What if we started just calling the set of techniques we’ve been calling “responsive” plain old design, and came up with an alternative label for what people used to do? (Ok, my own sites aren’t all responsive, but they will be whenever I next get around to it – the point is that new designs should all be done this way).

So I took to the twitter stream for inspiration. Storify below, enjoy.

New England Give Camp

This weekend I had a chance, thanks to Ian Muir, to present at New England GiveCamp. GiveCamps are an international phenomena, in which developers and designers (and marketing and strategy folk) get together with non-profit organizations over a weekend to build or enhance sites (happily, many on Drupal and WordPress) for those charities.

New England GiveCamp ran all weekend (May 4-6) at the Microsoft NERD Center in Kendall Square, and feature 29 different non-profits and over 110 volunteers. You can read more about it on their news feed which is also frequently linking to blog entries by attendees.

I hope next year to be able to attend and do some development, not just drop in and chat about strategy, but it was great to be able to be involved.

Here’s the deck I used to drive the conversation.

Often these are from the Berkman Video Fishbowl or other Boston area events that I wasn’t able to attend in person. (As I’ve written before, Boston is an embarrassment of riches from the point of view of interesting events). The video below isn’t from the fishbowl, but is from iLaw 2011. In it, Jonathan Zittrain gives an updated version of a talk he’s given multiple times (Google turns up many videos from the last 2 years) called “Minds for Sale,” in which he examines “the consequences of crowdsourcing, economically, legally and socially.”

It’s a fascinating talk, though it may start out a bit slow if you’re already familiar with the basic terrain of crowdsourced labor online, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and the like. When he starts to get into the notion of crowdsourcing the identification of protesters in photos, though, it starts getting really provocative as it pushes on our tendency to call for a hands-off when it comes to ‘net regulation.

I was reminded of it again when I saw today that Google is using ReCaptcha (a crowdsourced, labor-for-free, decomposed into small parts so no one knows the whole task model similar to those Zittrain describes) to improve recognition of street addresses in street view (techcrunch).

Street addresses as seen in Captchas

How far off is this from using Recaptcha (or similar technologies) to decode the license plate of cars parked at an Animal Rights conference as seen from afar? Or, for that matter, at an HIV treatment facility?

Although his usage is a bit different than ours was (and Acquia has been using the term for some time) I couldn’t help but recall all the writing we did about The Assembled Web when I was at Optaros in 2008-2009. Specifically, I went back to “The Assembled Web: Notes Toward a Manifesto” on this blog from September of 2009, and I was amazed at well it holds up, even with the themes of DrupalCon 2012.

Some highlights from the original post I thought remained relevant:

1. You should always be thinking multi-site, multi-interface, multi-project.

Although we weren’t calling it responsive design then, we were thinking about the notion that any time you create content or functionality, you need to think about the multiple contexts in which that content or functionality might be used. We were thinking less about devices and more about contexts, perhaps, but it still sounds like pretty decent advice.

4. Design is critical, and design is not about pretty shiny objects

Well, ok, one could argue there’s never been a time where this wasn’t true – but we were right to say that its importance was only increasing as interfaces proliferated.

5. The internet itself, like the *nix operating systems on which it (almost entirely) runs, is a set of small pieces loosely joined

Other than the shameless poaching from David Weinberger’s book this one holds true too. This is maybe the closest to what Acquia has picked up and taken from the meme we tried to create, with the elaboration:

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.

Next week I’m off to Denver for DrupalCon 2012. Since DrupalCon 2008 (which was in Boston) I’ve done both SXSW and DrupalCon each year, but that was proving to be a bit of an overload, so this year I’ve dialed back, skipped SXSW, and chose DrupalCon instead. I’ve found it consistently more useful.

I’ll be attending the Drupal in Education Unconference Monday, and then the main conference Tue-Thurs. (See my schedule of sessions).

I’m most looking forward to:

• Jay Batson’s talk on Web Experience Management in Drupal
• The session on Organic Groups 7 (though it conflicts with a good session on responsive design as well)
• The Drupal Ladder – an outgrowth of an initiative in the Boston Drupal Group I’ve participated in
• The Open Academy presentation – A Drupal Product for Departmental Websites
• Designing for Content Management Systems

Though like all good open source conferences there are many time blocks where there are 5 or 6 sessions I’d like to attend.

It will also be my first year at DrupalCon as an official CMS Myth Mythbuster – looking forward to bringing some Drupal community perspective to myths about CMS.

BarCamp Boston 7 Coming April 7th and 8th to the NERD Center

I originally started this blog just before the first BarCamp Boston, back in may of 2006, and I’ve helped organize / volunteer at a number of them as well as given a few talks.

This year BarCamp Boston 7 returns to the NERD center on April 7th and 8th – hope to see you there.

Maybe I’ll give a talk on the Official.fm Feed Generator, or the WPGPlus plugin – I’d love to get some hacker help with the latter in particular.

The Waiting Room Podcast at Official.fm

One of my consistently favorite podcasts of the last few years has been The Waiting Room, a new music show out of Cardiff, Wales. The show is broadcast on a number of internet radio stations, but I generally listen to it as a podcast, so that I can timeshift and listen when I have time not when it is being broadcast.

They’ve been hosted for some time now on Official.fm, a site which allows users to post tracks and playlists, make them downloadable, make them embeddable, and the like.

Official.fm

Official.fm does produce an RSS feed of a given user’s tracks (there’s a little grey RSS icon at the lower left corner of a user’s page), but the structure of that feed doesn’t work for podcast clients, including itunes.

A while back I made a Yahoo! Pipe that would translate the appropriate official.fm feed into something that Downcast (my podcatcher of choice) would be able to handle, but it annoyed me that this still wasn’t usable in iTunes. (iTunes requires that the enclosure file end in an appropriate extension like .mp3, which means the /download style links Official.fm produces cannot be used in an iTunes feed).

So this weekend I hacked up the UnOfficial.fm iTunes Feed Generator (github page). It takes an official.fm username (and some other metadata used by iTunes) and creates an iTunes appropriate RSS feed.

