Eric Martindale

RPGChat is one of the other large roleplaying forums out there, and they've been around since about May, 2001. Since then, RPGChat has gone through many evolutions, and has expanded rapidly - they started with a forum, grew into a decent sized roleplaying chat, and finally removed the chat and went back to forums.

You'll immediately notice the large number of forums, which for most boards isn't an issue. In today's roleplaying world, RPGChat's index fits right in.

They've got four basic navigation options at the top of the page, which are images instead of text, which isn't very good for SEO. The four menu options are Home, Forums, Chat, and Rules. I gave each of them a shot, but it looks like only the "Home" and "Rules" link work.

I'm going to take a look at their code, because using images for links isn't horrible if you specify the right attributes. Let's have a glance:

<a href="http://forums.rpgchat.com/index.php"> <img src="header/but_home.jpg" border="0"> </a>

Yikes! Not only does the anchor not have a title attribute, but the image doesn't have an alt attribute! Search engines won't be able to understand the context of these links, and the flow of link juice to the two working links won't be very beneficial.

I participated on these forums for a few months as the username Alighieri, for that period, I became the single most active user in their welcome forum. I posted in several other topics, but got pretty frustrated with the limitation on the length of a post (20,000 characters).

When attempting to post a profile for one of my characters, I was immediately snubbed by the limitation. This makes well-researched posts difficult to make, specifically with the citations that must be put in place for accurate references. Ultimately, I was forced to cut out portions of my character's history to fit it into the post.

After posting for a few weeks nonstop in the Welcome Forum, I headed off to the The Arena area, where turn-based fighting is largely popular. I opened a topic with a list of the top turn based fighters, placed into a neat little image and posted right into the topic. It took a few days to get any response at all, (save for a few people who contacted me over AIM) and when I did get a response, I logged in to RPGChat to find that I had been banned for "advertising on multiple occasions", much to my surprise.

However, while my visit was cut short, I met some good friends, and had some great discussions. Unfortunately, the forum does not allow any links to external sites of any kind, and also does not allow signatures, which makes it very difficult to spread the word about the topics you start there. This isn't very good for encouraging member interaction, and makes it very difficult for momentum of any sort to be gained within the community.

After speaking with someone who had messaged me on AIM prior to my banning, I confirmed my worst fears - RPGChat is a closed community, and is not very open to outside communities or positive interaction with those communities. This is the number one concern mentioned to me about RPGChat and their future, and there is ongoing fear of the community continuing to stagnate without any growth other than direct referral.

I sent a request via the site's contact form, as listed at the bottom every page, which merely opened a new email to their support address, forums@rpgchat.com - I sent a couple questions in my email, and I identified who I was, but I haven't yet received a response. It'd be great if we could get an interview with an admin from RPGChat on the history of the site!

In terms of organic visitors, a search for pages on RPGChat has about 16,200 results. When digging through the pages, I noticed that only 477 pages were in the primary index, with the remainder in the supplemental index. That's scary!

Let's take a look at their search results:

As you can see from the above search, we can confirm that there is some duplicate content problems. However, from what we've seen - most of RPGChat's traffic is a result of direct referral. We can identify with the importance of defensible traffic, but organic traffic is also a high-quality method of driving laser-targeted traffic to your site, and it looks like RPGChat is seriously missing out on this.

RPGChat has a relatively active forum; 63,708 threads, 1,925,709 posts, and 59,352 "active" members. While that's only an average of about 30 posts per thread and only about 32 posts per user, they do have some great quality and style elements in their posts that you simply don't see in many other places in roleplaying forums these days. I think it would be a great move for them to deactivate a lot of their older and inactive members, and send out reminders to these users to come back and join in on the fun.

It also seemed like a consensus that the single best area on RPGChat was the Clans & Guilds forum, which most users simply called "C/G" for short. It looks like most other forums' version of a multiverse, where roleplay is freeform, and most action is player-driven with rules being defined by the status quo.

Lack of availability aside, RPGChat leaves a pretty strong impression, and if you're careful to follow their 500 word list of rules, you can likely make some friends and enjoy some great high-quality roleplay. The administration needs to do some overhauling if they're going to keep the community healthy, but for the time being - RPGChat makes for a great roleplaying destination.

All About Forensic Psychology

New video to promote The All About Forensic Psychology website. I originally built the the website as a student resource for an undergraduate course in forensic psychology I wrote and delivered.

Highlights on the website include:

A detailed and clear account of what forensic psychology actually is. Important because of the way the subject has been distorted, sensationalised and inaccurately presented in books, films and on TV. See following link.

http://www.all-about-forensic-psychology.com/what-is-forensic-psychology.html

A series of information pages on criminal profiling. A fascinating subject to learn about in iteslf but also important to know of its place within forensic psychology; for example is criminal profiling a realistic career goal? See following link.

http://www.all-about-forensic-psychology.com/fbi-profiler.html

The Forensic Psychology Degree Directory. A great resource for anybody thinking about studying forensic psychology. See following link.

http://www.all-about-forensic-psychology.com/forensic-psychology-degree.html

Free full-text articles. A wonderful collection of publications including a special "Inside the Criminal Mind" collection showcasing all the major articles written by members of the Behavioral Science Units, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, at the FBI Academy. See following link.

http://www.all-about-forensic-psychology.com/forensic-psychology-ebook.html

I really hope that you find all the information and resources on the All About Forensic Psychology website useful and engaging.

All the best

David

http://www.all-about-forensic-psychology.com/

All About Forensic Psychology

New video to promote The All About Forensic Psychology website. I originally built the the website as a student resource for an undergraduate course in forensic psychology I wrote and delivered.

Highlights on the website include:

A detailed and clear account of what forensic psychology actually is. Important because of the way the subject has been distorted, sensationalised and inaccurately presented in books, films and on TV. See following link.

http://www.all-about-forensic-psychology.com/what-is-forensic-psychology.html

A series of information pages on criminal profiling. A fascinating subject to learn about in iteslf but also important to know of its place within forensic psychology; for example is criminal profiling a realistic career goal? See following link.

http://www.all-about-forensic-psychology.com/fbi-profiler.html

The Forensic Psychology Degree Directory. A great resource for anybody thinking about studying forensic psychology. See following link.

http://www.all-about-forensic-psychology.com/forensic-psychology-degree.html

Free full-text articles. A wonderful collection of publications including a special "Inside the Criminal Mind" collection showcasing all the major articles written by members of the Behavioral Science Units, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, at the FBI Academy. See following link.

http://www.all-about-forensic-psychology.com/forensic-psychology-ebook.html

I really hope that you find all the information and resources on the All About Forensic Psychology website useful and engaging.

All the best

David

http://www.all-about-forensic-psychology.com/

Google Reader + Disqus would be a better Google+ than Google+

I'm not feeling Google+. I get that people are excited about high level of "engagement" and stuff, but to me it looks like something that is trying to solve too many problems at once. Or combine things that don't need to be combined.

My stream on Google+ looks something like this: link post, link post, lolcatz, lolcatz, long 3-page-down post by +Robert Scoble , lolcatz, link post, long post, etc. It's kind of like twitter, but it's not glanceable. I can have twitter on my secondary monitor and glance at the timeline every few minutes and get back to what I was doing if I don't see anything interesting in a number of tweets that fits on the screen. With G+ the number of posts to glance at is about 1. So you have to scroll to check what's going on - no go, imho.

And to be something like a social blogging platform it lacks formatting, flexibility, etc. And most importantly it requires you to make a move which is not what most people are willing to decide to do easily.

On the other hand, I like that you can read the stream and comment right away. Unlike in Google Reader (or any other RSS reader) where you have to click through to the site to comment/read comments. And quite a lot of the blogs already use a global social commenting platform - Disqus.

So if there was a GReader-like RSS reader combined with inline Disqus comments it would have everything I like about Google+ without all the other stuff that looks like a big indecisive pile of everything to me.

Google Reader + Disqus would be a better Google+ than Google+

I'm not feeling Google+. I get that people are excited about high level of "engagement" and stuff, but to me it looks like something that is trying to solve too many problems at once. Or combine things that don't need to be combined.

My stream on Google+ looks something like this: link post, link post, lolcatz, lolcatz, long 3-page-down post by +Robert Scoble , lolcatz, link post, long post, etc. It's kind of like twitter, but it's not glanceable. I can have twitter on my secondary monitor and glance at the timeline every few minutes and get back to what I was doing if I don't see anything interesting in a number of tweets that fits on the screen. With G+ the number of posts to glance at is about 1. So you have to scroll to check what's going on - no go, imho.

And to be something like a social blogging platform it lacks formatting, flexibility, etc. And most importantly it requires you to make a move which is not what most people are willing to decide to do easily.

On the other hand, I like that you can read the stream and comment right away. Unlike in Google Reader (or any other RSS reader) where you have to click through to the site to comment/read comments. And quite a lot of the blogs already use a global social commenting platform - Disqus.

So if there was a GReader-like RSS reader combined with inline Disqus comments it would have everything I like about Google+ without all the other stuff that looks like a big indecisive pile of everything to me.

Google Reader + Disqus would be a better Google+ than Google+

I'm not feeling Google+. I get that people are excited about high level of "engagement" and stuff, but to me it looks like something that is trying to solve too many problems at once. Or combine things that don't need to be combined.

My stream on Google+ looks something like this: link post, link post, lolcatz, lolcatz, long 3-page-down post by +Robert Scoble , lolcatz, link post, long post, etc. It's kind of like twitter, but it's not glanceable. I can have twitter on my secondary monitor and glance at the timeline every few minutes and get back to what I was doing if I don't see anything interesting in a number of tweets that fits on the screen. With G+ the number of posts to glance at is about 1. So you have to scroll to check what's going on - no go, imho.

And to be something like a social blogging platform it lacks formatting, flexibility, etc. And most importantly it requires you to make a move which is not what most people are willing to decide to do easily.

On the other hand, I like that you can read the stream and comment right away. Unlike in Google Reader (or any other RSS reader) where you have to click through to the site to comment/read comments. And quite a lot of the blogs already use a global social commenting platform - Disqus.

So if there was a GReader-like RSS reader combined with inline Disqus comments it would have everything I like about Google+ without all the other stuff that looks like a big indecisive pile of everything to me.

