A View from the Isle

In the beginning, there was email

Web-based collaboration tools and strategies has been one of my professional passions for a decade now. Beyond that I always thought it was cool, I started telecommuting in 2000, so needing easy and complete solutions was high on my priority list.

Over the years, I think I’ve tried nearly all the solutions around with varying degrees of success and failure. Almost always success or failure has been determined by either the willingness of the team to adapt and change or the ease of use of the tool. Even a tool that has the potential to save time, money, even your precious sanity will fail if it isn’t intuitive and easy to use.

Can blog engines provide a solution?

I had played with the original Prologue theme when it was launched about a year ago. It was pretty useful then, but I didn’t have something to apply it to (not that I didn’t try to use it). I had heard and seen demos of the successor P2 and thought that there was some potential, but I didn’t get it until I read Matt’s post about how Automattic uses P2 internally:  How P2 Changed Automattic — Matt Mullenweg

The part that brought it all home was the video:

Now that’s when the light came on. I saw a lot of potential there. It would be great to be able to have our team at M2O use it to update projects, scripts and ideas. The problem was that if I wanted it to be most useful it needed to be on the public Internet, but still private to just us. Being able to update/use it from iPhones and Blackberries would be important, and I wanted to add a little twist using Twitter. So here’s how I did it:

• Basic WP 2.7.1 install
• P2 theme
• Registered Users Only plugin
• WordTwit and WPTouch plugins from my friends at Brave New Code

That’s it. Okay there is one more thing. I set up a Twitter account with its updates protected to post updates to from the blog. This way the team can be updated via Twitter, but the tweets aren’t public.

Will it work?

I think P2 is about as easy as it can get. It even highlights for you the new items since your last visit. It can stand alone using Prism or Fluid to make it an “app”. What’s left? What’s missing? Getting the team to accept and use the tool. Since I think there is a lot of potential here for projects, classes, updates, and messaging I’m going to keep at it in hopes that I can get some momentum.

There are some special tweaks I’m going to look into, but that is another story.

Interested in my P2 collaboration solution? How would you improve on it? What’s missing? Would you use it? Ah so many questions, but that’s half the fun isn’t it?

Tweet This Post 

We owe a huge debt to Johannes Gutenberg. Here’s a guy who just wanted to wrestle publication of The Bible out of the hands of The Church and monks and unwittingly (perhaps) set the stage for blogging.

The movable type printing press revolutionized how information was disseminated. If you wanted to rail against the government, printing up a broadsheet didn’t mean you and a bunch of folks hand copying your treatise, you wrote it, set the type (with the aid of your friendly neighbourhood printer), and just stay up running off copies. Labour intensive, sure, but nothing like hand copying.

So let’s flash forward a few hundred years (about 570 years, actually) at publishing is at a cross roads, bloggers, who are very much like the rabble rousers printing up newspapers in times of political change, are making the folks printing on dead trees shudder, quake and worry. In fifteen short years, people sitting at computers publishing short missives to websites has changed how we consume news, what makes news, and discuss news.

I think Gutenberg would be stoked.

Regardless, in about an hour from now a group of us are going to gather at The Shebeen Club and discuss what new media means for old media…

[From Facebook | Old Publishers Have New Think Coming]

Which, if you think about it, is pretty much the same way all revolutions got into swing, groups of liked minded folks gathering in pubs, bars, and coffee houses gathering to discuss what was going on (and then take those ideas to a printer to distribute in the morning).

I think tonight will be no different, with the exception that the world will know a lot faster.

So who’s with me in this new revolution?

Tweet This Post 

So an actor named Ashton gets a million followers and a talk show host named Oprah joins Twitter and the world rejoices. Twitter has hit that magic point of becoming mainstream.

Of course, there isn’t universal cheering, but that is to be expected. I’m sure the academic community was aghast when AOL users could send and receive email from the Internet proper.

The questions on my mind were echoed by Fredric on RWW:

Can the Mainstream Handle Twitter?

On its own site, Twitter will also have to explain its utility better if it wants to draw in all the potential mainstream users who will hear about Twitter for the first time today. Twitter, after all, still asks you what you are doing, even though that is probably the least interesting way of using Twitter. It is also important to note that Twitter, being the small company that it is, barely has any tech support besides its Get Satisfaction page, so a befuddled new users doesn’t have any place to go to ask questions about how to use it.

Can Twitter Handle the Mainstream?

