Hear what I mean:
Crapface 09 – That was like ESPN!

I’ll admit I have a lot of fun recording and keeping up with the DrupalEasy Podcast, but our goals are SO different from that of a laid-back, wine-induced, pop culture free-play verbal romp.

I’m now trying to get a group of people excited about producing local independent media so we can publish it on Orlando Scene TV, but the goals and the tone there will be equally different from DrupalEasy or Crapface. I miss sitting on the couch and broadcasting to 3 people. Let’s bring it back.

In response to my eBook reader review, I got some discussion. One comment in particular drew me to want to write a longer post.
Adam McKercher (I went to school with him) wrote a comment:

I don’t know how you [...] keep up with all the “If Only” aspects of computer culture, the vastness and need for improvement, and constant revision is what ultimately lead me to change majors.

I have to say, being in a business like this requires you to be able to look through a telescope, binoculars, bifocals and a magnifying glass, sometimes in the same sentence. Keeping yourself sane while doing so is… an exercise in the power of the human brain. I’m actually hoping to do less “microscope” level work in the future. I really like following trends and making recommendations based on my knowledge of some sort of understanding of the eco-system.

At the same time, when I talk about following trends, it’s difficult to draw a hard line between watching trends and keeping up with the Joneses. If you pay too much attention to what everyone else is doing, it will end up influencing your medium-term decisions, and most critically, your day-to-day work.

A former manager of mine had this illness: the “me-too” illness. My coworkers and I started calling it “chasing the bunny”, like a greyhound on the racetrack. We would be hard at work on something that we were told to do the previous week, and then we would get these mixed messages from our manager. Once we learned to ignore it, things were OK, we were able to focus on work. However, now we were used to ignoring our manager. This tells me that chasing the bunny is not a good management style. The environment we had was not agile enough to be able to make these changes in direction very easily.

I guess a really easy way to avoid this is to have a great mission statement for your business or product, and create a very clear vision – the place you want to reach in 3, 5 or even 25 years. If you know where you’re headed, you won’t be prone to rubbernecking at your competition while you should be keeping your eyes on the road.

This idea is not completely mine (at least not lately). I’ve been reading a killer book on a recommendation from Mike. The subtitle of this book is “How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant”. Basically, their advice tells you to look at the competition, and “zag” where they “zig”. Instead of directly competing, try removing from your product three things that they claim are important, and add a few things that they’re not even thinking about.

In the case of 37 Signals’ Basecamp, they may have just taken out those three things and stopped. I’d love to see the 4-square Strategy Canvas for any 37 Signals product. Maybe I’ll have to blog about this one later.

The book itself was written in 2004, so their case studies are a bit dated – similar to how reading The Long Tail (which was written pre-YouTube), kind of feels like it’s missing the boat on the biggest long-tail product of the decade.

At the same time, if you’re any good at abstraction, you can take the case studies in these books, extrapolate a bit, and come up with a decent picture of what the author(s) might have said, had they gotten an extra 6 or 7 years to write the book. Maybe that’s the best argument ever to create “living” books, like the Complete Guide to Google Wave. When you’re writing about something that changes almost daily, how do you reach the point when you can say, “this is the most complete picture of this concept”. I read earlier this week about a fancy kind of publication called a Monograph. What a very old-world concept. Very pretentious. Very wrong.

How much do you follow trends, and consciously let those trends effect your work? Would you rather just stop reading raw, real-time messages, and only consume “dead tree” media, allowing time for the message to slowly drip into your train of thought? Do you have a system for absorbing this stuff at all?

I’m learning to develop for iPhone, so I found two books from Pragmatic Programmers, Cocoa Programming Quick Start and iPhone SDK Development.

Following this, you’ll get a screenshot of each reader, and a bit about why I would / wouldn’t use it.

Here’s Preview:

Preview

After having gone through the other apps in this list, Preview is actually not too bad for reading technical books, but not my first choice.

I had heard Andy Ihnatko talking about Stanza. I think he likes it to synch books between his iPhone and his laptop. I’m pretty sure you can also buy books wirelessly from your iPhone inside this app.

stanza

The problem here is that this app is designed for reading story books – tons and tons of text, no fancy formatting. In fact, this app strips out all of the formatting and fonts, to the point that it makes no sense for tech manuals.

I saw Tofu on another site reviewing Mac eBook readers.

Tofu

In the description, there was a line “Tofu is different”. In fact, Tofu works almost exactly like Stanza (at least for my purposes). While Tofu did keep more of the fonts and formatting, Tofu still wants to break the layout that the original publishers created, which makes this the wrong choice for programming books.

Then I discovered my saving grace: Skim – and it’s open source!

Skim

It may be because it is created by programmers scratching their own itches, or maybe because it is not geared specifically for mobile devices or story books, but something just felt right about Skim. I really like the ability to highlight text and leave notes. Everything you highlight now becomes a bookmark you can jump back to for future reference. This seems like an app I’ll keep open while I’m coding to go back and refer to examples and explanations. More or less, exactly what I was looking for.

It also has pretty good search functions – when it finds a word you’re looking for, it circles it in red. You also have tools to manually circle text, draw a box, underline or strike through text, or draw arrows to help you annotate graphics.

There is a full screen mode and a presentation mode, as well as a neat feature called the reading bar – basically, a line-by-line bookmark to let you remember where you left off.

I’ve said the most about Skim because that’s my pick. It’s free, Mac-only, and open source.

A final note: I also tried an application called eReader Pro. This seemed to be tied to an online bookstore, and had zero support for PDF. Any tech book I’ve seen comes as a PDF, so steer clear of this one if you’re a programmer.

While I was at the museum I also purchased a Diana F+ Camera by Lomography and proceeded to incorrectly load the film – I’m pretty sure my first sixteen photos on Lomo will be ruined, but we’ll see.

I am finally getting to hang out at Proctors after having built them a new site last spring. It’s cool to actually see this space “IRL”.

