Home › Feed aggregator › Sources

Open Parenthesis

Syndicate content Open Parenthesis
Because these are the early days of a long revolution . . .
URL: http://www.openparenthesis.org
Updated: 1 week 2 hours ago

Updated WordPress Facebook Plugin

Wed, 08/13/2008 - 18:45

(As of 8/20 - updated again, to 0.7.5).

WPBook, the WordPress for Facebook plugin which Dave Lester and others at Scholarpress originally created and which I’ve contributed some to, has been updated again.

Version 0.7.4, which I just tagged in subversion (so it should be showing up in the Wordpress plugins directory by the time I post this) includes the following:

  • Works with WordPress installs in subdirectories, using ABSPATH to ensure the right includes get called
  • Fixed for the “new Facebook” javascript but remains compatible with “old Facebook” javascript as well (as described here)
  • Removed hard coded reference to MyAvatarsNew(); and downgraded to WordPress standard avatars
  • Fixed the (previously hard coded) offset for permalinks to be dynamic based on blog’s home url

All in all, this should be a much more stable version for most folks.

Note: If you use the “upgrade automatically” feature in WordPress, you must remember to copy the wp-facebook folder from /wp-content/plugins/wpbook/ to /wp-content/themes/ - it must reside at /wp-content/themes/wp-facebook in order for the plugin to work correctly.

You can get the new version from my plugin page or from the WordPress plugin directory.

Links for 2008-08-12 [ma.gnolia]

Wed, 08/13/2008 - 00:00

SXSW 2009 Panels Proposed

Tue, 08/12/2008 - 10:38

SXSW 2009 Last week, while I was on vacation meeting my new nieces and attending my 20th year high school reunion, the Panel Picker for SXSW 09 went live.

Although voting by prospective attendees is only “about 30%” of the decision making process, I figured I should promote my submissions here, and hope that readers of this blog might be interested in commenting on them or voting for them in the panel picker. (Although they call it the panel picker - no one can resist alliteration - it includes sessions which are solo speakers or dual speakers as well as more tradition 4-5 person panels).

So here are the sessions I proposed (links go directly to the Panel Picker):

Managing User Generated Content
The age of content being managed only by authorized professionals is over. Users expect to contribute to, rate, review, recommend, filter, tag, and moderate their experiences on the web. What does this mean for designers and content management professionals? How do you encourage appropriate behavior and discourage spam and vandalism, without completely reverting to non-participation?
Open Source and Design: Ideologies Clashing
Thesis: Open Source and Design are fundamentally philosophically incompatible. Antithesis: Open Source and Design are profoundly similar in core beliefs and approaches. This talk works to articulate a meaningful synthesis between these two positions.

Managing Your Online Identity Outside the Walled Garden
(Dual talk with Joshua Porter). This talk will cover 3 basic ideas: 1) What Managing Identity means these days and why it is important 2) Off-the-shelf technologies that help you manage your Identity 3) A DIY (Do-it-yourself) approach to managing your Identity…how you can roll your own identity services using existing pieces

The first is really an updated version of this talk from Web Content 2008, which seemed to go over well.

The second is inspired by r0ml’s series of OSCON talks over the last 3 years: rambling, philosophical, and entertaining in addition to being educational and thought-provoking. I’m sure I’ll fail to live up to his example but have fun in the process. I tried to update the description in the panel picker but failed - here’s what I was trying to add:

The context for me is in trying to articulate why free and open source projects have historically found it difficult to recruit / retain / attract designers as contributors. (Or, depending on your point of view, why open source projects have been so inhospitable to the design-oriented contributors who show up).

Thesis: Open Source and Design are philosophically incompatible.

Open Source is about enabling anyone and everyone to share the same code base. Open source pushes markets toward commodity status, leveling the playing field by making the same technology available to all. Design, by contrast, is about differentiation; standing apart from the crowd and being unique on the basis of creative innovation.

Besides, Open Source projects are ugly, and only engineers can use them. Well designed, beautiful, and easy to use projects have always come from proprietary approaches.

Antithesis: Open Source and design are profoundly similar in core beliefs. Open source and design are both based in solving problems based on known patterns. Good artists copy, great artists steal. Maybe some very small portion of “design” is about differentiation, but design is much broader than that subset. Also, many open source projects differentiate and innovate - sometimes on ease of use.

