O (b LOG N)

Speaking at UCSD / CALIT2 on Collaboration

Long time no post. I’ve been very heads down with a new MindTouch.com site relaunch, building a sales team and cementing some great new partners and customers. Recently I spoke about collaboration and Free Knowledge at UCSD. Here’s the short snippet of my talk. This portion is about MindTouch Deki.

Enterprise 2.0 Implementation - Integrate Web 2.0 Services Into Your Enterprise

I’m not sure if I mentioned that I recently did some work with Jeremy Thomas and and Aaron Newman on a book for McGraw-Hill. I provided the technical editing. It was a lot of fun, informative, and I got paid. Heck yah! I guess this makes me an expert on Enterprise 2.0 or something.

I’m excited to see the book hit the stands and to read the final version. The book is really a fantastic resource that provides just the right mix of technical and high level information. It will prove highly useful to the IT and business reader alike.

Pre-order today and save 37%.

Social Glass » Why It’s Been Quiet

Aaron Newman and I have been working for several months on putting an Enterprise 2.0 implementation guide together. Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of MindTouch, has been doing the tech editing for us. And we’ll have another all-star, Jevon MacDonald, doing the forward for us. This is my first book, and let me tell you the process is extensive. Figures and illustrations have to follow a special naming pattern, chapters have to meet pre-determined page counts, and the tone of the book has to be consistent (which is tough when you have two authors writing it). Aaron and I edited each other’s chapters as they were completed, then sent them on to Aaron F. for more editing.

AppRising video interview, can you do this with Skype?

I was recently interviewed by Geoff Daily of AppRising. Geoff describes his blog as:

App-Rising.com covers the development and adoption of broadband applications, the deployment of and need for broadband networks, and the demands placed on policy to adapt to the revolutionary opportunities made possible by the Internet.

App-Rising.com is written by Geoff Daily, a DC-based technology journalist, broadband activist, marketing consultant, and Internet entrepreneur.

Unfortunately, I can’t embed the video here, but you can watch the video interview at Geoff’s blog. I start off a little slow, but I think the interview gets pretty interesting once I get comfortable with the format.

On the topic of the format. I think it’s fantastic. I’d like to do interviews, picture in picture, like this, but I would prefer to use Skype and then I would upload the finished product to Viddler. Viddler rules. Geoff is using SightSpeed, but to get all the features Geoff uses costs money and no one I know uses the application; so, I would have to ask them to install. Skype video would be so much better. Anyone know an easy way to do this? Tools?

Wiki.ObLogN.com, a Christmas wiki

As you might suspect, given my affinity for wikis, I’ve a personal wiki. This is running at the un-announced shared hosted site that I won’t mention by name, but I will provide a link to it. I plan to do a complete write-up about this at the work blog in the new year when we announce the service, but by then this gorgeous Christmas theme Damien built will be obsolete. I’m using the Pro version of this service, which gives me 10GB of storage, a custom domain, and custom HTML regions that allow me to injects ads, widgets, Google analytics, whatever into the site. It’s a killer service. I use it a lot for taking notes, sharing files, aggregating content in one view from all over and for keeping private communications. The Pro version is only $60/year. The free version is ad-free and limited to 100MB of storage, but I think we’re going to drop that down to 15MB of storage. I suspect this service will cut into some of the competitors’ market in the shared hosted/software as a service wiki offerings that are charging several thousands of dollars for a weaker feature set, user limitations, and quite frankly an inferior wiki. This is the best damn wiki you can find, you can do mashups, you can run your own ads, and you’ve got the richest enterprise wiki feature set available. For free…or $60/year.

We’ve intentionally kept this service quiet since the Holidays crept up on us while we were still working out some last minute kinks in the service. Announcing it now would be pointless because it would just get lost in the Holidays. Moreover, we’ve still got some minor kinks to get around and we’re already getting a lot of traffic to the site just through the word of mouth of the community. In fact, we’re all pleasantly surprised by the number of Pro registrations we’re getting a day. I’ve seen lots of churches, schools, Universities, orgs, and some businesses going Pro in the last few weeks.

This wiki service is a great extension to a blog because it provides a fully customizable, persistent and collaborative authoring tool. For example, let’s assume you blog about online marketing. Well, your blog is a tool for you to publish time sensitive information on the subject. However, frequently there is the need for a more persistent information architecture. Also, the wiki can provide a medium for building a community around your blog by which you allow your audience to participate in the conversation in a more meaningful way than allowed by comments. It’s important to note that this particular service also allows you to easily and automatically aggregate content from all over the Internet on particular topics. Moreover, you can easily create rich application mashups to serve as interactive extensions to your blog posts. These can include interactive maps, charts, graphs, forms, countless widgets, flickr, news feeds, video, search tools, and more… I’m certain it will soon be the case that all bloggers with a community they’re looking to engage will have a wiki extension to their blog sites to facilitate a richer engagement with their audience and to provide persistent and more robust information sharing.

