New readers who found this site in the last week probably aren't aware that the OPML sampler fits in with thought's I've had about something I've been calling OnyxCube as it's a content black box. You push RSS, OPML and your intentions into one end and get out RSS, HTML or whatever other format makes sense on the other.

I did a bit more with the example script yesterday. I wanted to see how my sampler script would handle a real challenge, and wanted to work through some of the scaling issues to see how they'd need to be dealt with. So, I fed it a big challenge: Scoble's 860 feed OPML file.
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I've got a saying I use fairly often. I'm sure I picked it up somewhere, but can't attribute it to whom.

The early bird gets the worm. But, the second mouse gets the cheese

This ran through my head as I was trying to get the answer to the question of what project Wordpress forked off from (b2 is the answer). Why? Because, if you compare the relative userbases of b2 and Wordpress, it's clearly an illustrative case. The "2nd mouse" is eating all of the cheese.

I hear all the time about how important the "1st mover" advantage is. And, in many industries, it's critical. Just look at eBay vs. Yahoo and all of the other auction wannabe's. Nearly no activity on any of them in comparison. When your product or service is dependent on its community of users *as* the product or service, being first matters.

However, when you're talking about software or content, I'm not so sure it does very often.

Those 3D software boxes and ebook covers are everywhere and with good reason. They really help people envision your digital object as being more "real". What is unreal is the money they are asking for the services to make them as well as the software dedicated to the task. If you've got Photoshop and a few minutes, you're set and I whipped up a screencast showing just how easy it is.

Sample Software Box - Web 3.0, with more hype.

Watch the video: Screencast: Ebook Covers and Software Boxes with Photoshop on Google Video

I submitted my registration (and coin) for SXSW Interactive this morning. I tend not to go to conferences, boot camps or other 5 day events that cost more than my entire home theater. There are a lot of reasons why that's generally the case, but apparently, this one caught my eye in some way that I haven't yet completely figure out and I'm actually going to this one.

One factor was that it's about as cheap (registration fee-wise) as conferences get. Some of these conferences, after fees, hotel, airfare and food end up costing more than my truck. While still not cheap (it's always expensive to pay someone to throw you and your luggage through the air across the country), this is about as cheap as it gets.

My interest was sparked by an invitation to go made by Robert Nagle after a series of exchanged emails about a variety of things including my OpenFiction activities. I know from experience that in person you can accomplish SO much more than you think that I decided to take him up on the invitation to visit his city.

And, part of it is my longer term goals, which include not *needing* consulting income to live. I'll probably keep doing it for quite a while longer, because I really enjoy directly solving problems for clients. However, I want to build up my blogging empire and other projects to get a more diverse and stable way of making my living. Eggs, baskets and all. I think that getting out there a bit in the interactive media community is part of that.

At the moment, it looks like I'll be travelling alone and still need to book my travel and lodging. If you'll be at SXSW March 10-14 or just in Austin, TX in general, let me know. I love to eat and enjoy good conversation over a meal or just in general. I'm not into parties and would rather hang with a few others and share ideas. I'd particularly enjoy conversations that can be recorded as podcasts in case anyone's interested in that as I expect I'll be bringing equipment along.

[Edit:
I booked my travel and lodging and am staying. My flight is scheduled to arrive in Austin at 9:30 Friday night and I fly back at 4:30 Tuesday afternoon. I'll be staying at Hawthorn Suites Ltd. - Austin Airport. That (as the most obsessive among you have already figured out (welcome back from Google Maps, folks)) is about 10 minutes from the actual conference.

While being right on site or a couple of blocks away might be great fun, the fact that the price difference between where I'm staying and places the conference folks suggest leaves a $650 gap (I could hire a limo to take me to the conference every day for that or a new laptop or any number of really cool things) makes me OK with the shuttle/taxi solution that will result.

So, the next time someone asks me how I can "afford" my gadgets or a new laptop every year or 2, etc., I'll just point them to the savings from this conference and smile.]

With the recent stuff I've done with OPML and the reading I've done of some commentary on it, I'm making my "attention queue" a bit more public. I've had my OPML file (the one full of the stuff I read for my own benefit) up, but I also wanted to provide an input mechanism other than sending email. Turns out that delicious (I don't do the dots thing) has a tag that allows folks to put pages/links in front of me. So, if you've seen something interesting and want me to see it too, tag it "for:jwynia" and I'll take a look at it. I've put a feed that pulls those sites into my daily viewing and it's a way to get whatever interesting stuff you're reading into my browsing inbox.

delicious, tagging, bookmarks, attention, opml, rss