All posts by Dawn

art of community, foo, O'Reilly, OSCON

Art of Community

I have been talking recently at conferences (OSCON and FooCamp) about the Art of Community as part of a project that Danese Cooper and I are doing for O’Reilly Media. We are in the process of writing a book on the Art of Community, which will start as a wiki with plans to write an initial first draft of the chapters, post them to the wiki, and allow the community to be our editors / collaborators on the project. We also plan to record a bunch of podcasts to include on the wiki and use as vignettes in the text of the book. We are still in the process of writing the chapter drafts, so the wiki is not yet public; however, we are looking for input and ideas.

If you have something interesting to say about community and would like to talk to us, please contact me: dawn at dawnfoster dot com.

internet regulation, MySpace, young people

MySpace is #1 … on the Worst Web Sites List

PC World just rated the 25 worst web sites with several classic oldies, like BonziBuddy, Rentmychest.com, and The Dancing Baby, making the list along with several modern sites including Hotmail and Microsoft Windows Update.

I was a bit surprised to see MySpace at the top of the list, but the MySpace site has its share of problems. I previously blogged about how MySpace could make better use of web 2.0 technologies and better leverage the MySpace community to improve their online help functions, but PC World has some different concerns.

PC World had several concerns about MySpace. First, the use of MySpace by online predators fuels politicians who can leverage parental fears about the Internet to win votes and promote other actions that impact our use of the Internet (net neutrality, VoIP wiretapping, etc.) Second, PC World suggests that many MySpace pages “look like a teenager’s bedroom after a tornado–a swirl of clashing backgrounds, boxes stacked inside other boxes, massive photos, and sonic disturbance” in addition to hogging your CPU and being a haven for spyware. Third, MySpace could take more actions to protect minors.

I’m not sure that these are really fair concerns. First, if the politicians didn’t have MySpace to fuel parental concerns to get more votes, there are plenty of other sites they could use as the poster child for why they should regulate more of the Internet. Second, of course it looks like a teenager’s bedroom. These are teenagers, and MySpace is the online equivalent of their bedroom. It is their online haven complete with the typical mess and hazards akin to finding a slice of leftover pizza forgotten under the bed. The best that parents can do to alleviate their fears with online (and offline) concerns is to educate their children and give them the guidance and support to help them make the right decisions.

PC World wraps up their analysis with this:

“Is MySpace totally bad? Not at all. Are we old farts? Yeah, probably. But the Web’s most popular site needs a serious security reboot. And probably a makeover. Until then, MySpace won’t ever be OurSpace.” (Quote from PC World)

As an ancient MySpace user (at the age of 35), my page looks clean and tidy (like my house), and yes, I get annoyed by the busy pages that you can barely read due to clashing backgrounds combined with poor text color choices playing music I would never choose to listen to while taking forever to load. However, I know that teenagers will be teenagers, and this is their space, too.

blufr, techcrunch

Too Addictive

Thank you very much Marshall Kirkpatrick at TechCrunch. I just saw the post about blufr and had to check it out. I am now addicted.

Blufr is an online quiz with True / False answers (Way! or No Way!), but it keeps a point tally that goes up or down based on your responses. Careful, it is addictive.

Powered by Answers.com:
free online dictionary and more

YouTube

LonelyGirl15 Identified

There has been quite a controversy brewing in the viral world of YouTube recently. I won’t bother to rehash the summary, since Danah Boyd did a fantastic job of outlining the events leading up to the discovery that LonelyGirl15 was the creation of a group of filmmakers, and not a lonely, young teenager making videos in her bedroom.

Today, Silicon Valley Watcher has identified LonelyGirl15 as Jessica Rose, a 19-year old New Zealand actress.

LonelyGirl15:

Jessica Rose:

I think we have a match!

Thanks to Google cache, unless you were dropped into the online world out of thin air, your past can never be completely erased. A little scary, perhaps, but it reminds us to be a little cautious of how much we share online knowing that someone, somewhere, can unearth our online past.

community, wiki, wikipedia

The Great Encyclopedia Debate: Wikipedia vs. Britannica

The Wall Street Journal today contains an interesting debate between Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia‘s founder and chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation, and Dale Hoiberg, senior vice president and editor in chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Here are a few of the most interesting snippets:

Wales: “We believe that encyclopedias should not be locked up under the control of a single organization, but a part of the healthy dialog of a free society.”