Google Reader + Disqus would be a better Google+ than Google+

I'm not feeling Google+. I get that people are excited about high level of "engagement" and stuff, but to me it looks like something that is trying to solve too many problems at once. Or combine things that don't need to be combined.

My stream on Google+ looks something like this: link post, link post, lolcatz, lolcatz, long 3-page-down post by +Robert Scoble , lolcatz, link post, long post, etc. It's kind of like twitter, but it's not glanceable. I can have twitter on my secondary monitor and glance at the timeline every few minutes and get back to what I was doing if I don't see anything interesting in a number of tweets that fits on the screen. With G+ the number of posts to glance at is about 1. So you have to scroll to check what's going on - no go, imho.

And to be something like a social blogging platform it lacks formatting, flexibility, etc. And most importantly it requires you to make a move which is not what most people are willing to decide to do easily.

On the other hand, I like that you can read the stream and comment right away. Unlike in Google Reader (or any other RSS reader) where you have to click through to the site to comment/read comments. And quite a lot of the blogs already use a global social commenting platform - Disqus.

So if there was a GReader-like RSS reader combined with inline Disqus comments it would have everything I like about Google+ without all the other stuff that looks like a big indecisive pile of everything to me.

There's been a lot of active discussion about the state of AOL's directory project, DMOZ. There have been many attempts to unseat the directory project from its position as the most authoritative listing resource, such as the Yahoo Directory. Many of these attempts have fallen by the wayside, as Rand Fiskin points out, but none have remained more controversial than DMOZ. More recently, Chris Crum's post on WebProNews about his lack of respect for DMOZ has stirred up a hornet's nest of DMOZ criticism, including a particular post claiming DMOZ is a waste of time.

I forwarded a lot of this on to Philip Nicolcev, known by username as "frug", who is the editor of several roleplay-oriented categories on DMOZ. He responded to me directly with a highly insightful email, and I was fortunate enough to receive his permission to share its contents.

I've been editing the pbp category at DMOZ for what... 4 years now? About that. This article is a big whiny complaint which misses the mark. They are both correct and sadly mistaken. Yes, dmoz is outdated and yes, it fails because of attitude problems, but not silly allegations of 'corruption' or people who are bitter because they didn't get listed. We don't list everything, I don't list even half of the submissions I get, and anyone who has been an administrator or an editor for a similar type of project knows better than to take these kinds of complaints seriously. One thing they say is definitely correct: Apply once carefully following their rules if you wish and then, as Will suggested, forget about them.

This is exactly the approach that should be modeled for any directory, regardless of its state or condition. When you are submitting a link to a directory, you are being offered the privilege to be listed as a resource by the owners and management of that directory. They are not obligated to list your link, let alone review it in a timely fashion--but this would be genuinely appreciated and would reflect on the directory's position as a "good" resource.

DMOZ is the primary source for Google's Directory, and you must respect the opinion of such a large and successful company. It's obvious that the idea behind an open directory like DMOZ is good, but where they fail is in execution. More on that later.

He continues:

That is what you should do. Apply once and forget about it, don't claim anybody is corrupt because whether you believe my opinion or not, there's no corruption. Nobody cares enough about dmoz anymore for it to be valuable for extortion. Don't be ridiculous. Furthermore if you were to speak to some of the senior editors you'd discover that they are pretty damn uptight, even obsessive. The problems with dmoz are, in my opinion, twofold. First off, you have the dated trashy look of the website which is a relic of the 1990's. It's not user friendly, it doesn't entice anyone to go browsing, and it hasn't adapted or added features that would help people understand the structure of the directory or find what they're looking for. The editor forums still use phpBB2, and you should see the editing panel. You wouldn't believe how dated this stuff is. Frankly it has needed an overhaul for years now.

I largely agree with him. The phpBB team deprecated the phpBB2 branch at the beginning of this year, ending support for the outdated platform. AOL would do well to do a complete overhaul of the site's design now that "Web 2.0" has come and gone (and I could reference posts all day on that) - and AOL has completely missed their opportunity to latch on and ride the wave.

Philip finishes his correspondance with the frightening truth that has been plaguing many post-Web2.0 sites and services:

The second problem, attitude, is partially the cause of the first problem. It's a stagnant atmosphere where nothing gets done and nobody gets listened to. They would rather leave a directory as a cluttered mess of garbage than risk breaking its structure by overhauling it. Fixing my category took me about two years before I had approval to restructure it, and I'm in a small niche category nobody pays much attention to. Since becoming an editor I have deleted about 60% of the outdated links listed. Had I not joined, they'd still be there cluttering things up with linkspam geocities pages from 10 years ago. So yeah, dmoz is failing, but not because of corruption or because some guy didn't get what he wanted. And, honestly, if the author of this article was applying to dmoz just to 'test how fair it was' then I'm glad they rejected him. Somehow they made the right decision because he's wasting their time.

And that's the exact problem - the DMOZ community has completely stagnated, which has resulted in the puddle of goop that the directory has become. In my personal opinion, I think that AOL could do a lot better job at community management (all reputation management aside) by setting up a more rigid structure of responsibility. The editors need to be held responsible for a timely review specified by their superiors, and there needs to be cross-checking of the editor's work by other qualified editors.

Is this another example of AOL's purchases being mismanaged and ultimately being forgotten, such as what many people claim is the case with ex-Nullsoft product WinAmp? Perhaps, but I think that remains to be seen. After all, even our favored Google took a questionable amount of time to convert phone-consolidation service GrandCentral to the new Google Voice after its 2007 acquisition. DMOZ was in fact originally a Netscape project, which then-strong AOL acquired in 1998. Since that acquisition, little has changed.

All said and done, DMOZ needs some love if it's going to survive as anything more than a relic of trust and authority in the Web 2.0 bubble. As Philip points out, it has both good and bad traits and deserves further attention, but it needs to be attention in (and from) the right direction. The questions remain; where has AOL been? What can be done about the editors (or lack thereof)? How can DMOZ be improved?

I just invested in $500 worth of targeted advertising for GWing Roleplay. So, what's the total impact upon my wallet?

A grand $5 in activation fees.

Big shoutouts to Computers.net for pointing this out. I was thinking of organizing a group of friends to throw multiple instances of these offers into advertising for GWing, but I realized that it would be difficult to target the advertising properly, as I found it rather complicated to create my own template of keywords and negative keywords to match the optimal result for what we desire in our community. If you sign up for these offers, be sure to carefully monitor your expenses! The billing is most likely set to recurring, and will continue to charge your credit card after your account balance has been used.

Alternately, I woke this morning to find DoesMyGeek's New Podcast, and was greeted by a shoutout and a link over the air to yours truly, and GWing Roleplay. What an amazing podcast, talking about the classic combination, roleplay and beer. Here's to you guys. ;)

One more - I just got linked to Michael Robertson's Evaluation of a College Degree, and found the article particularly interesting in this time. And now: back to work.

Yep, this April 22nd, 2008 is my birthday (credit to the intro goes to sXePhil), and I'm turning 21 today. However, due to the upcoming MMA fight that I've got at Dorton Arena on April 26th, all mandatory 21st birthday celebrations will be postponed until after the fight.

For those of you who aren't already aware, you can pick up tickets at Carolina Fight Promotions. I'm going to be fighting Andy Teague, a well-versed jiujitsu competitor, and the match is scheduled for three rounds at 3 minutes each.

So, today being my birthday--and as such, I've received tons and tons of birthday wishes--I thought I'd give some shoutouts to everyone who has done so. It's pretty simple, all you've got to do is write a "happy birthday" post somewhere on the web, link to me, and then show me the page you want me to link back to.

My twitter friends have had an early start, and it's already the afternoon - don't procrastinate, I'm ending this at midnight tonight!

Thank you guys for the happy birthday wishes! Martin Bowling Michelle Reno Brian Mark Rae Hoffman Dave Rohrer Alex Simpson Heather Sexy SEO SEOcom

I'm a pretty heavy feedreader, with about 164 subscriptions. Over the last 30 days, I've read 8,032 items, starred 9 items, shared 20 items, and emailed 2 items. Of course... I really enjoy a good number of things that I read - and I want to share these items with everyone.

Then there's the question about content-theft. Some bloggers like to take RSS feeds and republish them on their own site, earning revenue from the content, and there's a huge backlash from the original authors.

What I'd like to do is publish my shared items feed here on my blog, without changing anything in the original article. I'll have to play around with tagging and the like, and I'll have to decide on what plugin to use exactly. However, will I get any backlash from the authors? Is this appropriate?

(There's supposed to be a list of shared items here... but apparently it isn't working.)

Now, keep in mind that each of them would most likely get their own post, with all of the original links intact. I'd be pulling the RSS feed from my Google Reader account (if I could link to my profile, that'd be great - then people could even "Add Eric as a Friend" and subscribe to my shared items. Alas - Google doesn't make it that easy), and letting people read and see it here.

What do you think? Blog authors who I frequently share from, I'd really appreciate your opinion, or even suggestions on alternatives. Google Trends says my most shared items are from Lifehacker (a getting things done blog) - so YOUR comments would be especially helpful. ;) Let me know!

So, Firefox allows you to open favorites in a sidebar - which is great for things like FriendFeed, Google Talk, Twitter, or even Facebook chat. It lets you use a good web service as what essentially becomes an extension for your browser, so you can browse your regular pages while still participating in the conversation.

I recently switched over to the social browser, Flock - with great success and elation. Flock is built from the Firefox codebase, but they are massively more social in what the browser does - drag and drop images, open media feeds, view your friends in their People and Places sidebar, among many other really cool things.

Then there's Friendfeed - which is a web service that recently took off (but I must say, I've been using long before the hype. :D) because it allows you to combine all of your social media connections (Web 2.5, if you will) and even cross-post responses between them (closer to Web 3.0, minus filtering and duplicate content issues...). After putting in a request to Flock's develpment team to start moving in this direction, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

When you bookmark something in Firefox, you can open the properties of the bookmark and hit a checkbox, "Open this link in the sidebar." However, this option is not available in Flock (by default). So let's open our trusty about:config:

Do a filter on "sidebar", and you'll find a value called "flock.favorites.loadPageInSidebar" - which is set to false by default. Right click this value, and click "toggle".