This sudden mainstreaming of Twitter, however, doesn’t mean that Twitter has finally jumped the shark. In the end, Twitter going mainstream will barely affect most current users. After all, once you manage to unfollow Ashton Kutcher again, most of us won’t have to deal with Oprah, Kutcher, or any other celebrity on the service, though, who knows, you might soon be getting DM’s from your mom…

[From Twitter's Big Day: Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher Bring Twitter to the Mainstream - ReadWriteWeb]

I feared that Twitter would tank today, which would be a bad, bad thing if you’re going to be on Oprah. Twitter, however, has stayed up and seems to be functioning as good as ever. The larger question is: what now? To which I answer: Open servers.

The reference above to AOL was a lead in to this. Long-time internet users will remember the days of having several email addresses because CompuServ, AOL, BITNET, and EDUNET couldn’t reliably communicate and send email back and forth. Not an efficient way to communicate, to say the least.

Then came standardized email gateways, POP, and SMTP and an AOL address was as good as a .edu and email exploded into the mainstream. Now it’s micromessaging’s turn.

Right now the leading contender is laconi.ca (aka Identi.ca) and what it will take is for the servers to have a protocol mapping so that trishussey@twitter.com connects to my Twitter account and have tris [at] media2o.com be able to be mapped to a laconi.ca install. Just like tris.hussey [at] gmail.com works for email and chat.

What’s it going to take to get it working? More laconi.ca servers and more people using them and more clients out there to connect up to. Then…

We have to use them.

Tweet This Post 

All that is old is new again, or so we’ve been told. This weekend the Twitterverse has been slammed with a couple of bothersome worms that propagate rapidly using basic social engineering: we like to click links from friends.

Mashable [mikeyy: Second Twitter Worm on the Loose] and ReadWriteWeb [Twitter Worm Could Take Over Your Computer (in Theory) - ReadWriteWeb] covered this charming present from the Easter Virus Bunny over the weekend but it seems that most folks missed a basic point while pointing fingers at Twitter: we’ve seen this all before. Remember the early days of HTML email? Remember being told to just disable HTML email in Outlook Express and Outlook because just opening a bad email could infect you? Well those days are back, at least for the moment with this Twitter worm.

The “Mikeyy Worm” and others are so freakin’ clever you have to give them props. Basically you see a Tweet from a friend with a link to check out a site or later how to prevent infection and it goes to an infected Twitter profile with a charming piece of Javascript buried in it that infects your Twitter account as well.

Nope not your computer per se, but your Twitter account/profile. It propagates by putting the nasty code into your profile and sends out a tweet on your behalf to keep the whole cycle going.

Ah let’s virus like it’s 1999…

So is this Twitter’s fault? Of course it is.

Is this unexpected? Hell no.

Are we ever going to be rid of things like this? Also a resounding, hell no.

The problem is that most of these kinds of attacks use basic social engineering tools. Click on links from friends, click on links saying your account has been compromised, give “tech support” your username and password…they pray on trust and our assumptions of safety.

Yes, we all need to be careful and skeptical, but honestly not ever clicking on links from friends defeats the purpose of sharing through Twitter (and others) doesn’t it?

So we’ll all be more careful. We’ll make sure that we know how to quickly close off all Twitter related apps, blow out browser caches and cookies, and reset passwords. Man their could be a great AppleScript or Automator script in there…

Tweet This Post 

Are you not familiar with “The Queen of the Engines” (fine that’s a reference to The Difference Engine)? Ada Lovelace wasn’t just the first programmer, pushing Charles Babbage’s Difference and Analytical to beyond what Charles himself envisioned, I’d venture that Ada was the world’s first geek girl.

Here’s a women who bucked the Victorian trends of the day and did some kick ass stuff with “computers”, and we should all be grateful to her. Thus today, Ada Lovelace Day, a day to blog about women in tech you admire.

Honestly I had a really hard time picking someone to blog about, because I know a raft of amazing women in tech. So with no slight to any of my friends, I have chosen two women. I’ve chosen a woman of right now and a woman-to-be who I know will do some rockin’ tech things.

I’ve picked Justine (iJustine) Ezarik (now) and my daughter Aislinn (future).

Most of us have heard of Justine, and I think all too many people write her off or dismiss her off hand. You see a cute blond talking about tech and being a goof on camera and think, yeah whatever. Oh you are so wrong.

I first heard Justine speak at the first BlogWorldExpo with Leo Laporte, and in the misguided interest of getting the post out fast, I didn’t stay for her whole talk. What I did hear blew me away. She started her first website at twelve because a boy dissed her and she wanted revenge (the true mark of a geek, vengeance). She is smart, savvy and together.