As a sample and test feed, here’s an iTunes compliant feed for The Waiting Room:

http://johneckman.com/uo/feed.xml

You can take this url, and in iTunes got to Advanced->Subscribe to Podcast. Paste in the feed url, and voila – TWR is back in your iTunes.

The feed gets updated every 24 hours (heck, they only post shows weekly!) via a cron job that recreates the feed.xml file.

If you’re geekily inclined, you can grab the script from github and configure it as you see fit for other official.fm artists.

(Official.fm does apparently have an API, but I didn’t see any simple way to get the path to the actual mp3 file via the API, even when it is marked downloadable).

For now, since the Google+ API is read-only, I’m borrowing inspiration from Luka Puši?’s GPlus Bot and Dmitry Sandalov’s Twitter 2 Google Plus script.

This means emulating the Google+ mobile web experience using Curl.

WPGPlus adds a box to the post edit screen where you can choose yes/no for publishing to Google+, as well as a place for a message to be used in the body.

(If you provide a Google+ message it is used; if you provide a post excerpt it is used; otherwise post content is used).

Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think!

Photo by Peter Wood, cc-by-nc-nd license.

This last weekend I finally got drafted and posted Closing the Books on WordCamp Boston 2011 over on WCBOS site.

Planning WordCamp Boston the last two years has been quite an experience: challenging, at times high-stress-inducing, but well worth the effort. It’s only really been possible, of course, because of the first class team of organizers and volunteers, many of whom worked quietly behind the scenes getting all the hard tasks done, especially in the weeks leading up to the camp.

Thanks are due (much overdue) to my fellow organizers and all the volunteers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees who made WordCamp Boston 2011 a great success!

Now, on to 2012.

Western Mass Drupal Camp will be held in Amherst MA on 1/21/12

I was very happy to find out this weekend that I will be speaking next weekend (1/21/12) at Western Mass Drupal Camp in Amherst.

I’ll be walking through a case study of the site ISITE Design recently designed and built for the JFK Jr Forum at the Harvard Institute of Politics (The Forum site is new, the Institute of Politics site is existing).

As I wrote in the session description:

An interesting project – in some ways a very simple Drupal site with a single content type, but lots of interesting features.

Key features we’ll review include:

• Kaltura – open source (and SaaS) video platform for livestreaming, transcoding, and delivery, including HTML 5 video
• Programmatic content migration from EZ Publish, using Feeds
• Homepage feature carousel and “featured” forums: Views, Blocks, Nodequeue
• Complex Views (Headers, Contextual Arguments, rewriting)
• Taxonomy: Speakers, Moderators, Cosponsors, Subjects
• Calendar of Forums

Looks like it will be a very full day of sessions, including presentations on responsive design, Drush basics, Views, and usability testing.

Yes, this is what I look like when I'm having fun.

ISITE Design created a fun iOS app, Photoblast (best on iPhone, but you can run it in pixel-doubled mode on your iPad too) that lets you add bling, facial hair, luchadors, and the like to your photos for extra impact. Forget Instagram, ours has a pimp cup!

The app itself is free, and comes with a few standard packs, but bonus packs are available (in-app purchase) for $0.99. (I’ll be first to say it: bonus packs are the new ringtones).

Related posts elsewhere:

• Instagram filters not cutting it anymore? Maybe it’s time to bring the bling with PhotoBlast (Silicon Florist)
• A Recipe for Innovation (ISITE’s Gene Ehrbar in ISITE Insight)
• Photoblast App (ISITE Design’s Petra Gregorova on building the app’s marking site with responsive design)

Try it out, and let me know what you think.

• WordPress 3 Ultimate Security
• WordPress 3 Cookbook
• WordPress 3 for Business Bloggers

All three have now been published and are worth checking out. Details of each below.

The earliest of the three to be published was Olly Connelly‘s WordPress 3 Ultimate Security.

Connelly covers a broad swath of general web security while honing in on WordPress: everything from securing your home wifi to setting up ssh on a remote linux server. Though the advice is most deep for people on dedicated servers or VPS’s where they control the whole stack, there’s a lot of useful info here for folks on shared hosting as well.

He also covers troubleshooting, recovery, backing up (sometimes necessary for recovery!), and many of the plugins available aimed at making WordPress more secure.

The second (in publish order) was WordPress 3 Cookbook by Ric Shreves and Jean-Baptiste Jung.

This one takes the familiar form of a cookbook, presenting a series of “recipes” for how to accomplish specific tasks using the WordPress platform.

The recipes range in complexity from very simple tasks requiring no plugins or code editing (just using WordPress’ built in settings) to complex theme development and plugin configuration.

The current sample chapter on the Packt site is Chapter 5, “Building Interactivity and Community” which gives a good sense of the style of the book. (Though I found Packt’s free chapter function non-functional in Chrome – try Firefox instead).

I won’t even hold it against them that they chose to suggest Simple Facebook Connect over my own WPBook as a way of doing WordPress Facebook integration. ;)

The third was WordPress 3 for Business Bloggers by Paul Thewlis, which, as the blurb has it:

shows you how to use WordPress to run your business blog. It covers everything you need to develop a custom look for your blog, use analytics to understand your visitors, market your blog online, and foster connections with other bloggers to increase your traffic and the value of your blog.

It’s got a case-study format, based on a kind of individual-consultant-professional style blogger using his blog to show his professional knowledge and spread a personal brand – but the lessons are applicable to a wide variety of different kinds of bloggers.

WPBook 2.3 is released. This uses the same Facebook SDK (3.1.1) as WPBook Lite which I just released last weekend – this will make it easier to manage both.

It will also let me start work on adding more features to the plugin- a more stable base to work from.

—-
Third test. Should publish just to WPBook page.
—-
Oops. That’s why we test. Typo in publish_to_facebook.php fixed.
—-
Sorry for the testing post. Just working on an update to WPBook 2.3, including an update to the Facebook SDK, and need to make sure in the process I haven’t busted anything.

This should post to personal profile and to page wall.
—-

Difficult Choices. (Photo by Beppie K, cc-by-nc-sa license)

Over in the WordPress Support forums for WPBook, WPBook user TheCitizen was asking about the absence of “share” links on Wall Excerpts posted via WPBook. I responded that in my experience posts made via the API (by an App, rather than by the user directly) don’t get “share” links inside Facebook.

