All yesterday and this morning I’ve been seeing tweets about SWIFT, so I finally googled it to see what it was about. The service promises to help organize conferences in some new 2.0 way, but it looks to be about as preposterous a social network as WalMart’s aborted 2006 attempt at copying MySpace.
There are some real lessons here, however, about how to court the early adopters that are essential to making an application that depends on user activity successful:
Anybody want to bet me a drink that SWIFT won’t break the 1,000 users mark before the end of CIL? I doubt anybody using the CiL wiki would take me up on that.
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By Casey
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Tagged with: antipattern, antipatterns, community, faux pas, license, social networks, social software, SWIFT, trust|
Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology
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823 hits, about 22 daily
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WordPress 2.5 is out (and the WordPress site got a facelift), and I’ve already upgraded MaisonBisson using SVN. The changes are exciting, and seem to reflect a tradition that’s developing in WordPress of delivering some really revolutionary features in the x.5 release.
The loss of file-based object caching was a bit of a problem, as my 
VPS’s load average jumped to over 30 pretty quickly after the upgrade. I tried Mark Jaquith’s apc-object-cache enabler and saw load average drop back to 2 or so, but I also saw tag and category names disappear and discovered other weirdness. Why it happened I don’t know, but I’m looking into it. Fortunately, NeoSmart’s file-based object cache replacement works perfectly and efficiently. (Mind you, Ryan Boren thinks WordPress caches should require more adventure.)
bSuite seems to work perfectly in 2.5, though the new shortcode API obviates one of bSuite’s coolest features: tokens. Still, it’s better to run with the herd, so I’ll be transitioning bSuite’s built in tokens to take advantage of the shortcode API soon.
One of the features that’s not received much attention yet, but is hugely valuable to those (like me) who are using and advocating for WordPress as a general purpose CMS, is the concurrent editing protection. That is, if another WordPress author is editing a story, you can’t save changes to it until that editor is done. The next step for this is to allow concurrent team editing in the way Google Docs does as well as versioning (versioning has been discussed as a feature for 2.6).
March 28, 2008 – 12:04 pm
I had fun with the signs in Taiwan (jet powered baby stroller and men’s bathroom signs, for example), but why travel around the world for these things when you can make them at home?
Create warning signs, protest signs, church signs, library catalog cards, or whatever.
March 27, 2008 – 10:13 pm
All Things Digital is interesting. Parents would say My Baby Our Baby.com is a little more important. But Tibet Open Letter is as real as the violence.
Two things to note: all of them are based on WordPress, and those who discuss Tibet probably risk being listed by the Chinese government as a trouble maker.
March 27, 2008 – 12:53 pm
Aaron Swartz’s Bubble City, Chapter 8:
He sent the report to his superior and wandered off for a bit to dwell on the power he had as a faceless person deep inside an office park in Mountain View to know every detail of another person’s life. He wondered what it would be like if he came across that person on the street, he would know every detail of his life, his household budget, the secrets he confided over IM, even what he looked like naked.
WP Contact Manager turns WordPress into a contact manager. It’s a combination of theme and plugins (including Custom Write Panel) that allows you to enter and manage contacts as blog posts (familiar, eh?). Use Members Only to secure access.
TDO Mini Forms ?allows you to add highly customisable forms to your website that allows non-registered users and/or subscribers (also configurable) to submit posts. The posts are kept in ?draft? until an admin can publish them (also configurable).?
March 23, 2008 – 12:19 am
I ate here. It’s every bit as good as the review suggests. Seb’s description and photos tell more, I’ll post my own photos soon. Update: posted.
Short story: there’s a restaurant in Australia with a three month waiting list, but a Sydney Morning Herald reporter says the restaurant I ate at is its equal or better, but without the waiting list and at US$33 per meal.
March 17, 2008 – 10:49 am
Google’s always been in the awkward position of claiming that PageRank is algorithmic, not editorial, while also explaining that they’re constantly adjusting their algorithms to ensure that PageRank reflects editorial judgments of quality. Here’s a peek inside the machine.
