Notes, links and conversation

[Skip this posting if you’re not living in/close to Belgium or don’t have anything to do with Finance – I’m just using my almost-abandoned web-oriented blog to get this out asap]

[Update Feb 20: the team is complete – thanks to all of the people who helped spreading the message!]
[Update Feb 24: tools used (some stats and screenshots): 11 hrs of talking over Skype, some 250 msgs over 40 mail conversations, and the blogpost that mainly spread via Twitter and Linkedin]
[Update Feb 24: 6 teams made the final selection, we (Frank Herrman, Koen Pellegrims, Els Heremans,  Andre Keil, Marc Hensmans and I) are one of those teams]

WHAT?

iBootcamp is a crash course in building a viable business out of an initial idea. It is organised by IBBT.be in Ghent and (indirectly) financed by Flemish government – but participation is open for everybody (I myself am a Belgian living in the Netherlands – the language of iBootcamp is English).  Ten ideas have passed a first selection and five of them will make it to the iBootcamp itself:

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Probably you already have encountered the following:

• you left a comment on a blog posting, hoping to get feedback from the author or other users on your question or remark
• revisited the page after a while to check for follow-up comments
• … revisited … revisited… revisited… finally gave up on it or forgot
• discovered a few months later that an interesting follow-up had been posted afterwards, with exactly the tip or info you needed badly back then

Blog commenting as a collaboration tool is frustratingly flawed, and here are some suggestions what you can do about it as a commenter, blog owner or external service… (more…)

Recipe for instant blog fame: use some Web2.0 api and let your visitors visualize or recombine their own user data, or their own blog’s data. That was a bit the case for my own really simple “Top sources of del.icio.us links” posting, and it is definitely the case for this “Blog valution calculator”. (more…)

Nivi suggested using the top sources of your del.icio.us links, in order to clean up your feedreader and throw out feeds you don’t find worthwile to bookmark links from anyway. It created some discussion on whether this was feasible/ethical/practical to build this as a service only requiring the (public) username (meaning you could probe any other del.icio.us user’s “attention stream”) (more…)

Peter Forret suggested WizaRss, or using an RSS webfeed to package a wizard, a step-by-step-tutorial. Since RSS separates presentation from content, and is both simple and popular, it would be a great way to syndicate step-by-step-tutorials and have them re(dis)played, reused and remixed in every kind of skin imaginable. (more…)

Kailash Nadh is probably someone we’ll hear from more.
He’s 18, and author of the BoastMachine, a php/Mysql Blogging engine. The Boast machine is, though maybe a bit less sophisticated than WordPress, very nice and easy to install. It takes some ideas from bulletin boards: threaded comments, BBcode. Other projects of his are a news aggregator and a Pingoat, a Ping-o-matic clone. (more…)

Nivi would love to hear our thoughts on why people do things for free.
Apart from the reasons he quoted (and still lots of other ones), there’s this one: (more…)

Via Kubrickr, the Flickr-based webservice for graphically impaired people (like me).
This is how you do it: (more…)

Peter Forret is considering Tikiwiki to power his tango site.
I’m not sure whether Tikiwiki is the ideal solution here, (more…)

Jaysea at Don’t Back Down is very sceptical on “social” bookmarks. (more…)