For more information, see the Viddler developers page.

Note: If you are using Google Reader you may not be able to see this video. The Reader team is dragging their feet on supporting Viddler’s latest embed code. Come on over to my site to see it.

Kyle Slattery, whom you all should know by now, has also published a post about comparing the physical keyboard input with that of his DROID and the challenges faced by device manufactures that provide both a physical keyboard and a multitouch interface.

The good bits are in woven into the fabric of his piece. Essentially Kyle hopes that geocoding continues to improve and, most importantly, becomes much easier to use. I’ve already said that 2010 is the year of location. Location based services are going to explode this year and any content-publishing service that does not somehow include location in 2010 will probably be left to wallow in the dead pool come next year.

That much time, attention, and resources being thrown at a problem will hopefully mean real progress. We’re going to see a lot of change for good and bad over the next 12 months in this area but at the end of it all, as Kyle mentions, it has to get easier and more accurate.

Kyle, a longtime user of Brightkite, also mentioned that he agreed with my What Brightkite Could Be. What Brightkite Should Be. post. Some of which is relavent in this context if you haven’t read it.

Welcome to Random 60 season 2! Sorta. Today we have a special guest, Kyle Slattery, who is a friend and fellow Viddler team member. Today’s topic, haircuts.

I just got my haircut and I usually just tell the lady at the hair place to cut as much off as she’d like to. What do you do? How often do you get your haircut? Answer in the comments!

“If it tastes good, it is probably bad for you.” We’ve all heard this saying and for the most part it is true. Although I tend to like all food (my vice in life) – most of the food that you crave, that you pine for, that you’d be willing to walk 12 city blocks in the middle of the night in New York City for, is typically not all that good for you. Heck, I’d be willing to say that the food usually has as much nutritional value as… well, I simply can’t think of anything worthless enough to make my point.

Today while catching up on Tumblr I ran across Kyle’s ‘reblog’ of KFC’s Double Down chicken sandwich, which he found through Justin Blanton, and I was all at once appalled, intrigued, and overwhelmingly desirous of the sandwich. Let’s take these emotions and elaborate on them one-by-one.

Justin Blanton succinctly stated, after finding out that KFC had a sandwich that – instead of using bread as its primary means to package the contents of the sandwich – uses fried chicken to keep its bacon and cheese filling neatly packed, “Of course they do”. This is where the appalling feeling came from. Of course KFC would be so brazen as to offer a sandwich that would smash together bacon, cheese, and fried chicken.

But, then came the intrigue. Remember the days of The Atkin’s Diet? The diet that pretty much said “bread is bad”. That anything that has a carbohydrate in it will go straight to your hips! That if you so much as look at a plate of pasta you’re bound to never fit into swimsuit ever again! So is it bad that KFC had done what any good Atkin’s dieter had been doing for years… remove the bread from the sandwich and only offer the innards as the meal. Take away the carbs, eat the fat.

Then, like a torrent river of blood that started in my ears and went to my toes, the desire to eat one of these seemingly delicious, incredibly irresponsible sandwiches surged through my body. I must have succinct friends because Kyle simply stated “Wow. I need to try this.” and I have to agree with him. Even though I want to try this I’d be kidding myself, and lying to you, if I didn’t say I need to try this.

Hey Kyle, the next time I’m in town we’re going to find a KFC and document the noshing of this Atkin’s Diet friendly abomination. Because we need to.

Fellow Viddler and friend Kyle Slattery is reworking his tag search pages. He’s created a really nice way to filter through the various types of content on his site based on tag search results. For instance, going to a tag search for my name will result in a few photos and a few links that he tagged with my name. You can then filter those results to only show you the photos or only the links.

But what if you hack the URL and search for a tag that shows no results? At current Kyle shows an error page. However, there was no error. His Web site should never link you to a page that doesn’t return any results (though it does right now). So how did the person end up here? They may have done a search, they may have hacked the URL, or someone else linked them to this page. Which ever way they ended up on that URL – there is still no reason to show an error.

