I’ve been doing some research over the last few days and have found that niche search is far from solved. Many market verticals are lacking an effective aggregator for timely content. The tools everyone needs are known, but they haven’t been implemented. Instead of true solutions, we find scraping sites that just suck in content and spit it out un-validated, unverified and unorganized. Because of the high costs of building robust tools, what results is a poor, incomplete collection of information, which quickly becomes stale.

That coupled with inaccurate supporting information, primarily due to high data-set costs, provides a less than desirable experience for users. Mahalo saw this in the generalized search market and put into place human editors who comb the internet looking for the best information and vetting user submissions. The result are guides of information that are informative and helpful.

How long will it be before we see Mahalo style sites targeting niche verticals? Who out there is working on a white label Mahalo which can be reused in these smaller markets?

Some five or six years ago, I implemented an email data transfer process using PGP to handle file encryption leveraging self signed keys that relied on the freely available tools to handle the encryption of the data. All was good (or good enough). The data was secure, everything worked and I was happy.

Fast forward to present day.

I need to update the code so I can deploy on a new environment so I turn back to the company who was so much help last time and what do I find? The “free” product has been replaced by a 30 day trial version that cripples some features (actually locking you out of your data BTW). Licensing is ridiculously hard to understand - suddenly I realized why so many individuals and small businesses don’t bother to encrypt their data. Hell, many organizations don’t even do it as often as they should.

Unfortunately I can’t alter this process to veer from PGP, I am no longer the owner of it, but I think for all future implementations I’ll use GnuPG. I highly recommend anyone dealing with sensitive files make a strong effort to stay away from the larger vendors until they make a serious effort to make encryption available to individuals freely (and easily).

Two days ago, AF-Design’s blog moved to WordPress’ SVN access which brought version 2.7-hemorrhage up. For any who are comfortable and familiar withe the existing WordPress administrative screens, I suggest you take a look at the proposed wireframes. Much like anything, it takes some getting used to, but there are some really great usability things coming along. One feature I really like is the quick edit for posts. If you’re like me (and I suspect a number of others) I often mis-categorize or tag a post and it provides a nice quick interface for making the updates.

WordPress Administrator Screenshot

Of course running bleeding edge software right from the repo isn’t without cost. So far I’ve been bit by a few items that I know of:

1. Comments are disabled by default for new posts created with the QuickPress.
2. Pingbacks are disabled by default for new posts created with the QuickPress.
3. Saving changes to already published posts seems to create an invalid page reference which would throw an error in the admin. Not sure what the root cause was there. I’m hopeful r9078 takes care of it.
4. Images are automatically wrapped with a caption [ caption ]…[ /caption ] by default (see above screenshot) and the uploader (as of r9078) doesn’t have a way to turn that off, so it requires manual deletion of the comment code.
5. Alignment of the image doesn’t carry over from the “Insert Media” feature

I think the Automattic WordPress team is doing a fantastic job and am looking forward to a stable version release.

I originally wondered about what was happening to Photosynth back in May and now it looks as if Microsoft has officially launched it and is having some success too. I am very excited about this and it’s possible impacts on virtual reality. What a cool way to go see things that were formerly too difficult or expensive to get to! Kudos to Microsoft on their success. Unfortunately it’s still just Windows, and I’m unable to access it via Parallels on the Mac. According to the satisfaction.com support forums, VMWare’s current beta works.

This morning my spam filter caught this message from Amazon announcing the new Amazon Block Storage service. I’m looking forward to seeing this work it’s way into implementations from hosting companies that are currently re-selling a service layer on top of the already interesting EC2.

One of the largest drawbacks with EC2 (and a major reason I’ve stayed away from it with a 10′ pole) has been the lack of persistent storage. If your just purchasing occasional horsepower - say for a large compute project - you would have to configure your instance - import your data - do your calculations etc and then bring all your data back down. How many times have you needed to wait until the middle of the night to run complex queries or analysis on your data and didn’t want to take down your database to do it? It’s been more than I can count for me. Now you can run the server only when you need it. I can see this a serious boon for folks wanting to do data analysis but don’t need the large EC2 container running over weekends and holidays but don’t want to pay for transfer costs to and from local sources (or deal with pushing data in and out of S3).

