People are searching for things all the time on the web. If you’re a blogger looking to write good content, it is a good idea to get out there on the net to find what people are searching for. There are a few tools for doing this, but I wanted to isolate one of them and play with it for a minute.

@marknunney posted a link on Twitter about a “new tool from Wordtracker for content ideas”, so I clicked over to the site and read the following:

“People often type complete questions into search engines: if you find these questions and answer them, you could get some great search traffic”.

Below it was a box for entering in a word, so I tried a few words out. The results were amusing enough for me to want to share them. Further analysis follows.

Results for Life

I found the results for the word ‘life’ to be what one might expect. Right now, people are wondering about life insurance. However, the ‘color of life in ancient egypt’ is something that is phrased in such as strange way that it could warrant further research — especially since it was looked up 156 times. At #6, ‘what is the meaning of life’ is asked. I guess life insurance and ‘how time of my life was chosen for american idol’ were more important.

My personal favorite is #13 — ‘how to summon a real life dragon’. I bet if someone were to write a post on that, they’d get lots of hits. Maybe lots of Diggs too. I’m not sure how I’d go about researching that one. It’s probably better than trying to write a post on #8 — ‘how to ruin someone’s life’.

Results for E-mail

How does E-mail work? Apparently people are asking this question. But there is an important trend happening elsewhere in these question results. That would be the address of one (or rather two) ‘cole sprouse’. They happen to be identical twins, and are, according to the Cole Sprouse Wikipedia article, “known for their roles in the film Big Daddy…and for portraying the title characters on Disney Channel sitcoms”. Good luck finding their E-mail address, as well as the address of Prince Harry, Zac Efron and Jamie Spears.

But you can write about how to E-mail pictures, or #9’s ‘who invented E-mail’. That one actually seems particulary interesting. The narrative histories of everyday things are always a joy to read about.

Results for Business

‘How to write a business plan?’ Can’t one just download a template from Microsoft Word or something? That question is really a broad one. It depends on what kind of business one wishes to start. #3’s ‘how to start a cell phone business’ is pretty good. #10’s ‘what is the best business opportunity’ is a really intense question that cannot totally be answered. #11’s ‘how to start a web design business’ is actually very answerable by a variety of sources such as Design Float and Smashing Magazine.

#8’s ‘how to start a business with no money’ is interesting. I think it’s never been easier — and more difficult. It’s probably time that’s the big issue. Taking a lot of time really works. A cell phone business might manifest as an online reseller of cell phone accessories.

Results for Google

I was confused by these search results. I didn’t think they’d be this broad, or this ill-informed. Are Google founders Larry and Sergey that obscure? I wonder what sources Wordtracker is using for its search queries.

It might also be interesting to create a post on the founders of Google just to see what happened to it. I’m sure Wikipedia and Google have this question answered already.

Results for Yahoo

I queried Yahoo! just to see what would happen. Very similar to Google’s results, except there was a question of what Yahoo stood for. I’m actually wondering that myself right now (goes off to find the answer).

The answer as to what Yahoo! stands for comes from About.com’s ‘Internet for Beginners’. The answer is that “Yahoo! (spelled with an exclamation mark) is short for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”. Apparently, “The original name: “David’s and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”, was appropriate, but not exactly catchy“. You can read the rest of Paul Gil’s Yahoo! article for the whole story.

Results for Money

The search results for money really surprised me. I had no idea that so many people wanted to know about ‘what presidents are on money’. I wonder what demographic asks this question the most. Is it youth? Is it due to a bet? Is it a homework assignment? Perhaps it is to clarify the use of slang words.

#2 and #3’s ‘how much money does it cost to open a bar’, and ‘how can kids make money’ are interesting. I’m wondering if more kids than parents searched for that phrase and if there a way to tell. As for #2, a lot of people seem to dream of owning and running their own bars.

I thought that #7’s ‘how to make money’ would be higher up on the results than that, but apparently the presidents on money trumps that. It’s also a much easier niche to write for than the seedy ‘how to make money’ post. #8 and #9’s ‘millionaires who give money to help’, and ‘millionaires who give free money’ make a lot of sense. Those questions make me wonder how many millionaires out there actually give money out to strangers who ask for it over the Internet. Generally, processes and charities are involved. Darn! Perhaps Google or a blogger will write about another way?