This brings me to why I call these types of URLs “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for URLs”. These are URLs where you know what the person is looking for (droids) you just don’t have any. In the example URL I use above, a tag search for my name filtered by entries, Kyle does a good job of stating that there are no entries tagged with my name. This is much better than showing an error. In the other example, of a tag search that ultimately returns no results, he should do something very similar. This isn’t an error. There is just no content on his site that is tagged with ‘asdf’.

One of the suggestions I gave to him was to do a search through his own tags and try to see if, perhaps, they’ve mistyped the tag. I’m not sure what ‘asdf’ could have been, maybe sad? Or, what if someone spells my name with two Ls? This isn’t easy to program against – but there is an easier option that he could set up. Offer a search box with the tag that they entered already filled in and show a message of “Sorry, but I have nothing tagged with ‘asdf’. Maybe you misspelled what you’re looking for?”

My site isn’t a good example of best practices here. It used to be. But I had to hack WordPress to bits to get it to work last time and I’ve since upgraded WordPress too many times for those old hacks to work. However, if you’re looking for good examples – I’m sure Kyle’s site will end up being a pretty good example soon enough.

Have you seen any really good examples of this?

Eating a Gombo at The Goose with Kyle, Jeff, and Rob. Incredisandwich.

Related: I’m adding “The Goose” to my favorite places less than 2 hours from home list.

Viddler all-star Kyle Slattery (right) is back from his semester in Germany. He’s already back at work and back to eating Gombos from The Goose. We’re happy to have him back and to feed him.

Oh yeah, Rob Sandie is in this photo too.

Wow. This could be a really, really long list. I would say most people’s favorite places are within 2 hours from their home because, well, they are relatively close to their home. Obviously I have some favorite places on this earth that are no where near where I live (which is in northeastern Pennsylvania, btw). Hawai’i, New York City, some places in North Carolina and Florida, as well as various locations in California all immediately spring to mind. But they don’t count!

So, since this list will be too incredibly long to deal with – lets focus for a bit and simply create a tag here on the blog to create this list overtime. We’ll call this tag 2hourfavs.

Watch that tag. It will probably get pretty big.

Blog posts like this are everywhere. Page through my Photography tag and you’ll see a ton of tips and tricks that I’ve linked to in the past. What separates Kyle’s post from others is that he points out exactly what has helped him, rather than just a laundry list of tips that may help people shoot better.

Oh, and I love what he’s been doing with his photos section. He uploads his photos to Flickr and they are automatically synced with his site in an orderly fashion. Definitely a different approach but one that I think works extremely well.

If there is anything in the culinary world more centering than pizza I don’t know what it is. We all have our favorite toppings, styles, and even ways to eat it. Folded in half, the way all true New Yorkers do, maybe two pieces on top of each other, or even eating it backwards crust-to-tip.

No matter what kind of pizza you like, you will always hunt down your favorite style no matter where you go in life. I remember when my brother moved from New Jersey to South Dakota (don’t ask). He had a laundry list of things he missed in New Jersey. On the top of that list was, of course, pizza. Kyle Slattery says that his family often picks up a few pies of their favorite pizza in a completely different state to take it home on the plane to warm up later!

My favorite style is New York style. Thin crust, tons of grease, served with attitude. When I was in San Francisco in July of 2007 for Wordcamp I searched my then newly purchased iPhone for “pizza” on the Google Maps app. The moment I saw “New York Style pizza” pop up I practically jogged the few blocks to Arinell Pizza.

Upon entering Arinell Pizza I knew I was in the right place. The line was out the door and halfway down the block. The music playing in the background was some sort of late-80s hard rock. The guys behind the counter only accepted cash, rarely washed their hands, and had hair well below their shoulders. Oh, and they gave you about 8 seconds to make up your mind about what you wanted.