He pointed to Facebook Page Publish, a WordPress plugin which also cross-posts to Facebook (though it does not import comments). Posts made via this plugin do get a share link.

Digging in a bit, I realized that Facebook Page Publish uses the Link object in the Facebook Graph API, whereas WPBook and WPBook Lite both use a Post object.

What’s the difference? That’s what I’m trying to determine now.

Links are posted with these fields (ref):

• link
• message

The rest of the values “are taken from the metadata of the page URL given in the ‘link’ prarameter.

Posts are created with these fields (ref):

• message
• link
• picture
• name
• caption
• description
• actions
• privacy
• object_attachment

So Posts are more complex than Links, whereas Links rely on getting the Facebook metadata from the page returned by the link.

How does each appear, on the timeline and in the news feed?

Here’s the same link, posted twice, using the Facebook Graph API explorer – the first time (the lower box) is as a Link, the second time is as a Post:

That is how they look on the timeline – logging in as another FB user and looking at News Feed, I could not even see the Post type, only the Link type:

Though I’m certain that in the past I have seen items in the newsfeed which were posted as Posts. (Maybe it was that I’d just posted the same link as a link, so Facebook was hiding the second item as spam? I’ll retry with something different).

(Update: here’s what a Post type object looks like in the Newsfeed – the item for this blog post):

A few things to note:

• The nicer excerpt – “We are an interactive agency . . . ” was pulled from the page being linked to by Facebook themselves, not entered by me. In the case of WPBook or WPBook Lite posts, we want to provide the full excerpt, not have it pulled from the link destination.
• The image – again, this was pulled from the link destination. In the case of WPBook or WPBook lite posts, the image would be provided by the app (the featured image from the post) not grabbed from the destination link – but it looks the same in both.
• In the case of the link type, the “via the Graph API Explorer” is next to the poster’s name, but in the Post type it is down at the bottom above the action links
• The Link type gets a “share” action link, while the Post type only gets “Like” and Comment.”

Given all this, plus the fact that I found it hard to find the Post type in the newsfeed of an account I know follows me, I wonder if we shouldn’t switch to posting blog posts as the “Link” type.

The challenge is that the “link” type depends on the target blog having the right open graph metadata in place already (unless wpbook / wpbook lite try to actually provide that metadata).

When Facebook visits the link, it looks for Open Graph Metadata – which your blog’s theme may or may not provide.

Using the “Post” object allows WPBook / WPBook Lite to control the message being sent to Facebook more explicitly, rather than relying on metadata.

The part that worries me though is how frequently “Post” type objects get into News Feeds. Since Facebook controls the algorithm which decides what, out of the hundreds or thousands of possible posts in any given user’s feed, to show that user, I have no way of knowing whether object type (Post vs Link) has any impact.

Anyone have data on that to share?

1. Eliminate the canvas page and tab altogether – make WPBook just focus on cross-posting and comment import, thus potentially eliminating the SSL requirement?
2. Make it optional – keep the canvas page and tab, but make them optional – only for users who want them and have the necessary SSL certificate
3. Fork the plugin – make a version of the plugin which works like the current model, but also a second (WPBook Lite?) that only does cross posting and comment import? That way we could have separate directions for each to simplify setup confusion
4. Stop developing WPBook – There are a number of other plugins which do Facebook posting, and at least one which does Facebook comment importing (probably more). Is it worth continuing to develop WPBook if better alternatives exist?

Ultimately, I settled on Option 3: Fork the plugin, and create a lighter-weight version which did not include the canvas page or tab. The result is WPBook Lite, available now in the WordPress Plugin Repository.

Should I use WPBook, or WPBook Lite?

I suspect this will be the main question folks will face, so here’s a quick comparison table:

Basically, if you are able to access your blog via HTTPS, and you WANT the view of the blog inside Facebook as a canvas application, or you want the page tab feature, you should use WPBook.

If your blog is not accessible via HTTPS, or you don’t want the view of the blog inside Facebook / page tab, then you should be happier with WPBook lite.

I’ll be updating the instructions over at WPBook.net shortly to reflect Facebook’s new look for developer settings shortly, and will also differentiate between WPBook and WPBook Lite. In theory, configuring WPBook Lite should be significantly simpler for most users.

If you’re already using WPBook and shift to WPBook Lite, you will need to regrant permissions.

Migrating from WPBook to WPBook Lite:

1. View your WPBook settings page, and write down your profile ID as well as the IDs of any pages/groups to which you want to cross publish.
2. Deactivate WPBook (but don’t delete it yet)
3. Install and Activate WPBook Lite
4. Set up a new Application for WPBook Lite – this time you should only need the “Website” settings under Integration, not any of the “App on Facebook” section settings
5. Visit the WPBook Lite settings page in WordPress, fill out the required fields (APP ID, Secret, your profile ID), and save the form
6. Re-visit the WPBook Lite settings page, where you should now see an opportunity to grant appropriate permissions

If done correctly, WPBook Lite should pick up right where WPBook left off.

If you run into problems, please comment in the appropriate WordPress Support Forums: WPBook or WPBook Lite.

Pittsfield in the Near Future (from Cameo Wood on flickr, cc-by-nc license)

The first is a change Facebook has made, requiring SSL certificates for “all Canvas and Page tab applications.” (They announced this change earlier this summer, as part of the bizarrely Orwellian “Operation Developer Love” but it went into effect as of October 1st).

This is a problem because many WPBook users’ blogs are not available via https connections (including my own), and with this new Facebook change their WPBook implementation will fail, though how exactly that will be manifest isn’t clear to me yet (see below). Getting an SSL certificate for your blog isn’t an insurmountable task, but if you run your blog on cheap shared hosting, the costs of an SSL certificate (and the dedicated IP it requires) can be nearly as much as you’re paying for hosting! It’s also a task that the non-technical user will find horribly confusing.

The second is a recent report showing that:

Using a 3rd party API to update your Facebook Page decreases your likelihood of engagement per fan (on average) by about 80%

The study results suggest that one of WPBook’s core functions – posting automatically to your wall (or the wall of a fan page, group, or application) whenever new blog posts are published – might not even be a good idea to begin with.