From the email:

Prior to Amazon EBS, block storage within an Amazon EC2 instance was tied to the instance itself so that when the instance was terminated, the data within the instance was lost. Now with Amazon EBS, users can chose to allocate storage volumes that persist reliably and independently from Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes can be created in any size between 1 GB and 1 TB, and multiple volumes can be attached to a single instance. Additionally, for even more durable backups and an easy way to create new volumes, Amazon EBS provides the ability to create point-in-time, consistent snapshots of volumes that are then stored to Amazon S3.

Amazon EBS is well suited for databases, as well as many other applications that require running a file system or access to raw block-level storage. As Amazon EC2 instances are started and stopped, the information saved in your database or application is preserved in much the same way it is with traditional physical servers. Amazon EBS can be accessed through the latest Amazon EC2 APIs, and is now available in public beta.

Recently I was helping a friend get his new movie review blog started and decided to review a few monetizing strategies. The offering from Amazon struck me as interesting and so I have posted it here for everyone to see. This item in particular is a great widget because it puts content that I couldn’t otherwise create directly into my site. It becomes a value add for me, the publisher, because I get a very rich experience for my users, that I can tailor to meet my content needs, while Amazon gets potential sales leads. Of course I get a kickback too…

Amazon also offers more traditional banner size advertising, product links and other integration points. Check them out as a possible option for monetizing your site.

Right now I think I’d rather have a Tesla Roadster than an iPhone. Sure that’s a bold statement considering I can afford an iPhone and not a roadster but I think the car takes the cake for innovation. Being a huge fan of technology and cars I’ve drooling over this car since I first heard about it about a year ago and now that they’re “available” I’m equally as excited to see what they do with the sedan rumored for 2010 production.

See what the hype is about in these videos.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been developing and working completely remotely. Removed from my office, removed from my resources and often while in remote locations from the car with my family as we travel from destination to destination. It’s been enjoyable to be part of everything the family is doing but it has not been without difficulty. For example, it can be hard to debug complex problems with kids unhappy in the back seat or to read a terminal session with the sun washing out the screen. It can also be challenging to be working via SSH and have the connection drop because we travel through an area without data connectivity.

Those sorts of problems aside, the one thing I miss most is my reference library. I’ve amassed a number of books that are helpful references for obscure bits of knowledge I don’t keep locked away in my mind. Last year I travelled with my books and never used them. This year, however, I’ve found myself wanting them in a couple of instances while working. While I can use Google for the majority of the code snips and shortcuts I would need, it’s a highly inefficient, to continually switch windows. I’ve contemplated signing up for O’Reilly Safari but have found digital books don’t save any time over Google and the $22.99 or more per month seems expensive for materials generally available elsewhere and locatable through Google.

I’m an Apple fan boy. I switched with at dawn of OS X and haven’t looked back. I love the iPhone for it’s style and functionality - but when it comes right down to it - I’m not compelled to buy a new phone that’s really only moderately better than the last version. Sure GPS is great (I’ve got that now) and the touch screen is amazing - but I’m going to be sticking with my Blackberry for a while longer. I might go out and get that iPod Touch I’ve been thinking about instead because it doesn’t look like true improvements in the device are happening anytime soon. Information week has a few other reasons not to upgrade. If I do need a new phone (let’s hope not this one’s hardy 2 months old) I may venture over to the Nokia store and see what they have to offer.

Robert Scoble posted a tweet today calling out an interesting visualization of Twitter client usage up on Neoformix. Being a big fan of data visualization and of course the methods of Edward Tufte, I took a look. Unfortunately the graphs aren’t exactly of the same caliber as the work Tufte promotes - they were non the less interesting. There’s also another interesting visualization of usage patterns for the top Twitter users and how much they use twitter. It’s clear it’s increasing for all of them.