Archive for June, 2008

  • Not For Tourists: web natives

    Okay, this is the third and almost the last of my posts about who I met in NYC. Not for Tourists is an independent publisher of guidebooks. They do a whole load of US cities in addition to the one that doesn’t sleep, including LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Washington, Atlanta and Philadelphia and more. They’re launching the London edition in October. They are the very epitome of an indie NY publishing company and they get the Web. They get it to such an extent that they give all the content away – as in, you can get a PDF of everywhere they cover. As founder Rob Tallia says, “You either pay in money or printer cartridges and paper”. We had a really fun time with Rob and Craig and I look forward to steak and booze next time. ;-)

    You can’t write for this outfit unless you live where you’re talking about. This and the design is very moleskine:elastic, This makes NFT (could be some probs there chaps – we have a National Film Theatre known as NFT here in old Europe… but perhaps that’s an other opportunity… who knows?) a highly desirable objet-cum-info-resource. Seriously better than Time Out. More clandestinely Web 2.0 than Kudocities and Qype. Moodier, cooler name than StreetFlow. Rock and roll – I want a t-shirt (they’ve sold out). I turned up in a Euro-looking scarf with Richard Lawson. They took the piss a bit. We all got on.

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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    11th June 08

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     Social Web

  • A community for foodies: The Foodist Colony

    Foodist Colony logo

    Another of the cool people I met last week in New York was David Ziegler, founder of Foodist Colony – a community website that allows food lovers to share restaurant recommendations. The community has been growing rapidly since David launched the site two years ago. There are lots of cool features to save people time: content is aggregated from the best food bloggers/websites and presented as a map mash-up.

    Foodist Colony screenshot

    Community members can rate and comment on restaurants and this creates an attention index of the top and buzziest restaurants. There are restaurant charts. Users can create a personal restaurant guide and share this with others. They can follow other people whose recommendations they find useful. And they can even book restaurants. Foodist Colony also launched a highly successful iPhone web app a few months ago, and this was featured at Apple.com as Apple’s ‘Staff Pick’. As a measure of the site’s success, it’s impressive that a whopping 73% of all registered users have bothered to build a personal restaurant guide. This is a vibrant, living community.

    The site currently serves the good folk of New York, but it’s obviously an idea that would work well in other cities both in the US and beyond. There are widgets – see a couple of example here and here. And of course there’s a Twitter page, which I am now following

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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    10th June 08

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     Social Web

  • BeerMenus.com – my kinda site

    BeerMenus.com

    I met Will Stephens for a beer last week in a pub in Williamsburg (I can’t remember what it was – very hoppy) to find out more about Beer Menus – a very cool beer, bar and map mashup covering Manhattan and Brooklyn. Will had a terrific story to tell about the new service. It launched in March this year and now carries details of nearly 300 venues/beer menus, and 1,514 individual types of beer. It’s a labour of love, but it also addresses a genuine business need: people who run bars very strong beer-dens don’t want to run websites on the whole. In many ways, the bit that most impressed was the way in which they’ve built the service so that people who run bars can keep the menus (including prices) up to date with little or no extra effort.

    Will started the site with his brother and the story of two boys creating Beer Menus has a ring of Bo and Luke Duke about it – in a good way. I love brother stories – and was out there working with mine, so it seemed like a sign. But that wasn’t all. The project that took us to NYC has been using this bar called Spuyten Duyvil as a placeholder, and I was astonished when Will told me it was just round the corner. Half an hour later I was beginning to understand why people working in such close proximity to *very* strong beers need very simple ways of updating their websites. I was two drinks in to an evening but they were both the same strength as barley wine or super-strength lager. It was great fun, but I think I’ll sick to my pilsener shandies ta.

    Anyway – it was ace to meet them. BeerMenus is built in Ruby on Rails and these guys gave done a really great job. It’s grown quickly and seems eminently scalable. What I like about it most is the way they’ve done fewer things really well.

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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    9th June 08

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     Social Web

  • P2P gardening community site swapping seeds: copyright theft?

    MyFolia.com, an innovative new online gardening community and organiser that lets you list the plants you want to grow and matches you to gardeners who want to swap seeds. As you’d expect, MyFolia.com is packed with tools to allow gardeners to swap ideas and tips as well, but it’s the seed swapping that drew the attention of a commenter at Lifehacker and has cast a dark cloud over conversations in the groups area of MyFolia:

    The seed stash lets you list your cuttings and seeds. Seed saving is a huge movement in the UK and parts of the Pacific Northwest. It’s a grassroots effort on behalf of our vanishing biodiversity and a protest against corporate control of local and global food supplies.

    Unfortunately, even without genetically modified plants in the picture, now hybrid plants often also have copyright protections on them.


    Canadian Gardening Magazine     called it the “Facebook for Gardeners” but the copyright debate makes it sound more like illegal file-sharing. Is this a job for the Creative Commons’ Biological Materials Transfer Project (Science Commons) or is this the start of seed piracy?

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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    1st June 08

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     Social Web

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