Results for Puppy

Puppies. They’re somewhat irresistible. So irresistible that a lot of people question just how large they’re going to get, apparently. It would be useful to make a site that gave information on how large any breed of puppy was going to grow. It would be complete with a puppy weight calculator, to answer question #3 as well. One would simply have to enter in the breed and the age of the puppy and the Internet robots would do the rest. Hooray for calculators.

I wonder how many new pet owners typed in #7 after watching their new puppy pee on their freshly installed carpet? Is there any way to tell? Perhaps they should’ve just stuck to drawing a puppy instead of owning one, like those who searched for #4’s ‘how to draw a puppy’.

Results for Read

This was wild. I did not expect to get results on horoscopes, tarot cards or reading palms. I’m not sure what I expected originally, but it wasn’t this. I thought people liked books more than daily horoscopes. My college experience has given me some explaination for these results. Everyone in my dorm was obsessed with reading their horoscopes to each other. Some of them even printed out astrological charts. I didn’t participate.

But result #6 makes a lot of sense in this respect. Aside from horoscopes, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is one of those books that’s assigned to the majority of school districts across the United States. I’m assuming a lot of kids didn’t want to purchase the book, lent it to someone else, forgot it at home or at school, or were looking for a quick way to read a chapter before an annoying quiz after lunch or homeroom period.

Results for RSS

What *is* RSS? Oh man. It is probably the greatest thing since the last iteration of really cool stuff that people enjoyed. It allows the quick and easy access of content without having to browse for it. I recommend watching RSS in Plain English instead of searching for RSS in Google. It’s an extremely short video by the Common Craft show. Totally sweetopian.

Hmm…#13’s ‘how do i find my twitter rss fed url’ is curious. Not only is fed spelled incorrectly, it is searched for 7 times. I’m sure there’s a great tutorial on this out there somewhere. …Or is there? I suppose that’ for random people to find out.

Results for SEO

These were not surprising. ‘What does seo stand for?’ Search engine optimization, of course. How does one ‘become a certified seo?’ Well gee whiz, that’s a hard one. Probably from showing it on your own site, and the sites of your clients. And by not selling links from bad sites. Also, by educating people thoughly about your techniques.

‘How to set up seo?’ Go through a standard checklist on your website, checking for alt tags, title tags, a sitemap, ect. I like the free Website Grader from HubSpot for a really quick website check and grade.

Results for Six

I wondered about numbers next, so I checked out an the number six. Purely arbitrary (by arbichance? arbitration?). I was amused to find such a long phrase at the top of the question results. ‘The six basic fears and how to eliminate them’. That is totally a book by Sharry Harris. #2’s ‘what are the six terms of geography’ totally sounds like a query taken directly from a homework assignment.

#3’s ‘what are the six parts in a business letter’ has reminded me to re-examine my business letters for the correct number of parts. Perhaps I can do that while developing a six pack while using Six Sigma techniques.

Results for Twitter

‘What is Twitter?’ Ahh…if only there were an easy way to explain that. ‘How to use twitter’ is even more complicated. See, it is the emptiness of a vessel that gives it use-value, and Twitter is an empty vessel. The question of ‘What are you doing’ is never fully answered. Thus, how to use Twitter is like telling someone how to use a vase. The emptiness gives it many uses, whereas a tutorial can only give a finite amount of use-cases.

Finding the Twitter RSS feed URL is another matter. Simply scroll down to the bottom left corner of your Twitter page and click on RSS. Or you can right click to ‘copy the address’ to place it elsewhere with ease.

Results for Unicorn

So Unicorns are very important to the state of the world. They give us a fantastic antithesis with which to view things. I assumed that I would get different results because of this mindset, but I did not. The number one search for unicorn relates to finding free Unicorn pictures to color. That is a total let-down.

I guess people are interested in drawing Unicorns, though. Perhaps they’ll make some awesome viral Unicorn videos when they get older. Like Charlie the Unicorn.

Final Verdict

WordTracker’s new tool is pretty fun, but I’m not sure how terribly useful it really is. I think you’re the judge for that.

————-

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Internet Marketing Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online @caseorganic.

These are notes from the WhereCamp Portland morning session on dark content and the geoweb. It was led by Paul Bissett, CEO of WeoGeo. About 15 people were at the session, and brought up some very interesting points.

