Notes from an internal review meeting. It’s possible that the design may need more work.

We went to mashup* Events Widgets last night. There were about 200 people there, four panelists and some people demo’ing new stuff. I went along to find out what is happening on the widget scene. I was hoping to hear about some concrete examples, and was interested in hearing how people, brands, media owners are making money from widgets. So was everyone else, and the audience attacked.

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Adweek published a great article this week by Benjamin Palmer of the Barbarian Group. It it, he challenges the ad industry to stop being scared, embarrassed and confused by “Web 2.0″ and to start exploiting crowd-sourced creativity from within as well as radically new ways of working together. He urges both advertising creative and television commissioning people to learn from the way ideas are generated and developed in a Web 2.0 world.

Web 2.0 is more than just user-generated content. It is, in short, rich media applications (AJAX), folksonomies (like tags), new development approaches (”fail fast, fail cheap” and agile development), interoperability (RSS) and, yes, user-generated content. And since this is also the world of publishing 2.0, you should totally look up those terms on Wikipedia.

It’s definitely our experience over the past 18 months that there are two types of web project:

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Images from the Flickr Coversourcing pool

Random House have come up with a very good wheeze to promote the upcoming book ‘Crowdsourcing’. Crowdsourcing, for the unitiated is:

“the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”

taken from Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing blog

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Here at Made By Many we are technology agnostic. Primarily because we believe a client should use the best technology solutions to fit them and fit the problem we are trying to solve. We work with lots of in-house technology teams and out-sourced partners for clients, offering technology consultancy wrapped into a holistic offering on next-generation website problems.

That’s not to say we don’t have technology preferences. With all things being equal for greenfield deployments we can work with the best technology to do the job. That’s why we have delivered several solutions using Ruby On Rails and use Wordpress for delivering blog solutions, such as this one.

I’ve spent some time making Wordpress deployments as easy as Ruby On Rails using the excellent Capistrano, this also lets me control environments which are hosting both Wordpress and Ruby On Rails in the same way.

Capistrano 2, while built for Ruby On Rails, can be used as a generic deployment tool with a little work. It adds capabilities to open-source infrastructures which were previously only available to things like high-end J2EE application servers. Here are some of the things to make Wordpress deployments with Capistrano.

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Phew…