EchoDitto - The Web

Zero Bars - posted by Gisele Toueg

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:27:53 -0700

This past weekend, my husband took me on his annual camping trip to the Catskill mountains. For those of you who know me, you know that I am not one to rough it. In fact, last week was the first time I have ever even been to the "Outdoor" aisle of any large department store.

As we drove up the mountain, the bars on my iphone slowly started to decrease. As they went from four, to three, to a sad dotted line, I started to panic. You see, it didn't even occur to me that there would be no cell reception in the woods. I used my phone in Argentina, my husband sent me text messages from Chennai, how could my phone not work in New York's Hudson Valley?

The first night, I made him drive to the lake so I could check my messages. If you stood in one spot, on one foot, you could get a weak signal. It tided me over for the evening, but by the next day, I was itching to get online. What was happening on twitter? Had anyone updated their relationship status on Facebook? What about all the blogs I follow? These were things I needed to know.

I'd like to say that my need to check email and voicemail decreased over the weekend, and that my trips to the lake decreased. Sadly, that's just not me. Every time we got high enough on a mountain, I pulled out the phone. While others were scaling waterfalls and spying shooting stars, I was refreshing my gmail (and dreaming about dinner).

As we were packing up to go home, everyone was talking about how relaxing the vacation was, not having cell reception, eating food off the grill, hiking through scenic trails. I was dreaming about my charger and the fudge stand on the New York State Thruway. Still, I did have a breakthrough moment. This morning, as I was coming out of the subway on Canal Street, it occurred to me that I should check my email to see if anything came in while I was on the train. And then, for a moment, I dreamed of the woods, where there was nothing to do but read Marie Claire and eat Chips Ahoy. Maybe there's a little bit of camper in me after all? Nah...

Sprinkle A Little Social On Your Site - posted by Meaghan Lamarre

Sun, 25 May 2008 11:13:41 -0700

So our friends at the leading social networks -- MySpace, Facebook, and Google -– are finally getting the idea that we don’t really want to spend all our online lives on their websites. Last week these three companies launched new plans to let us integrate our profiles on their networks with other sites we use. All three initiatives claim to be advancing us closer to the idea of the utopian open social web, where we can connect with all our friends on any network through any website. But how close are we?

Google's initiative here is the most interesting … and the most disappointing. Called Google Friend Connect, this initiative allows any website owner to, as Google's David Glazer says, "sprinkle a little social" on their sites (listen to the audio of the announcement, thanks to ReadWriteTalk). I didn’t realize “social” was a noun, but I digress. Through some applications Google is developing and, eventually, other developers will be contributing, a website owner can paste in a little code on her website and voila! she can now have users post photos, add comments, and other social functions on her website (check out Google's demonstrations to see what I mean). Sounds kind of cool. And it's definitely great if you’ve got a static site that needs some spice, and you don’t know a lick of code.

But there are a couple of key failings of this new plan.

First, you've still got to select your network. After Google announced Friend Connect, which originally was supposed to include your Facebook profile as a networking option, Facebook banned Friend Connect, saying it violates their privacy settings. So, if you put a Friend Connect application on your site, your users have to have a Google or OpenID account. If you want let people connect with their Facebook friends, you can't do it through Friend Connect.

The bigger drawback, however, is that there's no way to integrate the data from Friend Connect with whatever you’re doing on your site. At EchoDitto, we recommend using everything you know about your users to tailor your communications with them and their experiences on your site. But the really cool discussions that you might foster on your site, or information on the users who submitted photos to your contest, all of that will be inaccessible to you. And that doesn't sound very open.

The jury's still out on Google Friend Connect, which isn't even available to the public yet, as well as Facebook Connect and MySpace's Data Avaibility initiatives, so it remains to be seen how these programs will work in practice, or how quickly they'll lead us to that utopia of the open social web.

Where do you get your news? - posted by Meaghan Lamarre

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:20:04 -0700

There's been a lot of talk lately about the demise of the traditional print newspaper, sparked by Eric Alterman's article in the New Yorker called "Out of Print". It's an interesting discussion that made me examine my own news-procuring habits.