Now I should get back to work fixing their Drupal TV displays. I only have a few minutes before I go meet everyone from the theatre.

Click here to register and get more info about DrupalCamp

Drupal has a very active community that will gather at DrupalCamp Florida on February 20 and 21st, where new and seasoned users learn about and share their knowledge of Drupal. The event is an opportunity to get an overview of Drupal and the developer and user community in Florida.

We will be having an event after all the learning to get some grub, drinks, relax, and get to know each other better.

If you’re interested in this event, please comment below and let me know!

Download a 10 minute podcast about the 2010 Florida DrupalCamp and our Coding for a Cause non-profit benefit

I was overjoyed that this crappy video I shot was getting used in something so professional and awesome.

Then I realised that we can bring that feeling to dozens and dozens of people every time we release a half-hour show, and a whole bunch of pieces clicked together in my head.

In order to really have the community feel like they own this thing, we have to make a pointed effort to include their contributions in every single episode, and make a call for entries loud and clear.

This isn’t about UGC. This is about something more real than that. Each community member has an equal chance of creating something that makes the final product better.

Then, they will want to call their mom and their friends and tell them “turn on channel 1, watch my video on this show!”

If I can call my mom, then we have succeeded.

When there are moms calling other moms, we have reached the tipping point.

If all those moms and their kids give us a few bucks, we can quit our jobs and make this full-time. We can rent a coworking space, train new filmmakers, buy them equipment, build a network and live the dream.

From Yahoo News:

The recession has squeezed advertising further, forcing broadcasters to accelerate their push for new revenue to pay for programming.

That will play out in living rooms across the country. The changes could mean higher cable or satellite TV bills, as the networks and local stations squeeze more fees from pay-TV providers such as Comcast and DirecTV for the right to show broadcast TV channels in their lineups. The networks might even ditch free broadcast signals in the next few years.

I say this can be a good thing for Local Producers looking to grab ad dollars from retailers in their area, and find ways to connect with their local community and economy. The hyper-local video shows we are producing in the dark now will have a hungry audience looking for content.

However, I don’t think that we can be successful unless internet gets a lot more ubiquitous – we either need more competition, or more over-the-air access to the network, or both. Where is all the WiMax we were promised?

Once we get the WiMax, then why doesn’t it come bundled with content, similar to Verizon FiOS? They would do well to throw in a set-top box like a Roku or the upcoming Boxee device with a 2-year contract, and maybe some bonus subscriptions thrown in there.

A small chunk of the ad revenue is being recouped online, where the networks sell episodes for a few dollars each or run ads alongside shows on sites such as Hulu. Media economist Jack Myers projects online video advertising will grow into a $2 billion business by 2012, from just $350 million to $400 million in 2009.

But that is not significant enough to make up for the lost ad revenue on the airwaves. Advertisers spent $34 billion on broadcast commercials in 2008, down by $2.4 billion from two years earlier, according to the Television Bureau of Advertising.

Crybabies! Figure out how to operate lean and mean, trim the fat, and stop paying people who think they know what’s best for their audience – why not try asking us for a change?

If all they’re going to do is keep making reality TV, I’ll be happy that it’s not getting sent over the airwaves – I don’t want to see any more of that crap. I don’t care if they do have Ben Folds now, it’s stupid, mindless and childish.

But tell us how you really feel…

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

One of my favorite parts is when he talks about feeling as though you have “completed” reading the magazine. He says it from the editorial point of view, but for me it has to do with my habits (or you could call it OCD). When I’m reading email or feeds, I get driven by the number, as in the number of remaining articles to be read, or the number of comments to approve, the number of plugins to update, the number of emails to delete. It gives me a sense of how far I’ve gotten, and it’s a powerful motivator for someone like me.

It’s also cool that the spine is e-paper. That and the “heating up” rubbing gesture are two of my favorite parts about this video.

Really, these concept videos are so damn flashy – even though this one is trying to be minimalist. I get frustrated, because I know that actually seeing this device is still several years away, if it ever gets made. I still think of the Optimus Keyboard, which is now finally released 4-5 years later, and with a $2000 price tag. On the other hand, it’s pretty awesome.

Even if we never see this device in the wild, hopefully the good design and user experience will make its way into other applications and devices in the next few years.

This morning I grabbed Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 (download), and it’s got some interesting fun features. First of all, HTML 5 Videos can go full-screen. This is a big step towards in-browser video. Another huge improvement is support for CSS3 fonts, particularly the new WOFF format.

There are also some cool new CSS and DOM features, like crisp vs smooth image scaling (the only way to see the result is to have 3.6 installed) – then there is something very cool I would love to see someone play with – accelerometer support! I assume this will be most useful when they start rolling out mobile browsers, but it currently works on Mac OSX.

I’ve also been helping to test some extensions by just doing basic reporting with the Addon Compatibility Reporter. Really, the best part here is that it will let you use Extensions that are not properly flagged, so I get to work around one of the most frustrating beta-testing features, which is that you lose some of those useful tools! I’m glad they have a way to keep my essential addons around.

Go Try it out!

Then we have the exact polar opposites, like Orlando Event TV – this and several other shows produced locally are really trying to show everyone what it really means to be a citizen of this community, and they are all about the transparency. When you watch this video of Mark Baratelli in Winter Park, for example, the voice is completely different than the nightly news. He is much more watchable than a talking head in a TV studio.

I had a similar dream not too long ago, and that manifested itself as Orlando Scene TV and a bunch of other sites, like Orlando Video. The honest truth here is that I was not able to keep the momentum going for long periods of time. Producing video and being an unstoppable advocate for your product take a lot of time, energy, and the cooperation of a passionate community. Then there’s a question of money – how can I pay my rent, etc. if all I’m ever doing is recording people’s rock shows and theatre performances. It just never added up for me.