Besides, many open source projects are now actively pursuing design contributions, running usability studies, encouraging themes/skins, and working to compete with proprietary software on both “eye candy” and ease of use.

Synthesis: How can open source projects benefit more from the talents of the design community (across visual design, interaction design, information architecture, usability, and branding)? How can designers and design communities benefit from the lessons of free and open source software?

The third is a joint talk with Joshua Porter, whose book Designing for the Social Web is a must read. He’ll be talking about some of the “off the shelf” services available to help you manage your online identity (like Chi.mp), and I will be talking about the DIY approach, assembling together from free and open source software an online identity management toolbox.

Links for 2008-08-05 [ma.gnolia]

Wed, 08/06/2008 - 00:00

Community, Gender, and Free/Open Source Software

Mon, 08/04/2008 - 09:34

Just came across yet another excellent post from Alex Russell of the Dojo project (and foundation): “The Price of Anonymity: Our Principles?”

Russell uses the occasion of some nasty comments in Digg on a Caryl Shaw article for PC gamer (and a series of presentations at OSCON a few weeks back) to reflect on the issue of sexism in free and open source software communities. Ultimately, the issue is really about what kinds of communities we want to be building. As he notes:

the frustrating conclusion [is] that this is the outcome the community allows. Surely this kind of objectionable behavior wouldn’t show up so frequently if we were closer to gender balance in the OSS world. But the larger tech world seems to be addressing the topic badly if at all and OSS is no exception.

Many have argued, of course, that free expression is the ultimately value above all others, and that keeping the purity of free expression inviolate somehow requires allowing people to behave badly. But it is important to think not only about the positive value of free expression but also the negative impacts of the kinds of comments commonly seen in IRC channels and public forums:

degenerate behavior in support channels or on discussions about popular links serves no principle, rises to no higher cause than prurient interest, and builds no “community” other than those who tolerate the objectification and denigration of half (or more) of the world’s population. Frankly, that’s not a community I want any part of.

How does this particularly apply to free and open source software? Given the self-forming nature of community, the reliance of our projects on participation, and the attention paid in such communities to issues of governance, one might expect free and open source software projects to be ahead of the curve in this respect:

the Open Source world finds itself debating the moral and practical consequences of obtuse licensing aspects on a daily basis. What makes norms of community behavior around race, gender, and other forms of bias so different and loaded that Open Source community leaders then can’t or won’t speak to them? If we’re developing this software with society at large, for society at large, why is absence of half of society from the process not the largest topic of discussion in the OSS world? It’s certainly much more disturbing to me personally than any of the dickering over licenses that consumes so much time and attention.

Of course there were a number of presentations at OSCON which touched on this issue or addressed it directly. Unfortunately I missed Emma Jane Hogbin’s talk, about how she managed to get 50% female participation and speakers at her conference.

I did get a chance to see Pia Waugh’s talk on Heroes: Women in FOSS, which focused on creating visibility for women already in free software and going directly to primary schools to show young girls that technology is an option for women. Danese Cooper’s keynote Why Whinging Doesn’t Work — which was originally focused on women in open source, but was broadened for the “general audience” — also focused on creating and making visible positive success stories, including the directive “teach your daughters to code” as a core mechanism for breaking this cycle. (Whether they go on to become programmers, I’d say, is nearly irrelevant - think of the whole digital literacy and set of assumptions that gets broken in the process of learning to program - changing the kind of “magic” of making the machine work into a tactical, knowable process).

Russell links to a draft code of conduct for all Dojo Foundation projects. I’m sure this will generate lots of discussion - some of it serious and well meaning, some of it snide, sarcastic, and misogynist. (The blogosphere in general loves to attack codes of conduct perceived as too idealistic).

But ultimately the more important thing, I think, is the social norms we all as free and open source software community participants enforce and encourage on a daily basis. It’s all well and good to have a code of conduct or other document which encodes those norms and makes them clear to new participants, but it ultimately comes down to what behaviors we all tolerate or engage in.

It brings me back to the same thoughts I had at and after ROFLcon, in which many aspects of “internet culture” were being celebrated that I hoped would be more critically examined.

If free and open source software is produced by and for communities, what kind of communities do we hope those will be, and what are we doing to ensure that they are communities in which we’d like to live?

