1. DJ Edna – an open-source website framework for musicians, including streaming, store, gallery, all that stuff.
   

   “…allows the artist to bypass traditional distribution middlemen in order to interact with and sell directly to their fans.”

   Kinda like if MySpace was actually useful.

2. Localtone Radio – Kinda like if Digg was streaming indie music.
   

   “It’s radio that is not only created by local artists, but artists you can see in the Twin Cities in the near future.”

Both projects care as much about the musician as the fan, which is rare.

Quicktime version

The team at Slantwise Design is testing out ShoutAt.com, their second build-in-a-week Ruby on Rails project.

From the sole developer, Dan Weinand:

“It’s still a little rough around the edges, and we’re already looking at features to add. We’re looking for help in testing it out, especially since every phone, and every carrier has their own way of doing things.”

I recorded my first experience with ShoutAt.com in the 11 minute video above.

I’m excited for more of these services because the real value to these recommendations services is with very small communities. Where everyone could conceivably know everyone else. With too many members and too many contributions, another filter is needed for the recommendations, and the urge to game the system becomes too high. Defeating the whole point of peer review and contribution. So, more, small, focused ponds are better.

1. Sun Developers Network Share (SDN Share) is soliciting code samples and articles from Sun developers, then wraps the participation in a points-based rewards program (code sample = 4 pts, article = 10 pts, etc).(Disclosure: I put together the early information architecture for SDN Share)
2. MarketWatch Sync is glossier, and visually mature (design by MNteractive’s own Christopher Leighton-Brooder) financial-Digg. I think the strength of this service is bringing the member-contribution/ranking model to a less l33t hax0r audience, to the people if you will.

“The next wave of innovation isn’t going to be as easy. The hard problems in the WWW are no longer usability or ease of everyday content creation.” – Peter Rip, EarlyStageVC

As a bonus, Mr. Rip offers a ‘is your web 2.0 project forgettable’ checklist.

More from Steve Borsch.

Here’s a link: Adobe Apollo

The and brillant minds at slantwisedesign just launched Better Together (goesbetter.com). It’s a new toy site where you tell the world how much better pointless and web applications, human blood and ice cream, and chocolate and peanut butter are, um, well, together.

Aside from the possibility of entertaining and pairs, I foresee some interesting pair-battles: the you and i faction vs. the you and me faction.

Many thanks and to slantwise for leaving the sign-in/out form off the front door – and making the site useful without registering or signing-in. Based on my poking around, if you want your pairs, votes, or comments to be savedassigned to you…you need an account. Otherwise, no. In fact, I don’t see a sign-out link anywhere. Cool.

Fun and loving copywriting throughout, like: “If we let you have a profile, you could change it here”, the fake profiles, and the ever changing footer strings.

Rumor and is, the whole site came together in 65 hours of work. There’s something energizing about that short of a turnaround for a v1.0 release.

Thankfully, the site is a whole lot less threatening than gottabet.com (not from slantwise).

• RSS/XML-RPC: this is the magic key from my perspective. It’s how applications (web or desktop) talk to each other. Without XML-RPC as a publishing mechanism and RSS as a distribution mechanism, the web as we know it doesn’t exist.
• Ruby on Rails : an open source framework biasing speed, iteration, and simplicity. Rather than needing everything up front, RoR makes it easy to develop as far as you know.
• BitTorrent: Now that customers are doing your marketing through their weblogs, bittorrent lets them do your distribution as well.
• WordPress : an open source publishing system that is so easy to install, use, extend and enhance that I’ve written 5 plug-ins for it and have lost track of how many installs I’m maintaining. Sure, it’s not perfect, but it’s everywhere, and it’s really easy to make it do what you want.
• Joyent/TextDrive: a web services vendor focused on being the vendor of choice for web developers. If I’m having a development problem, their forums are the first place I go after Google. I do all my hosting with them. Primarily because of their lifetime-customer plans.
• Skype: The start-up’s telecom and collaboration solution.
• Amazon S3 storage: Crazy cheap bandwith and storage for files, so reliable and cheap that Basecamp uses it for customer files.

None of these are really dotcom properties. To me, the things built with these technologies and services are far less interesting than their aggregate potential and promise.

To kick it off, I talk with the Refactr team; Ben, Jesse, and Scott, to talk about how they’re building a software consulting company on the agile software development, Groovy on Grails, and without an office space.

Listen to MNteractive Profile: Refactr [18 min].

Back around MinneDemo 1, Aaron Fulkerson presented MindTouch‘s enterprise wiki software at wiki.com.

According to their press release:

“MindTouch today announced it has partnered with Entrepreneur John Gotts to launch Wiki.com, the premier online destination for consumers to learn about, create and share wiki sites.”

Yes, the same wiki.com that Gotts bought for $3 million.

I was there when you said,”What is this 1999? $3 million for a domain name? That’s crazy.”

Well, in fact it is. As of this writing, wiki.com forwards to wik.is.

“John Gotts, the owner of Wiki.com, has agreed to transfer all wiki sites to MindTouch. The agreement does not include the Wiki.com domain….our technology powered Wiki.com from the beginning and we are intimately familiar with the backend…We’ll be providing additional details shortly on the new domain, features, and services.” – Aaron Fulkerson

Mike Arrington speculates a bunch. ValleyWag predicted the John Gotts, the owner of wiki.com would walk away before the bill came due.

Coincidently, Aaron moves to San Diego.

( sorry I decided to post to another blog I contribute to, but seems to sort of fit what we’re covering here as well )