Then a little while ago I realized that the only way to really get a local indie TV project off the ground would be to distribute the workload as much as possible.

What does this look like? Well, now that I have the idea from The Art of Community to come up with a list of teams and their responsibilities, I see the teams as follows:

Let me be clear about a few things:

Audience

The role of the audience here is to let us know that we are giving them something they want, and to give us some ideas to keep moving this machine forward. Kickstarter (or something like it) could be a powerful force here: we can hold certain great ideas for ransom unless there is a certain amount of community support. The audience laid out here is really a fraction of the audience, the most passionate 2%. I also think this group will be web-savvy enough to have their own web sites or popular facebook profiles (hundreds of friends), and they will want to use these channels to help us promote our cause.

Tech Leads

Aside from pushing buttons, I also put these people in the role of “product designers”. If Jony Ive has a lot to do with the success of Apple products, then we should be able to assign a few people in our community a similar amount of responsibility. These people are very highly skilled, and may only contribute once every few years, when we redesign the title graphics and the website, or they may help us create fliers, blog badges an mini-sites on a more frequent basis. These are also the User Experience designers – in charge of the overall way in which people interact with the product.

Producers

Here, a producer is anyone who makes something. That means hosts, script or show notes writers, video editors, etc. A production team could be all of one person, or it could be as large as 5 or 6. It really depends on the skills of everyone involved and the scope of the particular project. A large goal here would be to make sure that anyone who counts as a producer could technically do everything by him- or herself if needed, but it’s really a question of time. Like I said before, this is the repetitive and time-hogging part, even if we can streamline the whole process.

The other key is to make sure that everyone owns his or her work, not only from an intellectual property perspective, but in a support fashion as well – if someone has a question about the restaurant you reviewed, you should be the one to get the notification and reply. In this way, people may start to develop a “beat” or even “channels” of information, and it could make sense to give certain producers their own sites. Pulling a line from The Starfish and the Spider, the producers give little more than spiritual guidance to the community. He can suggest large projects or hair-brained schemes, but he will be on his own unless they get a decent number of other community members to support and participate. These ideas can even come from the Audience, but as they don’t often produce content, an audience member will have to find a champion for her great idea.

The last piece of this puzzle for me is the equipment. We only need a few REALLY expensive tools – many people already own a computer, and video editing tools are freely available. Coming by decent video cameras is what used to be difficult, until recently. If you really want to spend some green, go ahead and get a Flip or a Kodak – even most consumer still cameras have pretty nice video capabilities. However, this still costs anywhere from $100 – $350, and that is a large financial barrier right now.

What if we could make the cost of entry $30?
That’s such a small amount, we could probably raise a few hundred dollars from our community and outfit an entire army with these cheap video tools in no time at all!

I heard about the Coby CAM3000 Mini Digital Camcorder on a podcast I regularly listen to, The Daily Giz Wiz. As far as I know, this is the absolutely least expensive (yet decent) tool for capturing video made by a well-known manufacturer. I plan on picking one up just to field test it – it’s so affordable, why not?

The other part of my plan here is to get some training and best practices in the heads of these videobloggers before they get out in the wild. We already have some community spaces and LOTS of events happening, so the material is always out there. We could pair up one new guy with an experienced producer and mentor them in the basics. Make sure they know not to film in too much or too little light, how to get some decent sound, introduce them to some basic video editing, and how to post videos. This might take one long day or a few evenings out, but there will be a certain point when a new producer will just have to get out on her own and start learning by doing.

We won’t just “give” out these cameras – they will have to be earned. If we apply some sort of a value to the camera – say, 10 points, and videos another – say 1 point for a video shorter than 3 minutes, 2 points for a video 4 minutes or longer of a reasonable quality – later when we can offer better equipment – the Kodak Zi8, or the Flip Mino HD, or perhaps even other stuff to barter for. I also have this thought right now that if we have any advertising revenue to share, it will be based on your continued contribution of at least X points in a 1-3 month period – we would probably need a way to make sure that we always have fresh content coming in, so we need to assign deadlines to keep people from getting lazy. As soon as this machine loses a certain amount of momentum, it might as well not be running at all.

That’s as far as I’m going to wander into this thought experiment for now. I don’t have a great picture of how other organizations do it, and this is just something I’ve been stewing on for a few months when I really get the chance to think about it, which is not very often at all. I’d love to take a look at how NowPublic and a whole bunch of other public media entities handle this. There are lots of questions unanswered here, but I’ve been struggling to really write down and communicate this idea to a large group for a while now.

If you’d like to talk more, I think we should wake up the PodCamp Orlando mailing list. I’m going to send this same text out there to see if we get any bites. Please blog about this, tweet it, point to the list page, get everyone who might be interested involved in the discussion.

Tonight is a Florida Creatives Happy Hour, and Friday is MOOM. We should be having a Likemind on December 4th, and another Happy Hour on December 21st. If you’d like to talk in person, these days are really good ones to engage me and others who are interested in making Orlando more awesome.

Update: We now have a project planning site – if you want to get an invite, leave a comment below, and make sure you fill in the email field.

This was actually a large part of my daily responsibilities while working for Popular Science. We spent a lot of time working on a site for the annual Best of What’s New promotion (the email for this year’s BoWN just went out), as well as some micro-sites for a sports promotion, and the B2B part of BoWN.

Drupal’s multi-site capabilites, combined with things like Themes, Internationalization, Installation Profiles (or Features), and finally management products like Aegir, can really make rolling out a few dozen Drupal sites just as easy as rolling out just one site. We’ve actually had talks about this at some recent Florida Drupal User Group meetings.

Um… where has the time gone? So many things have been happening lately, I feel like if I were to tell them all here, I’d pass another 2 weeks just re-counting all of them.

