B. Mann Consulting

BarCamp Vancouver 2009 wrapped

bmann — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:24:52 +0000

So, that's a wrap: BarCamp Vancouver 2009 is "in the can". I really enjoyed this year's event -- I even went to and gave some sessions! (yes, that's worthy of note - as an organizer, it can be hard to relax and get into the flow)

I attended a great talk by Dustin Sacks on the 10 principles of Burning Man and how they compare / contrast with BarCamp. It was great, and made me think about a ton of things.

One thing that stood out for me is that I think that BarCamp has "moved on" from its original core focus on making code -- in part because of the principle of "radical inclusion". We kept making it more inclusive until lots of people that weren't at the same "level" started coming (in tech, in background, etc. etc.). It's not a problem, per se, it's just evolution.

I used the phrase "Know when to fork" in a later session: and a bunch of local tech "makers" have done just that, with BazCamp Vancouver. Looks like it will be in early November - I'm looking forward to it, and I'm definitely going to have to follow up on the @MakerBot angle (blog post asking for "expressions of interest" forthcoming).

In any case, thanks to Dustin for leading this - I know we could have spent more time diving into these topics in even more depth. I definitely want to explore / focus / highlight some of these principles in future events. Gifting, civic responsibility, radical self-reliance -- all seem to resonate highly.

Passion and Frustration

I was further moved when Mark Busse pulled me into running a session with him on Balancing Frustration and Passion. The session took a lot out of me, as it is a line that I walk *all the time*. We ended up in all sorts of interesting places - many of which were themselves frustrating! :P Mark is an incredible person, and I really enjoyed tossing discussion points back and forth with him and other participants.

I think passion and frustration are two sides of the same coin. It's funny, but I've often told people - I bitch because I care. If I send you 18 usability issues with your website (frustration) it means that I care (passion). If I didn't care, I wouldn't bother writing up the email and sending it to you.

My main recommendation for tackling any project - that is, actually deciding that you will work on it - is that you ideally need to recruit a total of three people. Yourself, plus two others. With only two, each person needs to be aware of all the details in case the other person needs to take a break / gets run over by a bus / whatever. With three, the load is spread a bit more easily. Of course, if you're high on passion, you'll just go ahead all by yourself, but it's something to keep in mind for longer term / larger projects.

Co Working

Right after the "Passion" session was the co-working session. It ended up being mainly an information sharing and level set session, but judging from the amount of different initiatives we heard about, it was a necessary first step.

I started by talking a bit about WorkSpace closing down - the exact details aren't clear, but ultimately it wasn't financially sustainable as a for profit business. Then I covered the planning / idea stage that the Bootup Entrepreneurial Society is at - we'd love to solve the pain of flexible space for software startups, and to provide a core gathering space for entrepreneurs in the downtown core.

I had just met @NickMolnar the week before and compared a few notes, and invited him to participate as well. He is looking into building a commercial hack/maker/builder space. Nick wrote up a post on what he's thinking / planning. I think some of the existing Vancouver Hack Space folks got a bit miffed by Nick being new to the scene / misappropriating the term "hackerspace". I believe Nick's focus is perhaps similar to Tech Shop - which has a strong commercial component. Of course, VHS is growing as well, so this could concievably be something that existed "next door" to each other.

Next, we heard from Irwin a bit about the W2 Community Media Arts organization / space that is going into the Woodwards complex. If you want to volunteer, there is a Volunteer Meet and Greet tomorrow.

I would really liked to have gotten into some more needs and wants of individuals of potential spaces, but we ran out of time - hopefully we'll get to some of that in further face to face meetings, as well as via survey as described below.

The two main next steps are:

1) re-factoring and extending the notes on the wiki (thanks to Raul for liveblogging).

In particular, I'd like to see each initiative listed there with mission, capacity, cost, and current needs. For example, Irwin of W2 will have incubator space targeted at social enterprise - his example was getting an aboriginal film festival off the ground. This would need to be captured as part of the mission / goal of each space. The needs section is also supremely important. For example, the Bootup Society currently needs space and funding. The Network Hub is currently full, so their needs might also include "more space". If we can get a good overview of shared goals and needs, then we know where we can work together, and where we need to apply the principle of "know when to fork".

