I’ve also taken the audio from that video and converted the SlideShares slides into a screencast, which syncing the audio to the slides:

It’s much more useful this way than just the slides were.

WPBook

So for a while I’ve been working on and beta testing the next version of WPBook. Tonight I’ve just tagged it for release, so it will be available for download shortly. (I’ve already been running it here for a while and testing it on a few other test blogs).

The main improvement in WPBook 1.5 is that it now knows how to use stream.publish, meaning that it will automatically post to your wall in Facebook when you publish a post in WordPress. Your friends should see that notification as well in their streams. (We’re not, however, sending application updates or tracking all users’ user id’s – instead you enter your own userid into the settings and it uses that to post to your wall). Included are attachments (first image attached to the post is used) and excerpts (if you hand craft excerpts they will be used in the wall post).

The other main improvement is that WPBook now requires PHP5, and as such can wrap Facebook calls in Try/Catch blocks. For the non-programmer, this means those awful, dramatic “fatal uncaught exception” error screens are gone. WPBook isn’t doing anything terribly meaningful with those errors yet – still working on that- but at least it traps them.

In this release:

• WPBook now requires PHP 5
• Enables user to post to stream, including to pages. (Must be pages for which you are the admin, to which you have added the app, and which have granted stream.publish permission – link provided in the admin to grant permissions.
• Catches exceptions thrown by the Facebook client. (Doesn’t yet surface those in good error messages, but at least they are caught)
• Fixed, I hope, issue with comments inside Facebook for some users
• Clean up of some admin styles (resized gravatar images as well as some basic hierarchy on options)
• Added Page Options as their own section
• Allow user to select pages to be excluded
• Added option to allow a menu of parent pages at top of the app below the title
• Fixed “Facebok” typo in line line 182 of theme/index.php
• Option to turn on and off page list under content (independent of menu)
• Option to turn on/off recent post under content
• Allow user to set the amount of recent post to show under content (default 10)
• Cleaned up custom header/footer now only one function instead of two (no reason to have two functions)
• Added %tag_links% and %category_links% to custom header footer as well as made archive pages work.
• Set smart default for when Blog Title isn’t set

Next steps?

• Better error handling code – do something with the messages Facebook returns when an exception is thrown
• User selectable theme directory – for users who’ve taken the time to customize their theme
• Threaded comments – likely means requiring WP 2.7, though for error handling (and just simplicity) I’m thinking of jumping right to WordPress 2.8
• Cross-Posting to a commenter’s wall when they comment inside Facebook. (Because it is in response to a user action, I understand they don’t even have to grant stream.publish permission).

What else would you like to see?

Update: Closing comments on this post. For troubleshooting please use the support forums instead.

Hard to fit the talk into 30 minutes with time for questions and roadmap – there’s so much more I want WPBook to do – hopefully I can find the time soon.

I also took the opportunity, naturally, to promote WordCamp Boston, coming January 23rd. See you there?

Looking forward to watching sessions the rest of today and volunteering this afternoon / tomorrow. If you’re here, stop me and say hello.

Optaros Beer, which was free as in freedom but not as in beer

Of course, as r0ml pointed out in a masterful OSCON presentation in 2008, we do have a corresponding word in English to libre – Liberal, or Liberty. Maybe if we’d been calling it “Liberty Software” or “Freedom Software” all these years there’d be less FUD.

Two recent posts crossed my blog reader on the challenge of value versus cost. Now that so many content creators are taking approaches similar to free software via unconferences and creative commons licenses, we need to remember that “free” in these case does not mean without value and does not have to mean without cost.

Chris Brogan at Gnomedex (Photo by turoczy, cc-by license)

First, my friend Chris Brogan writes about why the Inbound Marketing Summit isn’t free (in the sense of no charge to attend):

When you run conferences, everyone wants in for free. It’s understandable. Times are tough and people don’t have as much money. . . . The ticket price is $695 to attend (unless you know @dmscott, @justinlevy, or a few other people, who have codes for VIP discounts).

Otherwise, you’ve gotta shell out to get in.

There are lots of reasons why it isn’t free, of course, not the least of which is that running the conference means incurring costs:

The venue, Gillette Stadium, is home to the New England Patriots. They charge me money to be there. The food costs me money. The power, the booth construction, all that stuff. This is simple, right? It’s a transaction. I ask people for something, and they tell me how much it will cost. Sometimes, I get a discount if I buy in bulk.

Chris goes on, though, to talk about the difference between a cost focus and a value focus, encouraging us to think in terms of value:

Don’t ever feel embarrassed to charge for value. Never apologize that something costs money if you’ve determined the value of it.

