Recently the folks from the Democract Convention Committee were looking to hire a Web/Drupal savvy person in the Denver area. They posted to Craigslist, I added it to Groups.Drupal.org but what else can you do?

There are several good places in Denver to find tech-savvy employees (likewise, if you are looking for work, pay attention to these places that advertise jobs):

This is awesome. The Democratic National Convention Committee has announced a credentialing process for bloggers so that bloggers can cover the event with permission and access that will help them get a scoop not unlike the old-school media. That blog post makes it clear that it will be in a separate "pool" which is a slight bummer, but giving bloggers the same access as old-school media is probably just forward leaning enough to make the old-school people pout. This is a great step for citizen media and freedom of speech.

Are You Cool Enough to Blog the Denver Democratic Convention?

The requirements they have for applying seem interesting.

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One of the problems I have with a lot of "green" building ideas is that the products are so specialized you have to get them from across the country. At which point it's not so green anymore...

From elephant magazine I found Sutherlands Lumber which sells all sorts of building products in Boulder and Fort Collins. Not exactly convenient to Denver, but not bad.

So, what information do you want to see in prediction markets?

Reports and Alerts for Prediction Markets

Certainly graphs that show the price history and volume with Open/High/Low/Close is mandatory. It would be nice if these graphs could be both snapshots and updating (i.e. provide links that show a period in time and links that show most recent).

For an individual they (and admins) will want to know Open Orders and Order History on a per user or a per security basis (or per user per security, perhaps).

Another graph I've heard of is the "Shape of the Book" that would show a list of all open orders with their volume on bid and ask sides. This would let a trader know how far they would need to go in price to fulfill an order of a certain size. Interestingly enough InTrade provides a small amount of this information (the first 20 records or so) while some of the others you have to sign up to get to a point where you could see so I don't know...

You may have noticed that I killed third party javascript widget thingies on my site (maybe not, maybe you read only via RSS). Verious money making schemes are gone (most didn't work, but that's no my focus here). I killed my site widgets because they were slow and made my site appear to be slow as well.

What?

What are Widgets (Blog Widgets)

Widgets are the little things that people place in the sidebars and other low-value parts of their site. They do this to provide additional features, to show affiliation with something, to prove the value of their blog, to make money from their blog, basically they do it for a lot of reasons. Prominent examples include the MyBlogLog widget, Last.Fm widget, Adsense widget, Flickr photostream widget, the Google Analytics widget (hidden widget, but still a widget).

Even fast blog widgets are slow

Browsers are designed to download files from webservers. It used to be that a page was a page. You downloaded that one file and you were done. Then we got images, and css, and javascript. So your browser downloaded 4 or 5 files. Typically this was done serially (one after the other) which means that the page loads first, then the css and javascript, and finally you see the images loading into the page one after the other. Some browsers can doanload in parallel where they grab multiple files at the same time which speeds the process because it takes full advantage of your network link.

Each file that gets downloaded takes time because of the size of the file itself and also because of the additional request. Each file request has additional overhead associated with it. So, downloading 1 file that is 2MB will take less time than 2 files that are 1MB each.

Widgets add more files to your page. More files makes your page slower, even if they are served quickly. But what if they are served slowly or - ghasp - the widget server goes down.

The Enthusiast Group is an exciting company built around providing social networking and citizen media platforms for passionate folks. For nearly 2 years now they've been building sites to support communities around adrenaline sports (YourMtb.com, YourClimbing.com, YourHorseSports.com, YourCycling.com, YourRunning.com). This has given them great experience in the world of social networks and user-generated-content (citizen journalism) including some relatively novel uses like Grassroots coverage of major events.