Event Summary:

What is the state of the Geoweb? One of the major problems is that relevant informaton is locked away from being indexed by search engines. We call this dark content because it is unlit and unsearchable.

How much dark content it out there?

~800 Terabytes of data is currently unsearchable online.

~91,000 Terabytes is inaccessible. It’s non-searched, non-indexed digital content.

What does that mean? It means that less than a percent of the digital knowledge we’ve collected and stored online is not availabile for our use.

That means there’s no indexing, no searching, and no synergistic use of that content because it’s not being indexed.

This makes it an enormous productivity sink to everyone involved to access, verify and collect data from the limited sources that are available. Only relatively ill-equipped, uninformed decisions can be made.

What can we do?

Things need to be indexed.

Say we want to buy a house, but we want to make sure we are purchasing a house in a safe area. You can look at a map that has earthquake zones, and one with tsunami zone, and you can even overlay all these maps to see intersections of data. Those are information layers.

But imagine doing that for every decision you make. Having layer maps for everything you do, and ever choice you make.
Now, this probably doesn’t matter as much if you’re making a decision about going to Starbucks, but when you’re deciding where to put a water purification plant, or a park or recreation system, it becomes very important.

How do we do this?

The good thing is that ever since Google Earth launched, geography has become cool.
But it’s one thing to use the data, and another to contribute to it to make it more rich and usable.

The other problem is that most of these data sets are not text based. They require a series of information unwrapping protocols to dissect them into usable content.

You need the tools to be able to do this. You can find a file, but then you must also be able to get into it.

There are also decision processes surrounding that data. Each file is different, that’s why a lot of it stays in the dark. The processing systems become as important as the data when data is so seperate and stuck in silos.

There is no metadata standard/standards that would at least allow for cross indexing of different data and content. This is essential for the sharing of processing of data.

Existing metadata standards are cumbersome and there is limited motivation to use/decipher them.
There’s also the scalability of data sets. Large data sets are difficult to break down into usable chunks.

The openness of data is based on different cultures. Government data has a different culture around it than Myspace. One company has the right to create something, and it is very expensive to get access to it.

All data should be sharable — so that people can build upon each other’s work.

Resources:

You can find out more about WhereCamp Portland here.

—–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online at @caseorganic.

Mashups and API’s are some of the best ways to get customized, rich data that is not accessible by one site alone.

Mashups use API’s to gather different data streams into ones that allow less user action to useful data ratios.

As search-expert Rand Fishkin of Seomoz.org pointed out, “One of One of the best resources out there for finding APIs is ProgrammableWeb’s API Directory.

I had a great time hanging out on it, and found that while some of the apps were broken or missing, some of the apps were worthy of review. I’ve placed 5 here for your edification. At the very least, they should spark inspiration, critisim, or discussion: your pick.

1. Local Blog Search

FeedMap allows you to see Blogs from your neighborhood and subscribe to their RSS feeds after seeing their descriptions and latest posts.

When I searched for Portland, Oregon, I found a lot of blogs, but none that I recognized. Most were under the radar - not the big ones like eROI, or SiliconFlorist:

Sample Result for Portland, Oregon:

Loosely Coupled Human Code Factory - A.K.A. Mercenary Engineer Feed Blog
Recent posts: Your Agile and The Flow

The site has nearby blogs as well as tagging capabilities for each blog. Not bad for finding smaller blogs within one’s area.

2. Auto Generated Event Sites

EventSites allows you to make quick websites for your event.

Test

I decided to make a site for Tweet PDX, and was amused to find that the hours were in 24 hour mode.

Flickr Tags

Excitingly, there was a Flickr tag prompt. I found this to be useful.

Saving the event

I was promoted to register an account with Eventful to create the event, so I did. Another caseorganic landgrab.

Event Dispersal

I really enjoyed one aspect of EventSites; the ability to send the event to Google Calendar, del.icio.us Events, Ping-O-matic, Upcoming.org and Facebook, Myspace and Technorati with a few clicks of a button (assuming you allow Upcoming.org access to EventSites).
Cool stuff.

3. Ask 500 People and Watch the Results

Ask500People shows real time stats of poll questions geographically and numerically as they are asked.
Awesome.

4. A Place Between Us

a.placebetween.us says “Trying to find a meeting place between friends? Enter your addresses and the type of place you want to meet.”