Later I had the pleasure of being on a panel with her at Affiliate Summit West talking about social media and affiliate marketing. Again, amazed. Talking with her is fun, because she is smart, easy going, and really loves to geek out with the best of us.

Now, my second person, my daughter Aislinn.

Of course I’m a proud Dad. She wanted her own blog at 9 (yes, she has one but it’s private). She took up digital photography last year and is just gifted. She rocks Club Penguin and Webkinz online. She intuitively understands how the world of social media has changed the world. She just groks it. I know that she might not always be into tech, but any girl who could out tech support her teacher in Grade 1 and was asked to be on TV with Leo Laporte at 10 has it seriously going on.

I am so proud of her, l love her, and miss her dearly.

Who are your choices?

And not to slight the feelings of my son, he’s my choice for Charles Babbage Day is there is one.

Tweet This Post 

Yes, my second slide really was titled “I hate blogs.” The reason is that saying that a site is a blog, or built on WordPress people get the wrong impression.

Free software can’t be all the good. Or why should I pay you do to it…

Let’s face it, you’re still building a site and once you get over the mechanics, there is some technique involved.

Regardless here are my slides from my talk. You might also like the post from WordCamp (similar topic)

Tweet This Post 

Welcome to Third Tuesday Live blog from Vancouver…

Flickr set from the evening:

Tweet This Post 

Well Allen might not be writing about Twitter every day, okay well I don’t either, but starting sometime last evening I stopped getting email notification of DMs or follows on Twitter, and that got my attention.

I didn’t realize how much I depend on Twitter for fast updates. Okay, getting notification of follows isn’t too crucial to my existence, but not getting DMs, yeah that causes a little problem.

Like last night I was meeting the crew from Molson for a beer (of course) and DMs were zapping back and forth…except I didn’t get them until I was home. Oops.

This made me realize how important Twitter has become to many of us as a rapid communications tool and info source, but it hasn’t stopped there. Jennifer Leggio commented recently, on Twitter of course, that she had culled 100 feeds from Google Reader because she doesn’t go there often anymore. I asked a question recently about Twitter and RSS and got a similar response, Twitter is becoming more important than our once vital RSS readers.

So we have a single point service that is becoming vital to many of us, which means when something goes off the rails, we notice.

I can’t help but wonder if now would be a good time for Twitter to take some of their money and set up a series of relays on major hosts across the Net. SXSWi is coming up soon-no I don’t know if I’m going-which tends to put a huge load on Twitter, maybe a little pre-planning would be good.

Of course many of us also rely on Gmail, and when it goes down we go a little nuts (and we tend to then go to Twitter to get updates). I think it is more than a little ironic that the Internet was built on the concept and mantra of reliability and redundancy, but many of us have chosen to rely on single point services for our communications.

Maybe it isn’t just Twitter that should think about backup plans.

Tweet This Post 

Going to do this post in segments…first my slides:

This is the “magic” code that fixes the problem with having a pre-set “Home” button:

<?phpwp_list_pages('exclude=2,10&title_li=&depth=1'); ?>

What this does is block the pages with IDs 2 and 10 from being listed. You’ll have to find out the page ID from your Edit Pages section in the admin panels. I mouse over the title and look at the URL in the status bar. Please, please bring back the ID number in the columns!

I’ll post links shortly, but the best place to find things on Extending WP on WordPress.org so honestly look there and the most popular themes and plugins are your best bests.

Tweet This Post 

Yeah I love TweetDeck , it’s open all the time and one of the first things I installed on my netbook. TweetDeck is the only way I’ve found I can get much out of Twitter at all. Iain is a very talented guy and eventhough I didn’t “get” TweetDeck at first, now I do.

Om Malik thinks Iain getting $500k in angel funding is a sing of Twitter insanity, I have to strongly disagree.

[From Tweetdeck Funding…a Sign of Twitter Insanity]

TweetDeck freakin’ works. Everyone who I’ve turned on to it wonders how they lived without it. Every-freakin-one. To me that is the mark of awesome software. I should know, I helped guide Qumana when it was the blog editor of choice for many in the pro-blogging community. People just “got it”. This means to me that if people “get” TweetDeck, then there is something to it. I know Iain has plans for the app. I know I have ideas too. I see TweetDeck becoming more and more a central dashboard of information, so lets give Iain the cash to live on so he can make this app rock.

