portland, social networking, social productivity, social software, web 2.0

Join Us for the First Lunch 2.0 in Portland!

I hope to see everyone at the first Lunch 2.0 held in Portland! Lunch 2.0 is a an excuse to eat lunch with other people (instead of at our desks) and to meet other interesting technology types around Portland. If you have never heard of Lunch 2.0 and want to learn more, you can visit the main Lunch 2.0 site.

You can get all of the details and RSVP on Upcoming for the Portland Lunch 2.0.

The Details:

Wednesday, February 27, 2008
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
AboutUs.org
107 SE Washington Street, Suite 520
Portland, Oregon 97214

A huge thank you to Jake Kuramoto for reminding us that we needed to do one of these in Portland and then for working with AboutUs to actually make it happen!

ignite, ignite realtime

How XMPP (Jabber) Can Do So Much More Than IM

Matt Tucker (XMPP guru at Jive, one of the XMPP Standards Foundation members involved in setting the standards for XMPP, and my boss 🙂 ) has been spending a lot of time thinking about how the technology industry can benefit from XMPP beyond just as an instant messaging protocol. XMPP is the protocol used by Google’s GTalk IM and most recently AOL has been experimenting with XMPP. Matt’s post on Jive Talks today about how XMPP is the future for cloud services starts to outline some of his thoughts about how XMPP can be used in many other areas:

There’s a new firestorm brewing in web services architectures. Cloud services are being talked up as a fundamental shift in web architecture that promises to move us from interconnected silos to a collaborative network of services whose sum is greater than its parts. The problem is that the protocols powering current cloud services; SOAP and a few other assorted HTTP-based protocols are all one way information exchanges. Therefore cloud services aren’t real-time, won’t scale, and often can’t clear the firewall. So, it’s time we blow up those barriers and come to Jesus about the protocol that will fuel the SaaS models of tomorrow–that solution is XMPP (also called Jabber) . Never heard of it? In just a couple of years Google, Apple, AOL, IBM, Livejournal and Jive have all jumped on board.

…

Fixing the polling and scaling problems with XMPP as Tivo has done is compelling, but the built-in presence functionality also offers tantalizing possibilities. Presence includes basic availability information, but is extensible and can also include things like geo-location. Imagine cloud services taking different actions based on where the client is connecting from.

More people, us included, will make the shift to XMPP, which will provide the missing evidence to create momentum toward a tipping point. In fact, I’m happy to announce that Clearspace 2.0 will include a feature that’s powered by an XMPP-based cloud service. We’ll be publishing a series of blog entries in the near future to discuss how we built it.

Quoted from Jive Talks

I think it is about time we moved beyond the old model of polling and into new, more efficient paradigms. As we come to expect real time, always available tools on the web, we should be thinking about using real time collaboration technologies (like XMPP).

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

collaboration, community

Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working

I just finished Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working by Anne Zelenka. Connect is all about web workers, those people who spend all or part of their time working remotely over the web either as telecommuters, freelancers, or some other online working arrangement. When I was at Compiere, I spent about 6 months working remotely, and I could have used a book like this. Based on what I learned from my experience, this book was right on target and offers great advice to people interested in working over the web with good coverage of both the good and the bad aspects. While the flexibility was great for me, you can go a little stir crazy, and Anne has a lot of ideas to help minimize the issues inherent in working from home.

In addition to the basic information about web working, some of the related ideas in the book really helped define some of what I have been noticing over the past couple years that seem to he changing the way people work. Anne makes a great distinction between knowledge work and web work. With knowledge work, the focus has been on the corporation, proprietary technologies, desktop tools, and knowledge, but in contrast, web work is focused on individuals, open technologies, web tools, and relationships. When I was at Intel, the focus was more on knowledge work, but I am noticing that at Jive, the focus is on web work as Anne defines it with collaboration, openness, and relationships being of utmost importance. As an community person, I am definitely more suited to the web work model.

