Citadel, MySpace, and BBS

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So, I’m wanting to find out more about this projected called Citadel. It’s a groupware package for lots of important stuff like calendars, email, and chat. I actually found it while looking for a good calendar server solution. Citadel is more than a calendar for sure, the site says it can be used like a BBS.

While learning more, I ended up reading this blog post. It is a must read, particularly for anyone who remembers the BBS scene (or is still involved). The idea that MySpace is just another BBS is completely accurate. I’ll quote another good point:

Even the “BBS’s are from yesteryear” groupthink over at Slashdot is particularly ironic, considering that Slashdot itself is basically just a big BBS optimized for the reporting and discussion of tech news.

So for all you peeps who ran a BBS in your basement purely for the joy – you can now build one on the Internet and sell it for over half a billion dollars. I’m sure, forum centric products like vBul are not the answer. A forum is but one small aspect for a virtual community. Custom baked community software rules until something more modular and diverse than our typical forum software comes along.

Perhaps Citadel is a good foundation for something like that. I will be checking into it.

It’s time to give Firefox an audio mixer.

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The title says it all, it is time to give Firefox an audio mixer.

The web is becoming increasingly more multimedia. While the bulk of web content is still text, and will likely remain text for a long time to come; multimedia is here to stay. The curent state of multimedia on the web is painful, particularly on sites such as MySpace where opening a single page could result in several movies or MP3s playing at once… not to mention the chaos that can happen with for those of us that are addicted to browser tabs.

All audio played from a plugin should be passed to the browser’s audio mixer. The browser should have a variety of mixing controls including:

  • global mute and volume
  • per-tab mute and volume
  • automatic volume adjustments based on focused tab status
  • volume and mute controls per embedded object
  • automatic volume adjustments for embedded objects in view status

Plugins should be given an api to the mixer. There is likely a way to mask older plugins to some kind of virtual device. If so, Firefox could add this functionality without making updates to any plugins.

Such an API could also be accessable via javascript, giving AJAX the power to have sound events or stream audio. Then things will get really fun.

How to NOT build community.

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Over the past couple of days, I’ve had an e-mail dialog with the organizer of a meetup.com group for marketing. It all began shortly after I added the group to my list. I noticed several very pointed e-mails asking people to RSVP for the upcoming gathering. So, I submitted my RSVP. On the day of the meetup itself, I learned that if I attended the meetup – I would be there alone.

I would like to share with you the dialog I had with the group organizer. This, in my mind, is exactly how NOT to motivated people to get involved with a group.

From the organizer to me:

I am not coming out and hope you get this message since I don’t have your number to call. One person is not worth a meetup confirming. Please e-mail me back ideas so we can team up and talk outside of the group. Sorry for any inconvience.For you being dedicated enough to confirm I want to make assistant organizer of you want.

Sincerely,
Xxxx Xxxx

From the organizer to the entire group:

I requested a e-mail at XXX@XXX and only got one response. So lets go for next thursday at the same time and hopefully a better response for confirmation. I am not doing this for free and paying 20 dollars literally to make this happen for fun. So next time you say yes and cancel there will be a 5 dollar fee for canceling. To use a place I need headcounts or to want to invite special guests I am not wasting their time either. If you dont pay the penalty fee you will be kicked out. You will be e-mailed my address to mail the fee as well.

From me to the organizer:

Xxxxx,
I wanted to let you know that this type of motivational approach really turns me off to the group altogether.

I don’t know how you would enforce a $5 cancellation fee, but I know that I will never pay one. I understand that you’re upset about the lack of participation in your group – but I don’t think threatening people who cancel is going to work to your benefit.

I think you’d be more successful if you found positive approaches to attract people to the meetings.

Just my $0.02. Best of luck.

From the organizer to me:

Dear Xxxx,
I run this group and will do what I want. If you want to be a member you will pay or get kicked out. You are a grown man with no fee to be here and I pay 20 dollars a month . So if you take my time and say you will be there . On top of that I make arrangements on a certain head count . In the end I look bad telling an owner one count and 2 show up. I have a busy schedule and am not doing this for fun or paying this fee hoping someone shows up. Thanks for your 2 cents ,but my word is final at all times. You being turned off is the least of my concerns . I need a devoted group not time takers.

