alexandrasamuel.com

Furlitis?

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May 31st, 2005 by Alex

A little mystery at Furl, when searching for tag-specific pages defined by multiple tags. The page http://furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=blog+canada includes one link. The page http://furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=canada+blog contains no links.

Clearly, both pages should be producing the same results. I’m asking the folks at Furl what’s up.

What a difference 2 years makes

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May 31st, 2005 by Alex

Today I spent some time looking around for server-side RSS aggregators that would give me more configuration options than I can get in Bloglines. In the course of my travels I came across this interesting snippet, dated March 4 2003:

I looked at a couple of RSS aggregators the other day. These are programs that you run on your machine that allow you to subscribe to various weblogs that support a protocol called RSS. These programs make it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs.

I was very disappointed in what I saw, at least in terms of Linux based programs. Every one I looked at sucked. Couldn’t get any of them to work.

What’s interesting is that people have been focusing on creating client side RSS aggregators. I think the world needs a very good server side aggregator. I’d use it. You could do all sorts of interesting things with a server side aggregator. You could probably fund it with advertising (at least the Google style text advertising en vogue these days).

Did you ever read the Orson Scott Card book Ender’s Game? In the future world depicted in the book, there’s a vast computer network, a la the Internet, with discussion forums. While we aren’t lacking in discussion forums these days (mailing lists, USENET, web boards), I think a closer analogy to what was in the book would be blogs as viewed through an aggregator.

The source of this musing turns out to be none other than Mark Fletcher, the CEO of Bloglines. Nice to see what happens when someone is inspired to solve an obvious gap in the Net.

e-Engagement Tools That Fit

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May 30th, 2005 by Alex

Organizations have tremendous cultural variations that need to be considered when designing an e-engagement plan or selecting e-engagement tools. E-engagement will be most successful when it’s based on tools that fit with the way an organization approaches technology and with the way it approaches engagement. Since organizations may approach internal (employee) engagement differently from stakeholder or public engagement it’s worth looking at a matrix for each area of engagement work.

I’ve created a draft matrix to help inform these choices. I’d be delighted to get feedback on whether the matrix is helpful, or thoughts on which tools should be added (or moved) within the matrix. See image below, or download a PDF version.

10 tools that tap the power of blogs

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May 22nd, 2005 by Alex

Blogging has been a hot topic here at OD2005. While there’s a lot of interest in blogging as a tool of public conversation, there’s also a lot of skepticism about the quality of information and discourse on blogs.

In my own presentations I have talked both about how to use blogging as an engagement tool and how to use blog tools for improving knowledge-sharing and collaboration among e-deliberation practitioners.

To that end, here’s my list of the 10 technologies and tools that together unlock the power of blogging as a very easy and effective way to track news, discover information, and collaborate with colleagues.