The irony is the the Inbound Marketing Summit now has to compete – for mindshare if not for actual audience, since I don’t know what the actual attendee profiles of the two events look like – with PodCamp, an unconference he co-founded a few years ago.

PodCamp’s model is to charge nothing or a minimal fee (this year’s PodCamp Boston did charge $50 ), attract sponsors, and encourage all attendees to speak on topics about which they have knowledge. (PodCamp itself was modeled after BarCamp, which was originally created in juxtaposition to FooCamp, which was an exclusive, invite-only event for “Friends of O’Reilly.”).

Just as the increased volume and quality of so-called “amateur” content has put incredible price pressure on “paid content” online, the increased frequency and quality of unconferences (*camps, tweet-ups, social media breakfasts, and the like) has put tremendous downward price pressure on more traditional conferences. They aren’t the same thing – any more than fan videos are the same as Hollywood movies – but they are enough alike that people naturally compare them. There’s a personal ROI calculation that goes into conference attendance (which includes not only the entrance fee but travel cost and the opportunity cost of time spent), and the presence of “free” or “nearly-free” alternatives has an impact.

Amanda Palmer (Photo by McWonthelottery, cc-by-sa license)

In another field heavily hit by price pressure related to digital distribution, Amanda Palmer writes about why she’s not afraid to ask for money:

artists need to make money to eat and to continue to make art.

artists used to rely on middlemen to collect their money on their behalf, thereby rendering themselves innocent of cash-handling in the public eye.

artists will now be coming straight to you (yes YOU, you who want their music, their films, their books) for their paychecks.
please welcome them. please help them. please do not make them feel badly about asking you directly for money.
dead serious: this is the way [it] is going to work from now on and it will work best if we all embrace it and don’t fight it.

Amanda and Chris are both in a difficult position, trying to demonstrate consistently the value of something intangible and make their living from it. Both demonstrate that stepping into new territory – experimenting with new revenue models, new ways of sharing value with communities, and new ways of interacting with audience(s) around intangibles like art and knowledge – isn’t some magic path that enables you to avoid all the thorny questions about value. If anything, Chris and Amanda are leaping headfirst into the storm, trying out new ways of sharing value and determining cost, and in the process hitting these issues head on.

Who gets to set the value of an experience? The performer? The audience?

What happens when the audience values the experience differently than the performer or organizer? What if you determined the value of a conference after attending it, rather than before?

I know I’ve been to many a “professional conference” where if I could I’d have demanded a refund, or felt like my time would be best served by walking out rather than staying put for the complete conference. I’ve also been to (and helped organize) “free” conferences that were packed with value.

Similarly, I’ve paid for CDs or concerts which ended up being disappointing, and seen free concerts or downloaded free music (legally!) from artists who blew me away. The link between cost and value is tenuous at best, which is something I think most consumers know intuitively.

Which brings us full circle to free and open source software. (The ambiguity of “free” is one of the reasons some prefer the term “open source” – though for others this is the problem with “open source” – that it lacks the key ideological valence of “free”).

Libre (Photo by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³, cc-by-sa license)

Understanding the true value of free and open source software means recognizing two key aspects:

1. It isn’t just that you have access to the software without cost, it’s that you also have access to the source code, enabling you to examine, understand, and modify its behavior to suit your needs
2. It isn’t just that you can obtain software under an open source license, but that there is a community attached to that code, in which you are invited to participate. (Though, to be fair, not all open source communities are equally open – some commercial open source companies do limit participation in various ways)

If the dominant reason for your interest in FOSS is that it will be free of charge, you will likely end up disappointed. (This is equally true of folks for whom the primary reason to attend a BarCamp or PodCamp is the free or cheap price rather than the conversation and open space approach to coordinating content).

If, on the other hand, you’re interested in being more able to experiment, being more agile in your ability to stand up new experiences and launch new sites quickly, and being less tied to traditional “lock-in” licensing agreements, you will find much to love in open source platforms and solutions built on them.

Just don’t forget that value is being exchanged, even if costs are not.

You may not be paying for access to the source code, but that doesn’t mean you should not expect to invest in all the other aspects of the solution. (The expression “free as puppies” is sometimes used to draw this distinction – you will need to manage, support, and maintain any solution you build or acquire, which you can do yourself or pay someone else to do for you).

Street Performer Gets A Tip, Photo by ceajaegirl, cc-by license)

The Assembled Web is not experienced as a set of discrete web applications and sites, neatly separated from each other and organized into categories: it’s an indiscriminate field of content, functionality, and people interacting in multiple contexts and in unpredictable ways: like life.

New web applications are assembled from other projects/applications/frameworks/services, sometimes on the server, sometimes in the browser, sometimes in the cloud. People’s accounts, identities, and networks come with them across sites, applications, and contexts.

