Thesis: Open Source and Design are fundamentally philosophically incompatible. Antithesis: Open Source and Design are profoundly similar in core beliefs and approaches. This talk works to articulate a meaningful synthesis between these two positions.

The talk, unfortunately, wasn’t accepted for presentation at the conference, but they suggested that instead I do a shorter, podcast or video podcast version for the Extended Content program.

I did, and that content now has gone live on the SXSW site:

In our first installment of the Extended Content series, John Eckman tells you everything you need to know about open source and design. The differences and similarities, how they benefit each other and why they have trouble getting along.

Extended Content at SXSW Interactive

(Unfortunately they don’t allow embedding, so you’ll have to go there to watch it – and at least on two browsers I tried it on, you’ll have to wait for the whole thing to preload before it starts playing – so go get a cup of coffee or whatever while it loads).

It’s just shy of 20 minutes, and having been created back in February 2009 feels (to me) a bit outdated in spots – mostly the continued evolution of the work Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt have been doing with the Drupal community (not just on Drupal.org but also on Drupal 7 itself), which I encourage you to check out if you’re interested in the subject.

Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate

It reminded me of the scene in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman’s uncle corners him and tells him “I got one word for you: plastics.” Except that now the new word would be something more like “audience” or maybe “brand.”

(Eileen Gittins of Blurb got the biggest laugh of the day with her answer – “marry well.” Ouch. I thought the days of “pre-wed” degrees were over – though to be fair she said that applied equally to male and female grads).

Anil Dash provided a bit of insight that “only the old folks are worried about this – young grads will get crappy jobs that pay poorly as young grads have always done.” True enough , but I’d argue the whole question is wrong.

It’s based on a premise that no longer holds – that you wait until after graduation to start “real life,” and that your employer (or set of employers) has a substantial and significant role in defining your career path. It assumes that your career is about what job you get, and how you manage it, rather than what kind of audiences you build and how you create opportunity based on those audiences.

It’s also based on the idea that college grads are 22-year-olds with no experience. I don’t have statistics at hand, but it seems to me that even when I was teaching college writing courses 10 years ago, college students were incredibly diverse in age and experience: I learned as much from many of my students as they (I hope) learned from me. Why assume the ‘graduate’ is looking to us, rather than ‘we’ (large media company folks with decades experience) looking to ‘them’ for guidance?

The digital natives are going to create the future of publishing, not necessarily the digital immigrants who currently run media companies.

Why, for that matter, assume that the college degree is the primary path to career at all? I’m a big proponent of formal degrees (and have a student loan bill which rivals my mortgage from gathering my own) but there’s no reason to assume that this is the only (or even primary) way to make a career in 2009.

For those who are the proverbial 22-year-old impending college grad looking to ‘get started,’ why wait for graduation?

Blog! You’ve got greater information technology producing and publishing power at your fingertips, at nominal cost, than most major media companies had just 2 decades ago. Build a consistent brand for yourself as a producer of quality content – that brand (represented in something like a blog, or a site which tracks your work over time) will be stronger than any resume or set of job titles.

Build your network of influencers – connect with people working on what you’re passionate about, and the “career” stuff will work itself out.

Check out the folks at CoPress and what they’re doing in bringing open source platforms and thinking to college publications. Get involved in an open source, open culture, open content, or other organization that is focused on creating community value first and company value second.

Currently, however, they are running a Campaign to Save Paste, soliciting donations to offset operating losses. What does the need for such campaign tell us about the future of online publishing?

Many people, myself included, got hooked on Paste via the CD-sampler which accompanies each issue and lets you hear many of the artists being discussed and reviewed.

Paste has also made interesting moves to reflect the popularity and primacy of the Internet as a mechanism for discovering music, while still retaining their editorial vision and curatorial role.

First, they moved the sampler CD online. Instead of distributing physical CDs with every copy of the magazine sent to subscribers or sold at newstands, the CD is available for download, with subscribers having accounts and print versions containing a code to access the download. Subscribers who prefer the physical CD can still request one.

Digital VIP

• 12 Free Albums (downloads) selected by Paste editors, plus often bonus albums
• Digital versions of the magazine, including access to back issues
• Early access to the sampler and magazine
• A Paste t-shirt
• The ability to give gift subscriptions (not VIP but regular) to friends for $10

It’s a great program – allowing the brand evangelists to pay more and get premium access, while also enabling them to spread the brand. (Disclosure: Paste is not a client. I’m just a very happy subscriber and brand enthusiast!).

I wish, in fact, that magazines like Mojo and Q, which I often buy in print while in the UK, would emulate this model: keep publishing in print, but let people choose to subscribe to a digital edition and get the tunes which would otherwise come on a physical CD online.

None of this, however, has enabled Paste to completely avoid the global economic meltdown current recession. They’re recently launched a “Campaign to Save Paste,” calling on readers, musicians, and other supporters to help them get through what they’ve described as “a little cash infusion to make up for running at a loss for a while.” (See Save Paste FAQs).

The campaign itself is very well executed, including a letter to readers, a Facebook Group, a twitter account, over 70 tracks (many rare and otherwise unreleased) made available by musicians and labels to anyone who donates, and even banners supporters can take and embed on their own blogs, myspace profiles, and the like:

So what does this campaign, and the model of Paste in general, tell us about publishing in the age of the assembled web?

The pessimistic view would be that it demonstrates that even a small, dedicated, niche-focused print magazine can’t survive. Music, film, and book bloggers have taken over the curatorial role and publish mp3s, trailers, and samples – often with less respect for the strictures of current copyright than a published magazine can manage. In this view, even though Paste was doing everything right they can’t survive without the voluntary donations of supporters. Philanthropic patronage is the only hope of the print publication.

A more optimistic view, though, would take seriously the version Paste themselves offer. The model is fundamentally sound, subscriptions are growing, and the future looks bright. As they write in the Letter to Paste Readers:

Long-term, Paste will emerge in good shape. Even with the fall-off at the end of the year, 2008 was our best year yet—print subscribers, print ads, online readers and online advertising were all at record levels. Readers (print and online) remain strong. And new advertisers have come on board even in the recession, with more ready when their advertising budgets come back.

In the meantime, we’ve adjusted our business to weather this storm. We’ve cut costs, and we developed a robust online business that’s among the best in the industry. Fundamentally, we’re in good shape and won’t need another appeal down the road.

I have, of course, no visibility into Paste’s finances and can’t really discern which of these views will be more accurate in their specific case. But I truly hope it’s the latter.

While Times Reader focused on creating a desktop experience that had some of the richness of the print edition, this one is focused on the kind of rapid update stream of information made popular by Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, et al.

Times Wire (Click for Full Size)

The best description I saw was Nicholas Carr, who quipped:

The news scroll updates every minute, as fresh stories flicker into consciousness and old ones flicker out. Times Wire doesn’t just give the Gray Lady a facelift; it jabs an IV into the ashen flesh of her forearm and hooks her up to a Red Bull drip bag. It’s Times Wired.