1. Really Simple Syndication (RSS): RSS feeds are constantly updated streams of information. Lots of news sites and blogs offer RSS feeds of their content so you can stay up to date on their latest content without having to visit the same sites every day. You can find an official definition, but the most important thing to know is that anytime you see the initials RSS or XML or Atom (another format like RSS) on a web site, you can “subscribe” to its content using an RSS “aggregator”. (And Michael Weiksner tells me that Atom will replace RSS.)
2. Bloglines: an RSS aggregator that lets you read and keep track of RSS feeds. This is a great way of creating a one-stop web page for reading all the newspapers and blogs that interest you. Make bloglines your home page and then create a bookmarklet for your toolbar so that anytime you find an interesting blog or news site you want to track, you can subscribe to its RSS feed with just one click. Once you’ve added a few feeds to your Bloglines account you’ll probably want to make your Bloglines page your browser’s news default page so that you’ll always be on top of the latest news in your field and the world. Check out my Bloglines blogroll to see how I use it to keep track of news, blogs, and web resources.
3. Technorati: the Google of blogs. A Technorati search is a great way of discovering who is saying what about which topics. For example, you can use Technorati to find out what bloggers are saying about e-democracy. And if you join Technorati you can turn that social security page into a “watchlist” — an RSS feed that you can subscribe to using Bloglines. That way you can stay up-to-date on what bloggers are saying about e-democracy.
4. PubSub: Like Technorati, PubSub lets you create an RSS feed on whatever topic(s) you want to track. But it’s not limited to searching blogs: it searches all sorts of RSS-based content, including press releases and newsgroups (usenet groups). You can create some pretty elaborate searches in PubSub and then keep up-to-date on the results using Bloglines. The only downside is you can’t see your results right away; once you set up and subscribe to your search, you have to wait for new things to get written before you’ll see any payoff.
5. Blogrolls: that list of other blogs that appears in the sidebar of most blogs you visit. A blogroll is how a blogger tips her cap to fellow bloggers she reads or tracks. If you find a blog you like, check out some of the links in its blogroll, because chances are you’ll like some of those blogs too.
6. OPML: a file format for storing blogrolls. Bloglines can automatically create an OPML file of the blogs you subscribe to, which you can use as a blogroll on your own blog, or as a way of enhancing your blog tracking (see below).
7. Feedster: Another blog search service, along the lines of Technorati and PubSub. But Feedster has the nifty added feature of letting you create (and subscribe to) searches that are limited to a single OPML file. So if you subscribe to a lot of different blogs and news sites that sometimes write about an issue you care abut (let’s use the e-democracy example again), you can use Feedster to search just those blogs for the term e-democracy. If you’re a BlogLines user, the URL for the OPML file for your public subscriptions (the feeds you’ve included in your publicly viewable blogroll) will be http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=YourUserName
8. del.icio.us: An online system for storing links to favourite web sites (”bookmarks”), and for discovering related web sites that you might not find on your own. Del.icio.us lets you assign tags to the web sites you store so that you can find them again, and shows you who else is storing web sites under the same tags. For example, you can create a Bloglines subscription to the RSS feed for the del.icio.us “deliberation” tag as a way of staying on top of new web resources in the deliberation field.
9. Blogger: Blogging is contagious. Once you become a regular blog reader you’re likely to get the blogging itch — even if it’s just a way of keeping notes on the other blogs you’re reading (bloggers commenting on bloggers is a proud tradition — that’s why people call the blogosphere an “echo chamber”.) But starting your own blog doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive: you can get your own blog up and running in literally five minutes using Blogger. (You can do this in Bloglines, too.)
10. WordPress: Blogging can be a great way of collaborating online. WordPress is a very flexible and extensible blogging platform that allows people to work together easily. The Online Deliberation blog is a WordPress blog that uses a number of enhancements to enhance its collaborative value. If you’re interesting in finding out more about using blogging as a collaboration or conference tool, e-mail me at alex (at) angus-reid (dot) com.

Make blogging part of your workflow

.22.5 | 9 Comments »
May 22nd, 2005 by Alex

For all my tagging evangelism, I’ve been enigmatic and elusive about how I myself use tagging to be a better blogger, a better worker, and a better human being. But the whole reason I’ve become such a tagging fanatic is because it’s allowed me to dramatically streamline my workflow so that I can track and share resources much more effectively. Thanks to my Vice President of Documentation, I now have a summary of my integrated workflow using Spurl, del.icio.us, WordPress and FeedWordPress.

I use these tools together to:

• Store links to web sites I want to remember, along with an archive of each web page I store in case the original disappears.
• Blog easily about some of the sites I store, at the same time as I bookmark them.
• Make these blog entries look like regular blog entries, not like a linkroll.
• Keep my blog posts about a web site in the same categories that I use to tag that site in del.icio.us and Spurl.

Here are the tools you’ll need to do the same thing:

• An account with Spurl
• A “spurl it!” bookmarklet in your browser, which you can find under Settings/Setup once you’re logged into Spurl.
• A WordPress blog
• FeedWordPress installed on your WordPress blog
• Optional: a del.icio.us account. If you set up a del.icio.us account set your Spurl account to save any new links to del.icio.us, too.