I came to software (mostly web) development (and FOSS) from the academic world, in a graduate English department, having done a doctoral dissertation which (in part) was on the reconfigurations of race, gender, and class in US history at the turn into the 20th century, and how “the city” provided both the geographic context and dominant trope for the exploration of anxiety generated by these changes.

In essence what that experience taught me is that the stories which community members tell each other — about what they are trying to accomplish, about what values they share, and about other participants as well as non-participants — are critical to community definition. More critical, ultimately, than even the explicit foundational governance documents.

That doesn’t mean I think codes of conduct are a bad idea - it helps to be able to point to values in an encoded form when bad behavior occurs - but that the informal, social norms based enforcement of a living community is always a stronger and more lasting mechanism.

Scrabulous down for the count?

Sun, 08/03/2008 - 10:02

Scrabulous

Guess the negotiations with Hasbro and Electronic Arts didn’t go so well. It was really my primary reason for actually logging in to Facebook.

Comment Fail

Tue, 07/29/2008 - 05:05

If you’ve tried to leave comments here recently, bless you, and I’m sorry.

First, the WP-OpenID plugin for one specific version (2.2.0) had a bug which ate comments containing double quotes, which means all comments with links in them. 2.2.1 fixes the problem.

Then, Luis Villa told me in email that the Captcha on my site was unusable. So I tried it, and he’s right.

A while back I installed a plugin for Mollom, which catches comments which are thought to be suspicious in one way or another, and then asks users to solve a captcha. Problem is that they were all unsolvable.

Or, rather, they were perfectly solvable, and I solved them - as I’m sure Luis had. But Mollom refuses to recognize my solutions. Maybe I really am a computer, and thus fail the Captcha.

Anyway, the point is, I’m not trying to make it difficult to comment on this blog, just trying to deal with spam. I’ve turned Mollom off again, and won’t re-enable it until I try it myself and see that it works.

Open Web Foundation is to Autonomo.us as OSI is to FSF?

Thu, 07/24/2008 - 14:28

This morning David Recordon formally announced the Open Web Foundation in a morning keynote at OSCON. (The shorter url openweb.org will come at somepoint).

The OWF tagline / elevator statement is “The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.” The OWF goals, from their home page:

Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

The foundation is trying to break the trend of creating separate foundations for each specification, coming out of the realization that we could come together and generalize our efforts. The details regarding membership, governance, sponsorship, and intellectual property rights will be posted for public review and feedback in the following weeks.

This is wonderful, and it is great to see the large number of significant companies and well known advocates for open source which are part of the foundation and it’s efforts.

But I worry about two specific things.

First, is this foundation itself an example of the “yet-another-foundation” syndrome? Why is it that none of the existing organizations would suffice? This is not the Open Social Foundation, not part of OSI, not part of the FSF, not closely related enough to any of the existing non-profits? Why do open source efforts so often end up making their own new group? (Developers always feel they need to invent yet another protocol or start yet another project, rather than adapting an existing one).

Second, is this foundation too focused on a broad, commercially friendly vision of the open web, and not enough focused on user freedom? Is this about continuing to run services based on open source software but services in which the data is captive? Is the focus on non-proprietary specifications too narrow to ensure real freedom, if the implementations of those specs achieve lock-in through data rather than code?

I know it is early days - there’s much discussion which will need to happen to see what OWF can really contribute.

What makes me optimistic is the individuals behind Open Web Foundation - all of which I respect for their contributions to open source and free software. What makes me concerned is that throughout David’s talk this morning he kept focusing on “the big companies that make up the web.” I’d rather see the DiSo approach to social networking, or the Laconi.ca approach to microblogging, be the types of applications the Open Web Foundation helps bring into existence.

In short (as I said on this thread at Get Satisfaction), I’d hate to see us all replicate the FSF/OSI history, with Autonomo.us and the Franklin Street Statement on one side and OWF on the other.

(This is a pretty drafty post for me with lots of initial thoughts - please do let me know what you think about this!)

Links for 2008-07-23 [ma.gnolia]

Thu, 07/24/2008 - 00:00

Reviewing the Groundswell

Tue, 07/22/2008 - 19:29

One danger of reviewing a book is the reality that the reviews ultimately say more about the reviewer, and the book he or she wishes had been written, than they do about the book which actually was written. It’s in that context that I offer this review of Groundswell, by Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, published by Harvard Business Press (note: disclaimers at the end of the post).

Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

To start with the positive: This is a really solid business book, which sets out a clear methodology (including the Social Technographics Profile and the POST method with which Forrester clients / subscribers are already familiar), walks through a broad range of well explained case studies, and situates the business benefits of the different approaches.

Bernoff and Li have clearly done their research here, talking to a wide variety of companies in different industries about their experiences with “social technologies,” and they do a very astute job of avoiding oversimplification (never suggesting, for example, that every business should follow a simple formula) while also not falling back on the consultant’s refrain (”it depends”) or failing to give real, useful, pragmatic, and actionable advice.

The book is laid out into three key sections (you can see the whole table of contents online):

  1. Understanding the Groundswell - in which they lay out the basic context of what has changed and why businesses need new approaches, as well as the social technographics profiles
  2. Tapping the Groundswell - in which they lay out the POST method, and walk through all the ways companies can benefit from / leverage this new world
  3. The Groundswell Transforms - in which they extend the argument to include how this new set of conditions can transform the enterprise.

Each section is supported by a handful of specific case studies and other examples, which are drawn from a wide variety of industries. There are indices by company and by strategy at the end of the book, so you can quickly find examples from your own vertical or place on the adoption curve.

Li and Bernoff are at their rhetorical best when they are describing the veritable sea change that the groundswell represents:

You cannot ignore this trend. You cannot sit this one out. Unless you are retiring in the next six months, it’s too late to quite and let somebody else handle it. The groundswell trend is unstoppable, and your customers are there. You may go a little slower or a little faster, but you have to move forward. There is no going back.

They also offer solid, sound advice to those looking to manage the cultural change required within an enterprise to successfully pull of “Groundswell thinking”:

  • First, start small.
  • Second, educate your executives.
  • Third, get the right people to run your strategy.
  • Fourth, get your agency and technology partners in sync.
  • Fifth, plan for the next step and for the long term.

Not exactly radical or wholly original advice, but wrapped in the context of real business decisions made by people facing the issues, and informed by real experiences.

In short, I’d say the book is a must read for anyone from a traditional (by which I mean anything existing before the web) business looking to adapt to the internet age, anyone trying to convince their more traditional colleagues or bosses to adopt new strategies, and anyone hoping to sell such folks consulting and technology services.

Having said all of that, there are some minor blemishes - for example, when did del.icio.us become “a simple downloadable application”? Are they talking about the bookmarklets (javascript buttons for your browser to submit things to del.icio.us)? But that is really an exception in an otherwise well researched and well documented book.

Rather more difficult to ignore is the almost complete absence of Free and Open Source Software from a discussion of “Social Technologies.” There is a section titled “people collaborating: wikis and open source” (the lack of title capitalization is in the original - even the book title is in all lower case), but it really should be called “people collaborating: wikis.” Granted, Bernoff and Li aren’t technology analysts per se - in the sense of analyzing development approaches and platforms - and in the POST methodology technology is the last element. But I’d argue that it is critical to understand the context of mass collaboration rising out of open source communities in order to better understand the mechanisms by which communities are created and sustained, thrive or fail, and interact with each other in an online world.

Instead, the whole of the analysis of this phenomenon comes to a paragraph in which we learn:

The same sort of cooperation [as that which drives wikipedia and other wikis] drives other forms of online collaboration, including open-source software products like Linux (a version of the Unix operating system), Apache (a Web server), and Firefox (a Web browser). In open source, technically adept developers combine their efforts to build, test, and improve software products, and the code is available for all to see. Before you scoff at this form of development, recognize that Linux now underpins many Web servers and consumer electronics devices, including TiVo; Apache is the dominant Web server software on the Internet, and Firefox has gone from zero to over 25 percent market share in less than two years.

That’s it, basically, for open source. No analysis of the massive collaboration efforts behind those projects, or how they are managed, arise, die, become businesses, become communities, etc. No analysis of how these and other open source projects provide either models or anti-patterns to be avoided. Not even any analysis of how the open source development methodology and licensing practices have influenced other cultural practices through things like creative commons licensing, open access, and challenges to many fundamental corporate notions of intellectual property.

Bernoff and Li seem to assume that their reader has no familiarity with and no interest in development - which may be accurate - and don’t seem to have much interest themselves in the impact open source can and has had.

(Readers interested in these issues would do well to check out Chris Kelty’s Two Bits and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody - the former on the cultural significance of free software, the latter on how technology changes have enabled and facilitated changes in social organization - both of which I hope to write more about in the future).