So I did. I said I’d like to meet someone between the Portland Small Business Accelerator and Backspace. It wasn’t smart (I had to enter the exact address as well as the city and state), and the results only gave me Startbucks Coffee.
Good idea, terrible data granularity. So much for that Mashup.

5. Where is the Path? (or street)

Where is the Path is an interesting mashup that combines topographic maps with Google Satellite maps to help you match trails with what they look like in real life, from above.

The interface uses two targets that match up the topo map to the Google map. Not bad. Also works for cities. Might be useful for finding bike paths/alt routes.

Conclusions

If you find an awesome Mashup or set of Mashups, please tell me about it.

You can also send billions of links to @caseorganic if you happen to enjoy Twitter.

Shizzow was released today in Private Beta to various members of the Portland Tech Community - or at least a lot of Portland Twitter folk.

Shizzow is Portland-based social network Geolocation service with exceptional data granularity. That means that it is possible to define your own location (my house is Caseorganic Laboratories and Bram’s is Link En Fuego Headquarters).

Local networks have been in need of this service for a long time. Services like BriteKite don’t offer the sheer amount of nuanced locations that a local network like Shizzow does.

I received my invite from Dawn Foster at 10:16 Am and only a few hours later I had already had 10 friends “listening to me”. Listening is the equivalent of a “follow” on Twitter.

Geolocal Shouts

Shizzow also has “shouts” instead of Tweets, which serve to inform other listeners of a user’s location.
Before long, I knew that @reidab and @donpdonp were at Urban Grind Coffee NW, and I didn’t have to sort through my Twitter feed to gain the knowledge.

Cleaning up the Twitter Feeds

Shizzow takes the communication capabilities of Twitter and applies them to location, giving locations a feed. For instance, I can see the history of a location by clicking on it. Through this, I was able to discover that a fellow Twitter contact was at Backspace seven hours before me.

Adding/Finding Locations

Shizzow has a ton of locations already listed, but one can also add locations that don’t. When I typed in the location of the Portland Small Business Accelerator, it recognized it as an ‘office’, and I was able to add it to the list of locations I’m capable of regularly shouting from.

User Interface

I found the UI to be smooth, and the ability to add connections very simple. I also used it to find Dawn Foster and friends at a Green Dragon Shizzow meetup. She and other founders were working on fixing minor bugs already. What service! Not bad for a first day of beta!

Resources

If you’d like to know more about Shizzow, mosey over to Shizzow.com, or read the awesome Silicon Florist post about Shizzow.

I want to thank everyone who worked on Shizzow for doing such an excellent job. We’ve all been reading  and waiting for a great futuristic technology like this to finally come about. While we were thinking about it, the Shizzow group went out and did it. Major Kudos to them.

——-

Thanks for reading Oakhazelnut.com! If you feel like it, you can follow me on Twitter, or subscribe to the Oakhazelnut.com RSS feed.

It’s been a big week in Portland Tech, and it’s still going strong tonight with the Demolicious/Portland Web Innovators event at Cubespace. What is Cubespace? Rental office space for start-ups, consultants, and freelancers. What is Demolicious? 5 project presentations, 10 minutes per project. It basically means that a bunch of innovative people in the room, watching, sharing, and presenting prodigious pre-beta/beta/live web projects. Good stuff. Gone is the era of stale doughnuts and flatlined agendas. This stuff is groundbreaking, interactive and sweetopian.

There’s also beer here, provided by MyStrands, a social/community/aggregator startup based on music sharing (currently in Beta edition, but I can send you an invite).

There’s probably about 50 people here. A lot of faces from last night’s Gary Vanerchuck event at Portland’s ad agency Weiden+Kennedy, and W+K’s Monday Lunch 2.0 Event.

If you’re curious about what’s going on in the Portland Tech scene, and want to join in on some of these events, check out the next events at Yahoo’s Upcoming! website. (The next Lunch 2.0 Event is on July 16th at Souk!)

Presentation Map:

* Kevin Chen, Metroseeq
* Don Park, Do-it-yourself Friendfeed
* Matt King, Interface Content Management Framework
* Mounir Shita, GoLife Mobile
* Lev Tsypin, Green Renter

The first presenter is Kevin Chen of Metroseeq

“Metroseeq is a location-based search engine that aggregates offline deals,” says Chen.

