Introducing a Simpler Client and a Searchable Public Site

Today we released a couple of significant new features; a new lightweight iterasi client and a new searchable Website. The new client is a lightweight bookmarklet version of the full iterasi product that’s been out for a while. Our searchable Website allows anyone to search among the hundreds of thousands of public pages housed in the iterasi archive.

Below are details of each of these features. But before I lose you to the details, let me take a moment to discuss the ‘why’s’ behind these features. Our goal at iterasi is simple: to be a place where users can memorialize what they experienced on the Web and either keep it privately or provide it publically for the benefit of others. At this time almost 80% of the archive is public. With this release of our Website all these pages are fully indexed – all keywords in each page, Tags, URLs, Notes – so that everything in the page is searchable. The bookmarklet adds a simple-to-use tool that allows anyone to memorialize pages of significance to them – be it a favorite recipe, blogpost, research report, or maybe even the results of a historic Presidential race.

So use iterasi to capture history. And perhaps give it a try when you want to see what others find interesting.

The Bookmarklet

The new iterasi bookmarklet provides a lightweight version of the full iterasi product. There are both advantages and shortcomings when compared to the iterasi toolbar solution.

Bookmarklet advantages: the Bookmarklet is basically a link that you can save as a favorite and add to your Links bar if you'd like. To archive the page you see in your browser, just click on the link. With the Bookmarklet there is no browser plug-in and no installation process. When you save a webpage using the Bookmarklet, the capture is performed in our datacenter in the cloud instead of on your computer. So you don’t install anything and no longer have to wait for the capture to complete in your browser. Being a link that runs a small Javascript script, it can run on any modern browser.

Bookmarklet shortcomings: the Bookmarklet simply queues up the archiving process to run later on our hardware. The Toolbar installs in your browser and has the ability to capture exactly what you see in your browser when you press the Notarize button. In many cases that will not make any difference which tool you use - a recipe, article or blogpost will most likely archive just as you see it. Pages that use dynamic content or are accessed behind a login/password are best archived using the full iterasi Toolbar.

Public Search

With this release we now offer anyone – iterasi account holder or anyone coming to our site - the ability to search among the public pages archived by iterasi users. (Note that pages marked Private are NOT AVAILABLE in the Public Search Site). Remember that pages in the iterasi archive are selected by a real people and not by spiders or bots. The collection of archived pages covers all corners of the Web – sports, politics, programming tips, recipes, analyst reports, tutorials, jokes, etc, etc. Whatever a user wants to save.

Some choose to save history. In the blog ‘Teaching Online Journalism’, Mindy McAdams writes how she had a student spend election night archiving 98 different news sites from around the world using iterasi. From the New York Post to the Hindustan Times. From Gazeta Wyborcza to The Australian. From the Dallas Morning News to Le Monde. To see all 98 pages click on: US Presidental Election from the eyes of 98 news sites from around the world

It’s a very impressive collection. And now the digital versions are a permanent part of the world’s history.

So take a look at what the iterasi community is archiving. Try our search and you may find something of interest. Or archive pages that you find interesting. Otherwise, they just might disappear.

What I Want To Learn At WordCamp Portland

I am going to first give a big thanks to Aaron and Betsy for putting in all the big effort for WordCamp Portland this coming weekend. They are hard working, doing it for the love kind of folks. It's people like them that make Portland such a wonderful place to be a blogger, vlogger, photographer or magic bus loving, media cooker. Bus loving media cooker?

Here's what I hope to get out of the event.

1. iterasi is switching to Wordpress. What type of ecosystem should we develop? Pete is interested in creating more threaded discussions. I look forward to exploring views about the different mixes, combinations and methods for creating a community profile of the people and our work here at iterasi.

2. How should we be treating distributed comments such as optional comment postings to friendfeed? Should we have the ability for people to post video comments? What about integrations for showing related posts?

3. What WP themes should we consider for the type of ecosystem we seek to create?

Please look for me if you are going to WordCamp Portland. I am the guy wearing the orange hat. I look forward to seeing you there!

iterasi now imports bookmarks from the iPhone and ma.gnolia

iterasi now imports bookmarks from the iPhone, Safari on the Mac and ma.gnolia, the popular social bookmarking service.

