Jon Kraus has a great writeup on something I’ve been preaching about lately - on how it is a great time to be a entrepreneur. What he’s talking about now, I’ve talked about many many times before. Expense cuts due to the usage of open source software, lower prices on server hardware and a much lower investment on marketing efforts make launching any kind of project an easy task.

I recommend anyone who’s thinking about starting a new project, or investing on one to read his article. It doesn’t bring any new important advice, but it sure is another voice in the pool of people who’re betting on a new age for IT development.

Today, O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference kicked off. Where 2.0 is a conference about the mapping and location technology movement, and discusses some of the projects related to these technologies. Companies like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft as well as smaller (but not less interesting) services and companies like Meetro are at the event to talk about some of their latest efforts.

So, that being said, today we saw the release of two mapping APIs by Google and Yahoo!, each of them with a different usage perspective. I usually don’t take sides in this kind of thing, but Google sure is kicking some ass. Not only do they allow developers to use their technology in 3rd party webpages, like my own, but they also provide an extremely broader use of their technology, with more functionality and more documentation.

Yahoo! on the other hand just gives you a list of URLs you can use, and how to use GET variables to change the results. Not that impressive, even though you can never tell when there’s something up the sleeve that they just haven’t told everybody yet. Take a look at both and compare:

• Google Maps API
• Yahoo! Maps

My small example using Google’s API maps my current location (latitude and longitude values used for the calculation are aproximations) shows how easily it is to place markers and overlays on Google generated maps. Yahoo! still doesn’t have worldwide coverage, so I didn’t get to try it out just yet.

Anyway, the real point to this post is that these are interesting times. Inumerous ideas bubble up if you think about where you can use this sort of technology, even if we’re still seeing its first steps. My suggestion for people who like to live on the edge of this sort of thing is to keep an eye on the O’Reilly Radar weblog as well as the official Where 2.0 coverage site.

This third installment of the 5 parts to a better blog series discusses the influence of colors in guiding the human eye to the content you’re trying to put out. Most people don’t realize it at a first glance, but there’s actually a small number of things that can help your users see what you want them to see. Lets take a look at those.

Have you ever wondered how your website would look like in grayscale, without the help of color to guide your eyes? Apart from looking dull, because it most likely would, it would also keep you away from actually reading it. Thats because we are used to visual hints on screen text - like a webpage. Have a look at the screenshot below:

Without the color hints, you are forcing the brain into making decisions about what’s important and what isn’t. One thing to notice is that this is a screenshot of something you know, which helps that decision-making process, but if you were looking at a random webpage in grayscale, you’d trash it in one second because you wouldn’t make sense of any of it.

So what all of this means is that the eyes and the brain “look” at colors for guidance and to build a “tree of relevance” for each element on a screen. This is why you are now focussing on this text and not the sidebar or the menu up there. See what I mean? (more…)

I was both overwhelmed and humbled to see how my profile was up on They Matter, next to people like Evan Williams (Odeo), Jeff Taylor (Monster.com), Craig Newmark (Craigslist) and Niklas Zennström (Skype). Seeing those names and my face somewhere in the middle both shocks me and makes me aim higher. I felt like I had to say a couple of things about how I feel and think:

I try to make a difference. If you read WeBreakStuff regularly, you probably know I’m from Portugal, which isn’t really what you could call IT-heaven, or anything like it for that matter. People aren’t used to pushing the envelope around here, and while that saddens me, it also makes me want to change it somehow. Lately, my attempts have been paying off. Getting job offers almost daily (several times a day sometimes) to create new and interesting stuff for companies, getting calls thanking me for the advice I’ve been giving and being picked by Google to develop a project for the Gnome Foundation and the Open Source world, makes me believe it is possible to have some sort of impact, even if small.

I can’t see myself in the same lines as I see the other people who’re featured in They Matter. They’re the geniouses, not me. I’m just trying to get my ideas out, and helping others get their own ideas out. It sounds like a good plan to me. Good enough to make me want to continue. Thanks for the support, everyone.

By the way, I know most of you are waiting for the 3 upcoming parts of “5 steps to a better blog”. I have 2 of them almost ready to publish, so stay put. Thanks for everything, again.