Bingo. Now you will have the checkbox on all your bookmarks that will allow you to open links in your sidebar!

Tags: flock, browser, web, sidebar, friendfeed, social media

As I have mentioned before, I'm in a love affair with Chyrp, which is an up-and-coming platform meant to replace WordPress and work a bit like Tumblr, as a microblogging and lifestreaming service.

One of Chyrp's major draws for me is the Aggregator module, which is included in Chryp 2.0 by default. Mike Crittenden of MergeWeb Fame has covered the use of Chyrp's Aggregator previously, but I figured I'd dive in a bit further and help others in configuring their feeds.

You may also be familiar with StackOverflow, a crowd-sourcing social-media head-bashing awesome site that enables users to ask tech-related questions and get awesome community-approved answers. The same group runs several other sites using the same model, including SuperUser and ServerFault, and they are even releasing their codebase as free and open source as the <a href="http://stackexchange.com/>StackExchange project.

But, onward into the goodies: syndicating your activity on StackOverflow (and the other sites) using Chryp.

The first you'll need is your Activity Feed. To acquire this, visit the "Recent" tab of your user profile and look in the bottom right hand corner: you'll see a link to "user recent activity feed". This is the URL for your activity feed, grab that and let's move on to Chyrp.

In Chyrp, you'll want to add a new aggregate in your Admin panel. Paste your Activity Feed into the "Source URL" box, then configure the remaining settings as follows:

Feather: Link Post Attributes: name: "feed[title]" source: "feed[id]" description: "feed[description]"

Now, assign a "Name" and make sure the correct Author is selected, and click "Update". You're all done! You'll see new content from your feed the next time your aggregates update.

Questions? Comments? Lemme have 'em.

I often get asked for my Skype address, sometimes in relation to business or casual conversation. I politely decline with some degree of hand-waving about my reasons, and suggest an alternative form of communication (typically either Google Talk or Google Hangouts, depending on the context—both are built right in to Gmail!). I'd like to outline some of the reasons why I've made the decision to avoid Skype, primarily so I have something to link to when someone asks me about it.

First and foremost, we don't really know what Skype actually does. The binary (the actual program you run on your computer) is obfuscated, so attempts at disassembling it [PDF] to verify some of its strange behavior and the information it is transmitting have so far come up with very little. This is an issue, because Skype produces encrypted traffic even when you are not actively using Skype. This means we can only speculate on what information Skype is collecting about you after you've so graciously chosen to install it, and perhaps more importantly who it is sending that information to.

Quoting Salman Baset:

When a Skype client is not in a call and is running on a machine with public IP address, it has on the average 4-8 active TCP connections and atleast one UDP connection.

While connecting to external IP addresses is normal for a server/client architecture and necessary for receiving notifications, the volume of traffic and number of connections is concerning, considering the compounding issues between Skype's peer-to-peer architecture [PDF] and the "reasonable level of detection accuracy" in snooping on voice calls in Skype [PDF], despite the [purportedly] encrypted nature of the Skype protocol.

Speaking in general terms, Skype is "black box" software which has undergone no public review despite very concerning observed behavior. When new Skype malware (like Skype IMBot, of which an analysis is available, or the more recent Skype account hijacking) is released, there are very few options to protect ourselves if we've got Skype installed. On Linux, tools like AppArmor and TOMOYO exist, but without the ability to easily view the source and understand the attack (per perhaps even fix it proactively, before it occurs) we are at the mercy of Skype's new maintainers to provide a timely resolution in a reactive approach.

If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

In conclusion, while Skype may be convenient, it presents a series of questions that must be asked and implications to be considered before choosing it over other chat, VoIP, and video chat solutions. I can only hope that more people consider these things before doing so.

Following suit with the likes of Tim Bray and Eric Meyer, I figured I'd throw together my browser's letter sweep tonight.

• [A]dmin Site. Yeah, I guess I would be visiting the admin panel for this. Quite frequently.
• Mirascape's [B]log. An infrequent haunt of mine, but fairly obvious.
• [C]MON. Cluster Monitor for MySQL Cluster, something I almost always have open.
• Google [D]ocs. This one is painfully obvious, I use Google Docs extensively.
• [E]ricMartindale.com. Okay, that's a gimme. Does this make me egocentric?
• [F]acebook. I'm actually fairly ashamed of this one. Why can't I have a cool F site? sadface
• [G]mail. Three accounts linked using Google's Multiple Sign-in. Open [almost] all day.
• [H]ighcharts JS. A pretty kick-ass Javascript library for generating charts on the clientside.
• [I]nternal Discussion. A site for communication with my team. :)
• [J]Query Mobile Demo, 1.0 alpha 3. I've been spending a lot of time toying with jQuery Mobile, seeing where it's going compared to Sencha Touch.
• [K]r.github.com. Keith Rarick's GitHub redirect. Total ass-kicker.
• [L]inkedIn. Pretty straightforward, between hiring for our team at @Mirascape and the travel to and from various conferences and Meetups lately.
• [M]irascape. The augmented reality platform I'm responsible for.
• [N]oxBot. A nice PHP-powered IRC bot with various plugins. A bit out of date, but very powerful. Been using it for a couple things lately.
• [O]K, QR Me!. A QR Code-generating link shortener I built.
• [P]ostmark. Best Email delivery service I've used. Nice RESTful API, flat rate for emails sent.
• [Q]uora. These guys nail Q&A, and they're doing it pretty well. Check out all their buzz, too. But for some reason, I just don't stick.
• Google [R]eader. “From your 1,040 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 21,549 items, clicked 274 items, starred 853 items, shared 37 items, and emailed 8 items.” -- </stats>
• [S]erver Stats for Mirascape. Powered by Munin, it's how I keep track of the status and metrics of all my servers.
• [T]witter. Not surprising. I love their webapp for my personal use, but own and manage at least five accounts using SplitTweet.
• [U]serVoice. Pretty sweet tool I use for giving the communities I manage a good way to build a consensus on what they desire most. Examples I run: for RolePlayGateway, and EVE UserVoice for EVE Online.
• Google [V]oice. Allows me to use SMS from my computer, read (as opposed to listen to) voicemail. Great tool. If only it supported MMS.
• [W]achovia. One of the places I do banking.
• [X]DA Developers. An indisposable resource for getting rid of carrier-installed crap and running my own choice of software on the hardware I purchased!
• [Y]ouTube. Another big namer. No surprise.
• [Z]ecco. Where I trade most of my public stocks. :)

Surprisingly populist, and there's a lot of Google-owned properties in there. I'm also using Chromium, so I think it prefers the roots of the sites I visit instead of searching through my history for individual pages.

2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io and para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth.  This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.

Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at +Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.

Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4].  As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].

Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as +Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment.  It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.

After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO +Brian Marks.  Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry.  My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!

Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways.  Now let's go make the world a better place.

[1]: One of which, DigaForce, was just acquired: http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2014/01/02/apex-tech-firm-strategic-link-partners.html?page=all — congratulations to +Anthony Pompliano and +Matthew Cotter!
[2]: Jeff is one of the core developers of Bitcoin and a former +Red Hat team member from Raleigh.  How's that for the Triangle Company Family tree, +Derrick Minor?!
[3]: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/11/29/which-currency-is-up-over-9000-this-year-and-sells-for-almost-as-much-as-an-ounce-of-gold/
[4]: http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-can-be-the-new-western-union-2013-12
[5]: You might recall that in March of 2013, the Cypriot government restricted withdrawals and then utilized citizens' bank accounts directly to bail out their banking system, resulting in a surge in Bitcoin prices as individuals fled the fiat currency: http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/28/investing/bitcoin-cyprus/
[6]: Here's an interview I did while CTO of Coursefork with +Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com that explains the vision: http://opensource.com/education/13/9/coursefork-education-tool
[7]: As a cofounder and CTO at WebAssign for 13 years, Brian took the education company from zero to over $30M in yearly revenue before becoming my co-founder at Coursefork.

Onward, and Ever Upward
2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io and para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth.  This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.

Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at +Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.

Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4].  As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].

Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as +Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment.  It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.

After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO +Brian Marks.  Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry.  My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!

Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways.  Now let's go make the world a better place.

[1]: One of which, DigaForce, was just acquired: http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2014/01/02/apex-tech-firm-strategic-link-partners.html?page=all — congratulations to +Anthony Pompliano and +Matthew Cotter!
[2]: Jeff is one of the core developers of Bitcoin and a former +Red Hat team member from Raleigh.  How's that for the Triangle Company Family tree, +Derrick Minor?!
[3]: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/11/29/which-currency-is-up-over-9000-this-year-and-sells-for-almost-as-much-as-an-ounce-of-gold/
[4]: http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-can-be-the-new-western-union-2013-12
[5]: You might recall that in March of 2013, the Cypriot government restricted withdrawals and then utilized citizens' bank accounts directly to bail out their banking system, resulting in a surge in Bitcoin prices as individuals fled the fiat currency: http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/28/investing/bitcoin-cyprus/
[6]: Here's an interview I did while CTO of Coursefork with +Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com that explains the vision: http://opensource.com/education/13/9/coursefork-education-tool
[7]: As a cofounder and CTO at WebAssign for 13 years, Brian took the education company from zero to over $30M in yearly revenue before becoming my co-founder at Coursefork.

Onward, and Ever Upward
2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io and para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth.  This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.

Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at +Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.

Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4].  As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].

Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as +Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment.  It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.

After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO +Brian Marks.  Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry.  My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!

Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways.  Now let's go make the world a better place.

[1]: One of which, DigaForce, was just acquired: http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2014/01/02/apex-tech-firm-strategic-link-partners.html?page=all — congratulations to +Anthony Pompliano and +Matthew Cotter!
[2]: Jeff is one of the core developers of Bitcoin and a former +Red Hat team member from Raleigh.  How's that for the Triangle Company Family tree, +Derrick Minor?!
[3]: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/11/29/which-currency-is-up-over-9000-this-year-and-sells-for-almost-as-much-as-an-ounce-of-gold/
[4]: http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-can-be-the-new-western-union-2013-12
[5]: You might recall that in March of 2013, the Cypriot government restricted withdrawals and then utilized citizens' bank accounts directly to bail out their banking system, resulting in a surge in Bitcoin prices as individuals fled the fiat currency: http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/28/investing/bitcoin-cyprus/
[6]: Here's an interview I did while CTO of Coursefork with +Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com that explains the vision: http://opensource.com/education/13/9/coursefork-education-tool
[7]: As a cofounder and CTO at WebAssign for 13 years, Brian took the education company from zero to over $30M in yearly revenue before becoming my co-founder at Coursefork.

