Yes, Bloggercon was a success. Yes, I finally got to meet and have some face time with some of the people behind the blogs and the IRC nicknames. Yes, I got to show Blogware to a number of people and learn about what they wanted in their blogging software. Yes, I got invited to play accordion at the closing session (Thanks, Dave!). Yes, I’m coming back home with a ton of ideas and all fired up to make cool software.
All that pales to this: I stealth discoed Dave Winer.
See the video (408K QuickTime).
Update: I forgot to mention that Ryan “Skadz” Skadberg took the video for me. Thanks, Ryan!
I have arrived in Boston and am killing time until the various dinners held by various Bloggercon luminaries take place later on tonight. I’m entering this from the HOTEL@MIT’s business center; it’s going to be a couple of hours until my room is ready, so I think I’ll poke my nose around and try and catch what they call “local flavour”. Maybe some clam chow-dahh too.
I just got off the phone with Boris, who’s driving down here from Montreal. He’s just crossed the border, so I figure he should be here by dinner. Look out, Beantown, Trouble Incorporated is about to hold a meeting in your city!
Anyone for a beer somewhere in Cambridge, either this afternoon or tomorrow evening? I’m reachable via phone at (416) 948-6447.
In the meantime, I’m going to look up and down Mass Ave and see what’s happening.
The help authoring program I’m using has destroyed many hours’ worth of work and I have to board a plane in five hours. I’m ready to hurl my computer against the wall, but I think I’ll just go to bed instead.
Today marks the end of the “stealth period” for the blogging software that my employer, Tucows, has been developing for the past few months. It really wasn’t a terribly stealthy stealth mode — thanks to the magic of referrer logs, Scoble found Boss Ross’ blog, which had just enough info for him to deduce that a new blogging tool was being built. Roland Tanglao then found out, and made an announcement that Ross had started his own blogging company and had hired me as an evangelist (I picture myself as a younger, goofier, programming-and-accordion-playing Guy Kawasaki). Although not quite correct — and hey, I can’t blame him, we Filipinos love to gossip (or as we say “get our tsismis on”) — Blogware became known to the general public.
Tucows is in the business of helping hosting services move bits better. Hosting, as our CEO Elliot likes to say, is like the construction industry. Unlike many industries out there, there are no “big players” with 80% of the market. In hosting and construction contracting, there’s a vast sea of providers, some with more market share than others, but there are no Microsofts eating up a sizeable chunk of the total customers. If hosting services are like construction contractors, then we want to be Home Depot. My own role in the company makes me Bob Vila (or, if you’re Canadian, Mag Ruffman, the sexiest home handyperson alive.)
Blogware services aren’t going to be sold directly to bloggers. Instead, we’ll be selling it to hosting services, pretty much the same way we sell email services, domain name registration services and secure certificate services. Hosts will then offer Blogware to their customers as just another thing that comes with an account: “You’ll get x email addresses, y meagbytes of storage, web space, and oh yeah…we’ve got a blogging tool too.”
Here are some screenshots…
The Dashboard, pictured above, is the first page you’re taken to immediately after logging in. It provides a quick report of some stats (number of articles, comments, trackbacks and authors) as well as listings of the last five articles, comments and trackbacks.
This is the Article and Photo Manager, the master list of articles and photos that have been posted to the blog.
The Favorites page makes blogroll and link management pretty painless. Favorites can be divided into groups — the group pictured above consists of people who link to me.
Although Blogware is completely database-driven — that’s right, blog pages are generated on the fly, rather than generated as static pages — it exposes the database through a filesystem interface. The interface is so “real” that you can even FTP into it. Pictured above is the File manager page.
Nearly forgot — here’s the Post Article page.
For those of you who are into what’s under the hood, Blogware is written in Ruby and uses PostgreSQL as its database. I’m going to try and get a Q&A interview with the developers, all of whom are very sharp and very nice guys. A filet mignon on a flaming sword to the developers!
For those of you attending BloggerCon’s Day 2, I’ll be demonstrating it to anyone who’s interested. We’ll also have a group blog that anyone at the Con can log into so that they can give Blogware a test spin for themselves.
If you have any questions about Blogware, feel free to ask away in the comments!
The preparations for BloggerCon are keeping me busy, but not so busy that I can’t fulfill my obligation to post a picture of a cat on my blog. You’ll need the Shockwave Flash plug-in to see the kitty picture below, but it’ll be worth the download.
Click the picture to see the horror. Warning: This picture made some kids cry. Parents, put the kids to bed before you click.
(This image is an old one, originally shown on the now-defunct konstruktiv.net.)
Enough to make you believe that these creatures actually do suck the breath from babies, eh?
Saturday
6:50 a.m.: US Airways flight — Accordion City / Pittsburgh / Boston. You shave $100 off the ticket by stopping over and switching planes in Pittsburgh.
10:50 a.m.: Land in Boston
12 noon: I should be at my hotel, HOTEL@MIT by now!
Afternoon: I can’t afford the US$500 for Day 1, so I’m going to enjoy the afternoon with whoever wants to enjoy it with me. Hopefully Skadz will be able to catch up with me for some Guinness.
Evening: Several BloggerCon dinners take place, each one hosted by a prominent blogger. I will be at AKMA’s dinner.
Late evening: Hijinks of one sort or another. Who’s with me?
Sunday
9:00 a.m. – 5:00 a.m.: Day 2 of BloggerCon. Attending various seminars, demonstrating Blogware, playing accordion.
Afterwards: More hijinks. Who wants to join me?
Monday
11:30 a.m.: US Airways flight — Boston / Pittsburgh / Accordion City.
If anyone wants to reach me, I’ll have my laptop, but the best way is via cell: (416) WIT-N-HIP.