You can probably already tell what is wrong with his approach. He’s bitter towards the very members he’s trying to recruit. His negative energy will continue to push people away from him. I believe his core fault is his attitude of entitlement. He seems to feel that people owe him their attendence because he’s invested his time and money in the group. This is the wrong attitude to have, and it will only lead to disappointment.

When you build your communities – either virtual or in the real world – do it for the joy and the fun. If you start with a “this better pay off” attitude, you’ve already failed.

Why to NEVER spam! – A Lesson From a 2001 Startup

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What We Did

Near the end of the first bubble, I joined a cool idea for a startup company. We had a subscription based product to sell online and I was hired as the Director of Web Development. I was stoked; but it didn’t take things long to fall apart. Even if the bubble hadn’t popped, our gig was doomed to fail. I’ll now share with the world one of our biggest mistakes – spamming.

We were getting exactly the subscription rates I expected; but we weren’t seeing nearly the rates that marketing wanted. To solve this, marketing purchased a list with millions of e-mail addresses. This list cost us a whopping $50. Then, they put one of our programmers on the task of building some quick spamming software. Once it was ready, they fired it up and sent out an unsolicited bulk e-mail to millions of unsuspecting folks. What was the content of this e-mail? It was a promise to donate a percentage of all new subscriptions to a Sept. 11th victim fund… then it linked directly to our site. While I didn’t really agree with the ethics of the message, that is an issue for another blog post entirely.

As you might have guessed – I NEVER KNEW about the spam machine. There was no doubt, I never would have agreed to it. Marketing was wise enough to do the whole thing behind my back.

Up until this point, I had been working various promotional techniques to build site traffic. I was working to gain better search engine indexing. I was finding ways to get online communities talking about us. I was doing link exchanges. All the while, I was putting in late hours trying to get the backend parts of our website coded… And for some reason, and I didn’t think to ask why, our other Web programmer was busy on some secret project.

What Happened

It started off like any other day, I started by checking my e-mail. I noticed a flood of unsubscribe requests. I was a bit surprised. I started asking questions, and then found out about the spam machine, the $50 list, and what had been set in motion in meetings behind closed doors.

unsubscribe emails in my inbox

By the time I found out, it was too late – the damage was done. Still, we were just starting to know the damage. Aside from damaging our brand’s image, we’d pissed off enough of the right people to put a real hurt on our business.

First, our mail server was configured to send overflow e-mail to the ISP’s main mail system. Our flood of messages, and the returning flood of bounces and unsubscribe requests completely flooded our system and then the ISP’s system. We took their mail server completely offline. All of their customers were without email, thanks to us. We didn’t even make a scratch on our $50 list of e-mail addresses before the system collapsed. One of our guys – the one who hooked us up with the ISP to begin with – spent his next couple of days cleaning up the aftermath and getting all the servers cleaned up and online. A lot of legit e-mail belonging to innocent people got lost.

Once we got the mail server up and running, we noticed that we were still having trouble getting e-mail messages pushed through. Why? Because we were blacklisted! We’d made enough noise to pop up on black lists all around the Internet. Our important, completely legit e-mails were being sucked into tiny blackholes all around the Internet – never to be read. Heads should have rolled, seriously. Our head of IT spent weeks begging to be removed from lists. It doesn’t end there, not just yet. There was a bit of a kicker.

our web traffic blocked

Because we were so blunt in our spamming techniques, it was easy to pin the source of the spam directly to our domain. So, our entire domain was blocked on routers all over the Internet. This meant that the normal traffic I’d worked so hard to build was suddenly blocked from our servers. No one could subscribe, even if they really really wanted to… because they couldn’t even reach our site!

How Did It End

Some people don’t learn. I did. I learned that some of the blokes I worked with didn’t have the sense God gave a turd. They modified the spamming software to send e-mails in bulk bursts as to not bring down the mail server, and they turned the spamming machine back on. After all, they still had the rest of the list to spam.

