The meme sites were abuzz yesterday about Zooomr - believed by some to be a Flickr killer, and purportedly written by a 17-year old in three months. Two of its killer features, apparently, are the ability to add audio to pictures, and to geocode pictures.

Aside from the shameless rip of Flickr's name and appearance (don't people feel a little ashamed when they do this? While it works for parady and satire, when used for a legitimate company it makes the foundations appear dishonest and shady, especially when the product is targeting at exactly the same market and use), superficially ripping off an existing site is easy. We subcontract some work through several of the code-farming sites, and every day we see low-cost jobs completed for tasks like "make a clone of MySpace" or "make a clone of Ebay". Hysterics about how amazing it is that a superficial Flickr clone + marginal features (such as a mash-up with Google maps, one of the cheapest techniques to liven up a website) was written in three months betrays a basic lack of understanding about where the difficulties of software development lie.

Of course, like the widely hyped Riya, I haven't actually been able to look at Zooomr -- it appears that their servers fell over and died under the onslaught (one of those non-superficial features you have to design in is scalability, and appearances are that it wasn't a primary concern).

As an aside, I read TechCrunch, but take everything Mr. Arrington and crew say with a monster-sized grain of salt: He seems far too incestuously embedded into the Web 2.0 hype community to offer any sort of critical analysis, and occasionally offers up some highly suspect infromation (such as yesterday's recommendation that everyone sign up for TrustedID to take advantage of already existing, usually free services for $8 US per month).

Speaking of geocoding and ideas, years back -- early in Google's ascent -- I emailed them advocating that they pioneer and evangelize geocoding standards for webpages: A standard that would allow web authors to indicate where, if appropriate, a particular webpage applied. For example Burlington, Ontario, Canada, perhaps even a particular street corner for a fish shop (possibly longitude and latitude). This thought came to mind because of the difficulty searching locally, which naturally led to a diminished value for small, localized businesses to take advantage of the web -- while we were gaining the ability to search a world of information, it was becoming, and remains, enormously difficult to zero in on locally relevant data.

At the same time I advocated that they should pioneer web client geocoding -- a proposed feature that with the user's authorization would enable an HTTP header, much like the language header, that would indicate what geographical location or proximity that they are most interested in, automatically incorporated throughout the web. Obviously there are some privacy concerns with this that would need to be evaluated. As it is this sort of feature has somewhat been accommodated via reverse-DNS and geographical records correlating with IP.

Google has added some hit-and-miss, high false-negative code to try to detect and extract addresses on websites, but it only partly achieves the goal. It would have been very advantageous for both users and businesses if geocoding were a principal element of page markup at the outset.

While commenting on a grab-bag of thoughts, here in Canada we've watched our dollar climb about 30% against the American dollar over the past two years. While a part of this can be attributed to the monstrous reserves of the oil sands we harbour, with a world oil price that finally makes it cost-effective to perform the costly oil extraction,  the principal reason our dollar has ascended has simply been the decline of the US dollar on world markets (e.g. we're largely spectators along for the ride). Several important Asian currencies are tied to the US dollar, and thus have also dropped against the Canadian dollar.

The impact this has on Canada is that anything sourced in the US, or in Asian countries whose currencies are tied to the US $, is that much cheaper in Canada. While our exports are more expensive to some countries, and thus less competitive, for organizations that rely upon substantial foreign inputs for their products or even operations, this can be a great advantage.

Given that I'm in the IT industry, of course I'm talking about computer hardware.

From LCD displays to laptops to servers, the prices across the board are amazingly low, and if a shop held off upgrading a server, there are some fantastic currency advantages to doing so now. You can get more computer hardware for less, far beyond the power/$ advances of the computer market.