Back when the internet was a new wild untamed frontier small businesses flocked to sites like the now defunct Geocities to mark out their territory on the web.

They were often instantly recognizable amateur hodge-podges of clipart, blinking text and inexplicable music clips and while some evolved over time to their own domains and added pointless Flash intro page animations many watched the new Web 2.0 wave coming and decided it was too hard and have become detritus, abandoned to entropy.

That hasn’t changed the fact that small businesses looking to get started on the web need a platform. Often they can’t afford to go to bespoke developers, and they don’t need a complex CMS or integrated back office (when they do need those things, then they can probably justify the cost)

A couple of years ago there were a few second generation platforms appearing that allowed people to host sites that were more than just a Blogspot or Live Spaces blog – they provided layout tools and themes and pre-defined blocks of functionality and you could even make them appear on your domain not on someone else’s sub-domain (a friend of mine once described that as “Trailer Park Hosting” and I’ve never quite shaken that image).

Office Live from Microsoft is one such platform offering a one-stop shop will integration into back end facilities such as email and document management. It has free and premium offerings with varying levels of functionality and support.

Weebly is a simpler alternative that doesn’t try to offer as much but does provide a lot of flexibility and is really easy to get started with.

Both platforms provide themes to set up basic layout for your site, though at Weebly you have a lot of control over the underlying HTML and CSS – with premium accounts you can make quite significant changes to the layout and look of your site. Weebly offers an affiliate scheme so satisfied users can get a small reward for recommending them – that helps offset the (reasonable) premium costs.

While Office Live tried to provide everything you need in one place (though some functionality – for instance adding a blog – requires using a couple of different Microsoft services) Weebly instead allows you to include either pre-defined components from other services (a Flickr slideshow, or a Google Maps for directions, Nabble forums, or pre-defined Miniclip games as well as Google Calendar and Paypal integration) as well as some of their own services (they have an integrated blog for instance – which doesn’t support Windows Live Writer yet so the downside is you have to edit it online)

Both provide a “one stop shop” if you want to use your own domain name to host your site and both are adding new features and functionality – though it pains me to say Weebly is probably the more agile of the two.

I was surprised how functional and easy to use Weebly was. It’s had great reviews in Time, TechCrunch and others – and my wife can use it which can’t be a bad thing!

With the current economic climate a lot of folks have been wondering about the future of ad supported content on the web - from services like Hulu to blogs like TechCrunch.

It was always a touch challenge even in the boom times when I worked at rushTV to ensure that you could raise enough money from ad inventory to make a living.

For content creators models like sponsorship and advertorial only go so far - sure you can get a better, or more predictable return from them but it's a very fine line to walk especially if you have a sponsor who wants to influence the content you deliver.

The other balance is how much advertising do you run. If a site gives up 30-45% of it's real estate to flashing, rotating, expanding adverts how much of the actual content will users be able to consume.

Sophisticated users are getting more aggressive using Ad Blocking scripts or proxies to shield themselves from advertising all together which means the content providers lose out.

Some sites supplement or replace advertising with paid membership or premium content - ranging from reputable news sites to porn the model works if you're providing consistent value to the user and they're willing to pay for an ad-free experience (I do that for my Hotmail Plus service for instance).

Many blogs and smaller sites today don't have enough of a draw to charge users even a few bucks a year to visit, and there isn't a practical micropayment solution out there yet. While I use Hotmail every day so the $20/yr works out at a nickel a day but while I might pay a few bucks a year for Engadget I visit Valleywag so rarely that I wouldn't want to commit any upfront money to it.

That leads me to an opportunity for the ad serving companies.

They already have an infrastructure in place, they track users, they have the network.

If I could go to (for example) DoubleClick and pay them $20/yr to never see one of their adverts (or a pre-determined low impact ad threshold - no interstitial, no animation, text only placement out of the main content experience etc) and the ad network shares a portion of that up-front fee with the sites in their network based on eyeballs then everyone wins (including the network who can invest and earn interest on the upfront fee of course).

