note to self: if there hasn't been a US Drupal gathering in a while......make it it's own event.

I am stoked that a large portion of the Joomla crew are coming out -- they've got a massive release on the go with many, many exciting changes and I want to learn more. Alfresco should serve nicely to teach us all a little more about "enterprise" features. They also went 100% GPL open source on my birthday this year, so it will be interesting to see what changes that brings.

Lastly, but absolutely not least, Yahoo: again, thanks to all involved for sponsoring and letting us bring this event to the heart of your campus. I want to see lots of cool code integrating with your sites and APIs, from the ever present Flickr to Yahoo Maps, Pipes, and all the other stuff you've got brewing. 

I'll be in San Francisco late tomorrow until noon on Monday, March 26th. My time will be filled out with OSCMS events plus the overflow of Drupal activities at the Sheraton Sunnyvale, but if you're in the area and/or attending, I'm looking forward to connecting with you.

OSCMS Summit is something that I helped pull together in short order last year. We had great attendance (about 300 people over 3 days, with about 150 people per day) and lots of local Vancouverites mixing in.

This year, Vancouver has the Vancouver PHP Conference which is going on right now, and the OSCMS Summit 2007 is happening down at Yahoo's Sunnyvale campus. Yep, Yahoo: we joked about this a while back, and then some of the folks we know inside Yahoo said -- sure, we'd love to help out with this. Moral of the story: ask and ye shall receive. I have to say, Yahoo should be applauded for this: they've really been reaching out to developers lately, with great events like Hack Day showing off some of the great work they've got going on.

Once again, the OSCMS Summit will be a kind of "container" event for other projects to gather around. This does mean the Drupal hordes will be descending...but, if all I wanted to do was a Drupalcon, that's what I would push for. I'm still really passionate about having various open source projects come together and discuss solutions and approaches to web content: we're all facing the same challenges and the nature of open source means it's that much easier for us to learn from one another. 

I'm currently at a Yahoo! Canada preview event at the Opus Hotel. I'm actually skipping out on the Vancouver Drupal User Group because it's taking longer than I expected (sorry, guys!).

Yahoo! is going to be focusing heavily on the Canadian market. I've long been convinced that focusing on the Canadian market is a great strategy. Obviously, it's not as large as the US market, but the 'search density' is very low: it's very easy to get top ranks for keywords that include Canadian place names.

Yahoo! Canada has grown from 12 people to over 100. Of course, most of those are based out east: there is a small sales ofice here in Vancouver. Next goal (for me): get an R&D lab in Vancouver. Of course, I still know more people out of SF Yahoo than here in Canada: most of the focus here is on sales rather than technology.

The Panama Search advertising demo was very interesting. Most of the presentation was focused on ad purchasers, rather than inventory providers. It seems to have a much more robust dashboard and great geo-location capabilities, visualization, analytics, etc. -- they actually mentioned 13 provinces and territories.

Via IM from James and posting from bopuc, it seems that Flickr is patenting "interestingness".

What?!

Are you kidding me?!

How about we do the same thing...only call it "intriguingness". Perhaps "disgustedness" would be a better term.

Reading through the patent, it seems very specific to interestingness and Flickr's implementation. So, I would kind of figure...why bother patenting? I guess this is the lawyers at Yahoo getting hinky.

I ran into Todd Sieling at Take5 Cafe today (our defacto Innovation Commons - sign up to put your money down now!). He's been working with a company down in the valley on something very timely -- a social bookmarking site called ma.gnolia. Todd actually briefed Roland and myself on this a couple of months back, and we were bitterly disappointed when we didn't get a live demo. Today, Todd clicked me through a couple of sample pages. What can I say? The design looks nice and polished, we quibbled a bit about what the semantics of "send a link" are and what icons should like, and so on. I'm looking forward to kicking the tires on it when it goes live some time in the new year, especially since its target is regular web users. Saying things like "get a del.icio.us account and subscribe to your private 'for:' feed in RSS" pretty much results in blank stares today...

So, can another (or any?) social bookmarking site succeed? Well, aside from arguing as Paul Kedrosky does that del.icio.us' installed base are "early-adopter geeks utterly unrepresentative of anything approximately a larger market than del.icio.us's current 300,000 supposed users". Of course, there are all sorts of interesting comments in that post going back and forth about whether buying del.icio.us was "worth it" for Yahoo, and I've actually changed my mind a couple of times because of the different viewpoints there.