Here’s how I use these tools together:

1. Find a web site that you want to write about in your blog.
2. Spurl the page (i.e. bookmark it in your Spurl account) using the “spurl it!” bookmarklet on your browser toolbar.
3. Optional: Assign the bookmark a category, if you’re using categories as well as tags (I recommend that you just use tags — or at least, avoid nested categories.)
4. Tag the bookmark with “blogthis” and any other tags you want (I have some advice on choosing tags).
5. Enter a description or comment on the link in the “description” field. This description will become your blog entry, and can include full HTML code (though you should be careful about using special characters like dashes or quotations marks in your actual text). I’ve yet to encounter its upper limit in terms of post length or number of characters.
6. Go to your Spurl account and navigate to the page for your “blogthis” tag. Click on the “ATOM” button in the upper right-hand corner. Copy the URL that loads (it will look something like http://www.spurl.net/myspurls/library.php?p=atom&userid=XXX&c=259295 ) to your clipboard.
7. In WordPress Dashboard, go to Links / Syndicated. (We’re assuming you have FeedWordPress installed.)
8. Paste the URL you’ve copied from Spurl into “Syndicate a new site” and click “Syndicate”
9. A confirmation page appears. Click on “Edit.”
10. Change the link name to whatever you’d like, and add a description.
11. Click “save changes” at the bottom of the page.
12. In Options / Syndication, set “Unfamiliar categories” to “don’t create new categories”.
13. Load the URL http://www.YOURWEBSITE.com/blog/wp-content/update-feeds.php?shibboleth=fooble to update your feed. (You should have changed your “shibboleth” secret word” in the WordPress Dashboard under Options / Syndication; use your secret word in place of “fooble”. And you may want to set up a cron job to run regular updates of your feeds.)
14. Go to your blog; your recently Spurled page should now appear as the most recent blog post. If not, try updating your FeedWordPress feeds again because it sometimes takes a minute or two for Spurl’s feed to update.

Coming soon: tips on customizing FeedWordPress for your personal workflow.

FAQ:

Q: Why use Spurl instead of del.icio.us alone?
A: Del.icio.us limits its description field to 255 characters, which is too short for most of my blog posts.

Q: Why use del.icio.us instead of just Spurl?
A: Spurl is pretty slow, which can be frustrating when it comes time to accessing your bookmarks. So I use Spurl as a nice way of storing (and backing up) my bookmarks, and del.icio.us to retrieve the. Also del.icio.us has lots of interesting complementary tools that make it useful in other ways too.

Q: Why shouldn’t I use categories in Spurl?
A: Give up on hierarchical (nested) categories; these can screw up your tags, especially if you synchronize with del.icio.us or an external blog. Single-word, non-nested categories will work well ok as tags when Spurl exports them to del.icio.us. But at that point you might as well just be using tags.

Q: What’s the relationship between tags and categories?
A: They’re basically the same thing. WordPress calls the topic of each blog post a “category” but FeedWordPress handles incoming tags as if they were blog categories. So you’ll make your life much simpler if you harmonize Spurl categories, Spurl tags, del.icio.us tags and WordPress categories. You may have a lot more tags that you use in Spurl and del.icio.us than you have WordPress categories, but make sure that all your WordPress categories exist in Spurl and del.icio.us, and that you spell them the same way in both places.

The Annotated New York Times

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May 20th, 2005 by Alexandra

Michael Weiksner of E-ThePeople showed us a site called The Annotated New York Times, which shows what people are saying about the NYT on the blogosphere. It’s a lot like what Salon is doing with Technorati.

My presentations at the Online Deliberation 2005 Conference

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May 18th, 2005 by Alexandra

I’m presenting on two different panels at OD2005. My main paper (in room 380x at 2:40 on Saturday) is on “Found” Enagement: Lessons from Hacktiivsm and Blogging. I’ll be talking about the increasingly fuzzy boundary between formal consultation and spontaneous activism, and how online deliberation can learn to incorporate spontaneous participation the way offline deliberation incorporates activism. This paper is partly based on the research I did for my dissertation on Hacktivism and the Future of Political Participation.

