island 94

Wrote this a while back and it’s been floating around my drafts pile. The story is a little light, but mostly I wrote it to remember all the arcane details my landlord’s handyman told me when he came to rehang our doors.

Monday morning; my girl was out of town on business. Her business. I was watching the Price is Right: dolts with nothing better to do with their time either. One knocked at my door.

I wiped the spent food refuse and old files towards the far end of my desk. The desk is a large one and sometimes that’s needed. Today it wasn’t.

I called it, her, in. …read more

I’m very proud to be officially launching Panlexicon.com: a unique thesaurus. Using intuitive “tag clouds” to represent synonyms, Panlexicon makes discovering the word you want quick, easy and explorational.

Panlexicon’s current functions allow you to:

• First, perform a lookup on a single word and receive a weighted cloud of synonyms.
• Second, view synonyms that overlap across multiple words either by entering the words manually, or clicking on words already in the cloud to further refine your search.

For example, performing a search on “cool” provides a wide variety of synonyms from “chilly”, to “unimpassioned”, to “groovy”. Refining the search using cool and nifty provides more refined synonyms.

By varying the size of the typeface, like tag clouds do, the most relevant terms pop out at you allowing you to quickly scan through large lists of words. Also, because the algorithm is a little fuzzy, you may run across related words that provide better context.

Panlexicon was developed jointly with Rebecca who originally proposed the project and did much of the research on thesauri and helped develop the word relevance algorithms. …read more

Last week I attended NTEN’s 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference and sat in on a wonderful session entitled Nonprofit Communications 2.0: Seven Steps to Transform Your Organization. Led by Lauren-Glenn Davitian of the CCTV Center for Media and Democracy, the session provided a strong framework for nonprofits to better communicate in an increasingly networked society.

I am also very lucky to serve with Lauren-Glenn on the editorial board of the Community Media Review.

The video itself is approximately 1 hour, 24 minutes long and worth every second, but I included my notes from the session below. …read more

I just got back from some extended travel in California where I met with some fellow AmeriCorps*VISTAs and, among other things, discussed how we could get our AmeriCorps social networking website growing even faster. Right now the site has over 300 registered users, which is pretty good for a six month old baby.

Most importantly, we’re working on stepping up our outreach. Unlike what some of the hype may tell you, social networking website don’t build themselves. If you build it, they won’t come, at least not if you don’t tell anyone about.

Outreach is key, and unfortunately it usually means a change of strategy. We’re building our networks online because it’s cheap real estate, but on the internet you can’t shout very far and most people are deaf. If you’re trying to get in front of someone’s face (or next to their ear), putting something on the internet is probably the worst way to go about it.

Physical objects are best, so I’m in the process of designing a postcard to mail out to AmeriCorps host organizations.

Also, because MeetAmeriCorps.com already has so many members across the country, we can have them lend a hand too in outreach activities. That’s always a benefit of working with AmeriCorps: we love to help.

I’ve had these notes kicking around my desktop for a few weeks and just got around to typing them up into a cohesive post.

I’ve an avid participant of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center’s Tuesday Luncheon Series. On February 27, author Matthew Pearl gave a great talk on copyright in the nineteenth century; I have reordered and summarized the content, though you can listen to the full audio. Through analysis of the writings and motivations of numerous 19th century authors, publishers and tradesman, Matthew Pearl carried an interesting theme: the intellectual property rhetoric of pirates and thievery was pure artifice until the rhetoric itself was codified as law, or still in some cases, not. …read more

When planning a dynamic website, using Open Source Software (OSS) can make a lot of sense. I think there is enough information out there about why OSS is the cat’s meow, so here are a few reasons I’ve hear from people that don’t want to use Open Source Software for their web development projects:

• “I don’t know anything about it” is a common refrain I hear from larger institutions. This usually translates as “I don’t know anyone that does it”. Oftentimes larger organizations will have established relationships—historical, contractual or personal—with proprietary developers.
• “All the examples are really awful” is a statement I have to agree with, but fortunately there is an explanation. Open Source CMS software like Drupal or Wordpress is free and relatively easy to use. Thus these systems have an enormous number of people using them; people with no design or development experience. Therefore there exists a very small signal-to-noise ratio of beautiful and usable websites to poorly designed or out-of-the-box examples. This means you’re much more likely to run across the latter.
• “I hear it’s insecure” is a common and legitimate concern whether you’re using open source software, buying a proprietary system, or building from the ground up. Unfortunately, the explanation for this common refrain is very similar to the aesthetic complaint: because the install base of these systems is so large, there exist many more instances of improper or unsafe configurations or failures to properly update software.

Click To Play

Drove downtown to eat lunch with an old high school friend. Then jammed my camera between the dash and the windshield and drove up I-5 to Swami’s, my old surfing spot in Encinitas.

Click To Play

I had a two hour layover at Dulles Airport. Before I left, I was showing off my camera to my boss . It shoots full frame (640 x 480) mpeg-4 video; that’s over an hour of video on a two gigabyte card. My boss told me to make lots of videos.

I shot and edited this entirely while waiting for my connecting flight. I waited till my final destination to upload it though.

The video quality is a little poor from multiple compressions. I edited it in iMovie and had to export and reimport the video in order to timelapse it to the speed I wanted.

I’m currently helping out a small group of Digital Storytellers in the process of designing and launching a new community website. We put the project out as a Request for Proposals (RFP) and are now working with a webdeveloper. As a webdeveloper myself, I’ve learned a lot about the process from the other side.

For all of my development projects I’ve worked with people I know or on projects in which I have some stake or significant interest. Because of this, my process has usually been us all sitting around the kitchen table drawing pen and paper workflows and mockups till the wee hours. I’ve never formally responded to an RFP and usually invest myself in mapping out the who, what and whys before even getting into the hows.

With that said, I was surprised to see that so many of the development proposals included a logo design process, usually as the first milestone. We are an ad-hoc group across several organizations without an existing identity, so I understand the need for a logo. Of course, most groups may already have an identity so the logo design itself may not be needed, but the thought and process that goes into it is. …read more