We've had a lot of great blog traffic about Vinismo. I thought I'd try to pull together a few of the better ones.
- vinismo! wiki wine compendium from Hugh McGuire.
- Vinismo Opens Its Doors to Wine Lovers Everywhere from the Creative Commons Weblog. Thanks, guys!
- Vinismo: Wiki + Wine from Zach Copley
- Vinismo from Wendy Copley.
- DemoCampMontreal3 report from Montreal Tech Watch
- DemoCampMontreal3 Report from Josh Nursing
- Vinismo Presentation at DemoCampMontreal3 on the SearchAnyway Blog. Probably one of my favourite pieces, although it makes Niko real mad since it cuts off just before he starts talking. Make mental note: don't say "Uh" so much.
- Bienvenue sur Vinismo, le guide des vins libre by Niko. Niko also bemoaned the difficulty of keeping our project under wraps in Mon lourd secret bientôt dévoilé. What a drama queen.
- Vinismo : un wiki sur le vin by Olivier Niquet. He's suspicious that we are sponsored by J. Lohr, because there are so many J. Lohr wines on our front page.
All in all it's been pretty good. I hope we'll get some more, though!
DemoCampMontreal3 report
So, it's been a couple of days and I should probably get around to posting my own DemoCampMontreal3 report.
- Niko and I started off with our own demo for Vinismo. It was a lot of fun: we talked about the reasons for starting the site, the technical, information architecture and graphics/UI design challenges, and what our future extensions are going to be. At the end of it, we took some questions, which was fun. The most interesting for me was from Roberto Rocha, whose TechnoCité is one of my favourite tech columns in Montreal. He asked, "Your typical contributor will be much older. What will you do to make your wiki more accessible to them?" It was a good question I don't have an answer to yet, but I want to think about it more.
- The second demo was by Heri Rakotomalala, who showed off his social-networking GTD tool, WorkCruncher. It's a TODO list with a twist: items that you don't get done age off the list. You have to re-commit to doing a task on an almost daily basis. I think it's a great and refreshing design; my TODO list gets depressing long and filled with unfinishable tasks, and I get too intimidated to work on ones that really matter. I think Heri might have to make some concessions to people's expectations for TODO lists -- maybe a way to automatically archive tasks, rather than deleting them entirely...?
- The third demo was by the gang from Defensio, who are providing an great anti-spam Web service similar to Akismet. They had a few examples of where they're different, but I'm not well-versed enough in comment spam issues to understand them. My guess is that since they're getting into the market after Akismet, though, they have the opportunity to make a smarter technology. Their one downside? They used slides -- which the rules of DemoCamp. They did demo the service, though.
- Fourth up was the indefatigable Simon Law. Simon's project? To turn back time. Talk about ambitious! His effort consisted of making a typical kitchen clock turn backwards. He disassembled the clock and explained how it worked to the audience. It was great, except for two things: the clock didn't work at the end of the demo (although he got it working by the end of DemoCamp), and he took a few minutes to draw a diagram of the clock; in my mind, that's just a low-tech PowerPoint slide.
- Fifth, and quite fascinating, was a tool that Jerome Paradis showed off. It was a Google-Maps mashup that filtered special emails for an informal private jet sharing network. Apparently, companies who charter private jets often have space in the jets, so they'll make that space available. People who need a last-minute charter jet can send email from their Blackberries and such, and if there's availability they get contacted by the charter companies. The interesting part? These people use a highly structured lingo ("O/W" = "one way"), and Jerome's tool scrapes these emails to make the data into a mapping app for his customers. Very interesting!
All in all, it was a good night -- probably made better by the Argentina Cabernet Sauvignon I had. There's a DemoCampMontreal4 scheduled for August 17th, but I won't be in town for it. Too bad for me!
tags: democampmontreal3 defensio workcruncher simonlaw jeromeparadis vinismo