SwirrlSpeak

Swirrl has a Bright(box) future

Posted by Ric Wed, 12 Mar 2008 13:40:00 GMT

Swirrl is being developed on Ruby on Rails. I’ll post again later with more details about our choice of platform, but for those who don’t know: Ruby on Rails is an open source web development framework originally created by David Heinemeier Hansson (commonly referred to in the Rails community as DHH) from 37 signals, and then extended by open source contributors.

Anyway, the main point of this post is to mention our excellent web hosting company, Brightbox, who provide Xen-based Virtual Dedicated Servers, with a full Rails stack pre-installed and ready to go.

Why are they so excellent? Well, for a start, their offering is based on Xen, which DHH and 37 signals themselves approve of. Brightbox is a young company (formed less than a year ago), but the fact that they are a small and friendly company coupled with their speciality in Rails hosting, means that when I’ve contacted them for support their responses have been reassuringly swift and knowledgeable. They have also been keen to take suggestions on board, impressing us with their genuine willingness to improve.

Brightbox also make it easy to deploy to your virtual server by providing a gem with a set of Capistrano 1.4.1 recipes, which although not perfect, provide a good starting point for deployment. (We’re in the process of honing these recipes onto our own specialised deployment strategy using the more recent version 2.2). In order to make sense of these recipes and all other aspects of their service, Brightbox provide a very useful, ever growing support wiki.

The service itself has been reliable enough since we signed up, given it’s in its infancy. Their reasonable pricing and great support means I see no reason why we can’t enjoy a long and happy relationship with Brightbox.

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Wikis more popular than Britney Spears

Posted by Bill Sun, 09 Mar 2008 18:03:00 GMT

I’ve been having a bit of idle fun with Google Trends and found that ‘wiki’ as a search term is surprisingly popular, climbing steadily over the last three years or so and searched more often on Google than all sorts of other popular things, including Britney.

This isn’t really what I was expecting, since although it seems pretty clear that wiki use is steadily growing, along with other Web 2.0 tools, it is still probably in the ‘early adopter’ stage.

Comparing ‘wiki’ with ‘wikipedia’ on Google perhaps gives a clue:

The climb of wiki popularity closely follows that of wikipedia and perhaps many users are using it as shorthand for wikipedia. I’d love to think there is that level of interest for wikis in general, but it seems unlikely!

Another interesting snippet from Google Trends is that people in Japan search for ‘wiki’ much more than anyone else, while the biggest searchers for ‘wikipedia’ are Finnish.

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What is your data worth?

Posted by Bill Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:46:00 GMT

Paul Miller has started a new blog on the semantic web at ZDNet.

Paul presents an in-depth interview with Tim Berners-Lee, which is well worth a listen (there is also a transcript).

It’s full of interesting stuff, but I thought I’d highlight one point (about 9 minutes in) that helps to illustrate our motivation for building Swirrl:

“Well you should take an inventory of what you have got in the way of data and you should think about how valuable each piece of data in the company would be if it were available to other people across the company, or if it were available publicly, and if it were available to your partners.”

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