Posts
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Presenting at 106Miles
Russ and I are going to be presenting at 106Miles in April. The topic is “Every Business Needs a Mobile Strategy”, and as much as possible I would like to encourage discussion on this one. So lets start out beforehand and figure out what topics we want to hit when we get together at the meeting. Russ and I have been running Mobile Monday meetings here in the Bay Area, and the response has been simply fantastic. One of the most well respected conferences that I know of, DEMO, merged the mobile and main tracks of their conference because it seems like the two are now inseparable:
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Bloghercon
Elle has been helping out with the Bloghercon effort that Elisa has bee driving. I wasn’t sure if they wanted to make info about the effort public yet, but apparently is was announced this past week and discussion is underway. They’re not sure yet if men will be welcome at the session yet, which I admit I don’t agree with. But I do agree with a lot of the stuff that Charlene says about the effort. Although I can come up with a dozen or so women who blog faster than I can say them normally, a lot of the other points in there I agree with. Jessica Baumgart recently posted some points as well.
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Controlling Your Tag URLs
I haven’t finished the test, the tags in my posts don’t seem to be getting picked up by Technorati right now for some reason, but I just posted the source to a simple redirect script to use when tagging. There’s some concern over linking to Technorati with each tag. Technorati knows this, and allows the tag URLs to point anywhere and they still process them. The problem is that then your tag links don’t really point anywhere useful. So what about pointing the URLs at yourself? I have that tag.php script sitting on my site so that I can link to something like http://www.bitsplitter.net/tag.php/entertainment. Technorati should pick up the end part of that URL and index the post. But I control the redirect, so that I can change it should I want people clicking on my link to go somewhere else in the future. I also made the tags potentially multileveled, so that I could toss in a link like http://www.bitsplitter.net/tag.php/photo/106miles and it’ll go to a photo page at Flickr instead of Technorati tag summary page. Of course it’s a pain in the ass to have to deal with this now, but say Wordpress eventually grows this function (and eventually other publishing engines, it just starts with Wordpress cause that’s what rocks the most). Redirect as a standard function, admin interface to redirect locations, and editing tools that allow tagging posts without having to manually enter HTML - that could be dealable I think. Here’s a link to the basics about Technorati tags for those who have no idea what I’m on about.
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Testing Out a New Toy
I had a few minutes free while Niall and Elle are over at the Computer History Museum checking out the Visable Storage display and decided to hack on an idea I had last night.
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Claiming my other feed
No Need to Click Here - I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster
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Oren Michels Joins Feedster - I'll Be Hacking Again Hopefully
We now have Oren Michels in the trenches with us at Feedster!! I’m really excited about it cause hopefully it means I’ll have more time to get down and dirty in the code. I’ll be working on some of the projects that we didn’t have enough hacker-hours available for before (which is really what I’m best at anyway) as well as continuing to service the external relationships I’m already engaged in. Oren has joined as the Vice President of Engineering, so he’ll be taking over the higher level stuff. Stuff that I simply didn’t have the skills to do, and that those who did didn’t have the time to do. Oren has been around the block a few times, and I’m sure that working for him will be as educational as it will be rewarding. Welcome aboard Oren!
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Some Support for Niall AND Technorati
I’ve been running around quite a bit, and haven’t posted about a bunch of things that I wanted to. There are a few things I want to at least throw out there though. The first is that I want to point people toward the post that Rafer put up about the common interpretation of the Feedster reaction to the still-ongoing issues that Niall had with one of his blog posts. I just want to point it out here as well, cause I think the reaction was misinterpreted by many. As for my own reaction to the issue, I’ve already posted about why I think the policy is important. On the overall issues I have to admit that I have a reaction somewhat like what Stowe Boyd expresses. There is a dangerous precedent at work here, and it’s not the kind of thing that one person can fight alone. Corporate culture encourages an environment which is really pretty unhealthy as a whole. How do we attempt to change that environment without forcing some people to martyr themselves for the cause? How do we do so without the companies those people work at also having to martyr themselves? Because there definitely was risk to Technorati as well, they’re judged by some rather unhealthy standards by the rest of the business environment. This is a sea change move to try to uninstall a widespread and flawed set of social norms. I have no idea how one would go about trying to do it. But I do know that Niall is an exceptional person to know in the real world, and it would be unfortunate if he were only able to partially express himself online for fear of negatively reflecting on his employer.
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Corporate Blogging
The issues that Niall Kennedy has had regarding this blog postings definitely surprised me. I didn’t expect Technorati to have the reaction to the postings that it did, even if there was some flack from those companies and projects pictured in the image Niall posted (which by the way I liked two days ago, and am now considering getting made into a full size poster given the effect that it had - I consider the current conversation evidence that his image was good art). I would have expected the reaction by Technorati to be something more like telling the responding companies “Hey, Niall just works here, we don’t own him. If you have issue with what he said please direct your comments to him.” Seems perfectly rational to me. For some additional commentary and a great running timeline of how it went down check out Tony Gentile’s post.
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The Mobiles Show
Ewan Spence (who I know from #mobitopia on irc.freenode.net) has started a new podcast called The Mobiles Show. The interviews are great, the information is timely and well delivered, I’ve definitely found a new show to add to my subscriptions! Thanks for the excellent info Ewan, I’m looking forward to more of it. There are two episodes up right now, and the first was recorded completely on a mobile device. Definitely interesting. Given all the discussion that was going on a while ago about mobile recording kit I think there would be a lot of interest in a system that allowed people to record simple bits and pieces and upload them right away. Think about the soundseeing tours that Adam Curry did, around that time there was a lot of discussion about how to create podcasts while walking around or commuting or otherwise engaged in some other activity. A simple audio production tool for a handset (and this could be as simple as a start/stop recorder with the ability to clip out bits of audio) together with services like Audioblog could be pretty compelling for that group of users. Personally, I’ve been thinking a lot about video in addition to that audio, and how to get handsets doing that bit well.
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Innovation Commons and the End to End Network
There’s an excellent bit of commentary about innovation and the end to end design principle of interconnected networks in the audio from Larry Lessig at the SDForum Distinguished Speaker series. Here’s a quote that really stuck out for me:
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