Busy vs. bursty is also a common theme throughout the book. Busy work is based on work hours, email, company relationships, inflexible long-term planning, and web surfing as a time waster, while bursty work is about getting the job done regardless of hours worked, collaboration tools instead of email, relationships that are broader than just your company, agile planning, and web surfing as fuel for ideas. This isn’t to say that you can replace all of the busy work with bursty work; you still need some amount of busy work to get through the tedious, but necessary tasks. However, bursty work also has a place, and again it tends to be more in the style of how we work at Jive and is more suited to my personal style of working.

I will admit to skipping over a couple of sections, like technology recommendations for home work systems, since I have an in depth knowledge of some of these topics based on my recent experiences as a web worker. Even if you aren’t a telecommuter or freelancer working mostly over the web, I still recommend the book and Web Worker Daily, the companion web site. It has a lot of interesting ideas for how work is changing as we move more and more of our lives online.

community, ignite, ignite portland, portland

Want to see me present at Ignite2?

Don’t forget to RSVP for Ignite Portland 2! We have some awesome presentations on the lineup.

I’ll even be doing a presentation on online communities in the style of Dr. Seuss. For example:

Dr. Seuss:

“I’m the Lorax who speaks for the trees which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please.

NOW…thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground, there’s not enough Truffula Fruit to go ’round.

And my poor Bar-bar-loots are all getting the crummies because they have gas, and no food in their tummies!”

Dawn’s Translation: Play Nice: Be polite and respectful in your interactions with other members.

Other awesome presentation topics include: robots, rockets, sushi, undercover hookers, biodiesel and more!

community, FastWonderPodcast, podcast

Podcast Episode 6: Online Community Management with Stormy Peters

In this podcast, I talked to Stormy Peters, Director of Community and Partner Programs at OpenLogic. Prior to Open Logic, Stormy founded and managed the Open Source Program Office at HP. She has addressed the United Nations, European Union and various U.S. state governments on open source software, and she is a co-founder of the non-profit GNOME Foundation. We talked about a variety of topics related to managing successful open source and online communities.

Download:
Online Community Management with Stormy Peters (mp3)

If you are doing something really cool with your online community, please let me know! I am open to suggestions for potential interviews.

You can also subscribe to the Fast Wonder Community Podcast via iTunes.

Related Fast Wonder Posts:

blogs, rss, Yahoo

Find Top Blog Posts Using Yahoo Pipes with AideRSS

I’ve been really excited about the potential of Yahoo Pipes recently, and as a result I’ve spent quite a bit of time playing with Yahoo Pipes over the past couple of weeks. I recently put together a pipe that I am finding really useful, and I thought a few others might find it interesting, too.

The problem:

When reading my rss feeds, I tend to skip blog posts with titles that do not immediately catch my eye as something interesting. As a result, I sometimes miss important news or ideas that everyone else is talking about.

The solution:

I decided to put together a pipe that takes some of my favorite blogs as inputs and sends the posts through AideRSS to find the ones with the most comments, discussion, bookmarks, etc.

Details:

  • I put together a csv file with some of my favorite blogs formatted without the leading http:// to make them easier to process through AideRSS (alternatively, you could also bring in the complete URL and use pipes, to reformat the strings, but I was striving for simple). I then pulled this into the pipe as input using the Fetch CSV module.
  • I then used the Loop module with an embedded URL Builder module to append the appropriate string (blog url from the csv file) to an AideRSS URL (filtering on only the “great” posts). The output from this module produces a bunch of URLs each looking something like this:
    http://aiderss.com/rss/great/webworkerdaily.com
  • I ran this output through another Loop module with an embedded Fetch Feed module to fetch each individual blog post from each URL built in the previous step.
  • In order to filter out any duplicates, I then ran it through a Unique Filter module based on item link. You would only need this step if one or more of your original sources in the csv file aggregates feeds from other sources.
  • I also wanted to limit my results to blog posts from the past 5 days, so I used the Filter Module along with the Date Builder module to restrict the dates.
  • The result of the above steps gives you the basic information, but I decided that I also wanted to reformat the titles to add the AideRSS rating and post date directly into the title, so that I could easily see which ones were the most important. I used yet another Loop module with an embedded String Builder module to add additional data to the title. I then stored the output back into the item title, which results in titles like this:
    Rank 10.0 1-19 This is the blog post title
  • My final step was to sort the items using the Sort module to put the highest rated posts (using AideRSS rating) at the top with a secondary sort by date that puts the newest posts at the top when you have several posts with the same rating.

