The new EricMartindale.com is an experiment in data aggregation, and might have a few bugs. Feel free to explore, and then provide feedback directly to @martindale.
Share if you oppose "Booberday," the G+ meme of sharing photographs of cleavage.
It's demeaning, and it is precisely the gateway to harassment that drives women away from online communities. We have a responsibility as early adopters to create a respectful, caring community where everyone feels welcome. If it is acceptable in a community to post a photograph of cleavage, it becomes okay to comment on it with sexual jokes, then to comment on a photograph of a woman in the G+ community with a sexual joke, and then with sexual comments that are not jokes. If left unchecked, an online community that tolerates harassment against women can become dangerous for women, professionally and physically: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/06/gender.blogging.
When I commented on +Robert Scoble's post disagreeing with his participation, there were two primary reponses: (1) telling me to relax because it was just a single post of a woman who consented and (2) explaining that the purpose is breast cancer awareness. I normally wouldn't get upset about a single poster, but when my stream went from a thoughtful, respectful community to 2/3 animated gifs of breasts, I think I have reason to warn people: this isolates women and will cause them to leave. And this is not about breast cancer awareness, this is an excuse to share photographs of breasts without being derided as a pervert; if there ever was a component related to breast cancer awareness, that was lost the moment that the photographs were directed to excitement, rather than to the collection of research dollars (immediately?).
+Robert Scoble, I expected more from a public figure than to join in with a concept that degrades the quality of this budding community. You have one of the highest follower counts here, so what you endorse can dramatically shift the nature of the community. As a result of your post, thousands of additional people will join in this meme next week. That participation will harm women.
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Share if you oppose "Booberday," the G+ meme of sharing photographs of cleavage.
It's demeaning, and it is precisely the gateway to harassment that drives women away from online communities. We have a responsibility as early adopters to create a respectful, caring community where everyone feels welcome. If it is acceptable in a community to post a photograph of cleavage, it becomes okay to comment on it with sexual jokes, then to comment on a photograph of a woman in the G+ community with a sexual joke, and then with sexual comments that are not jokes. If left unchecked, an online community that tolerates harassment against women can become dangerous for women, professionally and physically: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/06/gender.blogging.
When I commented on +Robert Scoble's post disagreeing with his participation, there were two primary reponses: (1) telling me to relax because it was just a single post of a woman who consented and (2) explaining that the purpose is breast cancer awareness. I normally wouldn't get upset about a single poster, but when my stream went from a thoughtful, respectful community to 2/3 animated gifs of breasts, I think I have reason to warn people: this isolates women and will cause them to leave. And this is not about breast cancer awareness, this is an excuse to share photographs of breasts without being derided as a pervert; if there ever was a component related to breast cancer awareness, that was lost the moment that the photographs were directed to excitement, rather than to the collection of research dollars (immediately?).
+Robert Scoble, I expected more from a public figure than to join in with a concept that degrades the quality of this budding community. You have one of the highest follower counts here, so what you endorse can dramatically shift the nature of the community. As a result of your post, thousands of additional people will join in this meme next week. That participation will harm women.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Share if you oppose "Booberday," the G+ meme of sharing photographs of cleavage.
It's demeaning, and it is precisely the gateway to harassment that drives women away from online communities. We have a responsibility as early adopters to create a respectful, caring community where everyone feels welcome. If it is acceptable in a community to post a photograph of cleavage, it becomes okay to comment on it with sexual jokes, then to comment on a photograph of a woman in the G+ community with a sexual joke, and then with sexual comments that are not jokes. If left unchecked, an online community that tolerates harassment against women can become dangerous for women, professionally and physically: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/06/gender.blogging.
When I commented on +Robert Scoble's post disagreeing with his participation, there were two primary reponses: (1) telling me to relax because it was just a single post of a woman who consented and (2) explaining that the purpose is breast cancer awareness. I normally wouldn't get upset about a single poster, but when my stream went from a thoughtful, respectful community to 2/3 animated gifs of breasts, I think I have reason to warn people: this isolates women and will cause them to leave. And this is not about breast cancer awareness, this is an excuse to share photographs of breasts without being derided as a pervert; if there ever was a component related to breast cancer awareness, that was lost the moment that the photographs were directed to excitement, rather than to the collection of research dollars (immediately?).
+Robert Scoble, I expected more from a public figure than to join in with a concept that degrades the quality of this budding community. You have one of the highest follower counts here, so what you endorse can dramatically shift the nature of the community. As a result of your post, thousands of additional people will join in this meme next week. That participation will harm women.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Share if you oppose "Booberday," the G+ meme of sharing photographs of cleavage.
It's demeaning, and it is precisely the gateway to harassment that drives women away from online communities. We have a responsibility as early adopters to create a respectful, caring community where everyone feels welcome. If it is acceptable in a community to post a photograph of cleavage, it becomes okay to comment on it with sexual jokes, then to comment on a photograph of a woman in the G+ community with a sexual joke, and then with sexual comments that are not jokes. If left unchecked, an online community that tolerates harassment against women can become dangerous for women, professionally and physically: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/06/gender.blogging.
When I commented on +Robert Scoble's post disagreeing with his participation, there were two primary reponses: (1) telling me to relax because it was just a single post of a woman who consented and (2) explaining that the purpose is breast cancer awareness. I normally wouldn't get upset about a single poster, but when my stream went from a thoughtful, respectful community to 2/3 animated gifs of breasts, I think I have reason to warn people: this isolates women and will cause them to leave. And this is not about breast cancer awareness, this is an excuse to share photographs of breasts without being derided as a pervert; if there ever was a component related to breast cancer awareness, that was lost the moment that the photographs were directed to excitement, rather than to the collection of research dollars (immediately?).
+Robert Scoble, I expected more from a public figure than to join in with a concept that degrades the quality of this budding community. You have one of the highest follower counts here, so what you endorse can dramatically shift the nature of the community. As a result of your post, thousands of additional people will join in this meme next week. That participation will harm women.
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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 wordlist 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.
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I was just reviewing some of my older starred posts in Google Reader, and I came across a great post from ShoeMoney about Understanding Communities. Pam outlines some great approaches to the whole social media market, and how to understand and utilize the communities on which they are build.
Oldie but goodie! Does anyone have any feedback on how relevant this four month old post is? I for one, totally support the ideas that she came up with for usability. I don't think usability will ever become a non-issue, personally. SEO is huge, but as we've always hammered home - your visitors come first.
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The Google+ Community on Kiva is 26% of the way to its first goal!
We're trying to raise funding for 250 distinct loans by March 1st. Fellow community members +Carmelyne Thompson and +Lucas Johnson helped me put this together at the end of last year, thinking it'd be a great way to help change the world for the better in 2012. We've raised $1,900 for 69 different loans so far, and hope you can do something to pitch in (with as little as $25)!
I'm confident that as much as Google+ has grown in recent months, we can blow this goal out of the water and effectuate great things for the world. Let's see how far we can take it. :)
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The Google+ Community on Kiva is 26% of the way to its first goal!
We're trying to raise funding for 250 distinct loans by March 1st. Fellow community members +Carmelyne Thompson and +Lucas Johnson helped me put this together at the end of last year, thinking it'd be a great way to help change the world for the better in 2012. We've raised $1,900 for 69 different loans so far, and hope you can do something to pitch in (with as little as $25)!