Map my vacation, please?

If someone wants to make a useful “Web 2.0″ application I’ve got a cool idea for you. Make it really easy for me to map my trip route, then with drag-and-drop ease place my Flickr photos on the map, add notes, and save the map in a re-usable format (KML, I guess). As a ‘++’ make it easy for me to review stuff along the way. Oh, and make each component in decomposable, clean re-usable formats (atom, kml, hReview, etc).

I just got home from a week long vacation with Ashby and Tara. Of course, we took photos the whole time. Every day I shot a dozen or so photos to Flickr and Facebook from my iPhone. I was moblogging so much in fact that Brett sent me this hilarious plea for assistance in makinig my moblogging less noisy in Facebook. He said he loved me, but I had turned his Facebook into the Fulkersonbook. Check out Brett’s Facebook news view:

OMFG, ridiculous. I thought Facebook provided a digest of these things! Apparently adjusting the Notes feed slider in facebook doesn’t effect the mobile notes. Facebook needs to fix this. Anyway, I felt like a spammer. I’m shocked no one else has complained. I suspect you’ve all just blacklisted me. Well, I couldn’t figure out a way to prevent my moblogging from being so noisy so I cut back on moblogging to facebook and now I shoot most of my photos to Flickr only. Back to my cool idea.

Prior to leaving for my vacation I mapped the route. Along the route I shot photos using my digital camera and my iPhone. The latter, as mentioned, I sent directly to Flickr and Facebook with the occasional note. The bulk of the photos didn’t get uploaded until I got home. Upon my return I wanted to blog about the trip and I thought a cool thing would be to provide a map with:

• trip route
• replete with geotagged photos
• , notes
• and maybe even some reviews.

We packed groceries and didn’t eat out much, but it would be cool if I had provided the occasional hReview of the few restaurants we did stop in as well as of the campground we split from in favor of a crappy motel room that had a great view in Morro Bay. If it were easy to generate hReviews I would do it more often. Especially if I could do it on the spot.

One could fulfill my dream by mashing a few services from different providers. Google Mapes, Flickr, Big Tribe… By providing some connective tissue it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with something really useful. All weekend I’ve scoured the Internet for an easy way to do this and every service I’ve found either doesn’t meet the aforementioned requirements or is too time consuming. What I found was that Greasemonkey scripts can make geotagging photos easier, but I can not find a way to easily map photos, with notes, and route. I think I found a way to do this by paying, but this service was borderline unusable, and I’m still not clear how easy it was to map routes, or if I could. I also had to re-upload my photos instead of using those on Flickr. Lame. Also, there was a fee and I’m not going to pay until I know it works. Then I might pay Flickr prices. Other alternatives didn’t allow me to display only my stuff and again routes were an issue. The only option that did allow me to do everything I wanted, I think, was such a pain the ass I’m not going to do it. It involved Greasemonkey scripts, Google Earth, and some serious hackery. I don’t have time for that!

Optimally I would have a service that I could use to map my trip. While traveling I could map photos based on my location. Use a mobile app for creating reviews along the way; otherwise I probably won’t review. And then I could polish it all off with additional photos when I get home. This would be killer, right?

Dopplr or some of these other travel services should implement this. I would then actually want to use the service. Currently I can’t possibly muster the time or energy to waste. Mind you, I’m the target audience for services like this being I typically travel a couple times a month for work.

Oh, here’s my vacation photos. I suspect this blog post is the closest I’m going to come to realizing my dream of a digital vacation scrap book with a map interface.

Ted:Seadragon and PhotoSynth

Seadragon promises:

If this sounds a little vague, consider the following four “promises” of Seadragon:

1. Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects.
2. Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.
3. Transitions are smooth as butter.
4. Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.

You might already know of PhotoSynth. Perhaps prior to it being called PhotoSynth. PhotoSynth promises to change how we share photos and virtually visit places. Seeing is believing.

If you don’t see the video of the demo above go to the Ted page

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Stunning. Another spectacular technology that Microsoft will likely never allow the public to benefit from. Meanwhile, you have Google Gears released for the world to Beta.

Useful links:

• PhotoSynth roots
• PhotoSynth
• Seadragon