Blogging Roller

Latest Links #42

2009-03-14T16:00:02+00:00

Bad Times Spur Entrepreneurship, But There's a Catch - Boing Boing
"The day we have national health care is the day that we unleash a wave of entrepreneurship the likes of which we've never seen before."

Ben Hyde - The Misery of Opportunity: Barry Schwartz on Paradox of Choice
"those who maximize a job choice did in fact capture significantly more income, but at a cost."

Jon Stewart creams Jim Cramer on the Daily Show
"I wonder if Rick Santelli will show his face on Stewart's set? Highly unlikely"

Unit Structures: NY Times Botches SNS Privacy
"The conclusion that Stross draws - that adults are now going to massively change their disclosure behavior because of young people - is as flawed as his 'privacy as anachronism' point."

Rich Bowen: More twitter blah blah blah
"To tell me that I need to define a goal for Twitter is somewhat like telling someone: you need to define a goal for conversation, and then every conversation you have needs to be working towards that goal."

Geir's Blog - Dalibor's "Nanny State" Argument?
"I hope I'm just misunderstanding what Dalibor is trying to say"

PC Pro blog: I'm sorry but Dreamweaver is dying
"Web 2.0 isn't an empty slogan, it marks a fundamental break with the past and Dreamweaver lies on the wrong side of it."

Social software and multi-media whiz kid for hire

2007-09-26T08:44:00+00:00

Local multi-media and social software whiz kid Brian Russell is hanging out his shingle as an consultant. Best of luck, Brian. If you're looking to grow an online community or upgrade your organization to Web 2.0, check out his resume and portfolio.

Nice weekend and DCampSouth

2007-06-04T09:41:52+00:00

It was a nice weekend: I had dinner and went to a musical (The Full Monty at the RLT, quite good) with my parents, played some Heroscape with the kids, got a little work done and on Saturday I attended DCampSouth.

DCampSouth was a lot of fun. Thanks to Jackson Fox and friends for creating just the right environment for a barcamp experience. Here are a couple of notes on my experience.

The day started with a keynote by Thomas Vanderwal. He discussed how to design social software centered on the user, the person or the "person using" as he prefers to say since he dislikes the term user and it's negative connotations. I sensed that the term "developer" might have some negative connotation for Thomas and I felt tempted to ask him to refer to developers as people too, or "persons developing." Despite that developer vs. design guy tension, the talk as informative and full of good ideas. For example he stressed how important it is to provide a good experience for individual users and especially for the 1:1 connections between users since those are so valuable and nuanced. Too often, he said, developers and designers focus on the many and forget to focus on the one.

Vanderwal also talked about using tagging to help people navigate and self-organize corporate intranets. So I had to ask him what software folks are using for that. He mentioned an open source option Scuttle, DogEar from Lotus Connections and had high praise for ConnectBeam.

After the keynote, everybody gathered in the lobby to propose and pitch sessions. I was torn between Ruby Sinreich's Microformats session and Kim Ashley's Web behind the firewall session. I ended up in the Web 2.0 behind the firewall sessions where we discussed the difficulties of using blogs/wikis in a top-down control environment, the self-service nature of Web 2.0 tools and tagging for intranets, which everybody thought was a great idea -- especially the two guys in the room from the stealth startup ("Distruptive Monkey" I think they said).

Finally, I attended Jackson Fox's agile vs. web development session. I always thought web development was especially well suited to agile techniques, since you can deploy often and you get constant user feedback. Apparently, it's not that easy if you want to follow the various agile methodologies out there. I found Jackson's discussion of using agile methodologies at Lulu.com very interesting.

Overall DCampSouth was a nice way to spend a Saturday and thanks again to Jackson for that. We need more of the BarCamps around here.

Sun open sources Slynkr, Digg-like social bookmarking app

2007-05-21T08:05:41+00:00

Sun just open sourced an interesting Java webapp called Slynkr that supports a Digg-like form of social bookmarking and tagging. You can get the source and docs at slynkr.dev.java.net.

Slynkr was developed inside Sun by Jamey Wood and others. The small community that formed around it found it useful and fun and wanted to share it. Slynkr was first deployed externally (and experimentally) at slynkr.sunwarp.net and more recently it was put into production at www.sdnshare.com.

Slynkr has a nice feature set and UI, but under the covers it needs some work. It's only been tested with the Sun app server and Oracle, so it's probably got some "portability" issues. For better or worse, it's got a simple Servlet/JSP and JDBC architecture -- no frameworks or persistence layer yet. Jamey is interested in improving the architecture, making it work on multiple servers and databases and growing a community around the project. So if you're interested, grab the source, join the mailing-list and get in on the ground-floor of an cool new open source project.

Update: check out Jamey's post on Slynkr for some more background.