Enterprise 2.0 Conference Pass

I don’t normally cross-promote heavily across the multiple places I blog, but this one seemed worthwhile.

From my blog at Optaros.com: “Enterprise 2.0 Free Conference Pass”

At the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this June, I will be moderating a panel on Open Source Platforms.

The panel will be Thursday, June 12th, at 8:30am.

Here’s the session description:

Community and collaboration pervade open source. It’s no surprise therefore that there are a number of open source platforms which are not only capable of delivering Enterprise 2.0, but are delivering it with innovation, flexibility, and agility. This session covers several, including (but not limited to) Alfresco, Drupal, and Ringside Networks.
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Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus

You may have seen my link to a transcript of this talk if you follow my ma.gnolia feed or johneckman.com.

Now (via LaughingSquid) you can watch the video. It’s Clay Shirky’s keynote at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, on the “cognitive surplus” as a characteristic fueling mass collaboration.

Interestingly, this seems to break my facebook app. No longer resizes the iframe to the right size? Something is trying to call location.toString() and getting denied - my guess is that Blip.tv is trying to track where the video was embedded and facebook doesn’t allow apps inside iframes to access parent location.

You can see all the Web 2.0 Expo videos at Blip.tv or put this rss url into Miro and get a channel: http://web2expo.blip.tv/rss

TripIt gets rail

Ok, so I’m a bit behind in reporting the news here - I see from my email that TripIt added rail back on November 1st. But it was one of my few gripes about tripit, so I felt it was worth noting.

From their email update:

We’ve also received feedback from many of you who rely on trains for travel, particularly our users in the Northeastern U.S. and in Europe. So now, you can click the new Add Rail option in your TripIt itinerary and add a train reservation. You can also forward rail bookings (made on Amtrak, Via Rail Canada, Eurostar, and in the UK Great Northeastern Railway and The Trainline) to plans@tripit.com and we’ll automatically add those rail bookings to your itinerary. If you use other train sites, please forward us those confirmation emails and we’ll work to add them in the future.

Haven’t had a chance to test anything other than Amtrak for now, but it you forward those “This is NOT a ticket” reservation emails amtrak.com sends to plans@tripit.com it does a pretty good job.

It got the time and stations right, picked up the reference # Amtrak uses, and got the traveller info right.

I was mildly disappointed it didn’t recognize Penn Station (NYP) as being in New York City, but that’s pretty easily corrected in the itinerary and I believe it would be picked up from any corresponding hotel reservation you send.

Free (as in Freedom, not as in Beer) Beauty Squadron

Nicholas Reville has an interesting post yesterday at miro (”The Free Beauty Squadron“) about the challenge of good interface design which has classically plagued open-source projects, especially on the desktop:

Open-source software projects tend to be initiated and built exclusively by programmers and their focus usually lies, as it should, with core features and technology. But a project that is exclusively driven by programmers usually won’t have an elegant user interface.

This post started as a comment on his blog, but got too long so I moved it here instead.

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YouCanHasCheezburgers; or, Employees are Miscellaneous

ICanHasCheezburger, or at least sites like it, should have a place on your corporate intranet.

So Why should lolcats (pictures of cats with captions in the imagined/projected diction of a cat who uses IM/SMS a lot) belong in your Enterprise 2.0?

Developed by two individuals known as Cheezburger and Tofuburger, is best enjoyed without deep explanation - just start visiting the web site, subscribe to the RSS feed (this is the one which works best on my phone), or follow them on twitter. For those who need explanation, start here:

• ICanHasCheezburger/About
• I’M IN UR NEWSPAPER WRITIN MAH COLUM: Rapidly spreading Web photo-posting phenomenon centers on felines with poor spelling (Houston Chronicle article)
• im in mai blog, postin’ bout cats: The Cuteness of Grammatical errors
• im in ur programmz, codin in ur dialect: LOLCode and Feline Dialectology

Because your employees are people too. In fact they were people long before you made them employees. As people, they have interests which only partially (or maybe even not at all) overlap with whatever it is you pay them to do (gasp!).

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