And at 1:10 on Saturday I’ll be part of a panel on Collaboration Tools for the E-Deliberation Community (in room 041), which will look at how e-deliberation researchers and practitioners can facilitate knowledge exchange and collaboration. I’ll be talking about the DO-Consult listserv for people working in the field of online consultation and dialogue. I’ll also talk about some of the tools you see on the conference blog — like CiteULike and del.icio.us — and how they can help us coordinate our work.

RSSMix

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May 18th, 2005 by Spurl.net

Combine a whack of RSS feeds into a single uber-feed.

RSSMix

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May 17th, 2005 by awsamuel

Combine a whack of RSS feeds into a single uber-feed.

del.icio.us feeds my vanity

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May 17th, 2005 by Alex

We spend a lot of time using the Internet as a mirror. A lot of the time we use it as a big mirror that helps us see the people who think like us or talk like us or dress like us.

Many web tools succeed by helping us focus that big mirror down towards a reflection that looks more and more like us — for example, my ongoing preoccupation with tag-enabled sites that let me find people who share my interests.

But at the end of the day, the most sought-after mirror may be the mirror of one: the web site that lets you keep track of you. My conversations with tag and RSS users suggests that a lot of their work goes into keeping track of what people say or think about them personally.

And I’m not immune. That’s why I was delighted to realize that I can create a
del.icio.us vanity feed to keep track of how many people are bookmarking my tagging story (ten so far, but who’s counting… Oh yeah: I am.)

Anyone care to hazard a guess as to how much web traffic is accounted for by these sorts of vanity searches and feeds? I’m guessing that vanity feeds account for a bigger proportion of RSS feed subscriptions than vanity searches account for in the big picture of Google searches.

Today in the Toronto Star: Tagging

.16.5 | 24 Comments »
May 16th, 2005 by Alex

My piece on tagging finally appeared in the Toronto Star today, after a long struggle to make the tagging phenomenon both accessible and meaningful to a general audience. Since the final story had to be edited significantly due to space limitations, I’m posting the full version here.

Del.icio.us spreads tagging fever

Joshua Schachter was working at a trading desk when he decided that he needed a new way of organizing his growing collection of bookmarks – the list of web sites that he kept on his computer, in case he needed to return to a site. His solution was to create a database that stored his bookmarks online, so that he could access them from any computer that was connected to the Internet, anywhere in the world. And to ensure that he could find the bookmarks he stored, he set up the database to accept tags — keywords that described each bookmark. Type in a tag, and up pops Schacter’s personal list of every web site that tag describes.

Schacter opened his database for public use in 2002 at the address http://del.icio.us. Three years later, his database is the darling of the digital elite: Schacter recently quit his day job to focus full-time on del.icio.us, thanks to investment support from such heavy-hitters as Esther Dyson, Amazon.com, and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreesen. The del.icio.us site itself has more than 80,000 users, and is one of the hottest topics and technologies among influential bloggers.

The del.icio.us tag system is the source of this heat – a heat that is spreading beyond del.icio.us to other corners of the Internet.

At del.icio.us, tags not only help users find their own stored bookmarks, but let them discover other resources they might not find on their own. Search for the tag “marketing” on the del.icio.us site and you find hundreds of marketing-related web pages, ranging from marketing handbooks to blogs to case studies.

Unlike other web page directories, the del.icio.us page for “marketing” doesn’t reflect the opinions of one editor – or worse, no editor at all – about which web pages are worthwhile. Each del.icio.us tag brings up web resources that have been selected by dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people. Many del.icio.us users find these resource lists so useful that they set up notification systems that let them know when a new web site has been added to a favourite topic.

Del.icio.us has great sets of web links because it offers users a great amount of additional value in return for only a little bit of extra work. When a del.icio.us user stores a web link to the essay “Hiring is Obsolete,” it only takes a few extra seconds to tag it with a memorable description like “jobsearch,” “employment” or “startups.” But once that tag has been added, the essay can be found anytime — not just by the person who first added it to del.icio.us, but by anyone who looks up jobsearch, employment or startups in the del.icio.us system. Schachter describes this as “enabling groups of people to remember things together.”