It even creates a new market for a single aggregation point that does deals with all the advertisers. Just like I don't want to pay each site individually I don't want to have to pay DoubleClick and MSN and AdMob and Burst etc

The ad funded web isn't going to die any time soon, but the business models will need to change and adapt over time to provide a better experience and less volatile model.

I've been using PortableApps for a while as a way to keep a copy of FileZilla and Firefox close to hand with my preferred settings.

Like most PortableApps users I used to use a USB key to carry them around - but recently I've been less attached to that dongle and started relying on the cloud storage and synchronization capabilities of Live Mesh to make sure the utilities are always to hand.

Because PortableApps doesn't install anything on the host PC (it's more like an OSX or Linux app in that regard - no registry changes, no INI files squirreled away in user directories) it's a perfect fit for a Mesh folder... and really easy to set up.

I created a new Mesh folder on my test machine and called it PortableApps (imaginative I know, but I wanted to be able to find it easily!). I then installed the base PortableApps version ("Platform Only") into that folder to get everything initialized. Once that was installed I added the three apps I wanted - Filezilla, Firefox and the PortableApps updater (useful to keep things at the latest version - no Windows Update for these apps sadly!) and tested they were working.

Just for good measure I added a shortcut for the Portable Apps launcher to my Windows start folder so it would run automatically when I logged in.

I then sync'd the folder to machines where I knew I wanted to run those apps (my Windows Home Server and my laptop) and also shared the folder with my wifes Mesh so that I would always have the apps there if I was using her machine for anything.

Now my settings follow me around, and if I update something on one machine a sync later it's everywhere I need it.

... is this the start of everything living in the cloud and being available on every connected device I can authenticate on?

After my initial playing with a webcam and weather related time lapse I got a second hand wireless webcam (a Linksys WVC54GC) to play with. As a package it's really easy to set up and connect to the camera and stream video either using their supplied app or Windows Media player. But no use for getting snapshots as user controlled intervals and putting timestamp overlays on them etc.

That left me with a couple of choices:

• Buy an application to do it (but frankly after looking at some of the options I decided they didn't offer much value - when the software costs more than the camera I expect more from them!)
• Build my own.

Now, a few years ago when I was developing code on a daily basis that would possibly have been the easiest.... whip up something to connect to the stream, grab a frame, overlay the timestamp and FTP it to the destination.

Today I'm lazier, and anyway the bits I need to do this are all available for free - I just need to tie them together with the command line and they set up a scheduled task to make them run.

Grabbing the stream

The first challenge was connecting to the stream and grabbing a jpg snapshot that I could work with.

Using MPlayer grabbing the frame didn't turn out to be too much of a challenge. It allows you to attach to a streaming video and pull a number of frame to save as a JPEG

mplayer.exe http://{userid}l:{password}@{camera_ip}/img/video.asf -frames 1 -vo jpeg:quality=100:maxfiles=1

Every time this runs it connects to the WiFi Camera video stream and grabs a single, high quality, jpg image (by default saved as 00000001.jpg each time - thanks to the maxfiles parameter)

I used this version of MPlayer built for Windows as it installs and updates easily.

Annotating the image

The next challenge was adding the timestamp to the image to give it some context. This actually gave me two challenges - adding the timestamp and formatting the date correctly from a command line script.

The first was solved with the RunNow.vbs script which allows you to define a number of environment variables for a command line script. I needed to add my own additional environment variable so don't forget to add this to the script

'MonthName
objEnv("MN") = MonthName(Month(dNow))

Next of course was the challenge of actually updating the image itself. For that I turned to ImageMagick a tool I've used before to add text and effects to images. This gives you a number of options for adding a caption to an image.

convert -background "#00000080" -fill white label:"%DOWN% %MN% %Day%, %Year% @ %Hour%:%Minute%:%Second%" miff:- | composite -gravity south -geometry +0+3 - 00000001.jpg image.jpg

This rather scary line takes the source image 00000001.jpg (created from Mplayer) and adds a label using the parameters to position where I want it. The variables %DOWN% etc are all supplied by running this via the RunNow script.

Uploading the image

When the image was composited I wanted to upload it to the Weather Underground site.

