Ignite Boston

Posted on by John

No, I’m not suggesting any revolutionary activity in Beantown – so if you’re NSA, you can stop reading now.

Ignite Boston

Ignite Boston is an O’Reilly event, which Andy Oram calls “not a serious academic conference . . . [but] a chance to meet interesting folks and be dazzled by the wide range of stuff your neighbors are inventing” and Mike Hendrickson describes thusly:

From 6-7pm, mingle and talk tech with your fellow FOOs, alpha geeks, and techies from the greater Boston area. Join a MAKE challenge team and participate in building bridges (how much weight can your bridge–made from less than 1K popsicle sticks–support?) After that, we’ll have a special keynote address from author Scott Berkun (The Myths of Innovation; The Art of Project Management) kicking off our Ignite night. Then, onto guest speakers who’ll catch you up on the cool, new, innovative stuff going on in technology today. Don’t blink or you’ll miss their lightning-fast, five-minute presentations. During intermissions, get a cold beer and chat with speakers, sponsors, and O’Reilly’s own editors. Join us Thursday, May 31, for a fun, energetic evening of talking, learning, making, collaborating (and drinking!).

With my usual luck of timing, I’ll be out of town and won’t be able to make it- but it sounds like great fun.

Streaming from home

Posted on by John

This weekend I finally got around to setting up our music library machine to stream outside the house: so that I can take my whole library with me wherever I go, and Jo can listen from her studio. (Kudos to mick_w and his guide Building a Mini-ITX server)

I’ve been using slimserver for years, and loving the ability to stream music throughout the house.

All the music lives on one server (a Shuttle XPC SB61G2 for you hardware geeks), and gets delivered to any computer on the home network as well as to a Squeezebox2 connected to the home stereo.

After several frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful attempts at using Orb (neither 1.0 nor 2.0 ever worked reliably for me) I finally bit the bullet and decided to solve two problems at once:

  1. The Slimserver was running windows
  2. The slimserver was not accessible outside the home network

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:Vocalo – the station/community formerly known as Chicago Public Radio

Posted on by John

(via Reclaim the Media)

I don’t normally blog here about projects Optaros has been involved in, but I think this article in the Current is too good to pass up sharing: “It’s public radio, but with nearly everything different, including the name”

It describes the new station/site (in which Optaros was involved) from Chicago Public Radio called :Vocalo.

There will be a website, but it would be wrong to say that it’s the station’s website. Really, it’s the website’s radio station.
The name, :Vocalo, is an invention, essentially “Vocal” with an “o” at the end. It rhymes with “Zocalo,” a Spanish word that in Mexico refers to a town plaza and in Colombia refers to the infrastructure that stabilizes a large building. The colon before the “V” is intentional — a trademarked emoticon.

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Plugin mania

Posted on by John

I’ve recently added a bunch-o-plugins. Please let me know if you notice anything funky going on in terms of being able to access the blog, make comments, etc.

Plug-ins I’m trying:

All goodness.

I’m also thinking about enabling Flickr photo and del.icio.us links into my feedburner feeds – so you may see some changes in the feed.

It’s the community, stupid

Posted on by John

Joshua Porter writes in “Why Invest in Social Features for Your Web Site?“:

In addition to the explicit benefits for the site owner, implementing social features means building a community around shared experiences. The notion of “shared experiences” difficult to define, but the benefits of increased participation and caring are clear. People respond best to communities where they believe they’ll find like-minded people and where they feel their ideas and opinions matter. This trust is the real benefit of social software.

Therefore, adding social features isn’t so much a leap of faith as it is an investment in a long-term experience design strategy.

It’s a great article, describing some of the softer or harder to quantify benefits of adding social features to your site, and connecting them to core user experience design issues.