I was livid, and I expressed it. We started to tank and it wasn’t long before there was an initial round of layoffs. Guess who made the list? Yeah, me! When the operations fellow made the announcement to our group, he got a bit upset and stepped out of the room. Upon his exit, I actually shouted in joy and danced a little jig right there in the conference room. I got some funny looks for that one, some folks were really upset about loosing their jobs. I felt free. I felt blessed.

I’ve got to give them some credit, they fought to the bitter end. A few key employees setup shop in one guy’s house. They kept the company running as long as the remaining investment would allow – which wasn’t long. Ultimately, in just a few months, it was all just a bad memory.

The worst part is, the product itself was a great idea. It could have worked then, and it could still work today. I’m surprsied it’s not being done already.

Frappr – It’s like Web 2.0 meets MySpace

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I just found Frappr.com tonight. What a surprise! As this post’s title suggests, the best way to sum the site up is as “a Web 2.0 version of MySpace“. It really is kinda nifty.

From what I’ve found about the site tonight, it looks like it began as a way of mapping your social network and kinda grew from there. The map is provided via the infamous GoogleMaps, of course. The 20 minutes I’ve spent digging around felt a whole lot like MySpace with customizable profiles, blogs, photos, a social network, embedded videos, groups, and all that crap.

The site gets Web 2.0 buzzword-points for scoring lots of interoperability. The mapping system is the first and most obvious feature. In addition to that, there are ways of importing your friend/contact lists from other sites such as GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, MySpace, and Xanga. I also saw some Flickr stuff; which makes me wonder if they’re not backloading on Flickr for image storage. Even the name of hte site, Frappr, seems to be a mashup all it’s own… Friends + Maps + Flickr?

This virtual community has grown a decent user base, at least it looks like it has. I haven’t explored it in detail and I’m not sure if I’ll come back to it. At the very least, it was an interesting find.

Building better communities by knowing your user.

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I was reading Web Development 2.0 and found a lot of really interesting information. One bit relates well to virtual communities.

One example: Flickr had a report of users with no contacts in the Flickr social network, which they called the “Loneliest Users” report. What a great report — a way to see who is uploading photos but not sharing them with anyone! With that, they could go add themselves as contacts for these “loneliest” users, and teach them how to use the contact feature.

Simply put, this is smart. More specifically, but still generalizing, they are identifying personalized ways of interacting with community members to encourage social behavior. Now here’s an opportunity for a buzz word.

Anyway, the whole piece is good. If you’re a developer, I recommend giving it a read. As a side note, I dropped Drivel and am trying out new blog posting software called “Blog Entry Poster”… Ironically, this very generically named software has much better formatting features. If you’re reading this, the software works.

Community Thunderlizards

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I recently hit a couple of interesting posts by Guy Kawasaki. For the most part, I like his content. However, he threw me a curve ball in his last post titled “The Art of Creating a Community“. The curve ball is the term “Thunderlizards”. Sweet, another buzzword! But what is it? My first thought was to ask Wikipedia, because it knows all. There was no entry in wikipedia for Thunderlizards, but a search linked me over to an article on Eek! The Cat. Google told me a little more – apparently Thunderlizards are supposed to get rid of us pesky humans.

So I’m at a loss. This new buzz word is a mystery to me. What is a Thunderlizard in terms of virtual community development?

Anyway, the rest of the article is a decent read, but a bit on the light side.

Dr Wikilove, Or Wow I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The PMWiki (1964)

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The Wiki

I remember reading about the wiki so many years ago (mid 90s?). I wish my college Technical Writing classes would have included them. Wiki would have made the class far more interesting to those of us that were also CS majors, which accounted for a good 80%.

Only in recent times have I had a life situation that called for a wiki. Our office environment is one that uses a lot of shared documents. The company has long had a wiki, however it was an older piece of open source software that had long been abandon and left with many bugs. Since then, wikis have grown a slew of new features such as support for name spaces and moderation tools. With the time between project cycles, everyone agreed it was time for a new wiki. Knowing that we would have to grow and extend our wiki software in the future, I was most concerned about the design choices of the software itself.

