EchoDitto

This post was written to appear elsewhere, which is why it overlaps so much with Gisele's post. But I was encouraged to share it here, too. To those of you who've already been following our New Orleanian adventures: sorry for the repetition!

If you're making a post-apocalyptic science fiction epic and are having trouble budgeting for the outdoor shots, I have a suggestion.

So, as you know EchoDitto just got back from our annual retreat. This year we did something different and scheduled a service project for our first day together. The idea was to start things on a positive note, get everyone working as a team, and hopefully do some good. Being a company forged from the remains of a liberal presidential campaign, we naturally decided to accomplish this by destroying a church.

Of course, it was pretty well destroyed to begin with. The church in question was located in New Orleans' lower ninth ward, close enough to the water that you could see the levees from the front door. I don't know how high the water got there, exactly — twenty feet? twenty-five? — but it was high enough to engulf two floors of a church sanctuary. Three years later, much of the mud was still wet.

Summer's almost over, but I and my fellow Ditto geeks remain as pale as ever. We might not have gotten to the beach as much we'd've liked, but we did manage to put some interesting things up on EchoDitto Labs. Here are a few of 'em:

• Asterisk for Web Developers
• The command line: perpetually more powerful than you realized
• An overview of the goodies that Drupal 6 promises to bring
• Tying Yahoo Pipes to an external PHP web service
• Getting full-text feeds out of the Freakonomics blog
• and finally, an RSS-to-AIM bot

Geeky enough for ya? If so, you might want to subscribe to our feed.

It's true: we already have a perfectly good blog. In fact, you're reading it right now.

But I and the rest of the tech folks at EchoDitto decided we'd like a more appropriate venue for our geeky predilections, so we've gone ahead and set up EchoDitto Labs. It'll provide an place for us to talk about our work, our hobbies, and things that we just find cool. It'll also serve as a new home for our open source offerings, which we'll be updating and reorganizing over the coming months.

Head on over and check it out. It's very much a work in progress, but we've already got several interesting posts up:

Cross-posted from sxsw.echoditto.com. For more of our South By Southwest coverage, head over there.

It's all over. Amidst the haze of beer, URLs and nicotine hand lotion (available in every conventioneer's bag!), who had the most memorable presence? Well, with the caveats that I couldn't see as many panels or people as I would've liked (particularly since my flight left Tuesday morning), here are some overall impressions of SXSW.

Most Buzzed-About: Twitter (by a mile)
This one's easy. The folks from Obvious Corp were determined to make a splash, putting up Twitterified plasma screens, handing out t-shirts (text: "wearing my twitter shirt") and approaching panelists about their service. Honestly, they didn't have to bother: if a panelist wanted to namedrop an exciting new technology, they almost always chose Twitter. It was fun to watch our friend Alex, who's just been hired by Twitter after doing some contract work, enjoy his new company's success with contented bafflement.

I feel a little sheepish for not mentioning it here earlier, but I'd encourage anyone who's interested to come over to sxsw.echoditto.com to read about the things that I and the rest of the EchoDitto SXSW crew have been up to in Austin for the past 24 hours.

We've written a nifty SMS app, eaten some Tex-Mex, had a few beers on Microsoft's dime (take that, Redmond! also, thank you) and been to a lot of excellent panels. Drop by and have a look — and if you're in Austin, too, let us know where we can find you.

In a previous, much crappier professional life, I worked as a programmer for the government. Most DC-area geeks do, in fact, although the work is usually so secret and/or boring that you don't hear much about it. But the federal government spends a staggering amount on IT. The only thing more astounding than the scale of the enterprise is how little direct good it does for the public.

I'll be the first to admit that not every project is a good candidate for release into citizens' hands. But there's a lot of code and data that could and should be released. But it isn't.

Now that I work on the advocacy side of things, I know that one prime example is the difficulty involved in helping a user find their congresswoman. Matching a zip code to a congressional district is a pretty obvious and simple capability that the government could make available to developers for very little cost. This would presumably facilitate conversations between constituents and representatives — if you believe in representative democracy, it's pretty hard to say that this would be anything other than a good thing.

Ask any geek: Asterisk is the new hotness. The open source voice-over-IP software is revolutionizing the world of Private Branch Exchanges, or PBXs. You’ve used a PBX before, even if you don’t know what it is: every time you dial into an company’s call-receiving system and navigate a series of menus through the use of your phone’s keys, you’re working within a PBX system. The same goes for when you check your voicemail at the office, or route a phone call to an extension one meeting room over.

PBXs used to be implemented via expensive hardware from unapproachable vendors. Asterisk is changing that. You can install the software on even a modestly specced machine, subscribe to an inexpensive VoIP provider like BroadVoice and be routing calls in no time — and doing it between a variety of data streams. Asterisk allows VoIP, SMS, fax, the Plain Old Telephone System and the internet to be stitched together with relative ease. It’s not exactly user-friendly (although there are GUIs that make it a bit less hostile), but it’s not rocket science either.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that Jess and I made our way out to Seattle for this year's N-TEN Nonprofit Technology Conference. This was the first event dedicated to nonprofits' online strategies that I've attended. Not quite knowing what to expect from each of the defined seminar tracks, I stuck with what I knew best: the geeky stuff.