Onward, and Ever Upward
2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io and para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth.  This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.

Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at +Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.

Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4].  As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].

Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as +Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment.  It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.

After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO +Brian Marks.  Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry.  My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!

Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways.  Now let's go make the world a better place.

[1]: One of which, DigaForce, was just acquired: http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2014/01/02/apex-tech-firm-strategic-link-partners.html?page=all — congratulations to +Anthony Pompliano and +Matthew Cotter!
[2]: Jeff is one of the core developers of Bitcoin and a former +Red Hat team member from Raleigh.  How's that for the Triangle Company Family tree, +Derrick Minor?!
[3]: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/11/29/which-currency-is-up-over-9000-this-year-and-sells-for-almost-as-much-as-an-ounce-of-gold/
[4]: http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-can-be-the-new-western-union-2013-12
[5]: You might recall that in March of 2013, the Cypriot government restricted withdrawals and then utilized citizens' bank accounts directly to bail out their banking system, resulting in a surge in Bitcoin prices as individuals fled the fiat currency: http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/28/investing/bitcoin-cyprus/
[6]: Here's an interview I did while CTO of Coursefork with +Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com that explains the vision: http://opensource.com/education/13/9/coursefork-education-tool
[7]: As a cofounder and CTO at WebAssign for 13 years, Brian took the education company from zero to over $30M in yearly revenue before becoming my co-founder at Coursefork.

Excellent chart in the link

Ah, I opened the link, very nice indeed.

Hmm. Strange; my Gmail says it was created on 2010. I know for a fact that it was before this; because the YouTube account linked to it was created in 2007! Hmm.

Facebook's released "Timeline". Here's the link to get it working, if you still have your account active over there.

I refuse to visit sites or even share links that complain about their visitors' decisions to block ads. Find another revenue model already!

Facebook's released "Timeline". Here's the link to get it working, if you still have your account active over there.

Facebook's released "Timeline". Here's the link to get it working, if you still have your account active over there.

Facebook's released "Timeline". Here's the link to get it working, if you still have your account active over there.

+Eren Mckay Absolutely! Go right ahead. Link me when you do!

I've found http://www.codecademy.com/ a fun way to get my coding feet wet. Does anyone have a similar link for Python?

RT @martindale: I refuse to visit sites or even share links that complain about their visitors' decisions to block ads. Find another reven…

RT @martindale: I refuse to visit sites or even share links that complain about their visitors' decisions to block ads. Find another reven…

RT @martindale: I refuse to visit sites or even share links that complain about their visitors' decisions to block ads. Find another reven…

RT @martindale: I refuse to visit sites or even share links that complain about their visitors' decisions to block ads. Find another reven…

+Ken Hughes I do! I'll share my link publicly here: http://schemer.com/invite/ileued0pkvlhc

We assume Flame was origined in USA (or in some allied country) because of the target and the precedent of Stuxnet (after years they admitted it was born in the West, finally... it was so obvious, with its target, it didn't even need the confirmation) it's far more possible they have the same origin (not literally, just as country\group of allies\Society).

Sure, only an admission would prove the theory (and not even the admission, without the complete code and algorithm.. it's easy to take someone else's credits), but it's reasonable to link Flame to Stuxnet and so to USA\Israel\allies.

...and in Internet related news this morning, Google+ Ambassador Eric Martindale was spotted at a local caffeine stand this morning (WHO was up at 0630?) spreading the news about Hangouts to the counter staff, baristas, and any stray morning coffee grabbers. His enthusiasm for Google Hangouts does not dim when he is away from his computer, and the excitement seems to be infectious. Word is that, as soon as he left the coffee shop, all of the employees and customers clustered around a computer, started a Hangout, and they are all still there, wired to the gills on caffeine, trading links and yakking about how many of their friends will be turning to Google+ and away from "the other social notwork". Eric, did we say to get some sleep? .. NO! Stay up ALL NIGHT! (another coffee?)

Oh, yes. I think I will.

FIC has announced an on-sale date for its Neo1973, expected to be the first low-cost, high-volume phone with a user-modifiable Linux-based operating system. Additionally, the OpenMoko project building open-source software for the phone has published a wealth of technical resources.

See the link for more information. This is a huge step towards my dream phone.

Well, it looks like Google is rolling out Google+ Pages now. The link to "Create a Google+ Page" [1] on the first page I found [2] (coincidentally, for Google+ itself) apparently "isn't ready for everyone", but I deleted the lightbox using my DOM inspector and was able to play around with the interface. Here are some screenshots of the options available when you create a Google+ Page.

[1]: https://plus.google.com/pages/create
[2]: https://plus.google.com/101560853443212199687/posts

Well, it looks like Google is rolling out Google+ Pages now. The link to "Create a Google+ Page" [1] on the first page I found [2] (coincidentally, for Google+ itself) apparently "isn't ready for everyone", but I deleted the lightbox using my DOM inspector and was able to play around with the interface. Here are some screenshots of the options available when you create a Google+ Page.

[1]: https://plus.google.com/pages/create
[2]: https://plus.google.com/101560853443212199687/posts

Well, it looks like Google is rolling out Google+ Pages now. The link to "Create a Google+ Page" [1] on the first page I found [2] (coincidentally, for Google+ itself) apparently "isn't ready for everyone", but I deleted the lightbox using my DOM inspector and was able to play around with the interface. Here are some screenshots of the options available when you create a Google+ Page.

[1]: https://plus.google.com/pages/create
[2]: https://plus.google.com/101560853443212199687/posts

After taking a look... it looks beautiful. But I agree with +Neeta Tolani, it's a scrapbook that is looking backwards. It doesn't really help you be social and connect now. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page that +Eric Martindale linked, there is a short video on the "new" FB apps. Now these seem more relevant to helping us connect with others, but, other than maybe being better designed, how's that much different than the apps we already have?

All of these Social Networking sites have been giving me a real headache since... well, since forever. There's too many of them. I can't keep track of everything. I've always had the idea of creating a service that'll link all of these together, check and update them all. Well, someone beat me to the punch.

Sara show this to me, but it's take me a while to post my results. Well, here I am.

Now, the other question is what am I supposed to do with all of these accounts that work as an OpenID, like Facebook? Do use one of these as my primary OpenID? Or should I go with one of the many OpenID providers? If so, which should I pick?

Yes, yes--we all read about CERN's _spec_tacular FTL neutrino results. But did you see UC Berkley's paper on visual experience reconstruction from fMRI?

This effectively translates to being able to build a video of what a person is seeing (or imagining). Now imagine if they applied a more aggressive machine learning algorithm to their model.

Publication: nishimoto et al 2011 | gallantlabucb
Alternative link: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/scientists-youtube-videos-mind/story?id=14573442

Yes, yes--we all read about CERN's _spec_tacular FTL neutrino results. But did you see UC Berkley's paper on visual experience reconstruction from fMRI?

This effectively translates to being able to build a video of what a person is seeing (or imagining). Now imagine if they applied a more aggressive machine learning algorithm to their model.

Publication: nishimoto et al 2011 | gallantlabucb
Alternative link: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/scientists-youtube-videos-mind/story?id=14573442

Yes, yes--we all read about CERN's _spec_tacular FTL neutrino results. But did you see UC Berkley's paper on visual experience reconstruction from fMRI?

This effectively translates to being able to build a video of what a person is seeing (or imagining). Now imagine if they applied a more aggressive machine learning algorithm to their model.

Publication: nishimoto et al 2011 | gallantlabucb
Alternative link: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/scientists-youtube-videos-mind/story?id=14573442

Yes, yes--we all read about CERN's _spec_tacular FTL neutrino results. But did you see UC Berkley's paper on visual experience reconstruction from fMRI?

This effectively translates to being able to build a video of what a person is seeing (or imagining). Now imagine if they applied a more aggressive machine learning algorithm to their model.

Publication: nishimoto et al 2011 | gallantlabucb
Alternative link: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/scientists-youtube-videos-mind/story?id=14573442

Work is work, as per the usual. I'm work at a company called TechNoggins, doing all sorts of various things. Primarily, I am Callcenter Manager, handling calls for three states and eleven major cities. It's unfortunately fairly slow today, which means my salary isn't augmented by the influx of web development work. Sad day.

I've been messing around with some of Facebook's features, recently. I just linked "My Notes" to this blog, which seems like a cool feature, but it needs some work. It imported my posts what seems to be twice?

Someone posted LeekSpin on the Grand Tournament forum. I've been subtly amused by the music to which this has been put, and have been listening to it for just over an hour now. You want to talk about overplaying, hrm? Full immersion, hrrrm?

Well, looks like I have a PC here in the office that I need to fix. So, until later, I'm gone. :P

Here's my list of "top topics" according to +Mohamed Mansour's Stream Plus, which uses a distance and grouping algorithm to analyze your stream for public posts, and determine what they are about. Pretty svelte results!

+Jake McCuistion, +Carmelyne Thompson, and I helped him build this almost immediately after the Google+ API was released -- as far as I can tell, it was the first public application built on top of it. :)

What does your "top topics" look like? What do you think this algorithm accurately conveys? Share!

Link to app: http://stream-plus.appspot.com

Here's my list of "top topics" according to +Mohamed Mansour's Stream Plus, which uses a distance and grouping algorithm to analyze your stream for public posts, and determine what they are about. Pretty svelte results!

+Jake McCuistion, +Carmelyne Thompson, and I helped him build this almost immediately after the Google+ API was released -- as far as I can tell, it was the first public application built on top of it. :)

What does your "top topics" look like? What do you think this algorithm accurately conveys? Share!

Link to app: http://stream-plus.appspot.com

Here's my list of "top topics" according to +Mohamed Mansour's Stream Plus, which uses a distance and grouping algorithm to analyze your stream for public posts, and determine what they are about. Pretty svelte results!