How should enterprises not only come to grips with this bewildering confusion but thrive in it?

By embracing the assembled web and participating fully in it.

Assembled Web First Principles:

1. You should always be thinking multi-site, multi-interface, multi-project. If you think you will (always) only have one interface to any given set of content of functionality, you’re mistaken, and you will paint yourself into a corner.
   
   
2. Success on the web is no longer (if it ever really was) about driving traffic to your site, or keeping eyeballs there once they arrive. It’s about engaging audiences everywhere they already are. It’s about improving the size, quality, and velocity of your “digital footprint.” Ubiquity is the target, not exclusivity. The danger is not that people will say bad things about you but that you will be ignored.
   
   
3. Your brand is not what you say it is, but what your prospects, customers, partners, and employees say it is. In short, your brand is what the Internet says it is. You influence this not through marketing but through creating appropriate experiences and getting users exposed to those positive experiences. (Micro-interactions are ultimately assembled into and become brands).
   
   
4. Design is critical, and design is not about pretty shiny objects. It’s about usable interfaces, in the sense of traditional HCI (Human Computer Interface) design, visual design, and technical design. Creating usable experiences for users and usable projects for developers are both essential, and to ignore either is to invite failure.
   
   
5. The internet itself, like the *nix operating systems on which it (almost entirely) runs, is a set of small pieces loosely joined. Every project you do must be composed of smaller discrete components communicating with each other. The corollary is that every project you do must also be composeable or consumable by other projects – including projects you know nothing about. This is true across multiple projects (within your organization and outside it) as well as over time within a given project.
   
   
6. The difference between “behind the firewall” and “out in the cloud” is trending toward zero. Same for the difference between employees and contractors, customers and prospects, competitors and partners. If you’re still thinking in terms of intranet, internet, and extranet, remember that the difference between them is (from a technology point of view) entirely arbitrary. What differentiates them is business processes and decisions.
   
   
7. There is no defensible reason to invent a proprietary standard wherever an open standard exists. In fact, even where no open standard exists, great efforts should be extended to create one, rather than implement a proprietary version.
   
   
8. Working in isolation from the rest of the internet is inherently limiting and dangerous. This is true whether you’re a one-developer shop or a 5000 developer IT department in a Fortune 100 company. Collaborative engineering with appropriate participants (which almost always means open source licensing arrangements) is required. Why continue to work alone now that the Internet exists?
   
   
9. Consumer Technology is beating Enterprise IT, and soundly. If your “in-house” IT can’t compete with a consumer-grade provider available “on the web” you need to catch up and compete or concede the function.
   
   
10. Small incremental releases are essential. It isn’t just a question of not putting too many eggs in one basket – it’s also about lowering the cost of failure and therefore raising the level of innovation. Don’t accept quarterly releases of functionality, or even monthly. Web applications should change hourly or at least daily. The web is live, not pre-recorded.

Photo by ehnmark, cc-by license

I’ve submitted two panel proposals this year – each is described below with a voting link.

The first is Who Pays for Content?: Re-evaluating Paywalls. As described in the proposal:

Everyone knows Stewart Brand’s statement that “information wants to be free,”. Less well known is the other half: “information also wants to be expensive.” If no one pays for content, and no one clicks on ads, how will we fund online initiatives, applications, and sites? What could drive users to pay for content? What has, historically, and how can we learn from that?

I think this is a very timely discussion that hits at the core issues for SXSW attendees – what funds the work so many of us do on the web? What models other than advertising and pay-for-content will work in the assembled web?

The other is What’s in it for me? Open Source and Interaction Design. This builds on the video podcast I did as part of last year’s extended content program. As an open source developer and advocate who has also long been a promoter of the value of interaction design, I want to broaden awareness within the interaction design community about why licensing matters. From the proposal:

Open source advocacy has generally focused on the perspective of developers, for whom access to source code is a real need and the opportunity to change or extend functionality is a practical possibility. But what about the interaction design community? In this talk I explore why interaction designers should care about free and open source software.

You’ll have to register to vote, of course. You can also leave comments here or in the panel picker itself.

See you in Austin in March!

Thesis: Open Source and Design are fundamentally philosophically incompatible. Antithesis: Open Source and Design are profoundly similar in core beliefs and approaches. This talk works to articulate a meaningful synthesis between these two positions.

The talk, unfortunately, wasn’t accepted for presentation at the conference, but they suggested that instead I do a shorter, podcast or video podcast version for the Extended Content program.

I did, and that content now has gone live on the SXSW site:

In our first installment of the Extended Content series, John Eckman tells you everything you need to know about open source and design. The differences and similarities, how they benefit each other and why they have trouble getting along.