It’s interesting, certainly, to consume the NY Times the same way one consumes updates from long-lost high school buddies on Facebook, but it isn’t clear whether this experience plays to the NY Times strengths, which might be closer to in-depth substantive reporting, investigative journalism, and reasoned opinion, not the latest breaking celebrity gossip or tech scoops. As Tech Crunch put it:

Overall, it definitely seems like a step in the right direction for the organization, as real-time is a hot trend right now. And it’s useful as a live overview of the entire site. But for people only interested in certain topics, it’s probably fine to stick with RSS because the real-time river isn’t flowing fast enough to necessitate keeping the page open.

Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb was even less sanguine:

This particular product probably won’t be hugely useful for the general public, it seems more like a product that info junkies (like bloggers) and newshounds would enjoy. But it’s definitely a worthwhile experiment.

Increasingly, I think we’re seeing an openness to experimenting in public. Rather than assuming that “they” (whether you read that “they” as large scale media companies, or as referring to web application designers and developers) know what users/readers want, the developers at the NY Times are experimenting: trying out new approaches, based on hypotheses gathered from experiential data, and then seeing what happens when those experiments are released to the wild.

Check out this 7-minute video from Creativity Online with Nick Bilton and Derek Gottfrid, both part of the overall R&D / Development team at the NY Times, where they discuss how technology relates to journalism and the public experiment that is the NY Times APIs:

(Creativity Online doesn't allow embedding, so click through to view the video)

I love the concept of moving (or helping enable the evolution of) readers into users and ultimately creators, and the idea of journalists who code. Getting a better, deeper and broader understanding of digital technologies infused throughout large media organizations is clearly movement in the right direction.

I wonder, though, if it isn’t better to focus on journalists (and managing editors) with a better understanding of digital media overall, paired with smart programmers who have a broad understanding of journalism.

In other words, rather than journalists who have learned to write code, I think we need journalists who really use the Internet and have a broad understanding of what digital media make possible; they can set the hypothesis for the kind of public experimentation we need, and be paired with coders (and user experience folks) who broadly understand journalism but have a depth of focus on application design and development to implement those experiments well. Which, it seems to me, is exactly the approach the NY Times is taking.

Returns to favor among publishers, that is. Will readers accept new paywalls, or simply go elsewhere? Will micropayments finally become a cost-effective option users adopt, or just a costly distraction? What about freemium models, in which base content remains free but other rewards are used to entice what amount to donations?

Please Pay Here (Photo by Mykl Roventine, cc-by license, click through for details)

According to Editor & Publisher (reporting based on an aritcle in Financial Times, which ironically you may or may not be able to read depending on your rank in FT’s metered access system), the Wall Street Journal plans to begin testing the micropayments approach this fall:

They call it “a milestone in the news industry’s race” to find better online business models.

“A sophisticated micro-payments service” will launch this autumn, Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of the Journal, told the Financial Times.

What kind of pricing will the micro-payments support? Financial Times reported:

Pricing for individual articles and for premium subscriptions had yet to be decided, [Thomson] said, but would be “rightfully high”.

Wouldn’t that make them not micro-payments? Not exactly macro-payments, which might be a good term for the $100+ regular Wall Street Journal subscription, but just plain old payments?

Pay What You WIsh (Photo by Delwen L., cc-by-nc, click through for details)

Meanwhile, at the New York Times, Valleywag reports based on the Twitter streams of two attendees to a strategy meeting that the model will not be micropayments:

Apparently the NYT does not want to have its standard content be paid per se, because they feel that it would hurt online ad revenue too much. The paid online plan that’s being floated sounds instead like some sort of backdoor way to get revenue out of those readers who love the NYT so much that they’d be happy to donate money to it. So—and all of this is still in the planning stages, it seems—the idea would be to keep access to the current content free, then devise some sort of program offering superlatives or rewards to people who want to pay to be “members.” Keep ad revenue high and add additional revenue streams, rather than gate content and risk seeing traffic plummet.

Yes, the irony of citing a Gawker media article, which is itself based on twitter streams, in a piece about the future of the New York Times is not lost on me. I love twitter as much as everyone else (see @jeckman) but it does feel strangely postmodern to try to divine the strategy of the Old Gray Lady from a tweet like this one:

What wud premium members want? Free stuff and discounts? Access to ppl? Trying to fig that out.

That said, the transparency that Twitter provided in this case is an interesting improvement over the carefully edited, on-message press release that must eventually result from the brainstorming in that room.

My own twitter response?:

@michaelluo Want: more access to ppl. More good content. Do not want: macro-payments or micro-payments. kthxbai #nytimes #premium

(Update: See more info about the WSJ’s plans on paidcontent.org and Jeff Jarvis’ response: Bring it On, Rupert which outlines what Jarvis feels are the negative results likely to occur)

Mozilla Labs posted a screencast yesterday of a new feature as part of the Weave project, which enables OpenID at the browser level, which will have potentially significant impact on adoption and use of portable identity technology.

Weave is a Mozilla Labs project, started back in December of 2007, which (before this latest announcement) was mostly known for their Sync service, which can synchonize (and keep in sync over time) bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history, and tabs, keeping your firefox browser experience consistent across multiple computers. It’s quite useful for those of us who have a work desktop, home desktop, and laptop, or some other combination of multiple computers regularly used.

This new effort, however, integrates OpenID into the Firefox user experience:

Our sprint changes the browser to provide single-click login to sites with saved passwords as well as sites that support a federated identity (OpenID in this case). It also provides the option to automatically sign in when the page is loaded, essentially providing a single-sign-on-like experience regardless of the login method being used. In the case of OpenID, we intercept the login procedure and, taking advantage of the fact that you’re already logged into your browser, and then use Weave identity to let you into the site.

Screencast

Unfortunately, for now, you have to install the latest weave development build which also requires you to be running Firefox 3.5 beta, so it isn’t really quite ready for public consumption.

There’s also, of course, the risk that people will use this poorly – storing saved OpenID on shared machines, etc – but I think the model of allowing the browser – after you’ve logged into it – to login on your behalf – will be a really good UX improvement over time, and one I hope the other browsers will take up and implement themselves.

Times Reader focuses on improving the user experience of reading the NY Times on your laptop, netbook, or home PC.

Times Reader 2.0 (click for full size)

Using Adobe’s AIR framework enables cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) support, and makes possible offline access (the reader downloads and stores up to 7 days of papers). Intriguingly, the 2.0 version in some ways more closely mirrors the print edition of the paper than the online:

The first version of Times Reader was organized more like NYTimes.com than the printed paper. On the Web, where our readers may not visit every section, we play the same story across many sections. For example, a story about the sale of a sports team- might appear in both our Business section and our Sports section. In print, of course it will appear only once. On the Web, where our readers may not visit us every day, we sometimes leave stories that were published yesterday, or the day before, on the section front. In print, of course we only include today’s news. In TimesReader 2.0 you will now see only today’s stories, and only in the sections in which they were published in print.

(For more info on the new features and thinking behind the design see Sneak Peak of Times Reader 2.0).

As in the previous version, Times Reader provides an interactive version of the NY Times crossword (non-subscribers get an archived puzzle). Finally, this version of the reader adds a “News in Video” view to the “News in Pictures” view from the previous version, as well as a “browse” view which shows pages laid out in a matrix, and allows you to scan through the articles.