I'm confident that as much as Google+ has grown in recent months, we can blow this goal out of the water and effectuate great things for the world. Let's see how far we can take it. :)
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The Google+ Community on Kiva is 26% of the way to its first goal!
We're trying to raise funding for 250 distinct loans by March 1st. Fellow community members +Carmelyne Thompson and +Lucas Johnson helped me put this together at the end of last year, thinking it'd be a great way to help change the world for the better in 2012. We've raised $1,900 for 69 different loans so far, and hope you can do something to pitch in (with as little as $25)!
I'm confident that as much as Google+ has grown in recent months, we can blow this goal out of the water and effectuate great things for the world. Let's see how far we can take it. :)
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The Google+ Community on Kiva is 26% of the way to its first goal!
We're trying to raise funding for 250 distinct loans by March 1st. Fellow community members +Carmelyne Thompson and +Lucas Johnson helped me put this together at the end of last year, thinking it'd be a great way to help change the world for the better in 2012. We've raised $1,900 for 69 different loans so far, and hope you can do something to pitch in (with as little as $25)!
I'm confident that as much as Google+ has grown in recent months, we can blow this goal out of the water and effectuate great things for the world. Let's see how far we can take it. :)
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So, entirely not in light of any recent events, I was integrating the chat rules that Vexar wrote into RolePlayGateway's Rules, and I was looking for some examples of forum etiquette that other forums use. In searching, I found this perfectly humorous video:
(I found it on Neil Boortz's website, but since headed over to videojug to get the original. PS, Neil? You're awesome.)
That was probably the best one I found, above and beyond the video I came across that seemed geared towards the Steam forum community, which was a bit too NSFW to actually embed here on my blog. If you'd like, you can go check out posting a new thread on AlbinoBlackSheep.
I'm admin on several online forums, and I'm a moderator on many more; not counting the countless other communities where I'm an active member. I was pretty proud of the rules I put together on Gateway, and I think they're clean, simple, and easy to follow. No one likes being bombarded and tacked down by rules, so I try to keep them as simple as possible. What do you think of them?
How do you manage forum users and set rules? I know Martin Reed has some good tips on forum rules, and there are many others out there that learned a lot from running forums. The best thing that we can do is learn from others, and gather experience on how to handle these issues. What is your approach to forum etiquette?
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There's some discussion about how forums are or are not social media, (frankly, I don't think there's any question at all) - and it occurred to me the answer of why there is this rift in perception of forums/message boards.
Message boards haven't changed in almost 25 years. There simply hasn't been any real innovation - and that's why there's so much "real" social media out there that's exploding right now. The stuff is so radically different from traditional mediums such as forums that everyone is missing the core of what social media is: community engagement and interaction
So, here are some of the things I'd like to see in a forum, and some things that I've implemented on some of my own forums (heh, or at least planning to implement):
Trackbacks
It'd be awesome to have the same functionality in a blog post that we have on Wordpress or other blog software - did I give credit to someone? Let me hit the trackback API to make sure there's a connection between the two posts in the semantic web.
A forum thread is no different than a blog post. It has a topic, a goal, and a discussion pertaining to the original post. Let's see some of the functionality we found in the current decade put to use!
Native RSS Support
There's nothing worse than having to write an RSS extension for your forum, and still not have the functionality you want. Give every URL on my forum a /feed, please. This includes forums, threads, posts, users: the whole shebang.
While you're at it, tell Feedburner to support filtered feeds - a lot of my users don't want every single post. And I sure as hell don't want to burn a new feed for every forum. C'mon, let's meet somewhere in the middle.
Semantic URLs
Blogging software does it, why do we still have URLs on forums that use IDs right there in the URL? What benefit does that have to the user?
Social Profiles
Alright, we've got friends and foes lists on our forums, now - but where is the option to make this information public? Why aren't we displaying a users' friend list on their profile page by default? What about all their most recent posts and actions, and selected excerpts?
A community can only grow in a stifled manner if interaction between members isn't made as easy as humanly possible. Current forum software is stuck in the 90's, with an XHTML wrapper around it. Let's fix this, and soon - before we all melt.
Real Metrics and Algorithms
Stop using post count as a legitimate metric. This only encourages poor post quality. Let's see the ability to easily show Flesch-Kincaid, average word count, or something similar. The amount of posts a user has is not a good valuation of their contributions.
Instead, replace these with something more community-driven. Look at Digg for example. There is a solid (questionably) algorithm in place that measures users based on what they've submitted and the reactions of other users' reaction to that content, whether it be a comment or a submission.
Maybe I'm just whining. Maybe I've got legitimate desires. What do you think?
P.S.: And good god, phpBB! Why didn't you include this stuff in your phpBB3 release?!
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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 referencepostsallday 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.
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?
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The author of the particularly famous Wheel of Time series passed away yesterday due to cardiac amyloidosis. Diagnosed with the disease in March of 2006, Jordan, born James Oliver Rigney Jr., vowed to fight the disease and continue his legendary writing career for many years to come. It is a great loss to the fantasy community...
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One of my favorite blogs is run by Martin Reed, and it's about online community building. He's really onto something here, and it's a shame there aren't more blogs out there on the topic (ahem, nudge nudge, wink wink). His content is top notch, and it relates directly to what it is that I do with my sites, particularly RolePlayGateway.
Just today he posted an article on active forum members and their value, and I'll be damned if I didn't forward that article to two teams on RolePlayGateway. And then I submitted it to StumbleUpon for good measure! Keep up the good work, Martin!
Does anyone know of any blogs about online community building? Please, share!
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The author of the particularly famous Wheel of Time series passed away yesterday due to cardiac amyloidosis. Diagnosed with the disease in March of 2006, Jordan, born James Oliver Rigney Jr., vowed to fight the disease and continue his legendary writing career for many years to come. It is a great loss to the fantasy community, and on behalf of RolePlayGateway, we send our condolences to his family and friends, who will no doubt be the most affected by his passing.
It is with great sadness that I tell you that the Dragon is gone. RJ left us today at 2:45 PM. He fought a valiant fight against this most horrid disease. In the end, he left peacefully and in no pain. In the years he had fought this, he taught me much about living and about facing death. He never waivered in his faith, nor questioned our God’s timing. I could not possibly be more proud of anyone. I am eternally grateful for the time that I had with him on this earth and look forward to our reunion, though as I told him this afternoon, not yet. I love you bubba.
Our beloved Harriet was at his side through the entire fight and to the end. The last words from his mouth were to tell her that he loved her.
Thank each and everyone of you for your prayers and support through this ordeal. He knew you were there. Harriet reminded him today that she was very proud of the many lives he had touched through his work. We’ve all felt the love that you’ve been sending my brother/cousin. Please keep it coming as our Harriet could use the support.
Jason will be posting funeral arrangements.
My sincerest thanks.
Peace and Light be with each of you,
Wilson
Brother/Cousin
4th of 3
To Catalyst: Never, never loose faith. RJ did not. Harriet hasn’t. I haven’t. Going through what we have, our faith is only strengthened. Besides, if God didn’t exist, we would have never had Jim. We did. God does. Remember my Brother/Cousin, my friend, think of him fondly and glorify God’s name.
Editor’s Note:
The entire staff of Dragonmount.com would like to extend its most deepest sympathies to Robert Jordan’s family. He touched all of our lives in some way and we wish him the rest and peace he deserves. We will be posting information in the near future about where you can send condolences. Please check the News Section for these updates.