Extended Content at SXSW Interactive

(Unfortunately they don’t allow embedding, so you’ll have to go there to watch it – and at least on two browsers I tried it on, you’ll have to wait for the whole thing to preload before it starts playing – so go get a cup of coffee or whatever while it loads).

It’s just shy of 20 minutes, and having been created back in February 2009 feels (to me) a bit outdated in spots – mostly the continued evolution of the work Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt have been doing with the Drupal community (not just on Drupal.org but also on Drupal 7 itself), which I encourage you to check out if you’re interested in the subject.

Mozilla Labs posted a screencast yesterday of a new feature as part of the Weave project, which enables OpenID at the browser level, which will have potentially significant impact on adoption and use of portable identity technology.

Weave is a Mozilla Labs project, started back in December of 2007, which (before this latest announcement) was mostly known for their Sync service, which can synchonize (and keep in sync over time) bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history, and tabs, keeping your firefox browser experience consistent across multiple computers. It’s quite useful for those of us who have a work desktop, home desktop, and laptop, or some other combination of multiple computers regularly used.

This new effort, however, integrates OpenID into the Firefox user experience:

Our sprint changes the browser to provide single-click login to sites with saved passwords as well as sites that support a federated identity (OpenID in this case). It also provides the option to automatically sign in when the page is loaded, essentially providing a single-sign-on-like experience regardless of the login method being used. In the case of OpenID, we intercept the login procedure and, taking advantage of the fact that you’re already logged into your browser, and then use Weave identity to let you into the site.

Screencast

Unfortunately, for now, you have to install the latest weave development build which also requires you to be running Firefox 3.5 beta, so it isn’t really quite ready for public consumption.

There’s also, of course, the risk that people will use this poorly – storing saved OpenID on shared machines, etc – but I think the model of allowing the browser – after you’ve logged into it – to login on your behalf – will be a really good UX improvement over time, and one I hope the other browsers will take up and implement themselves.

Making Ice Cream
(Photo by Rachel J)

This weekend, freshly jet-lagged by back-to-back trips to the UK and Switzerland, with a brief stop in between for BarCampBoston 4, I attended the Northeast User Group Leader Summit, sponsored (thanks!) by O’Reilly Media and Microsoft. (Although I don’t technically lead a user group, I play host to BostonPHP at Optaros, volunteer for BarCampBoston, and participate in Boston’s Drupal and WordPress groups, as well as North Shore Web Geeks up in Newburyport.

The event, hosted in the new Microsoft NERD facility, brought together user group leaders from across the technology spectrum, and from New York to Maine. (See a shortlist of user groups represented in the wiki).

Sessions Board (Photo by Rachel J)

It was simultaneously frustrating and reassuring to see that the core issues are so similar across user groups:

• Attracting and retaining members, speakers, volunteers
• Dealing with financing, venues, sponsors
• Keeping members and organizers motivated, active
• Making meetings useful, interesting to a broad audience
• Balancing newbies with ‘experts’

Reassuring because it shows that these problems are well understood – frustrating because no simple easy solutions will make them go away.

Ingredients we used for instant ice cream (my photo)

A few of the interesting sessions I attended, with links to notes which are all accessible from the event’s wiki:

• Care and Feeding of a Large Group / Large Event Financing – a combined session, for which I was the scribe, led by Shimon Rura from BarCampBoston and Darius Kazemi of Boston Post-Mortem
• Managing Event Overload – a more casual session, which the two of us attending turned by popular vote mostly into a discussion about NewB Camp, taking advantage of the time with Sara Streeter, who organized this session and also NewBCamp.
• Moving past the presentation – a very interesting session about the other ways one can manage a user group meeting, beyond just the traditional “talking head” format most folks are familiar with.

In addition to the formal sessions, Jeff Potter delighted all to a reprise of his food hacking demo from FooEast and BarCampBoston 4, making instant ice-cream using liquid nitrogen. This time, I participated, with a group of fellow vegans (and one ‘fellow traveller’).

Making Ice Cream with Liquid Nitrogen (Photo by Rachel J)

(Note for future food hackers: soy milk, at least the Light Vanilla variety we used, required a bit more liquid nitrogen and a bit longer to ‘set up’ – lower volume of liquid in the mixing bowl, longer time to mix in. At first it all just foamed up and spilled over the bowl, but thanks to a patient chef we were able to enjoy banana-coconut-rum soy ice ice cream custom made in a microbatch).

Ultimately, of course, what really makes any community successful is the people. While the problems of open source and commercial software user groups can vary a bit (I heard several Microsoft technology user group folks talk of having too many sponsors and too much schwag from companies to give away – a problem I’ve not seen in any open source based user group) they share an essential component, which is competition for people’s attention. The key to breaking through the noise and consistently getting their attention? Good, relevant content, consistency (of venue, time, and quality), and true community.