Media Wiki

Since the infamous Wikipedia runs on Mediawiki, I gave it special consideration. Mediawiki is a PHP based webapp, and I like PHP. It had all of the features we were interested in, except one. After installing and exploring the software, I set out on my first task: modify the wiki to use ldap for authentication. I started off on the LDAP Authentication page on the Mediawiki website. I expected it to take no more than an hour or two, but this task consumed far more of my time. The progression of the code base and the fact that ldap support was not officially supported lead to various conflicting files and instructions for different versions of the wiki. I do have to give Mediawiki credit, it had a nice clean container class setup for overriding authentication. Regardless, after a full day of sorting through diff conflicts and digesting docs, I stepped away from the project to clear my head. Before I got back into the code, a co-worker had setup a copy of another wiki, complete with full ldap support. This brings us to the next wiki of discussion – Flexwiki.

Flexwiki

Flexwiki appealed to many of our developers because it is written in ASP. More specifically, Flexwiki is written in C#, which many of our developers like even more. Flexwiki also supports its own scripting/macro language called Wikitalk. Flexwiki is actually one of Microsoft’s first releases as part of the new shared source initiative.

Most wikis aren’t pretty, but I must say that Flexwiki is down right ugly. I found the colors and layout annoying and the interface non-intuitive. The markup language quickly became confusing and overly complicated. When wiki markup reaches a point where it was more difficult to read than html, we’ve gone too far!

My biggest concerns came when I went to validate Flexwiki’s html. Even with a transitional doc type declared, Flexwiki fails validation. It is common to see pages fail validation because s user entered data containing invalid markup; but in this case the offending html code belongs to Flexwiki itself. Flexwiki is definitely a Microsoft product.

But, we chose to use Flexwiki anyway. You might think the story ends here, but it doesn’t. Not long after we settle in on Flexwiki, another project came along requiring the use of of Wiki. Once again, I went on the wiki hunt, this time with different results.

PMWiki

I started going through demos on OpenSourceCMS. I saw the PMWiki demo running and almost disregarded it as to simple looking. I happened to take a second look and noticed a reasonable feature set, so I downloaded it. By chance, of the three wikis I pulled, PMWiki was the first wiki I decided to test. That’s when things got good.

PMWiki is another PHP based wiki. The code is clean and simple. More importantly, it’s loaded with features just waiting to be enabled. I felt like a kid in a candy store. Within half an hour, I had more neat stuff configured in PMWiki than I did in a full day with MediaWiki. But, for this project, I had one big lingering task.

Next, I needed to link PMWiki’s authentication with an existing vBulletin community. Because I had easy access directly to the vBul database, I thought the hard part would be working within PMWiki itself. I was completely wrong. In less than an hour, I had PMWiki figured out and and the code written. However, I got hung up on vBul’s authentication system. I expected the passwords to be encrypted with MySQL, since this is rather common. Instead, vBul uses a combination of crypt functions. Finding this out took hours. Navigating through the vBul source code hurts my brain. I was jumping in and out of subdirectories chasing down includes. Instead of using native PHP syntax, the vBul developers created custom functions to use like operators. I finally found the three separate methods used for encrypting passwords and managed to complete my authentication function in PMWiki. We now have a fully operation battle station.

To take things a step further, I created a group on the vBul forums for wiki admins. I then modified PMWiki to only authenticate users in that group. Now, a moderator can easily manage who gets to edit the wiki from within the vBul control panel. The end result is very satisfying.

Conclusion

I don’t want to put to dark a note on Flexwiki, as it might become a very interesting piece of software. Mediawiki is, without a doubt, a very well refined application. However, for an easy, lightweight, and powerful PHP based Wiki solution – I highly recommend PMWiki.

Podcasting + Shoutcast = A Media Revolution Waiting To Happen

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I recently had lunch with someone that got me thinking about video blogging. I still cringe at the word “blog” so “vlog” is no better. I’m a little more comfortable with the term podcasting. Maybe I’m starting to fall for all that trendy mac advertising.