+Jake McCuistion, +Carmelyne Thompson, and I helped him build this almost immediately after the Google+ API was released -- as far as I can tell, it was the first public application built on top of it. :)

What does your "top topics" look like? What do you think this algorithm accurately conveys? Share!

Link to app: http://stream-plus.appspot.com

Here's my list of "top topics" according to +Mohamed Mansour's Stream Plus, which uses a distance and grouping algorithm to analyze your stream for public posts, and determine what they are about. Pretty svelte results!

+Jake McCuistion, +Carmelyne Thompson, and I helped him build this almost immediately after the Google+ API was released -- as far as I can tell, it was the first public application built on top of it. :)

What does your "top topics" look like? What do you think this algorithm accurately conveys? Share!

Link to app: http://stream-plus.appspot.com

Since you cannot reshare a share, I linked to the article by +Carmelyne Thompson instead. Nice read regarding how we operate in Hangout Academy!
http://hangoutacademy.com

Whoever is curious what we use:
- Gerrit for Code Review
- We use Debian for Staging Server / Production Server
- We have automated builds that it deploys the web app to Staging server
- We follow agile development, we do modified SCRUM every other day.
- We document enough so that if a new member joins, they wont get lost.
- We design, we architect, we develop and iterate!
- We use hangouts for our main communication tool.
- We use Google Apps with Sites / Mail / Calendar integration

The team is beyond awesome, read her post to know the full picture! We love to tinker, we love development, and we love design!

via +Carmelyne Thompson

Since you cannot reshare a share, I linked to the article by +Carmelyne Thompson instead. Nice read regarding how we operate in Hangout Academy!
http://hangoutacademy.com

Whoever is curious what we use:
- Gerrit for Code Review
- We use Debian for Staging Server / Production Server
- We have automated builds that it deploys the web app to Staging server
- We follow agile development, we do modified SCRUM every other day.
- We document enough so that if a new member joins, they wont get lost.
- We design, we architect, we develop and iterate!
- We use hangouts for our main communication tool.
- We use Google Apps with Sites / Mail / Calendar integration

The team is beyond awesome, read her post to know the full picture! We love to tinker, we love development, and we love design!

via +Carmelyne Thompson

There's a large number of Content Management System, Bulletin Board, and Blog solutions available, all with amazing functionality that simply can't be missed on today's rapidly advancing internet(s).

Examples CMS: Joomla, with around 280,000 lines of code. BB: phpBB, with around 150,000 lines of code. Blogs: WordPress, with around 170,000 lines of code.

My challenge is this: What is the smallest full-featured CMS, BB, or Blog that you can create?

Contest submissions must include the following features:

• User Accounts
• Article Posts (or "Topics" in BB-land)
• Comment System

Submissions will be accepted in any language, so long as the content can be served up over HTTP. To submit, comment on this post with a link to your project!

Good luck and happy coding!

As of today, I've changed the address of my blog from just EricMartindale.com to a new location that will contain my blog posts in a new format. Don't worry though, all your old links will still work just fine.

Why am I doing this? Well, there are a number of reasons why - not the least of which are some SEO (search engine optimization) adjustments that I'm in the process of making. However, the biggest and most important thing to you is the introduction of Eric Martindale's Lifestream, which is the newest and latest feature of EricMartindale[dot]com. This new area of the site is called a Lifestream because it will show you everything that I've been doing lately, from shared posts on Google Reader to photos from Flickr.

When did you create your first Google Account?
During a conversation at the +LocalSense office today, I happened to go back and look for the oldest email I'd received in my Gmail account and it got me thinking about just how much data I've given Google over the years.  It's incredible to think about a sense of scale now, especially considering that I have [as of this moment] 134,530 messages in Gmail alone -- that doesn't even consider all of Google's other services now tied to my Google Account.

You can quantify some portion of how much Google knows about you through the "Google Dashboard" [1].  Google also allows you to download [some] of your data with their data liberation tool [2].  I recommend doing this regularly, and making an effort to be aware of the amount, and value, of your data.

I received the first two emails in my Gmail inbox on 11/28/04. They were both from Google, and a few of the links don't work anymore. [3] Didn't anyone tell them that cool URIs don't change? [4] The attached photo is of the well-written introduction to Gmail, the second message in my inbox.  It's fun to look back and think about the state of email at the time, and how innovative Gmail actually was.

[1]: http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
[2]: https://www.google.com/dashboard/
[3]: http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/start.html
[4]: https://www.google.com/settings/exportdata

When did you create your first Google Account?
During a conversation at the +LocalSense office today, I happened to go back and look for the oldest email I'd received in my Gmail account and it got me thinking about just how much data I've given Google over the years.  It's incredible to think about a sense of scale now, especially considering that I have [as of this moment] 134,530 messages in Gmail alone -- that doesn't even consider all of Google's other services now tied to my Google Account.

You can quantify some portion of how much Google knows about you through the "Google Dashboard" [1].  Google also allows you to download [some] of your data with their data liberation tool [2].  I recommend doing this regularly, and making an effort to be aware of the amount, and value, of your data.

I received the first two emails in my Gmail inbox on 11/28/04. They were both from Google, and a few of the links don't work anymore. [3] Didn't anyone tell them that cool URIs don't change? [4] The attached photo is of the well-written introduction to Gmail, the second message in my inbox.  It's fun to look back and think about the state of email at the time, and how innovative Gmail actually was.

[1]: http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
[2]: https://www.google.com/dashboard/
[3]: http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/start.html
[4]: https://www.google.com/settings/exportdata

When did you create your first Google Account?
During a conversation at the +LocalSense office today, I happened to go back and look for the oldest email I'd received in my Gmail account and it got me thinking about just how much data I've given Google over the years.  It's incredible to think about a sense of scale now, especially considering that I have [as of this moment] 134,530 messages in Gmail alone -- that doesn't even consider all of Google's other services now tied to my Google Account.

You can quantify some portion of how much Google knows about you through the "Google Dashboard" [1].  Google also allows you to download [some] of your data with their data liberation tool [2].  I recommend doing this regularly, and making an effort to be aware of the amount, and value, of your data.

I received the first two emails in my Gmail inbox on 11/28/04. They were both from Google, and a few of the links don't work anymore. [3] Didn't anyone tell them that cool URIs don't change? [4] The attached photo is of the well-written introduction to Gmail, the second message in my inbox.  It's fun to look back and think about the state of email at the time, and how innovative Gmail actually was.

[1]: http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
[2]: https://www.google.com/dashboard/
[3]: http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/start.html
[4]: https://www.google.com/settings/exportdata

Dear Search Engine Roundtable,

Since I subscribed to your feed (in early 2005), I have received and read every post you've made using my RSS reader of choice (Google Reader, currently). Your excerpts have been enticing, with well-written post titles and seemingly interesting topics. The idea was good, to aggregate content and discussions about Search Engines from multiple locations at one central blog.

Unfortunately, I've found that your articles are less informative than I'd have hoped, with frequent referrals to other locations where the conversations are actually taking place. Instead of effective bullet points and topic reviews, I find quick and hastily-written overviews of the content and discussion in question.

Not only that, but you're only providing partial content in your feeds! When I come across your posts in my daily reading of over 500 posts, you've caught my attention with your title - and because you're only giving me the partial article text, you've got me clicking through to your site (hoorah, ad impressions!). Unfortunately, half the time I'm wasting even more time by being forced to click through to yet another page to follow the conversation.

I rarely (if ever) find myself sharing your content, and from what I can tell from a cursory glance - you've never shown up in my shared items feed. (PS, when will I be able to control this page, Google? I hope this link juice means something in the future. Maybe even market that page in a bit more of a controlled fashion. I digress.) I've maybe starred one or two of your articles for future reading, but again - when I do finally read the posts, I find that I'm disappointed by your article quality and content.

What's up with that?! Alright, rabid feedreaders and social media evangelists - tell me if I'm in the wrong here, but I'm going to unsubscribe from Search Engine Roundtable.

When did you create your first Google Account?
During a conversation at the +LocalSense office today, I happened to go back and look for the oldest email I'd received in my Gmail account and it got me thinking about just how much data I've given Google over the years.  It's incredible to think about a sense of scale now, especially considering that I have [as of this moment] 134,530 messages in Gmail alone -- that doesn't even consider all of Google's other services now tied to my Google Account.

You can quantify some portion of how much Google knows about you through the "Google Dashboard" [1].  Google also allows you to download [some] of your data with their data liberation tool [2].  I recommend doing this regularly, and making an effort to be aware of the amount, and value, of your data.

I received the first two emails in my Gmail inbox on 11/28/04. They were both from Google, and a few of the links don't work anymore. [3] Didn't anyone tell them that cool URIs don't change? [4] The attached photo is of the well-written introduction to Gmail, the second message in my inbox.  It's fun to look back and think about the state of email at the time, and how innovative Gmail actually was.

[1]: http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
[2]: https://www.google.com/dashboard/
[3]: http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/start.html
[4]: https://www.google.com/settings/exportdata

Prediction: Global Riots One Year Away?

In 2011, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute (CSI) released a paper [1] presenting a model for understanding (and ultimately predicting) the social unrest that rocked countries such as Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt [2].  Of the data analyzed, the principal factor influencing said unrest was determined to be the food price index.

That's a pretty simple concept.  If one of your most basic needs was threatened, what would you do?  To quote the MIT Technology Review's explanation of the paper [3], “This isn't rocket science. It stands to reason that people become desperate when food is unobtainable. It's often said that any society is three square meals from anarchy.”

These models have other complex implications around the world, such as in the financial markets.  Another paper from 2010, titled “Predicting economic market crises using measures of collective panic” [4], shows that the economic crisis (and other singe-day panics in the market) in the United States were predictable events that relied on the relatively volatile sociological phenomenon of uncertainty and nervousness -- which makes some of the original paper's assertions even more interesting.  Most notably:

“Both factors in food prices can be linked directly to recent US governmental actions. Speculator activity has been enhanced by deregulation of the commodities markets that exempted dealers from trading limits, and subsidies and other policies have been central to the growth of ethanol conversion.”

Food for thought.

[1]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2455v1.pdf
[2]: http://www.globalissues.org/article/792/mideast-north-africa-unrest
[3]: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425019/the-cause-of-riots-and-the-price-of-food/
[4]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1102.2620v1.pdf

Prediction: Global Riots One Year Away?

