Social Media Webinar 2/12/10

Join us for the Social Media Webinar will be on 2/12/10. We will be talking about how we utilize social platforms to produce traffic for your site. This seminar is 20 minutes long and will show how to increase sales.

Climategate blow up...facts from both sides

Perhaps you heard about the climate scientists who had email exposed after a hacking incident showed that they were using data set and statistical "tricks" to show continued support for global warming theory.  This has riled both the scientific community as well as the global warming theory detractors up on Capital Hill.  Supporters are worried this shoots a hole in the scientific credibility of the theory while detractors seize it for proof that there's nothing to it.

I've had a feed running on WebPartner for quite some time on the subject of global warming (http://webpartner.com/globalwarming).  I should say that I believe it is happening and most probably has a human component.  But if you listen to the detractors there are some very valid points made that at the very least would give you pause that this subject is not so cut and dried.

Sorting through truth and fiction can be tedious.  The Global Warming feed does present and track feeds from both sides of this argument.  For quite some time I've been tracking a site called "Climate Audit" by Steve McIntyre.  Steve is a retired financial analyst with an impressive ability to sort through statistical analysis.  For several years he has taken it upon himself to expose the statistical aberrations and political meddling in climate analysis reports.  He has led the charge to force climatologists to support their work and has forced the disclosure of numerous volumes of data so that he can double check the conclusions and he has raised more than a few questions on the methodology used to reach a number of conclusions about climate change.  Interesting stuff if you're a statistician.  In the long run I'm glad there are people like this providing balance to this discussion before we geoengineer a climate change that has unintended consequences.

A closely related topic, Peak Oil, (on Twitter at @PeakOilNews) also tracks the ecological, social, economical, and political issues around Peak Oil Theory.  An interesting article from that feed recently from PeakOilDebunked goes into great detail exposing the potential problem with promoting "Local Food", the idea that buying food locally saves money, energy, and the environment. 
http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2009/10/426-local-food-guzzles-more-fuel-than.html

The point in this article is that there is a trade off between the massively inefficient use of petroleum in local food production and distribution compared to food more efficiently produced and transported by means of scale.  It all goes to show there are two sides the pressing issues of our time.  Tracking the sides and discussion can make us all more informed.

Randy Cox
CTO-WebPartner

iPhone or Android..the brawl is just beginning

You may or may not follow the recent mobile device wars going on between AT&T and Verizon which is also a proxy for the war between Apple's iPhone and the newer Google Android OS based phones most recently touted by Verizon.  It may be a while before any of this makes a difference to anyone but those companies.  However, there are some interesting things at play.

As much as anything this is shaping up to be open community versus closed community.  Apple's App Store has been roundly criticized for being too harsh and rejecting what seem to be perfectly good applications.  Android applications, we'll hope, will run on most Android devices regardless of whether Google gives a boost to one manufacturer over the others.

There is every reason to believe that the Android OS will easily push out Windows CE as the mobile OS of choice for those developers developing mobile apps for cell phones.  Apple may be missing the boat if they continue holding things so tight.  An iPhone developer wondering whether to spend enormous time developing an iPhone application with the very real risk of being rejected by the App Store may think the market will be just as large with Android and will carry a lot less risk of a total loss in the event that their app gets rejected by the Apple App Store.

There are some very powerful forces behind the sides, Apple/AT&T, Google/Verizon/Open developer community, and this is going to be an interesting fight to watch.

You can get mobile news from your WebPartner feeds by simply pointing your mobile browser to http://webpartner.com.  We do our best to figure out your device and direct you to the best display.  We have specifically optimized sites for the iPhone Safari browser and the Opera based browsers of the BlackBerry.

Feel free to contact us with any questions: http://webpartner.com/?wp=contact

Randy Cox
CTO-WebPartner

Google to Digitize parts of Iraq's National Museum

This headline caught my eye as I scanned customer Deltina Hay's feed.  http://webpartner.com/deltina.
ReadWriteWeb.com: Google Plans to Digitize Artifacts at Iraq's National Museum http://bit.ly/6aIW8J Full http://bit.ly/5JnzZO

I'm fascinated by all the various initiatives that go on at Google wondering what the particular motivation is behind each one.  You've probably heard of their work to attempt to digitize millions of pages of books.  That seems like a pretty clear case of taking digital search to the library and cashing in on it.