Premium version? Since I already donated to TweetDeck as it is, I’m pretty sure I’ll pony up for new features.

What’s your crazy idea for TweetDeck? Come on, spill…

Tweet This Post 

Next week is WordCamp Whistler and in addition to exercising my shoulder do I can take pictures, I’m also prepping to give a short talk on using WP to build “regular” websites.

When Duane and Rebecca opened the speaker submission form, I zapped in with one of my favourite topics: using WP to build a website (yeah with a blog too). Morten had a similar idea, and while a panel was the first option, now each of us will have 30 mins of fame:

In my original pitch I asked for a one hour session. But unbeknownst to me Tris Hussey, another WordPress as CMS expert, had pitched almost the exact same topic to the event. Rather than pick sides and give one of us the full hour, it was decided that we would each get a 30 minute session so we both get our foot in and the attendees can get two different perspectives. Which is a great idea: This is by no means an exact science and while I’m sure Tris and my approaches compliment each other they will be vastly different. And that “double perspective” will give the listeners a far broader understanding of the subject matter than if one of us were to do the session by ourselves. [From WordCamp Whistler - WordPress as CMS presentation by Morten Rand-Hendriksen | Design is Philosophy - The Pink & Yellow Media Blog]

Before you groan and think that we’re going to be repeating each other (actually it would be me repeating him since he’s first on the docket), don’t worry we’re coming at the topic from two totally different directions.

Morten is going to dig deep into WP as a CMS. We’re talking custom fields, theme hacks, all the things that would make the site uber cool and without many obvious WP touches. This is awesome stuff, and I know there are going to be a lot of people taking notes in his talk (including me, since I want to learn more about these WP hacks), so I’m not going to step on his toes.

My talk is going to be at more of an entry-level audience. I’m going to assume that you know how to install WP, upload themes, and add plugins but that’s it. Here’s what I’m going to cover. You want to build a decent site based on WP, but you’d like to know what plugins, themes, and settings will really make it hum. Simple as that.

I’ll touch on the settings that make sense on a site that you might not think of, and a few WP template tricks to make your navigation sing. The plugin list is going to be pretty standard, but you know I’ll probably have a trick or two up my sleeve.

That said, while I have a several favourite themes (some free, some not) and my key plugin list, but I’d also like to hear from you. What are your favs?

What are the pieces that make a WP install complete to you? Don’t worry if you think the plugin is “too bloggy” because you know I’ll be encouraging people to have the blog portion active too.

If you have some WP-powered websites that you think are great examples, pass those on too. I always love to see and show lots of examples to show the range of possibilities.

Now I need to set my demo site up…oh what to choose, what to choose…

Tweet This Post 

Here’s a great idea. Whenever someone follows me on Twitter I’ll send them a little direct message back thanking them or something. Okay maybe I’ll throw a link to my blog in too. Hmm, maybe a video? How about the product I’m selling…

You can see where I’m heading with this, auto DMs on Twitter. Sounds great, but honestly they are annoying. I try to follow almost all the people who follow me, but I’m more choosy now than I have been in the past. Why? I’m getting sick and tired of those DM pitch messages.

Don’t get me wrong, sending me a DM later that I can tell is more personal is cool. It’s a nice touch.

I posed this question to my Twitter followers this morning and got these replies:

That’s a pretty resounding: “they suck” response. Now I repeated the question and specifically asking my followers who do send out these autoDM what value they got out of them. Heck they could even DM me with their answer.

No takers.

This leads me to again wonder, why do it?

Are people clicking those links? Friending on Facebook? Signing up for newsletters?

I really want to know. I help folks with using Twitter for business, etc and if it does work then I can recommend it.

Yes, I can see how it could be useful.

“Thanks for the follow. Don’t forget to watch the live stream of the event” (for an event account, clearly).

“Thanks for the follow. Don’t forget our fundraising party…”

But just the hi and thanks?

But just hi and thanks? Not so much.

Bottom line: do you unfollow people who send autoDMs? Are you more careful following because you don’t want to get an autoDM? Do you use autoDMs and have found success with them?

Leave your answer below…

Tweet This Post 

Wow. Digg bleeding cash, ad revenues tanking, everyone want stuff for free–is there a smart, safe, and sane business model for the web?

The same cannot be said of Digg, a site conceived by television host Kevin Rose as a replacement for the editors who pick headlines for readers. On Digg, readers vote headlines up by “digging” them, or down by “burying” them.