What ultimately left me dissatisfied with the book, however - and here we return to the question of whether this reveals more about me as a reviewer than the text - is that it never steps outside its tightly constructed frame, which essentially comes down to “how do I use this to improve my business”?

It isn’t that I expected, or even wanted, Li and Bernoff to craft a revolutionary manifesto - a sort of Cluetrain II or Wealth of Networks for the MBA set - but that the tone is so relentless in its focus it can begin to feel like the only valid reason for the Internet’s existence (and the only valid use of it now that it exists) is to sell more widgets, make people feel better about the widgets they’ve bought, and maybe help a few companies make better widgets.

It ended up reminding me of one of my favorite 80s movie scenes, from Say Anything, when John Cusack is asked what he wants to do with his life, and answers:

I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.

Again, to be fair, I’ve got no problem with businesses trying to understand how to adapt to the changing environment the Internet and social media represent, or even with helping businesses figure out how to leverage these new approaches to generate profit or awareness - in fact, that’s a fair description of what I do at Optaros, and what Optaros does more broadly.

It’s just that in the middle of the focus on tapping, listening to, talking with, energizing, embracing, and connecting with the Groundswell (every single chapter title involves doing something with the groundswell or enabling it to do something to your company), there’s precious little exploration of what is driving the Groundswell in the first place, or what it means more broadly as a social and historical phenomenon. Why the groundswell now? What impact is it having on us as a culture, other than just what toothpaste we think is cool?

(Yes, there is a section in the opening chapter on what the groundswell is and why it is happening now - but it is reduced to this level of causality: “These three trends - people’s desire to connect new interactive technologies, and online economics - have created a new era.”)

Ultimately, Groundswell presents “the groundswell” as something which is happening to us - something we are not creating but either passively suffering from or being carried by, like a surfer on a wave. It seems almost a force of a nature - an inevitable technology tsunami - rather than a collective project in which we are all engaged in actively constructing a specific historical reality.

So is it fair to critique Groundswell for staying within its own well-defined purpose? To criticize it for not being The Wealth of Networks?

If what you’re looking for is an eminently readable, well researched, pragmatic guide to business strategies for dealing with this set of social changes, Groundswell delivers. But in doing so, I wish it had taken more time to step outside the framing of this social change as a kind of natural consequence of the inevitable march of technology and understand the set of changes themselves in greater detail.

Disclosures: Forrester sent me a review copy of the book, as they did to a number of bloggers. Optaros co-sponsored a webinar with Josh Bernoff earlier this year on the topic of open innovation. Several of the companies discussed as case studies are or have been Optaros clients, though Optaros was not involved in any of the specific projects described. Swisscom Mobile Labs, an Optaros client project, was a finalist in the groundswell awards. Optaros is a Forrester client. I know a number of people who work there or have worked there.

Links for 2008-07-21 [ma.gnolia]

Tue, 07/22/2008 - 00:00

Things are going to get wierder

Fri, 07/18/2008 - 07:50

Via Jake McKee I just discovered this video of Chris Heuer interviewing Clay Shirky:

Clay’s long been a favorite speaker of mine - Perl as an act of love and the cognitive surplus being two other videos featured here - and Chris does a great interview here.

My favorite quote, as you might suspect given the tagline of this blog: “Things are going to get wierder before they get saner.” We’re in the midst of a long transformation - we’ve left point A but point B won’t be clear for some time.

On the Internet, People Know if you’re a dog

Thu, 07/17/2008 - 09:33

(Update, 2pm ET: Scott Hintz from TripIt replied in the comments on the original post apologizing for the employee’s behavior - thanks Scott.)

One of the famous cartoons of the first internet craze was this one from the New Yorker:

On the Internet Nobody Knows You\'re a Dog

On the Internet Nobody Knows You're a Dog

The reality is, however, that increasingly people’s online identity can be mapped to their offline identity. (Check out Who Controls the Internet? for a well informed and very smart extended exploration on what this means from a legal perspective, and this reality checkfrom UNC).

Earlier this week, I wrote a blog post about TripIt and Dopplr, two major companies in the social travel market, which people use to share information about various trips they are taking or planning. It was a perfectly innocuous post, describing some of Dopplr’s new features which make it more like TripIt, and presumably more competitive with TripIt as a result.