Here’s how it works on the iPhone. Apple designed the iPhone to sync it’s bookmarks to the local browser – Safari on Macs and IE7 on Windows PCs - using iTunes as the synchronization ‘hub’.

On the Mac, iTunes syncs bookmarks with the Safari and on Windows PCs iTunes syncs bookmarks with IE7.

In this release we added support to Mac platforms to import bookmarks from Safari. So using Import Bookmarks on the iPhone involves two steps:

1. Use iTunes to synchronize bookmarks between the iPhone and the Mac (or PC).

2. Use iterasi to import the bookmarks from the browser. With this capability we are now able to Import Bookmarks from the iPhone on either Macs or PCs.

Our integration with ma.gnolia is very similar to how we incorporated support for delicious.

A user enters their ma.gnolia username and password into the iterasi Import Bookmark wizard.

iterasi will import all your bookmarks from your ma.gnolia account and offer you the ability to archive each bookmark once, once a day, week, or month, or not at all.

It’s pretty straight forward, simple and powerful.

iterasi Moves to the Heart of Downtown Portland

We moved downtown to the heart of Portland, Oregon!
We are located at 715 SW Morrison St, Suite 800, which is pretty much ground zero in downtown Portland. We occupy the 8th floor of the Pioneer Arts building.



This is a great building with opening windows on all sides so light and airflow is assured. We look up and down Broadway – effectively Main Street in Portland – and oversee the goings on at Nordstrom and Pioneer Square. We moved from 2,200 sq ft to about 4,100 sq ft so we have lots of room to spread out. We are all pretty excited to be here and invite you to come by and visit us! If you are far from Portland, we took some photos to give you a glimpse of our new digs. :-)

We moved here for two primary reasons: better proximity for many of our employees’ commutes to work and to get closer to Portland's exciting and thriving high-tech community.

It’s exciting to see what is going on in Portland right now – new companies forming, others moving into the area and new deals getting funded. It has been some time since I felt this level of energy in the high-tech community in Portland. What’s also great is that there are new faces emerging with fresh new ideas. Events such as Lunch 2.0, Beer-and-blog our upcoming first-time-ever CyborgCamp held in conjunction with sister-city Vancouver BC, live local broadcasts in the form of Strange Love Live and all the other wacky things going on make Portland an a great place for the 24 hour-a-day high-tech junkie!

As a retread from the wonder days of Web 1.0, I’m here to tell you that this time it is different. There’s something in the air this time around. It’s called community. It’s real and it’s catching on. I don’t think things will ever be the same. I like it. It’s right.

Pete

A Quick Fix

We released a new iterasi extension on Sept. 5 that lets you import bookmarks from delicious. Since then, we have received feedback from some people using our Firefox extension, that their tags were not properly separated during the import process. This resulted in some of the imported pages containing one long tag string instead of several separate tags. We sincerely apologize for this error.

Yesterday, we released a new Firefox extension that fixes this issue for any future imports from delicious. If you imported your delicious bookmarks prior to yesterday’s release and you have this issue, we can help you correct the tag problem with a fix on our end. The fix will convert all tags with spaces to comma separated tags on those pages that were saved by the scheduler.

If you are interested in having us apply this fix to your tags, please email us at support@iterasi.com and include your username.

TechCrunch 50 To The Sounds of Tahiti

Back from TechCrunch 50. At the San Francisco Airport I recorded a group of women from Tahiti singing while they waited for their plane. They were the happiest people I have ever seen waiting for a plane. I wanted to find a way for people to hear the music so I decided to set it to the photos I took at the conference. Thanks to the TechCruch team for bringing together a group of start up entrepreneurs,venture capitalists and a whole bunch of familiar faces. :-)

Allen Stern, Import Bookmarks and Tahiti Folk Songs

I met Allen Stern of CenterNetworks at TechCrunch 50 on Wednesday. Allen covered DEMO in addition to TechCrunch 50. He interviewed Pete at the DemoPit. It's short, basic and to the point about the import bookmark feature we added to iterasi earlier this week.

Discovered Allen's post with Pete just before boarding the craft back to Portland. I did not want to leave. A group of Tahitian women kept putting smiles on the waiting passengers with their playful folk music. They just laughed and sang. Perfect way to head home from a fantastic few days at TechCrunch 50.

Getting late. Good to be home. Here are some more photos from TechCrunch 50.