After the New Media Think and Drink, (go listen to the audio, and the audio of the 2nd half), I was excited about Community Building and Social Media Consulting even more than I have been in a long time. Also, the Digital Media Banner Center asked me to contribute to their New and Emerging Industries Task Force, which is basically trying to find jobs for journalists who have been laid off recently. I was very excited and honored to be a part of something constructive and forward-thinking. Needless to say, they were able to (once again) gather a group of smart, talented and well-experienced people and get them to talk about changing the world. I love that kind of stuff.

We have been doing lots of awesome DrupalEasy stuff lately – we have great podcasts with book authors and our patented “bookaway” contests, where you get Drupal books just for listening and commenting. I also got the chance to FLY up do to some Drupal Training in North Carolina. It was the first time that someone (specifically, Tomas and Jerry) actually FLEW to come hear me speak. I was proud.

I had a great time and got to try some wonderful craft beers at the Flying Saucer in Raleigh. I also learned that Raleigh has a Drupal User Group, but a bit too late. They actually had their meeting the same night I was headed home. Maybe next time!

The new house is treating me very well, the cats, Mariah and I are all settling in just fine, but Fozzie (my cat) has to stay in his cage, because he’s still trying to heal his leg, and he gets in too many fights with Litmus and Loki (Mariah’s cats), who are much older and set in their ways. He really likes chasing them around the house and is constantly getting hit in the face while trying to mount the large cat tree in the living room.

It’s also really nice working here. I have been “working from home” for most of the past 6 years, but only in this house have I ever had a dedicated room as an office, and an atmosphere that was so conducive to working and collaborating with others. I think getting this house will be one of the things I look back on as being very good for my work and creative lives, in addition to the benefits everyone else gets from owning a house. We already had one big party here, back on Talk Like a Pirate Day, and a few weeks ago, we tested out the Party Patio, the BBQ grill, and the fire pit.

A large part of my last few months was actually dedicated to working with a friend of mine, Kyle, on teaching him Drupal, and updating the website for his podcast, the Student of the Game. That site and Florida Creatives are two of the ideas that have really stuck back from the days when I was doing Liberatr more full-time. Kyle was laid off, and I was trying to introduce him to web site building and freelancing. We got pretty far with the whole idea, but it’s not like you can just flip a switch and change someone’s life, so he’s taken a contract with some place crunching database rows and generating reports. We’ll keep working on it, just a bit slower. That’s fine, because I need to work too.

Speaking of Florida Creatives, we are inching up on the start of the 4th year of Orlando Happy Hours for creative people. Our regular meetup will take place on the 16th at Crooked Bayou, just like it always does. I’ve also been trying to delegate some of the responsibility, like website design. Erik Baldwin is a fantastic designer and a good friend, and he’s been coming up with some designs based on my rudimentary wireframes, and I’ve also been adding new features to the site, like the Communties and Meetups page. I’m not sure how this feature will ultimately present itself, but it’s already better than a flat wiki page with just text and links. There’s nothing stopping anyone from adding new ones, but we’re not exactly advertising the feature just yet.

Also this week, I have been having some problems with an old server I keep around for hosting personal sites and sites for friends, so I started the very large task of moving several gigabytes of files over to Amazon S3. Namely, all the podcasts I recorded a few years back, and everything Kyle produced for the Student of the game in the past 4 seasons of football. As far as I can tell, everything is happily hosted by “the cloud” now, and the end users don’t know the difference.

One more geeky update, and I’ll be through. It’s about Twitter, so feel free to tune out now.

Twitter finally added a feature… something useful, and something that would be hard for a 3rd party to add. It’s called Lists, and I started making some. They’re useful for me, as I’m following 1700 people and my attempts to make the list shorter are really just making me find more people I want to follow, but for a multitude of subjects. One is just plain old technology, which is what my RSS reader used to be for. The next is a collection of the other Twitter accounts I own or manage, and hopefully one day twitter will let me say WHY I made each list one day. The last and most complete right now is my list of Drupal people. I think I’m also going to start one for coworking, but I haven’t really done much with it yet.

I’m sure I’m leaving stuff out, but I feel pretty well vented right now. I really need to get to this blogging thing more often…

Still, you have to write what you know, so Jono’s 4 big examples so far are the Jokosher sound editor, Linux user groups, the LUG Radio Podcast, and the Ubuntu project, of course.

He has a big emphasis on writing things down, which I have to say I haven’t always been the best at in the past – I like to get my hands dirty. However, when the mission, goals, and a plan are written down and shared with everyone, more doors can be opened than if you keep everything in your head.

What do you mean by “making it suck”?

One of the coolest examples from the Art of Community is when Jono is discussing methods for brainstorming. One of the ways he suggests to get people talking and break down mental barriers is by asking them to design an end product with the opposite goals in mind.

From The Art of Community, Chapter 2, p. 55:

The idea is simple: reverse the aims of what you want to achieve.

As an example, imagine you wanted to design a cell phone. Traditionally, you would brainstorm the attributes of a great cell phone. Instead, turn everything on its head. What would make the worst possible cell phone? Maybe it ignores all calls? Or maybe it only accepts calls from telemarketing companies? Maybe the buttons are too small? How about really short battery life?

Awesome idea. I’m stealing that one.