Although I think it’s important to draw a distinction between simple, relatively cheap licensing (the Expression Engine model) and Free and Open Source software, I generally agree that

Now, we have really powerful comparatively easy to understand, open source content management systems

And that this shift- from needing a large scale custom development project or an expensive proprietary CMS to now being able to leverage open source platforms – represents a key point in the maturity of web development.

Community minus people = empty (Photo by marilynpratt)

It suggests than an “online community” is something you build like you build: a web site, or a portal. It suggests that the community is the site itself. (It’s a strange kind of synecdoche, in which the web platform where some community interaction takes place is taken to be the actual community itself).

But a community is not a site – it is a group of people who interact with each other. And an online community isn’t a web site, it is a set of people who interact with each other online.

In his report from the Online Community Unconference East 2009 (which I was unfortunately unable to attend but have heard good things about) Bill Johnston list as one his three key takeaways the importance of thinking about your online community in the context of a broader eco-system:

One point that I have evangelized for many years is the fact that online communities generally don’t live in a single location. Most successful community strategies engage the entire ecosystem of touchpoints that members (or potential members) find valuable. This ecosystem can be made up of destination community sites, but relationships are also forming on blogs, social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn), mass social media (YouTube, Flickr), and even offline at meetups or user group meetings. Conversations at the OCUE this year generally spilled beyond the boundaries of a hosted community destination, and most folks were thinking about how to prioritize various opportunities for engagement in their community ecosystem.

Absolutely! The community is the people, not the site.

Just as a company needs to learn to think of its digital footprint across the assembled web – all the interactions consumers, partners, and employees have with the company’s products, brand, and content – online community managers need to think about all the ways in which the members of their community interact with each other across the Internet, not just the interactions they have on the official community site.

What this should tell you? That large companies at the forefront of enterprise social computing — like Intel, Dell, and others — routinely turn to multiple suppliers for different types of internal and external communities. This may have something to do with inter-departmental politics and silos, but I think it actually makes sense: different vendors in this marketplace target different scenarios and will therefore be better suited to different business objectives

While I certainly agree that different vendors target different scenarios, I’m not sure I’d so easily accept the notion that multiple internal and external platforms make sense. He continues:

For example, Telligent sees some internal implementations, but is known mostly for its external-facing community implementations, while Jive’s Clearspace can and does get implemented externally, but is mostly known for its behind-the-firewall implementations. You the buyer should not assume that one size fits all.

Of course there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to community building. But does that necessarily mean the answer is to license multiple competing proprietary platforms for a single enterprise?

How well integrated are an internal implementation of Java-based Clearspace and an external implementation of .NET-based Telligent ever going to be, given that both are proprietary?

• What happens when Intel’s business needs suggest sharing content from the internal Clearspace community with users in the external Telligent community? How difficult is it to migrate content from one to the other?
• What happens when the internal community realizes it might benefit from external input, or the external community starts to involve internal users?
• Do users who have a presence in both maintain separate usernames and passwords? How easily can both be pointed at a shared user repository?
• How efficient is it from an IT management point of view to have ongoing enterprise license agreements with two vendors? Do users joining both communities essentially increase the license fees for both vendors?

Of course, imposing one monolithic solution may not be possible either. I regularly deal with clients who have not just two core content management systems but as many as five or six: due to the “inter-departmental politics and silos” Tony mentioned above, or due to corporate acquisitions which bring their own legacy systems, or due to serial leadership changes and different IT strategies over time.

How do you enable the right balance of “fit-to-purpose” (which might identify different platforms for different social scenarios) against “fit-to-enterprise” (which would explore the impact of platform proliferation and silos)? What happens when the community you expected to be purely internal suddenly realizes that it would benefit from external input?

Leveraging mature open source platforms- and customizing them to fit the specific scenarios of the community being served- will better preserve long term business agility and ensure that those silos don’t become islands, but can share data and functionality with each other.

See also: CMIS, ECM Interoperability, and Services-Oriented Content Management

MediaCloud

In essence, Media Cloud monitors a set of sources, and then semantically processes the news items from those stories, creating a rich structured dataset which enables various queries and visualizations.

Media Cloud Summary (Image from MediaCloud.org)

The project also relies on a partnership with Calais to provide the term extraction and entity identification capability.

Currently, the visualizations are rather limited. You can create a comparative graphic across any three media sources in the system, of one the following types:

• Top 10 most mentioned terms
• Top 10 Term Pivot
• World Map

Unfortunately there’s no easy way to identify what sources are in the database, other than starting to type and seeing if the autocomplete finds what you’re hoping to use. There’s also no way to tell what “terms” are considered significant, though the error message notes:

The available terms that you can currently serach for are focused on prominent people, places, and events. This will broaden considerably in the future.