The experience of using the reader is actually quite pleasant – columns reflow automatically to fit available real estate, pictures are vivid, and the layout is clearly designed for reading on screen. What you lose, though, is the community. Look at this article view, for example:

Article View in Times Reader (click for full size)

What if, while reading this article, I decide I want to share it with my friends, my colleagues, or my broader social network? What if I wanted to write a blog post about it? Not only do I not have any of the social sharing buttons users have come to expect (digg, stumble upon, facebook, twitter, most popularly), I don’t even have a url (let alone a permalink – it is as though the content had no web representation whatsoever – planning for later articles which might be only available via Times Reader?).

Nothing in the interface points me to the same article on NYTimes.com, though a quick google search finds it as a post on the Dealbook blog, complete with email and share tools:

Article Tools on NYTimes.com Blogs

What about integration with Times People, the NY Times own social network style community? If I were a Times Reader subscriber (at the current $14.95 a month it’s a pricey user experience compared to the web), would I be able to share my activity from inside the Times Reader with non-subscribers outside?

Will the Times Reader find an audience with those who miss the experience of reading the paper in print, and have no use for the community tools? One could argue that the NY Times through its APIs, Times People, and related efforts, offers more than enough community interaction for those who need it.

Is this a deliberate and strategic decision to offer different experiences to different audiences, or just a limitation of the 2.0 release?

Which is more important to you – community interaction or a pleasing user experience? Does it make sense to have to choose?

Hope. Which Way? (Photo by bixentro, cc-by license, click through for details)

Mass High Tech, which I still read in print, featured on its front page Richard Anderson from Village Soup and Alan Baker of the Ellsworth American. (The article is online here: Two Maine newspapers test the future of newspapers’ plans). Additionally, there were a number of articles about Amazon’s new Kindle, and how e-Readers in general might represent new hope for publishers.

Approach one: hyperlocal, shared platform, business-sponsored

Village Soup sign in Belfast, ME (Photo by Timoth Valentine, cc-by-nc-sa license, click through for details)

Anderson’s model, which you can experience in a number of communities linked from VillageSoup.com, is essentially a hyperlocal model, in which a significant portion of revenue is driven by sponsored blog posts, which VillageSoup calls bizOffers:

The most distinctive component of our model are the sponsored postings . . . that businesses can buy. The posts, which run right next to the ordinary editorial content, are not controlled by us. No fetters, no filters.

In the two most mature of the four markets we serve, the sponsored blogs help generate a large portion of the online sales that collectively generate 19% of our $2.5 million in annual advertising revenues.

(You can see the bizOffers in action in the right column of the Knox County Village Soup site).

VillageSoup also received a Knight Foundation News Challenge grant in 2007 to

create an open-source version of VillageSoup’s successful community news software, combining professional journalism, blogs, citizen journalism, online advertising and “reverse publishing” from online to print.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to locate a meaningful update on their progress in that direction. There is some discussion of code access under the name “Village Soup Common”:

How does this model work?

VillageSoup handles the technical stuff. While a version of the platform code is available free, the installation, maintenance and improvement of the code is not. Software engineers and connectivity costs can be shared among all members of the Common. VillageSoup also allows provides the brand and its promotion. This promotion goes in two directions. To the public, we promote theSoup as a trusted source for hyper-local information around the globe. To the major product brands, we promote theSoup as a direct connection to the hyper-local residents as they head to their local retailer. Finally, a VillageSoup Common wiki provides a repository of experiences and ideas which empowers small operators to learn and advance in ways not achievable as stand-alone entities.

As one of the commentators on Anderson’s recent blog entry on making hyperlocal pay pointed out, however, that doesn’t seem likely to be what the Knight Foundation expected when it funded creation of an open source project. Perhaps we’ll hear more as the end of the grant period (June 2009) approaches?

Regardless, it stretches credulity to think of hyperlocal as a new strategy in 2009. Hyperlocal undoubtedly plays a role in the future of news publishing, but it is unclear whether it will produce the kind of revenue necessary to significantly impact the large publishers who are in trouble.

Approach two: rebuild the online paywall / make users pay for content

Not free (photo by ol slambert, cc-by license, click through for details)

Users are offered, on the landing page of the Ellsworth American, a choice: go to the free limited edition of the paper, a site called FenceViewer which offers summaries of stories from the paper, or subscribe:

The full Ellsworth American is available weekly as a PDF download to those willing to pay a $32 annual subscription.

While paid subscription to online newspaper editions is something the rest of the industry has struggled with – famously only the Wall Street Journal has been able to maintain a paywall over time – the paper is hopeful in the case of this small Maine community, perhaps due to its niche presence:

The Ellsworth American’s payment strategy serves an even narrower niche. From 12 percent to 15 percent of its subscription revenue is in mail subscriptions — typically snowbirds who get the paper by mail during winter months. Problems with the postal service have taken their toll.

So far, about 100 readers have subscribed online, said Chris Crockett, the paper’s IT manager, but it’s still early in the process. There have been “some comments,” about the new model, he said, but many people have been satisfied to be pointed to the paper’s trimmed-down free site.

Is 100 readers subscribing only a sign of hope, or yet another sign that users don’t want to pay for access to content online? While it may be too early to tell for Baker and Crockett, the rest of the web seems to have pretty clearly voted on this one already, and recreating an information scarcity economy seems unlikely.

Approach three: sell content on new devices

Kindle (Photo by Brian Vallelunga, cc-by-nc-nd license, click through for details)

While new devices can certainly reset user expectations – look at the influence of the iPhone on mobile web applications in the U.S. – it is difficult to imagine that such devices will create a market for paid content that replaces the drastic decline in traditional subscription revenue.

Additionally, while the gadget sites and tech press have been quite excited about the new e-reader formats, it’s hard to imagine proprietary format readers ever becoming nearly as ubiquitous as mobile phones and netbooks using existing open formats. As Alan Mutter puts it:

Instead of trying to persuade consumers to adapt to an expensive, awkward and idiosyncratic gizmo like the wide-body Kindle, newspapers would be wiser to spend their time and resources optimizing their existing offerings for the interactive formats already in popular use. Netbooks are already here, growing in popularity, and much more likely to find broad acceptance than dedicated readers.

While some users will adopt, and evangelize for, e-readers of various styles, they’ll never match the audience of the web (and the mobile web). If developing for those formats requires significant investment in proprietary formats (and associated DRM technologies to enable paywall and prevent piracy), publishers risk again missing the bulk of the audience. (See also MG Siegler’s excellent Tech Crunch post “The Big Screen Kindle Hail Mary To Newspapers Will Fall Incomplete“).

Users in the assembled web expect to be able to consume (and share, and interact with) content where they are – in social networks, on community sites, and throughout the web. Content I can’t share is inherently less valuable than content I can. In other words, what makes the e-reader story so attractive to publishers – relatively closed (non-generative) platforms which enable paid content subscriptions – is exactly what makes them unattractive to most readers. (Or, to put it another way, piracy of paid content will be what makes them attractive).

Will the short-term gain (a bump up in revenue as the initial readers roll out) be worth the long-term loss of taking focus off making the web work?