What is the motivation behind the effort at Iraq's National Museum?  The initiative was enough to bring out CEO Eric Schmidt to announce the effort to digitize the museum's collection and make it available for free.  Besides the effort required to properly photograph such a collection, he promised some surprises to go along.  I'm thinking 3D imaging.  Of course there could be a nice little mashup to go along with a Google map to peg each artifact to a location and supply some additional history behind the artifact, location, or period in time it was found.

I recently had the good fortune of attending a dome theater presentation from Vance Howard and a gifted group of photographers, musicians, video specialists, and special effects artists.  Vance has taken several trips down the Grand Canyon amassing a whopping 40,000 still photographs.  Connecting with new and much cheaper 360 robotic photography and state of the art, but accessible, stitching software including detailed digital topographic information and location tagged photos, Vance and company were able to create a fully immersive and artistic tour down parts of the Grand Canyon displayed in the Gates Planetarium in Denver on the huge dome theater.

I feel like I have a good handle on a lot of new things going on, but this is the sort of blind side where you realize that technology and creativity are converging in almost every aspect of our daily lives.  Where a private company had to carry a heavy, large, and expensive IMAX camera to get large theater format films, it's now possible for a savvy person on the street to do similar things with a tripod and precision robotic panoramic camera for a fraction of the cost.  Will there be a new industry start up again in dome theater presentations that give an experience done by mere mortals with good instincts and good tools?

Putting the Gates Planetarium experience together with the sort of photography and information that Google is amassing, how will our educational and entertainment experience change over the next 10 years?  Can we get a deeper appreciation into worlds that are foreign to us, whether it is some other part of Earth or maybe some other part of the solar system or galaxy?.  It's mind boggling.

Randy Cox
CTO-WebPartner

WebPartner Webinar December 1, 2009

Ever wondered what WebPartner does or can do for your Twitter account, Facebook account or website? Do you want to increase traffic to your website or increase your followers on Twitter?

At WebPartner, we are answering your questions via a Webinar on December, 1st 2009 at 1pm MST. Please visit us at http://webpartner.com and contact us. A landing page for the Webinar is at http://webpartner.com/webinar.

Thank you from the Webpartner team!

Man's effect on nature - rodents more cautious

ScienceDaily: Why Israeli rodents are more cautious than Jordanian ones http://bit.ly/1AL4Wz Full http://bit.ly/2npCy8

Here's an interesting article the Agribusiness News feed that came from ScienceDaily.  A study of rodents, reptiles, and ant lion species revealed a remarkable difference between these species in Jordan and Israel.  It was particularly interesting because these species share the same climate conditions and are not separated geographically enough to account for the differences the researchers saw.


Because of relatively more agriculture happening in Israel the red fox is much more common.  As it turns out, more common to have changed the behavior of rodents despite the virtual boundary on the map.  Israeli rodents, the researchers found, are much more cautious than their Jordanian brothers.


Perhaps we know that we have an impact on the Earth, but I typically and wrongly think that the impact comes down to the existence or nonexistence of a species.  In this case the behaviors a species also changes due to man's habits.  This is one simple case that was studied.  How many more changes have we made?


You can get more agribusiness news at http://webpartner.com/agribiznews.


Randy Cox
CTO

Headline renaissance?

Nikonian News: Shoot yourself -- win a Nikon and $100K  http://bit.ly/1wY1WW

http://webpartner.com/photography


You have to love what blogging has done for catchy headlines.  Are we in the middle of a whole new world of headline authoring?  After all, making good headlines helps drive home the main message of a blog posting or news article.  It can also make people chuckle and entertain them much as this Nikonian News headline has me.  But perhaps most important is the ability for headlines to drive traffic.  Making headlines consumable, informative, and entertaining may be one of those skills everyone will need to have over the next 10 years and perhaps we're only just seeing the start.


