Edgeio has been up on Techcrunch twice in 2 weeks because it’s closing down and assets are being sold. Being one of the startups I have personally been involved with in the past (and the main reason why I lived in Silicon Valley for a while), I can’t help but feel sad about its demise. Mainly because the idea behind Edgeio was/is quite powerful.

The idea of aggregating content from the edge of the publishing network (blogs) into one place that parses what’s being said and makes sense of it (in this case, extracting items for sale) is quite powerful. If well executed, one can make the case that it would have an impact on websites like Ebay, where people have to sign-up to sell something.

Despite the idea being good, the company failed. The discussion at Techcrunch talks about fast money burning, too many expenses (which Mike hinted at in his deadpool post) and not being the right time for that particular idea. All of these may be right, although I’m not going to comment on the economics because when I left Edgeio, it was still just about to getting funded and had been bootstrapped until then.

Bubble or not (I’ve shared my opinion about that countless times and am honestly tired of the discussion), failure is necessary sometimes - even if only for the ecosystem to catch a breath. Shame failure struck people I care about.

Writing this post made me remember waking up at 8am PST over at Mike’s place to our almost daily product brainstorm meetings. I do miss those days - the people working on Edgeio then (I didn’t meet many of the new guys) were brilliant.

I remember years and years ago when I first started working with web standards. I felt back then what I feel now - there’s good intentions but little activity except for a few initiatives. Zeldman, who I have the greatest respect for, calls it moving at a glacial pace.

There’s people like Molly trying to move the gigantic W3C boat, but it’s not really happening. There’s the HTML5 mess, there’s CSS drafts taking years, and there’s people getting confused and pissed - and rightfully so.

Luckily for web developers out there, the last few years brought something extremely valuable to the table - information. Developers at least understand what’s out there now, standards-wise and are making the best of that - one very clear example is microformats. The last couple of years have proven how resilient the development community is with exploring what’s out there now. We’re better living through current standards than sitting around waiting for the future to unfold.

Jeffrey Zeldman: One day, people from nice homes may forsake XHTML for HTML 5, making us wonder what that XHTML pony ride was all about anyway. Or not. If HTML 5 bombs, we’re not so badly off with the markup specifications we have. Remember this. It may help you sleep at night. If HTML, CSS, or accessibility go seriously astray (and depending on who you ask, at least two of these are in trouble), we will still be able to use HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, CSS1 and 2.1, ECMAScript, the DOM, and WCAG 1.0 (with our without reference to the samurai errata) when Britney has grandkids.

Jeffrey says there’s no such thing as a crisis in web standards, and although I agree, I sometimes secretly wish for a small revolution to actually happen - to stir things up a bit and remove the political cruft in the way. But there’s no such thing and for now we’re going to have to keep glueing what we have today in hopes of slowly building the future.

Merlin Mann (of 43 Folders), who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting at Microsoft’s HQ in January of last year, and someone I deeply admire for being a productivity aficionado (in a very good way), spoke Monday at Google about his concept for Inbox Zero.

I usually don’t post about videos unless they’re really good, so as you may guess I really recommend this one to all of you - especially those who can’t stand having all this email to deal with all the time, nagging you in the back of your mind. Merlin goes through his system for processing email through actions (Delete, Delegate, Respond, Defer, Do) and gives a few examples of how to deal with the typical email mess.

I am a GTD guy, but like quite a few people I relapse into FFA mode every once in a while - which is crazy. Client projects get in the way of everything else, email flow stops, inbox gets filled up - it’s like a huge stone in a processing line machine. Hey, only human, here.

So, these little systems are great to at least guide us into how to deal with something that really plays a huge role in an organization like our company - email. I’ll likely post about how I organize my daily work very soon, but for now, you really should see Merlin’s video.

Note: Oh, and if you care about this sort of stuff, you should definitely check this post by Mike Davidson about replying with 5 sentences or less to all email. Smart, systematic and effective.

It’s almost that time of the year again. Last year on September 2nd and 3rd we organized the first Barcamp on Portuguese soil - and this year we’re doing it again (only a day sooner - the 1st and 2nd of September).

If you remember last year’s announcement, the goal of bringing Barcamp to Portugal is to stir things up a bit and to give back to the place the team here at Webreakstuff calls home. Bringing people together seems to ignite change, so we’re bringing people together again.

Don’t know what to expect of a Barcamp event? Here’s a quick summary: exciting discussions, ad-hoc presentations, workshops, interesting people, great dinners, hilarity. Take my word for it, you’ll be addicted.

Roll up those sleeves and participate!

If you want to participate in this year’s event, drop by the Barcamp Portugal 2007 wiki page at Barcamp.org and add your name (password to edit is c4mp). Also, make sure you join the BarcampPortugal mailing list so you can stay on top of details and help organize the event itself.

If you’ve never been to a Barcamp - even if you have, it’s always a good thing to mention - keep in mind that it lives and breathes participation. This means that if you have been working on exciting stuff, or have some technology or idea you want to rave about, setup a presentation slot and get cranking on those slides and demos.

Sponsorship opportunities

Interested in sponsoring Barcamp Portugal? We love you already! We don’t have any major needs (this is a labour of love), but it would be great to have group meals sponsored by companies. Please get in touch with us at barcamp@webreakstuff.com - thank you!

Photo credit: Scott Beale @ Laughing Squid