No silver bullet

Ultimately, all of these strategies (hyperlocal sponsorship, paywalls for niche web content, and new devices/new formats) can contribute to the evolution of existing publishers into new media, but none of them represents a silver bullet. Publishers need to focus on reigning in costs and eliminating unnecessary duplications of effort, while at the same time generating compelling content which will attract audiences that advertisers desire, and even potentially be worth paying for.

A few videos to spark (or reinforce) your interest. First, (via Biella) a two-part series from an event by the Meme Factory, from March 24th of this year, in which they give a ~45 minute overview of internet memes. (Warning: much of the content may be NSFW – remember the Internet is Serious Business).

Part One:

Part Two:

Second, a Berkman Luncheon Series presentation by Tim Hwang (ROFLCon founder) titled “The LOLCat-hedral and the Bizarre: A Memescape Manifesto.”

Although I wasn’t able to make this Berkman luncheon, I did see Tim give a similar talk at SXSW interactive this year, which unfortunately isn’t yet one of the ones they’ve posted audio or video from. During the question and answer period of that talk, an audience member commented on the new circulation of old memes (e.g. 25 things about me no one knows) on Facebook, and noted that some people with less context for the word “Meme” were interpreting it as “me-me” (as in, these things are all about me).

What should newspaper publishers, and other content-centered businesses, do? How should publishing evolve to accommodate the tremendous shift in publishing power represented by the fact that every internet user has a technical capability to create and distribute content never before seen? How should they adapt to the assembled web, in which users expect to interact with content in contexts they choose, rather than in contexts publishers control?

Sharing the morning paper (Photo by Marjon Kruik, cc-by license, click through for more info)

One of the most widely read recent salvos in this discussion has been Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.” In that post (not surprising a blog post, rather than a traditional article) Shirky argues forcefully that the desire to “save newspapers” in the U.S. is fundamentally misguided:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

Shirky places the current economic issues of major metropolitan dailies in historical context, as a revolution perhaps equal in upheaval to the original print revolution following Gutenberg.

Presses, Fort Wayne Indiana
(Photo by Jon B. Swerens, cc-by-nc-sa license, click through for details)

In that context, hoping to save the newspaper seems the ultimate act of futility:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Shirky doesn’t mean, of course, that nothing from the era of the newspaper is worth preserving, just that it will take profoundly different forms, many of which we can only begin at this point to imagine:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. . . . For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. . . . No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

Shirky’s piece resonated throughout the web, being favorited, shared, retweeted, re-blogged, bookmarked, stumbled upon, and dugg.

The Newspaper (Photo by Cobalt123, cc-by-nc license, click through for details)

A very thoughtful response, from someone with a serious background in mainstream journalism, came this week (also in the form of a blog entry) from Jason Pontin, the Editor in Chief and Publisher of Technology Review: How to Save Media.

Pontin refuses to accept Shirky’s diagnosis, and declares the patient very much alive. He concedes that a number of practices of traditional print media have not helped in the current crisis – artificially inflating circulation, ignoring and cultivating a certain editorial disdain for ‘reader feedback’ – but also argues that there is strong and continued demand for well written, editorially curated content, and that this will continue to be the case in the future.

Newspaper stands in Cambridge MA (Credit will_hybrid, cc-by license, click through for details)

At some level, Shirky and Pontin are firing past each other, without realizing that in many ways they agree. Pontin takes issue with Shirky’s assertion that the root cause of the current crisis is that “printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run,” noting that most publishers have leased presses for the last several decades, and that the real cost of production is in all the other, knowledge-worker-driven work involved in producing a print publication:

The printing press stands here as an objective correlative for the material production and distribution of media. Shirky and Winer’s real error is that the physical is the least of it. The comparative advantage of mainstream media is not the ownership of presses, but the collaboration of professionals. The creation of good journalism is a tremendously laborious process, requiring an infrastructure more expensive than any press. The illustration and design of stories has an infrastructure, too. Developing an audience that will attract particular advertisers requires another infrastructure. Selling advertising requires yet another. These structures, which allow publications to reach large, coherent audiences, can exist only within complex organizations, mostly businesses.

While the point Pontin makes is certainly valid – the printing press here stands in for a whole set of organizational and bureaucratic structures which make large scale coordinated efforts possible: namely, the corporation. But that’s exactly Shirky’s point, and reading Shirky’s blog post in the context of Here Comes Everybody, it seems clear that he’s not ignorant of the large scale organizations (in corporate form) which made possible traditional production. What Shirky is arguing is that the large scale traditional newspaper is no longer the only – or even the most effectively adapted – method of organization capable of serving the needs newspapers historically served.

Newspaper stand in downtown Chicago
(Photo by Chris Metcalf, cc-by license, click through for details)

Where Shirky paints the newspapers (and by implication those who hope to “save” them) with a broad brush as ostriches with their collective heads in the sand, or unthinking luddites hoping to be spared the reality that times have changed, Pontin has a tendency to dismiss Shirky (and Winer, the other target of most of Pontin’s barbs) as outsiders from (gasp) the new media world:

Among those who write about new media, a fashionable consensus has emerged . . .

And:

This is all folly and ignorance. Shirky, Winer, and other evangelists know nothing about the business of media. . . . Shirky and Winer are disgruntled consumers and, as bloggers, advocates for an insurrection. Thus, they are to be read skeptically. Their prescriptions would be more convincing if they were less polemical and better informed by some knowledge of what publishers sell.

I don’t know (or care) what “business of media” bona fides Shirky or Winer bring to the debate, but it seems an unnecessary and unnecessarily self-conscious rhetorical circling of the wagons to keep the fanatical, evangelical, and insurrectionist outsiders from upsetting the publishing world’s self-image.

The Internet is not a Newspaper
(Photo by Mark O'Brien, cc-by-nc license, click through for details)

That said, Pontin’s set of recommendations seem utterly reasonable, well-fashioned, and on target (they also seem not too far from what Shirky might suggest, if he were focused on what publishers should do rather than on what will replace them). He breaks his recommendations into three major sections: circulation (subscriptions), advertising, and editorial.

For circulation, he accepts that print circulation must be allowed to shrink to “organic” levels, which will be much lower than today. Publishers need to determine how to deliver subscriptions to new devices in addition to print, as well as learn how to provide multiple subscription offering in ways which are sensible from the users point of view, including potentially a la carte or story bundle based pricing. Finally, he argues that printing and physical distribution should be done less frequently.

Newspaper and tea
(Photo by Matt Callow, cc-by-sa license, click through for details)

In relation to advertising, Pontin concedes that advertising has traditionally been “oversold,” and that classified ad revenue will never again be significant, sounding rather like Shirky (or even Winer):

Classifieds, except in the very narrow sense of job listings in professional publications, are no longer part of the business of publishing. Get over it.

Instead Pontin suggests publishers look to Google’s keyword based advertising model and increasingly accurate audience measurement online, as well as exploring custom advertising and microsites:

Among the most promising advertising forms for media companies is custom advertising. In these arrangements, a publisher works directly with an advertiser and its agency to create a unique campaign, attached to a particular editorial event, that targets a publisher’s audience and integrates all the publisher’s platforms, often with a microsite that harvests sales, leads, or whatever else the advertiser values.

