Stuartblog2

Has anyone ever noticed the newspaper vending machine database that I have in my blog side bar? I’m afraid to click on it. I’m sure it stopped working months ago. It wasn’t really easy to set up. It must have taken half an hour not including hours trying to find the necessary tools. Now with [...]

Thinking about the CleveWiki project motivated me to articulate precisely what I’m looking for in a review aggregator.

Open data. My data should be mine. I’ll post it and you’ll scrape it. That way several aggregators can have access to a combined and much larger pool of reviews. They’ll compete for eyeballs based on how well [...]

I mentioned del.icio.us in another post as a way to help keep track of the web presence of various Cleveland organizations. It may take some work to integrate del.icio.us into CleveWiki. In the mean time, there’s plenty of valuable information there to be stolen.

Cleveland : I’ve got a somewhere between 400 and 500 web [...]

Wow! Lawrence.com is the best. (True dat!)

Lawrence.com is a well designed community portal. It looks inviting. The layout is intuitive. The information is well organized and accessable. It all seems very well thought out. I’ve only examined it for a short time but I’ve been impressed on occassion by attention to detail. It’s all developed [...]

Another obvious component for a community portal will be a merchant database. I’ve been very determined to keep track of local restaurants online. Spatial organization and tagging were more important to me than rankings and reviews or other features so I moved from one mapping site to the next. I finally settled on something called [...]

One of the first components of the portal will be an events system. I recommend Upcoming.org. There’s an API so events can be entered programmatically. There are RSS feeds and iCal feeds so events can be extracted and manipulated conveniently. Upcoming.org has first-mover momentum and now that they’re under the Yahoo! umbrella I think that [...]

I’ve been seeing more Cleveland events pop up on Upcoming.org recently. I hope the Cleveland Wiki people take advantage of existing resources rather than compete with them. The difficulty in creating a community portal isn’t technological. It’s social. The crucial element is to get a critical mass of participants. I’m concerned that if this new [...]

As a companion to my cheese rant, I offer these links as context:
The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town:BLACKBERRY PICKING (James Surowiecki)

Last month, though, it became clear that a patent-infringement case
could force the BlackBerry’s manufacturers, a Canadian company called
Research in Motion, to kill the service in the United States by the end
of the year. [...]

All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. -Emerson

Warp and woof. I love those words. But it’s not the imagery that makes this quote powerful. It’s the message. No one owns ideas because no one’s innovation [...]

I was delighted to see Dine and Dish back for episode five but I was a little skeptical about the theme. Don’t get me wrong. I like the entire spectrum of Asian food but Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian, Filipino, Thai and Vietnamese food all in the same month? That’s a lot of eating and I’m [...]