At the intersection of design, tech, creativity and culture. Part blog, part life log.
Published in September 2005
In his blog post today, Seth Godin, author and agent of change, writes about “that feeling of the impending rush” with the rapidly changing web. “The web is changing, and so fast it’s almost impossible to keep up. But Emily is trying. Check out: Emily Chang – eHub. In just a few weeks, she’s collected literally hundreds of new companies/projects that are examples of things that are turning the web upside down.”
(Updated 9/30) Global traffic to eHub is still growing (hello, Cyprus!), email submissions come in every day from web 2.0 creators, eHub’s RSS feed is getting over 300 900 readers and 2000 7000 hits a day, and over 570 1300 people have bookmarked eHub in del.icio.us. I’ve put up this partial list of sites that have blogged about or linked to eHub. This list will be updated as sites come in daily.
Found these camera phone pictures on my T610 taken sometime last February.
I had gotten an email from the Netvibes team to take a look at the site last week and signed up and took a quick spin around. I finally had a chance to explore further tonight. The buzz around Netvibes is well warranted.1 In previous posts, I’d been writing about the desire for tools that make it easier to navigate our variety of information sources. Netvibes provides a fast and efficient interface from which to do just that.
Netvibes is “a very simple and intuitive web 2.0 customizable homepage, rss reader/aggregator, podcast player, and much more.” Perhaps it’s because I was deeply involved with portals several years ago2 but when I first saw Netvibes, I thought it was going to act mostly like a portal page – with little channels of info that sent you off on various links or opened new browser windows to the sites. But once I started adding my feeds to Netvibes and customizing my content modules, the AJAX-enhanced functionality quickly set it apart from the older paradigm.
Netvibes interface is simplified but not simplistic by any means. Adding content is fast and functional and the on-page reading of RSS feeds a pleasure. I might make the close action (x) a bit more prominent when the user is in reading mode, but otherwise, the experience was so fun I might ditch all my other RSS readers and just use Netvibes. One of the best features is the ability to listen to podcasts inline on the page (also available for download as an mp3). Just when I had gotten into Odeo, Netvibes is here to lure me away.
The site certainly has functional similarities with Google’s personal page, but Netvibes provides the niche content, design, and approach that web 2.0 users and bloggers are looking for. For example, Google has a rather mainstream selection of feeds, including a “Lifestyle” channel with MSNBC Travel and eDiet news while Netvibes’ Feed Directory contains podcasts from IT Conversations and a featured feed from TechCrunch and MAKE: blog – clearly, the new web geek’s choices du jour. Now, I’m just looking forward to being able to share my Netvibes page/view with others.
1They’re cruising up del.icio.us popular and being hit on eHub quite a bit.
2 I designed the first generation of the MyUB university portal.
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Barb Dybwad from The Social Sofware Weblog writes about eHub in her post, eHub and wsFinder: Web 2.0 applications and web services.
There have been some excellent examples of Google map applications recently like Plazes, which allows you to discover locations and find people by proximity or location, and Mappr, where you can view Flickr photos by US geographic landmark or region. While these apps provide a social network for specific social purposes, the other wave of Google map applications like gVisit and MapStats provide another: a new way to discover, navigate and humanize your web statistics.
For years, I’ve seen charts, graphs, and numbers associated with page hits, unique visitors, path analysis, click tracking, robot views and the like. Just this last week when eHub hit the del.icio.us popular page and traffic skyrocketed, I was glued to my various stats programs.
In today’s Get Real column at Corante, Stowe Boyd, President/COO of Corante, the world’s first blog media company, writes about discovering new web apps at eHub, a new resource by co-founder and Ideacodes principal Emily Chang. See Stowe Boyd’s post, Mapstats and Ajax apps at Corante and also visit eHub, a constantly updated list of web applications, services, resources, blogs or sites with a focus on next generation web (web 2.0), social software, blogging, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, location mapping, open source, folksonomy, design and digital media sharing.
Emily Chang’s eHub web 2.0 software resource has risen to the delicious popular page since Tuesday, Sept 13 with over 400 bookmarks, has been blogged and linked by bloggers in the United States, Spain, Germany, Japan, China, Sweden, Hungary, Italy, and Portugal, and has received over 4000 unique global visitors to the site since its launch on Monday, September 12.
Emily Chang launches eHub, a constantly updated list of web applications, services, resources, blogs or sites with a focus on next generation web (web 2.0), social software, blogging, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, location mapping, open source, folksonomy, design and digital media sharing.
This is the personal site of Emily Chang, designer and co-founder of Ideacodes, specializing in web, UI, UX, IxD. Also an entrepreneur, webling, geek, blogger, surfer. Likes robots. More...