Portuguese Digg

Posted by bordalix Mon, 20 Feb 2006 14:40:00 GMT

Digg is a huge success, so every one is trying to make a clone of it. The first one to win a lot of attention was Meneame, a spanish implementation of Digg, since they decided to deliver there code under the GPL license.

With free code available, it became a simple matter of time for other clones to pop up trough the net like mushrooms. And Portugal is no different: there is at least two new ones, ouvidizer.com and domelhor.net.

The latest is Paulo Querido's new project, and caught my attention due to some great links I have found there:

  • Belgium researchers were able to play the surrounding sound that was present during the painting of a south american vase with more the 5 centuries. You can hear people laughing, watch the video (in french);

  • Following Tetris, Russia give us a new form of addiction, Putin Chess. The link from domelhor.net points to a portuguese written page, more on Putin Chess here;

  • After Segway, Dean Kamen invented two devices, one able to purify 1000 liters of clean water a day, and the other one is a power generator able to make a kilowatt of anything that burns. More on CNN Money.

As you can see, it adds value, by helping one find news of interest, but the design of any of the webpages can be a lot better. Well, best wishes for everyone.

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2005 2.0

Posted by bordalix Wed, 28 Dec 2005 15:06:00 GMT

Everybody is trying to make a list of important things for 2005. Well, I was to, but decided to simply label it the "2.0 year". New business models are building from the peer-to-peer social model found in the net, and from the ability to explore the long tail of the market. In the first, digg became bigger then Slashdot, del.icio.us was bought by Yahoo, and wikipedia and folksonomy became part of our lexical.

On the second, iTunes Music Store proved to be a huge business success, eBay paid several billions to have Skype, and everyone is trying to take a piece of the AdSense pie. Maybe the best presentation summarizing all this, was made by Brandon Schauer, check is sources (in the PDF) for further reading.

But this year was also the year of Ajax, JavaScript frameworks and mashups. The web is now easier to use, easier to develop, and the API business model is growing rapidly, as stated by the growth of the mashup matrix. For an excellent example of a mashup, take a look at BlockRocker (GoogleMaps + Amazon + Craigslist).

Well, 2005 was a good year, hope 2006 be even better to everyone.

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