Sorry, print newspapers, but for me you're already dead. I most recently touched newsprint this weekend while I was balling up pages of the Washington Post to help get my campfire started. Before that, I can't even remember. I know that there are many of you out there who can't live without your morning paper (or papers), but that ain't me.

In fact, I get most of my news these days from Twitter. On the one hand, I get updates from official news outlets by following the NPR News Blog guys, the New York Times and CNN. On the other hand, and often more usefully, I get links to news articles of interest from the people I am following. I know I'm not unique in this - Steve Gillmor admitted to the same thing on a recent edition of This Week in Tech.

I used to read the Express, the daily tabloid produced by the Washington Post and distributed at metro stations here in D.C. But since getting my hands on an iPhone, I don't even pick that paper up anymore.

I shouldn't leave out radio here -- I listen to NPR religiously every morning as I get ready for work. And since we're chronicling my news media consumption, I also pick up bits and pieces from the TV in our office that's always tuned to one news network or another.

I know I'm not unique. There's plenty of data out there about declining newspaper readership, especially among young people. And we know that people are increasingly relying on blogs for their news.

But what about you - where do you get your news? Twitter, Facebook or email? TV or radio? Or do you love the smell of newsprint in the morning? Please share in the comments!

Spring Cleaning - posted by Gisele Toueg

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:39:54 -0700

Now that spring is here (well, maybe not so much in NYC, but it's coming!), thoughts turn to chocolate bunnies, March Madness and of course, spring cleaning. It's a good thing that EchoDitto recently launched the new Seventh Generation website to help smart, environmentally conscious consumers not only find the right cleaning products, but also connect with like minded individuals. Some highlights of the new site include:

consumer-generated product reviews
forums for discussing the environment, new product ideas, healthy living
a new corporate blog called 7Gen, in addition to the Inspired Protagonist, SVG President Jeffrey Hollender's well-respected blog
a new loyalty program where members can create profiles, share tips and ideas, download coupons and special offers and more

The techies among us are also quite thrilled with the innovative implementation of the new Drupal Panels2 architecture on the site (they told me to say that).

So before you head out for a game of ultimate frisbee this spring, check out the new seventhgeneration.com and join the Seventh Generation Nation. Enjoy!

SXSW Take Aways - posted by Chris Jones

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:42:23 -0700

South by Southwest was an absolute blast. I could go on and on about the panels I attended or the people I met, but I'll just say they were all awesome. Instead this will be about what I saw as the overarching themes of the conference: accessibility and data ownership/transferability.

Big Point #1: Everyone is online. We're all aware of this, but too few of us produce work that is accessible to anyone besides english readers in standard web browsers. What about assistive technologies? What about non-english readers? How will we deal with localizing our work? There are some great projects to help with the creation and maintenance of content in multiple languages. More and more, we're going to have to make use of these things.

First, it's important to nail down the key terms. Internationalization does not equal translation. Internationalization, according to User Experience Designer Jon Wiley from Google, refers to the overall design of a product. That means getting down to architectural considerations, like whether or not the visual presentation of a site is flexible enough to allow for changes in character set height and width or direction that appear with localization of the actual content. According to him, English has relatively short words, which can expand greatly when translated. As a rule of thumb, he says that any layout should allow a +40% size tolerance to account for that expansion.

Beyond those architectural decisions, content must be localized. Wiley describes localization as the act of making content appropriate for a target audience. This goes beyond translating words according to culture to color considerations. For example, what does red mean to a target audience? It might mean urgency, or it might imply luck.

Google is available in 117 languages, and gracefully shifts from left to right text (ex: english) to right to left text (ex: hebrew). Google's visual layout is also fairly simple compared to a lot of our work. Luckily, they've produced some useful tools. CSS Janus does a fairly decent job of translating left to right-focused CSS to right to left. Google Translate is useful to check the fitness of a visual design for proper expansion for other languages (NOT as a translation service, of course).