This might be a useful jumping off point for also listing spaces that are available for community meetups of various kinds - both James of Kontent Creative and Mark of Industrial Brand spoke up, offering space for ~30 people. The Society has a Vancouver Venues page / Google Spreadsheet that might be extended.

2) run a survey gathering information from people interested in co-working / shared office space / community space / incubator space etc. etc.

This is the main action item that I am taking on. I have a draft survey, which I will post to the BarCamp wiki. I would like to get everyone's input on what questions need to be included, and then we can ideally send this survey out once, to the broadest number of people, to get lots of useful information and feedback to help guide everyone's decision making process.

(Turns out Roland recorded the session, too)

Next Steps

The rest of the day is a bit of a blur. There are lots of sessions that overlapped and I'm sorry to have missed (esp. the Design Charette by @awesome). Lunch was good (we even had snacks in the morning, when all I thought we had was coffee). I think the space worked great, and I hope that Discovery Parks Vancouver gets a bunch of inquiries out of it (here's a direct link to the commercialization centre PDF). Vancouver Open Data was great. Clean up was quick. Yes, I'm fading here in the middle of the night. Go look here and there and you'll find more wrap ups a plenty.

What's next? Well, the organizers will send a wrapup email - please add links to upcoming events, much as we discussed verbally in the wrap up session. We'll also be meeting to debrief about the event. After the debrief, we'll be doing a "call for 2010 organizers".

If you haven't already, please continuing blogging, tweeting, uploading, tagging, wiki-ing and otherwise documenting the event. There is a long list of links right on the front page of talks with lots of links, so please continue to flesh them out. As well, if you have a blog post about the event you want to highlight, please start a new section on the front page - something like "Related Blog Posts".

Most importantly: take action. Documenting and sharing the knowledge is one thing, but the next is to take actions. I know I have a ton of follow ups to do, and I hope you all do as well.

Thanks to everyone for attending - and most importantly, participating. And a final note: be excellent to each other.

Form follows function: the growth of Drupal themes will directly mirror the growth of custom distributions

bmann — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:38:58 +0000

Yes, I've also read Morten, Todd, and now All Drupal Themes. Here's my take:

The growth of Drupal themes will directly mirror the growth of custom distributions. We are currently in the "it's so easy, we click together lots of Drupal modules from scratch" phase. Once there are more Open Atrium and ProsePoint type of distributions, with known modules / module options and features, then you can build great themes to support those functions.

Form follows function. I've tried to explain this a million times in the D7 process. Having a "great" core theme is impossible when we don't decide what kind of site Drupal should be optimized for out of the box. This same holds true for trying to build and market a theme that will apply and work well with the many vastly different kind of sites that one can build with Drupal.

Yes, CVS is "hard". Yes, all GPL is "hard". I would argue that the overhead of trying to create infinitely flexible themes for any possible view, module, and block layout is the hardest part. Define your functions, and we'll have the beautifully formed themes to match.

Federated micro-blogging for Canadian startup networking?

bmann — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 22:40:03 +0000

Some of you may have heard that Twitter was down the week before last. This kicked out all sorts of thinking and discussion that, perhaps, one company shouldn't be a single point of failure.

The other item that has been coming up again and again is a request that the Bootup Entrepreneurial Society run a "social network" of some kind. People really enjoy Launch Party and other events, and have found them a great place to network.

More specifically, running Co-Founder Speed Dating, we set up Crowdvine as a mini social network. What we found is that it was heavily used - lots of people used it to check out the backgrounds of other people and it continued to be used after the fact. People who couldn't make it to the event checked in and contacted people, some of which actually resulted in companies being founded.

