Margaret Olson

DropBox!

2007-08-16T06:50:00.000-07:00

Plum's new cool app DropBox on Facebook is live. Its our second app - Shoebox was the first.

DropBox is a place to share, discuss, and discover with your friends. Tell your friends what you are looking for, and they (hopefully) will help you out and drop stuff to you.

I'm publishing my "Drop Quest" over on the right at the top there - hopefully my friends will start dropping fun stuff to me. So far my Plum co-founder Hans Peter Brondmo has ignored my quests and has been sending me things he thinks I should see!

Let me know what you think - margaret-at-plum-dot-com

Boston BarCamp 2

2007-03-22T06:30:00.000-07:00

I wasn't able to attend Boston Bar Camp 2 but from everything I hear it was a great event in spite of the storm. I'm hoping to make Bar Camp 3. While everyone was braving the snow to get to the Stata Center and Bar Camp 2, I was in sunny Floriday watching wood storks, herons, egrets, and ibises among the mangroves. We also paddled up under a tree with a bald eagle, and saw many, many ospreys.

For the first time in years I left my laptop at home while travelling, and used my cell phone plus printouts. It was an interesting experience - all the sites that worked well had separate "mobile...." urls for the handheld browsing. For things that just aren't ever going to work well on a teeny screen printing on demand is the way to go.

BarCamp Boston UnReport (Updated)

2006-06-05T06:39:00.000-07:00

[This is an edited version of the June 5th post, to reflect feedback from readers. Most of the changes are in the second to last paragraph, but there are also a few edits for clarity in the third paragraph.]

I spent a good part of the weekend at Bar Camp Boston. I talked to some great people and got an update on what's happening with micro formats, but over all I came away feeling that Bar Camp has some great potential but the idea and the execution needs refinement.

The best sessions were the ones where the presenter was showing off what they worked on or are passionate about. Ian Muir's mico formats presentation was interesting, as were all of the product presentations I attended. The worst sessions were the ones where the presenter didn't know the technical aspects of the topic, and the ones where people were experting away on something they didn't have much experience with but had read about (generally without crediting sources).

The fact that anyone can talk about any topic is a great premise, but without bios or meaningful blurbs I wasted a lot of time running around figuring out what was worth listening to. The Bar Camp philosophy is deliberately anti-commerical. As a result, most people didn't put company names on the oversized stickies used on the schedule board. Most of the good sessions - where someone was showing off their work - were dutifully disguised under some general topic like "web 2.0" which again made it hard to figure out where to direct my attention.

There was a space pitch for about three minutes during lunch on Saturday. It wasn't a particularly good speech - it was somewhat condescending and not well tuned to that particular audience. Some attendees took offense on the grounds that at Bar Camp commercial pitches are inappropriate. But the speech was short and if anything the idea that the major sponsors give you space, food, and logistical support without an opportunity to address the audience came off as a bit childish. On reflection and after listening to Shimon Rura and others I've come to appreciate it as a mixture of idealism and naivete. Maybe I should have given a session on tanstaafl :-). Plum was a small ($200) sponsor, and although I'm happy to support the Boston technical community it's tough to justify sponsoring.

I noticed stacks of VCs, only one sponsoring. Smart guys - no need to sponsor, no fees, just show up, grab a session, and work the crowd!

Microformats

2006-03-10T11:54:00.000-08:00

Lots of good ideas at eTech - the convergence around microformats stands out. Plum already has some microformat support and we'll be adding more.

I admit that I approached microformats as more than a bit of a skeptic. I'm one of those pointy headed people who likes not only XML but XSL too. XML and XSL completely separate data from presentation in a way that HTML never did, and they both do so in very powerful and complete ways. But there is just one problem: data without presentation is useless and XSL does not have a good getting start story. Ok, getting started with XSL is just plain old painful.

What I like about microformats is they define data on the web in a standard way, they are pretty small, and they have a really great getting started story: just standardize your use of CSS class names to something pretty close to what you are doing already anyway. Since it's XHTML it's parseable and embeddable in atom, rss, and other XML formats.

Right now microformats are concentrating on really common bits of data in web pages: addresses, reviews, and events. These are all areas where the off line world already developed standards. As microformats evolve the flat namespace is probably going to start to bog down the process - light small standards change and adapt quickly and big ones (even big simple ones) do not.

The other thing I saw at eTech was a lot of RSS and Atom for information exchange. We're all doing it - plum, Microsoft Live, and of course every ajax api out there. If that's the future, why not evolve microformats to use namespaces when they are embedded in RSS, Atom, or any other XML format?

Mash-up Central

2006-03-07T15:06:00.000-08:00

This is a small demonstration of the plum api. The links are pulled
via our javascript API. "Margaret Olson" and "Hans Peter" have
addresses added by the Mac Plummer's addresss book extension. I used
Yahoo's maps API to map our addresses when you click on our
names.