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"Computational knowledge engine" WolframAlpha [1] just announced a new offering aiming at power users of their already amazing data science toolkit. I'm very impressed with the features they've chosen to add, including image processing and 3D plot export. Maybe I'm just being a huge nerd, but I think this'll be great for generating assets for presentations and demos. :)
I already use WolframAlpha for quickly plotting relationships in certain algorithms, or referencing certain datasets. It's great for checking on specs like display densities [2], calculating a transfer time (while automatically cross-referencing network specs!) [3] or even looking for obscure computing metrics [4]. It can help you calculate chemical reactions [5], or even plot a protein structure. [6]
My favorite day-to-day application is quick and dirty regression, for visualizing trends in my data [7], but it's still cool to play with n-gram decomposition [8].
Google hasn't even come close to this level of utility, even with innovations like Google Squared [9] (which was sadly shuttered last year... [10]) and the addition of function plotting to their universal search earlier this year [11]. They've been rolling in more and more tidbits like this, but I don't know that a company as large as Google can keep up with the delta, even with again-CEO +Larry Page's war on cruft [12] freeing up resources for projects like this.
It's priced at only $4.99 per month (or $2.99 for students, which I am not -- but I'll happily pay the premium at this price point!), right up my alley as building something comparable for local use (or even acquiring an existing software package) would be prohibitively expensive and moreover, complex.
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"Computational knowledge engine" WolframAlpha [1] just announced a new offering aiming at power users of their already amazing data science toolkit. I'm very impressed with the features they've chosen to add, including image processing and 3D plot export. Maybe I'm just being a huge nerd, but I think this'll be great for generating assets for presentations and demos. :)
I already use WolframAlpha for quickly plotting relationships in certain algorithms, or referencing certain datasets. It's great for checking on specs like display densities [2], calculating a transfer time (while automatically cross-referencing network specs!) [3] or even looking for obscure computing metrics [4]. It can help you calculate chemical reactions [5], or even plot a protein structure. [6]
My favorite day-to-day application is quick and dirty regression, for visualizing trends in my data [7], but it's still cool to play with n-gram decomposition [8].
Google hasn't even come close to this level of utility, even with innovations like Google Squared [9] (which was sadly shuttered last year... [10]) and the addition of function plotting to their universal search earlier this year [11]. They've been rolling in more and more tidbits like this, but I don't know that a company as large as Google can keep up with the delta, even with again-CEO +Larry Page's war on cruft [12] freeing up resources for projects like this.
It's priced at only $4.99 per month (or $2.99 for students, which I am not -- but I'll happily pay the premium at this price point!), right up my alley as building something comparable for local use (or even acquiring an existing software package) would be prohibitively expensive and moreover, complex.
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"Computational knowledge engine" WolframAlpha [1] just announced a new offering aiming at power users of their already amazing data science toolkit. I'm very impressed with the features they've chosen to add, including image processing and 3D plot export. Maybe I'm just being a huge nerd, but I think this'll be great for generating assets for presentations and demos. :)
I already use WolframAlpha for quickly plotting relationships in certain algorithms, or referencing certain datasets. It's great for checking on specs like display densities [2], calculating a transfer time (while automatically cross-referencing network specs!) [3] or even looking for obscure computing metrics [4]. It can help you calculate chemical reactions [5], or even plot a protein structure. [6]
My favorite day-to-day application is quick and dirty regression, for visualizing trends in my data [7], but it's still cool to play with n-gram decomposition [8].
Google hasn't even come close to this level of utility, even with innovations like Google Squared [9] (which was sadly shuttered last year... [10]) and the addition of function plotting to their universal search earlier this year [11]. They've been rolling in more and more tidbits like this, but I don't know that a company as large as Google can keep up with the delta, even with again-CEO +Larry Page's war on cruft [12] freeing up resources for projects like this.
It's priced at only $4.99 per month (or $2.99 for students, which I am not -- but I'll happily pay the premium at this price point!), right up my alley as building something comparable for local use (or even acquiring an existing software package) would be prohibitively expensive and moreover, complex.
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"Computational knowledge engine" WolframAlpha [1] just announced a new offering aiming at power users of their already amazing data science toolkit. I'm very impressed with the features they've chosen to add, including image processing and 3D plot export. Maybe I'm just being a huge nerd, but I think this'll be great for generating assets for presentations and demos. :)
I already use WolframAlpha for quickly plotting relationships in certain algorithms, or referencing certain datasets. It's great for checking on specs like display densities [2], calculating a transfer time (while automatically cross-referencing network specs!) [3] or even looking for obscure computing metrics [4]. It can help you calculate chemical reactions [5], or even plot a protein structure. [6]
My favorite day-to-day application is quick and dirty regression, for visualizing trends in my data [7], but it's still cool to play with n-gram decomposition [8].
Google hasn't even come close to this level of utility, even with innovations like Google Squared [9] (which was sadly shuttered last year... [10]) and the addition of function plotting to their universal search earlier this year [11]. They've been rolling in more and more tidbits like this, but I don't know that a company as large as Google can keep up with the delta, even with again-CEO +Larry Page's war on cruft [12] freeing up resources for projects like this.
It's priced at only $4.99 per month (or $2.99 for students, which I am not -- but I'll happily pay the premium at this price point!), right up my alley as building something comparable for local use (or even acquiring an existing software package) would be prohibitively expensive and moreover, complex.
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Wow, it's Friday already. Payday. Christmas gift time.
So, I've been pondering if I should go to an online university, a community college, or just straight to an in state school (UNC, NC State, possibly Duke)?
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Since we've moved the LocalSense team into our new offices in downtown Raleigh (we're at 319 W. Martin St., feel free to swing by anytime!), we've been firing on all cylinders -- it's incredible what the community here has to offer. We love the RDU area, and want to help the startup ecosystem grow even further. If you feel the same way, check out the 90-day challenge Anthony Pompliano has put together.
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"Since 1998, the Open Directory Project has been the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a passionate, global community of volunteer editors." - and they just launched a blog.
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That's one of those great, simple ideas that makes me think, "Huh. Why didn't someone think of that sooner?" :) Your dedication to making a positive difference is really inspiring!
My current project is to give back to the online community that has taught me so much by making some educational videos of my own! I hope to start very very soon, if school doesn't get in the way of my education. =P
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Thing is, I know how to code, but I don't feel like I'm handed a lot of opportunities to use that skill to make personal choices. The last time I felt like I had a really trivial-to-set-up environment in which to write useful utilities in was HyperTalk. Maybe we as a community should do something about that.
(I'm not saying current usable environments don't exist; just that there's a lot of barriers for people who aren't don't primarily identify as computer geeks. Knowing coding basics is only half the battle here, I think.)
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+Carel L. van Rooyen apologies for the delayed response! I think the most important thing is to realize that the government can not and will not be able to make a significant impact on education without the initiative being led by the community itself. Access is key, and there are many projects that solve the challenges associated with access--see laptop.org and kiwix.org--but the best people suited to understand a child's needs are those closest to them.
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There's been a lot of talk about how Squidoo is getting punished because of how they are getting used by spammers. The idea there was to go in, create something called a "lense" that is relevant to something about your niche, and then do your marketing thing there.