Facebook posts direct versus via 3rd party APIs (Edgeranker study)

If third-party automated postings get de-prioritized by Facebook, you might be better off using a Facebook share button and manually cross posting to Facebook each time you publish. On the other hand, maybe the reason third-party automated postings get less attention is because people post more crap weak content that way. (If what the 10 most popular third-party apps post is lots of nonsense about games, thinly veiled ads, and self-promotion, maybe that is what the study results show people are ignoring – not that good relevant content posted by automated applications gets ignored).

So, what’s the way forward?

The scenario I’m imaging is to split apart the functions of the current WPBook and make some portions optional.

WPBook currently does four main things:

1. Expose a view of your blog as a Facebook application (a canvas page or set of pages). Basically this is an iframe inside Facebook containing your blog content, drawn by WordPress in a theme supplied by WPBook, to make it look more like other Facebook pages.
2. Expose a view of your blog as a “tab” for use on Facebook pages. This is also iframe based, but a bit different in terms of what is allowed in that tab.
3. Cross-post to Facebook whenever a new blog post is published. (To your personal profile wall, or to the wall of a Fan Page, Group, or Application, or some combination thereof).
4. Import comments made against those wall posts, and make them WordPress comments

I believe that the Facebook requirement of SSL only affects numbers 1 and 2 of this list. Even in the current WPBook, if you set “use external permalinks” then users never need know your application canvas page exists – they will just click on the links in wall posts and be taken to your (external) blog. Users without SSL certificate capability (or interest) could still get the benefits of 3 and 4 without having to worry about 1 and 2.

(It’s not clear to me right now how this would impact setup of WPBook-based applications. Facebook’s developer blog clearly indicates that canvas and page-tab applications will require SSL, but that would seem to imply other kinds of applications will not. Is it just a question of choosing a different application type during setup in Facebook? The whole app creation flow has changed so many times it is hard to keep track – maybe it is a question of unchecking some of the boxes in the dialog below?)

New Facebook App Creation Options

So the question becomes, is it worth it to keep WPBook trying to do 1 & 2 above?

Originally this was all WPBook did, and it seemed to me quite useful and distinct from any other Facebook related plugin. In essence you could use WPBook this way to drive a whole in-Facebook experience and never require (or even let!) users go to the blog outside of Facebook (though preventing them from accessing the blog outside Facebook would require some extra work on your part).

Open Parenthesis, as seen outside Facebook (left) and inside Facebook (right) - click for full size

But most users, it seems to me, were confused by this “Facebook view of my blog” approach. They wanted cross posting, and comments import, but didn’t like the application view of the blog (which required all users viewing blog content to consent to application permissions) or worried about it taking traffic away from their external blog.

Should I:

1. Eliminate the canvas page and tab altogether – make WPBook just focus on cross-posting and comment import, thus potentially eliminating the SSL requirement?
2. Make it optional – keep the canvas page and tab, but make them optional – only for users who want them and have the necessary SSL certificate
3. Fork the plugin – make a version of the plugin which works like the current model, but also a second (WPBook Lite?) that only does cross posting and comment import? That way we could have separate directions for each to simplify setup confusion
4. Stop developing WPBook – There are a number of other plugins which do Facebook posting, and at least one which does Facebook comment importing (probably more). Is it worth continuing to develop WPBook if better alternatives exist?

My concern with option 2 (“make it optional”) is just that configuring WPBook is already too complex for many users, given the variety of ways Facebook can be used and the variety of ways WPBook can be configured. Adding yet another set of variants (which would change not just what you have to set inside WordPress but also what choices you make when setting up the corresponding Facebook application) will only increase complexity and therefore support requests, which I honestly just don’t have the time to answer as quickly or extensively as I’d like.

My concern with option 3 (“fork the plugin”) is similar – more work for me, when I’ve had difficulty keeping up with plugin maintenance and maintenance of the instructions as Facebook constantly changes their application settings pages. If maintaining one plugin is difficult, maintaining two will be more so, even if they share some segment of the code base.

So option 1 (“eliminate”) is perhaps the simplest. (I say “perhaps” because I haven’t looked into it in depth yet – how hard will it be to untangle all the permission setting and checking logic, which is currently using a canvas page to display the current permissions? How will that change existing applications built using WPBook?).

But once that’s gone, what distinguishes WPBook from all the other Facebook posting plugins?

The fourth option would be to just declare WPBook obsolete. Existing WPBook installations work, if the user’s blog supports SSL. Currently if users browse Facebook in https mode, my own WPBook-powered applications just don’t work, because I don’t have SSL certificates for any of my blogs – just not worth the effort. But I’m ok with that.

It may be seems that new WPBook users will find they can’t set up a Facebook application (necessary to use WPBook) without an SSL certificate, and if they want to have cross-posting and comment import they’ll need to use an alternative approach, but a quick search of the plugin repository suggests other options are plentiful.

I’d love to hear from you all – especially if you are WPBook users (it’s had over 100,000 downloads, but I’ve no idea how many are in active use).

• Are you using the “Canvas Page” or “Tab Page” views inside Facebook? If so, do you have an SSL certificate for your blog? Would you miss these views if WPBook were revised to eliminate them?
• Have you evaluated other WordPress plugins for accomplishing the same thing? Did they work, or what issues did you run into?

As always, comments (and patches!) welcome.

Here’s the video, including Q&A:

Wish I’d been able to make it!

While I was only able to catch three sessions, each would have been worth the trip on it’s own. All three were led by dynamic, engaging, even charismatic presenters who clearly know their stuff and know the Podcamp audience.

First up was Dave Wieneke (@usefularts) on the “Seven Sins of Digital Innovation,” aka “Stuff that F*#@s up your work, and what the hell can be done about it.”

Dave invited the assembled crowd to co-present, opening up a discussion about how projects go wrong, how to manage change in organizations, how to build buy-in, the dreaded ROI, and how to build sustainable digital strategies. Lots of great quotable moments here, many can be found in Dave’s own Storify recap).

