Google Sidebar/Firefox?

I've been test driving the Google Sidebar for a few days.

It is interesting from the standpoint that it has a pluggable architecture with available API's (Brad thinks this is good :-)) The "out of the box" Sidebar items are fairly vanilla and include widgets like weather, news, etc. Several of the widgets, including "Quick View" and "Web Clips", sniff IP traffic to monitor sites you have visited and RSS Feeds among other things.

The Quick View widget works pretty well for IE traffic, however, for some reason it refuses to monitor anything I visit in Firefox. The Sidebar image shows Firefox views, so it must be me. Anyone encountering a similar issue?

Google Adsense

I dropped in the required Javascript earlier today to enable Google Adsense. A bit of poking around tells me that there is quite a bit of tuning to be done to maximize things.

My first thoughts are not so great - the ads took hours to show up and when they did, they are all for garage doors! (probably taken from my URL http://www.davehodson.com/garage/) I'll be monitoring this closely over the next few days to see if the ads become more contextual based on the actual content in my blog.

Gnomedex - Thoughts

Gnomedex 2005 - what a conference/un-conference. So many people from the AO 100, startups (Michael Tippett from NowPublic, Greg Linden from Findory, the guys from litefeeds), citizen media (JD Lasica, Our Media), Scoble, Scoble, Scoble, Scott Rafer, Mark Fletcher, serveral guys from Yahoo and large scale movement (MSFT RSS). ... I'm exhausted just thinking about it all.

Special mention has to be made about Robert Scoble - I made sure to track him down and let him know what an impact he has made. He has worked tirelessly to help bring transparency to Microsoft and I think he has succeeded in a BIG way. While he took no credit, I for one, think that the release of the MSFT RSS cf extension under Creative Commons would not have happened without him.

I made one serious mistake at lunch that I have to cop to - embarrassingly, I thought Mark Fletcher was Mark Cuban. Sorry Mark!

And to Chris Pirillo especially - what a great experience. Thanks! Your challenge (should you accept it) is to have Gnomedex 2006 be at least as good as this year.

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Gnomedex - FeedMesh

I attended the Feedmesh BOF tonight (after Gnomedex ended for the day). The BOF was led by Bob Wyman and the audience consisted of folks from Technorati, Feedster, Google and various others. There were quite a few items discussed. Midway through, Jason Calcanis spoke up and presented a publisher-centric view of the Mesh. He really made us rethink our positions, specifically, the value of full feeds. IMHO, it was great, something we might not have encountered on the email list.

Later on, we headed over to the Seattle Public Library. I spent some time with Dave McClure of simplyHired, the team from PodcastNetwork, Doug Kaye, Steve Gillmor and many other folks.

The highlight of the night was meeting Greg Stein from Google, also the Chairman of the ASF. Greg provided some fantastic insight on the ASF and his role in the organization. His insight on Open Source and the Feedmesh were very interesting - I learned a lot about the current structure of the ASF and the value it adds.

Overall, a high-quality night. Special thanks to PubSub and Bob Wyman for leading the Feedmesh discussion (and t-shirts!)

Update: Looks like Greg Stein has an interview at Podtech.net on the way.

Gnomedex - MAKE Demo

PT from MAKE just gave the demo I've been waiting for - how to get video running on your iPod. He burned Podzilla onto several iPods, detailing how to record on an iPod and other items. The thing I found most interesting was the ability to view video on a Mini. Granted, the quality was not top-notch, but still very interesting.

How long until FireAnt/iPodder/jPodder can handle this? How long until the iPod/iRiver support this?

Good stuff.

Gnomedex - First night

Gnomedex 5.0 began tonight - what a crowd! Steve Rubel, Dan Gillmor, Doug Kaye, Adam Curry, Chris Pirillo (of course), Bob Wyman...a lot of folks.

Besides the fire alarm going off, it was a great night. In general, the conference is fantastic. The mindshare around blogs/podcasting/vlogs is pretty incredible. My personal highlight was talking to Adam Curry about the next release of iTunes and the impact it will have on media.

The fact that an iTunes user can download the Daily Source Code as easily as the new 50 Cent single is going to introduce a sea-change in media. The Rocketboom folks were there also, check out their site for some video of the night.