Over at IZEA there are a lot of balls up in the air at any given time. Lately Dan and I have been concentrating on a relatively new creation — CloudShout. It fits in nicely with the blog focused atmosphere for IZEA, and we’re both pretty excited about it. It already has a lot going for it, and I hear what’s available now with it is just the tip of the iceberg. Either way it’s something new and interesting, that I think you’ll be hearing a lot more about in the months to come.

Cloudshout is, in the most basic terms, a widget that can be installed on any site that enables realtime communication across the interwebs. It provides a open way for new developers to create javascript applications that can be installed by any user or site using CloudShout. One of the best ways to see what’s possible is to check out some sample applications. Just click on application tab in the widget and it’ll show what’s installed on my blog. Here are some applications that are already available:

• A group chat application (chat has to be realtime of course)
• An app that pull recent tweets from the blog owner, and even tweets from other site visitors
• An app that pulls recent flickr photos from the blog owner, and other photos from site visitors
• Multiple games — like checkers
• A “Growl” like application that shows activity for the site (if you’re using a mac and don’t use Growl it’s worth checking out)

It’s important to note that any of these applications are updated immediately as new visitors come to the site. So lets say while you’re reading this blog post someone new comes to my site. They’ll show up immediately on the right, and you’ll be able to view tweets, or play checkers with them. Having realtime communication and the ability to send Javascript to other users really opens up a whole new world of application possibilities, so we’re thinking of, and hearing suggestions about new applications every day.

We Have the Technology

You can check for yourself how it’s all done, but it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise — ajax using script tag insertion. Since you can’t use XMLHttpRequest across domain (well until cross-site XmlHttpRequest becomes mainstream), it has to include script tags occasionally to get updates from the server. It does all of this by having the site owner include a single javascript file and creating a div with a specific ID. After that just hit the URL and you’ll see the widget.

The main hub itself and any applications you write have full access to JQuery, which I’m definitely falling for. We’re still looking into how to incorporate some kind of a library to take advantage of the huge amount of Jquery plugins and extensions that are available, but until then the basic jQuery should keep you busy.

Developing applications is easy, especially if you use Textmate. There’s a bundle available that allows editing application code locally and saving it to CloudShout. When developing you’ll get a URL to include on some sample page (usually stored locally) that will load the base widget and only your application. You can make changes and view them in this sandbox, then publish your application once it’s perfect. At that point one someone from IZEA will review it (no nasty hacks or bad code, etc) and then it’ll be available for anyone to install to their blog.

Oh there’s more?
At first some of this was sounding a bit like Google Site Widgets (which I heard about once then never again) — a way to enable some basic dynamic functionality. The difference is astounding though. CloudShout is realtime, open, extendable and just more badass in general. It’s also not specific to a single site. There’s quite a bit more to it, and for some you can watch Dans talk at BarcampTampa.

Did you make it to IzeaFest last week? It was a fun experience, and a major source of motivation to do better as a blogger. As a general conference attendee, I was even surprised by how well everything turned out. Talks ran smoothly, things went well, they were broadcast live through Ustream, flickr and twitter feeds were buzzing throughout the event (and some up on monitors throughout the event) — just well done all around. The development team at Izea was working hard for quite a few product releases during IzeaFest as well, including some great new addons to SocialSpark and the public alpha of CloudShout (available on the Izea Blog if you want to check it out). I just started helping out on CloudShout about 2 weeks back, but I’m floored by the possibilities of it; and it’s been fun for someone as interested in Javascript as me.

One very nice thing about IzeaFest is that all the talks are available online! One of the talks I was most looking forward to didn’t let me down either — Merlin Mann from 43 Folders keynote on How to Blog. Deceptive title for a great talk. I dare anyone to listen to it and not want to start a blog right then and there. He has some other great talks out there like Inbox Zero and Getting Things Done.

Aside from that, Izea has a way of throwing some great night events. Thursday night they took over the lounge at the Grand Bohemian for an elegant night of great food and drinks. Friday and Saturday nights also had food and drink events down on Wall Street with tons of bloggers and advertisers in attendance. I still have yet to find out the details on the IzeaHunt (a photo scavenger hunt through downtown) from yesterday night, but I’m imagining it was crazy.

If you’re in Orlando this week there’s a lot of cool stuff going on. Monday is our monthly Adogo meeting with a very interesting talk on Ajax by Brian LeGros. He’ll be going over some Ajax basics and move onto some “push” Ajax, a topic that’s extremely useful but rarely covered. A majority of ajax sites use polling to know when to retrieve data from the server, but with a push service, such as BlazeDS, you can cut out the polling altogether. It’s something I’ve been wanting to learn about for a while, so I’m looking forward to his talk. If you’re curious about the code, it’s available in the Adogo SVN repo, and a recording of the presentation will be available online shortly after.

Thursday is the monthly Orlando Ruby Users Group meeting, which this month will be taking a break from Ruby in favor of Seaside, a Smalltalk framework. There’s a famous quote (by DHH I believe) referencing Seaside: “I defy anyone to come up here and use any other framework to duplicate what we’re doing in Rails as quickly. Except Avi.” — Avi being the creator of Seaside. Although I haven’t messed with Seaside this looks like it’ll be an interesting talk. Don’t know if I’ll make it though, due to the BIG EVENT for the week.

Thursday night through Saturday night is IzeaFest, which is looking better and better. Aside from a fast growing list of attendees, there’s some exciting speakers including Merlin Mann from 43 Folders, Jeremy Shoemaker from ShoeMoney, John Chow a lots more. The scavenger hunt on Saturday night should make for some fun stories after the fact as well.