For a good account of several of the sessions here at Web 2.0, go see Readwriteweb.com.

I’ll be writing up the sessions I’m attending later. I try to do the stream of consciousness and I end up writing 20 lines of tangential thought for every interesting idea…

I need a tool that allows me to remember places using Google maps. I envision a web-hosted service on which I can add “places”, by address, to an ever-increasing inventory. I wanted to be able to open up my “places” and see all the locations that I’ve marked. This would make travelling much easier. Right now, I’m entering and re-entering addresses into Google Maps and it’s really a pain.

Kind of like bookmarks for web pages, but bookmarks for places instead. Really simple. A lot like FoundCity but more personal and, of course, not just New York City.

If someone already has this, please let me know!

Steven Johnson, author of Interface Culture, Emergence, and Everything Bad Is Good for You, has written an article in Discover comparing Web 2.0 with a rainforest. Very interesting!

Tim O’Reilly, Trend Spotter, has written what is sure to be a modern classic in What is Web 2.0, his first definitive piece on the topic. It’s a good one.

Conference Season is upon us. I’m going to two in the next month.

• Web 2.0 Conference
  Next week I’ll be traveling out to San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Conference, hosted by Medialive and O’Reilly Media. I hope to meet a lot of the folks who I’ve been writing about, including the makers of many of the cool applications that are popping up like mad. Any Bokardo readers in the area? Drop me a line and we can have a chat! My email is bokardo at bokardo daught com.
• User Interface 10 Conference
  The week after is the big one: User Interface 10 hosted by us at UIE. We’re really excited about this one because we have more people from more places coming to a line-up that you just can’t find anywhere else. I know I haven’t posted about this much, but I’m very proud of the speakers we have: Gerry McGovern, Molly and Eric, Kelly Goto, Kim Goodwin, and of course our founder Jared. I’m really looking forward to it!

Tis the Season.

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot going on in the Web 2.0 development world these days. A few masochistic folks have even been trying to document a good part of it. I’m in awe of them:

• TechCrunch (Michael Arrington & Keith Teare)
  “TechCrunch is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing every newly launched web 2.0 business, product and service.”
• eHub (Emily Chang)
  “eHub is a constantly updated list of web applications, services, resources, blogs or sites with a focus on next generation web (web 2.0), social software, blogging, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, location mapping, open source, folksonomy, design and digital media sharing.”

Seriously, these two sites are great for finding out what apps are on the bleeding edge of Web 2.0. I just hope the site creators don’t burn out, because they’re doing great work that’s really helpful if you have the jones for information overload.

:)

Add these two sites with tech.memeorandum, which I profiled in-depth the other day, and you’ve got yourself three fantastic aggregation services. That’s what its all about…

(via tech.memeorandum) Google is testing two new services that promise to change what we do on the web (again).

One is personalized search history. If you have a Gmail account, sign in and on your Google home page (http://www.google.com/ig) you can find your Google Search History in the top right nav bar, at this address (http://www.google.com/searchhistory/).

Personalized Search History is important for privacy issues. We’ll trust Google more if we know what information they’re keeping about us. Folks are are getting leary about what Google knows and what they would potentially use it for. This is a great way to increase transparency and alleviate public fear. And who knows, if they provide RSS feeds for this…someone will come up with some really cool way to aggregate it.

The second is a way to provide feedback about search results. They’re testing a new feature designed for giving feedback when you get spam in your search results. Presumably, over time Google would be able to offer a better search by gathering this sort of feedback from users.

Search Feedback is huge because it’s including users in the filtering (architecture of participation). In addition to giving page links weight, this would be a more community-involved way to refine search results. Just yesterday I wrote how I think filtering is incredibly important right now. I think this feature is the tip of the iceberg.

This is incredibly big news! I can’t wait to see where it goes from here…

Here’s a recommendation for a book recommendation system: What Should I Read Next?

Pubsub linkcount is confusing. I have no idea what it means. One day bokardo gets 3 inlinks and its ranked 1,691 (in the top 4% of something). The next day it gets zero links and drops down to 91,755. The day after that its gets 6 inlinks and rises to 14,617. It would seem that the rank is based on the activity of other sites somehow. Is this just counting the number of links on a given day and ranking by that day only?

Does anybody know what this means?

By now you’ve heard why Ajax is great for web-based applications:

• It is standards-based
• It is degradeable with unsupporting browsers
• It is relatively easy to implement
• The benefits of a one-screen interface (no disruptions for page refreshes)

The Side Benefit of Ajax

But there’s another side benefit, that I think might be as influential as any of the above. When you build an Ajax application, you need to break down your server calls into smaller chunks. You’re no longer requesting complete web pages when you hit your server, you’re requesting information via a simplified API that you create (something as simple as a PHP script, perhaps).

This is yet another step toward microcontent, or pieces of data that live on their own and are called together to form applications screens or web pages. If you weren’t planning on accessing your content in this way before you decided to use Ajax techniques, you will definitely have to if you move that way.

This seems to be an overall trend, however. First we gain granular access to our own content for our own needs, and then we provide public access to others after we see how useful it is.