Universidad de Morón (from Wikipedia entry, cc-by-sa license)

Second, was Chris Brogan on Google+ (with guest assistance from Christopher S. Penn running the laptop). I’d just seen Chris talk about why folks should be on Google+ during the Inbound Marketing summit a few weeks back in Boston, so many of the themes in this talk were the same. Why are so many in digital marketing / social media collectively whining about having to learn a new network? Did they really forget orkut, friendster, and myspace? Are they still rocking an @aol.com email address, and a compuserve dial up account?

Chris has become a superstar but still manages to make himself so accessible that everyone thinks he’s their good friend – that’s a skill. (And I don’t mean that as a criticism – he’s authentically interested in everyone he meets in a way that seems entirely natural to him – and he listens, and remembers things you’ve said).

Finally (before I ran off to lunch) I caught Tamsen McMahon‘s (@tamadear) talk about standing out in a bell curve world.

While “personal branding” topics can devolve into hokey admonitions to “be yourself,” McMahon was funny, compelling, and insightful. She used real, understandable, and approachable examples, including reality tv for humor and local social media celebs for color and context. She’s used labels for herself like “intellectual magpie” and “personal cartography“: simple, clear, suggestive, but also entirely unique. (Almost feels like personal branding via google bomb, but those were generally meaningless phrases where hers actually make sense and suggest what she does and is).

I left Podcamp feeling energized, enthusiastic, and smarter than I’d gone in. Not bad for 3 hours on a Saturday morning.

• Perry Hewitt, Chief Digital Officer, Harvard (@perryhewitt)
• Gene Begin, Digital Marketing Director, Babson College (@gbegin)
• Tom Baird, Vice Chancellor, University of Michigan Dearborn
• Mike Petroff, Web and Technology Enrollment Manager, Emerson College (also a writer for .eduGuru) (@mikepetroff)

I’ll update this post with the video from the session as soon as it’s available.

Videos from the session have been posted, and below is a quick Storify list of tweets from the event:

(See also Erik Devaney‘s coverage in New England Post: Inside FutureM: Digital Marketing and Higher Education)

Here’s the schedule (which they haven’t yet published except as a google doc):

My friend Dave Wieneke will be presenting Saturday am on “The 7 Deadly Sins of Business Innovation” and again Sunday afternoon on “Applying Digital Strategy Across your Business.”

As though that weren’t enough reason to attend, other speakers will include Chris Brogan and Christopher S. Penn (the original founders of Podcamp Boston) as well as a who’s who of Boston’s digerati.

Will I see you there?

Klout score as of 9/20, the week after FutureM, IMS, and DrupalCamp Montreal

That’s a big bump in my supposed influence – but doesn’t it really show just how artificial the whole mechanism is? Did I become more influential by attending and tweeting about conferences?

DiPietro pointed out a significant dip in his Klout score, exactly 30 days after WordCamp Boston, where he was busily live-tweeting. I don’t see the same dip (I’ll have to check back in 30 days), though maybe my numbers were never high enough to show the impact in the first place. I did see this weird pattern in the “true reach” segment:

True Reach, part of a Klout Score

The first bump up corresponds to Aug 29 – Sept 1, then down again, then up on the 7th and 8th of September. Why? I’ve no idea yet, but it doesn’t seem correlated with being 30 days out from anything.

What does any of this prove? Algorithms can only be as smart as the data they have access to and the assumptions of their authors. Klout has access to the number of tweets published by an account, how often those tweets are retweeted, how many twitter followers that account has, etc. Klout doesn’t account for multiple twitter accounts (the official tweets coming from @wordcampboston for example, which has its own Klout score but no impact on mine). Klout also can only indirectly differentiate between the speaker on stage being tweeted about and the person doing the live tweeting – all those listening to the speaker but not tweeting about it don’t count as “reach” for the speaker.

In the end the only conclusion I can draw is that Klout favors the noisy – though if you are so noisy that people unfollow you or report you as spam that may come back to haunt you.

So, want to raise your Klout score? Tweet early and often. Go to events with popular hashtags and post quick snippets from key speakers.

We all know that people would more often prefer to be entertained than stimulated or informed. But your obligations are not satisfied if you look only to popularity as a test of what to broadcast. You are not only in show business; you are free to communicate ideas as well as relaxation. . . . It is not enough to cater to the nation’s whims; you must also serve the nation’s needs. And I would add this: that if some of you persist in a relentless search for the highest rating and the lowest common denominator, you may very well lose your audience. Because, to paraphrase a great American who was recently my law partner, the people are wise, wiser than some of the broadcasters — and politicians — think.

(Full text of the speech, including audio recording)

To commemorate the event, Berkman brought Minow, along with Ann Marie Lapinski, Jonathan Alter, and Yochai Benkler for a panel moderated by Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey, with responses from Susan Crawford, Perry Hewitt, Ellen Goodman, Virginia Heffernan, Reed Hundt, Kevin Martin, Nicholas Negroponte, Ethan Zuckerman, Doris Kearns Goodwin (a surprise), and comments by Terry Fisher. (More info on all those folks)

Left to right: Jonathan Alter, Ann Marie Lipinski, Yochai Benkler, Newt Minow, Jonathan Zittrain (back to camera).

It was really a fantastic collection of smart people and the kind of event only the Berkman Center can pull off successfully. (Time for a redefinition of Cognitive Surplus? Interestingly, the ship on Gillgan’s Island, one of Clay Shirky’s examples of where the cognitive surplus used to go, was named the S.S. Minnow in reference to Minow and this speech!).

I only wish there’d been more time to explore the value that the diversity of media channels has brought since that speech – the value in the productive capability each of us now carries in our phones, laptops, and internet connections. There seemed to be a bit of nostalgia for the moment in which Minow really could “shake the lapels” of the assembled broadcasters and have his one voice carry so much weight. But is the loss of the bully pulpit such a bad thing when it is compensated for by multiple alternative avenues for the protection of the public interest, including some arguably commanded by “the public” themselves? I haven’t yet read Benkler’s newest book (The Penguin and the Leviathan: The Triumph of Cooperation over Self-Interest, though it is on my nightstand waiting) but it seems a missed opportunity that we didn’t hear more from him on the positive side of this shift away from 3 national broadcast media channels into a profileration of voices. Instead we got lots of pessimism about the Tower of Babel and broad references to the Arab Spring. I’d similarly love to have heard more from Ethan Zuckerman on global voices and the role of independent media. Maybe a few fewer celebrity respondents would have allowed the panel more time?