Consider for a minute what Twitter has done to the art of headline creation.  I still see numerous corporate blogs and press releases that have titles that could be two sentences long.  If you're a self respecting PR or corporate communications person, how will you be able to justify titles like this when the expectation is that it has to be less than 140 characters?  Actually quite a lot less when considering you need to get at least a short url in to let people know where they can learn more.


Anymore when I look at corporate communications I learn a lot about how up to date that company is by simply adding up the number of characters in their news headlines.


Randy Cox
CTO-WebPartner

Really? New home inventory dramatically undersupplied?

CNNMoney: Home construction at lowest point in 6 months http://bit.ly/1cDEVc Full http://bit.ly/1tFTY

Interesting article on WebPartner customer The TG Financial.  Of course all of the news Tawaine puts up there doesn't necessarily reflect his opinion.  I haven't spoken to him about this one. 


A real estate analyst at Weiss Research, Mike Larson, was quoted as saying, "The new home market, which was dramatically oversupplied during the boom, is now dramatically undersupplied."  I don't know about you, but here in Colorado where the recession hasn't hit quite as hard as other locations, there are still plenty of new homes for sale.  Some of those have been for sale for more than a year.  There is even one early 2000 model home on my block that has been for sale for nearly two years.  This leaves me wondering just what part of the country is under served with new homes or for that matter where is there a lack of homes for sale?

The original point of the article was that new home starts have dropped again and are at their lowest level since last April.  Markets aren't 100% efficient and so I suppose there is speculation that builders have over reacted, but until I see fewer for sale signs around the neighborhood I think I'll give the builders the benefit of the doubt that things are still overbuilt and the housing market in general is over supplied.  It's still a buyer's market out there.

What do you think?

You can see more finance and mortgage stories at Tawaine's feed http://webpartner.com/TGFinancial or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/TheTGFinancial .

Randy Cox
CTO-WebPartner

Proton Energy Systems announces $1 million scholarship program

DomesticFuel.com pushed an article yesterday ( http://bit.ly/1MYvUJ ) about Proton Energy Systems funding a $1 million scholarship program to promote scholarship and achievement in science and technology.  The great thing about this is that it complements several other scholarship programs like Hydrogen Education Foundation’s Hydrogen Student Design Contest and the H-Prize.  More information can be found here: http://www.protonenergyscholarship.org/

Proton Energy Systems is a leading supplier of hydrogen generators.

Although a hydrogen economy seems to be an elusive goal, hydrogen generation does hold promise as a fundamental energy source.  Coupled with other alternative energy energy generation mechanisms, like wind energy where the production of hydrogen can be very green, it is a virtually unlimited source of energy and can go a long way toward solving the energy consumption problems in the transportation industry where oil is king.

DomesticFuel.com is tracked on the WebPartner Alternative Energy feed and can also be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/altenergywebpar .

Randy Cox
CTO-WebPartner

Fortune 100 Twitter accounts underutilized or unused

SmartBrief: Many Fortune 100 Twitter accounts sit idle http://bit.ly/3M53H4 Full http://bit.ly/2a6GMy  

This is another interesting headline that came across WebPartner customer Robin Kinsey's "The Sales Factor" account.  This SmartBrief posting links to a good article on Mashable: http://bit.ly/95JYY which reviews a study on the use and lack of use of Fortune 100 Twitter accounts.  They assert that Fortune 100 accounts often focus too much on brand or they simply don't know how to use their Twitter account at all.  

As much as anything it goes to show how early the use of social media is with business in general.  That's where we believe there is a huge opportunity with the WebPartner service to use news and information to help get conversations going and give voice to short handed companies looking to build a presence on Twitter and Facebook.  

News isn't the only thing most corporate Twitter accounts can use.  Having dynamic content on your website helps bring traffic back.  Of course engaging with @ messages from people who comment on your content or may have a question about your service or product is extremely important.  But if your Twitter account suffers from some of the same lack of use or confusion that Fortune 100 companies are seeing, then there is a big opportunity to use WebPartner to help get your social media strategy in gear.