Windows comes with a built in command line FTP client, but the Weather Underground server wanted a passive connection which the supplied client doesn't support so I used the free version of MoveIt from Ipswitch - a secure FTP command line client that is a 'drop in' replacement for the existing client.

All I needed to do was create a parameter file to control the FTP script (I saved the script as wificam.ftp)

open webcam.wunderground.com
{username}
{password}
passive
type binary
put image.jpg image.jpg
bye

and call that from the command line

ftps -s:wificam.ftp

Automating execution

Now I had the pieces it was simple enough to create a Scheduled Task that runs every 10 minutes and executes

RunNow.vbs wificam.cmd

the wificam.cmd script contains the call to Mplayer to grab the frame, the call to ImageMagick to add the caption and the call to MoveIt to use FTP to upload the new image.

The results

Every ten minutes the webcam should upload a new image to Weather Underground here, and they create a stop motion view (last 24 hours below).

A quick note on the WVC54GC: While it's an okay camera for the job I can't recommend it. The Linksys software is pretty horrible and the specs on the camera are at the lower end of the spectrum - small image size/resolution and really bad low light performance. I know they have better cameras now so look to spend a few extra bucks.

There's a lot of stuff on the web, and managing it can be a real pain.

Thumbtack is an easy way to save links, photos, and anything else you can find on bunch of different Web sites to a single place.  Grab the stuff you want, put it into a Thumbtack collection, then get to it from anywhere you can get online. 

You can share a collection with your friends, or just keep it for yourself. It’s way easier than sending a bunch of links in an e-mail, and even easier than setting lots of favorites in your browser.

It works with both Firefox and IE and with both bookmarklet and accelerator support it's really easy to set up and get going.

If you've ever used something like Del.icio.us to collect bookmarks to things on the web you'll appreciate how easy it is to use - and the fact you can actually include snippets of the content, not just a link to the page makes it so much more useful.

Once you collect the information there are gadgets that you can run which (for instance) can automatically parse out addresses and create links to a map so you can see where they are - useful if you're planning places to visit on a vacation, or looking at apartments to rent and want to share the list with your partner.

MIX09 is the Microsoft event of the year for all things web, so if you don't know what it is you should head over to VisitMIX and find out.

If you do know, you probably want to promote it... and just displaying the same old image for every visitor is so old fashioned, so I turned to my handy 4 lines of javascript to spice things up a little...

   1:  <script type="text/javascript"> 

   2:  var v1= Math.round(Math.random() * 6) + 1;

   3:  document.write('<br><a href="http://2009.VisitMix.com"><img src="http://blog.offbeatmammal.com/samples/MIX09/MIX09_BlogBling_' +v1 + '.jpg" border="0" alt="Visit MIX09"></a>');

   4:  </script>

or... even easier is to just insert this one line of Javascript into your page and as I find new bling I can update it automatically

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://blog.offbeatmammal.com/samples/mix09/mix09bling.js"></script>

if you define two variables in your javascript before you call the random blog bing script then you can over-ride the width and height - just like this

<script type="text/javascript">

var bling_width=120;

var bling_height=160;

</script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://blog.offbeatmammal.com/samples/mix09/mix09bling.js"></script>

and you can see the results here (just refresh the page to see it change)

A while ago a built my own code to display my latest location on Navizon (a GPS, WiFi and Celltower location service that runs on Windows Mobile, Nokia and iPhones)

While rolling my own gave me a fair amount of flexibility it struck me as fairly inefficient - all it's doing is grabbing an XML feed with location and displaying it on a map.

Since my first quick play with Popfly I've not really played around with the mashup service, but I had some idle time this morning and wondered what I could do to solve the same problem that way...

Well, 20 minutes later the Navizon + Virtual Earth mashup powered by Popfly was built (you just need to change the Navizon ID to show you instead of defaulting to me - if you sign up to Navizon to try this don't forget my referral code: 5E585D5B5A!)

This mashup refreshes every 30 seconds, pulling the location data from the Navizon XML feed and updates the pushpin with the username and the last seen data.

