Jon Stahl’s Journal

So, yesterday I whined a bit about the MacBook’s trackpad.  Today was problem-solving mode.Turns out it’s mostly the lame Apple trackpad driver, rather than the hardware itself.  Fortunately, there is an alternative: SideTrack. It adds back the nice scroll-at-edge feature us Synaptics users have grown used to, and adds a bunch more bits of trackpad […]

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A little known fact is that I haven’t actually bought a personal computer for myself since 1993, when I purchased a PowerBook 145B before leaving for a semester in Denmark.  (Actually, I think my parents may well have paid for it!)   Since then, I’ve always used various work computers, or computers belonging to my now-wife, […]

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Marty shows yet again why he is one of the keenest observers in the nonprofit technology space: Direct online interaction robs the very important inattentive trust building components to relationships. Twitter, facebook, etc. provide a unique window into watching someone without paying direct attention to them. How many of you log on to do work late […]

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Managing Proprietary and Shared Platforms: A Life-Cycle View by Thomas R. Eisenmann looks like a really interesting examination of the challenges of both shared and proprietary platforms as they grow and evolve. The research shows that challenges confronting platform managers vary systematically, depending on whether the platform is proprietary or shared and on the stage of […]

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We’re finishing up a big intranet project here at ONE/Northwest, and that led to an interesting conversation between me, Dave Averill and Gideon Rosenblatt about tagging and keywording content in a website. Here are a few notes from it. Definitions: 1) “Tags” - keywords that are stored per-item and per-user, ala del.icio.us. Plone doesn’t provide […]

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Jeff at Lullabot is dreaming big dreams about the potential for Drupal in the social change sector.  A great mix of optimism and realism.  Worth paying attention to, even if you are, say, a Plone developer.

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Gosh darn, that is pretty cool.  One can almost hear Bill saying, “how do you like them apples, Steve?”

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More wisdom from Dave Pollard: In studying the use (and non-use, and mis-use) of various tools, I’ve come to the realization that some pretty simple rules govern whether, and how, communication tools are used: A tool has to be both simple (intuitive to learn, comfortable and versatile to use) and ubiquitous (everyone needs to have access to it) before it […]

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Seems like I’m not the only person thinking about website comments these days. Our friends at The Tyee have been doing some heavy duty musing on this lately, too: The Tyee just launched its new commenting system yesterday, and it’s been a very interesting ride so far.  Overwhelmingly positive feedback, but of course some disgruntled commenters who […]

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Ethan Zuckerman (and I) think you probably are. Some of my geek friends seem concerned that I’ve lost my sense of shiny. Talking with friends at South by Southwest, they were concerned that Global Voices wasn’t very appealing to the social software geek. You can’t vote, you can’t edit our articles, you can only read or leave a comment. Not […]

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What a fantastic meme.  Michelle quotes Deborah quoting some unknown-but-sage librarian, talking about the “free”-ness of open source software:“…all of these technologies are ‘free’ as in ‘free kittens,’ not free as in ‘free beer.’”The point being that open-source software takes care and feeding, and the occasional trip to the vet.

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Dear Lazyweb: If you have had good (or bad) experiences with USB speakerphones, I’d love to hear about it. My gut instinct would be to spend the $129 for the Polycom Communicator, since Polycom has a pretty good reputation for quality speakerphones.   But I’d love to know if there are decent quality alternatives.

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Whit Morriss, who recently led the fantastic Plone commuinty “BBQ Sprint” in North Carolina, published a few great bullet points of sprinting wisdom titled “Get Your Sprint On.” Don’t [work|code|drink] aloneSprints are social event above all and you plural are the main resource.Socks, then shoes:Start at a starting point, move in a direction.Start with a planyour POA.  […]

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“If you haven’t maintained software, then you are not qualified to design or build new software.”– some guy on Slashdot Interesting notion.  Do you agree?

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NTEN recently published a solid little paper by Michelle Murrain and Katrin Verclas that sums up the state of open APIs in the nonprofit CRM sector.  It’s an important read if you believe in the importance of integrating tools.There’s a lot of good stuff in this short paper, and I particularly appreciate that they make […]

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Ryan Ozimek’s piece “Islands and Bridges, the building has begun” is a great hallelujah to the power and importance of integration via open APIs.  It’s clear that PICnet and ONE/Northwest are drinking form the same cup, when Ryan writes: The power of open source, combined with best of breed proprietary systems with open APIs give organizations the […]

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Interesting interview over at Salon, entitled “Software Is Hard“, with author Scott Rosenberg, about his new book “Dreaming in Code” which is about the troubled story of Mitch Kapor’s Chandler software development project.  But really it’s about how hard software development is in general. You’re doing the project because there is this new feature or features that […]

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… and he’s just talking about connecting Outlook 2007 and Google Calendar! Bottom-line: support for standards is necessary but not sufficient. Even when products comply with standards like iCal, people struggle mightily to use those products interoperably. It’s the conceptual barriers that get in their way. It’s really hard to figure out how a concept expressed […]

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Yesterday’s big nonprofit technology news was Convio’s acquisition of GetActive, which combines two of the largest players in the big-client integrated CMS/CRM market. The players aren’t really talking about the underlying motivations behind the deal, so it’s pretty easy to read whatever you want into the tea leaves. That said… As I’ve written before, I believe […]

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My colleagues and I from ONE/Northwest recently signed onto the Integration Proclamation, a first step towards encouraging funders, software developers and those of us who work with them to invest resources in making tools that play together better.If you agree that social change activists need tools that assume they’re part of a larger picture, not […]

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