Randy Cox
CTO-WebPartner 

Science and environment lure students to ag colleges

This from WebPartner customer The TG Financial (http://bit.ly/1xgEC8):

USAToday: Job prospects yield large crop of students in ag schools http://bit.ly/17R9wy Full http://bit.ly/1IOASG

Interesting article from USAToday on how agricultural schools are attracting unlikely students. Drawn by concern for the environment, the amount of applied science, and a skyrocketing interest in health, ag schools have seen huge enrollment increases over the last several years. Where I grew up the people that went to ag schools and got various agricultural degrees were the sons and daughters of farmers. What they're seeing now is interest in regional development and organic practices from a new range of schools coming from inner city to the city suburbs.

Larry Ellison misses the point...again

Many of you may know of Larry Ellison of Oracle, the company that makes enterprise database software, ERP solutions, etc., for big companies. He gets the choir laughing in this little bit where he rants on the hype around cloud computing. I'm not quite sure why he cares so much and it takes him five minutes before he actually lists and and acknowledges the benefits of cloud computing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UYa6gQC14o

The fact is that cloud computing is much more than Larry's assertion that it's nothing new ("Computers on a network"). WebPartner is built on a combination of hosted services and cloud computing (Amazon EC2). For companies like ours, cloud computing has meant that we don't have to burn capital acquiring hardware, we can scale as load has demanded, and we haven't had to take on a full time IT professional just to keep machines running. That's huge for any company. Done right, with the help of all of the companies that VC's are funding that Larry denigrates, many things become possible for a much wider range of bricks-and-mortar companies and tech companies alike than ever before.

Robin Kinsey (@TheSalesFactor), a WebPartner customer, had a Tweet on her feed that you may have missed: CRN: Rackspace Numbers Show New Cloud Math http://bit.ly/3KeFS0 . One of the main points to come out of this study, from a company that offers both hosted service and cloud computing, is that IT managers never want to buy another server again. That's profound and another reason why Larry is missing the point.

Randy Cox
CTO-WebPartner

Deconstructed Turkey

Discovery.com: A Cheaper and Faster Thanksgiving Dinner: Deconstructed Turkey - http://bit.ly/3thZ2z

Couldn't help but notice this Tweet from WebPartner customer JavaJuice. (http://www.javajuiceextract.com/ , http://twitter.com/javajuiceinc ) It's a great idea to cook your turkey in parts as it can cut down on cooking time which saves energy and you can also load up on extra parts of the turkey that you and your family like the most.

While we're on the topic of food you can probably use a liquid pick-me-up too. Take a look at the JavaJuice website. This liquid coffee extract comes in a rugged pouch/envelope of concentrate and is suitable for travelers who want great coffee on a business trip or anyone who may not have time to brew up a pot of coffee but don't want to sacrifice flavor. You can buy these at R.E.I. and other retailers.

Make a blog or website widget out of a WebPartner feed

If you want to create a widget from your own WebPartner feed or one of our public WebPartner feeds, we would highly suggest that you use a service called Widgetbox to create a widget that you can easily use on your blog (TypePad, WordPress, Blogger, etc), Facebook page, or website.

Simply start a Widgetbox account and create a new RSS widget. Then give it the URL to the WebPartner feed page, like http://webpartner.com/photography. Follow the instructions on Widgetbox and you will end up with a widget that is installable on any of the platforms mentioned above. The standard widget looks like this:

Please contact us if you have any questions.

Deliver your headlines to more venues

For channel owners and editors there have been two interesting things that have happened in the last month that only signal more great things to come. That is the ability to add headlines in your channel to both Twitter and a Blogger gadget.

If you have a Twitter account you can put the username and password into the Channel Properties dialog. From then on any new headlines produced by your WatchPoints or any new solo headlines you add to the channel will automatically be posted to your Twitter account.

If you already have a channel going you will see a "TWEET" link beside each headline. This will allow you to manually send a headline to the Twitter account associated with this channel.

Once you have assigned a Twitter account to a channel, the channel title bar will then show a Twitter icon to anyone who views the channel. They can then link to the Twitter view of this channel and follow you from their own account.

We hope to soon offer the ability for anyone viewing the channel to "Tweet" any headline to any Twitter account. But for now there is automatic posting of your new headlines to a Twitter account you have assigned to the channel.

I will write an article soon to discuss how to put headlines in a Blogger gadget and add it to your blog.