The most unexpected part of the evening was hearing Doris Kearns Goodwin learn that she too could edit wikipedia – I wonder if she’s made her first edit in the last week?

The video of the event is embedded below. Note that at roughly 4:33 yours truly interrupts the camera view just as Minow is being announced – coming in late. My 0.15 seconds of fame?)

Other coverage:

• Ethan Zuckerman liveblogged the event
• The ‘vast wasteland,’ reconsidered (Harvard Gazette)
• Harvard’s Berkman Center hosts star-studded forum on media and the “vast wasteland” (O’Reilly Radar)
• A Vast Wasteland, Five Decades Later (Josh Stearns on Storify)
• Harvard Law School coverage
• “A Vast Wasteland Revisited”: A Berkman Center discussion on the state of television and media (Joshua Benton, Nieman Journalism Lab)

McIntyre Medical Building (Photo by un flaneur, cc-by-nc-nd license)

DrupalCamp Montreal was this past weekend, and the videos are already posted! The event venue was McGill University’s McIntyre Science Center, which is equipped with an automated system to capture lectures at specific times.

The system captures the video output being projected as well as video of the lectern where the speaker is standing, and makes the files available on a predetermined url. (I found that the “webcast” view with slides and speaker both visible sometimes failed in Firefox but worked in Chrome – unfortunately it’s silverlight based).

Definitely Worth watching:

• Jen Simmons on HTML 5: webcast | mp4
• Angie Byron (Webchick) on Getting involved in Drupal: webcast | mp4
• Educational Roundtable: webcast | mp4

My own video is embedded below, or you can see the webcast version (includes slides in one window and me talking in another – may not work in some browsers) or download the mp4.

Thanks to the organizers and sponsors for a great camp!

Now You See it

Cathy Davidson‘s Now You See It argues that the educational system in the US is failing to prepare graduates for the work they will be doing in the 21st century. While I found myself vigorously nodding at the general argument of the book, there were also some places I wished Davidson had developed in greater detail.

The best part of the book for me is the description of the roots of our standard educational approach going back to the early 20th century: Taylorism, the IQ, and standardized testing on a large scale. These approaches made sense when education’s focus was the creation of disciplined, managerial, bureaucratic middle-managers for hierarchical, command-and-control corporations.

Unfortunately, while the workforce is adapting to new realities of globalization, the digital revolution, and commons-based peer production, the educational system has not kept pace.

She’s definitely on to something, and I agree with much of her rant in both its aims and its general tenor. She’s also generally compelling when she talks about the variety of approaches they’ve taken at Duke (distributing iPods, how to crowdsource grading) and that she’s experienced as director of the HASTAC program (and as an all-around digital humanities evangelist).

The book’s a bit weaker, for me, when she tries to describe alternative educational approaches which embody the values and approach she wants to promote: collaboration through difference, game mechanics, and creative expression over standardized testing. They end up resonating as anecdotes but don’t provide a true alternative program which could be managed at any broad scale.

I also found the sections on what the modern workforce is like rang a bit hollow. It’s easy to critique Prof. Davidson as an academic – the old “Ivory Tower” versus “real world of work” contrast – but I think it’s fair to say that Davidson doesn’t reflect deep lived experience here in describing the “average” office worker, whatever that might mean.

If you have a job just about anywhere but Google, you are most likely working in a space designed for a mode of work that is disappearing. . . . We’ve just begun to think about the best ways to restructure the industrial labor values we inherited in order to maximize our productivity in the information age.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve spent the last 12+ years working in interactive agencies, on web projects, and with open source communities, but the descriptions Davidson offers of all the signposts of the new felt immediately familiar to me, as I suspect they would to anyone working in web strategy, design, and development. Global conference calls supplemented by a digital backchannel (irc / IM, over public networks or internal intranets) and web-based collaboration environments (maybe we don’t all use Second Life, but the specific technology isn’t really the point), working toward consensus and community-driven decision making over command and control – this is how everyone I know works!

Again, I don’t think this takes away from Davidson’s primary point about the organization of the educational system in relation to the way work actually happens – I just think the new mode of work is even more widespread than she suggests. It isn’t just the denizens of the Googleplex or Big Blue who are working in a collaborative, technology-embedded, continuous partial attention world. (It’s also not just agencies, based on what I’ve observed at clients).

The second place where I wanted more from Davidson was in what industry likes to call “the solutions space.” Other than reducing class sizes, and decreasing reliance on standardized tests (which drives the behavior of teaching to the test rather than the kind of critical thinking, research, and collaboration skills Davidson emphasizes), what path should educators (or parents) take?

Davidson gestures in the direction of solutions with a few specific cases of schools and a broad discussion of game mechanics (cue Jane McGonical). Would substituting boss challenges for end of grade (standardized) testing be both radically productive in improving education and sustainable at large scale? If every university starting giving students iPods (or perhaps now iPads) and eliminated letter grades, would that magically shift the conversation back to creativity and collaboration?

I was also concerned at Davidson’s fast and loose use of “crowdsourcing” and “open source” as though they were interchangeable or nearly interchangeable references to work done by large groups. (The simple fact that she’s talking about cooperative production and there isn’t a single mention of Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks or The Penguin and the Leviathan or, for that matter, the Public Library of Science, or Open Courseware). There’s one quick nod to Creative Commons but it’s dismissive: “it’s not always a simple matter in a collaborative endeavor to agree to ‘share alike’” (232).

Instead we get broad references to “open source” via Linux and Mozilla, and crowdsourcing via Wikipedia, but with no clear definition or explanation of how free software and open source communities came to be or organize themselves. There doesn’t really seem to be any recognition of the core freedoms open source is really about. She cites the Cathedral and the Bazaar, but never really explores why or how this mode of production compares to traditional software (which is very much still present and arguably even dominant in education). There doesn’t seem, for example, to be any concern about the involvement of companies like Apple and in driving educational initiatives. What does it mean to train students on a proprietary platform when free platforms are also available? What impact might the free software and free culture movements have on institutional education (elementary on through tertiary) if we took seriously their challenges to proprietary software and big corporate media?