So to summarize, everyone's online, and content needs to be accessible to more people. Localization is no small task. Following accessibility guidelines is not easy. So this point, machine translation projects cannot produce worthwhile text, so budgets will have to expand to work with translators. Still, it's crucial to get the full breadth of the audience on board with whatever it is a site is promoting, so it sounds necessary to me. Honestly, I'm excited about this stuff. I'm in the process of a full redesign of the website of a community bike shop I work with, which will be localized for both english and spanish-speaking audiences.

Big Point #2: We want control of our data. Again, we're all aware of this. Down in Austin, I felt a genuine air of paranoia about who owns data, and how protected and portable it is, and how we sort through it all. We've all dumped loads about ourselves on the web, and clearly business has an interest in using it to target marketing.

Users need choices and clear explanation about what is public and what is not. I'm probably not alone in being unsure as to which parts of a Facebook profile are public and which aren't. Things need to be simple and easy. Catering to the lowest common denominator is not always preferable, but with everyone using data harvesting services, maybe it's necessary. I can't imagine it's a bad thing that everyone knows exactly how Netflix works. They bop you over the head on every page as to what ratings do and how they produce better recommendations, so even my parents know how it works. That sort of transparency is good.

What about who owns the data? Facebook's culture is to just dump everything about yourself. Zuckerberg (Facebook's CEO) says that he's in this to change the way we communicate, and says relatively little about how that information will be used. Seemed like Beacon wasn't widely loved. What about our loved services? Flickr rules, right? Well, it's already owned by a fairly large company, which may soon be owned by an even larger and not always loved company. What about services like Twitter that exist with no revenue and tons of users. We love Twitter, but I don't understand how any company could exist with no revenue forever. How will these sorts of services use that information? Again, I love you, Twitter. This is not an attack, just a question.

How do we access all this stuff? There was a great panel that focused on OpenID and oAuth. Creating a new profile for every site we visit seems a little silly. Decentralized single sign on sounds great to me, but it's crucial that we trust those third party authentication services. I'm hoping to do more with OpenID in my projects at Echoditto.

In closing, the big points are things we've been aware of and thought about for a while now. The difference is that it's clear the rest of the web is thinking about these things too. We're in for some interesting times. Drupalers, time to look at the internationalization handbook. Maybe it's time to read about RDF, as it might blow our data concerns wide open. There's some neat stuff coming down the pike.

3 months the wiser - posted by Anne Keenan

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 07:01:30 -0800

It’s been three months since I started at EchoDitto—hard to believe, right? I wanted to share a few trends in my life since I’ve been here.

1. Personal content. In the world of non-profits, the personal voice is not the preferred voice. In fact, the preferred voice is generally one that uses words like “community building” “stronger, healthier families” and “together, we can make a difference.” It got so that every time I went to write something, those words miraculously came out, without my even trying. Now, nearly everything I read is written by a real person, and you can tell. Unsurprisingly, I trust the content so much more.

2. Immediate gratification. Once Jason talked me into Amazon Prime, I’ve been hooked. This has saved me from the bonus items that had previously been needed to push me over the $25 free shipping limit. Why not order two USB hubs? Also: 2 copies of it’s called a breakup because it’s broken (gifts), Homicide: A year on the killing streets, Grace After Midnight, a stainless-steel salad spinner, and so so much more. Most of these things were purchased after reading extensive customer reviews. I even wrote a few of my own (see #1).

3. Immediate information. News happens more quickly here, which is probably part of changing my focus from reproductive-rights-only to a broader technology perspective. We watched the Steve Jobs keynote live on Phil’s iPhone, Tom told us about Heath Ledger’s death hours before the office next door heard of it, I just read that there may be a Del.icio.us 2.0, which I’m oddly excited about.

4. Environmental focus. There are only so many Seventh Generation calls you can overhear before you switch all of your cleaning products to biodegradable, non-toxic cleansers. I’ve of course purchased these things on drugstore.com (which I love, see #2), probably negating any positive environmental impact.

I’m pretty sure I could keep this list going forever, but maybe I’ll save some for my recap of the next 3 months.