That post recieved the following comment, from someone identifying himself as Thomas, with an email address at Yahoo! mail, and no url:

Well, in regards to Dopplr’s generic email import approach, I’ve tried forwarding several different emails I have from my company, travel agent, and from major airlines such as American Airlines, but they don’t work one bit. For example, Dopplr thinks I’m going to different places in Europe when I send in my opentable reservation.

In contrast, most of these work “out of the box” with TripIt. And when I complained about my travel agent not being supported, they added it within a day.

What’s more, is that I don’t really want to “discover” people I do not know on a trip. All I’ve been wanting to do is to manage my business travels better and inform my family. TripIt fits that bill perfectly.

So, I don’t really find Dopplr very useful. My two cents.

Thanks for the nice write-up though.

Best,
Thomas

Not itself a controversial comment, and I almost approved it without a second thought. But then I noticed that the IP address from which the comment was posted (69.12.150.246) is mapped to a machine called wall.tripitinc.com:

jeckman$ nslookup 69.12.150.246

Non-authoritative answer:
246.150.12.69.in-addr.arpa name = wall.tripitinc.com.

(I would likely not have even noticed, but either WordPress itself or one of my plugins actually adds that info to the email it sends me letting me know that a comment has been recieved and is awaiting moderation).

So I emailed “Thomas” - using the yahoo.com address he provided - and suggested he disclose that in his comment.

I never heard back - perhaps the email wasn’t valid to begin with. So, I decided to post the comment, but also note what I had determined about its origin.

Lesson learned? It’s easier than you think to determine who you are when you do various things on the net. If you’re going to post comments on blogs that discussion your product(s), disclose your relationships. Nothing wrong with posting - I’ve had many comments from folks whose products/services I discuss in blog posts - but posting a comment like the above without disclosure is basically astroturfing, and it never works.

Links for 2008-07-16 [ma.gnolia]

Thu, 07/17/2008 - 00:00

Some people out there in our nation don’t have maps

Tue, 07/15/2008 - 10:38

An oldie but a goodie. The folks at ROFLCON just announced that Miss Teen USA South Carolina will be the emcee at the upcoming SF-ROFL thing (August 29th).

Unfortunately I don’t think I will be able to get to this one - and not because I can’t find San Francisco on my map. Unlike many U.S. Americans I believe in building up our future for our children and that our education here should help the Iraq and the Asian countries. ;)

Dopplr gets Email, Twitter, SMS import

Tue, 07/15/2008 - 07:20

One of the more popular posts on this blog is the one which describes how to import trips from TripIt into Dopplr, in order to avoid the re-entry tax. After all, as I wrote in my comparison of the two services last October, TripIt’s email import was the critical factor in my decision of how to manage this information:

Tripit’s mechanism for adding trips is superior. The ability to simply forward (or even set an automatic rule to forward) confirmation emails is a major step forward . . . Where TripIt seems better at pulling data in, Dopplr seems to be better so far at pushing their data out, or letting people pull it into other contexts.

Well, now Dopplr’s gone and added some new import mechanisms of their own. This post from the Dopplr blog (ok, it was posted back on July 8th, but it has been sitting in my queue to write about) lays out three new options: Twitter, SMS, and Email:

Today I’m really happy to say we’re taking the wraps off a number of new ways to get your future into Dopplr and share your travel information with those you trust: Dopplr by Twitter, SMS and… Email!

Dopplr Blog

Although I love twitter as a notification service (a way of letting me know something relevant happened) I don’t see myself using it as a data input service. For those of you who would like to, just follow the dopplr user and send direct messages with your trips, like: d dopplr a trip to London July 28th to August 3rd. (Nicely, it also happily accepts @dopplr posts, in case you want to announce your trips as well as put them in dopplr). SMS is another option - you associate your SMS number with your Dopplr account and you can text message the same types of messages to Dopplr’s number.

Finally, they’ve got email working at trips@dopplr.com (wonder how many people will confuse plans@tripit.com with trips@dopplr.com - did they make plans@dopplr.com an alias?).

Interestingly, you can use the same kind of shorthand messages used for Twitter or SMS - “a trip to London July 28th to August 3rd” - or you can forward confirmation messages from booking services (which is how TripIt handles import). This is because Dopplr did not set out to parse all the complex formats used by different agencies, but took a simper approach, as explained by MattB:

There are an awful lot of ways to format a travel itinerary. When people asked us to extract trips from emails, we looked at our long history of e-tickets, confirmations and reservations, and scratched our heads.

