Archive for February, 2008
Facebook Application Development How-to: 11 Tips You Don’t Want to Miss
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on February 28th, 2008
I’ve built several facebook applications now, and although none of them are as successful as my friend Ben’s “Make A Baby” application, I’m very happy with how they run. Here are the tricks that I used – although you’ll find them mentioned elsewhere, and each of them is important by itself, if you’re just getting started on your first facebook application, you need to know: Read the rest of this entry »
Fixin wordpress Tags to make Matt Mullenweg Happy
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on February 26th, 2008
At Northern Voice this past weekend, I had a chance to chat with Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress, and he pointed out an ugly little bug in the Flock blog editor – specifically, we weren’t using the right API call to submit tags with Wordpress posts.
This bug had turned up about 6 months ago, in a new release of Wordpress, and Flock hasn’t revisited the wordpress support in quite some time.
Luckily, it was a simple two line fix.
This post is, in fact, a test of the fix. If we’re happy, it should be tagged:
wordpress
Matt Mullenweg
lloyd budd
flock
bug fixin
How did we do?
Talking about Collaboration over at OpenInnovators.net
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on February 25th, 2008
I’ve started blogging over at OpenInnovators.net today, kicking off a discussion about collaboration within collaboration companies. Here is an excerpt:
This last weekend, at the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver, I had the pleasure of spending a few minutes talking about collaboration and crowdsourcing with the great folks at GiveMeaning. I had a similar discussion with Jaison Morgan, of the X-Prize Foundation, in Santa Monica last fall. But sadly, these sorts of meetings seem to be few and far between.
By my last count, there are a few dozen web portals dedicated to crowd-sourcing, on the spectrum from ideation, through charity and into straight-up commerce and procurement. I should know – I run one of them. And yet, in a field defined by cooperation over competition, and the wisdom of the crowd over the supremacy of the individual, there is a noticeable
glaringlack of communication between these companies.
To see what conclusions I draw from this, as well as the new cross-media tags I’m proposing, you can read the rest of the article here.
And, if you have ideas of things you’d like to see me blog about, (at OpenInnovators.net, on the BountyUp blog, or here) – please let me know.
Live Blogging – Northern Voice / Moosecamp 08 – TransitCAMP
Dustin Sachs is giving us the rundown on transitCAMP, and the challenges of “open source government.”
“Google has the transit data, but we don’t.”
No Canadian cities have made this data publicly accessible.
Some folks have scraped the site for the data themselves. (If they publish it, they’ll prob. get sued, though).
Someone in the back of the room knows the guy at BC Transit who helped release the data to Google – says it’s just in text files.
Question from the room: “What’s the problem with just Google having it? Does the public really NEED it?”
Blogged with the Flock Browser
Tags: nv08, moosecamp, transitcamp, opensource government
Live Blogging from MooseCamp – Part Deux
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on February 22nd, 2008
Citizen Journalism with CBC:
Key Takeaways:
- What does the citizen get out of it?
- Who participates?
- Why is CBC doing it? What are they getting out of it?
- CBC doesn’t give credit, except for photos. No link love.
- CBC asks for what they want – on air, and online.
Live Blogging from MooseCamp 2008 – Northern Voice
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on February 22nd, 2008
Sitting in the “Blogging for Political Activism” session right now – kicked off as a doctoral thesis project by the speaker, M. Kathleen Milberry
The Progressive Economics Forum – Chief Economist / Blogger, Andrew Jackson. Marc Lee. So far just talking simple technology of setting up blogs – DreamHost, picking a theme, getting a domain name. Nothing specific about motivating activism yet.
Extent of “ripple effect” is limited to Technorati, and promotion to”Progressive Bloggers“.
700-1000 page views per day avg.
Intersections with Mainstream media – “A number of times when I’ve made a post, have led to mainstream media contacting for an interview. It just happened, not promoted. No mediaroom section on the blog.”
If you want media coverage of your blog, put that all in the mediaroom. Make it easier to capture.
Watch the Comments on the posts (via RSS, etc.), sometimes the first comment can derail the whole thread.
The DMCA is being used to shutdown dissenting voices in the US. Hosting companies will generally shut down the blog first, ask questions later.
TAKEAWAY: Use a Canadian web host to avoid the DMCA, or try:
What about using Reddit/Digg for collecting Canadian political content? Try using the Canadian Reddit section.
5 Ways to Make People Do What You Want
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on February 15th, 2008
Ever since we came down from the trees and started waving around our opposable thumbs, humans have been struggling with “ethics”. At its core, the idea is very simple – if I can make you do what I want, should I?
There are dozens of aphorisms around this theme:
- Might makes right
- The ends justify the means
- The meek shall inherit the Earth
And, of course, my personal favorite: The Golden Rule.
Now, there are a couple of problems with the Golden Rule – firstly, it’s often misquoted, which gives it an ugly twist. Before we dive into where things go wrong, here’s the version I prefer: Read the rest of this entry »
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