(Starter Recommendations: Chris Kelty’s Two Bits: On the Cultural Significance of Free Software, Gabriella Coleman‘s research on the ethics of hackers and hacking.).

Promising Whiteboard Sketch for Mozilla Education - photo by Mark Surman, cc-by-nc-sa license)

The last major gap I was surprised to see Davidson not explore further is alternative educational approaches. There’s no mention of homeschooling or diy education: increasingly used by significant segments of the population to opt-out of the institutional part of the educational system. Would she support this approach, as it is inline with adaptive learning and flexibility and anti-standardized testing, or would she bemoan the approach as it doesn’t provide enough collaboration? (Of course, home-schooled students could collaborate online with others, which might pretty closely mirror the life of the new IBM consultant – some have said IBM stands for “I’m By Myself”).

In the end, Now You See It is a compelling read if you’re interested in the failings of standardized testing, and exploring more creative, internet-era-appropriate methods of education. The challenge it raises to educators is a signal one: how are we checking our own institutional biases in favor of really exploring what students will need in the workforce, and how can we make school more like the new workplace?

As someone who’s argued that Lolcats belong on your corporate intranet, I’m sympathetic to Davidson’s desire to recuperate the reputations of internet “distractions” and recognize that it is ok that kids like video games and that students might spend part of their school day on thinking that is not immediately measured on a multiple-choice test. I just wish there was a more specific program of actions we could take to get there, as I want to play along.

LOLCats on teh Internet (Click here to expand)
Source: Online Education

Just found out I will be speaking at DrupalCamp Montreal in a few weeks, on the subject of Open Source Video, using Kaltura with Drupal.

We’re doing some work with an institute at a local university involving migration of a large video archive and design of a video microsite, so the research for the presentation will line up nicely with the ongoing effort.

Look forward to seeing Montreal – I haven’t been in years – and also hope to run a BoF for Drupal in higher education.

Already planning some restaurant visits on Vegan Montreal. (It’s very strange to my anglophone ears that “végétalien” means vegan in French, but “végétarien” means vegetarian – what trouble that must be for native Japanese speaking vegans trying to visit Montreal, given this).

I finally got around last month to reading Adam Greenfield’s Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing.

I was concerned at first when I picked it up, thinking that any book written in 2005 and published in 2006 that claims to cover ubiquitous computing would obviously be horribly out of date, and at best interesting for historical perspective, but I was wrong.

It’s a fantastic book, and as timely as ever.

It’s not a “how-to” guide (more of a “how-not-to guide” in fact) or a technical reference to the hardware and software of ubicomp, but an extended essay, delivered as a set of 81 theses, all but the last of which is followed by a brief explication.

The theses themselves are broken down into sections:

1. What is everyware? (Theses 1-8)
2. How is everyware different from what we’re used to? (Theses 9-23)
3. What’s driving the emergence of everyware? (Theses 24-33)
4. What are the issues we need to be aware of? (Theses 34-46)
5. Who gets to determine the shapre of everyware? (Theses 47-51)
6. When do we need to begin preparing for everyware? (Theses 52-69)
7. How might we safeguard our prerogatives in an everyware world? (Theses 70-81)

Greenfield’s writing is masterful: this is the kind of book I would like to have written. He’s neither technophile nor luddite: not falling into technical determinism but also not oblivious to the impact technologies can have on the societies which make them. He’s careful not to claim to have all the answers, yet still establishes by iteration a clear way of understanding the changes and challenges that make up ubiquitous / pervasive computing in all its possibilities and threats. It’s a theoretical book, to be sure, but never feels far from practice, and is clearly rooted in a strong understanding of how things actually get designed and made (and sold, and resold, and imitated, and used for unintended purposes . . . ).

The theses-based approached can come across at times as a bit too mystical for me – as though they’re trying to be modern-day Zen koans. For example, the concluding thesis (81):

These principles are necessary but not sufficient: they constitute not an end but a beginning.

The reality though is that throughout the primary text of the book the thesis have a kind of epigrammatic relationship to the chapters they announce, and are simple and clear: telegraphing meaning, not obscuring it. A few other examples:

Thesis 01: There are many ubiquitous computings.

Thesis 34: Everyware insinuates itself into transactions never before subject to technical intervention.

Thesis 48: Those developing everyware may have little idea that this is in fact what they are doing.

In the end Greenfield stakes a claim that in essence ubiquitous computing / pervasive computing necessitates a design intervention: that if we’re not careful about how we design and develop pervasive computing systems we’ll end up taking everything bad about desktop computing and making it ubiquitous, making systems that get in our way as much as (or more than) they help us. Pervasive computing will force re-evaluation and reconsideration of notions of privacy and appropriate behavior even more than the internet has, as everyware essentially drives the ongoing blending of the digital into everyday life.

(Citation Stacks for Everyware - photo by Adam Greenfield, cc-by-nc-sa license)

As I said at the beginning, it’s a masterful book, densely packed with careful but suggestive ways of understanding a process that is simultaneously just getting started and (perhaps) already too far along. I don’t consider myself a ubiquitous computing or pervasive computing person – I’m generally focused on digital strategy, content management, and open source software in the web world – but I’d highly recommend everyware to anyone involved in any kind of software development, design, digital strategy, architecture, sociology, urban studies, space planning, etc. In fact I’m hard pressed to imagine a discipline or practice that wouldn’t benefit from a close reading of this book.

Further reading:

• Adam Greenfield on Everyware (UX Podcast)
• Everyware (Fabien Girardin)
• Hiding in Plain Sight (Boxes and Arrows – where I think I first heard of Everyware)
• Speedbird (Adam Greenfield’s blog)
• The Introduction to Everyware published on A List Apart
• Designing for Everyware: An Interview with Adam Greenfield (AIGA)
• Everyware: Interview with Adam Greenfield, Part I (ReadWriteWeb)
• Why the iPad May Save the Internet Fridge (Part II of the Inverview at ReadWriteWeb)
• Greenfield’s current venture: Urbanscale, and their project PERRY
• Urban Computing and Its Discontents (PDF, by Adam Greenfield and Mark Shephard, from the Situated Technologies series)>

Even at a smaller camp there were multiple parallel tracks of presentations, and I found myself wishing talks had been recorded so I could see some of the ones which overlapped, my inability to be simultaneously two places at once hold me back yet again.