Well, I just ran into "a new service from Amazon. It appears to let you create your own list and present it to the social community. I'm definitely thinking about using it before the Googledance makes it another cesspool.
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One of my goals for 2012 is to permanently commit more of myself to philanthropy. Late last year, +Carmelyne Thompson, +Lucas Johnson, and myself started a lending group for the Google+ Community using Kiva.org, a way of using microfinance to help eliminate poverty around the world by enabling you to provide very small loans ( $25 ) to projects of your choice. I strongly encourage everyone to join our group and make at least one loan!
What other things can you come up with to help people in need, worldwide?
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One of my goals for 2012 is to permanently commit more of myself to philanthropy. Late last year, +Carmelyne Thompson, +Lucas Johnson, and myself started a lending group for the Google+ Community using Kiva.org, a way of using microfinance to help eliminate poverty around the world by enabling you to provide very small loans ( $25 ) to projects of your choice. I strongly encourage everyone to join our group and make at least one loan!
What other things can you come up with to help people in need, worldwide?
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One of my goals for 2012 is to permanently commit more of myself to philanthropy. Late last year, +Carmelyne Thompson, +Lucas Johnson, and myself started a lending group for the Google+ Community using Kiva.org, a way of using microfinance to help eliminate poverty around the world by enabling you to provide very small loans ( $25 ) to projects of your choice. I strongly encourage everyone to join our group and make at least one loan!
What other things can you come up with to help people in need, worldwide?
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One of my goals for 2012 is to permanently commit more of myself to philanthropy. Late last year, +Carmelyne Thompson, +Lucas Johnson, and myself started a lending group for the Google+ Community using Kiva.org, a way of using microfinance to help eliminate poverty around the world by enabling you to provide very small loans ( $25 ) to projects of your choice. I strongly encourage everyone to join our group and make at least one loan!
What other things can you come up with to help people in need, worldwide?
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I'm growing weary of the community that thrives on IRC, particularly of the fighter portion. (When I say fighting, I refer to a sport called text-fighting.) Andrew describes them quite eloquently: arrogant. They seem to believe that the IRC world is all there is, and that it is necessary to determine which channel, and perhaps even network, is better through means of blind hatred and ignorance.
Take, for example, this Animelab and SurrealChat thing. The GWing chat is hosted on SurrealChat. We often get users from Animelab telling GWingers that they suck and should die, in much more vibrant color, because SurrealChat is stupid, and they hate SurrealChat. Granted, this conflict has died down, but it does seem to be an epidemic.
I love when a conversation of these IRC nerds proceeds as follows.
"I'm the best roleplayer on this server." "No, you're not." "Yes, I am." "How about a hybrid match to determine that, then?" "Okay. Stance up."
Does my point need to be exemplified any more clearly?
Fighting a hybrid match is NOT ROLEPLAYING. Morons.
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+Coursefork is happy to announce the Startup Giveback, an initiative for entrepreneurs to donate equity instead of cash to social initiatives, in partnership with +Shoeboxed and the +American Underground. All are welcome to our first event, which will be hosted at the Shoeboxed HQ in Durham, NC. 100% of equity will go directly to Startup Endowment, while cash donations at the door of the event will go to the Triangle Community Foundation.
Donations of all sorts, not just equity, are welcome! While we're aiming for a 1% equity donation from each participating company, you're welcome to donate cash either online or at the door of the event. Feel free to leave comments if you have questions! I hope to see you there.
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I got a haircut last night - I'm down to maybe half a curl of hair. I don't have any pictures yet, but as soon as I do I'll post them here. Tonia killed me two or three times over when she found out. Sorry!
On another note, I'm writing this post in Google Docs. Since I'm using the Blogger Beta, I wasn't able to do this up until about a week ago, but I'm only now testing it out. It's a fairly easy setup, all I've had to do is select "Blogger (Beta)" from the Blog settings here in Docs, and then enter my username, password, and finally which blog I'd like to post to. This last bit of information is optional, and they said that they'll post to the first blog they find if you don't specify it.
We're (GWing Roleplay) looking at some excellent affiliate options, and will be presenting the community with a good number of resources in the near future. There are some outstanding opportunities that have presented themselves, and we're striving to give GWing the best environment possible for the roleplayers. We'll keep you updated as things progress, we promise!
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Google is coming to #Raleigh next week to talk about Google+ for business.
Google employee +Devin Buell is putting on the show at the Marbles Kids Museum in downtown Raleigh. Interesting tidbit:
“Local "power users" will also share how they've successfully used Google+ to achieve business goals. Whether you're a new or experienced Google+ user, this is a rare opportunity to meet, greet, and learn from Google and some of North Carolina's savviest social professionals.”
If you're in the area, it might be a great opportunity to see what Google+ is able to offer to #local businesses and engage with the local Google+ community. :)
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Google is coming to #Raleigh next week to talk about Google+ for business.
Google employee +Devin Buell is putting on the show at the Marbles Kids Museum in downtown Raleigh. Interesting tidbit:
“Local "power users" will also share how they've successfully used Google+ to achieve business goals. Whether you're a new or experienced Google+ user, this is a rare opportunity to meet, greet, and learn from Google and some of North Carolina's savviest social professionals.”
If you're in the area, it might be a great opportunity to see what Google+ is able to offer to #local businesses and engage with the local Google+ community. :)
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Google is coming to #Raleigh next week to talk about Google+ for business.
Google employee +Devin Buell is putting on the show at the Marbles Kids Museum in downtown Raleigh. Interesting tidbit:
“Local "power users" will also share how they've successfully used Google+ to achieve business goals. Whether you're a new or experienced Google+ user, this is a rare opportunity to meet, greet, and learn from Google and some of North Carolina's savviest social professionals.”
If you're in the area, it might be a great opportunity to see what Google+ is able to offer to #local businesses and engage with the local Google+ community. :)
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Google is coming to #Raleigh next week to talk about Google+ for business.
Google employee +Devin Buell is putting on the show at the Marbles Kids Museum in downtown Raleigh. Interesting tidbit:
“Local "power users" will also share how they've successfully used Google+ to achieve business goals. Whether you're a new or experienced Google+ user, this is a rare opportunity to meet, greet, and learn from Google and some of North Carolina's savviest social professionals.”
If you're in the area, it might be a great opportunity to see what Google+ is able to offer to #local businesses and engage with the local Google+ community. :)
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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. ;)
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Open Source is the Future of Education If you're familiar with coding, chances are you've seen how the open source software landscape has changed over the past few years with the advent of +GitHub. With my new company +Coursefork, I'm hoping to incite the same kind of change in the world of #education .
+Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com interviewed me recently about how we're building a better education, but it can't stop with us—he correctly identifies that the most important ingredient is the community of people who will be a part of the social fabric of education as we move forward.
Check out the interview and let me know your thoughts.
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Open Source is the Future of Education If you're familiar with coding, chances are you've seen how the open source software landscape has changed over the past few years with the advent of +GitHub. With my new company +Coursefork, I'm hoping to incite the same kind of change in the world of #education .
+Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com interviewed me recently about how we're building a better education, but it can't stop with us—he correctly identifies that the most important ingredient is the community of people who will be a part of the social fabric of education as we move forward.
Check out the interview and let me know your thoughts.
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Open Source is the Future of Education If you're familiar with coding, chances are you've seen how the open source software landscape has changed over the past few years with the advent of +GitHub. With my new company +Coursefork, I'm hoping to incite the same kind of change in the world of #education .
+Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com interviewed me recently about how we're building a better education, but it can't stop with us—he correctly identifies that the most important ingredient is the community of people who will be a part of the social fabric of education as we move forward.
Check out the interview and let me know your thoughts.
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Open Source is the Future of Education If you're familiar with coding, chances are you've seen how the open source software landscape has changed over the past few years with the advent of +GitHub. With my new company +Coursefork, I'm hoping to incite the same kind of change in the world of #education .
+Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com interviewed me recently about how we're building a better education, but it can't stop with us—he correctly identifies that the most important ingredient is the community of people who will be a part of the social fabric of education as we move forward.
Check out the interview and let me know your thoughts.
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I'm so pleased that +Coursefork made +Opensource.com's list of the top 10 open-source projects for 2013... this puts us alongside +Docker and +OpenStack, a true honor in my book.
If you haven't heard what the team has been working on, Coursefork is building an open-source collaboration tool for educators. In the same way software creators can re-use open-source resources to get ahead in the development cycle, we want to enable teachers to re-use materials and improvements thereof to allow for the accretion of teaching techniques in place of continual re-invention.
“We're creating the pull request for courses, and the process of getting there means creating the tools necessary to support the community of a new open future for education.”
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Coursefork Among Top 10 Open Source Projects of 2013 I'm so pleased that +Coursefork made +Opensource.com's list of the top 10 open-source projects for 2013... this puts us alongside +Docker and +OpenStack, a true honor in my book.
If you haven't heard what the team has been working on, Coursefork is building an open-source collaboration tool for educators. In the same way software creators can re-use open-source resources to get ahead in the development cycle, we want to enable teachers to re-use materials and improvements thereof to allow for the accretion of teaching techniques in place of continual re-invention.
“We're creating the pull request for courses, and the process of getting there means creating the tools necessary to support the community of a new open future for education.”
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Coursefork Among Top 10 Open Source Projects of 2013 I'm so pleased that +Coursefork made +Opensource.com's list of the top 10 open-source projects for 2013... this puts us alongside +Docker and +OpenStack, a true honor in my book.
If you haven't heard what the team has been working on, Coursefork is building an open-source collaboration tool for educators. In the same way software creators can re-use open-source resources to get ahead in the development cycle, we want to enable teachers to re-use materials and improvements thereof to allow for the accretion of teaching techniques in place of continual re-invention.
“We're creating the pull request for courses, and the process of getting there means creating the tools necessary to support the community of a new open future for education.”
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Coursefork Among Top 10 Open Source Projects of 2013 I'm so pleased that +Coursefork made +Opensource.com's list of the top 10 open-source projects for 2013... this puts us alongside +Docker and +OpenStack, a true honor in my book.
If you haven't heard what the team has been working on, Coursefork is building an open-source collaboration tool for educators. In the same way software creators can re-use open-source resources to get ahead in the development cycle, we want to enable teachers to re-use materials and improvements thereof to allow for the accretion of teaching techniques in place of continual re-invention.
“We're creating the pull request for courses, and the process of getting there means creating the tools necessary to support the community of a new open future for education.”
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You're right, +Debbie Coultis. The problem is that more often than not, any customizations made to the existing open resources (+MIT OpenCourseWare, for example) never make their way back "upstream", or otherwise made available to future educators or students who might have use of them. I talked a bit about how +Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), specifically with software, was involved in the open-source community very early on, but perhaps I should've gone into more depth here.
There are many free (and some open) educational resources emerging, but we need deeper interchangeability between them if their innovations are to be capitalized on.
+Bob Calder I don't know if Robert Panoff was in the audience or not, but you're right. +Coursera isn't the answer, but it is at least a step forward in increasing the availability of the delivery system. Once we're able to edit that content and the processes (e.g., make everything hackable), we'll close the loop on collaboration in education.
Thanks, +Nathan Greenling! Once +Coursefork ships more robust composition features, I'll attach the slides into the YouTube video at their corresponding points and perhaps include some further speaker notes.
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Now that it's public i'd like to share some tips that i think enrich your experience here and help your art be heard and seen and some new ways of profiting from it.
1. Re think your marketing strategy I see a lot of artists still using the site like twitter or facebook and just posting songs and not giving any inside story about how it came to be or what influenced it. Give people a reason to comment on your posts and continue that discussion.
2. Collaborate with artists outside your medium One of the most rewarding things about this site is the quality of the community here. As a musician, think of ways you can collaborate with photographers, graphic artists, software engineers etc.. This idea i think is the future of how artists of all mediums can be profitable and retain their artistic integrity ( i have a collaboration with +Colby Brown and +byron rempel that i'm working on right now that will showcase this)
3. Be Humble or at least be real The major change for artists that i feel is coming is how this amount of engagement and deeper connectivity will promote certain types of artists. Don't think that no matter how talented you are you can get away with thinking your art is enough to stand on it's own. Also, promote who you are and get people invested in who you are as a person and let them find out about your art if they want to know more about you, but don't push it on to people.
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Now that it's public i'd like to share some tips that i think enrich your experience here and help your art be heard and seen and some new ways of profiting from it.
1. Re think your marketing strategy I see a lot of artists still using the site like twitter or facebook and just posting songs and not giving any inside story about how it came to be or what influenced it. Give people a reason to comment on your posts and continue that discussion.
2. Collaborate with artists outside your medium One of the most rewarding things about this site is the quality of the community here. As a musician, think of ways you can collaborate with photographers, graphic artists, software engineers etc.. This idea i think is the future of how artists of all mediums can be profitable and retain their artistic integrity ( i have a collaboration with +Colby Brown and +byron rempel that i'm working on right now that will showcase this)
3. Be Humble or at least be real The major change for artists that i feel is coming is how this amount of engagement and deeper connectivity will promote certain types of artists. Don't think that no matter how talented you are you can get away with thinking your art is enough to stand on it's own. Also, promote who you are and get people invested in who you are as a person and let them find out about your art if they want to know more about you, but don't push it on to people.
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Why isn't education open-source in the first place? I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle Park about education and open source, and how the freedoms that are necessary for a healthy education system were systematically removed over time. While the slides aren't available in the video, I've uploaded them to +Coursefork [1].
It's incredibly powerful to lay out the data and show how increased spending and manpower has impacted the quality of education over time: aptitude measurements have stayed flat (or negative!) while test scores and grades continue to inflate. It seems as if we've built a system of education that is extremely good at—wait for it—_getting people to pass standardized tests_.
Companies like +Khan Academy and +Coursera are really chipping away at the problem of making the resources available, both content and services (i.e., actual teaching), but making the content interchangeable and hackable is of critical importance to building the healthy open source ecosystem that we've seen emerge in the software community (a la +GitHub) within the world of education.
One day, we'll see the equivalent of the pull request in education. I'm hoping to build it with +Coursefork.
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Why isn't education open-source in the first place? I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle Park about education and open source, and how the freedoms that are necessary for a healthy education system were systematically removed over time. While the slides aren't available in the video, I've uploaded them to +Coursefork [1].
It's incredibly powerful to lay out the data and show how increased spending and manpower has impacted the quality of education over time: aptitude measurements have stayed flat (or negative!) while test scores and grades continue to inflate. It seems as if we've built a system of education that is extremely good at—wait for it—_getting people to pass standardized tests_.
