Nikhil Kothari has a nice .NET wrapper for FaceBook.

The ValleyDUG portal is now live. If you are a DotNetNuke enthusiast residing in Silicon Valley or the Bay Area, please join the group.

I am a bit disappointed as my travel schedule and other commitments impeded my ability to be very active in CapitalDUG, which I co-founded with Antonio Chagoury. So last month, I finally gave in and relinquished my role in the group.  

Once my move to Silicon Valley is complete, I don't anticipate traveling as much and will be able to devote time regularly to ValleyDUG. I find the user group meetings to be quite exciting and am looking forward to building the membership of this group.

The last time I was this excited about anything web-related was when I first encountered DotNetNuke in 2003. Last week, when I finally got a chance to check-out the FreeBase alpha, I was euphoric. Finally, a structured way to access and query all the knowledge in the world. If you have not yet checked it out, don't wait another minute. FreeBase is one of those "first time I used a web browser"-type moments...they are rare and life-changing.

What's so great about FreeBase you ask?

Freebase.com is home to a global knowledge base: a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone.  It could be described as a data commons. Freebase.com is enabled by the technology of Metaweb, which is described at www.metaweb.com.

That about sums it up. As a developer, I am quite excited about the prospect of being able to create applications that integrate structured data of this scale. I spent some time exploring the data that's already been loaded and the API and I must say, MetaWeb has done a great job with the UI and the documentation. Sure, it's an alpha, and there are lots of holes, but overall everything just works intuitively.

I'm not sure how much of the site is publicly accessible, but here's a video that gives a pretty good overview:

http://www.freebase.com/view/tutorial/

I'm going to take a shot at creating a simple FreeBase app using .Net later this week. I'll document the process as best as I can. Stay tuned.

The past couple of weeks, as I worked on my focus areas for DotNetNuke Open Force '07, I have been thinking a lot about presentations and presentation techniques. In the past couple of days, Guy Kawasaki made two very interesting posts -- today on Speaking as a Performing Art and yesterday on Steve Jobs' WWDC presentation. The latter got my attention. In it, Guy links to this amazing post by Garr Reynolds comparing Bill Gates and Jobs' presentation styles. Even though it's an old post, if you speak in public, this is a must-read. What Reynolds describes as the "Microsoft Method" of presentation he nails it. I know exactly what he's talking about.

At the MVP summit in Seattle earlier this year, while sitting through Bill Gates' keynote, I couldn't help noting the utterly boring presentation style of the world's most successful technology entrepreneur. It was probably the fifth or sixth time I have been to a Gates keynote and each time, no matter how exciting the announcements, the presentation was unfailingly underwhelming.

The contrast to Jobs' simpler and minimalist presentations is stark. He could be talking about something totally mundane, but still somehow get the audience to listen with rapt attention. Reynolds' post makes it all clear -- Jobs uses the Zen aesthetic of kanso or simplicity. 

"Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means."
                                 — Dr. Koichi Kawana

He emphasizes how PowerPoint encourages you to visually spell everything out in bullet points, when what you should be doing is the exact opposite -- have less on the slides and arouse the audience's imagination. This is a very simple concept, but thinking back on past presentations, I know that it is very difficult in practice. Nevertheless, now that I know about kanso I am determined to see if it will work for me.

Have you noticed that when using Internet Explorer the Flash content on many websites requires you to click before the content is activated? This is due to an automatic patch which causes IE to do this by default for "active" content i.e. add-on controls/objects.

You might assume this is a security measure, and you would be wrong. You might also assume this is a technical issue, and you would be wrong again. Although it's hard to believe, this behavior is a deliberate crippling of IE in order to comply with a patent dispute from a company named Eolas. It's hard to decide who is more to blame for this -- Eolas or Microsoft -- but one thing's for sure...the end-user experience has taken a nose-dive with these changes.

There is hope. Geoff Stearns has created SWFObject, a simple Javascript script that enables Flash movies to be embedded with script. Apparently, objects rendered dynamically are not constrained by the patent issue. SWFObject provides a simple and elegant way to insert Flash and circumvent the click annoyance.