Randy Cox

CTO

Mobile WebPartner is available

We have been a bit quiet about this, but in the last month or so we have introduced a mobile site where you can get your WebPartner channels delivered. Most mobile devices will be routed there directly if the device browser is aimed at www.webpartner.com. But in case we miss your device you can always get to it by going to http://m.webpartner.com .

We will be continually adding functionality to the mobile site including the ability to create a new account. Right now you can log in and get to your My Channels list. The performance is great. I can get my channels onto my older slower iPhone in a flash. Very nice when killing some time at the airport or waiting in the doctor's office or waiting anywhere for that matter.

Let us know if you have any questions. Contact Us

Randy Cox

Wow. Have we been busy!

It has been a while since any of us have posted a new blog entry on all the progress we've made with the product and service. Here are just some highlights:

• Completely new look for the whole site. It's just much cooler and more usable than before.
• Better "My Channel" management. You can now page through your channels and control things like how many channels show up on a page and how many headlines per channel to show.
• WebPartner channels can now be published to Twitter.
• We now have a Blogger widget so you can show your WebPartner channel on your Blogger blog. Check out the Help page for details and two different ways to publish your headlines on Blogger.
• A whole new search engine. This one works a lot better and is constantly re-indexing the site every five minutes or so. Now it's easier than ever to locate channels that may already have found the best sources of information you are looking for.
  
• Many more public channels are available. We have added probably 50-60 new channels since the website overhaul.

WebPartner usage has been building all the time. We think we're on to something.

Enjoy the new site and let us know if there is anything we can do. Contact Us.

Randy Cox
CTO

New channel on Wind Power

From the very launch of WebPartner, the Alternative Energy channel has been the most popular channel week after week. It's a great way to stay up on things going on in alternative energy without searching out the many sources of alt. energy news.

With the continued interest in this channel we have also begun new channels to concentrate specifically on areas of alternative interest. Today we announce the creation of the Wind Power channel.

The Wind Power channel will follow projects large and small in the effort to create more energy from wind power. There are many efforts targeted at both utility scale power as well as residential scale wind generators. Exciting things are happening in both areas and we'll do our best to cover them and also follow legislative issues at both local, state, and national levels in the US and the world.

Other recent additions in the energy topic area include Hot Rock Geothermal and Geothermal for Commercial and Public Buildings. This can be a confusing area because the word geothermal is used to mean very different things depending on the target.

Many people understand geothermal to mean the electricity production from water pumped onto hot rock thousands of feet below the surface of the earth. There are a lot of utility scale projects getting underway to tap this enormous source of energy.

Geothermal is also used for the micro extraction of stable heat from just a few feet below the earth's surface in your backyard. Highly efficient heat pumps have been developed over the last several years that will cool and heat your house based on whether heat is being pumped in or out of your home or building. It's a very efficient process and causes virtually no carbon output besides the electricity to run the pump which is similar to running your ice box.

This is a very exciting time in alternative energy and we hope WebPartner can keep you up to date on everything that is happening out there.

Enjoy.

Randy Cox

Earthquake Channel Maps Out The Shaking

Southern California was rocked by a 5.4 earthquake earlier today. I have been running an Earthquake Maps channel for quite some time due to my interest in geology and background from the Colorado School of Mines. WebPartner has picked up a lot of traffic today from people looking to see where the shaking was.

I created the Earthquake Channel because in my own quest to keep up to date on earthquakes I found I had to go to a long list of bookmarks and shift between many pages, particularly on the USGS site where much of this information resides. Now in one easy glance I can see the latest maps, magnitudes, and shake charts for the latest earthquakes across the globe. It even shows activity for parts of the U.S. that you may have thought were immune to earthquakes.

Earthquake Tracking Maps

Randy Cox

Tour de France almost over, Olympics in sight

I love summer sports and this summer we have a one-two punch with the Tour de France and the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

The WebPartner "World Of Cycling" channel has spent a lot of time on the Tour de France in the last two weeks. If you're like me and you're into a topic, there's almost never enough sources of information. One nice thing about the World Of Cycling channel is that it is pulling feeds from several of the top cycling news sites as well as picking up "one-off" articles written about an individual, usually from a newspaper or online news source close to where the person calls home. VeloNews is a great pulication and does concentrate more on US teams. But there's nothing quite like reading articles written on Cadel Evans from a news source "down under". Many of the cycling publications will want you to see the race from their perspective. With the World of Cycling you can get tour news and info from many sources and different regions of the world .

