from a content factor whitepaper about corporate blogging:

Start slowly. Read extensively. Post frequently. Link liberally.

(via thenonbillablehour)

Right on!

Because what you believe in, you can teach. And teaching is the “killer app” for a newer, more ethical approach to marketing… Kind of a markets-are-classrooms notion. Those who teach stand the best chance of getting people to become passionate. And those with the most passionate users don’t need an ad campaign when they’ve got user evangelists doing what evangelists do… talking about their passion.

From Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users

Beautiful.

I scramble to unlash the kayak resting on the roof of my pickup. As my kayak arrows towards the activity, I grow anxious, willing the sun to stay up a just a bit longer. About half an hour later, I am paddling among them, in the middle of a pancake commercial, flapjack-like creatures tumbling over themselves, flying everywhere, some of them off in the distance, some only feet away.

I’ve been entranced by the magic of the Sea of Cortez since reading Steinbeck’s Log

Michael Albert’s story and photos about his encounter with the Mobulas certainly re-confirm it’s place on my must-travel list.

From Seth Godin’s guide to building a viral blog, Who’s There? (pdf) (see p. 29):

Blogs work when they are based on:
1. Candor
2. Urgency
3. Timeliness
4. Pithiness and
5. Controversy
(maybe Utility if you want six)

I’ve tried with little success to explain my fascination and enthusiasm for collaborative tagging, specifically del.icio.us, to intelligent, tech-savvy trend-wise friends & family. (If you’re interested, my tags are here)

Jon Udell hit on what it is that excites me so much—it’s an enabler of, if not “artificial intelligence,” at least a whole new way to “amplify human intelligence”:

Before my talk, Scott Rafer… opined that there is no strong AI, that there may not be in our lifetimes, but that many of the benefits we associate with AI will nonetheless accrue as collaborative tagging and filtering become ever more pervasive and efficient…. True machine intelligence was what the advocates of strong AI wanted to hear about, not the amplification of human intelligence by networked computing.

I don’t care whether it’s true artificial intelligence or just amplified intelligence, I’m interested in seeing the new connections and the deductions that come as a result of having data associations identified, even if it is only loosely and very messily associated.

What Google did with backlinks, collaborative tagging has the potential to enable across all sorts of industries and applications to categorize, rank and identify appropriate data.

We use Basecamp to manage a great number of our projects. It’s a great tool—easy to use, makes us more productive, and our clients have told us it makes us look good (we need all the help we can get!).

However, because we have so many projects that we manage with it, I’m regularly frustrated with the two- to three-clicks that it takes to accomplish common tasks.

So I hacked together a greasemonkey script called basecamp_quicklinks

A Basecamp project with the quicklinks script enabled.

• Add a new project w/o going back to the dashboard
• Add a new message w/o going to the messages tab
• Add a new to-do list w/o going to the to-do list tab
• Add a new milestone w/o going to the milestones tab
• Add a new file w/o going to the files tab
• Record time w/o going to the time tab

You can add a new project without going back to the dashboard.

The header gets quicklinks to common “new” activities.

There are a couple of important caveats with the time recording functionality:

• It defaults to the current day
• You’ll have to find and add your basecamp “person id” to the script. The easiest way to find your person id is to go to the dashboard, then the to-do tab. View source and find the id associated with your name in the “responsible_party_form”

Log your time from just about any project page.

1. Make sure you have greasemonkey installed
2. Download it
3. Install it just like any other greasemonkey script
4. Edit it & add your basecamp “person id”
5. Check the javascript console for test output
6. Edit it to turn off logging

This is an early, basically untested script. There’s lots of room for improvement. A couple of items that come to mind:

• Add confirmation on successful time logging
• Prompt user when leaving a project to record their time

Please let me know what you think!

So I’m starting in on learning ruby and rails.

The first thing I encountered was several server options, but after an hour or so culling through TXD’s forums, I couldn’t find a high-level overview, so I threw together the following. I’ve asked the rails forum at TXD if this is correct, so check over there for any updates.

(Most of this comes from the Pragmatic Programmers rails book came—see pages 453 – 461 in the July 2005 printed version—as well as reading between the lines on the forum.)

• WebBrick – simple ruby-only server
• Apache + CGI – has to instantiate the entire ruby environment for every request
• Apache + FastCGI – loads the ruby environment once; but fcgi not being maintained any more and large memory footprint (PP says 20-30 MB, TXD forums say 80MB). Can be used but not recommended.
• Apache + mod_ruby – According to PP, mod_ruby is deprecated and not being developed any longer
• lighttpd + FastCGI – small memory footprint (3 – 8MB); great scalability features (like load-balancing app servers behind it); lingering stability questions [edit: v. 1.3.x is limited to uploaded files of less than 2 MB, and v. 1.4.x needs to have keepalive turned off to mitigate redirection problems]_

Looks like it’s gonna be lighttpd in production and WebBrick for development.

From the TXD boards, it looks like lighthttpd is their recommend environment, and there’s pretty good documentation and scripts to support the effort for my production deployment.

But, boy, I was dreading having to install it on my dev server. Glad to see that WebBrick should be a decent solution.

praying for katrina’s victims

“It don’t get any better,” said Larry King on Wed. night to Aaron Brown.

From the head of FEMA to the President of the Red Cross to the CEO of Wal-Mart, Larry King isn’t a journalist, he’s a fluffer.

Lee Scott, the CEO of Wal-Mart was on and Larry King was congratulating him on the $17 million that the retailer was donating to victims of Katrina. Did he ask any questions that were begging to be asked (“Are you going to continue to pay the associates at the 120 to 140 stores that were closed?”) Of course not.

Over and over senior administration guests have said “We’re marshalling all the resources we can. It just takes some time to build momentum for the relief.”

Who’s asking an easy question like “Who’s in charge?”

Who’s asking a moderately difficult question like “Where in the pipeline are the relief supplies?”

Who’s asking tough questions like “How many people are in New Orleans? What’s the plan to evacuate them? When will you start? Where will you be taking them?”

Who’s forcing them to tell the truth and cut the bullshit?

Not Larry King.

He’s busy promo’ing his 3 hour special, and jerking them off.