Back to Twitter. Or, more specifically, Laconi.ca, an open source "clone" of Twitter. The company behind it is launching Status.net - basically, a fully hosted *version* similar to (and interoperable with) Twitter. It also supports a few extras that Twitter doesn't -- like tagging of user profiles (great to do stuff like #cofounder_wanted or #mentor to show lists of users) and groups (great for setting up more "channelized" communications or question / answer about specific topics -- e.g. a "Legal" group).

So, the concept is to run this at something like yvr.bootup.ca, parlez.montrealstartup.com, somecooltorontodomain.com, talk.calgarytechnologies.com, etc. etc. - one in any region that wants to take responsibility to run such a thing.

Each site would serve as a mini social network / hub -- listing profiles of entrepreneurs, mentors, service providers, and anyone else from the regional technology areas that wants to participate.

I'm most definitely not ready to just go ahead with this. Running infrastructure like this is something that has to stay up. Picking a domain is important -- the "namespace" is what defines the community, in part. And, if we go with Laconi.ca as a base, it's actually less interesting if we just stand up one instance - we need at least one other network to commit to setting up and federating with us.

So, those of you have said that Vancouver / Bootup should set up "yet another social network", what do you think? Is this type of federated microblogging a good choice? Go kick the tires on Identi.ca - set up an account, fill out your profile, tag yourself, and start searching for other people.

Other suggestions for tools or requirements for such a system? I'm still not convinced we need something, but I do feel that we need to connect more, to tell the stories that are happening all over Vancouver, and all over Canada.

Gnomedex 2009 - On First timers

bmann — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 21:44:27 +0000

I'm here at Gnomedex in Seattle. It's been a couple of years since I've attended, for a variety of reasons, but I love the participants and have made many great connections here over the years. I made the decision last minute and picked up an extra ticket from the Hop Studios. The experience - as always - has been great: thanks to @chrispirillo and the rest of the Gnomedex team.

I want to talk a bit something I've been thinking about for a while, which is "first timers". The thinking behind growing BarCamp Vancouver to ~300 participants last year was simple math. If we have about 50% new people every year, that means only 75 new people experiencing the unconference format and BarCamp experience. Growing it to 300, meant we double the "new experiences" we can enable every year.

But "new" is constantly shifting. At Northern Voice this year, the conference sold out in just a couple of weeks. And yet, when we informally polled the audience, they were again about 50% new people. Here at Gnomedex, the "show of hands" of new people seemed higher than 50%.

My hypothesis is that, in part, the adoption of new technologies, people discovering them, and connecting with other people using them, is what drives this shifting of new. With Northern Voice, it was the bomb of Twitter adoption in late 2008 - everyone "saw" people they knew through Twitter buying tickets. They felt a sense of blogging because they "knew" these people from Twitter, and so Northern Voice was the conference where they met a bunch of people from Twitter in real life.

Here at Gnomedex, @bre talked about his MakerBot. As part of it, he talked about his history. He did stuff on the Internet, but didn't really know anyone else. So in 2005 he came to his first Gnomedex and met the other people from the Internet.

In 2009, 4 years later, he's on stage presenting, telling us about @makerbot.

The Giant Ant Media team (go buy the Bongo Film album!) talked about something similar. 2 years ago, @jaygrandin didn't have a home computer, and he thought Hotmail was the best ever. Oh, and they used MySpace.

Whatever conference you're at, especially if you're there for the first time, think about that. The new is always shifting, and your challenge is to participate, and to chart your future so that in 4 years, you're up on stage.

Flow-based organizations can grow an archive with microblogging

bmann — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:49:57 +0000

My friend James at AdHack introduced me to the concept of Archive vs. Flow:

The web works in two ’states’ (for lack of a better word): flow and archive.

Flow: all the new content coming onto the web and its parsing, aggregation, recombination, etc. For short, consider this the new stuff. New blog posts. New Twitter tweets. New YouTube videos. Access is by RSS, browsing, email, IM, alerts.

Archive: all the content that’s no longer new but is still accessible and indexed for retrieval. For short, this is the culmination of not-new stuff. Old stuff organized and accessed by tags, categories, searches and links.