For now, Digg is safe, insulated from the marketplace as a well-funded private company. But if Adelson no longer plans to sell the company, he will have to take it public. And when the day comes that investors can vote the company’s shares up or down, unless he can engineer a dramatic improvement in its finances, he and Rose will know what it feels like to be buried.

[From Black Holes: It Costs Digg $5 Million a Year to Run the Internet]

My question is only partially rhetorical. I know there are great business models online, but one of the staples of many of the companies I’ve been around have had the plan to get cash through ad revenue to offset investments, etc. Really this wasn’t a bad plan not too long ago. We see now that a business based solely on ad revenue will have a tough go of it. Okay, great what’s the other option?

If you look at newspapers they use ad revenue, but that is combined with classifieds and subscriptions. Unfortunately Craigslist pulled the rug out from under the classifieds and people are getting their daily news from the Internet and other sources, so we see where newspapers are now.

Subscription models used to work when the content you got for free was so-so at best. Now the free content online is amazing. Sure we’re tried doing subscriptions for online publications, and for niches I think they can work, but on masse? Not so sure.

What I’m thinking is as trends like the Detroit Free Press reducing home delivery and large media corporations have a harder and hard time making a go of it, is that we’ll see the ad market perk up.

As soon as it’s a provable fact that ad spend online turns into sales offline–well maybe we can start making money with ad revenue again..

Maybe

Tweet This Post 

It’s been quite a good week here in Vancouver. We’re getting a lot of attention for our social media, marketing, and snowball fighting skills.

Invesp Consulting released their Top 100 Marketers of 2008 list and Vancouver can be proud to claim at least two folks on the list:

14. John Chow

In April 1999, John started a little technology site call The TechZone. That site has grown to become one of the largest hardware tech sites on the net. Currently the site has over 10,000 pages and gets over 200,000 page views per day. Since then, he started one of the more popular make money online blogs that enjoys close to 45,000 RSS subscribers. John’s huge following and ability to grow at such tremendous rates got him the recognition and nomination to join our list.

Follow John on twitter.

25. Linda Bustos

One of our personal favorites, Linda Bustos, managed to increase the GetElastic blog`s rss-subscriptions from approximately 1,000 to over 5,500 in less than a year, exceeding company goals. Linda is an Emerging Media Analyst for Elastic Path Software. She is the main writer for the GetElastic blog; her posts always offer great insight into SEO, PPC, and just about anything ecommerce related. She has also guest blogged on the Invesp blog a couple of times.

You can listen to Linda at conferences such as shop.org, SES, Internet Retailer, and blogworld, among many others. She’ll probably have a camera set up to interview someone like Avinash Kaushik.

[From Top 100 Marketers of 2008 49 to 11]

Sure other cities and regions might be able to claim more folks, but given the size of the Vancouver tech community, well it’s pretty obvious that we rock.

Tweet This Post 

Remember when the web was young and we were all really trusting of usernames and IDs? I remember being on a woodworkers email list or news group and someone had the name/ID “Norm Abrams”. People were all excited to think they were getting email from Norm of New Yankee Workshop. Yeah, well it wasn’t him.

Things haven’t really changed have they? When someone has the ID “trishussey” you expect it to be me, right? The thing is that it isn’t always, especially where celebrities and brands are involved.

Gillian Shaw of the Vancouver Sun wrote a pretty telling piece this week about big companies–like major banks–not even aware of people using their name on Twitter.

Stiennon said already there has been a rush to claim all one- and two-letter Twitter IDs, similar to the early rush on dot-com names. A search of other Canadian banks on Twitter shows that @BMO leads to Twitter user Brian Moffatt.

At PricewaterhouseCoopers, global CIO Michael Calyniuk, said he is looking into a Twitter site with the ID PWC, which he isn’t aware of the company having.

“We are doing this from a security standpoint,” he said. “PWC is trademarked.”

The appearance of @scotiabank on Twitter has that bank trying to get the name — which appears complete with the bank’s logo — off the Twitter site.

“I personally wasn’t aware of it,” said Frank Switzer, director of public affairs at Scotiabank. “We’ll investigate and take the appropriate action.”

[From Web world’s all a-Twitter about seizing big corporate names]

Twitter is just one place you have to reserve your name. StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us … the list goes on. Have you made sure that your name isn’t taken by someone else?

I go and sign up for as many social media services almost right away not always to try them, but just to reserve my name space.

Are you check? Is your company check?

Yeah you might want to.

Like now.

Tweet This Post