Finally, in relation to editorial issues, Pontin concedes that editorial hubris is a barrier publishers must overcome to make significant progress:

As I rose through the editorial ranks of various magazines, I was encouraged to cultivate a mild contempt for readers. We disdained the market research our publishers commissioned, telling ourselves that readers didn’t know what they wanted. But electronic media and social technologies have had a paradoxical effect: on the one hand, disappointed readers can abandon a publication with a click of a mouse or stab of a thumb, and at the same time they have strengthened readers’ proprietorial sensibilities.

Readers expect, in the two-way medium that is the Internet, to be able to respond and influence the publications with which they interact, not just consume the publications they read:

One of the things that some readers say they want is to be able to post comments about stories as well as their own stories to the Web sites of media companies. Often, such readers want to be able to communicate directly with one another, using social technologies. The readers who want to do this are not very many, but they feel strongly about the subject, and become angry if they suspect editors wish to be “gatekeepers”. Editors must welcome such readerly participation, and should open their editorial departments to the wider world.

Kudos to Pontin for making the shift to Web 2.0, and understanding that “readerly participation” is not only a necessary concession but can also be a welcome one. (I can’t help but note though that the tone has not entirely changed: some readers say they want to be able to post comments? “Readerly participation” as a phrase is itself a bit dismissive, like “amateur photography” or “hobbyist programmer.”).

In essence, Pontin’s recommendations are entirely reasonable: focus on delivering valuable content to interested audiences through media they choose, adding the interactive capabilities (both in terms of community interaction and richer multimedia) and targeted advertising that those new media make possible. This will result in smaller editorial teams, smaller and less frequent print publications (likely also fewer of them, though Pontin doesn’t make this point explicit), and an increased reliance on advertising-supported, free, digital content.

Future City, Illinois
(Photo by ILMO JOE, cc-by-nc-sa license, click through for details)

If anything, the challenge to Pontin’s proposals may be that this is too little, too late. Newspapers as an industry have had over a decade to effectively respond to the opportunity that new media represents, and have broadly failed. While undoubtedly there is a future for content centric businesses online (and even for newspapers, in whatever form they might take), it does seem at this point that many existing business will disappear in the process. Thus Shirky may have the last word:

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

In the end, whether the “structures optimized for digital data” are the same “publishing companies” reorganized, made more efficient, with an infusion of digital thinking, remains to be seen.

Making Ice Cream
(Photo by Rachel J)

This weekend, freshly jet-lagged by back-to-back trips to the UK and Switzerland, with a brief stop in between for BarCampBoston 4, I attended the Northeast User Group Leader Summit, sponsored (thanks!) by O’Reilly Media and Microsoft. (Although I don’t technically lead a user group, I play host to BostonPHP at Optaros, volunteer for BarCampBoston, and participate in Boston’s Drupal and WordPress groups, as well as North Shore Web Geeks up in Newburyport.

The event, hosted in the new Microsoft NERD facility, brought together user group leaders from across the technology spectrum, and from New York to Maine. (See a shortlist of user groups represented in the wiki).

Sessions Board (Photo by Rachel J)

It was simultaneously frustrating and reassuring to see that the core issues are so similar across user groups:

• Attracting and retaining members, speakers, volunteers
• Dealing with financing, venues, sponsors
• Keeping members and organizers motivated, active
• Making meetings useful, interesting to a broad audience
• Balancing newbies with ‘experts’

Reassuring because it shows that these problems are well understood – frustrating because no simple easy solutions will make them go away.

Ingredients we used for instant ice cream (my photo)

A few of the interesting sessions I attended, with links to notes which are all accessible from the event’s wiki:

• Care and Feeding of a Large Group / Large Event Financing – a combined session, for which I was the scribe, led by Shimon Rura from BarCampBoston and Darius Kazemi of Boston Post-Mortem
• Managing Event Overload – a more casual session, which the two of us attending turned by popular vote mostly into a discussion about NewB Camp, taking advantage of the time with Sara Streeter, who organized this session and also NewBCamp.
• Moving past the presentation – a very interesting session about the other ways one can manage a user group meeting, beyond just the traditional “talking head” format most folks are familiar with.

In addition to the formal sessions, Jeff Potter delighted all to a reprise of his food hacking demo from FooEast and BarCampBoston 4, making instant ice-cream using liquid nitrogen. This time, I participated, with a group of fellow vegans (and one ‘fellow traveller’).

Making Ice Cream with Liquid Nitrogen (Photo by Rachel J)

(Note for future food hackers: soy milk, at least the Light Vanilla variety we used, required a bit more liquid nitrogen and a bit longer to ’set up’ – lower volume of liquid in the mixing bowl, longer time to mix in. At first it all just foamed up and spilled over the bowl, but thanks to a patient chef we were able to enjoy banana-coconut-rum soy ice ice cream custom made in a microbatch).

Ultimately, of course, what really makes any community successful is the people. While the problems of open source and commercial software user groups can vary a bit (I heard several Microsoft technology user group folks talk of having too many sponsors and too much schwag from companies to give away – a problem I’ve not seen in any open source based user group) they share an essential component, which is competition for people’s attention. The key to breaking through the noise and consistently getting their attention? Good, relevant content, consistency (of venue, time, and quality), and true community.

Photo by Uncle Bartelby

Adina Levin wrote earlier this month (Twitter, Facebook, and the unselfish API about the differences between Twitter and Facebook not in terms of how they treat their users but in terms of how they treat external developers.

In short:

Twitter’s API is unselfish. Using the straightforward REST API, developers can and do write clients, search tools, mapping tools, recommendation tools, analytics, personal organizing – a wide range of extensions. Twitter doesn’t do anything to constrain developers other than a rate limit.

Whereas:

Facebook’s API is build to serve Facebook more than developers.

She goes on to discuss the shift towards Facebook Connect, away from the emphasis on the application platform, but notes that even then:

The problem is that when sites use Facebook Connect, they have minimal connection to their user base. An an application or community site wants to create the policies whereby the site communicates to the community, and the community talks to each other. With Facebook Connect, those rules belong to FaceBook. . . . With FB Connect, all your member database are belong to them.

One could argue, of course, that it isn’t a fair comparison. Twitter’s platform is more narrow than Facebook’s, with a much simpler privacy model (protected or not, versus groups, networks, friends, and per-application settings), and much less potential for exposure (photos, videos, and detailed personal info being in Facebook’s direct control versus external services like TwitPic). Facebook would argue, I imagine, that they’re trying to create a high standard for privacy for their users, rather than allow every third party app to set it’s own rules, and that this requires them to maintain more control.

Still, I can’t help but feel that the “Open API” approach – impose as few controls as necessary – is ultimately more web-native and will succeed, while the “Controlled API” approach – only release the functionality absolutely necessary and control use with strict Terms of Service (ever read the FB Connect terms?) – calls to mind the old days of walled gardens like Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL, before they joined the real web.

Although I think it’s important to draw a distinction between simple, relatively cheap licensing (the Expression Engine model) and Free and Open Source software, I generally agree that

Now, we have really powerful comparatively easy to understand, open source content management systems

And that this shift- from needing a large scale custom development project or an expensive proprietary CMS to now being able to leverage open source platforms – represents a key point in the maturity of web development.