Schachter’s vision of tagging as a method for collaboration has quickly spread across the Internet, as both web sites and web users embrace tags as a tool for working better together. Marnie Webb of CompuMentor has convinced more than forty colleagues to use the “nptech” tag as a way of sharing information about the use of technology by non-profits. Patrice Neff is a software developer who uses del.icio.us to share links with a partner on a shared development project. And Cyprien Lomas, an academic technology expert, uses del.icio.us tags to reconnect with colleagues in the instructional technology field.

These early experiments reveal the pent-up demand for simple tools to support online collaboration. But they also reveal how tagging unlocks the gateway between information and community. By allowing people to share information effectively, tags create and support a growing number of online communities. And by bringing communities together around common interests, tags add value to the information those communities gather.

Del.icio.us isn’t the only site to link information and community through tagging. Inspired by del.icio.us, the Canadian photo sharing site Flickr adopted tags as away of organizing user-contributed photos. Every time a Flickr member uploads a photo to the site, she has the option of tagging it with a few words that describe the photo’s subject or image. Visit the “britishcolumbia” tag page for almost 5500 photos of BC. Or flip through almost 7,000 images tagged “office,” or 17,000 tagged “phone.”

Those numbers are directly tied to the way that Flickr’s tag system lets users work together to add value to their photos. “With Flickr, it makes a huge difference if all your family is using the same photo application.” says Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake. “It completely changes the experience of photos because with tags you can gather all your photos together and create a kind of album.” Thanks in large part to its embrace of tagging, Flickr is now home to more than 5 million photos – and was recently acquired by Yahoo! for a rumored $30 to $35 million.

Blogs are getting tag-friendly too, thanks to Technorati, a web site that lets people search blog content. Many bloggers file their stories under category names, so that a story about the Gomery inquiry is stored under the category “Canadian politics” or “Gomery”. Technorati uses those category names as tags, so that every blog post that has been tagged as “Gomery” can be found in one place on the Technorati web site.

That’s good news for the many blog readers who need a better way to find relevant information in the ever-growing world of blogs. And it’s great news for the bloggers themselves, who are embracing tags as a way building online community around shared interests and information.

“We’re still excited by the number of people who are using it to do group-forming,” says Technorati CEO David Sifry. “I know people who were saying let’s do a dynamic travelogue about Ireland. Somebody said if you travel to Ireland, tag your pictures and posts “Ireland” and we’ll all get together.”

And tag-based communities aren’t limited to fun projects like European road trips. Tags are increasingly helping people to solve problems and work smarter.

When 350 bloggers gathered recently for Canada’s first blogging conference, Northern Voice, event organizers wanted to mirror the live meeting with an equally lively online presence. With a limited budget, they couldn’t afford a team of videographers or stenographers.

So they asked participants to use the tag “northernvoice” in all the stories they wrote about or during the conference, and in all the photos they posted online. The Northern Voice web site automatically scoured the web for those tags, and pulled the stories and images onto its own pages. By the end of the one-day conference, participants had collectively created a web site with over 600 stories and an equal number of photos. “The online and post conference made the whole event much more rich than just the 8 hours we spent in the room together,” says Kris Krug, one of the key players in creating the Northern Voice blog.

Tagging worked particulary well for Northern Voice because its participants were already part of the blogging world. But tagging is already spreading beyond the ranks of computer geeks.

Sites like del.icio.us and Flickr are growing rapidly precisely because it takes no special skill to contribute and tag bookmarks, or post or tag photos. And with the universe of blogs growing at an equally rapid clip, more and more people will find that their online comments are being sucked into topical web pages that recognize blog posts by their category or tag.

As tagging grows, web experts are recognizing the challenge that its unique combination of information and community poses to traditional ways of thinking about information management.

“We’ve tried over and over again to have experts build taxonomies to tell us how information should be organized,” says Dave Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society who has been an early tag-vocate. “With tags we have people who use information telling us how it should be organized. And it turns out that there is a lot of wisdom.”

That grassroots spontaneity is also tagging’s greatest liability. Spontaneity is not only a source of creativity, but a source of chaos, with individual users choosing tags they find personally meaningful – but which may not be the tags you’d choose when tagging or searching for the same site.