Hoiberg: “But there is little evidence to suggest that simply having a lot of people freely editing encyclopedia articles produces more balanced coverage. On the contrary, it opens the gates to propaganda and seesaw fights between writers with different axes to grind. Britannica draws from a community, just as Wikipedia does. Ours consists of more than 4,000 scholars and experts around the world who serve as our contributors and advisers. … While Wikipedia may welcome scholars, all the reports I’ve seen suggest that most of the work is done by individuals who, though very dedicated, have little or no scholarly background.”

Wales: “Artificially excluding good people from the process is not the best way to gather accurate knowledge. Britannica has acknowledged the value of having multiple contributors, although of course because they are proprietary rather than freely licensed they would have a very hard time attracting the kind of talent that we have. The main thrust of our evolution has been to become more open, because we have found time and time again that increased openness, increased dialog and debate, leads to higher quality. I think it is a misunderstanding to think of “openness” as antithetical to quality. “Openness” is going to be necessary in order to reach the highest levels of quality. Britannica has long been a standard bearer, and they have done a fine job within their model. But it is time to work in a different model, with different techniques made possible by new technologies but the same goals, to reach ever higher standards.”

Hoiberg: “I can only assume Mr. Wales is being ironic when he says Britannica would have a hard time attracting the kind of talent that Wikipedia has. Britannica has published more than a hundred Nobel Prize winners and thousands of other well-known experts and scholars. Contrary to Wikipedia, Britannica’s contributor base is transparent and not anonymous.”

Wales: “We have spoken openly about some of the challenges and difficulties we face at Wikipedia. Not long ago, you suffered some bad publicity due to errors in Britannica. Have you considered changing your model to allow quick, transparent responses to such criticisms as a way to achieve a higher quality level? “

Hoiberg: “I must point out that Mr. Wales’s inclusion of two links in his question to me, one to Wikipedia itself, is sneaky. I have had neither the time nor space to respond to them properly in this format. I could corral any number of links to articles alleging errors in Wikipedia and weave them into my posts, but it seems to me that our time and space are better spent here on issues of substance.”

Wales: “Sneaky? I beg to differ. On the Internet it is possible and desirable to enhance the understanding of the reader by linking directly to resources to enhance and further understanding.”

Quotes from the Wall Street Journal

We have not resolved the great encyclopedia debate, and we probably never will. Both models have their strengths and weaknesses, and as a result, both can probably learn from the other, which is why the title of the WSJ article, Will Wikipedia Mean the End Of Traditional Encyclopedias?, is so misleading. The title implies a black and white solution to an increasingly gray world . We can have both a community encyclopedia and a traditional encyclopedia without having to choose one over the other. This gray world that we live in has enough room for both approaches to continue and thrive.

browser, connectivity, desktop, web 2.0

Smackdown: Browser-based Apps vs. Desktop Apps

Richard MacManus is running a poll at the Read / Write Web to determine whether people prefer desktop or browser apps. A day later, the results so far show that 62% prefer browser-based apps while 38% prefer webified desktop apps.

Judging by the comments, people fall into a few camps:

  • Desktop-based code is faster:
    “I have no clue who could possibly prefer web-based applications over ones running on your own computer. Native code, faster rendering, more memory, more bandwidth… how could ‘oooh, how neat, it works in my browser’ compete with any of those?” (Comment 1 from Mike Rundle)

  • I need to share my apps across multiple computers:
    “Well, I use five different computers on any given day, four windows XP and one Mac. You tell me how on earth am I going to enjoy apps running on any one of those PCs” (Comment 2 from hombrelobo)

  • Both are great for different reasons:
    “Basically what I’m saying is that certain apps (like productivity apps) are better suited for the Web, where production apps still have their place on my hard drive. So choosing between them is a little like choosing between my children, or maybe more like choosing between my cars, or maybe more like choosing room to take a nap in.” (Comment 8 from Steve Swedler)

In today’s world of near constant connectivity where work, home, coffee shops and airports are increasingly enabled for wireless, I tend to lean heavily toward browser-based apps. I am essentially forced to use Microsoft Outlook / Office / Communicator as part of the work environment; however, these are not the apps that I would select given a choice, and my personal usage tends to be browser-based with only a few exceptions. I almost always have Gmail, Meebo (IM), and Netvibes (RSS reader) open in Firefox tabs, and I use Google calendar, Blogger, and Remember The Milk (task list) at least daily. I also use a couple of desktop apps every day, mostly OpenOffice.org and iTunes (podcasts), but not nearly as often as I use the browser-based apps.