The ability for users to be able to find information from both offline and online sources effectively is the difference between Citysearch and Yelp.

But there’s more - the website also digitizes coupons. Chen tries to demonstrate this with a manila envelope full of paper coupons, but accidentally drops them all over the floor. It’s great, because shows his point even more. Then Chen navigates to the screen, where coupons for each listed business have coupons available for online users. It’s very nice.

Number two: Don Park, with Do-it-yourself Friendfeed

He’s working on solving the problem that everyone faces when they join social networks and have to re-enter all of their social connections. “When you’re joining a new social network,” he says, “you want to bring your friends with you.” Everyone’s data is locked up in different silos. There’s the Twitter silo, and the FriendFeed silo, and the Digg silo.

The key is to drain the silos and bring the dis-separate user data into one place. Use an RSS reader to to it to conveniently track it, and you’ve got your own personal mini-PR system at your fingertips. Brilliant.

Park’s XFN Spider project utilizes the attributes attached to a user’s friends on Twitter, Digg and Wordpress to map out other connections and links associated with those users. The spider can show the blog, Facebook profile, news sources and other pointers that contain the user’s profile/identity attributes, and consolidate them in one resource list.

“Your friendview in Twitter only allows 50 ids to display at one time,” says Park.  “A spider can index all of those ids…far past the 50 it allows in its display.” Attach an RSS reader to this process, and you’ll be able to read every RSS feed that your friends are reading.

The spill-over of extensive blogroll links on Wordpress and other Blogging sites can be put to good use by using attributes to track data.

He then uses Firebug to “inspect” one of his friends in Twitter. The whole sequence of links becomes a fractal. If someone The RSS does the updating. “You don’t have to depend on any other location to do the updating.” The speed at which you gain information is And it can go infinite levels deep. That’s a lot of Web 2.0 fractals. The downside? It’s kind of slow. But what is slowness compared to a social media site that’s often fail whaled?

Try it out at: http://donpark.org/spider/

Presenter numero tres: An Interface Content Management Framework, presented by Matt King

“I’m going to show you a content management system that builds content management systems.” he says. He then states that he’s going to build a fan site about the A-Team, because it rocks, and that he’s going to build the website in the next 10 minutes. He then brings up barebones interface. “Just to show you that I don’t have any tricks up my sleeve…” he points to the projection screen, “there’s no pages here”.

So he starts by adding a page. The audience watches.  Click. Click. This page is done.  “Lets hit save,” he says, “then we’ll add a page about the show, I guess.” He points out that you don’t have to assign a slug or a template. The site will do it for you.

The he does a pages about the A Team’s Van, because “the van warrants a page in and of itself, because it’s so cool.” Users can use templates to pull content in from the CMS.

The structure of the pages is easily modified, with the database automatically updating the url structure. Pages can also be infinitely nested.

King begins to add some dynamic content for the episodes and the characters. He does it this by adding models. “You can add as many as you want,” he states, explaining that “Models are the dynamic content of your site.”

There’s more. You can add as many fields to your content types as you like. You can upload images if you want.  Add a location and the database will automatically give you an address and will geocode it. (this system reminds me of an ultra-fast, ultra light version of Drupal).

Once the page structure has been created and set, one can instantly start adding content to it. Models can all be associated with each other. This part is kinda meta-style.

Season:

Associations: “has many”

Volia.

Like some sort of computer chef, King previews the site. “And then we’ll go to the page here,” he says, and “out pops a really nice page.” Watching King make a website is like watching a chef make something, put it in the oven, pause the camera, and take it out again, completely finished. Except there’s no baking time.

“Okay, I cheated. I did the templates beforehand”. The audience laughs.

“Go to seasons,” he says, ” and Pick a season. We’ll actually get to see what episodes are associated with it.”

Lastly, when you add content it instantly gets an API. King says that they used this for a few flash-based websites. The websites didn’t even need to use html, “just our API”. Nice.

Q+A:

“Is this internal only?”

“We’re trying to make this a base camp-type setup for it, so that you can sign up and get an instance of this development”.

“As long as we can get a website setup for it”, says King’s partner.

Matt King’s website is here, in case you feel like checking it out. He’s done a variety of other tech experiments. Perhaps you can use Don Park’s spider to find them all.