Companies like +Khan Academy and +Coursera are really chipping away at the problem of making the resources available, both content and services (i.e., actual teaching), but making the content interchangeable and hackable is of critical importance to building the healthy open source ecosystem that we've seen emerge in the software community (a la +GitHub) within the world of education.
One day, we'll see the equivalent of the pull request in education. I'm hoping to build it with +Coursefork.
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Why isn't education open-source in the first place? I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle Park about education and open source, and how the freedoms that are necessary for a healthy education system were systematically removed over time. While the slides aren't available in the video, I've uploaded them to +Coursefork [1].
It's incredibly powerful to lay out the data and show how increased spending and manpower has impacted the quality of education over time: aptitude measurements have stayed flat (or negative!) while test scores and grades continue to inflate. It seems as if we've built a system of education that is extremely good at—wait for it—_getting people to pass standardized tests_.
Companies like +Khan Academy and +Coursera are really chipping away at the problem of making the resources available, both content and services (i.e., actual teaching), but making the content interchangeable and hackable is of critical importance to building the healthy open source ecosystem that we've seen emerge in the software community (a la +GitHub) within the world of education.
One day, we'll see the equivalent of the pull request in education. I'm hoping to build it with +Coursefork.
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Why isn't education open-source in the first place? I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle Park about education and open source, and how the freedoms that are necessary for a healthy education system were systematically removed over time. While the slides aren't available in the video, I've uploaded them to +Coursefork [1].
It's incredibly powerful to lay out the data and show how increased spending and manpower has impacted the quality of education over time: aptitude measurements have stayed flat (or negative!) while test scores and grades continue to inflate. It seems as if we've built a system of education that is extremely good at—wait for it—_getting people to pass standardized tests_.
Companies like +Khan Academy and +Coursera are really chipping away at the problem of making the resources available, both content and services (i.e., actual teaching), but making the content interchangeable and hackable is of critical importance to building the healthy open source ecosystem that we've seen emerge in the software community (a la +GitHub) within the world of education.
One day, we'll see the equivalent of the pull request in education. I'm hoping to build it with +Coursefork.
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Open Source ALL the Things! I'll be speaking next week at +The Research Triangle Park about #OpenSource , #education , and +Coursefork. I'm extremely excited (and humbled!) to be a part of an event that includes speakers from +Red Hat and +IBM, especially to speak on a topic that I'm so passionate about. See the full speaker list at the official site!
I hope to see you there. :)
About the Event Open source. It's faster, cleaner, and more accurate than traditional methodologies -- and it's the culture the Triangle is fast-becoming known for. There's a reason that Red Hat, the first billion-dollar open source company, has built its headquarters here.
For September's “RTP 180," we're celebrating our region's fondness for open source with a speaker series that pulls from our three founding universities (NC State, Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill), companies and communities. On September 17, we hope you will join us from 6:00-7:30, at RTP’s headquarters (12 Davis Drive, Durham, NC), for "RTP 180: Open Source All the Things.”
Our doors open at 5:00 so you can stop in right after work to grab a snack; a reception will follow after the event. We hear there will be tacos and free beer.
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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.
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Warning: Strong nerdery follows. Please be cautious of your fragile mind.
Since late 1997, in all of my pre-teen glory, I have been involved with something my friends and I simply called roleplay in our own little vernacular. Of course I've since learned that roleplay doesn't only refer to the peer-driven world of online roleplay, it refers to all sorts of real-world tabletop games, live acting, and various amounts of storytelling, but this particular post is written with the word roleplay referring to the freeform online roleplaying that I have always been so close to.
Freeform roleplay, or the idea that there is no GM (game master) or storyteller (as in Vampire: The Masquerade), and is instead driven solely by the players, with no concrete rules for battle, statistics, or progression of the story. Rules and guidelines were driven by common expectation, which developed as a sort of social justice system that remains effective, even today.
The very roots of this sort of roleplay stem from early chat systems, where one could adopt a simple moniker and create a personality around the idea of an "avatar", which in most cases consisted only of this name. Players, without defining themselves as such, would interact in an imaginative world that coalesced out of their collaborative imagination. Each would react to the other characters' actions and dialogue in a fashion that suited their own character's theoretical personality, and this would create a constantly evolving story arc.
As the web (and the young teen's perception of the web) evolved and grew, so did the concept of roleplay. Online forums became an entirely new beast, allowing users to write more and more into their in character posts, instead of being limited to the single lines that chat provided (of course, some chats had enough space for people to post a full paragraph, or even two - but this was limited at the time), they were able to expound upon their writing and even proofread their copy before sending it across the web for the other players to view.
Freeform roleplay had also grown to be very competitive at this point, with groups of players forming groups known as clans, guilds, or otherwise, and expanded their IC competitions from chat to the forums and message boards now provided by a few enterprising organizations (or individuals). It was this competitive banter and challenge that defined what many now call the golden age of roleplay, which is what really drove the forefront of this gaming medium.
There were plenty of players who had entered their late teens (and some even were adults at this point, gasp!) who moved away from chat, and who moved away from the conflict-driven world of this type of roleplay. They went on to create storyline-oriented games, with a small and select number of players in more of a collaborative fiction setting. These players often went on to become writers and editors, being driven more by the literary aspect of relaying a fiction onto the internet, and often have their own private niche where they can continue to do this with their long-standing playergroup.
And... that's where we are today. The freeform roleplay community is growing and changing, barely 15 years old at this point. We have the chance to nurture it, just as we have the chance to neglect it. Those of us who've been involved since the beginning have the greatest opportunity to influence the course of growth, and that's exactly what I'm hoping to do.
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Yes, we're expanding. While +Wells Fargo [1] and +Wikipedia [2] start exploring #cryptofinance, we're also moving full steam ahead towards getting every company in the world to accept #bitcoin as a payment option.
Not only have we hired the best from companies like +Red Hat, +IBM, and Visa into our senior leadership, but we've established a firm position in the marketplace–we're now performing over $1,000,000 per day in transactions with Bitcoin, and there are now over 1,000 new businesses accepting Bitcoin every week. Now, we're hiring to support this investment in the community.
If you're interested in building anything related to #cryptofinance, give me a shout. We're extremely focused on #OpenSource and #cryptography , and will be spending a lot of our time [3] participating in the support of developers building applications in the space. If you want to build something that will shape the future of the world, #cryptofinance is the right space to be in.
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BitPay Expands, Fueled By Bitcoin Demand Yes, we're expanding. While +Wells Fargo [1] and +Wikipedia [2] start exploring #cryptofinance , we're also moving full steam ahead towards getting every company in the world to accept #bitcoin as a payment option.
Not only have we hired the best from companies like +Red Hat, +IBM, and Visa into our senior leadership, but we've established a firm position in the marketplace–we're now performing over $1,000,000 per day in transactions with Bitcoin, and there are now over 1,000 new businesses accepting Bitcoin every week. Now, we're hiring to support this investment in the community.
If you're interested in building anything related to #cryptofinance , give me a shout. We're extremely focused on #OpenSource and #cryptography , and will be spending a lot of our time [3] participating in the support of developers building applications in the space. If you want to build something that will shape the future of the world, #cryptofinance is the right space to be in.
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BitPay Expands, Fueled By Bitcoin Demand Yes, we're expanding. While +Wells Fargo [1] and +Wikipedia [2] start exploring #cryptofinance , we're also moving full steam ahead towards getting every company in the world to accept #bitcoin as a payment option.