So, what’s something I love, and how can I make it suck? I think Florida Creatives would be a great thought experiment:

• Membership is invite-only. Each event has a $50 entry fee, and you are not allowed to bring anyone new – ever.
• Meetings are now held at a private office with 3 keycards and 2 security checkpoints. meetings are announced one hour ahead of time; If you miss 2 meetings in a row, you are banned for life
• You can contact other members, but only through the web site, and only if you have paid for the last 3 meetings – your website account is locked out otherwise
• All events begin and end by passing a stack of business cards around the room – nobody is allowed to introduce him or herself, and no discussion is allowed to deviate from a pre-selected agenda
• The agenda for each meeting will be determined by a monthly sponsor. Sponsors must take the president of the group out to dinner first and only companies with 1,000 or more employees should apply
• a member should only ever mention his or her day job. Any “moonlighting” or “fun” projects are taboo, and anyone working for a startup will be banned
• 30 minutes at the beginning of each meeting will be dedicated to talking about how bloggers are destroying the news industry, and why every blogger should go to jail for being un-American. Also, anyone caught mentioning open source software, let alone using any free software, will be banned for life.
• the leader of a given group will be considered “dictator for life”, and he will be able to kick people out for dressing the wrong way or bringing up the wrong subject, or making a suggestion of any kind that relates to the group. most of all, anyone offering to give his or her time for free will be banned and will be told he or she will “never work in this town again”. The dictator will distribute all monies as he sees fit, especially if that means buying a new sports car to drive to meetings

Um, you get the idea… Now how would you make your favorite thing suck? The idea here is not to complain about an existing problem or bring up negative points. This is to be the “minus” side of the battery (+|-) or the “south” side of the magnet (N|S). What is so far opposite from the ideal, that any change whatsoever will be a step in the right direction?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

First of all, I must preface that the Drupal Community is without a doubt one of the best open source communities. (meaning: most open, most likely to share code, experience and best practices, most innovative, most forward-thinking, least likely to “chase the bunny”, most likely to be the bunny, and most likely to create tons of venture-backed companies in the next few years)

I mean, the people involved are just amazing. The two DrupalCons I’ve attended were just amazing, and our local Florida DrupalCamp and Florida Drupal user groups are a big part of why I have not jumped ship to Python, Ruby, or other even other PHP-based platforms, and why I have no plans to any time soon.

We had a demo of the penumbrant Drupal 7 at our recent monthly Drupal user group. I am convinced it is THE CMS with more power under the hood (built-in, for free) than anything else… ever. The whole Job Queue API by itself is a reason to build web apps on top of this, and stop thinking of Drupal as a CMS – if you’ve got tons of processing that needs to happen, such as processing thousands of RSS feeds, or creating something very processing-intensive like Feedburner or Flickr, you will need to use multiple servers – a simple Cron job isn’t enough any more.

Then there is the database layer – not that it was the worst before, but there were certain kinds of configurations which used to require hacking core. Now, because of some pretty OOP (yes, Drupal has objects now!), you can override the database layer, and it uses PDO.

One huge change is the addition of a Fields API (AKA adding CCK to core, but it’s more than that). This means that instead of storing simple rows in a database, Drupal 7 exposes data storage to developers and end-users. At the most basic level, fields are used to store the title and body of nodes, categories/tags, images, dates, links, numbers or references to internal objects like nodes and users. This allows you to add extra fields to comments, user accounts and taxonomy terms as well.

Next, we’d have to talk about user interface and workflow improvements. The entire administrative interface now has a default skin – and there is now a compact administrative toolbar at the top of each page, plus a customizable bookmarks area and a configurable dashboard (unlike Wordpress, where you get to read Matt’s blog). The interface is a great sensible default, which is a bit of a departure from where Drupal has been in the last few years.

You’ll actually notice that there will now be a choice when you install Drupal – to use a “Basic” install, or strip everything down to the bare metal. In fact, you don’t even have to turn on node module any more – really. This is part of some hard work by folks who would like to use Drupal’s core as a PHP framework for building entirely custom apps (instead of smelly Zend Framework or the other unmentioned PHP tools that exist). If you look around for #smallcore, you’ll see what I mean.

There is so much more to say… In fact, this presentation by Steve Karsch says more. If you’re a big podcast listener, I’d highly recommend listening to Lullabot’s Drupal Voices. I’ll leave you with this, Drupal Planet and Google to find more.

Download Eco Footprint Special: 350.org
 
Length: 3:04

Gabe LeBlanc of EcoFactory left me this message about the event being held on 10/24/09 to raise awareness about the level of Carbon in the air. More info can be found at http://350.org and http://ecofactory.com

Gabe is offering free beer to the first 350 people to arrive at Orlando Brewing at 3:50 PM on October 24th. Gabe is doing awesome stuff in our community, and I recommend everyone go and support him, or find a similar event in your area.

Please bring $5 cash per person – each paid admission also gets a free drink coupon for a drink at the bar (non-alcoholic options are also available). If you don’t want to pay cash, we can hook you up on the internet, but the EventBrite service slaps us with an extra $1 service charge.
http://thinkanddrink.eventbrite.com/

We will be keeping the venue open as late as everyone wants to stay, so call the babysitter, put out the cat, and tell the wife (or husband) not to wait up for you! The conversation can continue until the wee hours of the morning! The Cameo will keep the bar open as long as we need it.

Who will be there?

Gwendolyn Anello is a co-owner of Anello Consulting out of Merritt Island. She consults several organizations in the areas of communications, market development, community and public affairs, and fundraising.

Chris Blanc is the Marketing Director for the Enzian Theatre and the Florida Film Festival. As if that wasn’t enough, he’s involved in several other local communities, and had a hand in creating the Dandelion Cafe.

Darren McDaniel is the creator of a feature film (The Essence of Irwin), the founder of a local internet startup (Petentials), former programming director at the Downtown Media Arts Center, and has done PhD-level research Sociology at Vanderbilt.

Julie Norris is the owner of Dandelion CommuniTEA Cafe and the host of Front Porch Radio on WPRK 91.5FM every Wednesday. She’s also a new mommy! Congrats!

John Rife was a media missionary in S. Pacific / Asia, a founding member of Interactive Expeditions (IntXinc.com), is an independent documentary filmmaker, a video blogger and is currently pursuing an MFA in Digital Media at UCF.

Lance Turner is the founder of the Ourlando movement and the owner of AEonBlue in Winter Park. You’ll see Lance at tons of local events snapping pictures or signing up small businesses to bring the local color.