Most folks only get the archive aspect of the web once they’ve used it and managed websites for a number of years. It’s a little counterintuitive and different from all other media types.

Flow is short-term candy to fire people up. Archive is long-term value that ages and improves over time.

Once I started thinking like this - about content and experiences as Archive or Flow (or a combination, of course, if done right), it has permeated my thinking.

More recently, I've been thinking about organizations and their activities using this same model. And how many traditional, broadcast media organizations are all flow. They don't even *think* about archive. And this is epitomized by what I think is the very basis for all web-based Archive concepts: the permalink. If your piece of content, your experience, does not have a permalink, there is precious little I can do with it (including find my way back to it).

Two examples of media organization that are pretty much all flow: TV and radio (especially the news and/or local versions). Neither have permalinks in their "native" format. Their companion websites are slowly evolving some archive functionality, but it's not very good. Even worse, their websites do a bad job of showcasing the inherent flow nature of the organization and the content they serve.

Hulu is an example of a TV-related website that is starting to provide a great archive functionality. More like this, please!

Other TV sites do have some clips after the fact, and ways to link to them, but these are divorced from the native medium. You have to remember to go back to the website, somehow find the piece of content you were watching, and even then you might not have a permalink (think hour long clips, mini clips, or mystery meat javascript navigation that doesn't let you link directly to items).

Radio is the example that I think is:

in the most dire need of showcasing the "flow" nature of their content on their companion website and
has done a terrible job of doing anything to grow an archive that, as James says, has "long-term value that ages and improves over time".

A counter example is actually CBC Radio - they're growing an archive at a furious rate for most of their shows in the form of podcasts and interactive shows like Spark that blur radio and web and interactivity. But, I think the local "news" radio doesn't do nearly as good a job of moving from flow to archive on the web, arguably where it is the most important. The produced "shows" just happen to currently be broadcast over the air - but they are discrete chunks of content that can probably be better delivered via the web.

Last.FM is an example of a site that is tangentially related to this discussion, at least as regards music. They turn your "flow" of music listening into your own personal archive. And it grows richer over time. Radio doesn't do this for you, even on their own website. You can't favourite a song, or share it, or tell other people to tune in to a particular frequency RIGHT NOW if they want to hear it. It probably should.

So, how do flow-based organizations grow an archive? I think the prime example of native flow tools on the web today are all based on microblogging: Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook status messages. By looking at these native flow tools, media organizations can do several things at the same time:

Leverage the flow based, real time nature of their content and business - every item from their native medium becomes the basis for a microblog post coming from their own brand.
Build interactivity around this web-based flow version. What if your radio or TV station tweeted back at you? What if it used hashtag #traffic? or #news? or #contest?
Use all of this activity to automatically create permalinks which can be shared, rated, commented and in general, grow value over time. Since every microblog has a permalink "for free", there's the basis of your archive. Layer on other tools to remix, analyze, mashup, and visualize the depth of your archive over time.

Oh, and you probably shouldn't cede all of this great archive content exclusively to Twitter or any other third party network. Like cross-posting to YouTube, you definitely want to reach the audience on Twitter (and Facebook, and so on), but you first want to post to your "own" microblog. How do you get your microblogging network? I'm glad you asked!

There are a number of tools evolving to support the Open Micro Blogging standard that will let a number of different sites all talk to each other. This means that platforms like Drupal or WordPress can easily support implementations of microblogging.

More simply, Laconi.ca is an open source project designed to be a turnkey microblogging platform. The biggest single example is the Identi.ca site, and a good example of a community using it is Leo Laporte's TWiT Army. Evan Prodromou of Laconi.ca / Identi.ca recently shared with me that he's also working on a fully hosted option. Watch status.net to keep up to date with that option.

Much of the growth of the web has come from its Archive nature, rooted in the permalink and being able to instantly get back to a single piece of content. Google and Wikipedia are two prime examples of this. Flow and real time are more recent entrants, but they are making the web grow even faster ^[1].