Savvy users and observers are sanguine about the capacity for beating back the chaos with a combination of technology and human skill – or for transforming the chaos into a positive force. “We may waste a little time but we’ll learn a lot about how we think about information,” says Cyprien Lomas.

Even worse than chaos is the prospect of tag spam, a specter that most taggers see as an inevitable but perhaps surmountable challenge. “Tagging’s just another way to split and divide and find attention and memory,” says Schacter. “These things are all susceptible to people who want to abuse that.”

But don’t write the taggers off just yet. The folks behind del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati and other tag-friendly sites are confident they can fight off tag spam — though their strategies may have to remain mysterious if the sites are to keep ahead of would-be spammers.

And just as their success attracts spammers, it attracts imitators: new tag-friendly sites and software tools are springing up every day in an effort to build the tagged web. Within the next year or two, tagging may become a standard part of the software and web tools that are used by business people everyday.

In the rush to design those tools, software developers would do well to heed Schachter’s own approach to creating and extending the tagging functionality of del.icio.us itself. “I prefer to do stuff and see how people react and what people use and what they ignore,” Schacter says. “Pay attention to how and what they do and make it so that they can do it.”

Customize your WordPress Dashboard

.15.5 | 3 Comments »
May 15th, 2005 by Alex

Tonight, Rob and I crossed a marital and technological threshold with our collaborative creation of an enhanced version of one of the files in Matt Good and dr Dave’s excellent X-Dashboard plugin for WordPress.

X-Dashboard allows users to customize the WordPress admin Dashboard by turning off and on its various feeds and components. But we wanted to customize the text displayed in the Dashboard itself.

Our hack to the dev_feeds.php file for X-Dashboard lets you designate your choice of RSS feed to display in X-Dashboard. This is useful if you want to have the control that X-Dashboard gives you over the layout and content of your Dashboard, plus the ability to customize the incoming feed itself.

We anticipate that this will be most useful in collaborative blogging settings (such as for corporate blogs), where the administrator of the site wants to provide information or updates to the other contributors to the blog. But if there’s a favourite feed you’d like to see whenever you open your Dashboard, heck, that works too.

Quickstart:

1. Download X-dashboard.
2. Download the dev_feed.php.txt file and change the extension from php.txt to .php only.
3. Create your dashboard RSS feed (see below) or use a current one.
4. Customize the dev_feed file (see below).
5. Drop your new dev_feed file into the x-dash-plugins folder included with X-Dashboard, overwriting the original one.
6. Upload the X-Dashboard files to your WordPress server as directed, and enjoy!

To create your Dashboard feed:

1. Create a post category in your blog for internal blog updates (for example, xdash).
2. Identify the URL for the RSS feed of your xdash feed.
• with permalink structure enabled, typically http://yourblog.com/categories/xdash/rss, OR
• without pretty permalinks, it will be http://yourblog.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=[catno] where catno is the category number that is assigned to your xdash category in Manage/Categories
3. Optional: make your blog’s internal xdash category invisible to outsiders by following the instructions for excluding a category inwp_list_cats or list_cats and Exclude Posts.

To customize the dev_feed.php file:

1. In line 11, replace the “http://alexandrasamuel.com/blog/wp-rss2.php?cat=45″ with the URL of your own RSS feed.
2. In line 15, replace the text “Welcome to your personal dashboard.” with whatever you’d like as the title of your dashboard, preserving the single quotes.
3. In line 20, replace the text “Here’s what you decided you wanted to read:” with whatever you’d like to see as the permanent welcome message on your dashboard, again preserving the single quotes.

That’s the whole enchilada. Hardly enough to call a hack since it’s still 99.5% what Matt & dr Dave put together, but since it took us a while to work through we thought we’d share it with the world.

Follow up: dr Dave himself pointed me towards the full documentation for X-Dashboard, which includes details on customizing modules as we have. We’ll update our file name and documentation to create a new module (rather than a variant of the dev_feed) shortly. Thanks dr Dave!