Stories

Kin Lane

Distributed Data and Syndication

I am building out a pretty complex system that really seems like a lot of overhead to get some pretty basic systems up.It involves republishing small subsets of data to various data stores such as MySQL, Amazon S3, GData, or just XML.Then I syndicate web services / feeds in RSS, XML, JSON to those little data stores.I keep getting asked why don't you just allow one central data feed off main data store.From a security and load balancing standpoi...
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Kin Lane

RSS Feeds for All Businesses

I know I've ranted about this before, but here we go again. It cannot be said enough. EVERY business that has a web site and has information on the Internet needs to provide RSS Feeds for that data. I am looking for product review web sites right now. Looking to harvest data on different product areas and feed it back out to users. I am not looking to harness the traffic, it will go to the source of the reviews. I do this to get data and statistics and ultimately provide value t...
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Kin Lane

Google's New AJAX Libraries API

Just came across Google's New AJAX Libraries API. I was wondering when someone was going to merge together all the common JavaScript libraries out there into a single set of libraries. The AJAX Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular open source JavaScript libraries. By using the Google AJAX API Loader's google.loa...
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Kin Lane

Speaking at the UO American Marketing Association

I spoke last night at the UOAMA which is a student run marketing organization that aims to connect students with professional marketers and offer insight into the marketing profession through the avenues of solid leadership, strong communication, real-world marketing experience, and charitable involvement.I spoke on the topic of online marketing and social media marketing. Unfortunately my wife I...
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Kin Lane

Small Business Online Operations Plan

I have been working with my brother-in-law to really escalate the operations of his small business Thinwrench, which offers custom wrench and tool manufacturing. He has had the business since the 1990's and has had the site since I believe 2001. The site gets a fair amount of traffic and it generates a small trickle of orders for him though out the year, but nothing really significant. It is impress...
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Kin Lane

Participate in Question and Answer Sites to Market Yourself

How would you project your monthly costs in terms of storage and bandwidth if you didn't knowhow much traffic to expect on your startup photo/video sharing site?This is just one notable connection I've made via social networks, thought it showed the valu...
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Kin Lane

Bad Debt in America and How Bad it Really Is

I was just watching Bill Maher and was listening to their discussion on Kevin Phillips book called Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, and Cornel West said something that summed up how sad things really are: Read more →
Kin Lane

Fast Track to Widgets, Facebook, and OpenSocial Apps

I have been deploying large amounts of widgets, Facebook and OpenSocial applications to various social networks and platforms lately. Even though I am a programmer I have been able to do much of my heavy lifting using tools that are already available to me without any programming at all. I use a combination of Youtube, Read more →
Kin Lane

50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth

My wife and I just finished launching a new site for a client called 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. It is the revised, updated edition of a book originally released in the 1990's and was New York Times bestseller.We have been working hard for 3 months to design, develop and launch the site to support he book's release by Earth Day.It is a significant site for us. It is our first major release on the
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Kin Lane

Yet Another Google API, this Time for Visualizations

The Google Visualization API lets you access multiple sources of structured data that you can display, choosing from a large selection of visualizations.The Google Visualization API also provides a platform that can be used to create, share and reuse visualizations written by the developer community.You can embed visualizations directly into your website a...
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Kin Lane

Google Releases and AJAX Language API

Google added another interesting piece to its API stack. Now with the Google AJAX Language API, you can translate and detect the language of blocks of text within a webpage using only Javascript. The language API is designed to be used to translate and detect languages on the fly when off line translations are not available.It is a nice addition to the Google Family of API's and great for internationalization of web applicat...
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Kin Lane

New Workstation Setup

I just got a new levovo Laptop. It was presetup with Windows XP.It took me 30 minutes flat to setup completely for my needs.Installed my web development environment.Installed my database development environment.Installed Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger.Installed Firefox.Done, everything else I do is web-based. All my email, docs, files, everything is either on Google, Amazon Web Services or som...
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Kin Lane

Widgets and Social Network Applications are Temporary

I was just driving home tonight and thinking about all the widgets and OpenSocial applications I have been developing lately.Starting thinking about the limited distribution OpenSocial Applications and the wide distribution of widgets.I was playing with a real sweet Flash Distribution that was driven from XML. I was thinking about the different ways I could distribute it on web sites and social networks.Of course I think about how to make some use it and a...
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Kin Lane