How is your flow based organization going to participate in both?

^[1] Blogging is perhaps unique in that it embodies both Archive and Flow at the same time. We just never noticed its Flow aspect because interaction and "newness" spread out over hours or days rather than the minutes or seconds we can visually see with microblogging.

Social media is…

bmann — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:12:52 +0000

…cake. Sort of. John Ounpuu made an interesting comment the other day that I re-tweeted:

Social is not a new type of icing. It's a new way of thinking about your cake.

I then got a number of good responses. From Travis:

Actually, social is a new way of deciding what to make -- as Marie Antoinette found, the people might not want to eat cake.

And then from Justin:

Social is a cake fight. Everyone has a cake, and they're all throwing it at each other and trying to dodge.

Fun stuff, and a good excuse to make a summary blog post.

Drupal out of the box: let's make a community

bmann — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:55:04 +0000

First off, I need to apologize to @webchick for being called away from the Drupal BoF at Open Web Vancouver last night. It was great to have her here to do a run through with @chx1975 of where we're at with Drupal 7. I was around just long enough to once again raise the issue of what the default install profile will do.

We've come quite far in major core improvements, but we don't have a story for what Drupal is when you do a default install. What should Drupal do "out of the box"?

There is a placeholder issue for this now: #483987 Decide on direction for default install profile. As I've seen the UX process continue, I still see us focusing on building and constructing. The changes there have been excellent, but I think we're missing an opportunity to have a truly great out of the box experience. My codename for this is "drupaloob".

The first step is deciding the story for this. WordPress is a blog. We are not a blog. We are a multi user system. Can we turn on a minimal OOB experience that showcases some of our multi user and other strengths? In the words of President Obama, "Yes We Can!"

My personal opinion and outline for this is that we should ship with a "Community in a Box". I've documented it on groups.drupal.org. Regardless of the details of comments on or off, promoted by default, and other finer points, here is my user story for this Community in a Box:

A community site with front page articles, a community blogging section, discussion forums, and shared image galleries.

Anyone is welcome to sign up for an account and participate in the forums. After some time in the forums, users are invited to become contributors, and can post blog posts and photos, as well as submit unpublished articles.

The blogging functionality is a community multi user blog. It is not meant as one users blog, but rather a large community that can post quick thoughts responding to each other and sharing their ideas. (Note: this is in here because people get confused about "blog" functionality -- this is meant to highlight that having a community blog is not the same as a single user blog, so don't expect to be able to change titles and designs etc. -- your blog posts are in a shared, community space)

Editors are around and police the forums, as well as reviewing and publishing articles and other material for the front page.

The photo galleries are shared galleries: like the forum and the community blogs, users upload them to share, rather than in their own space. There are weekly suggestions for new gallery categories, and users can also tag photos with whatever they like to mix and match how the photos are grouped.

While I'm piling wishes on top of dreams, I'd even like to use the wizard that has been in core since Drupal 6 to make several parts of this OOB experience optional. That is, right at the beginning, users would have two options.

One would be to do an "express install" that would install everything with the defaults as I've outlined above.

The second would be to engage the wizard and answer a series of questions and options:

Do you want forums? yes/no
Do you want a community blog for contributors? yes/no
Do you want a community photo gallery? yes/no etc.

What do you think? What would you want people to experience when they first install Drupal 7? Edit the wiki, leave comments, or create some patches against default.profile.

Questions for Backbone Magazine - Fixing a stale web site

bmann — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 06:33:47 +0000

Back in September 2008 I got contacted by Backbone Magazine to answer a couple of questions about, well, corporate websites and business usage of the web in general. I forgot all about it, until my friend Laura in Ottawa was reading it and saw my name. It's apparently in the current issue (which I haven't seen the print version of). It's on the site as "Fixing a stale web site", by Andrew Rideout. Below are the original questions and my answers. I've added a few notes in parentheses and added links to things.