Not only have we hired the best from companies like +Red Hat, +IBM, and Visa into our senior leadership, but we've established a firm position in the marketplace–we're now performing over $1,000,000 per day in transactions with Bitcoin, and there are now over 1,000 new businesses accepting Bitcoin every week. Now, we're hiring to support this investment in the community.
If you're interested in building anything related to #cryptofinance , give me a shout. We're extremely focused on #OpenSource and #cryptography , and will be spending a lot of our time [3] participating in the support of developers building applications in the space. If you want to build something that will shape the future of the world, #cryptofinance is the right space to be in.
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BitPay Expands, Fueled By Bitcoin Demand Yes, we're expanding. While +Wells Fargo [1] and +Wikipedia [2] start exploring #cryptofinance , we're also moving full steam ahead towards getting every company in the world to accept #bitcoin as a payment option.
Not only have we hired the best from companies like +Red Hat, +IBM, and Visa into our senior leadership, but we've established a firm position in the marketplace–we're now performing over $1,000,000 per day in transactions with Bitcoin, and there are now over 1,000 new businesses accepting Bitcoin every week. Now, we're hiring to support this investment in the community.
If you're interested in building anything related to #cryptofinance , give me a shout. We're extremely focused on #OpenSource and #cryptography , and will be spending a lot of our time [3] participating in the support of developers building applications in the space. If you want to build something that will shape the future of the world, #cryptofinance is the right space to be in.
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I've been relying heavily on node.js this past year to provide a robust set of tools to solve the problems I encounter on a daily basis. I was pleased to see honorCipherOrder was added to node's TLS library in node.js v0.7.6, and released with node.js v0.8.0.
Late last year, security researcher Juliano Rizzo announced a new attack against the AES encryption used in the SSL/TLS transaction he dubbed BEAST. The details are interesting to those who care, but it turns out that we can mitigate this attack in node.js by enforcing honorCipherOrder on the server. Let's take a look.
If you have an HTTPS server that looks like this:
var https = require('https');
var fs = require('fs');
var options = {
key: fs.readFileSync('key.pem'),
cert: fs.readFileSync('cert.pem')
};
https.createServer(options, function (req, res) {
res.writeHead(200);
res.end("hello world\n");
}).listen(443);
...you can now manage the cipher order by using the ciphers option. In the following code snippet we're going set the options for the above server to use Steve Caligo's cipher order, which prefers TLS 1.2 ciphers (which are not vulnerable to the BEAST attack) for clients that support TLS 1.2 but falls back to the RC4 ciphers on TLS 1.0 clients.[...]
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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.
Don't spend everything you have on a single campaign.
Don't rely entirely on one vehicle of viral marketing.
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 Anfusocalls 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.
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[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.
[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!
[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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
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.
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SXG+: The Road Trip I'm now home and settled in after a whirlwind trip to +SXSW with +Superdave Houdini, and getting back to work on +LocalSense. We drove over 2,000 miles in total to +HIRL with amazing Google+ community members like +Carter Gibson, +Amanda Blain, and +Moritz Tolxdorff. It's over for me now, but the afterglow of meeting even more amazing people than I did at the #DCHIRL will linger with me for a while yet, and the impressions they've made upon me will be permanent.
It started in Raleigh, NC where I departed at around 6:30 PM to meet +Superdave Houdini in Valdosta, GA at around 2 AM. One Georgian speeding ticket later, I was #scheming with my soon-to-be roatrip partner (who'd just arrived from Miami, FL!) and +Raleigh Burke in a Google Hangout for an hour or two before hitting the road again.
We stopped in Tallahassee, FL for some breakfast and #starbucks ( #buxxin !) while I knocked out a few work tasks, and were New Orleans-bound within the hour. We soon passed a sign for a place called “Buc-ee's”, which was apparently 797 miles away ( #WTF ?) [1]. This is apparently a thing, and there's not one--but multiple posts on The Internet™ about that particular sign.
Following up our post-breakfast journey with a stop on Bourbon Street [2] for some wings was an absolute must, and we rewarded our success in overtaking +Amanda Blain (who was stuck way back Atlanta on the +StartupBus!) with a drink or two before cramming back into my car and cranking some #whitegirlfriday jams. Thankfully we had #bluetooth in the car, so +Superdave Houdini was able to play the appropriate soundtrack for the epic that was already unfolding.
There was more +Starbucks Coffee to be had in Baton Rouge, LA [3] before heading out on the final stretch to Texas, fueling our excitement as we looked forward to the upcoming shenanigans in Austin. Texas indeed greeted us with all its majesty, a grandiose lone star at a rest stop just across the border, where one of Mini-Supes' (R.I.P.) last photos was taken... (photo forthcoming!) but US-10 had some surprises for us before we'd land for the night.
Just as we were passing through Vidor, TX, we encountered bumper-to-bumper traffic that we later learned was the result of an overturned truck somewhere along that particular stretch. Not especially excited to endure three hours worth of traffic, we decided to route two hours down towards Bridge City [4] and then west to Winnie before picking up US10 again on the way into Houston, where we stayed with the brilliant and gracious +Calvin Christopher for drinks, intellectual discourse, and planning for the following day.
We all sadly lost a good partner and great friend that night [5], but we weren't to be thwarted--the show must go on! We had three hours remaining, and needed to be back on the road. So off we went! [6]
I'm sure all the others will document the happenings in Austin sufficiently, so I'll save my insight for later--but I'll end with a special thank you to +John Fanavans, +Summer Fulcher, and the rest of you who met us that night when we arrived. That night certainly set the tone for the remainder of what turned out to be one of the most alive, and vibrant, and incredible experiences possible.
Thank all of you for making Google+ for what it is.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
SXG+: The Road Trip I'm now home and settled in after a whirlwind trip to +SXSW with +Superdave Houdini, and getting back to work on +LocalSense. We drove over 2,000 miles in total to +HIRL with amazing Google+ community members like +Carter Gibson, +Amanda Blain, and +Moritz Tolxdorff. It's over for me now, but the afterglow of meeting even more amazing people than I did at the #DCHIRL will linger with me for a while yet, and the impressions they've made upon me will be permanent.
It started in Raleigh, NC where I departed at around 6:30 PM to meet +Superdave Houdini in Valdosta, GA at around 2 AM. One Georgian speeding ticket later, I was #scheming with my soon-to-be roatrip partner (who'd just arrived from Miami, FL!) and +Raleigh Burke in a Google Hangout for an hour or two before hitting the road again.
We stopped in Tallahassee, FL for some breakfast and #starbucks ( #buxxin !) while I knocked out a few work tasks, and were New Orleans-bound within the hour. We soon passed a sign for a place called “Buc-ee's”, which was apparently 797 miles away ( #WTF ?) [1]. This is apparently a thing, and there's not one-but multiple posts on The Internet™ about that particular sign.
Following up our post-breakfast journey with a stop on Bourbon Street [2] for some wings was an absolute must, and we rewarded our success in overtaking +Amanda Blain (who was stuck way back Atlanta on the +StartupBus!) with a drink or two before cramming back into my car and cranking some #whitegirlfriday jams. Thankfully we had #bluetooth in the car, so +Superdave Houdini was able to play the appropriate soundtrack for the epic that was already unfolding.
