Tonight I randomly IM’d Chris Messina of Citizen Agency. Chris’ blog, FactoryCity, is one that has made its way into my must reads. Chris is all about Microformats, BarCamps, coworking, and pretty much all things open source.

So, I just pinged Chris to tell him his blog rocked (hey, I was in a good mood). An hour later, I felt even more energized about this dramatic shift in focus I have taken professionally. It was a great chat about everything from microformats in the government sector to what the heck “coworking” is to SXSW vs. An Event Apart to a bit of valley gossip. A chat with Chris is what I expected—energetic and jam-packed with information. These “new web” folks love to share. And I love to listen.

Chris’ significant other is also, er… significant. Tara Hunt’s blog, HorsePigCow, is yet another that jumps to the top for me. Together Tara & Chris make up Citizen Agency, a consulting company with their own very unique take on marketing.

I first heard of Chris back when he was Open Source Abassador for Flock, a Mozilla-based browser with many social features built in. In fact, Flock made me switch from Safari for a bit, but I found that the features I used I could get with Firefox, so I have since switched full time to Firefox. Even then, most interviews I heard with Chris were about Microformats. He’s really the one that introduced them to me.

I even brought up Chris in a company meeting about our upcoming blog, noting that he used a interesting linking approach sometimes where if he had many different examples to link to for a single idea, he would link every word individually. I liked it. He’s probably not the first to do it—and some usability folks might vomit (though I’m sure he used very appropriate title attributes)—but it was different. (Example: While I’m a total Cederholm fanboy, I still get my inspiration from a wide variety of sources.)

So Chris, thanks for the chat. I’m sure I’ll randomly ping you again at some point.

I’ve linked to quite a few Inside the Net interviews on here. Turns out, Amber MacArthur has gotten too good for our own good. She’s been hired full time by City News International in Canada, so her time to conduct interviews for ITN has been severly slashed. It’s a bummer, but it’s geat for her. I first heard of Amber when Adam Christiansen of the MacCast interviewed her for his first interview ever. Since then, I’ve become a very dedicated listener to Inside the Net and watcher of commandN.

Amber is a Leo Laporte proteg√©, as she has worked with him on many TechTV and TWIT.tv projects (including Inside the Net). From what I gather, Inside the Net is far from her most popular venture, but it is my favorite because of the quality of her guests. It seems to always consistently be all the people I want to hear from. Inside the Net isn’t going away completely, but it will be different. Specifically, it’ll be less interview and more live commentary with Leo about new things she found on the web (presumably while researching for City News). I still enjoy Amber’s commentary—commandN is great and I’ve been checking out her early work at City News and it is fantastic.

The last traditional interview episode of ITN (Amberless, just Leo) was with David Sawyer MacFarland, author of the new CSS Missing Manual book. I took a half-day CSS session with David at WebVisions, so it was pretty neat hearing from him again. I hope to check the book out when a bit of time frees up.

Some other great interviews that stick out:

• David Sawyer MacFarland (#39)
• Jeffrey Yan of Digication (#35)
• David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals (#30)
• Jeff Robbins of Drupal (#25) ***
• Dan Cederholm (#19)
• Brian Oberkirch and Alexander Muse of Big in Japan (#17)
• Jason Fried of 37signals (#5)
• Chris Messina (then with Flock) (#2)

In Googling for this post, I noticed Amber’s now a big enough start to have a fan site! Right… I almost forgot to mention that Amber is… what’s the technical word I’m looking for here… adorable?

So, good luck to Amber. Inside the Net completely rocked.

*** Just a note on this one. A few minutes in, it was nice to hear that this was THE Jeff Robbins of Orbit. I absolutely loved Orbit when Jeff was fronting them. In fact, in my former “I want to be a rock star” life, I actually used to chat about Orbit’s label, Lunch Records, with drummer Paul Buckley.

So, who is Brian Oberkirch?

The About portion of Brian’s website describes him as “Social media consultant. Writer. Marketer. Dreamer & tinkerer.” Basically, to me, he is an idea factory. Forget about just social media and marketing, he has great ideas on tech subjects such as microformats and mashups, too. Brian does a series of interviews under the name “Edgework” and he recently rattled off three good ones in a row.

In the most recent episode, as I mentioned, he interviewed Ted Rheingold of Dogster and Catster. Dogster and Catster allow people to make web pages for their beloved pets. So, quite the community has grown around these pages. They talk about how the sites fill niche, passion-centric markets. General social networking sites don’t tend to do so well. It helps to have a common interest that the users rally around. Flickr revolves around photo sharing, for example.

MySpace started off as a site where users discussed unsigned bands that they were fans of. Now MySpace is far more general, but it is sustaining itself—probably because it is so damn ubiquitous. Facebook is now trying to do the same. They were a community that were bonded together by academia. You needed a .edu email address to be admitted. So, there was a sense of community because everyone had something in common. Now Facebook is letting more users in, and some existing users don’t like it. It will be interesting to see what happens there.

Before Dogster, Brian covered Kiva, a nonprofit founded by Matt Flannery. What is Kiva? Let me just let the site explain it:

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

There just aren’t many sites out there like Kiva… it’s a great idea. Not only community marketing, but community financing—for a cause. Kudos to Matt.

Finally, before those two episodes Brian talked to Chad Dickerson of the Yahoo Developer Network. The main topic was Yahoo’s Open Hack Day. Yahoo used to hold internal contests to see what types of cool hacks and mashups their developers could come up with. Recently, they opened it up to the outside world. Check out the winners here.