1. What specific things do you think separate a good corporate website from a bad one?

Not built in heavy amounts of Flash - Flash is also essentially invisible to Google, so you're not doing yourself any favours here
On the front page, have a way for people to stay in touch - that means subscribe by email AND an RSS feed
Don't use stock clip art of smiling diverse people - if you MUST use such stock photos, then buy the rights so those same people don't show up on other websites hawking other businesses

2. What type of applications or coding languages are out there that you think are underused by traditional business or SMBs?

We're currently undergoing a dramatic shift. In the past, the entire web has been composed of individual, static pages, that a third party web designer or PR agency would manually update on behalf of the company. Today, every single page is being shifted to run on top of a content management or blogging system. Every page has interactivity and personalization. We're still at the very start of this phenomenon. (NOTE: I have lots more to say on this, but I haven't boiled it down into an article yet) (BM: I still haven't written this article :P)

The other shift is the use of many distributed online services. As I mention in the doing more with less section below, there are many applications you can now access online. Take this a step further and think about what parts of your business you can outsource or distribute. One company I was talking to was thinking of working with stay at home book keepers in PEI to process bills and accounting overnight in time for west coast clients to access first thing in the morning. Another company dramatically reduced the size of their office to mainly a customer and company meeting space, gave everyone laptops, and had a happier, more productive team that had the flexibility to work from everywhere. (BM: the former company is QCDocs, the latter company is Aaron Gladstone's team at 2Paths)

3. What three things do you think every company's website needs to accomplish?

Communicate
Engage
Sell!

4. Can you name a web element or application that irritates the piss out of you every time you see it?

Autoplaying music. Enough said.

5. Seeing as though start-ups more often than not have to do more with less, what type of things do you think traditional businesses could learn from web start-ups?

Spending time on web-based / digital media and marketing has a much lower cost (or rather, a much higher ROI) than offline PR. And it can also serve two purposes: connecting with customers and potentially helping you define your product / service through that interaction.

As well, there are a host of web-based services that range from free to low monthly costs that can replace expensive internal IT investment, or just work better and more simply than a roll your own solution. Everything from shared calendars and document collaboration (Google Calendar & Docs) to invoicing (Freshbooks) can easily be setup and used securely from anywhere you have an Internet connection.

If you're a small business, you could even consider that expensive self-hosted website that you pay someone else to maintain, and switch to a hosted blog solution like WordPress or Bryght (BM - this was September 2008, before Bryght, er … went away).

One tool that I've been falling in love with more and more is Get Satisfaction. It's a hosted service that lets you run a space for customer feedback and problem resolution. (BM: another really awesome tool that both Mobify and Strutta use is Tender for support / feedback / knowledgebase)

6. If a company has an e-mail newsletter, how can they make it stand out from the rest of the crap that piles up in people's inboxes?

Archive it! Every piece of content you create should be available as a separate piece of content on your website, with its own unique URL. This will allow you to build up more content over time, which is great for natural search engine ranking that will make it easier for people to find you / your product online.
Publish to the web first: allow "subscribe by email", but publish articles, how tos, customer case studies and other material to your website directly. It's a single point of contact that people can come back to.
Natural tone: just like people are allergic to "PR speak" in traditional press releases, many newsletters can suffer from the same thing. The advent of social media like blogging has led to a much more natural tone, that people respond to.

7. What type of small things do you find enterprises and SMB's generally overlook when putting together their sites?

Websites are not something you redo every 2 years. They are a major channel for engagement. What is the #1 hit for phrases related to your business? To your business name itself? Design for search as well as for "human" visitors.

Give ways to give feedback -- if you don't provide a place for it, someone else will, and it's better to control / monitor / be aware of that feedback.

Back to the "websites are not a project that finishes". Always be thinking of what you can do to improve your web channel. And actively track metrics related to it. If you can't sell directly through the web, track where your leads / hits are coming from. How many contacts through your "web channel" turn into either positive PR or an actual sale?

Open Web Vancouver, Open Restaurants, Open Data

bmann — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:19:59 +0000

I got notice this weekend that my talk submission to Open Web Vancouver 2009 got accepted.