Viola! I have a pipe that finds the most important blog posts for me. Keep in mind that this will never help you find breaking news, since it usually takes a day or so for many posts to accumulate enough comments / links / etc. to have a high AideRSS rating, but it does keep you from missing really important news and ideas.

You can view the source of the Top Blog Posts pipe or get the RSS feed. You can also clone the pipe when viewing the source if you want to use it as a starting point for something else you want to do.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

dawn foster

Hippies, Atari, and Tequila aka 8 Things You May Not Know About Dawn

I was just tagged by Fred on the 8 things you may not know about me meme. Hmmmm, I live most of my life online, but I’ll try to come up with a few things you may not know.

  1. I was raised by hippie parents (Hi Mom!) and grew up in rural Ohio on a tiny organic farm with chickens, ducks, rabbits, goats, a variety of other animals, and lots of organic vegetables. We even had a goat named Sausage for a few years, but that’s a long story 🙂
  2. In college, I got pretty good at playing pool and even won a few tournaments. I still have my own pool cue (a Meucci), but I haven’t used it in many years.
  3. I played the clarinet from 5th grade all the way through high school in various capacities, including marching bands and various wind ensembles. I even played a the flute and classical guitar very badly and for very short periods of time.
  4. I love to cook vegan food (stir fry, pizza with homemade cornmeal crust, pasta, etc.), but I never make dessert. I can make a decent apple crisp, but beyond that I’m better off buying something from a vegan bakery, like Sweet Pea.
  5. My first computer was an Atari 400 (later Atari 800XL), and I loved writing stupid little programs in Basic that did something cool, but had no practical use whatsoever.
  6. In college (many, many years ago), I carried a flask of tequila and a lime in my pocket most of the time and knew where all of my friends kept their knives and salt shakers.
  7. I have a real weakness for questionable music. My most recently played iTunes list includes Rammstein, Godsmack, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Madonna, The Go-Go’s, Rob Zombie, Blondie, The Offspring, INXS, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kajagoogoo, David Bowie, Rancid, the Kinks, the Prodigy, and more.
  8. At the end of my senior year in high school, I held the records for the 100m and 300m hurdles.

Now the hard part … tagging another 8 people: Todd Kenefsky, Justin Kistner, Paul Biggs, Adam Duvander, Scott Kveton, Josh Bancroft, Selena Deckleman, and Aaron Hockley.

facebook

The Facebook Scrabulous Controversy

Facebook has been asked to pull the famous Scrabulous application from the site at the request of Hasbro and Mattel. While I am not surprised by this move, I am saddened by it. I love to play Scrabble on Facebook with friends in other locations that I rarely get the chance to hang out with in person.

You can join the Save Scrabulous Facebook group to show your support.

If Hasbro and Mattel were smart, they would be negotiating licensing deals and cross marketing arrangements with Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla (the makers of the Scrabulous application). I’ve heard more about Scrabble in the past few months as a result of the Scrabulous app, than ever before, so it is definitely generating buzz around the game. They should be focused on how to best use and build on this buzz to increase sales, instead of squashing something that could be really beneficial for them.

This is yet another example of big companies not “getting it”.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

google, ignite realtime, open source

Why I Love Open Source (Google Android Uses Jive Code)

OK, there are lots of things to love about Open Source Software. Here’s one reason: because if the code is good, companies like Google will pick it up and incorporate it in cool projects like Android 🙂

We recently learned that Google’s Android code uses our XMPP Smack library, and I think this really cool. We are honored to part of this – even if it is in an indirect way.

Open source, research, and other stuff I'm interested in posting.