A woman in front of me had called in her order. Two large pies with a single topping each. “Twenty five bucks.” said the longer haired guy taking the money after he had just tossed a new, fresh batch of dough into the air for the next few pizzas. The guy behind me, who hadn’t gotten his pizza yet, asked a few questions and was kicked out. Literally. I knew I was right where I needed to be for good pizza.

I was not disappointed. The pizza was delicious and I plan on stopping at Arinell Pizza every time I visit San Francisco and have a craving for really good, New York style, pizza.

I’m not sure what reminded me of this photograph I took with my iPhone of the sign at Arinell Pizza, or why I wanted to be sure I posted about it on my blog. But something did and so now I’ve done just that.

Arinell Pizza is at 509 Valencia St. in San Francisco, California. I highly recommend you have a slice. Bring cash and order quickly.

Some blogger I am, I didn’t even mention that I was going to go to the New Media Expo in Las Vegas.  Well, I did. And it was great. And you should have been there.

But now onto my point and why I used the above photo in this post.

Las Vegas is like Podcasting.  Sure, it is pretty well established.  There are very professional, glamorous, and dare I say elegant examples already in place. There are, of course, some “not so good” examples too – we’ll call them coolers – which inevitably show themselves in such a place.  But there is a fact which rings true and ever clearer in my ear now that I’ve attended the New Media Expo this year; it is still getting bigger.

Both Las Vegas and Podcasting are continuing to grow at a rate that seems fairly hard to calculate with any metric other than potential.  I was really happy to hear Gary Vaynerchuk say in his keynote speech on the first day of the Expo that people need to exercise patience and work hard to achieve their goals in podcasting.  And that mantra ran right through until the very last day.

People were very, very excited about the new tools, gear, the growing community and seeing each other’s faces – but more importantly they see that they can build a viable commodity all on their own, so long as they’re willing to work at it.

I was there, of course, with the Viddler team including Rob, Donna, Kyle, and Brandice.  We all had a great time sharing a booth with TubeMogul, meeting up with tons of Viddler members, and helping people set up their customizable Viddler players.

For weeks prior to the Expo we helped the New Media Expo team by setting up the video portion of their official site.  It ended up being a big hit for both the Expo and Viddler, and anyone not able to attend the Expo.  We consider video at these types of events to be the most powerful form of media for a backchannel. If you’re going to a conference, organizing one, or would just like information on how we put this together, be sure to drop me a line.

On the very last day Kyle, Brandice, and I created a show on-the-fly called Two Minutes at New Media Expo.  We did this by doing 2-minute interviews with as many people as we could on the last day of the Expo (which only went until 1 o’clock).  In that short amount of time we interviewed nearly 30 different expo attendees, companies, and even Kings. We have a bunch more episodes coming out so stay tuned! How did we do all of this? I’m planning on writing a post called “How to build a video podcast in 24 hours.”.  If you don’t see this by the end of next week yell at me.

I think I can speak for the entire Viddler team when I say that we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves at the New Media Expo this year and that we’re looking forward to the next one.  Viva la New Media Expo!

Especially on today’s Internet. I’ve had “my own site” for as long as I’ve ever been online. It all started on some Geocities and Tripod powered sites in the mid-90s. Then, when I switched from using AOL  (read: When I finally realized AOL was not the Internet.), I used some shared space on Prodigy.net, my ISP at the time. It wasn’t long before I discovered the world of Web development and purchased a domain (then called colinspage.com) for around $70 per year.

Fast forward about a year and a few of my friends put together a Star Wars related news site called thehutt.net. I didn’t help out too much with the design and development but I did write some for the site.  It wasn’t long after that when I wanted to scratch my own itch and had my own blog.  Which ended up turning towards theubergeeks.net, and now I have cdevroe.com.

I think having your own Web site is a valuable thing, especially for those of us that work on the Web.  It helps you stay in touch with what people are going through when they want to publish content online, edit some code, or even customize an open source project.  There are countless lessons to be learned by having your own site to fiddle with.

Great work Kyle. I’ll check in on you and your site(s) in 14 years.