Open Web Vancouver runs June 11th and 12th and the brand new Vancouver Convention Center, and registration is now open.

Here's the blurb from the registration page:

This year's conference promises to be at least as exciting as last year's. So far we have an exciting speaker roster confirmed, including keynote sessions with Rickard Falvinge, leader of Sweden's Pirate Party, and Angela 'webchick' Byron, Drupal 7 co-maintainer and Lullabot. Other confirmed speakers include:

Chris Messina ( OAuth / Citizen Agency )

Jacob Applebaum ( Tor )

David Ascher ( Mozilla Messenging )

Evan Prodromou ( identi.ca )

(BTW Open Web Van peeps - I'm tagging this #owv09, please post this somewhere as the "official" tag)

I posted my talk submission to the Open Restaurants wiki. What's Open Restaurants? Well, it's the namespace for that Semantic Web Community Barn Raising that I blogged about a while back. We had our breakfast meeting, 8 people came, and we've got a great cross section of Drupal devs, Freebase / semweb schema nerds, open data policy enthusiasts, and NLP experts that want to use Twitter posts to create Skynet :P

I said namespace, because we'll go about creating some schemas and hopefully bootstrap local communities, web apps, and other producers / consumers to adopt this schema and use it to build interesting things. I have some ideas about doing supply chain modeling for a Farmfed project that Anthony at Farmstead Wines has gotten me roped into.

I joked about the codename for the mashup we're going to create being called BaconPatioBeer. Except, the more I thought about it … the more I liked it and couldn't find another URL that seemed perfect. Hence, http://baconpatiobeer.com (which currently redirects to the Open Restaurants wiki). There'll be a blog up, soon~ish. Oh, look, there's this Twitter account, too @openrestaurants

I'm excited about getting the chance to work together with a group of people exploring Linked Data concepts directly. The "open data" part is also fascinating, and it looks like we'll actually get a chance to speak to Vancouver's city council in support of the concept - nice work, Karen.

So it looks like the "food for robots" phrase that I suggested at Drupalcon is becoming literal, since we're starting with food-related data. In fact, the Lullabots posted an audio interview of me talking Drupal + Semantic Web. I, uh, haven't gotten up the nerve to listen to it yet -- it was during the day of my all nighter, and I kind of remember looking up into space and monologuing. For more on Semantic Web/RDF in Drupal, try the next interview with Stéphane Corlosquet.

TweetLens is the Google Reader of Twitter clients

bmann — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:18:33 +0000

TweetLens is a web-based Twitter client. Built by Benson Wong aka @mostlygeek here in Vancouver, I find myself using it to browse my main account when I want to catch up on reading. Note that it is most definitely in alpha, and that you do need to enter your Twitter user / pass to login. I expect Ben to implement OAuth real soon :P

I use twhirl as my main desktop client, open to multiple accounts and with all notifications turned off except for @ replies and direct messages. This means that most of the time, the posts of the people that I follow just kind of scroll by in the background, and I only switch to it when I have something to post. This means that I don't actually read the majority of posts (sorry...but I *do* notice all mentions of @bmann); scrolling backwards through the twhirl interface (while new stuff is still coming in) doesn't work that well ... and, I'm really just scrolling, not really reading.

I think you could call TweetLens the Google Reader of Twitter clients. It has keyboard shortcuts for reading through and acting on posts. Like Google Reader, I can hit spacebar and "close" individual posts, visually indicating that I have actually read something. Like I said, I find this super useful when I'm taking the time to actually sit and "catch up" on reading through posts. I use twibble on my Nokia phone on the go, and just like Google Reader, it would be great if a mobile version of TweetLens saved my read / unread state.

When Ben first told me he was building a web-based Twitter client, I thought he was more than a bit crazy. But, I do find TweetLens interesting, and I'm looking forward to seeing it evolve. It's very much in alpha right now, and Ben is actively working on it, so expect some bugs or outages at times. See Google Code for the issues / features list, and follow @tweetlens for updates.