It's just a few weeks now until the Summer Olympic Games open. In preparation to celebrate and follow what is happening we have been running a channel to follow much of the news related to US Olympic teams as well as major stories from other teams and countries in their preparations for the games. You can find it at Olympics - Beijing. We will follow the good and the bad in the lead-up to the games and during the games. The slant will be positive, but won't ignore bad news for athletes, countries, or the hosts.

I do a lot of swimming as a masters swimmer here in Colorado, so I'm particularly keen on following Olympic Swimming. It's always peculiar to me when swimming gets very little coverage between games and then turns into one of the most popular sports every four years. It has been like that for as long as I can remember and I suppose it will stay that way.

If you would like to become a contributing editor to the Olympics-Beijing channel please drop us a note. Just go to "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the home page or "Contact Us" to go directly to the email form. We look forward to hearing from you.

Randy Cox

WebPartner and the iPhone

Did you know that WebPartner works really well on the iPhone? For those of you who have this device you can look at your favorite Channel Room via bookmark or direct link. Because of how the Channel Room is designed, the headlines with synopses and images are all lined up down the left hand side of the page and scaled in such a way as to make viewing on an iPhone very convenient. Try it sometime. You'll find it is a nice way to stay up to date during meetings or killing time in the airport.

Randy Cox

Journalist and Legend, Tim Russert, Passes On

I won't say anything different than thousands of people will be saying over the next few days. It's sad that such a news legend has passed on so early. I think Tim was the epitome of a great journalist and he will be missed. His presence was mostly felt in TV media, but I can't help but wonder who the great and enduring personalities will be across the blogsphere over the next decade. It's hard not to feel sad this Friday afternoon.

Randy Cox

Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup

This last Tuesday evening I presented WebPartner to the Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup. For those of you unaware of the "Meetup" service, go to Meetup.com and discover all the interesting groups doing things you enjoy in your area. It's eye opening how many groups, interests, and people are involved in all kinds of Meetups.

The Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup is one of the largest new tech Meetups around and is one of the largest groups overall. It's well attended with nearly 300 attendees to each monthly meeting on the CU campus in Boulder and it has well over 1400 registered members.

The presentation format at this meeting is interesting. The standard drill is five companies present their product or concept for five minutes and take five minutes of questioning before moving to the next company. Although there are some true flops and bad presentations from time to time (think presentations by geeks), there are almost always several gems that come out of each meeting and it's very worthwhile to attend.

I had presented WebPartner to this group last January with great interest and I wanted to get back in front of them to get some reactions since we went to public beta in early May. Only about a third of the 300 attendees at this meeting had attended the January meeting. For this group I quickly showed how easy it is to set a WatchPoint on a region of the page and then went on to show several channels that are running that they might be interested in. This group is pretty technical although it includes product managers, PR people, CEOs, VCs, and many other groups. I even met a gentleman in commercial real estate who was interested in building a channel to track commercial real estate activity in the Denver area.

Here were a few of the questions:
- "The Channel Room URL doesn't look very SEO friendly. Are you going to add something to change that?" My answer - There isn't an ability to add a user defined channel URL alias right now, but it's something that is on the drawing board.
- "How do you make money?" - My answer - Google ads and sponsored ads. The response at that point from the gentleman that caught a laugh was "How can I find your investor?"
- "Can I go back and look at old headlines?" - My answer - Yes. From the Channel Room there is a link to "Headline Archive" which will display past headlines for each WatchPoint in the channel. We have not specified a limit on the headline history, but that will probably have to happen in the future.
- "How often do you update the web page based WatchPoints and does the user have control of this?" - My answer - We update all feeds on an interval you specify in the WatchPoint properties. We will update as often as every 15 minutes.