This is a drastic change from a few years ago when connectivity was far from constant. I tended to prefer desktop apps to keep my data available when I was offline. Now, I find that the need to be connected is nearly ubiquitous. Even when reading email offline, people have embedded links to relevant information requiring a network connection to finish reading many of my emails. Over the past 6 months or so, the only time I usually find myself without any network connection is on airplanes. This just gives me an excuse to catch up on reading.

location, rss, tags, task, to do

Remember The Milk

I have been trying to get my personal life just a bit more organized, so I decided to try a web-based task manager. Based on a TechCrunch review of online to do lists, I decided give Remember The Milk a try. As a bonus, the company is also partially run by a stuffed monkey.

Remember The Milk has all of the cool web 2.0 features. You can tag your tasks and view them in a tag cloud if you just want to see tasks related to a specific tag or get a feel for which tags have the most tasks associated with them to see where you are spending your time. It also has a cool location feature where you can give each task a location and see them all together on a map. This could be great for someone planning sales calls or deciding how to most efficiently run a bunch of errands spread across the city.


You can associate notes, URLs, time estimates, due dates (single or repeating), priorities and more with each individual task. You can put all of your tasks together or spread them among several different lists to separate personal, work, and other types of tasks. Reminders can be sent to via email, IM, Skype, mobile phone, and other methods to make sure that you never forget a task.

The only thing that does not seem to work well is the RSS feeds. Netvibes will not recognize the feed at all and when I use the Firefox live bookmarks each task has a name like “2006-09-09T16:16:40Z” … not particularly helpful.

So far, Remember The Milk seems to be a good tool for managing my tasks despite the issues with the RSS feed.

portland barcamp meetup

Portland BarCamp and Meetups

Raven Zachary from The 451 Group is trying to get a critical mass of people here in Portland, OR for a local BarCamp. Dates are still TBD, but please drop your name on the Portland BarCamp Wiki if you are interested in attending (or helping organize). For anyone not familiar with BarCamp, it is an ad-hoc tech “gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.” (BarCamp.org)

I am also talking to Raven about organizing something a little less intense than a full BarCamp event. I was thinking something more like a meetup where a group of cool people interested in technology could chat over drinks one evening about every month or so. I will be emailing a few local techie friends of mine, but if you live in the Portland area and are interested in joining us, please drop a comment on this blog entry or send me an email. If we get enough interest, I’ll put something up on the BarCamp wiki to help us get organized.

At this point, I’m assuming this will be a “buy your own” … in other words, no free beer unless some nice Portland company would like to sponsor us 🙂

intel layoff

Intel Layoff Update

Thanks to all of the friends who have emailed and IMed me over the past couple of days checking in to see if I have been spared the ax. So far, so good … I am still employed. For those of you living under a rock (or camping in the woods over the past few days), Intel just announced the latest update on the progress of our efficiency efforts:

The workforce will decline to approximately 92,000 by the middle of 2007 – 10,500 fewer than the company’s employee population at the end of the second quarter of 2006.(Quote from Intel Press Release)

According to the Associated Press:

About 5,000 of the affected positions have already been cut or will be eliminated this year through a previously announced management layoff, the pending sale of two businesses, and attrition, said Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy.

The company plans to cut about 2,500 more jobs by the end of the year. The remainder will be shed in 2007, when Intel’s head count will settle around 92,000, Mulloy said. (Quote from Associated Press)

Others in the blogosphere (The Last Podcast for example) have been looking to Intel employees for more information on what this means; however, the reality is that we know as much as you do. The internal employee announcement today was similar to, if not identical, in content to our press release. This is a reflection of Intel’s open culture: tell the employees first closely followed by an announcement to the press with the same information.

All I can offer is my perspective. While I was happy to see progress and an announcement with some numbers to help employees understand the magnitude of the upcoming restructuring, I would have liked to see a speedier resolution. Based on the information announced today, the restructuring will drag into the middle of 2007. During any period of uncertainty, we will lose too many of the good people who decide to proactively leave rather than waiting to see who will be let go. Personally, I would rather know where I stand now … patience is not a trait that I hold in abundance.