It’s the long term plans, not the current visualizations, that make Media Cloud worth watching. Ultimately the Media Cloud project describes itself becoming:

A platform for open, collaborative research by scholars around the world . . . [which] does the heavy lifting in the “cloud” and provides the results as a web service

It isn’t clear at this point what specifically is meant by “in the ‘cloud’” – except in the limited sense that all remote web services could be said to be in the cloud. (See my colleague Andrew Webb’s The Open Cloud for a good overview of the various things “cloud” might mean in today’s environment). Similarly, I believe the only current access to the “web service” is via the front end site at mediacloud.org – no programmatic APIs are exposed yet.

Assuming, however, that the project can reach its goal of an infinitely scalable, cloud-hosted web service which would semantically index a great portion of the relevant media stream, and could be accessed by researchers at low or no cost – that would be a very powerful tool for understanding how media operates online.

Media Cloud is also a free and open source software project, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License and built in Perl using the Catalyst web framework and a PostgreSQL database. (Get code here).

Related:
Calais for Drupal

Now, 15 months later, there is a network for Optaros – but I can’t join it. (I also have no idea what finally triggered creation of the network – enough people requesting it? Enough people listing Optaros as their employer? I only discovered its existence because it showed up in a search result).

To join a network, one visits the account settings page, network tab, and uses the handy “add network” form, which you can see below:

Facebook add network form, as seen in the case of a work network

I fill in my work email address and submit, and the list of networks I belong to updates to this:

Facebook network awaiting confirmation - click for full size

Yeah! That looks like progress. Get the email, click on the confirmation link, and the network status page says this:

You might think you're done at this point - click for full size

You might think, at this point, that you’re done. Wrong. Go anywhere else in Facebook and then come back to this “networks” list, and guess what you see?

Facebook network awaiting confirmation - click for full size

I tried three times before I gave up.

One could go ask this question in the Facebook help section, but there’s an awful lot of questions and no real answers there.

So now I have a work network, but so far only 1 out of the ~175 eligible Optaros employees has been able to join it.

Wasn’t Groundhog Day in February?

Brands often use this approach to track mentions of their products and companies, developers can use it to track mentions of their favorite languages, frameworks, and open source projects, and anyone can use it to track mentions of their hometown, their own twitter username (to make sure you don’t miss any @replies).

TweetScan is one of several services offering email alerts based on keywords

Personally, I’ve been using TweetScan to track these terms I’m interested in:

1. Optaros
2. open source
3. Newburyport
4. vegan
5. jeckman

To avoid the “stalker effect” I don’t immediately reach out and @reply to anyone who mentions any of these terms, though I do often follow them to see if it is a common part of their conversation, which would suggest I might be interested in their stream.

Unfortunately, as the folks behind Tweetscan recently announced, they’re going to start charging for this service:

Tweet Scan is due for some improvements and the volume of queries and emails we’re handling isn’t sustainable on a hobby budget. So we’re going to start requiring a small annual payment to keep an account with us.

Please use the subscribe link below and let’s take this site to the next level! It’s $15 per year if you sign up by April 22nd. After that it’ll be $20 per year.

I can certainly understand the need to monetize an application that becomes popular and starts to generate a high volume of usage, but I’m not yet ready to pay for an account for personal use, so I found a few alternatives. (Note Tweetscan can also enable you to download you tweets since December 2007, and can be used as a live Twitter search engine).

TweetBeep

TweetBeep also sends email alerts based on the mention of specific keywords in Twitter, and can track specific URLs, whether they have been url shortened or not. TweetBeep lets you set frequency of alerts as well.

(It seems, though I haven’t verified this yet in practice, that the alerts based on domains – so an alert set for any reference to optaros.com or openparenthesis.org, for example – can’t be scheduled into hourly/daily as keyword alerts can, but are set to “live” – which may mean immediate? This might be an issue if you have a domain frequently referenced in Twitter streams.)

TweetLater

TweetLater, which is most well known for its “schedule a tweet for posting at a later time” feature, also provides a feature they describe as “Track keywords on Twitter” as part of their free account. They also provide other features:

• Auto DM to new followers (which I find frankly annoying)
• Automated following of folks who follow you (which I don’t do, but is not annoying)
• Automated unfollowing of those who unfollow you (hmm, that might be interesting)
• Vet new followers (this one I haven’t tried yet – not quite clear to me what it is except perhaps an easier way to act on new followers – follow, ignore, or block – rather than the one at a time approach twitter offers)

TweetLater also offers a professional / premium account for $29.97 a month which adds other features and is worth checking out for serious users.

