Author: Jeff Barr

img {border:2px solid orange;} Earlier today I logged in to Second Life and was greated with an IM (instant message) and a teleport invitation from a woman by the name of Tabatha Hegel. She indicated that she knew of my interest in Amazon interfaces within Second Life, and that she had something cool to show […]

Salon has published “I Make $1.45 a Week and I Love It”, a very interesting article on the Amazon Mechanical Turk. You will need to watch a short ad in order to read the entire article. The article covers the historic origin of the Mechanical Turk name, Amazon’s rollout of the web site, and requesters […]

Join the AWS Developer Relations team as a Developer Support Engineer and you will get the chance to exercise your programming and communication know-how. You will get to partner with and support developers who are building business critical applications on top of AWS. Ideal candidates will have: Working knowledge of Web services technologies, such as […]

Lately I’ve been spending some of my personal time in another world, a world called Second Life, to be precise. Second Life is a 3D virtual world. When you log in to Second Life for the first time you choose your “in-world” name and you create your own avatar. Once inside, you can chat, run, […]

Time to clean out the inbox with some interesting quick picks: Good article from Microsoft: Web Services and the Microsoft Platform. The BitPorters blog talks about the Amazon Mechanical Turk: Micro-Compensation – Affordably Driving User Incentive. Long-time AWS developer Francis Shanahan is writing a new book, tentatively titled Beginning Amazon.com Mashups. There’s more info and […]

I met Marc, the developer of Secret Prices, at Mashup Camp last week. Marc was eager to show me his site, and I found it quite interesting. Secret Prices is a comparison shopping tool. You can compare product prices across multiple vendors in 18 different categories including books, movies, music, electronics, and event tickets. The […]

On the way to work this morning I stopped by my local gourmet supermarket for some Aztec Trail Mix. I went to the bulk foods aisle, found what I wanted, and used the dispenser to measure out exactly what I needed — just enough for the next couple of days of random snacking. I hopped […]

We’re hitting the road and heading out to speak at a whole bunch of user groups and conferences. Here’s our schedule: July 22, Portland Code Camp – Vancouver, Washington. July 25, Portland Java Users Group – Portland, Oregon. July 25, Open University – Milton Keynes, UK. July 26, Portland Area .Net Users Group – Beaverton, […]