MIX, Vegas, The Venetian and 36°C!
by Niklas Richardson 12:06 am Monday, 30 April 2007.

I arrived yesterday in Vegas ready for the Microsoft MIX conference! The hotel/casino/theme park/mall is pretty incredible. It’s massive! 3200 rooms, and they’re building another 4000 rooms! Also, it’s pretty hot - 36°C and rising - and the locals even say that’s hot for this time of year. Glad it’s not just the UK enjoying unusually hot weather right now!

In any case, I’m also pleased to see that there is a good selection of other Adobe related folk here from Mike Chambers to Ryan Stewart. I haven’t had the opportunity to meet them before but I’m looking forward to meeting them here. If not at a meet-up tonight arranged by Andrew Shorten of ex-Adobe fame, or tomorrow at the BarCampMixer.

In any case, Vegas is a pretty amazing place as I hope the conference will be. I’ll keep you posted!

The Venetian Resort and Hotel
The Venetian, Las Vegas

The Venetian Canal (and yes - that is a fake sky)
The Venetian Canal, Las Vegas

The Paris Las Vegas Eiffel Tower
The Las Vegas Eiffel Tower

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Off to Microsoft MIX07 in Las Vegas
by Niklas Richardson 10:32 am Friday, 27 April 2007.

So, I leave tomorrow to Las Vegas for the Microsoft MIX07 conference. It will be a chance for me to see what is being done re-RIA technology on the other side of the fence. I’m actually pretty excited to see what Microsoft are doing and what their roadmap is. The last time I looked at their RIA offering it looked pretty far behind what Adobe was doing with Flex, so it will be interesting to see how things have progressed over the last few months.

It’ll also be an opportunity to catch up with some ex-Adobe friends who now work for Microsoft. If you’re going to be there, feel free to drop me a note at niklas [ a t ] monochrome [ dot ] co [ dot ] uk.

When I’m back next week I’ll give you an update on how it went!

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Life in the Feed-Squirrel Forum
by Neil Middleton 9:47 pm Tuesday, 24 April 2007.

Well, the FS forum has been up and running for a couple of days now, and what have I learnt? Well, for starters, spammers are a PITA which are able to get round almost any system you put in front of them. Secondly, the behaviours of users are very interesting.

Consider this: You have a site, be it a forum, or a social-based site such as mySpace. You have no users, but your concept is reliant on users. Users will not come to an empty site and will probably never return once they have witnessed it’s emptiness. So how do these things start? How does someone attract people to an empty social site? It’s quite an interesting conundrum which I am working out at the moment.

So far traffic to the new forum has been intentionally low, as I don’t want a mass of people seeing an empty forum, and due to this there has been a slow but steady influx of new users - some of which are posting happily. So the next step I suppose is to slowly increase the traffic to the site by increasing the number of external links, and waiting for Google to sort it’s act out. As these happen I would expect the site to hit a critical mass - a point where I believe the community will start to look after itself and the membership will reach a steadily increasing level up to an upper level where it will naturally sit whilst experiencing minor fluctuations as time progresses (a site like mySpaces being obviously a lot larger than that of this site).

So, all in all, I know a lot of people would think me insane for trying to start a forum in the middle of a community awash with sites such as Adobe.com’s forums, and lists such as CF-Talk, but I like the insane, and as I said, its also quite an interesting experiment.

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Whats new pussy cat?
by Neil Middleton 9:38 pm Sunday, 22 April 2007.

Well, the squirrel’s been busy beavering (or squirrelling??) away over the spring and now has decided to get very talkative. In order to help him out we have just launched a brand spanking new forum for everyone to use. This now means you can get to discuss the daily tech news you see on the site and also get to meet some of the other users. Hopefully the forum will grow into something genuinely useful (and yes adobe.com forum users, you can even edit posts).

http://www.feed-squirrel.com/forum

At the moment the forums obviously a little empty, but sign up, make yourself known and who knows, maybe something beautiful might happen.

If anyone has any ideas or feedback on the forums (or the site in general), please let me know, either by mail or via the, uh, forums.

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Mail Issues Update
by Neil Middleton 9:26 am .

I beleive that the mail issues are now resolved so if you have ever sent me a mail and not got a response, please try again.  If you still don’t get a reply then try me on gmail using neil.middleton and I’ll take another look at the server.

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