What tools are you using to monitor the twittersphere?

The topic was MediaWiki in production, with presentations by Greg Rundlett of Harvard’s Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) and Daniel Barrett, who wrote the (O’Reilly) book on MediaWiki, and uses it in production at VistaPrint.

Greg Rundlett presents at BostonPHP

Dan Barrett gets ready to present at BostonPHP

Greg’s presentation, appropriately enough, is in the format of a MediaWiki page. He provided an overview of wikis in general as well as some of the other activites of the MediaWiki Foundation, then got right into details of MedaWiki syntax, built in features, and plugins.

Daniel Barrett’s presentation (which he was kind enough to send to me and allow me to post – thanks Dan) focused more on how to deploy a successful wiki, including six lessons:

1. It’s not about the technology
2. Know the strengths and weaknesses of the platform
3. Know the culture of the enterprise
4. Pre-structure the wiki and write stubs
5. Integrate with legacy systems
6. Measure your results

There was also good time for Q & A at the end, including a number of questions that were as much about corporate culture as technology: how to handle “potentially dangerous” procedures, how to deal with employees who horde information in search of job security, and the like.

Looking forward to next month’s BostonPHP which will be Jesse Burns facilitating a “PHP IDE Bakeoff” – February 11th, 6:30 pm, at Optaros Boston (More detail on Meetup.com – please RSVP if you plan to attend).

The panelists were:

• Bob Bickel, from Ringside Networks
• John Newton, from Alfresco
• Jeff Whatcott, from Acquia

Although the conference doesn’t audio tape or videotape the breakout sessions in the smaller rooms – only the keynote – they were nice enough to allow us to record the panel’s audio.

You can download the MP3 (43MB, 128 bit rate) or listen in the player below:

The panel was covered a few places:

• On Jeff’s blog: “Enterprise 2.0 Conference: A Drupal Perspective“
• By Kathleen Reidy on the 451 Group blog: “Open source at Enterprise 2.0“
• By Dennis Byron at ebizQ: “Open source, including open source Sharepoint tool, in/at Enterprise 2.0“

Let me know if I missed any.

Online Communities: What Should a Retailer Do?

Abstract:

Most retailers have found success in providing online product ratings and reviews, and many have dabbled in engaging directly with participants in social networks. Many retailers are seeking to do more in the area of community, but the lack of clarity in both ROI and specific implementation ideas are causing many to pause and look for guidance.

This paper describes two specific community concepts that leading retailers are beginning to successfully deploy with positive economic outcomes—private event retailing and fan networks.

Registration (free) is required.

Description:

February 27, 2008 2–3pm – Are Your Products Open or Closed? How to Respond to the New Openness– at Online

Overview: Companies in many industries are struggling to determine how best to deal with the power that social computing gives their customers as an open forum to share how they feel about products with millions of fellow consumers. This newfound power in the hands of customers is creating an openness of information (positive and negative) that is having a dramatic impact on the success of new products and overall company revenues.

Join Josh Bernoff, Forrester Vice President, Principal Analyst and co-author of “Groundswell,” along with Colby Dyess, Product Manager from Endeca for this live TechRepublic Webcast to hear how leading companies such as Endeca and Swisscom Mobile are engaging with their customers to drive new product innovation through the “new openness”.

Tags: open innovation open source community marketing product development social computing customers groundswell forrester Josh Bernoff Colby Dyess Endeca Optaros

This hCalendar event brought to you by the hCalendar Creator.

This Webcast will address these important topics followed by interactive Q&A:

• ROI of Engaging with Your Customers for New Product Innovation
• What You Should Do to Tap Into Your Customers for Innovation
• Case Study: Building an Online Customer Community–Endeca’s Developer Network “EDeN”

I first requested one about a year ago and recently re-requested it.

We’ve got an Optaros group, and I know we could set up a page for people to become fans of Optaros, but what I really want is for us to be a network.

Can anyone who has successfully created a network share any tips on what they did?

WorkBook is apparently part of the WorkLight platform, and pricing starts at $10/user/month.

Some coverage:

• WorkLight secures Facebook for enterprises (Dan Farber on ZDNet blog – with a photo)
• WorkLight enters the Enterprise Facebook Market (Bill Ives at Fast Forward Blog)
• WorkBook: Getting Facebook Ready for Work (Andrew McAfee)
• WorkBook Brings Facebook Inside the Firewall (Web Worker Daily)

McAfee, who was able to see a demo, has the best details on the workings of the app:

In a quick demo, Lavenda opened up his standard public Facebook profile, then launched WorkBook (Worklight’s offering) just like he’d launch any other Facebook application. After he logged in, a separate section opened up within the profile. This section was devoted to the user’s employer— let’s call it Lavendaco. Inside this section were a number of standard Facebook features— friends, groups, Q&A, profiles, etc.—presented using the standard Facebook UI. But the data populating each of these were specific to Lavendaco, came from the Worklight server installed at Lavendaco, were encrypted as they travelled across the Internet, and did not pass through Facebook servers.