The Cameo Theatre
1013 E Colonial Dr (corner of Mills & Colonial)
Orlando, FL, 32803
Map Link: http://bit.ly/2gK2BC

About Florida Creatives

Ryan Price and John Rife hatched the idea for Florida Creatives Happy Hours in Ryan’s kitchen 3 years ago, and the event is now a fixture in the Orlando community. FLCreatives has expanded to Jacksonville, Brevard County and South Florida. The first New Media Think and Drink was held in January 2008 at Redlight Redlight in Winter Park. John and Ryan are planning to hold Think and Drink several times a year. Get more info at www.FLCreatives.com or follow @flcreatives on Twitter.

Long story short, we didn’t have enough time to pull off BATT. Time to take baby steps. At the same time, we still have a venue reserved, so it’s time to pull other ideas from my back pocket.

In the last 3 years, Florida Creatives has had an important role to play in helping the community grow, but we can take it farther. Our network (and network of networks) is capable of reaching all kinds of people around so many subjects.

I started a wiki page on the FLCreatives site to outline and suggest a format and possible topics for FLCreatives discussions. My main concern right now is the discussion we will hold on October 16th in the evening. Here’s my first draft:

The Role of Media in a Community

A collected panel of community leaders with a successful track record will be given the stage and a chance to share their thoughts and stories using media to communicate with:

* Their community members
* Traditional media
* Other organizations
* Their volunteers and employees

New forms of media seem to appear every day, and what used to work in a print, TV and radio world may not fly in the world of social networking and YouTube. Some more established community leaders will have had to adapt, and those with newer missions will have had to make it up as they go along. We can hear from both sides in a panel like this.

EDIT: New Media Think and Drink Event RSVP

We have already confirmed 2 panelists:

• EDIT: New discussion leaders!
• John Rife
• Darren McDaniel
• Julie Norris, Dandelion CommuniTEA
• Chris Blanc, Enzian/FL Film Festival
• Lance Turner, OurLando
• Gwendolyn Anello, PR & Marketing Consultant

Why do this event?

BarCamps and large events are great, but they only happen once a year in a given city – it would be hard to organize them too often. Happy Hours and Likemind are fun, but we try to keep the agenda out of those events. Ignite is great as a showcase of local talent, but there is no real theme to the event. The idea here is to pick one subject and pick it apart from several view points.

I always like following up a great discussion with some brainstorming, time to make plans and get things done, so my ideal would be to follow a great discussion with a “think tank” the following day – this is what the unconference format is great for – have an empty schedule and fill it with all of the things in your head after you get energized and inspired, then have a room full of people who are willing to talk about anything.

The discussion series should be followed by a BarCamp-like event to let people workshop on the discussion’s topic from the previous evening. It’s great to have time to “sleep on it”, go and reflect, then get back together and get stuff done.

We’ve got the venue for Saturday the 17th as well, and they’ll be happy to leave the chairs and equipment set up for us to hold a ‘Camp style event on day 2 if we want.

EDIT: I went ahead and picked a time and place:

Here is some proof:

(pass around a shortened URL to this slideshare with http://bit.ly/sAF6i)

I spent years making static pages and hand-coding stuff before I came to Drupal, and I feel as though I was able to reach the brains of some librarians today with a few of these links. It was good fun when I was showing off the article about Sprites. One guy said “…really small, fly around sprinkling magic dust”. Indeed.

Also, a quick reminder that we have a DrupalEasy CCK and Views Workshop coming up on July 23rd at Leu Gardens in Orlando. Use the coupon code “FLORIDA” to get $25 off registration.

40twits takes a look at the stats for the shortened URLs you post to twitter and decides which ones are most popular, then displays them in order. Dave’s current top link as about Wikipedia and Michael Jackson.

I don’t know if it counts the link being retweeted, but I’m going to guess yes.

This got me thinking about one of the original features of twitter – the favorite. I remember using favorites a lot before I started following 1000+ people. Now I just sort of let the wave go by. Also, not every desktop tool has an easy/visible favorite button.

I put out a call to my twitter group: “when was the last time you favorited a tweet?” and got a big response. (displayed in reverse order)

Thanks @gilcreque, @modulist, @karschp, @thandelike, @ericschechter, @domhay, @staticnrg, @tiburon, @doreeno, @incanus77, and @mrscrumley for replying. Of everyone who participated, it seems like Eric Schechter and myself are the only two people who don’t use it very often, or at all.

Looks like I’m not the only person thinking about the utility of Twitter Favorites. This post by Christopher Lynn is about the same subject.

TweetDeck has a view to let you look at your favorites, but I didn’t see a place to add a favorite very easily – it’s hiding under “other actions”, which you see when you hover over the user’s icon. Tweetie (desktop) requires a right-click, or you can press the “F” key, then a little star appears next to the tweet.

I currently pipe my blog feed to twitter, and I don’t hear a lot of complaints about that. I’m thinking about piping my Delicious bookmarks to twitter as well. Do any of you folks pipe your bookmarks in? Would you like to see more useful links on twitter?

Presented at IgniteOrlando just moments ago.

BlogOrlando 2009 from Josh Hallet’s blog:

After a great deal of consideration I have decided not to host a big, public BlogOrlando this year.
…
It is the complete end? No. I may still hold a small private event this year, or may think about hosting an event in 2010. We’ll see.

2 years ago, I talked about doing PodCampOrlando, but the farthest we got was a happy hour and photowalk (lately I’ve been using the site to teach people how to do stuff in Drupal). Honestly, the social media wave tends to hit Orlando a year or two after the West Coast, so while a small and intimate PodCamp would have been fun, it was hard to get the podcasters, videobloggers, and especially the news media to sign on for something like that.

BlogOrlando was serving many of those folks very well, but now there may be some room in the Orlando calendar to explode what was BlogOrlando into a WordCamp, PodCamp, PR-unconference, SocialMediaClub, etc.

There are a lot more podcasts being produced in Central Florida than there were in 2006, and the ones that are still around from those days aren’t going anywhere.