Program for DrupalCamp CT 2011 - click for larger

My favorite sessions of the day were Benjamin Melançon‘s “When there isn’t a module for that” and John Zavocki‘s keynote “From the Margins to the Center.”

Ben’s talk, which was an updated version of a talk he gave at Western Mass DrupalCamp (which I was not able to get to, but for which slides are available), covered the basics of Drupal module development using the x-ray module as an example. Nothing new for an experienced developer, but presented with clarity, color commentary promoting the community ethic, and humor, including this graph of “Community Karma Required to Escape Punishment” for specific crimes:

Community Karma Required - from Benjamin Melançon's slides (click for full size)

He was also the lead author (coordinator? driving force?) of The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7, and brought a copy to show. That is one serious tome of Drupal knowledge – over a thousand pages! (Ok, I’m including the index – but it really is massive).

One of Ben’s core themes – the ethics of contributing back to the community in multiple ways and at multiple levels – also ran through John Zavocki’s keynote. (John uses a mindmap to present rather than slides – he’s put two versions of the mindmap up on his site).

Zavocki – an engaging presenter with more than a touch of self-deprecating humor – starting by announcing this was his first keynote, and therefore was either going to go extremely well or suck entirely: turns out it was the former. A self-described fourteenth-century Venetian painter with post-modernist and feminist tendencies (or was it sympathies?), John focused on what professional ethics might mean to those in the Drupal community, the number of web developers who get to open source via non-traditional or ad-hoc career paths (what, my PhD in literature isn’t standard training for web development?), the need for project management and specialization (“find out what you’re good at and do that – hire people to manage you”), and the importance of reputation and long-term relationships.

In the end, the five-point outline he posted on his blog captures all the right themes, but misses all the crucial energy:

1. Your reputation is the most important thing that you have in our development community
2. If you are not allocating human resources for Project Management, you cannot say that you are doing have ethical business practices
3. Clients want software engineering (results) not Computer Science (theory)
4. Get the right person for the right job
5. The most important thing you can do is contribute back to the project.

After the “formal” section of the keynote was over, the audience kept feeding on his energy, asking questions and engaging with him on his sense of where the Drupal community is going. I wish I had some video of Zavocki jumping up and down on stage pointing to the mind-map projected behind him, if only to convey some essence of the experience.

It was also good to see such a strong Drupal community at Yale – yet more evidence of how Drupal is enabling higher education institutions. During the lunch break I had a chance to walk a bit around campus. The camp venue – Luce Hall – is on Hillhouse Avenue, a very storied street which Wikipedia tells me both Charles Dickens and Mark Twain declared “the most beautiful street in America.” Luce Hall itself doesn’t quite fit the description, being instead one of “Yale’s architectural embarrassments.”

(Photo by Adam Solomon, cc-by-nd license)

It’s Henry R. Luce Hall, of course, after the Yale Alumnus, founder of Time, Life, and Fortune, also, later, the staunch anti-community and author of “The American Century” – I wonder what he would have made of the impact of the internet on mass media publishing, as well as the open source movement and its core ethos of cooperation?

What would the “Lord of the Press” have made of citizen journalism, the rise of the hyperlocal, and a real-time web in which nearly anyone can become the source of news?

Here are the slides and speakerrate info for the talk I gave yesterday at WordCamp Boston.

Although the slides themselves are less entertaining without my voiceover, video from the talk will be made available – and I will link to it here as soon as I have the url.

Slides:

SpeakerRate:

Thanks so much for those of you who came, and gave feedback via Twitter. Those who didn’t – see you at next year’s WordCamp Boston?

This year’s camp promises to be even bigger than last years, with content from 30+ speakers spread out over one and half days at the Boston University student union. We’ve even got a pre-conference workshop the Friday before and a reception Saturday evening at the Microsoft NERD center.

If you haven’t already got tickets, you’ve missed regular registration, but you can still get in on late registration (which just means you’re in line after the regular registration folks for lunch and T-Shirts) for just $40.

Back in the beginning of May, I left Optaros and started working across the river in Cambridge at ISITE Design.

I spent five years at Optaros, and learned a tremendous amount from both the leadership and the staff with whom I delivered projects. I spent time in Switzerland, Germany, and London, as well as Austin and San Francisco, working in Optaros offices and on client sites. I wish them continued success in the social commerce / innovative commerce world; but it was time for me to move on.

ISITE Design is a smaller (~60 person) digital agency, which has been delivering to clients for 14 years. We’re headquartered in Portland (OR), with offices in Boston and Los Angeles. I first became aware of ISITE Design when they launched the CMS Myth back at Gilbane Boston in 2007. I’d met the “mythbusters” and other ISITE Design leadership folks over the years, and always respected their commitment to clients, to organic growth, and to putting strategy at the center of the digital conversation. (It’s also the home of El Consultador, one of my personal inspirations as a consultant).

At ISITE, I’ll be focused on digital strategy and account management, helping to grow the ISITE presence nationally and continue to build on ISITE’s core CMS practice. I hope to also help bust some myths about open source CMS’s, if we can just find a cape that fits . . .

Here’s just a bit of what’s been happening at ISITE since I joined – sign up for ISITE Insight to stay informed:

• ISITE Design were finalists in the MITX Innovation Awards, in the “Doing Good” category for Food Hub, a Portland based exchange for connecting local food producers with their customers
• We launched Day2, an optimization service “to help organizations measure and improve their digital channel with data-driven insights and actions”
• ISITE was named (again) to Portland Business Journal’s Fastest Growing 100 Private Companies list – and received a Lighthouse award for having been on the five years in a row!
• We bought a building in Portland, for the new corporate headquarters. Plans, photos and more: breaking ground

In other words, it’s a pretty busy place, full of smart people with a dedication to doing good work and helping clients succeed. Just the way I like it.