Community minus people = empty (Photo by marilynpratt)

It suggests than an “online community” is something you build like you build: a web site, or a portal. It suggests that the community is the site itself. (It’s a strange kind of synecdoche, in which the web platform where some community interaction takes place is taken to be the actual community itself).

But a community is not a site – it is a group of people who interact with each other. And an online community isn’t a web site, it is a set of people who interact with each other online.

In his report from the Online Community Unconference East 2009 (which I was unfortunately unable to attend but have heard good things about) Bill Johnston list as one his three key takeaways the importance of thinking about your online community in the context of a broader eco-system:

One point that I have evangelized for many years is the fact that online communities generally don’t live in a single location. Most successful community strategies engage the entire ecosystem of touchpoints that members (or potential members) find valuable. This ecosystem can be made up of destination community sites, but relationships are also forming on blogs, social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn), mass social media (YouTube, Flickr), and even offline at meetups or user group meetings. Conversations at the OCUE this year generally spilled beyond the boundaries of a hosted community destination, and most folks were thinking about how to prioritize various opportunities for engagement in their community ecosystem.

Absolutely! The community is the people, not the site.

Just as a company needs to learn to think of its digital footprint across the assembled web – all the interactions consumers, partners, and employees have with the company’s products, brand, and content – online community managers need to think about all the ways in which the members of their community interact with each other across the Internet, not just the interactions they have on the official community site.

Bruce Perens (co-founder of the Open Source Initiative) and Shane Coughlan (from FSF Europe):

Perens essentially calls the exclusion or downplaying of Richard Stallman a critical mistake made at the point of split between the “Open Source” and “Free Software” camps. They go on to discuss what the current challenges are in terms of helping people understand the core concepts of freedom underlying both approaches.

At risk of inciting a comments flame war, are “open source” and “free software” just two different names for the same thing, as Perens argues (even if you believe one name to be better than the other)?

Photo by suburbanslice

It’s a perfect example of what I’m seeing as a growing trend, in which various “social widgets” actually replace functionality which should be built into the platform hosting the site. Bundling together the ability to use your Facebook identity with the actual management of comments themselves looks like progress but I think it’s really a step backwards.

Announced on the Facebook developer blog, the Comments Box widget is embedded into your site through javascript, and basically enables Facebook-driven commenting.

Facebook users can leave comments using their Facebook identities, and when they do will also have the option to publish those comments back to their Facebook profiles. (This is already possible using the Facebook Connect APIs, but the comment box certainly simplifies the process).

Facebook Comments Box

What happens in the process, though, is that all your comments on your blog are no longer really on your blog. Those comments are actually submitted to Facebook, who stores them for you and shows them on demand when your pages containing the comment box load.

In WordPress terms, this means you’re not able to use Akismet, or Mollom, or OpenID, or ReCaptcha, or any of the other plugins you might be using on your site to manage comments. (You also won’t be able to use the WordPress iPhone app to moderate comments, since they aren’t submitted as comments to WordPress).

It also means that someday, when you decide to migrate away from the Facebook Comments Box, there’s no simple way to get all the comments out (and it isn’t clear whether the terms of service would allow you to do so even if it were simple).

The announcement is careful to note that:

The Comments Box allows non-Facebook users to make comments on your site as well.

But that feels a bit like “we’ll still allow you to use cash, even after we install the credit card machine” – it’s giving me back something I already had as though it were a bonus. It’s as though we’re at the point where “non-Facebook users” are, like “those with JavaScript disabled,” a community we magnanimously allow to continue to use the web but don’t really design for.

Like Yahoo Updates with JS-Kit, TypePad Connect, DISQUS, and IntenseDebate (though the last of these offers a comment import/export feature), this is yet another “all ur comments are belong to us” move, in which I think the hosting site loses more than it gains.

Or am I just a crusty old first-generation blogger thinking that I need to store away comments in a database I control, and I should really be more open to having my comments streams “in the cloud”?

See also:

• Facebook Launches Commenting Widget
• Facebook Connect Adds Cut-and-Paste Comments Widget
• Facebook Comment Widget: Quick Review
• Facebook invades your blog, rest of Web with new Comment Box

What this should tell you? That large companies at the forefront of enterprise social computing — like Intel, Dell, and others — routinely turn to multiple suppliers for different types of internal and external communities. This may have something to do with inter-departmental politics and silos, but I think it actually makes sense: different vendors in this marketplace target different scenarios and will therefore be better suited to different business objectives

While I certainly agree that different vendors target different scenarios, I’m not sure I’d so easily accept the notion that multiple internal and external platforms make sense. He continues:

For example, Telligent sees some internal implementations, but is known mostly for its external-facing community implementations, while Jive’s Clearspace can and does get implemented externally, but is mostly known for its behind-the-firewall implementations. You the buyer should not assume that one size fits all.

Of course there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to community building. But does that necessarily mean the answer is to license multiple competing proprietary platforms for a single enterprise?

How well integrated are an internal implementation of Java-based Clearspace and an external implementation of .NET-based Telligent ever going to be, given that both are proprietary?

• What happens when Intel’s business needs suggest sharing content from the internal Clearspace community with users in the external Telligent community? How difficult is it to migrate content from one to the other?
• What happens when the internal community realizes it might benefit from external input, or the external community starts to involve internal users?
• Do users who have a presence in both maintain separate usernames and passwords? How easily can both be pointed at a shared user repository?
• How efficient is it from an IT management point of view to have ongoing enterprise license agreements with two vendors? Do users joining both communities essentially increase the license fees for both vendors?

Of course, imposing one monolithic solution may not be possible either. I regularly deal with clients who have not just two core content management systems but as many as five or six: due to the “inter-departmental politics and silos” Tony mentioned above, or due to corporate acquisitions which bring their own legacy systems, or due to serial leadership changes and different IT strategies over time.

How do you enable the right balance of “fit-to-purpose” (which might identify different platforms for different social scenarios) against “fit-to-enterprise” (which would explore the impact of platform proliferation and silos)? What happens when the community you expected to be purely internal suddenly realizes that it would benefit from external input?

Leveraging mature open source platforms- and customizing them to fit the specific scenarios of the community being served- will better preserve long term business agility and ensure that those silos don’t become islands, but can share data and functionality with each other.

See also: CMIS, ECM Interoperability, and Services-Oriented Content Management

What’s Last.fm?

Basically you install some client software which tracks (the verb they use is ’scrobbles’) get played in your audio player of choice and uploads that data to a Last.fm server.

Why would you do that?

For one, it’s interesting to see what you actually listen to, not just what you think you listen to:

My Last.fm profile with Recently Listened Tracks

(You can see I’ve been catching up on my NPR Live Concert Podcasts this weekend while writing some blog posts).

In addition to your own constantly updated, live list of what you’re listening to, you can also track friends and what Last.fm calls “neighbours” (UK spelling showing you where last.fm hails from) – people who you may or may not know but who have musical tastes similar to yours.

