episode #005 show notes

We started the show with a mention about WordCamp and WordCamp Kansai.  We attended it and met some great people, including Naoko, Oli (more about Oli later) and of course Matt.  Hiro shows off his firefox shirt he won in a janken (rock, paper and scissors) match and signed by Matt.  He also announces that he is switching from Moveable Type to WordPress to help promote WordPress in Japan.  And I quiz him over  WordCamp San Francisco attendance.

Next was DiggBar and the mess that it created and partially fixed later.  I was a little surprised that Hiro shared the same opinion as me, since he is a big fan of Digg and Diggnation.

We talked next about Skype, and how Ebay is trying to sell it off.  Will it IPO or be sold to its owners?  Or is it just a special marketing campaign as Hiro suggests??

For the first time we had a special guest, Oli Studholme, who is responsible for the Web Directions East arrangements in Kansai.  He talked to us about the events that will be held later this month.  John Allsop will be giving a one day workshop in Kyoto on CSS3 and HTML5 (Sun 17th May 10am-6pm), as well as a presentation in Osaka entitled “State of the Web 2009″ (Tue 19th May 7pm – 8.30pm Apple Store Shinsaibashi).  The workshop will be in English with some Japanese translation.  Oli brought in an awesome signed poster from last year’s Web Directions East.  You can find more information at http://east.webdirections.org/ (Japanese only)

Hiro didn’t miss the opportunity to quiz Oli on his thoughts on user interface aspects of the popular Japanese sites like mixi.  He gave some really interesting answers, though probably because of time he wasn’t able to share some stories about mixi that he talked about just before the interview.  Maybe next time!  We are looking forward to when he can come and visit us again.  I’m sure he would enjoy the somen we are having for lunch.  (Also look out for a special special guest appearance by a masked man)

How cool would it be if you could claim you were one to the first 100 users of google or twitter?  Well, we announced our first screencast of our main project called hulor.  Hulor is a recommendation engine, that generates links it hopes that you would be interested in from your online activity.  We also appealed for help in designing and shaping hulor.  If you want to be part of the (potentially) next big thing, you can sign up at hulor.com.

We ended the show by talking briefly about our twitter feeds in our sidebar.  Something we promised in a previous show and it was good to tick it off  from our list.

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