Politics, the environment, technology, activism. And stuff.
Posted in General on Jan 4th, 2008
David Brin, answering Edge’s big question: What have you changed your mind about?, says, somewhat off-topic: Let me close with a final surprise, that’s more of a disappointment. I certainly expected that, by now, online tools for conversation, work, collaboration and discourse would have become far more useful, sophisticated and effective than they currently are. I know [...]
Posted in General on Nov 30th, 2007
Science fiction writer and commentator Cory Doctorow thinks Facebook is just as doomed as its predecessors: Keeping track of our social relationships is a serious piece of work that runs a heavy cognitive load. It’s natural to seek out some neural prosthesis for assistance in this chore. My fiancee once proposed a “social scheduling” application [...]
Posted in General on Nov 2nd, 2007
… it were possible to include the contents of an RSS feed in the group. This would make it possible to stream content from a group’s website to their Facebook group space, no extra software needed. For example, I would really like to be able to embed the RSS feed from http://www.onenw.org/news-events in ONE/Northwest’s Facebook group page. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 4th, 2007
I’m pleased to welcome Brian Gershon of the Web Collective to the blogosphere. Brian’s a long-time Plonista, a frequent co-conspirator, ONE/Northwest’s next door neighbor, and as smart and nice as they come.
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 29th, 2007
Very interesting. Facebook has announced that it will no longer rank popular applications by raw number of users, instead choosing to measure “engagement” those users have with the apps they’ve installed. This is a great, smart shift, and I think it presages lots of changes to how online activism is measured. We define engagement as the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 16th, 2007
Plone 3 Release Candidate 1 is out. This is a big milestone in the evolution of Plone, and a big leap forward for both developers and for everyday Plone users. The Plone 3 team is still putting the final polish on it, but Release Candidate 1 is more than ready for prodding, poking [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 22nd, 2007
Shae Allen offers a sharp, funny riff on the thrill of difficult web design clients. Dear Mr. Architect: Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 21st, 2007
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 [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 29th, 2007
I’m a longtime user of Bloglines for reading RSS feeds. It’s simple, clean and very, very quick to use. But, I’d been hearing good things about Google Reader lately, so I thought I’d take it for a spin. I’ve been reading my ~150 feeds in Google Reader the past few days, and I have to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 17th, 2007
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 [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 8th, 2007
My friend Jonah Bossewitch has been involved with a fascinating ‘online direct action’ campaign targeting Eli Lilly, who had been conducting an illegal “off-label” marketing campaign around their drug Zyprexa, despite knowing about the drug’s lethal side-effects.Jonah’s case study of the campaign weaves together simple, freely available technologies such as bittorrent file sharing, anonymous web [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 2nd, 2007
NewsCloud creator Jeff Reifman offers a nice guide for social news aggregation for organizations. It describes five increasingly-sophisticated techniques for groups to integrate NewsCloud-powered social news aggregation into their online activities. Add NewsCloud headlines to your Web site or blog Create a Journal to clip headlines from around the Web for your Web site or blog [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 5th, 2007
Ok, Drew convinced me to give Flock another whirl. It seems to have improved a LOT since the last time I checked it out. Basically, Flock is Firefox plus a bunch of really nicely integrated interfaces to various collaborative services like Del.icio.us, Flickr, various blogging tools, etc.
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 18th, 2007
Last summer, I did a quick count of the number of known security vulnerabilities in common open-source CMS products, and their underlying software stacks. The results were rather eye-opening. I thought it might be time for an refresh. Once again, my protocol was simple: I searched the MITRE CVE list of known vulnerabilities and [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 9th, 2007
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 [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 9th, 2007
Yahoo’s new “Pipes” service is going to enable some really cool RSS remixing, I think.The blogerati are agog. I am usually skeptical about these kinds of things, but what I think is most intriguing about Pipes is that it is not so much consumer-focused as about providing powerful, easy-to-use tools for building web services. Very [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 4th, 2007
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 [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 16th, 2007
… ’cause somebody’s got a rant (or two, or three) coming on. Democrats and progressive orgs like the one I work for have to hire website contractors to build, maintain and host our sites. They f*ck us over a lot.This is where we vent - Internet Directors, Directors of Communications, Bloggers, Webmasters, Communications Staff interns whose job it is to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 18th, 2006
Jonathan Peizer offers up some skepticism about Time Magazine’s designation of “you” as Person Of The Year: I am just not ready to give into a rose-colored panacea that seemingly lulls me into a false sense of who is in charge and the life-changing benefits of a “thingâ€?. Just because a new form of interactive, networked [...]
Posted in General on Dec 14th, 2006
In The Spam Farms of the Social Web Niall Kennedy sounds the alarm about spammers targeting popular social media sites such as Digg and del.icio.us. Will we see the kind of arms race that has happened in email and blog-commenting happen in the social media space?
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