MaisonBisson

a bunch of stuff I would have emailed you about

Huffington Post Introduces Badges and Social Rewards

How do you make news fun? Or, how do you make moderating often fractious comments on news stories fun? You follow FourSquare’s example and introduce badges: The Moderator badge allows you to more actively participate in this process. If you are a Level 1 Moderator (earned by flagging at least 20 comments that we deleted, […] » about 200 words

Listening Is Just The Start

Jeff Howe writes: idea jams “allow people to discover the fringe question (or idea, or solution), then tweak it, discuss it and bring the community’s attention to it.”

“Idea management is really a three-part process,” says Bob Pearson, who as Dell’s former chief of communities and conversation rode heard on IdeaStorm. “The first is listening. That’s obvious.” The second part, Pearson says, was integration, “actually disseminating the best ideas throughout our organization. We had engineers studying IdeaStorm posts and debating how they could be implemented.”

The last part is the trickiest and most important: “It involves not just enacting the ideas, but going back into your community and telling them what you’ve done.” Starbucks, which maintains its own version of IdeaStorm, employs 48 full-time moderators whose only job is to engage the online community. In other words, Starbucks is investing the vast share of its resources in the second and third parts of the idea management cycle.

Listen, evolve, report. Sounds like good advice to me.

Pearls Of Wisdom In Mail List Threads

David Cloutman on Code4Lib:

Don’t forget to look at trends outside of “Libraryland”. A lot of professional library discussion takes place in an echo chamber, and bad ideas often get repeated and gain credibility as a result. Librarians usually overstate the uniqueness of their organizations and professions. When the question, “What are other libraries doing?” arises in addressing a technical problem, don’t be afraid to generalize the question to other types of organizations. Too often, the answer to the question, “What are other libraries doing?” is “Failing.” Emulate for the sake of success, not conformity.

It’s a point I’m always trying to make: look outside your specialization.

Respond To Your Next Subpoena Like A Pro

Thanks to Kathleen Seidel, a fellow New Hampshire resident and blogger at <neurodiversity.com>, I now have what appears to be a good example of a motion to quash a subpoena (even cooler, she filed it pro se). I’ve also learned that NH is among the states that allows lawyers to issue subpoena in civil cases without prior approval of a judge.

Take a look and prepare yourself for some law talking.

Steve Jobs On Apple vs. Adobe and iPhone vs. Flash

Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash minces no words in its conclusion:

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.[…]

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

I’m a carnie huckster, you know it and I know it, but that’s OK

The title is a quote from Seth Stevenson Slate.com piece on pitchman Vince Offer, where he explains that Vince’s “smooth-talking condescension” is the most appropriate sales tactic in today’s cynical world. “Jaded consumers expect to get snowed and almost distrust the very pretense of trustworthiness.” The Rap Chop remix of Vince’s Slap Chop actually ran […] » about 100 words

Cleaning Up Category Relationships In A WordPress Scriblio Site

A few lines of SQL I used to clean up a Scriblio site. It’s probably useless to anybody but me. I’m not suggesting anybody else use this code, as it will result in changed or deleted data.

Update the post author for catalog records (identified because they have a specific post meta entry):

UPDATE wp_8_postmeta
JOIN wp_8_posts ON wp_8_posts.ID = wp_8_postmeta.post_id
SET post_author = 15
WHERE meta_key = 'scrib_meditor_content'

Get the categories attached to every catalog record (except the “catalog” category):

SELECT tr.object_id , tr.term_taxonomy_id
FROM wp_8_term_relationships tr
JOIN wp_8_posts p ON p.ID = tr.object_id
WHERE tr.term_taxonomy_id IN (
	SELECT term_taxonomy_id
	FROM wp_8_term_taxonomy
	WHERE taxonomy = "category"
	AND term_id != 30
)
AND post_author = 15
ORDER BY tr.object_id , tr.term_taxonomy_id

Using the above list of object ids and term taxonomy ids, build a series of queries like the following to delete them:

DELETE FROM wp_8_term_relationships WHERE object_id = 12275 AND term_taxonomy_id = 271872 ;

Insert a catalog category relationship for all catalog records:

INSERT INTO wp_8_term_relationships
SELECT p.ID , '271871' , '0'
FROM wp_8_posts p
LEFT JOIN wp_8_term_relationships tr ON p.ID = tr.object_id AND tr.term_taxonomy_id = 271871
WHERE post_author = 15
AND tr.term_taxonomy_id IS NULL

Solving Problems In Secret

Matt Blaze computer and information science at University of Pennsylvania and blogs about security at Exhaustive Search. His recent post on mistakes in spying techniques, protocols, and hardware caught my interest: Indeed, the recent history of electronic surveillance is a veritable catalog of cautionary tales of technological errors, risks and unintended consequences. Sometime mishaps lead […] » about 400 words

The Reward For Re-Discovering Archive Collections

Documentarians spend most of their time digging up materials that few people know exist. They frequent basements and dark storage rooms, endure conversations with crazy collectors, and typically develop vitamin-d deficiency and light sensitivity in search of what they need.

Their reward for finding the material? A bill from the original creators (the ones who lost and forgot about the work in the first place) for the privilege of using it.

Ars Technica reports a story about filmmaker David Hoffman who had to pay $320,000 for materials used in a film about Sputnik hysteria that swept the US in the 1950s. Unfortunately, the best The History Channel would pay for the entire film is $200,000.

Is The Filesystem Finally Dead?

From Rob Foster/Nimble Design:

By releasing the iPhone OS, Apple is putting a bullet in the head of a long standing convention that most folks could do without.

He’s talking about the filesystem. User-accessible filesystems, anyway.

This isn’t news, I don’t think the Newton even had a hidden filesystem, but it hasn’t gotten old yet.

My question: when will I finally get a system that cleverly mixes cloud and local storage to give me seamless access to all my photos, videos, music, and email…ever?

Why PHP’s RegEx Is Slow, And What You Can Do About It (if you happen to be a committer on the PHP project)

Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast, by Russ Cox:

Perl [and PHP and others] could not now remove backreference support, of course, but they could employ much faster algorithms when presented with regular expressions that don’t have backreferences.

How much faster? About a million times (no, I do not exaggerate).

I use a lot of regular expressions, and relatively few of them use backreferences. It’d be worth optimizing.

Edison Phonograph EULA

Think end user license agreements (EULAs) are recent inventions? Thomas Edison used them on his phonograph cylinder at the start of the 1900s. The EULA didn’t protect Edison from innovations elsewhere; discs quickly beat out cylinders once the patents expired. Photo from fouro. » about 100 words