In 2011, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute (CSI) released a paper [1] presenting a model for understanding (and ultimately predicting) the social unrest that rocked countries such as Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt [2].  Of the data analyzed, the principal factor influencing said unrest was determined to be the food price index.

That's a pretty simple concept.  If one of your most basic needs was threatened, what would you do?  To quote the MIT Technology Review's explanation of the paper [3], “This isn't rocket science. It stands to reason that people become desperate when food is unobtainable. It's often said that any society is three square meals from anarchy.”

These models have other complex implications around the world, such as in the financial markets.  Another paper from 2010, titled “Predicting economic market crises using measures of collective panic” [4], shows that the economic crisis (and other singe-day panics in the market) in the United States were predictable events that relied on the relatively volatile sociological phenomenon of uncertainty and nervousness -- which makes some of the original paper's assertions even more interesting.  Most notably:

“Both factors in food prices can be linked directly to recent US governmental actions. Speculator activity has been enhanced by deregulation of the commodities markets that exempted dealers from trading limits, and subsidies and other policies have been central to the growth of ethanol conversion.”

Food for thought.

[1]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2455v1.pdf
[2]: http://www.globalissues.org/article/792/mideast-north-africa-unrest
[3]: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425019/the-cause-of-riots-and-the-price-of-food/
[4]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1102.2620v1.pdf

Prediction: Global Riots One Year Away?

In 2011, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute (CSI) released a paper [1] presenting a model for understanding (and ultimately predicting) the social unrest that rocked countries such as Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt [2].  Of the data analyzed, the principal factor influencing said unrest was determined to be the food price index.

That's a pretty simple concept.  If one of your most basic needs was threatened, what would you do?  To quote the MIT Technology Review's explanation of the paper [3], “This isn't rocket science. It stands to reason that people become desperate when food is unobtainable. It's often said that any society is three square meals from anarchy.”

These models have other complex implications around the world, such as in the financial markets.  Another paper from 2010, titled “Predicting economic market crises using measures of collective panic” [4], shows that the economic crisis (and other singe-day panics in the market) in the United States were predictable events that relied on the relatively volatile sociological phenomenon of uncertainty and nervousness -- which makes some of the original paper's assertions even more interesting.  Most notably:

“Both factors in food prices can be linked directly to recent US governmental actions. Speculator activity has been enhanced by deregulation of the commodities markets that exempted dealers from trading limits, and subsidies and other policies have been central to the growth of ethanol conversion.”

Food for thought.

[1]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2455v1.pdf
[2]: http://www.globalissues.org/article/792/mideast-north-africa-unrest
[3]: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425019/the-cause-of-riots-and-the-price-of-food/
[4]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1102.2620v1.pdf

Prediction: Global Riots One Year Away?

In 2011, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute (CSI) released a paper [1] presenting a model for understanding (and ultimately predicting) the social unrest that rocked countries such as Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt [2].  Of the data analyzed, the principal factor influencing said unrest was determined to be the food price index.

That's a pretty simple concept.  If one of your most basic needs was threatened, what would you do?  To quote the MIT Technology Review's explanation of the paper [3], “This isn't rocket science. It stands to reason that people become desperate when food is unobtainable. It's often said that any society is three square meals from anarchy.”

These models have other complex implications around the world, such as in the financial markets.  Another paper from 2010, titled “Predicting economic market crises using measures of collective panic” [4], shows that the economic crisis (and other singe-day panics in the market) in the United States were predictable events that relied on the relatively volatile sociological phenomenon of uncertainty and nervousness -- which makes some of the original paper's assertions even more interesting.  Most notably:

“Both factors in food prices can be linked directly to recent US governmental actions. Speculator activity has been enhanced by deregulation of the commodities markets that exempted dealers from trading limits, and subsidies and other policies have been central to the growth of ethanol conversion.”

Food for thought.

[1]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2455v1.pdf
[2]: http://www.globalissues.org/article/792/mideast-north-africa-unrest
[3]: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425019/the-cause-of-riots-and-the-price-of-food/
[4]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1102.2620v1.pdf

As many of you know, a lot of my best friends came from an online hobby called "online roleplaying". One of the more popular forms is a type of collaborative fiction called "play by post", in which the participants alternate writing sections of the story. More succinctly; I started a roleplaying site of my own in 2005 called RolePlayGateway to give people the same opportunity I had when I was younger.

I wanted to take a moment and go over some of my favorites, for those who are reading.

RolePlayGateway: an obvious favorite. It takes a little while to find your place (if you're a more 'advanced' roleplayer), but our strength is the wide range of people that play here. Oh, and we have an awesome chat built specifically for roleplaying!

Roleplayer Guild: Run by Dan Neumann, Roleplayer Guild is as close to a sister site of RolePlayGateway as it gets. They've got a slightly different format from RolePlayGateway, letting you browse roleplays based on their "quality" level (e.g., Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced). A great place to go if you're looking to start a nice tight-knit group!

Althanas: Althanas is one of the only other large sites dedicated completely to play-by-post roleplay. I've roleplayed here for a couple years (as an anonymous account!) and they're a great group. The "Guides" sections is irreplaceable, so if you're looking to learn, this is the place to be.

Up and coming!

These sites are new or are just getting off the ground, so they're not as established as the above listings.

Roleplaygetaway: launched as a refuge from the insanity that RolePlayGateway provides, RolePlayGetaway (albeit, a confusing name) is showing a lot of promise. With a brand new roleplaying system built to track your roleplays, it is taking the same route that RolePlayGateway's fabled roleplay tab is taking. It's being run by several of my staff members and close friends, and I can attest that they know what they are doing. I hope to see more sites like this!

Fallen off my list...

These sites used to show some promise, but for some reason or another have fallen by the wayside. As such, I'm rel="nofollow"'ing their links.

AnimeLeague: AnimeLeague appears to have gone the way of AnimeMetro; that is, it has begun to focus more on Anime and conventions instead of roleplay. Sadface! Gaia Online: Gaia Online used to be a fairly decent place for play-by-post roleplay, but then it got uber popular. It too is now expanding beyond play-by-post, and the focus has been lost.

“Do not kill, do not rape, do not steal, these are principles which every man of every faith can embrace.” -- Murphy, The Boondock Saints

We should not be deluded into thinking that #OccupyWallStreet is a protest against capitalism. It is a protest against the blatant theft perpetrated by the financial and banking systems that has plagued our great nation and its government for at least the past 98 years.

On Capitalism versus Statism:
“[...] If we are to keep the term "capitalism" at all, then, we must distinguish between "free-market capitalism" on the one hand, and "state capitalism" on the other. The two are as different as day and night in their nature and consequences. Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government — the State — to accumulate capital for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence [...]” -- Murray N. Rothbard, 1972 [1]

While the protests continue to grow in cities around the country [2], Anonymous is warning the NYPD against continued police brutality [3] and even previously trusted news outlets begin to censor [4] if not blatantly ignore [5].

Look through the actual photos [6]. These faces are not those of hippies, bums, or of radicals. These are the faces of your friends and family, of your neighbors and coworkers [7]. It is the majority, the 99% of affected Americans, that are on the streets protesting. It is We the People.

Thanks to +Jeremy Dahl for providing the link and video, +Michael Mozart for livestreaming the protests earlier today, and +Breana Van Den Heuvel for providing a constant stream of photos and news as this evolves.

[1]: http://mises.org/daily/3735
[2]: http://www.occupytogether.org/
[3]: Anonymous WARNING to NYPD on Behalf of Occupy Wall Street.! will not be forgotten or Forgiven.
[4]: http://ampedstatus.org/twittercensorship-blocks-occupywallstreet-from-top-trending-topic-twice/
[5]: Keith Olbermann calls out Media Blackout on 'Occupy Wall Street' Protest
[6]: https://plus.google.com/photos/112353210404102902472/albums/5658628267519370497
[7]: http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

“Do not kill, do not rape, do not steal, these are principles which every man of every faith can embrace.” -- Murphy, The Boondock Saints

We should not be deluded into thinking that #OccupyWallStreet is a protest against capitalism. It is a protest against the blatant theft perpetrated by the financial and banking systems that has plagued our great nation and its government for at least the past 98 years.

On Capitalism versus Statism:
“[...] If we are to keep the term "capitalism" at all, then, we must distinguish between "free-market capitalism" on the one hand, and "state capitalism" on the other. The two are as different as day and night in their nature and consequences. Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government — the State — to accumulate capital for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence [...]” -- Murray N. Rothbard, 1972 [1]

While the protests continue to grow in cities around the country [2], Anonymous is warning the NYPD against continued police brutality [3] and even previously trusted news outlets begin to censor [4] if not blatantly ignore [5].

Look through the actual photos [6]. These faces are not those of hippies, bums, or of radicals. These are the faces of your friends and family, of your neighbors and coworkers [7]. It is the majority, the 99% of affected Americans, that are on the streets protesting. It is We the People.

Thanks to +Jeremy Dahl for providing the link and video, +Michael Mozart for livestreaming the protests earlier today, and +Breana Van Den Heuvel for providing a constant stream of photos and news as this evolves.

[1]: http://mises.org/daily/3735
[2]: http://www.occupytogether.org/
[3]: Anonymous WARNING to NYPD on Behalf of Occupy Wall Street.! will not be forgotten or Forgiven.
[4]: http://ampedstatus.org/twittercensorship-blocks-occupywallstreet-from-top-trending-topic-twice/
[5]: Keith Olbermann calls out Media Blackout on 'Occupy Wall Street' Protest
[6]: https://plus.google.com/photos/112353210404102902472/albums/5658628267519370497
[7]: http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

“Do not kill, do not rape, do not steal, these are principles which every man of every faith can embrace.” -- Murphy, The Boondock Saints

We should not be deluded into thinking that #OccupyWallStreet is a protest against capitalism. It is a protest against the blatant theft perpetrated by the financial and banking systems that has plagued our great nation and its government for at least the past 98 years.