I'd like to find a way to tweak it so that it remembers the map zoom level for a particular user and makes it easier to change the userid for other folks when they're embedding the mashup (my previous attempt allows you to send userid, width and height of the map as parameters) ... maybe if I have some free time I'll play some more ;)

When Silverlight 2 was first announced at MIX this year Vertigo and the Hard Rock Cafe launched a pretty amazing memorabilia site.

To celebrate the official release of Silverlight 2.0 the site has been upgrade and enhanced. The collection now contains more images, the zooming is faster and smoother and as well as being easy to share links to individual items you can now grab widgets to embed on your own site

It just keeps getting better :) Check ScottGus blog for more information on the Silverlight 2.0 release.

Normally I view TechCrunch as an okay source of information about what’s going on it the world of tech startups (though to be honest Scoble, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, ArsTechnica and others are better).

My biggest issue with TechCrunch has always been the egos and the echo chamber that it exists in… is it reporting the news or is it about Mike Arrington and his crew making the news? I’ve always suspected that they operate some pretty arbitrary policies and hold others to a much higher standard than they themselves use.

On a fairly slow news weekend it looks like Arrington has done a pretty good job of proving that.

Dare Obasanjo (a Microsoft blogger) on his personal blog has a post where he called out TechCrunch for not stepping up to the plate and helping the startup community they feed off by posting positive stories to help weather the crisis.

I read Dares post and didn’t see it as a personal attack on TC or Arrington, more a call to arms for the influencers in the community to do like Fred Wilson and Brad Feld have been doing – advise, educate and shine a light.

Sadly it seems that not only has Arrington decided it was an attack he’s decided to make it very personal bringing Dares family into it and also accusing Microsoft of having “sponsored” the attack on him.

Normally I can’t be bothered to comment on these sorts of posts – it was obviously a slow news day but Arrington has a responsibility to act like the reputable news source he claims to be and be mature about this, not appear as a thin skinned whiner who can dish it out but sulks when someone points a finger his way… well I made the comment in the image – which to me seemed fairly appropriate and certainly less offensive than the article itself.

I was pretty surprised when it disappeared so posted again (and took the screenshot this time) – I’d have hoped Arrington would at least be willing to entertain some debate rather than just censor everything apart from anti-Dare or Microsoft bashing posts.

Looks like I wasn’t the only person who was surprised to see the censorship in action… and even more disheartening was the fact that not only did Arrington – a self proclaimed news publisher and echo chamber A-Lister – confirm it was happening, but he seems quite pleased.

Looks like if Arrington and TechCrunch want to restore faith in their integrity and professionalism he’s going to have to grow up a little. In these tough times I suspect self-promotion alone isn’t going to be enough to sustain TechCrunch as a media empire.

I’m disappointed not only because of the original “Prickly Prince from Microsoft” headline (with accompanying silly picture) but the total one-sidedness of the discussion. I expected more from the New Media.

I’ve been using Skyfire for a while now and I’ve been pretty impressed so far (especially as they added Silverlight support for the Olympics) – although I’d used it initially on a 3G Touch device I’ve been using it a lot recently on my trusty 2.5G non-touch Shadow smartphone and for most things it’s become my browser of choice.

The good news is that there’s now a new release (with no waiting list for folks in the US if you’re not already on the beta program).

As well as the Silverlight support (I can now show people the Silverlight powered slideshow of my car on my phone!) it has improved performance and stability (as any new release should) and has added a really handy combined search/address bar (similar to what appears on Chrome or in Internet Explorer if you type a “?” followed by the words you want to search) to get you where you want to go quickly.

It still has some small hiccups with sites requiring text entry (though again that has improved significantly in this release) and performance with really interactive / Ajax heavy sites suffers because of the network and translation lag – but it does a better job than any other browser I’ve tried on a Windows Mobile phone up to this point.

They set out to bring the PC web experience to the constrained mobile platform and while the iPhone may get a lot of credit for their WebKit implementation Skyfire opens up options for plugins such as Flash and Silverlight that may be slow in coming to other platforms.