Blogs

If you attended my talk at Max ‘08 and want the slides or code, get them here:

http://alexeiwhite.s3.amazonaws.com/max_presentation_08_dw_uis.zip

Finally! We’ve launched Nitobi.com.. This is step 2/4 in our rebranding transition and we’re proud of the new site and what it offers to users in terms of information search, usability, and so-on. Some of the neat new features we’ve implemented are:

• Feature highlights
• Product tours
• RSS feeds for everything (news, knowledgebase, forums, etc)

Coming soon are our new forums and updated branding with our upcoming product point releases (grid 3.2 and combo 3.5) this month. Step 4 is a yet unnounced expansion to our product line.. more on this soon!

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Late last night we produced our second Ajax podcast covering a variety of topical issues we were thinking about this week. Topics include:

• Yahoo web service API’s – Google API’s and Pushpin (www.pushpin.com)
• Windows Live Mail
• Law suits
• Enterprise Ajax (the book!)
• Java and Ajax
• EBA Grid 3.05 point release!!

Check out the podcast (in MP3 format)!

Author of Broadbandits, and Business 2.0 writer Om Malik talks about the Future of Media. Incidentally, Om is a very funny speaker.

Whats the difference between “old world” and “new world” media?

• The traditional media if anything is more sanitized version of the world.
• No replacement for the Globe and Mail, New York Times, etc.. these are important media institutions.
• What’s driving new world media is primarily advertising.. the free-ness of information is made possible by ads alone.. people don’t pay as much for media.
• Everyone has made a big committment to online presences.
• Newspapers.. good newspapers will not disappear anytime soon. They will need to find their niche though.. it will be good to see some of the newspapers go.
• Blogs are killing off the trade press.. but the big media is still the big media.
• Not all behaviours can be changed easily. People still want television media, but it is basically a passive medium – relatively unimportant. Will work against it.
• Credibility in blogging comes from your content.
• Newspapers are also being forced to change because of the proliferation of “free” services – classifieds (Craigslist), news (especially trade news), etc.
• Someone in the audience says “When information is free, the only thing of value is point-of-view.“
• Om says: “When information is free, and so are opinions, context is more valuable.” Context is lacking from a lot of blogging.. people confuse what he writes for opinion when all he is trying to do is provide context.
• Om is part of John Batelle’s Federated Media Network, which is an ad network for high-traffic blogs.
• What will the online media do about people that turn off ads? Om: Most people don’t know how to do that.. the media will need to stay ahead (technologically) of that 85% of Internet nubes.

I’ve arrived at Mesh in Toronto. Looking forward to an amazing lineup! I was really fortunate yesterday to spend some time chatting with some of the gang from TorCamp yesterday – David Crow and Albert Lai (of Bubbleshare), and discovered to my surprise that they’re both speaking at Mesh!

Listening to Stuart MacDonald right now launch the event. The room has an electric feel.. and I think people are really excited about Canada’s first real Web2.0 conference!

Looking forward to hearing from a lot of the speakers, including Om Malik, Mark Evans, Stuart MacDonald, Steve Rubel, Albert Lai, David Crow, and everyone else..

Also going to see if anyone in the unconference area are interesting in talking about Ajax, the future, the present, the quick wins and pitfalls.

We’ve all got to start somewhere! No more am I content to just be a passive observer. With this blog, I want to add my voice to the ongoing discussion concerning primarily web based software and marketing, but also important peripheral issues like usability in software, design patterns, futurism, and business.

Since I am also a proud member of the EBA Team, I will also be sharing my thoughts on product development, features, project management, and other issues relating to the production of our web based Ajax components.

In late May, we’ll be releasing EBA Grid V3, which is a cross platform (J2EE, ASP, .NET, PHP, Coldfusion), cross-browser (Firefox, Netscape, Internet Explorer) Ajax datagrid capable of providing an Excel, or MS Access-like interface to tabular data. The emphasis here is on run-time performance. If you’re interested in finding out more about this, check out our demo on EBA Labs.