On Capitalism versus Statism:
“[...] If we are to keep the term "capitalism" at all, then, we must distinguish between "free-market capitalism" on the one hand, and "state capitalism" on the other. The two are as different as day and night in their nature and consequences. Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government — the State — to accumulate capital for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence [...]” -- Murray N. Rothbard, 1972 [1]

While the protests continue to grow in cities around the country [2], Anonymous is warning the NYPD against continued police brutality [3] and even previously trusted news outlets begin to censor [4] if not blatantly ignore [5].

Look through the actual photos [6]. These faces are not those of hippies, bums, or of radicals. These are the faces of your friends and family, of your neighbors and coworkers [7]. It is the majority, the 99% of affected Americans, that are on the streets protesting. It is We the People.

Thanks to +Jeremy Dahl for providing the link and video, +Michael Mozart for livestreaming the protests earlier today, and +Breana Van Den Heuvel for providing a constant stream of photos and news as this evolves.

[1]: http://mises.org/daily/3735
[2]: http://www.occupytogether.org/
[3]: Anonymous WARNING to NYPD on Behalf of Occupy Wall Street.! will not be forgotten or Forgiven.
[4]: http://ampedstatus.org/twittercensorship-blocks-occupywallstreet-from-top-trending-topic-twice/
[5]: Keith Olbermann calls out Media Blackout on 'Occupy Wall Street' Protest
[6]: https://plus.google.com/photos/112353210404102902472/albums/5658628267519370497
[7]: http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

“Do not kill, do not rape, do not steal, these are principles which every man of every faith can embrace.” -- Murphy, The Boondock Saints

We should not be deluded into thinking that #OccupyWallStreet is a protest against capitalism. It is a protest against the blatant theft perpetrated by the financial and banking systems that has plagued our great nation and its government for at least the past 98 years.

On Capitalism versus Statism:
“[...] If we are to keep the term "capitalism" at all, then, we must distinguish between "free-market capitalism" on the one hand, and "state capitalism" on the other. The two are as different as day and night in their nature and consequences. Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government — the State — to accumulate capital for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence [...]” -- Murray N. Rothbard, 1972 [1]

While the protests continue to grow in cities around the country [2], Anonymous is warning the NYPD against continued police brutality [3] and even previously trusted news outlets begin to censor [4] if not blatantly ignore [5].

Look through the actual photos [6]. These faces are not those of hippies, bums, or of radicals. These are the faces of your friends and family, of your neighbors and coworkers [7]. It is the majority, the 99% of affected Americans, that are on the streets protesting. It is We the People.

Thanks to +Jeremy Dahl for providing the link and video, +Michael Mozart for livestreaming the protests earlier today, and +Breana Van Den Heuvel for providing a constant stream of photos and news as this evolves.

[1]: http://mises.org/daily/3735
[2]: http://www.occupytogether.org/
[3]: Anonymous WARNING to NYPD on Behalf of Occupy Wall Street.! will not be forgotten or Forgiven.
[4]: http://ampedstatus.org/twittercensorship-blocks-occupywallstreet-from-top-trending-topic-twice/
[5]: Keith Olbermann calls out Media Blackout on 'Occupy Wall Street' Protest
[6]: https://plus.google.com/photos/112353210404102902472/albums/5658628267519370497
[7]: http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

Please see my post regarding Capitalism versus Statism [1], watch the video from Anonymous [2], and take a look at the non-partisan nature of these protests [3]. Don't just look at my links, go out and do the research yourself.

The #OccupyWallStreet movement appears to be spreading like wildfire across the country. San Francisco [4], Washington D.C. [5], Nashville [6], Portland [7], and New Orleans [8] all had organized and peaceful protests today and yesterday consisting of thousands of people. Other protests are rapidly forming around the nation [9], numbering at 895 different cities at the time of this post.

There's something very real, visceral, and most importantly democratic about how we're using the Internet to show a ground-up perspective of what is happening at these protests. There's nothing like seeing people like +Michael Mozart on the ground in New York, streaming live video of the protests, or +Rob Salzman sharing a steady stream of photos of the thousands of protesters in Portland directly to the internet. It's getting more and more difficult to trust anything but an individual who is on the ground, experiencing and documenting things first hand.

There is a major difference between "digital natives" and "digital immigrants", even at the chemical level [10]. We're entering a time where the people who've grown up with practically ubiquitous Internet access are becoming comfortable with adulthood and asserting their beliefs and opinions. This will have major and far-reaching implications at all levels of the human condition -- and I think we're only beginning to see the manifestation of this paradigm shift.

I'll be at the protest at Moore Square here in Raleigh, NC on Sunday at 5PM. Join if you'd like.

[1] https://plus.google.com/112353210404102902472/posts/QursuT1238T
[2] A message from Anonymous to the 99%
[3] http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gmKnCYzsbAREkc4_OfOjkD4vImvA?docId=6a6e6c9c649b45ecb6d415087395b2e5 and https://twitter.com/OccupyWallSt/status/121264275699417089
[4] https://plus.google.com/109398421611492546729/posts/gToCsE1PQjK
[5] https://plus.google.com/102476083858002705976/posts/WJhKqkv4EEA
[6] https://plus.google.com/108581371748491713295/posts/WxCWwTajucm
[7] https://plus.google.com/114124942936679476879/posts/7D47m9zJmjL
[8] http://www.wwltv.com/news/Occupy-NOLA-Takes-To-The-Streets-131290704.html
[9] http://www.meetup.com/occupytogether/
[10] http://books.google.com/books?id=74wgRl197fYC

Please see my post regarding Capitalism versus Statism [1], watch the video from Anonymous [2], and take a look at the non-partisan nature of these protests [3]. Don't just look at my links, go out and do the research yourself.

The #OccupyWallStreet movement appears to be spreading like wildfire across the country. San Francisco [4], Washington D.C. [5], Nashville [6], Portland [7], and New Orleans [8] all had organized and peaceful protests today and yesterday consisting of thousands of people. Other protests are rapidly forming around the nation [9], numbering at 895 different cities at the time of this post.

There's something very real, visceral, and most importantly democratic about how we're using the Internet to show a ground-up perspective of what is happening at these protests. There's nothing like seeing people like +Michael Mozart on the ground in New York, streaming live video of the protests, or +Rob Salzman sharing a steady stream of photos of the thousands of protesters in Portland directly to the internet. It's getting more and more difficult to trust anything but an individual who is on the ground, experiencing and documenting things first hand.

There is a major difference between "digital natives" and "digital immigrants", even at the chemical level [10]. We're entering a time where the people who've grown up with practically ubiquitous Internet access are becoming comfortable with adulthood and asserting their beliefs and opinions. This will have major and far-reaching implications at all levels of the human condition -- and I think we're only beginning to see the manifestation of this paradigm shift.

I'll be at the protest at Moore Square here in Raleigh, NC on Sunday at 5PM. Join if you'd like.

[1] https://plus.google.com/112353210404102902472/posts/QursuT1238T
[2] A message from Anonymous to the 99%
[3] http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gmKnCYzsbAREkc4_OfOjkD4vImvA?docId=6a6e6c9c649b45ecb6d415087395b2e5 and https://twitter.com/OccupyWallSt/status/121264275699417089
[4] https://plus.google.com/109398421611492546729/posts/gToCsE1PQjK
[5] https://plus.google.com/102476083858002705976/posts/WJhKqkv4EEA
[6] https://plus.google.com/108581371748491713295/posts/WxCWwTajucm
[7] https://plus.google.com/114124942936679476879/posts/7D47m9zJmjL
[8] http://www.wwltv.com/news/Occupy-NOLA-Takes-To-The-Streets-131290704.html
[9] http://www.meetup.com/occupytogether/
[10] http://books.google.com/books?id=74wgRl197fYC

Hello there, adoring internet-stalkers! (I'm kidding. ~_~) You may have noticed (if you were loyal, that is ;)) that my Feedburner-powered RSS Feed has been lacking in activity lately. There's a reason for that.

Recently, I got rid of WordPress and Sweetcron in favor of a new CMS platform, Chyrp. I had been running Wordpress for a long time, using it to share my thoughts with the general internet populace. However, it had become a bit of a chore to maintain, and it really felt like duplicate work on top of all the other content-generation I was already performing (i.e., forum posts, blog comments, Last.fm "Loved" Tracks, Google Reader shared items, etc.), so I began to look for a way to aggregate this content into a central place.

For a while, FriendFeed served this purpose well, but I didn't like the lack of control I had over the source. Facebook also filled part of this gap (and it still does, to a point), and they've even purchased FriendFeed, but I was looking for something quite a bit more customizable and self-hosted. Through various referrals, I came across Yongfook's Sweetcron project which was a new platform designed specifically for this new thing they called, le gasp, "Lifestreaming".

However, after fighting with Sweetcron and its aggregation methods, particularly its lack of support for various service feed formats; I decided to look into something else. Initial searches landed me upon Tumblr, who had conveniently announced a feature that syncs comments across multiple services (or aggregates). Sadly, I didn't want to get back into a world where all my code was hosted by someone else, and I had no control over it. I kept Sweetcron running on my site under lifestream/, but I continued searching for a better solution.

I then stumbled across Bazooka, which was billed as "the first free PHP tumblelog engine". Thanks to Bazooka developer Evan Walsh, who alerted me to a more up-to-date and current replacement called Chyrp. And I was sold. I immediately spent a few hours converting my existing content from WordPress and SweetCron over to a test installation of Chyrp, and then took the next night changing my site structure and 301'd all my old links to the new URLs.

That's where EricMartindale.com stands today. I've spent a few weeks getting my stream set up the way I want it, and I'm turning the RSS feed back on. Posts should begin flowing into your RSS reader very shortly. Post comments, feedback, and questions here!

Edit 10:13 PM EST: It looks like Feedburner is having some trouble parsing my new RSS content. You can subscribe to my direct feed and it will always work.

Edit 10:58 PM EST: I've fixed the problem and committed the patch to GitHub.

Please see my post regarding Capitalism versus Statism [1], watch the video from Anonymous [2], and take a look at the non-partisan nature of these protests [3]. Don't just look at my links, go out and do the research yourself.

The #OccupyWallStreet movement appears to be spreading like wildfire across the country. San Francisco [4], Washington D.C. [5], Nashville [6], Portland [7], and New Orleans [8] all had organized and peaceful protests today and yesterday consisting of thousands of people. Other protests are rapidly forming around the nation [9], numbering at 895 different cities at the time of this post.