Source: Kyle Slattery.com.

My 404 page consists of a simple message asking you to contact me to let me know that something went wrong.  There are a lot of services that do much more than simply display a typical “Page Not Found” message, and today we’re going to look at Brightkite‘s “smart” “profile not found” pages.

Brightkite knows how their user’s are using the system.  An example of this was brought to my attention by my coworker Kyle Slattery.  He told me about Brightkite’s ability to detect when a user does not exist on Brightkite, but may exist on Twitter.

Brightkite and Twitter share the same prefix for username detection, the @ symbol ((Other services, like Pownce, use the ! exclamation point.)).  Since Brightkite knows that some people use their system as a geo-enabled Twitter client, like I explained the other day, sometimes you’ll find people “talking” to or about people that do not yet have a Brightkite account. Kyle gave me the example of the username @mikemangino.  That username does not exist on Brightkite but it does on Twitter.

Here is what the profile page looks like on Brightkite for this user.

Rather than show their typical 404 error page, Brightkite asks if you are looking for the same username on Twitter, and even gives you the option to invite that person over to Brightkite.  Kyle thought this was “brilliant”, and I do too.  Kyle was wrong about one thing though; Brightkite’s “profile not found” page isn’t as smart as he might have thought.  Here is what Kyle said:

“Brilliant, if you go to a user on BrightKite that exists on Twitter, but not on BK, there’s a link to invite them, not a 404.”

I don’t think Kyle actually meant to say that Brightkite detects the user on Twitter, because they definitely do not.  But I just wanted to be sure it was clearly stated.

Brightkite’s “profile not found” page is smart enough to know that people are probably on that page because they clicked an @username to a Twitter account and not a Brightkite account. And that is indeed brilliant.  It is a great example of how Brightkite is continuously showing themselves to be “in touch” with how people use their system which makes Brightkite a joy to use.

Kyle Slattery, Viddler’s Lead Social Developer, recently released a nice little PHP-snippet for Facebook application developers:

“While building the Viddler Facebook application, I needed to create a pagination tool that worked just like Facebook’s. After looking at their HTML and their logic of what pages to display, I came up with one, which I’m releasing for anyone to use.”

Simple. Straight forward.

Date taken: June 25, 2008 | Kyle, friend and fellow Viddler team member, came to work here today.

He is wearing a Celtics shirt. He’s from Boston so he can get away with it, I guess.

“Now you can get Euro 2008 right on Twitter. For every update from Soccernet’s GameCasts, just follow @euro2008cup, and if you only want to get updates about goals, follow @euro2008scores“

Simple. Slick.

The interesting, and perhaps the most compelling thing about creating a bot like this, is that you get SMS updates out of the box.  Twitter has been calling themselves a “messaging platform” since day one, and developers like Kyle Slattery are using that to their advantage.  I think this is a perfect use of Twitter.

Source: Follow Euro 2008 on Twitter by Kyle Slattery.

We were able to give away a fair amount of Viddler tshirts, in only a few minutes, at the DiggNation Meetup in Brooklyn, New York to those waiting in line for the live taping of DiggNation.  We did have one stipulation, however, that you must wear the Viddler tshirt right now in order to get one.

It was great to see so many Viddler tshirts within the first few rows of the crowd for the entire night.  Even one girl wearing a Viddler tshirt was up on stage in front of, what we’ve been told was, a capacity crowd at Studio B.  So it was a definite WIN.

Hope everyone enjoys their Viddler shirts!

The iPhone helped the cabby find Brooklyn, Ha!

Some 14yr. old skateboarder dude was sleeping next to me.  His head kept bobbing and hitting me, so Kyle laughed.

Waiting for the bus in Hellertown, PA with Rob and Kyle. We’re headed to New York City for the DiggNation Meetup.

“Though CakePHP is lacking in a many areas where Rails really excels, I think it definitely has its place in the world of web frameworks.”

Source: Kyle Slattery » Blog Archive » A Review of CakePHP