Four: Mounir Shita, from GoLife Mobile

He’s presenting a mobile application platform for mobile applications. He shows a Traffic Camera Widget.

He accesses the platform on a sort of mobile device emulator. Then he swaps out the data source object without changing the code. “You can tie these UI components to different devices,” he says, “like switching one component traffic feed (Oregon) to another (Arizona).”

Simplified overview of the platform:

A widget contains UI components. UI components are attached to sources.

Platform layercake:

XML (standard Internet), SMS Vado (cell phone), HTML (iphone)

(Gateway)

(Virtual Widget Layer)

Action Layer (Show lists) (Show traffic information) (View article) (Write article)

(Personalization layer) (Content enhancement layer)

(Data Access Layer).

Simple use case: Person x wishes to find closest Starbucks. But a mobile device should also figure out where friends are. Mobile device will go and figure out where friends are and recommend a location on the basis of nearness. The device will then tell you where location is, how to get there, inform your friends of your trajectory, and smoothly handle any details, should they arrive.

A mobile device should also show you the menu options, deals, and drink selection of the location as well.  Dynamically. You shouldn’t be telling every single application what you like and what you don’t like. “it’s very very semantic”, he points out, “you’re plugging in very very small semantic codes that plug and play together”. On the whole, these semantic codes help mobile nomads get together on the fly.

It’s as semantic as a roving a meeting maker that negotiates meetups across dynamic time and space, as if the entire geography were a mobile, roaming office.

The website meta tag states that “GoLife Mobile is erasing the barriers between the physical and electronic worlds. We let your mobile device get to know you, so it can…” Well…you know. Here’s the website, if you’re intrigued.

Finally: Green Renter, presented by Lev Tsypin

Green Renter is a database of Green buildings available in the Portland area. Tsypin states that this database is location-agnostic. It has data values for the Portland area because it was birthed here, but should expand to encapsulate every real estate area.

There’s a featured building, and a cetegory for renters and owners. A real estate site that satisfies a eco-niche. A nice feature of the site is that it provides a list of features like:

The Building’s surroundings…

Community resources (i.e. libraries nearby)

Services (i.e. grocery stores nearby)

Public transit nearby

Car share vehicle nearby

Bike lanes/paths nearby

Park/open space/wildlife areas nearby

The same type of list is available for building materials, like non-toxic concrete mix, and bike racks.

All of these categories and feature layers aggregate together to form the context of a ‘Green Score’, a scoring system similar to Google’s Quality Score or Page Rank. Over time, this will hopefully spur the community transparency and ethics which will lead to more green buildings.

Something Green Renter wants to include in the future is a glossary for their green categorization system. Including this glossary allow the side an educational/resource component for those who with to learn about how to find/develop increasingly sustainable and environmentally friendly buildings. It’s like the etiquette of a website that’s been correctly structured according to W3C standards or SEO code.

Visitors can utilize an aggregate map of all buildings in a given area and filter out which buildings have vacancies or not, or which buildings have LEED certifications for green building.

The site also has a blog that links to green events that are happening around town. In this way, Green Renter can bolster the education and awareness of its community of readers, but can also connect those readers to other individuals who are also interested in living in sustainable architectures.

The add building feature allows users to  add commercial or residential property to the site, with property details, contact info, pictures, and renting or leasing information. It’s like a social network for the buildings themselves. Each building with its own avatar and characteristics. Pretty nifty.

The founders also own greenowner.com and are looking into develop that, but feel it is more important to really nail down a niche before going on to develop other things.

When addressing the massive market share that Craigslist holds over the rental/leasing market, Tsypin says that “if you post your green building on Craigslist, you can provide a link back to the site so that your viewers can see all of the green features and details of the building.” In this way, Criagslist and Green Renter can form a symbiotic relationship with one another. A Craisglist listing for a Green Building can function as a starting point into a extended database full of information about the given property, hosted by Green Renter.

And yes, the site supports OpenID.

GreenRenter is alive and well at http://greenrenter.com.

In Essence…

There is, of course, much more to say. I’ll leave you to analyize the nitty gritty stuff and add details. I left out a lot of important things, but it is late and there are only 110 hours in my workweek to get things done.

As always, I am blown away by the things that are happening in the Portland Web Community. Something amazing is happening in Portland. I’ve never seen anything like it. Everyone I meet is always working on something so interesting, and has an positive and innovative mindset on their shoulders. I’m eager to see what’s next.