But I have to confess my own reaction is closer to Bill Ives, which is, wouldn’t this be pretty easy to build yourself, on top of Facebook APIs?

Maybe a good candidate for our next ONE (Optaros New Employee) training class, wherein the team does a quick project. Our Intranet is Drupal 6 based, and shouldn’t be too hard to pull that in to Facebook. I know there is already a Facebook Module for Drupal 5.x

Unfortunately we weren’t able to record the audio of the whole presentation, but the slides themselves are now available on the Optaros site: “Rich Internet Applications: The What, Why, When, and How” (pdf, 3.37 MB).

It’s under a creative commons license.

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!).


Part of the disconnect between the fun people have using web 2.0 properties like YouTube, Flickr, LiveJournal, MySpace, and (the darling of the moment) Facebook is the fact that they get to talk about things that are not properly corporate. Some folks react to this by worrying about wasted time and lost productivity, but I think that is absolutely the wrong approach – at least if you want creativity, innovation, dedication, and loyalty from the people you employ.

Sometimes laughing out loud at a Lolcat from ICanHasCheezburger does more for my productivity than a week of intensive sessions on strategic planning.

To put it another way, and borrow from Dave Weinberger, your employees’ [interests] are miscellaneous. Or, looked at from the other side, the things your enterprise might be interested in are miscellaneous. Trying to decide definitively upfront what’s on topic and what’s off topic on your intranet will kill, or at least fatally wound, any potential innovation which might happen there.

A few recent examples of miscellany from Optaros’ own Intranet 2.0. (Ok, we don’t really call it that – it’s just our intranet, but it is Enterprise 2.0 enabled – every employee has an internal blog, in addition to forums and wikis for projects/topics of interest, etc.):

• And now for something completely different – a discussion from one of our user experience (UX) folks about Monty Python
• A post from a senior developer on foosball strategy, complete with diagrams of optimal bank shots against which defenses are inefficient and difficult to maintain
• Results of a cracker eating contest in the Austin office
• Photos from the Swiss offices’ joint (Geneva and Zurich) Tennis tournament – our own Swiss Open)

The PEW / Internet Project recently released a report on hobbyists, showing that:

83% of online Americans have used the internet to pursue their hobbies

and:

Relatively younger American adults are more likely than their elders to look for information about hobbies or interests online. Some 86% of internet users ages 18 to 29 and 88% of internet users ages 30 to 49 utilize the medium to pursue hobbies. By comparison, 77% of 50-64 year-old internet users and 62% of online Americans age 65 and older report using the internet to pursue hobbies.

So are these users, accustomed to researching online things of interest to them, going to be asked to stop cold and speak (and read) official corporate voice only when they hit your corporate intranet?

Click To Play

Related posts:

• Eben Moglen – Putting the F Back in FOSS
• More on Moglen v O’Reilly

This new online community continues and extends the work Optaros did on the print version of the Open Source Catalog at the beginning of 2007, enabling community interaction.

The directory site includes blogs, forums, and case studies

As Seb said:

The EOS Directory bridges the gap between corporations seeking solutions through the Request for Proposal (RFP) process and the open source community which does not participate in expensive and time-consuming RFP processes. Instead, open source software organizations provide free downloads for companies to begin working on a solution. The EOS Directory fills the gap by proving expert and user ratings, case studies, forums and requests for advice for organizations to better choose the right open source software based on functionality, community backing, project trend and maturity of technology.

(Lukas, Matt Asay, and Jack Loftus have blogged about it as well).

It’s in beta, and very much a work in progress – we hope to broaden the community involvement aspects especially, as well as provide better coverage across all categories.

Please do check it out, and provide feedback – here in the comments or (better yet) on the EOS Directory site itself.

They discuss a project Optaros did with Swisscom Hospitality Services as an example of the impact next generation Internet applications can have customer interactions, as well as how we think such applications are most effectively delivered.

The presentations from the webinar are now available:

• David Douek, Product Management, Swisscom Hospitality Services: Swisscom Hospitality Services Room 2.0 (Case Study) (pdf|899.27 kB)
• Joel Gardet, Project Manager, Optaros: What it means to assemble next generation internet applications (OptAM) (pdf|4.05 MB)
• Bruno Von Rotz, VP Strategy & Research, Optaros: The Evolution of the online customer communication and interaction (pdf|3.46 MB)