Brian provides a lot of great ideas about the mashup culture, which is nothing short of fascinating. To see more examples of mashups, check out ProgrammableWeb.

To find out more about Brian, check out an interview by Shel Israel on Naked Conversations. I recommend checking it out. One quote from that interview that stuck out to me was when he was talking about how old school marketers will need to be cognizant of the new school “unmarketing” techniques, though it will be a gradual process:

I know we talk a lot about dinosaurs and how everything is changing, etc., but I think it will be gradual. If you don’t eat well, keep smoking, never exercise, eventually that will catch up to you. Same thing will apply. You’ll be able to get away with it for a while, but there will be a tremendous opportunity cost.

I thought this exact quote could relate very well to what will happen if old school table-based web designers don’t pay attention to web standards.

Not to be bandwagonesque, but Jeremiah Owyang also recently had a post about Brian.

So, lastly… I need to ask a question. Brian… when are you going to write a book on all of this? Personally, I can’t wait.

One thing I’ve been looking for is a good primer about developing with web standards to share with some designer friends. I want to avoid sending people a mishmash of incoherent links. Roger provides a concise (34 pages printed out, but nice big, fat text) and extremely informative primer called Developing With Web Standards: Recommendations and best practices.

Update: Oh yes, this is why I like Roger. When putzing around in his lab section of his site, I came across a tutorial on How to create equal height boxes in CSS, something that’s easy with (gasp!) tables, but is kind of a mystery in CSS. I need this for my new site design. Yes!

Well, I guess I’d have five cents. Brian Oberkirch recently interviewed Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path for Weblogs Work. (Link soup?)

Dan talks about Interaction design not just how it relates to software, but to Disney rides, coffee shops, and other everyday situations. Dan’s book, Designing for Interaction, hits shelves this August.

Worth noting is that Dan & Brian were both on the insanely great “Let Go, Jump In” panel at WebVisions last week.

The interview is here.

Jason Fried is the director of 37signals, a Chicago-based design company that has moved from web site design to the development of web appliactions. 37signals is as much known for their philosophy as their products (though their products are extremely elegant and useful).

First off, I’ve listened to a few interviews with Jason, so I’m going to start with those. I highly recommend listening to them. Most recently, I listened to Jason on MarketingMonger, and that interview really pushed me to get this post up here (been meaning to talk about Jason for quite some time). Another very accessible interview with Jason was on Amber MacArthur’s Inside the Net podcast. The Web 2.0 Show had another great chat with Jason and finally on Vitamin Jason gives an interview titled Web apps, Cash flow and Pricing.

While that gives you enough to listen to for awhile, I’ll let you know some of the things I’ve really taken from 37signals over the past couple months:

• Web-based software is much easier to create and release than standard software. Think about it… if InDesign comes out with a great new feature, Quark has to wait until their next major release to respond. With web-based software, you can just update your site with a similar, if not better approach to solving the problem.
• The current software model begs you to create bloated, overfluffed software.
  With the traditional software model, you release your software and then must add to your software to get customers to purchase an updated copy. Are these additions really needed? Web apps use a monthly subscription-based model, which means there is a constant flow of income without needing to bloat the software to generate money. The software stays clean, fast, and elegant.
• Meetings are toxic. 37signals is a small company and therefore when the members of the company are meeting about various topics, they are not producing. Meetings, if necessary, should be kept extremely short and only involve the people that NEED to be there. How many times have you sat in an hour-long meeting and thought “I don’t need to be here.” Honestly, that’s why I’ve started bringing my laptop to all my meetings.
• Don’t fret too much over the initial design. Don’t wait around for everyone to approve a look and feel for a project. Just make it. Using web standards, the look can evolve easily. Using old Web 1.0 approaches (tables) this was very difficult. But if done correctly, you should just be able to start coding. Sure, sketching your ideas out at the very beginning is still a good thing, but don’t let this process go too long. I’ve let it go just a few days with my current project and I hope to start coding this week.

Well, there we go. There are many more—and maybe I’ll add some later—but those are just the thoughts off the top of my head (without listening to any of those interviews for about a week).

One that I have really come to admire is Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits. Dan is a web designer/developer here in Massachusetts. If you read the many interviews with him, his other interests come out—good music (The Pixies, Spoon, etc.) and baseball (he’s a Sox fan) among them.

Dan gives a great interview, both written and spoken. If you’d like to read one, I recommend a recent (September 2005, many of them are much older) interview with Digital Web Magazine. If you’d like to hear a couple, he did podcast interviews with the Web 2.0 Show (a podcast that interviews many cutting edge web designers/developers) and Inside the Net (a podcast by video and audio podcast superstar Amber McArthur).

Dan also has a pair of design books out—Bulletproof Web Design and Web Standards Solutions. I can’t vouch for these yet (trying to order them through work), but the reviews have been great.

Dan recently launched Cork’d, a web site that allows users to track and suggest wine purchases. I’m not much of a wine guy, but the site exhibits Dan’s knack for clean design, perfect iconography, and an excellent user experience.

The best thing about Dan is that he’s always there to help. He’s constantly writing, posting, and speaking about design and development, sharing his knowledge with the masses. He’s already been a huge help to me and I’m sure I’ll continue to learn more from him as I start reading his book and not just his blog, articles, and interviews.