Would you come to a PodCamp? What presentation would you give, or what discussion would you like to have? Do you understand what a PodCamp is?

It might look something like this

A few months ago, I attended my first DrupalCon, and what an explosion of open source community awesomeness it was. As Mike and I are running a fledging Drupal shop, I was subconsciously looking for a shop I could use as a signpost, a group whose values and practices were in line with where I would like to be in a few years. I met the fine guys and gal from Advantage Labs in Minneapolis/St Paul, and was introduced to some of the awesome stuff they do.

One really great thing they offer in addition to web hosting, consulting and training is what they call Lab Hours. Twice a week, anyone experiencing a hang-up in their site, or just folks who are interested in helping, come by their offices for some roundtable support time. A goal is set to accomplish a certain task at the end of 2 hours, everyone pairs off and work commences.

There is no “expert” in the room doing all of the work. It’s roundtable style, and that’s how it should be.

This is pretty much a direct physical manifestation of the kind of help you get in #drupal-support in IRC. I have helped out there a bunch, and then having heard about this concept, I decided Orlando could use some community helpdesk time as well.

Starting with the first Friday of the month, I’ll start hosting Lab Hours of my own here in Orlando. If you’ve attended DrupalCamp Florida or a Drupal Meetup, if you’ve attended one of our DrupalEasy training days or webinars, or if you’re just curious about learning how to use this open source content management system, you’re welcome to come by and share.

If nobody shows up, I’m going to open up IRC and help people in other parts of the world. I also intend to show everyone where they can go and get more help outside of helpdesk time.

CoLab is Orlando’s first and only coworking space, on the 6th floor of the Angebuilt building, 37 N. Orange Ave. It’s right at the corner of Wall St and Orange Ave, above Subway. It’s the perfect place to host an event of this kind.

Xavier Vespa from Hyve Up has done an easy to follow, step-by-step version of a retweeting recipe based on the content of my original tutorial.

From: HU Twitter: How-to Retweet Automatically – Video Demo

Mozilla Labs Jetpack – Intro & Tutorial from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

In the video, the developer mentioned two other Mozilla Labs projects, the first of which I hadn’t seen before. It’s called Bespin, and it’s a cloud-based code editor. Right now, they are hosting the app for open source developers, but I’d love to be able to host an instance on my own server in the future.

Introducing Bespin from Dion Almaer on Vimeo.

Last but not least is what’s basically an implementation of QuickSilver (the application launcher) in your Firefox browser, but instead of launching desktop apps, you’re accessing web services, search and browser actions. The project is called Ubiquity, and it’s cool (for people who like using the keyboard).

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Then they just get downright insane…

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

This video really takes the idea of web browsing away from just a bunch of flashing data and gives some good context. I can’t say I would like to use that exact interface, but extra points for effort.

Or if you’d rather see something that’s not so far in the future, this MIT student builds on some ideas that are already out there and improves them. It still has some of the “spatial history” ideas, and takes the idea of “pages” out of the browser, but if you ask me, it doesn’t go far enough.

Firefox Concept Video from liyan chang on Vimeo.

photo from orlandosentinel.com

Of the 67 shows at this year’s Orlando festival, a majority are from out-of-town (USA or International), OR have never appeared at the Fringe before. The festival is spread across 8 venues in Loch Haven Park, so everything is within walking distance. The proximity of the venues, along with the staggering quality of all the shows, makes this one of the premier unjuried theatre festivals in the world.

Half of Orlando has no idea this is happening. It’s even worse for tourists.

Fringe has been going on for 18 years, longer than any other US fringe, longer than the crappy Music Festival, and just as long as the Film Fest.

On top of all these things, 100% of ticket sales go directly in the artists’ pockets. No exeptions, substitutions or refunds. The only things the festival makes money on is the Button (everyone must buy one, $8), merchandise, Beer and Wine, and Donations. A huge part of their budget comes from Grants and Donations. They have several full-time and part-time staff. (donate something, yo)

Happy Hour Monday

If you’ve EVER read this blog before you’ll know I wrangle the herd of cats known as Florida Creatives. Well, once a year I try to inspire this group (you can’t tell these kids what to do, just suggest) to make the pilgrimage to Loch Haven Park with me and drink beer 3 miles from their normal gathering place. Last year, we enjoyed some marginal success, and one guy actually came to see a show with me! I know a few other folks came out on the weekends, brought their kids. Good thing too. Fringe has a great family atmosphere if you’re looking for it.

Blogging Fringe

I love this festival so much, I go there every day for 2 weeks, and I started an entire project (I don’t think of it as just a website any more) where I blog about Fringe, take photos, make videos, and try to inspire people to do the same.

The big change this year is I’m not really trying to aggregate anything, just evangelize. The most I’ve really done to that end is to try and filter twitter posts about Orlando Fringe, which grows in complexity (and annoyingness) all the time. The coolest thing about the recipe I’ve built is that it works with the global twitter community, which is still fairly easy to navigate. I can’t say the same of the blogosphere, especially since so many people are posting to private Facebook and MySpace accounts. The openness of twitter (which almost sounds like a joke) is a strength I am exploiting, and I’m trying to wield in a meaningful and usable way. Not everyone uses Twitter Search or TweetDeck, so I made one for them.

Herding theatre patrons

This year marks the 4th festival since I started doing Blogging Fringe, and I don’t feel as though I’ve gotten very far in getting other people to blog on my site. So this year I wanted to let them create content where they are most comfortable, and have them act as advocates for something bigger than Blogging Fringe or even a single instance of the Orlando festival.

We’re talking about the community.

Just as with my love for Drupal, your reasons for staying at Fringe are not always the same ones that made you come in the first place.

