Jason Bedell - Interactive Marketing & Technology Blog

Ruban's Tube

This is just awesome and geeked. Check it...

Rubens Tube - video powered by Metacafe

Portal Mashups

Ok, so my buddy Dan, that I used to work with, hit me up today asking me about creating widgets and flakes. After my initial response of, "huh?", he explained by directing me towards Pageflakes and Netvibes. First off, very cool. I highly recommend you check it out.

Now I have worked with Portals in the past and have been watching the evolution of Java Portals, Portlet Containers, and even the JSR-168 portlet specification for some time. I even have a new favorite called Liferay (the first of many shameless plugs for open source products to come). But somewhere in my infinite geekdome, I was missing the rise of much simpler, more accessible, portal solutions popping up around the Web 2.0/Mashup craze of recent.

I have been a MyYahoo user for many years now and have been frustrated by what I feel is a lack of innovation and development of new portlets and the inability to create and submit my own custom portlets (portlets are the little widgets representing a very specific feature or function that constitute a portal). Netvibes and Pageflakes address this shortcoming. By publishing an SDK and creating an extensible platform for others to develop on top of, these solutions have exploded with literally hundreds of portlets submitted by the global web development community.

What are your thoughts? Have you seen other such portal solutions? Have you created or dreamed up any portlet ideas of your own?

First Blog Entry

This is my first blog entry. Just kicking the tires and learning more about typepad and the services they provide. Since this entry should really include at least a little something, here is a link to my del.icio.us page. Post your own del.icio.us page if you like and discuss.