If you were at the meeting, thank you for attending. I hope you got something out of it and will come to WebPartner to give it a try. Create an account, find some interesting channels from our public library to subscribe to, give us some feedback, and create your own channel if you get motivated to try out creating your own channel.

Consider subscribing to the Colorado Startups Company Tracker channel. It's the only public place online that automatically tracks recent news and blog entries from many of the companies that have demostrated at the Meetup and have come across ColoradoStartups.com.

Randy Cox

Don't go to the grocery store hungry

I've noticed this phenomena many times while working on the Gourmet Cooking channel. It reminds me of going to the grocery store when I'm hungry. I end up wanting to cook everything that comes across this channel and what's worse is that it makes me hungry just working on it. I think I'm going to go have a snack.

While in the process of making sure things were up to date and adding a few more WatchPoints that I've come across, I found this little gem called "Seven Ways To Present Food Like A Chef". It's also posted on the channel, but I've left you a link here too. I've been cooking at a gourmet level for a while now, but food presentation is always something where I could use more experience and expertise.

Send me a link to some of your favorite cooking and recipe sites. I would love to share them on this channel.

Randy Cox

Wild Colorado Weather

Actually, the spring weather has been wild throughout much of the country's midsection. Last Thursday a line of thunderstorms traveled north to northwest along the Colorado front range raking several cities with strong wind and hail. In Boulder we had some slushy hail, wind, rain, and bright sunshine all within an hour around noontime. Unfortunately the area around Windsor, north of Denver and a bit southeast of Fort Collins, caught it on the chin. One person was killed and large portions of the community were flattened. Fortunately the community there is strong and the residents got right to work helping each other and trying to clean up and figure out how to rebuild.

I saved the animated radar of this storm on the Boulder weather channel. Scroll to the bottom of that page and you can see the yellow, red, orange, and magenta cell sweeping to the east of Greeley and Fort Collins.

In addition to the saved radar animation, I saved a headline from CNN that was posted at the time. This tornado was eventually classified as an F2 or F3 (Fujita Scale). Judging by the word descriptions on the Fujita scale I can even imagine it could have or should have been classified as an F4.

We maintain a few weather channels for places like Boston, New York, and the Bay Area too. If you would like to see more, drop us a line through our channel wish list .

Or feel free to create your own with WebPartner.

Randy Cox

Memorial Day 2008

Memorial Day 2008

Memorial Day means different things to different people. To some it’s just another day off from work. To some it means parades and barbeques. To others, it means another sale at the local mall.

To many people, Memorial Day means remembering those men and women in the U.S. Armed Forces who fought and died so that we could continue to have our freedoms here in the United States.

The Internet today is representative of those freedoms—to read what you would like to read, to be able to write freely about what’s important to you, to be able to blog, to IM to friends, etc. It’s easy to take these freedoms for granted.

On Memorial Day, we shouldn’t take them for granted. We should remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedoms. And if you should see someone in uniform today who is currently in our Armed Forces or who has served in them previously, please go out of your way and walk up to them and just say “Thank you”. Those two simple words will mean a lot.

Morey Schapira

Peak Oil - Are we on the downhill slide?

Peak Oil - It's a term that is gaining a lot of momentum out there in this day of $133 oil (no doubt we'll look back on this price with nostalgia). If you're not familiar with the term, Peak Oil is a concept that has been around for a long time and only now getting into the mainstream media. It's based on the fact that ultimately the world's oil supply is limited. At some point the reserves get so costly to extract or technologically infeasible that the amount of oil that can actually be delivered will not only level off, but forever be in decline.

Many pundits on both sides of peak oil have argued for years about when it will occur. Why do we care? Well, if the demand for energy across the world continues to rise and the ability to meet this demand is diminishing then there will be a massive commodity crunch coming that will literally limit the amount of growth an economy can have not to mention that oil prices will keep rising. Since practically anything a developed nation produces requires oil in some way, having an oil shortage, not simply an embargo as happened in the mid-80's, will produce an economic scramble unlike anything we've ever seen.