LinkedIn Offers Company Profiles

LinkedIn just announced they are offering that, "Now Companies too have profiles on LinkedIn".I have always used LinkedIn as a business facing presence for myself. It has linkages for all my employees?Now, you'll be able to see over 160,000 profiles of companies on LinkedIn, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to non-profit organizations as well as LinkedIn's own Company Profile page.C...
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Kin Lane

Amazon Launches New Web Service for Fulfillment

Amazon added another layer to their stack of web services to. They added the Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (Amazon FWS) which allows merchants to tap in to Amazon's network of fulfillment centers and logistics. Merchants can store their own products to our fulfillment centers and then, using a web service interface, fulfill orders for the products and ship a product to a customer.There are two sets of APIS - Inbound and Outbound.
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Kin Lane

Liveblogging, Reminders, Tasking and Calling Myself

I have been using Jott for that last few months to record tasks, record events, publish blogs, and other general communications by calling Jott and leaving a voice mail or "jott" and it translates and sends to the link that I dictate.I am pioneering using this for live blogging of events and sending out user generate reporters.Today I came across Utterz which is a simlar to Jott, but adds in the pictures and videos but utilizes a larger list of links you can post to.
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Kin Lane

Google Reader and Google Notebook as My Knowledgebase

I use Google Reader and Google Notebook on a daily basis. I read and consume feeds from 300+ blogs daily. I scan, read, visit and participate in many of the posts. I then either tag the blog entries in my Google Reader.Or I visit the blog and highlight some or all of the text and add to my Google Notebook.I keep huge amounts of information in both of these. With the combination of tagging in Google Reader and organizing in notebooks in Google ...
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Kin Lane

My Social Graph and Social Index

So I have several spurts in trying to understand, track, and ultimately evolve my social graph and my social index.For anyone not following these areas of study, here are some definitions:Social Graph Definition: Social Graph is the network of connections that exist through which people communicate and share information.Social Index Definition - Social Index is a measurement of the value, size and velocity of a social grap...
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Kin Lane

Legal Rights Involved with Photography

I enjoy taking pictures of anything and everything. I am always curious about the legal rights of taking pictures of people and places.I just read a great post called Photography and The Law: Know Your Rights which contained the The Ten Legal Commandments of Photography.It has great information about some common ...
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Kin Lane

Google Adds Maps to Google Chart API

Google released a new update for the Google Chart API. It allows you to create maps with specific data areas based upon what you pass.You can highlight states, countries and other elements and display summary or other data regarding those elements.A nice feature added to the API. The have a lot of features hitting the pavement lately across their web applications / API.
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Kin Lane

Adobe AIR Applications

So recently I have installed 2 Adobe Air applications. I installed twhirl a twitter client built on the Air platform, and now I just did Snippely a snippet code tool from MooTools.I really like the install process which is very smooth and makes installing new apps so easy.I really like the application itself too. They are very sexy, clean ...
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Kin Lane

Flash Mobs

Was just reading a cool post about Flash Mobs on Ignite Media. Very cool concept.Is it social media?Is it art?Is it protest?Ignite Media defines a flash mob as:You gather a group of people (through text messages, Facebook groups, emails, whatever) and ask them to come to a particular place at a particu...
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Kin Lane

Youtube Releases New API

Youtube finally has reworked their API to allow for uploading of videos. This was a huge problem in integrating YouTube in Social Media Campaigns.Here are some of the things you can do with the YouTube Data API now:Create a web front end to let people view videos about specific topics. Create a desktop application or plugin that pla...
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Kin Lane

Youtube Approach to their New API

I wrote earlier about Youtube's new API. I am really happy they updated it. It has several features that I feel are key to using their platform.However in thinking more about it and reading other posts about it I realize their approach and openness is the real gem. Youtube understands the basic 2.0 concept that user activity should not have to occur on your site. This is a very tough concept for some players to understand.Key player still think that the...
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Kin Lane

Wordpress Installation and Hosting on the Cloud

Just got a request to install Wordpress blog for a client that will potentially receive a large amount of traffic.So I opted to use the Mosso.com Cloud Hosting Platform by Rackspace. Took me less than 10 minutes to setup the site, install, and configure the Wordpress blog.In my Mosso.com admin interface and added a new web site, chose to use PHP 5 as core technology and chose mysql as the database.Once setup and created a MySQL database....
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