Podcasting

Anyway, podcasting is catching on. Generally speaking, a podcaster wants to be heard and/or seen. Regardless of the type of content a podcaster produces, the act of releasing it on the Internet means the author has a desire to engage someone else with that content. The current distribution method for that content works only for those within the blog culture… Actually, more accurately, it only works for those within the podcasting culture, which is a blogging sub-culture. The idea is nifty, but as it stands it will always be a nitch.

Shoutcast

On the flip side of the Internet, we have a completely different culture of entertainers bringing audio and video to the Internet populous through Shoutcast radio and TV. Shoutcast is a much more commercial minded solution that appeals to a broader audience of Internet users. As I compose this post, there are more than 124,000 users listening to shoutcast radio. Generally speaking, listerns and viewers of Shoutcast and ShoutcastTV are simply looking for entertainment and do not consider themselves part of a sub-culture – at least not the way podcasters do.

You might already see where I’m going with this. Think of the postcasting community as the entertainment media provider and the shoutcast community as the general audience. We don’t have to invent a lot of technology to bridge the gap between the two.

First, take a video or audio blogging service and start tracking metrics. Before that make sure your audio is crystal clear and the video has been edited using a video enhancer to make it much more catching. One metric could be the number of times an entry is listened to from start to finish. Another metric could be user submitted votes for the quality of that content. Combine all of these metrics together to form a ranking algorithm (not entirely unlike how google ranks websites). Now we have all of this podcaster generated content ranked in terms of potential mass appeal.

Next, take this ranked content and build a dynamic playlist. More popular content shows up on the playlist more often. The playlist should probably contains relatively recent content. Adjust the idea here and there – find what works.

Finally, broadcast that playlist as a shoutcast stream. If there is enough content to justify it, start breaking the content down into multiple channels based on what tags are associated withe the entries.

A service provider could slip a few ads inbetween content pieces and build a working business model. More inspiring, part of this ad revenue could trickle down to the podcasters that originally created the content. Then we would have a model much like broadcast television, only we no longer have all of the programming and content creation restricted to the discretion of some silly corporation.

It’s just an idea… It seems like a logical next step.

A New Season of Changes

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My new Burton Custom 162 It’s been a long time since I posted. I have a few quick things to talk about.My New Board: Burton CustomI finally replaced my old Kemper board. I recently bought an ’05 Burton Custom 162. I would have preferred an Arbor, but they’re hard to find and I snagged the Burton with bindings (Burton Cartel) for under $500. It seemed like a good deal. The best price I’ve seen on froogle for the board and bindings is $570 (and as high as $710) before tax and shipping. I’m having a frustrating time trying to get the bindings set just right for my boots – but I’ll get it all just right. These are my first toe-in bindings so I’m excited about trying them out.

Upcoming Trip: Crusty Butt

Last New Years I hit Crested Butte, Colorado for New Years. I’ll be headed back the day after Thanksgiving. I can’t wait to give my new board it’s first run! I will also be planning another New Years trip this season – but I haven’t decided where I’m off to yet. I wish I could justify the cost of Lake Tahoe. I’m also hoping to squeeze one more trip in this season, probably some time near spring break.

New Movie: First Decent

There’s a movie coming out called First Decent. It looks like it could potentially be good, even though the website kind of sucks. I’m hoping it feels something like Dogtown. The trailer and the site give me the impression that it covers the early days of snowboarding. I don’t know how historically accurate it will be, but it has some big names in it including Shaun White, Hanna Teter, Shawn Farmer, Nick Perata, and Terje Haakonsen. (There’s a longer/different trailer available on myspace.)

The Big Announcement: Snowtripping

Even though I’ve failed to update this site regularly, I still seem to get a lot of traffic. This inspires me. I fail to update this site because I built it from scratch, and never got around to building it so that it’s easy to update. In my first post to this site I said that I expected to reorganize the site and evolve it form a journal into something more. Well, the good news is, I am indeed making this happen. The new site, which I’m currently working on, will live at SnowTripping.com. Unlike this site, it’s not going to be all about me… instead, this new site will be a full blown community site. If you want to be alerted via e-mail when the new site goes live, drop me a note on the contact form. Details to come…