Julio’s Musings Around Columbia County, New York

Though I now find myself in Dublin, Ireland on my next leg of a two week trip to London and Ireland, I wanted to write a few more words around the Future of Web Application Conference (FOWA).
One of the most enjoyable though not educational aspects of the conference was the live filming of an installment of “Diggnation”. In the main auditorium in front of a standing room only audience, Kevin Rose and his sidekick Alex Albrecht (or maybe its the other way around) kept the crowd pumped,yelling and screaming with their adolescent politically incorrect banter while drinking whatever free beer was provided by the sponsors or fans.

Though I did not take an actual count, I suspect the audience as was the conference itself was about 95% male. The largest number between 20 and 29 years of age but there were 30 and 40 somethings as well to keep me from feeling anachronistic.

All and all, it was very interesting to be part of a group who truly believe they are re-making society and have that fleeting dream of becoming rich at the same time. It reminds me of the adolescent years and rock bands and thoughts of becoming the next Led Zeppelin or something similar. Now of course, behind all that facade it was just about finding and attracting girls. Sadly, the crowd at the Future of Web Applications hasn’t been as successful based on my visual survey of the scene.

Tags: FOWA, Future of Web Applications, Diggnation, Julio Hernandez-Miyares

I find myself in London, England at the moment attending Future of Web Applications FOWA for short. Excellent “dork” fest of folks in the Web development space getting together to hear each other speak about the Web and what’s happening and where its going.

Great way to make a living if you can. Pundits on the Web. I have tremendous respect for the folks presenting especially those that have taken action and established their own companies irrespective of the attendant risks. I don’t believe risk-taking of that caliber is for only the young but on the Web, or at least at this type of conference, its interesting to see those with Cult-status are barely out of college age.

I guess its humbling for me being over 29 years old listening and taking pointers from these 20 somethings but .. what the hell, I will take the pearls of wisdom from whomever.

Trying to finish this blog entry quickly so I can get to the live filming of Diggnation live from the ExCel Center.

Tags: FOWA, Julio Hernandez-Miyares

Things have been a little dry on this blog the past few weeks. Much work , long hours, usual squirrelly mess that is natural for a large organization.
. Well , there is always time to try out another Social Networking site. Its like gadgets, can’t help myself. This one is Wink. Similar to Namyz. Allows you to put together a consolidated list of one’s websites that presumably constitute your identity on the WEB or at least whatever part of such identity you want to make available to the Internet community.
Not sure when its just too much though I believe we are quite close to stumbling upon it. Not even sure why so much time is spent on these things (including myself). I guess its like what graffiti was in New York City during the 1980’s. A good presumably permanent way to make your presence known.

Tags: Julio Hernandez-Miyares, Wink, Web 2.0

Twitter! Another one of those wacky Web sites - makes you wonder, do we just have too much time on our hands? Nevertheless like electronic gadgets, I am a sucker for these. I can enter simple communications of what I am doing at any point in time that all my friends (currently 2 on Twitter) can get immediate updates.

Well, now by linking to my Twitter profile in this blog entry, you will be able to search google such as “Julio Miyares drinking a martini” and immediately get my one-liners everytime I am drinking one. What is the true utility of this? I don’t truly know. Maybe I should get my kids to use it and send SMS messages of what they are doing so I can see. T

Anyone , become my Twitter friend. Here is the link to Julio Miyares’ Twitter home

Tags: Julio Hernandez-Miyares, Twitter, Web 2.0

Fooling around with a Wordpress plugin named GeoPress The post photo is a shot of the Miyares Farm on a recent spring day after cutting the grass. This plugin makes it trivial to associate maps in my case Google Maps within Wordpress blog posts. The plugin is trivial to install and configure as it is with all plugins I have experimented with for WordPress. The actual documentation though informative and easy to follow leaves a lot to experimentation to actually figure out the simple steps to instrument a relevant map with your post. If you select the GeoPress option to have a map show up on each post, both the editing and viewing of the map as you edit the post and its appearance on the post when published works with little to no thought required.
Figuring out how to get the map to show up (what markup) is required when you don’t have the option of a map on each post is what I am struggling with right now.

Tags: GeoPress, Miyares Farm, Julio Hernandez-Miyares

In my never ending quest to try out various social networking sites, I have been spending time with Julio Miyares Fotolog. This is one of the top photo sharing sites worldwide especially outside of the United States. It is more about blogging and sharing select photos then photo storage such as Flickr. That is an oversimplification both about Fotolog and Flickr but is a simple way to describe what each attempts to be.
Though I have not personally encountered such, Fotolog apparently has growing pains that cause site instability and frequent outages. Furthermore, in comparison to Flickr, appears to have a lack of many basic features such as Search and tagging.

Nevertheless , as the following link describes, Fotolog overtakes Flick , Fotolog is the 26th most popular site on the web compared to Flickr’s 39th place.

Makes you wonder what truly drives traffic to popular sites. Since the relative rankings of Fotolog to Flickr is surprising to me, I am going to continue to invest time in building up my Fotolog social network trying to discover the secret of it’s success.

Tags: Julio Hernandez-Miyares, Fotolog

Noticed another one of those budding Web Products , this one named Zillow.com which is currently in BETA.
It is a Real Estate product in my opinion attempting to wrest control of Real Estate purchase and sale activities from Real Estate agents to Web Based products and hence shift (hopefully) the balance of power to the sellers/buyers. I have already “claimed” my particular condo for sale which is located at 1588 Moorings Drive, Reston VA 20190 on Zillow.com, uploaded a number of photos , updated some salient facts about the condo and stated a “Price to Move”.
I am going to try the SEO game and attempt through some SEO techniques to get myself highly ranked for the types of queries someone looking to purchase a home here in Reston, VA would try using a search engine.
For the benefit of the Search Engines who are the major consumers of my blog, Here is the link to my home page on the Zillow. 1588 Moorings Drive Reston Virginia 20190

Tags: Julio Hernandez-Miyares, Reston VA, Zillow