Walking north on Valencia I heard the characteristic snap snap snap of an old manual typewriter’s hammers striking paper on the platen.
I was more than a bit curious about who might still use such a classic machine even before its operator called out to ask if I wanted to buy a poem. Still, it’d been a full day exploring The Mission with a fabulous host and the time for my flight home was nearing.
?A poem?? I asked, and before I could inquire what the poem might be about or demand to review samples of his previous work, this sales savvy poet asked my name and the purpose of my visit and started hammering away on the faded blue portable Remington.
His name is Zach Houston, and in addition to running the Poem Store on various street corners around San Francisco, he also just opened a show in a gallery on the other side of The Mission.
But if he’s running a store, if this was a commercial transaction, I wanted a receipt. Into the typewriter went the remaindered piece of the shipping labels that he uses as a canvas for his work and in several more snaps he tapped out a suitable bill of sale.
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By Casey
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Tagged with: george bush, george w bush, license plate, politics, protest, texas, w|
Posted in Photoblog, Politics & Controversy, Questionable...funny. Pointless.
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1,441 hits, about 26 daily
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I announced yesterday Scriblio’s integration of Google’s new book viewability API that links to full text, previews, or additional book information (depending on copyright status and publisher foresight). Now that it’s live with Plymouth’s full catalog, I spent a moment browsing the collection and taking note of what books had what.
I get no preview for A Baby Sister For Frances, but another of Russell Hoban’s books, A Bargain For Frances. has one, even if the image quality is poor. My friend Joe Monninger has just one book that includes a preview, A Barn In New England.
Ironically The Search, Designing The Obvious, and A Passion For Books don’t (neither does Online Pornography, though it’d likely be a let down for most of the people looking for it). I’m glad to see that An Introduction To Book History and The Future Of The Book both have online previews.
It’s good stuff, and if I was smarter I’d get stats on how often the preview link was clicked. And if I could do it without tracking more information than I want, I’d love stats on how often the preview leads to a checkout or in house use. (I’m confident, however, that more frequently previewed books will be among the more frequently use books).
(crossposted at Scriblio.net)
Using the newly released book viewability API in Google Book Search, Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library and Learning Commons is one of the first libraries to move beyond simply listing their books online and open them up to reading and searching via the web.
Take a look at how this works with books by Plymouth authors Bruce Heald and Joseph Monninger. The ?Browse on Google? link in the New Features section leads to extended previews of their works where you can browse excerpts of the books and search the full text.
Matthew Batchelder wrote the JavaScript that makes it work, and all the features are incorporated in the current version of Scriblio. To implement it in an existing Scriblio installation, take a look at Matt’s script how it’s included in the theme’s header.php. You’ll also need to make sure your site’s catalog records include ISBNs to link with (I’ll be adding support for LCCNs and OCLCNs soon). If you’re using the standard MARC or III importers and your source records contain ISBNs, you should be all set.
Hat tip to Tim for giving me the hookup.
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By Casey
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Tagged with: books, ebooks, GBS, Google Book Search, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, library catalogs, read online, scriblio|
Posted in Libraries & Networked Information
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1,795 hits, about 29 daily
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March 11, 2008 – 11:32 am
?Spork? is a great name for a restaurant, but is it any good? Yelp says it is, but most of the reviews mention the burger, putting me in the position of having to review the reviewers and wonder if a hamburger person can recommend a restaurant to a vegetarian. Not that I am a vegetarian or not a hamburger person, but please tell me there’s more to the retrofabulous-looking place than a cool name and a hamburger. Something that actually requires sporks?
twittervision and twittermap show new tweets wherever they appear on the map, TwitterWhere let’s you follow tweets at a specific location, and Ask500People has nothing to do with Twitter but does show you global opinion. Live. While you watch (so they say, anyway).