There was more +Starbucks Coffee to be had in Baton Rouge, LA [3] before heading out on the final stretch to Texas, fueling our excitement as we looked forward to the upcoming shenanigans in Austin. Texas indeed greeted us with all its majesty, a grandiose lone star at a rest stop just across the border, where one of Mini-Supes' (R.I.P.) last photos was taken... (photo forthcoming!) but US-10 had some surprises for us before we'd land for the night.
Just as we were passing through Vidor, TX, we encountered bumper-to-bumper traffic that we later learned was the result of an overturned truck somewhere along that particular stretch. Not especially excited to endure three hours worth of traffic, we decided to route two hours down towards Bridge City [4] and then west to Winnie before picking up US10 again on the way into Houston, where we stayed with the brilliant and gracious +Calvin Christopher for drinks, intellectual discourse, and planning for the following day.
We all sadly lost a good partner and great friend that night [5], but we weren't to be thwarted-the show must go on! We had three hours remaining, and needed to be back on the road. So off we went! [6]
I'm sure all the others will document the happenings in Austin sufficiently, so I'll save my insight for later--but I'll end with a special thank you to +John Fanavans, +Summer Fulcher, and the rest of you who met us that night when we arrived. That night certainly set the tone for the remainder of what turned out to be one of the most alive, and vibrant, and incredible experiences possible.
Thank all of you for making Google+ for what it is.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
SXG+: The Road Trip I'm now home and settled in after a whirlwind trip to +SXSW with +Superdave Houdini, and getting back to work on +LocalSense. We drove over 2,000 miles in total to +HIRL with amazing Google+ community members like +Carter Gibson, +Amanda Blain, and +Moritz Tolxdorff. It's over for me now, but the afterglow of meeting even more amazing people than I did at the #DCHIRL will linger with me for a while yet, and the impressions they've made upon me will be permanent.
It started in Raleigh, NC where I departed at around 6:30 PM to meet +Superdave Houdini in Valdosta, GA at around 2 AM. One Georgian speeding ticket later, I was #scheming with my soon-to-be roatrip partner (who'd just arrived from Miami, FL!) and +Raleigh Burke in a Google Hangout for an hour or two before hitting the road again.
We stopped in Tallahassee, FL for some breakfast and #starbucks ( #buxxin !) while I knocked out a few work tasks, and were New Orleans-bound within the hour. We soon passed a sign for a place called “Buc-ee's”, which was apparently 797 miles away ( #WTF ?) [1]. This is apparently a thing, and there's not one-but multiple posts on The Internet™ about that particular sign.
Following up our post-breakfast journey with a stop on Bourbon Street [2] for some wings was an absolute must, and we rewarded our success in overtaking +Amanda Blain (who was stuck way back Atlanta on the +StartupBus!) with a drink or two before cramming back into my car and cranking some #whitegirlfriday jams. Thankfully we had #bluetooth in the car, so +Superdave Houdini was able to play the appropriate soundtrack for the epic that was already unfolding.
There was more +Starbucks Coffee to be had in Baton Rouge, LA [3] before heading out on the final stretch to Texas, fueling our excitement as we looked forward to the upcoming shenanigans in Austin. Texas indeed greeted us with all its majesty, a grandiose lone star at a rest stop just across the border, where one of Mini-Supes' (R.I.P.) last photos was taken... (photo forthcoming!) but US-10 had some surprises for us before we'd land for the night.
Just as we were passing through Vidor, TX, we encountered bumper-to-bumper traffic that we later learned was the result of an overturned truck somewhere along that particular stretch. Not especially excited to endure three hours worth of traffic, we decided to route two hours down towards Bridge City [4] and then west to Winnie before picking up US10 again on the way into Houston, where we stayed with the brilliant and gracious +Calvin Christopher for drinks, intellectual discourse, and planning for the following day.
We all sadly lost a good partner and great friend that night [5], but we weren't to be thwarted-the show must go on! We had three hours remaining, and needed to be back on the road. So off we went! [6]
I'm sure all the others will document the happenings in Austin sufficiently, so I'll save my insight for later--but I'll end with a special thank you to +John Fanavans, +Summer Fulcher, and the rest of you who met us that night when we arrived. That night certainly set the tone for the remainder of what turned out to be one of the most alive, and vibrant, and incredible experiences possible.
Thank all of you for making Google+ for what it is.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
SXG+: The Road Trip I'm now home and settled in after a whirlwind trip to +SXSW with +Superdave Houdini, and getting back to work on +LocalSense. We drove over 2,000 miles in total to +HIRL with amazing Google+ community members like +Carter Gibson, +Amanda Blain, and +Moritz Tolxdorff. It's over for me now, but the afterglow of meeting even more amazing people than I did at the #DCHIRL will linger with me for a while yet, and the impressions they've made upon me will be permanent.
It started in Raleigh, NC where I departed at around 6:30 PM to meet +Superdave Houdini in Valdosta, GA at around 2 AM. One Georgian speeding ticket later, I was #scheming with my soon-to-be roatrip partner (who'd just arrived from Miami, FL!) and +Raleigh Burke in a Google Hangout for an hour or two before hitting the road again.
We stopped in Tallahassee, FL for some breakfast and #starbucks ( #buxxin !) while I knocked out a few work tasks, and were New Orleans-bound within the hour. We soon passed a sign for a place called “Buc-ee's”, which was apparently 797 miles away ( #WTF ?) [1]. This is apparently a thing, and there's not one-but multiple posts on The Internet™ about that particular sign.
Following up our post-breakfast journey with a stop on Bourbon Street [2] for some wings was an absolute must, and we rewarded our success in overtaking +Amanda Blain (who was stuck way back Atlanta on the +StartupBus!) with a drink or two before cramming back into my car and cranking some #whitegirlfriday jams. Thankfully we had #bluetooth in the car, so +Superdave Houdini was able to play the appropriate soundtrack for the epic that was already unfolding.
There was more +Starbucks Coffee to be had in Baton Rouge, LA [3] before heading out on the final stretch to Texas, fueling our excitement as we looked forward to the upcoming shenanigans in Austin. Texas indeed greeted us with all its majesty, a grandiose lone star at a rest stop just across the border, where one of Mini-Supes' (R.I.P.) last photos was taken... (photo forthcoming!) but US-10 had some surprises for us before we'd land for the night.
Just as we were passing through Vidor, TX, we encountered bumper-to-bumper traffic that we later learned was the result of an overturned truck somewhere along that particular stretch. Not especially excited to endure three hours worth of traffic, we decided to route two hours down towards Bridge City [4] and then west to Winnie before picking up US10 again on the way into Houston, where we stayed with the brilliant and gracious +Calvin Christopher for drinks, intellectual discourse, and planning for the following day.
We all sadly lost a good partner and great friend that night [5], but we weren't to be thwarted-the show must go on! We had three hours remaining, and needed to be back on the road. So off we went! [6]
I'm sure all the others will document the happenings in Austin sufficiently, so I'll save my insight for later--but I'll end with a special thank you to +John Fanavans, +Summer Fulcher, and the rest of you who met us that night when we arrived. That night certainly set the tone for the remainder of what turned out to be one of the most alive, and vibrant, and incredible experiences possible.
Thank all of you for making Google+ for what it is.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
There's been a lot of active discussion about the state of AOL's directory project, 
As 