Inspiration came in the shape of Apple’s last OS X release, Leopard, and an intriguing feature called “Data detectors“.

We realised that instead of creating a piece of code to decode every email format out there, we could look for patterns of dates and place names in the text (and later, other information too) and turn those into trips.

A happy side-effect of this approach is that as well as extracting information from automatic reservation emails, it works well with short text strings like “I’ll be in San Francisco from 3rd July to 7th July”. This means we can work with many hand-written emails, with Twitters, and with SMSes too.

Of course it won’t work with every variation under the sun (for example, it’s most reliable when an email contains just a return trip in a single hop), but we’ve had very satisfying results in our testing. And of course every email you send us will be added to our test suite so that our engine can get better and better over time.

In other words, rather than specifically targeting all the different potential formats, and parsing them in some structured way, Dopplr looks for some specific patterns in the text and tries to understand their meaning without knowing the format of the email in advance.

I wonder how different this is from what TripIt actually does behind the scenes - how much they plan for specific formats they know in advance - and how successful it will be “in the field.” For now it is enough to convince me to turn off my automated importing and give trips@dopplr.com a try on my next few confirm messages. Then, I can automate a rule in my email such that travel confirmations get auto-forwarded to both plans@tripit.com and trips@dopplr.com, and be sharing my travel plans painlessly.

Links for 2008-07-14 [ma.gnolia]

Tue, 07/15/2008 - 00:00

Open Source Microblogging

Mon, 07/14/2008 - 13:59

Many folks have been looking for an “Open Source Twitter” for about as long as Twitter itself has been popular.

Here’s a shortlist of those projects I’m aware of - please do let me know in the comments if there are others I’ve missed.

  • Sweetter 2.0 - an “open source and fun microbloging service . . . being develop[ed] by SUGUS (group of GNU users from the University of Seville).” Go here for code. Based on TurboGears, a python-based web application framework. Affero GPL (AGPL)
  • Jisko - Affero GPL (AGPL) licensed framework for microblogging, PHP 5 and MySQL. I had to use Google Translation to try to read the wiki, as I no hablo espanol.
  • Yonkly - written in ASP.NET by Emad Ibrahim. Code hasn’t yet been fully released but you can get an early version here. (License is not yet specified though it is described as “open source.”)
  • Twoorl - a GPL (3) implementation of a microblogging service in Erlang using ErlyWeb. Started (and entirely written?) by Yariv Sadan
  • Prologue - not really a microblogging platform per se, but a Wordpress Theme which could be used as a microblogging platform. (Note that the Prologue post itself kills Firefox 3 for me - caveat browser). Prologue is available under the GPL, as is Wordpress itself.
  • Laconica, which is the software which powers Identi.ca. Also Affero GPL (AGPL). This is perhaps the most robust, and is based on the Open Micro Blogging protocol. It also embeds creative commons licensing on the content people publish, which I think is great but others may have issues with.

Am I missing other open source twitter approaches?

Has anyone created a Movable Type theme which does microblogging?

Beyond Broadcast 2008, Fair Use Guide

Mon, 07/14/2008 - 10:42

As appropriate for a conference by that name, the folks at the Center for Public Media at American University have made available a ton of content from Beyond Broadcast available online.

Beyond Broadcast 2008

You can also subscribe to their video podcast in Miro, using this as a channel:

http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/main/podcast/

(If you don’t use Miro, just copy that url into your podcatcher of choice).

They’ve also just published the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, which provides guidance to video creators. The goal of the code is:

to clearly establish what constitutes fair use in online video, and to reach out to creators and copyright holders alike to create a common awareness of what kind of quoting is legal and illegal. This can only be accomplished through participation — by spreading the word to your users, you can help to protect this emerging culture.

It’s well worth reading through whether you’re a video creator or a copyright holder.

Mollom anti-spam

Mon, 07/07/2008 - 09:47

I’ve enabled Mollom-based anti-spam to this blog - please let me know if this causes any unexpected difficulty or errors.

Mollom will ask “suspicious” commenters to solve a CAPTCHA before allowing their comments to post.

If this proves too onerous I will go back to just using Askimet but I wanted to try it out.

Thanks to Dries, Benjamin, et al for running Mollom and to Matthias Vandermaesen for maintaining the WP-Mollom plugin.