There's something very real, visceral, and most importantly democratic about how we're using the Internet to show a ground-up perspective of what is happening at these protests. There's nothing like seeing people like +Michael Mozart on the ground in New York, streaming live video of the protests, or +Rob Salzman sharing a steady stream of photos of the thousands of protesters in Portland directly to the internet. It's getting more and more difficult to trust anything but an individual who is on the ground, experiencing and documenting things first hand.

There is a major difference between "digital natives" and "digital immigrants", even at the chemical level [10]. We're entering a time where the people who've grown up with practically ubiquitous Internet access are becoming comfortable with adulthood and asserting their beliefs and opinions. This will have major and far-reaching implications at all levels of the human condition -- and I think we're only beginning to see the manifestation of this paradigm shift.

I'll be at the protest at Moore Square here in Raleigh, NC on Sunday at 5PM. Join if you'd like.

[1] https://plus.google.com/112353210404102902472/posts/QursuT1238T
[2] A message from Anonymous to the 99%
[3] http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gmKnCYzsbAREkc4_OfOjkD4vImvA?docId=6a6e6c9c649b45ecb6d415087395b2e5 and https://twitter.com/OccupyWallSt/status/121264275699417089
[4] https://plus.google.com/109398421611492546729/posts/gToCsE1PQjK
[5] https://plus.google.com/102476083858002705976/posts/WJhKqkv4EEA
[6] https://plus.google.com/108581371748491713295/posts/WxCWwTajucm
[7] https://plus.google.com/114124942936679476879/posts/7D47m9zJmjL
[8] http://www.wwltv.com/news/Occupy-NOLA-Takes-To-The-Streets-131290704.html
[9] http://www.meetup.com/occupytogether/
[10] http://books.google.com/books?id=74wgRl197fYC

Please see my post regarding Capitalism versus Statism [1], watch the video from Anonymous [2], and take a look at the non-partisan nature of these protests [3]. Don't just look at my links, go out and do the research yourself.

The #OccupyWallStreet movement appears to be spreading like wildfire across the country. San Francisco [4], Washington D.C. [5], Nashville [6], Portland [7], and New Orleans [8] all had organized and peaceful protests today and yesterday consisting of thousands of people. Other protests are rapidly forming around the nation [9], numbering at 895 different cities at the time of this post.

There's something very real, visceral, and most importantly democratic about how we're using the Internet to show a ground-up perspective of what is happening at these protests. There's nothing like seeing people like +Michael Mozart on the ground in New York, streaming live video of the protests, or +Rob Salzman sharing a steady stream of photos of the thousands of protesters in Portland directly to the internet. It's getting more and more difficult to trust anything but an individual who is on the ground, experiencing and documenting things first hand.

There is a major difference between "digital natives" and "digital immigrants", even at the chemical level [10]. We're entering a time where the people who've grown up with practically ubiquitous Internet access are becoming comfortable with adulthood and asserting their beliefs and opinions. This will have major and far-reaching implications at all levels of the human condition -- and I think we're only beginning to see the manifestation of this paradigm shift.

I'll be at the protest at Moore Square here in Raleigh, NC on Sunday at 5PM. Join if you'd like.

[1] https://plus.google.com/112353210404102902472/posts/QursuT1238T
[2] A message from Anonymous to the 99%
[3] http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gmKnCYzsbAREkc4_OfOjkD4vImvA?docId=6a6e6c9c649b45ecb6d415087395b2e5 and https://twitter.com/OccupyWallSt/status/121264275699417089
[4] https://plus.google.com/109398421611492546729/posts/gToCsE1PQjK
[5] https://plus.google.com/102476083858002705976/posts/WJhKqkv4EEA
[6] https://plus.google.com/108581371748491713295/posts/WxCWwTajucm
[7] https://plus.google.com/114124942936679476879/posts/7D47m9zJmjL
[8] http://www.wwltv.com/news/Occupy-NOLA-Takes-To-The-Streets-131290704.html
[9] http://www.meetup.com/occupytogether/
[10] http://books.google.com/books?id=74wgRl197fYC

In the spirit of PARTYMODE, here's a Harlem Shake bookmarklet.

HARLEM SHAKE!

Just like before, click it to see what it does, and click and drag it to your bookmarks bar to use it on other sites.

While marketing RolePlayGateway, one of the things we considered was the "virality" of our approach. Viral marketing is any marketing technique that induces Web sites or users to pass on a marketing message to other sites or users, creating a potentially exponential growth in the message's visibility and effect. We're going to guide you on the road to a truly viral campaign.

A successful viral push can be launched simply by following three simple rules.

1. Don't spend everything you have on a single campaign.
2. Don't rely entirely on one vehicle of viral marketing.
3. Be different from everyone else; stand out.

While we're not nearly viral enough, part of our success so far has been the evangelism of our passionate users. And there you have it, one of the most important keys to successful viral marketing:

Passion: Users who are passionate about your service, your community, or your site. They will propagate, they will evangelize, and ultimately will generate more passionate users who will do the same thing for you. Dawn Anfuso calls these members Boomers - and it is important to not ignore them.

Make it easy for your users to share. Make it hard for them NOT to share. Add a feature on your site that encourages them to send an email to their friends about the service. Add blocks where they can copy and paste code straight to their social profiles on sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo. Jeanne Jennings wrote an amazing article on Optimizing the "E-mail This" Marketing Opportunity, and I'd recommend you read it and implement the things you learn from it.

Widgetize: On that note, we arrive on one of our most powerful vehicles for viral marketing: Widgets. The list of sites that you can infect with widgets are endless. From iGoogle to individual sites, widgets encourage users to put your tool on their page. Be sure to incorporate other techniques here: Include encouragement to share it. Make it easy to post elsewhere and share.

One of the items that RolePlay Gateway could utilize to great success is the concept of game trailers. Many of the games on RPGateway are text-based, and have no real graphics. However, most of these games have amazing storylines, storylines which could be utilized to hitch audiences, or at least entertain them. Flash-based videos, or trailers, with pivotal content, captivating video and audio, and viral marketing elements such as "Email this!" or "Share This", would be an amazing leap forward. Take a look at how YouTube's video player works. Such trailers could even be uploaded to social networking sites, like YouTube and Google Video, and shared to millions of users with a touch of viral marketing magic.

Juice It Up: Include your URL everywhere you go. Facebook, MySpace. Everywhere. This generates user authority, even if the site you are on has nothing at all to do with your target market. Cross sections are a beautiful thing, and even if you don't get a drop of link juice in comments, market saturation is a very important, yet delicate, part of viral marketing.

Maintain a presence on every social networking site you can sustain. Extend your campaign to all of them. Create social groups for each of these sites, and publicize them. The more targets you hit, just like investing, the less committed you are to that particular market. Your assets are distributed, and while the workload may be unfathomably difficult (keeping up with so many social networking sites sucks... that's why we have ProfileLinker), the potential for success is incredible.

Reward: Another option is to provide tangible rewards for marketing. This can be in the form of prizes, such as in a contest, or to individual users. Incentives are very powerful, and drive many users to promote where they'd be otherwise apathetic. Things can be very simple, such as giving them tokens or credits, to very expensive, such as providing real cash per referral. This is probably the most effective, albeit expensive, method of encouraging users to infect others.

Don't Stop. Don't set these actions in motion and then hope they work. Get involved. Comment on profiles. Reply to messages. Enhance your viral effect. Make it tangible. If users can see that there is a real person there, they will be a lot more enthusiastic and encouraged to participate, and your viral marketing campaign will be more successful.

Other Resources!!! Web Marketing Today has an amazing list of resource articles that are sure to help you build your campaign.

I've been using Twitter since pretty early on (and long before @oprah), and I've found it to be a superbly convenient communication tool and notification service. Even though it's still very young on the web (Twitter was founded in March of 2006) It's been the home to great ideas like the #twitterdata proposal and the publicdomain book-via-tweets project. It's also an awesome reputation management platform, and can be used to both to provide effective customer service and help distribute news and updates about your business or product, which is exactly how I use it for my online roleplaying project.

But as with the rest of the social media world, Twitter can become very complex very quickly (but I still contend that there is no social media overload) and as a result, can be difficult to manage. As a result, I use several third-party tools to help me manage and gather information that helps me do my Twitter job much more efficiently and effectively.

Splitweet [caption id="attachment_196" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Splitweet allows you to post and monitor multiple Twitter accounts and brands."][/caption]

For those of us with multiple Twitter accounts (like some people who create a Twitter account for each roleplaying character they use), Splitweet is an absolute savior. This service allows you to tweet to multiple accounts at the same time, as well as combining the "stream" from each account into one page. A lot of desktop Twitter clients offer this kind of functionality, but where Splitweet truly excels is in its ability to track what it calls "brands" (more reputation management terms here): you can specify keywords and phrases that will appear in a separate feed, even if you do not follow those users. This gets us around the disastrous changes Twitter made to the @replies, and helps us keep up to date on any mentions of our site's name and any tweets relating to what it is that we do.

Sherflock [caption id="attachment_195" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Sherflock provides detailed statistics and summaries of Twitter users you are associated with."][/caption]

Sherflock is an absolutely awesome stat tracking machine that helps weed out the waves of spam that have been coming in since Twitter has gone mainstream. Sherflock gives a large number of statistics about each every account the either follows you or that you are following, and lets you sort and filter users based on these statistics.

Twitterfall [caption id="attachment_194" align="alignnone" width="217" caption="Twitterfall offers a live stream of twitter updates on keywords that you specify."][/caption]

This tool allows you to specify any number of keywords that you wish to view on a live, moving stream of tweets. This is very useful if you are using a computer that allows you to "pin" a window on top (like Ubuntu Linux), or if you have a multiple-monitor rig, or even if you use multiple computers using the input-sharing app Synergy. You'll get a live feed of updates on any topic of your choice, which can even be updated and changed in real-time.

Using these three tools will help you maximize you Twitter performance and make the most of an already awesome service, preventing you from being inundated with the massive stream of messages that you're surely going to subscribe to.

What are your top three Twitter tools? Feel free to make a comment or write your own post, and I'll gladly append a link to this post to help everyone out!