Special thanks to Portland Web Innovators, Cubespace, and all those who presented. Impressive awesomeness. Bram Pitoyo inspired me to do this write up, but this pales in comparison to his precise assemblages of brilliant journalistic data.

Thanks for reading, and please excuse any inaccuracies incurred based on my Strands-sponsored state.

If you’re on Twitter, I’m @caseorganic. I’d love to follow and meet more of you.

Aside from developers, visitors will be accessing your site to learn about your product, or to download/demo it, because they were referred to it from another source.  The second type of user is here to grab the app, install it, and fly out.

Never make your users search for a demo or dowload button. Lead them through the steps they should be taking to get to the information they need.

Developers who come to your site will tolerate small links to source code, but the average visitor will not. If they have issues with the app, they’ll run back for support. Make sure they can find it! If not, they’ll try looking for help from other sources such as blogs and forums. If you provide a support forum, they’ll be more likely to stay on your page while looking for help, and you’ll be able to better understand your users through their comments.

Provide an experience flow that gives the user immediate direction from the first step onto the page. A series of later steps that are given to the user exactly when needed. It should be fun for them - as easy as a dot-to-dot. At the end, they should have a clear picture of the services your product gives, or they should have already downloaded and begun to use it. The user should not see or care about step two until step one has been completed.

Case Study: PicLens Firefox Plugin Landing Page.

With dark grey backgrounds, and cheery, pastel colors, this site has great readability. Yellow (the natural color of attention) used sparingly, and with extreme care. Grey is neutral, much better than black. Light blue could be <h3>, pink <h2>, and yellow <h1>. The download button is light blue, massive, and somewhat three dimensional, allowing it to pop right out of the page. It’s like oil painting with attention.

The website knows that the user has Firefox installed, and that Firefox’s pop-up blocker script will interrupt the download process. PicLens handles this issue brilliantly by drawing the user to the top of the screen with a trip of text with a  yellow background to direct the user’s attention to the problem area, and how to solve it.

Overall, the website is arranged like a good piece of art. The focal point is chosen to be the Firefox logo, then the install, and then the Demo. Everything runs 1-2-3. Just like a dot-to-dot. I had a great user experience while installing the program, and I enjoyed using it. Kudos to the B2C team that created the PicLens page.

Peter Morville is the master of establishing his link estate on the Google search for his name. If your online presnece is not as robust as his when you search your own name in Google, you might want to work on your Flickr account, Linkedin profile, Digg profile, Stumbleupon profile, person and work blogs, and conference proceedings.

Case in point:

Strategy:

Assure you’re going to conference A, next week. You’re really excited becuase you have some great material (or not), and you’d like to use the mateiral to it’s full advantage.

Web 2.0 can help you. Instead of a document that exists as a pressentation at only one location in space and time, you can let your information out to many differnet outlets by blogging, Twittering, sending guest posts, and uploading your Powerpoint slides to slideshare and telling your Twitter community about it (something Peter Morville does excellently).

I. You’re going to the conference A in a week. Post on your (professional blog)(personal blog) ” I am going to be presenting next week at PLACE.TIME (LINK TO CONFERENCE) — I will be talking about (TALK ABOUT IT).

II. When you’re at conference A. Post on your (professional blog)(personal blog) “Hello from PLACE - these people are here (LINK TO THESE PEOPLE), and how SWEET they are because they’re presenting (talk about what they’re presenting).

II.5 On Twitter, while at conference A, write “I am at (LOCATION) about to present at (link to conference)”.

II.75 Use Mac’s Address Book to immediately enter in business card information, Twitter names, ect during the table breaks. Also write how/where you met them in the comments section (put their history, what they spoke about, and how their expersite can benefit your future self).

III. After conference A, post on your (professional blog)(personal blog), the conference proceedings (photos (use Flickr), briefs of (also link to this from Twitter (use tinyurl.com to make the url length shorter).

IV. If conference has site, try to post on their site with a copy of your speech/lecture/presenation/powerpoint, or your profile. Also comment on the conference on the conference website (if possible) to network with other conference visitors.

V. Post on socially conscious websites who are repositories of information on micromanaging…ect.

End goal:
Emulate Peter Morville’s online presence.
Over time, colonize as much of the google page about your name as possible.