Two of my last.fm neighbours, and our shared artists

You can also listen to streaming music from last.fm – a radio station created based on your own library (tracks you’ve scrobbled) or your neighborhood. There’s even a streaming iPhone application.

Why do we need Libre.fm?

In exchange for all this functionality, however, I’m essentially giving last.fm (and parent company CBS, and all the third parties specified in their terms of service) access to a substantial bit of data about my habits.

Who owns that data, both legally and in practical terms? What happens if I want to take all that data – my complete listening history of the last two years – and migrate to another service? What if the terms of service at last.fm change, and they decide to impose a fee on all users just to maintain profiles? Would my choice essentially be to take it or leave it? What if last.fm imploded – see ma.gnolia – and lost all that data?

(Technically I propogate the last.fm ‘recently played tracks’ stream as part of an aggregated lifestream at johneckman.com, so I keep my own copy of the data as well – but most last.fm users do not).

Users looking to run their own “track what I play, let me display it to friends and see theirs” service now have an alternative: Libre.fm, current in alpha release:

Libre.fm

You could say Libre.fm is to Last.fm as Identi.ca is to Twitter.

Like the code behind Identi.ca, the code running Libre.fm is licensed using the AGPL, and the content is explicitly licensed (Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike) for sharing. In addition to getting the code which runs the service, users can also retrieve data dumps of their own tracks and those of their friends.

Also like Identi.ca, the folks at Libre.fm are leveraging existing clients and APIs. identi.ca replicated Twitter’s API, enabling clients which had been built for Twitter to be easily adapted to point to Identi.ca instead, and even created a “bridge” function enabling users to autofeed microblog status updates to Twitter from Identi.ca. The Libre.fm wiki points to several clients which can “multiscrobble” (point to more than one scrobbling server) as well as clients which can be made to scrobble to turtle.libre.fm by use of a hosts file redirecting the last.fm scrobbler server address.

The intial site is in alpha – you can request an invitation to become a user or you can explore popular artists in the current users’ playlists. (I’m jeckman there as on last.fm)

See also: Libre.fm – Building an Open Last.fm

MediaCloud

In essence, Media Cloud monitors a set of sources, and then semantically processes the news items from those stories, creating a rich structured dataset which enables various queries and visualizations.

Media Cloud Summary (Image from MediaCloud.org)

The project also relies on a partnership with Calais to provide the term extraction and entity identification capability.

Currently, the visualizations are rather limited. You can create a comparative graphic across any three media sources in the system, of one the following types:

• Top 10 most mentioned terms
• Top 10 Term Pivot
• World Map

Unfortunately there’s no easy way to identify what sources are in the database, other than starting to type and seeing if the autocomplete finds what you’re hoping to use. There’s also no way to tell what “terms” are considered significant, though the error message notes:

The available terms that you can currently serach for are focused on prominent people, places, and events. This will broaden considerably in the future.

It’s the long term plans, not the current visualizations, that make Media Cloud worth watching. Ultimately the Media Cloud project describes itself becoming:

A platform for open, collaborative research by scholars around the world . . . [which] does the heavy lifting in the “cloud” and provides the results as a web service

It isn’t clear at this point what specifically is meant by “in the ‘cloud’” – except in the limited sense that all remote web services could be said to be in the cloud. (See my colleague Andrew Webb’s The Open Cloud for a good overview of the various things “cloud” might mean in today’s environment). Similarly, I believe the only current access to the “web service” is via the front end site at mediacloud.org – no programmatic APIs are exposed yet.

Assuming, however, that the project can reach its goal of an infinitely scalable, cloud-hosted web service which would semantically index a great portion of the relevant media stream, and could be accessed by researchers at low or no cost – that would be a very powerful tool for understanding how media operates online.

Media Cloud is also a free and open source software project, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License and built in Perl using the Catalyst web framework and a PostgreSQL database. (Get code here).

Related:
Calais for Drupal

The focus was quite technical – not sure if the “suits” in the room (there aren’t normally many at a BostonPHP meeting, but there were a few this time) really expected such a deep dive – and made you appreciate the herculean effort it takes to mount a sustained campaign like that one.

You can listen to the podcast version of the presentation, see some photos and check out Elena’s notes – she managed to capture the great majority of the details they shared.

Now, 15 months later, there is a network for Optaros – but I can’t join it. (I also have no idea what finally triggered creation of the network – enough people requesting it? Enough people listing Optaros as their employer? I only discovered its existence because it showed up in a search result).

To join a network, one visits the account settings page, network tab, and uses the handy “add network” form, which you can see below:

Facebook add network form, as seen in the case of a work network

I fill in my work email address and submit, and the list of networks I belong to updates to this:

Facebook network awaiting confirmation - click for full size

Yeah! That looks like progress. Get the email, click on the confirmation link, and the network status page says this:

You might think you're done at this point - click for full size

You might think, at this point, that you’re done. Wrong. Go anywhere else in Facebook and then come back to this “networks” list, and guess what you see?

Facebook network awaiting confirmation - click for full size

I tried three times before I gave up.

One could go ask this question in the Facebook help section, but there’s an awful lot of questions and no real answers there.

So now I have a work network, but so far only 1 out of the ~175 eligible Optaros employees has been able to join it.

Wasn’t Groundhog Day in February?

Brands often use this approach to track mentions of their products and companies, developers can use it to track mentions of their favorite languages, frameworks, and open source projects, and anyone can use it to track mentions of their hometown, their own twitter username (to make sure you don’t miss any @replies).

TweetScan is one of several services offering email alerts based on keywords

Personally, I’ve been using TweetScan to track these terms I’m interested in:

1. Optaros
2. open source
3. Newburyport
4. vegan
5. jeckman

To avoid the “stalker effect” I don’t immediately reach out and @reply to anyone who mentions any of these terms, though I do often follow them to see if it is a common part of their conversation, which would suggest I might be interested in their stream.

Unfortunately, as the folks behind Tweetscan recently announced, they’re going to start charging for this service:

Tweet Scan is due for some improvements and the volume of queries and emails we’re handling isn’t sustainable on a hobby budget. So we’re going to start requiring a small annual payment to keep an account with us.

Please use the subscribe link below and let’s take this site to the next level! It’s $15 per year if you sign up by April 22nd. After that it’ll be $20 per year.

I can certainly understand the need to monetize an application that becomes popular and starts to generate a high volume of usage, but I’m not yet ready to pay for an account for personal use, so I found a few alternatives. (Note Tweetscan can also enable you to download you tweets since December 2007, and can be used as a live Twitter search engine).

TweetBeep

TweetBeep also sends email alerts based on the mention of specific keywords in Twitter, and can track specific URLs, whether they have been url shortened or not. TweetBeep lets you set frequency of alerts as well.

(It seems, though I haven’t verified this yet in practice, that the alerts based on domains – so an alert set for any reference to optaros.com or openparenthesis.org, for example – can’t be scheduled into hourly/daily as keyword alerts can, but are set to “live” – which may mean immediate? This might be an issue if you have a domain frequently referenced in Twitter streams.)