There is a lot of dicussion about whether we have just passed peak oil. Saudi Arabia simply can't produce more oil even with the reserves they have. Some think that producers like this are simply sandbagging to support the price. Others argue that at $133 oil there is simply no reason for any person, state, or country to hold back and so therefore if delivered supplies have flattened or declined then we have as much evidence as we could get that peak oil has occurred. Many of the emirates in the Middle East are already adjusting their economies by redirecting oil revenues into tourist infrastructure as evidenced by massive investments in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, and many other gulf countries. The leaders of those countries haven't tried to keep any secret that they are planning for the future where their region simply doesn't exist on oil revenue. Like they say, follow the money.

The thing that can delay peak oil is, of course, finding more oil. Many on the contrary side of the peak oil concept say that reserves will continue to expand or technology will continue to improve that will allow us to tap otherwise uneconomical reserves and therefore the supply of oil will continue to meet demand. That has certainly been true for many years, but recently there is a groundswell of evidence and belief that the days of finding a massive reserve that can stave off peak oil are now gone.

If you're interested in this topic, WebPartner has developed a channel that covers many of the news stories and sources around this complex, but very important topic. It includes both "proponents" and "debunkers" of Peak Oil. Take a look at it and subscribe to it if you want to stay up to date.

http://www.webpartner.com/?wp=chroom&chid=8y572hijr7YBjJmS

Randy Cox

Colorado Green Tech channel started

I met with Kevin Geminiuc last night here in Boulder. Kevin is a co-organizer of the Colorado Green Tech Meetup group which is a growing group of green technology, founders, and investors. Their goal is to inspire people to get involved with and share knowledge of green technologies and to support "ecopreneurs" getting started with their own products or services.

Kevin and his co-organizer, Kris Wiesenfeld, are working on some green tech products of their own. They are highly motivated individuals and have the perfect profile to run a focused group like the Colorado Green Tech group. WebPartner is a good match for them. Both are extremely busy individuals, but they like the idea of being a focal point for news gathering and commentary in this area. Their members are busy people too and WebPartner can help harness the power of the community by finding the most relevant news and sharing it with everyone so they don't have to spend the time to find it themselves. That sounds like green tech to me!

Their blog is getting underway at http://coloradosustainableenergy.wordpress.com and their website is under construction at http://coloradogreentech.net .

Stop by to have a look at the Colorado Green Tech channel

Randy Cox

New Bundle of Wine Channels Now Available

Wine. You either drink it or you don't. Many a life has been devoted to pursuing its pleasures or the business of wine making.

Today we announce the creation of a bundle of channels specifically highlighting this pursuit. Wine Channel Bundle Right now this is a bundle that includes a general wine channel, one specifically for California wines, and one that pulls together the latest news in the wine industry.

We will likely continue to enhance the channels in this bundle and add more as we go. We are also anticipating that there are more than a few wine afficionados creating their own public, but personal channel, highlighting aspects that they enjoy.

Whether you drink wine or not, we think this is an excellent example of how you can take a very personal topic and keep up on it with very little effort. We have already researched and linked to many of the top wine blogs and will continue to post articles of interest. Literally within minutes you can have a great overview of what is happening in the industry and what people are saying about various new releases.

Enjoy.

Randy Cox

Houston, We Have Lift Off!

Houston, We Have Lift Off!

WebPartner™ is proud of passing another milestone. We are now in our Beta phase.

We have moved our website to a public one and people are beginning to visit and use our site. Building WebPartner™ has taken a great deal of creativity and energy.

Kudos to Mark for his vision and leadership, without which we would not be here today. His thoughtful inputs have been very helpful in guiding us in the right direction.

Kudos also go out to Randy for all of his hard work in designing, creating and operating the WebPartner™ web site. He engineered the toolbar and backend WebPartner service as well. This was a significant engineering accomplishment.

People really like our look and feel. It has taken thousands and thousands of hours coding, testing and optimizing the cool features and functionality. The ability of our readers to set 'watch points' to observe changes on non RSS enabled web sites is VERY powerful and unique.

We also want to thank Landon, Fran, Robert, Richard, and David as well as our friends and family testers for their contributions. Thanks for your help in moving us forward.

So please take a moment now to register, find the channels of topics that are of interest and stay on top of late breaking events and news by watching the headlines in those channels change in your browser as they are automatically updated for you.

Enjoy!

Morey Schapira