Normally, a friend will drag you to some show or other, or perhaps you know someone in a show, or a second- or third-degree friend is in that situation. At Fringe, the Kevin Bacon game is too easy. The circle is much smaller and the bonds are often stronger. There are plenty of people I only know during Fringe, because they live in Seattle, Canada, or the UK. I have actually taken one of these Fringe Friendships to the next level, by visiting some actor friends up in New York a few years ago.

Just like making friends online, sometimes Fringe Friends can become your friends in Real Life. This is sometimes true of locals, but not often.

Another crazy thing is that this village only comes together for two weeks. I’ve heard similar things about Burning Man. Another characteristic they share is a Gift Economy.

Whuffie at the Fringe

Orlando Fringe has an invention they call “Fringe Bucks”, which is a social currency you can touch. When you volunteer for Fringe, you get 1 Fringe Buck per hour. 4 Fringe Bucks gets you into a show, for free. Your used Fringe Bucks then go to artists, who in turn use their Fringe Bucks to get into other shows. Artists also often “comp” their friends and other artists. Up to 10% of any show is filled with people who didn’t pay money to be there.

Fringe Bucks

Volunteers also get a free Button, so if you are willing to spend time at Fringe (which is natural for many people), you can get into all the shows you want, for free, within reason.

I was reminded of Fringe Bucks when I read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and learned Cory Doctorow’s wild theory that someday money will be based on meritocracy. He called this new Social Capitol “Whuffie”, coining a term that has started a movement in social media marketing. Tara Hunt has even gone so far as to write a book about Whuffie. It’s called The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business, and I can’t wait to read it.

Printing Money, Whuffie Style

Other than volunteering, several other ways exist to earn social capitol at Fringe. “Hug a volunteer”, is a mantra that’s heard and acted on often. Billeting artists (giving them a place to sleep) actually earns you a SuperPass, which gets you in to any show for free. Buying someone a beverage at the Beer Tent is often proffered as a reward for a favor, a free ticket to a show, or just as an excuse to get some face-time with your favorite artist.

My mission this year was to try and capture some of that implicit social capitol and have everyone make the festival better by participating in a game. I often describe it as a scavenger hunt, but it’s not really correct to call it that.

I was inspired by Akoha, which is a game where you are given a physical card with a unique “Mission ID” or a deck of missions, and the whole thing is tracked online. The idea is to “play it forward”. One card will pass from person to person, as you perform small kindnesses to other people, making the world a better place.

Akoha at TED

The Game Itself

Each participant gets a small booklet containing a piece of paper with several “challenges”. Some of these are easier than others, but initially they were designed to be things you could do for free, and especially to generate a story you could then tell to others. The best one so far was a bizarre hula-hooping mishap… involving a girl wearing a skirt.

The Game, Manifested

Each mission is worth 10 points, with modifiers for fun reasons.

• Drink a beer with a Canadian (drink a beer with a Floridian, -5 points)
• Donate to the Fringe (1 point per $1 donated)

… and so on.

In order to get players engaged right away, I invented the idea of your first mission being something you’d have to carry out right away, with two added bonuses:

1. The First Mission always involves a 3rd party, who has not yet started playing the game.
2. You must convince said 3rd party to complete your mission without speaking to them.

This makes the first challenge, well, challenging, and gets you from zero to one as a player right away. Now, you also have to explain to your friend what the heck you just did when the mission is over, thereby spreading the game virally.

Choose Your Own Adventure

I had originally wanted to do this game more like Akoha, with an online registration for missions, players and points. Anyone could create a mission, assign a mission to someone, or gift points in recognition of “going above and beyond”. It would turn everyone into a facilitator of the game, and in a perfect world, it would have been great.

In the end, I chose to use paper and online photos as the medium, because it’s more accessible and there’s a lot less overhead (this is a free time project).

Any player is still invited to invent their own challenges, either by having me write them down, or by printing out their own sheets. You just need a 4 1/4″ square piece of paper, and you can write anything on it.

Artists often use printed fliers to promote their shows, so I thought this would be a good chance to make the fliers useful beyond just saying the show times. Now every flier you hand out is interactive and viral, and it inspires your patrons to share something related to your show.

We have designed a platform.

Measuring Success

As players are encouraged to use whatever platform is most comfortable for them (Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, etc.), measuring will be just as difficult as with most social media campaigns. My Blogging Fringe twitter bot helps a bit, and Google Alerts help a bit more, but the only (simple) way to be able to see all these posts will be to have all these people add me as a friend on the relevant network and look at their Activity Streams.

This is where open standards would really help. They could make aggregating this content easy, but Facebook and MySpace are inherently closed to the average Joe, and that’s me.

Luckily I know most of these people, or I’m getting to be Fringe Friends with them. In the future, scaling this game will be hard without a centralized web site to collect all the data, but for this year’s experiment, what we’ve got isn’t bad for the amount of time and money I put in to it.

The Goal

In coming up with my presentation for BarCamp, I stumbled across the mission for Blogging Fringe. Even though I had done it for 3 years prior, I couldn’t verbalize fully and succinctly why I was doing it. I came up with the following:

To inspire entertaining and unexpected interaction between patrons of the arts, artists and arts organizations.

Everything I generate now for this project and future iterations of Blogging Fringe will take this statement into account, and give me the razor-edged accuracy I need to make this free time project greater than the sum of its parts.

There’s a lot I haven’t covered here, but that’s the way with this project, it really is quite deep and nebulous. It took me more than 3 years to understand it, and I feel like I’m learning and re-learning new things all the time.

I’d love your feedback, or stories about similar campaigns. This will definitely come up in a future podcast, BlogOrlando, BarCamp or other session. I’d love to know what others can learn from my experimentation, and how I can make this project even better.

There were several photographers there, some from Metromix, and 2 representatives of The Daily City.

Daily City Photoset of Blunder Bungle by Mark Baratelli

Daily City Photoset of Blunder Bungle by Tisse Mallon

Metromix Photoset of Blunder Bungle by Miriam Lorenzi

photo my Miriam Lorenzi

el Presidente