TweetLater

TweetLater, which is most well known for its “schedule a tweet for posting at a later time” feature, also provides a feature they describe as “Track keywords on Twitter” as part of their free account. They also provide other features:

• Auto DM to new followers (which I find frankly annoying)
• Automated following of folks who follow you (which I don’t do, but is not annoying)
• Automated unfollowing of those who unfollow you (hmm, that might be interesting)
• Vet new followers (this one I haven’t tried yet – not quite clear to me what it is except perhaps an easier way to act on new followers – follow, ignore, or block – rather than the one at a time approach twitter offers)

TweetLater also offers a professional / premium account for $29.97 a month which adds other features and is worth checking out for serious users.

What tools are you using to monitor the twittersphere?

I’ve just checked the code for version 1.3 of the WPBook plugin into subversion, which means it should shortly be available for auto-update in your dashboard/plugins page, or for download here. (Remember that your dashboard/plugins page only checks once each 24 hours for new plugins, so you may not see it until tomorrow).

Changes in this release:

1. Improved Admin UI – options sorted into categories, with help text
2. More options: ability to include date with post title, option for custom header/footer including custom date/time formats, tags, categories, and author names
3. Style cleanup on the “view post on original blog” link (now matches the share this post link)
4. Bug Fix: No more duplicate blog name on the top of the “Invite Friends” page
5. Bug Fix: When profile boxes are updated as a result of a new blog post, the permalinks were pointing to the blog outside Facebook, rather than the Facebook urls

I also cleaned up the installation instructions (included in the plugin as an html page and PDF document) to reflect the new options screen and some facebook side changes.

NOTE: This will be the last version of WPBook that will support PHP4.

The Facebook client is only officially available in PHP5, and I need to add some exception handling for cases where the Facebook client fails to update the users profile FBML. (Right now that case, when it occurs, throws a very dramatic if harmless “Uncaught Exception” error in the WordPress interface).

If someone wants to create an alternative version of WPBook for PHP4, they can do so using this release as the place from which to branch, but when WPBook 1.4 comes out, I will no longer include PHP4 support.

Apologies to those of you who rely on PHP4, but it’s time to find a host that can enable PHP5.

Special thanks in this release to Brandon Dukes, who wrote most of the updated code in it. Sorry it took me a week to get it tested, packaged, and released.

Here’s a screenshot showing some of the new customization options:

Options available within WPBook for customizing the user's experience

Here’s the “advanced” options screen:

Advanced Options screen - click for full size

Next version, 1.4, I hope will include the ability to post notices into the Facebook status feed and/or news feed when you publish a blog post and (potentially) when comments are published. Not sure what the timeline on that will be, however.

Now BarCamp Boston 4 is coming up this April 25th and 26th at the Stata Center at MIT. Although ultimately the topics discussed are determined by who shows up, odds are that free and open source software, social media, voting, government transparency, robotics, hardware and software hacking, startups, and all kinds of topics related to openness, the web, and business will be common.

BarCamp Boston 4

I definitely plan to be there and I’d encourage you to register and attend, whether you’re a veteran or a n00b to the unconference world. It’s a fantastic opportunity to have a real conversation, in the absence of hugely expensive registration fees or overbearing sponsors.

I landed on the Firefox Google homepage, as I always do in a new browser window – http://www.google.com/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official is the address, I believe it is the default shipped with firefox.

But look at what I see in the upper right hand corner where my email address should be (click on the image for full sized one):

Google Homepage Issue

Very strange. I tried, just for investigation, clicking into “my account” or some of the other google services – I don’t seem to be actually logged in as someone else. Anything which would require login actually asks me to login and doesn’t prefill the box with stephenandmandy or anything. But it is really odd to see someone else’s email in that upper right corner.

Anyone else seeing this?

(For the non *nix folks in the audience, whoami is a shell command on most unix/linux systems that tells you what user account you are currently logged in as – or, as the man page so concisely puts it:

whoami — display effective user id

Try it on your local *nix box today.)

As described in this earlier post, I’ve modified Twitter Tools to use Identi.ca endpoints rather than Twitter ones, since I have my Identi.ca account set to auto-cross-post to Twitter.

Here’s a revised version of what I’m calling Identi.ca tools – just replace the twitter-tools.php from the 1.6 release with this one (rename it from twitter-tools.php.txt to twitter-tools.php of course) and you should be good to go:

twitter-tools.php.txt

Just checked in changes for WPBook version 1.2 – get it from the WordPress Plugin Directory or on this blog.

The biggest change here from 1.1.1 (and why I decided to make it 1.2 rather than 1.1.2) is a change to the mechanism used to create the user profile boxes. Although it worked for some users, the previous method (relying on an fb:ref url pointing to the recent_posts.php page inside the WPBook theme) was at best inconsistent, and could even cause uncaught exceptions.

The new mechanism, which sets the profile FBML in a function and uses an fb:ref handle to refresh it, seems to be more generically robust and should improve things, especially for anyone who had the “No content to display” error when trying to add the profile box to the profile.

Also in this release are some administration page improvements (thanks Brandon) and timestamp on posts.

As always, comment below if you have issues, and if you get your blog setup using the plug please leave a comment on this page.

I’m getting tired of Dopplr’s consistent FAIL on a common (for me) use case- a one day trip to NY on Delta.

Whenever I forward such a confirmation here’s what Dopplr does:

Thanks for sending us a message by email.

We automatically created a trip to Atlanta, GA, United States (from Newburyport, MA, United States) between February 10th and February 13th

We won’t share coincidences from this newly-created trip with your fellow travellers until February 18th. This is to give you a chance to check and correct any problems in interpretation.

If you’d like to check, go to [link removed]

Yours sincerely,
The Dopplr Team.

The problem is, I’m not going to or from Atlanta – that’s where Delta airlines headquarters is, sure, but it’s a long detour on the Boston->New York route.

I’m also not travelling Feb 10 to Feb 13, I’m leaving and returning on the 13th, and the trip was booked on the 10th.

I can (and do) go in and manually fix the trip in Dopplr, but in this type of case TripIt’s import feature just works.

Miro 2.0 is Here, and it's really really awesome

They’re right, Miro is awesome, and it’s an open source project which you can help contribute to, whether you’re a coder or not.

Also in the email:

How can you help the most?

• Send this message to your friends! Since we can’t afford to buy our way into their hearts, we need you to tell them about Miro and why open media is important.
• Translate! Only about 40% of Miro users are in English speaking countries. We need your help to translate Miro, our website, and the Miro Guide. Details are on our Volunteer Page.
• Test and code! Got chops? Join in.
• Help new users– you can answer questions and join the community conversation here: Miro discussion forums.

And don’t forget to download Miro 2.0!

Photo by Andrea Mercado

Thanks to Karen Huffman (@slakm) who raised some issues she was having with an installation of ReTweeter, I’ve tracked down the bug and uploaded and released 0.9.1.

Turns out that in late December of 2008, the Twitter API servers started sending a 417 Status Code response to many clients, including ReTweeter. (See Alex Payne’s announcement on the Twitter API Google Group and this message from Tom Morris which identified the necessary fix for CURL based clients).

In addition to squashing that bug, this update also better handles error responses from the Twitter API in general, which is to say it actually identifies to the user what status code was returned to enable better troubleshooting.

Remember to copy your settings from your old version before overwriting with the new.