At the Risk of Sounding Old-Fashioned... - posted by Gisele Toueg

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 10:27:00 -0800

The summer after I graduated from high school, my friend Tracy and I took off for a six week adventure through Europe. This was 1994, and the word "Internet" and "cell phone" were most definitely not part of our vocabulary (although I would guess that some of my co-workers were already online at this point, being the forward thinkers that they are). Armed only with a "Let's Go Europe", we treked our backpacks from hostel to hostel, occasionally calling ahead from a local pay phone to reserve a room at our next destination. Each week, I'd call my parents collect to let them know I was still alive, and to catch up on the news from home. Sometimes I dropped postcards in the mail, many of which arrived long after I returned from my trip.

Fast forward 13 years (I am ancient!) to December, 2007. My husband and I just returned from a two week trip to Argentina, and although I've traveled internationally since that trip to Europe so long ago, this was the first time I really noticed how different communications have become. When we landed in Buenos Aires, I sent my mom a text message from my iPhone to let her known we were safe (I taught her how to text the day before I left in an attempt to keep her from running up the international roaming charges on my phone), and pulled up the hotel confirmation info on my husband's blackberry. Once we got to our hotel, we fired up our laptop, connected the international wireless card, and within minutes, we had found a place to eat for dinner using chowhound.com, booked a walking tour of Buenos Aires, and found a fantastic place to stay in Bariloche with the help of tripadvisor.com. Throughout the trip, we snapped photos on the blackberry and immediately sent them home to friends and family, sent text messages from the tops of mountains, kept up with favorite blogs and even participated in a beta test for a new mobile GPS application. In fact, on our walking tour of B.A., the guide stood in front of a building, and told us that when we got home, we should pull up the location in Google Maps and check out the surprise on the roof of this particular building. He was a little freaked out when we pulled out the blackberry and told him it was a racecar track!

Technology certainly makes it easier to do almost everything, and it gave me a lot of peace of mind to know that my family could get in touch with me at any time, if necessary. Still, I must admit I kinda missed the thrill of being far, far away, and having complete control over how and when I connected to the world back home.

Happy and healthy New Year everyone!

My "social web" epiphany - posted by Meaghan Lamarre

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:45:53 -0800

I have a confession to make.

For the past year or so, I have been merely "going through the motions" of using the newest social networking technologies.

True, I have been dutifully maintaining (ok, "maintaining" may be too generous) my MySpace and Facebook profiles. I signed up with Twitter and I've even twittered more than 20 times (granted, that's over the course of two months; I've already been chided for my lame tweets). I use the EchoDitto del.icio.us feed, and even started a personal one. One thing I'm on top of: I'm a dedicated updater of my Gmail status messages.

But the usefulness of all of this just hadn't clicked for me. Until today.

There was no earth-shattering revelation, no life-changing lesson inspired by a friend's Facebook update. Rather, it was a slow dawning of realization, built up over several month's use of these tools, of they way they facilitate what I can only describe as "shared being."

It reminds me of living on campus in college. When living in a dorm, usually in close enough proximity that you can shout and be heard by several friends, there is a constant exchange of ideas. Sometimes these ideas are of little value, but sometimes they're really clever, or creative, or brilliant. And the fact that you can bounce those ideas off your friends in your dorm, or in the dining hall, allows the ideas to grow into something really great. I really loved that about being in college -- the constant flow of ideas. And the feeling that we're sharing it all with one another -- the boring, inconsequential stuff as well as the epiphanies.

That's the feeling I get with these new social tools. Thanks to these technologies that allow me (and my friends) to broadcast our thoughts to the universe -- in a way that's so quick and easy that it takes almost no more effort than talking -- I can stay in touch with what the people important to me are thinking and doing, whenever they choose to share it. I learn an enormous amount from a friend of mine who twitters about the various web projects she's exploring. I get great ideas (and much amusement) from my friends who include cool links in their Gmail status messages. I'm smarter for having read friends' and coworkers' del.icio.us feeds. It's as though we're all sitting around the dining hall table, sharing whatever's on our minds. And it's really cool.

So, ok, I'm converted. I've got to go twitter this now.

(More) lessons the progressive websphere can learn from the enterprise - posted by Ethan Winn

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:55:48 -0700

At first blush, it doesn’t seem like the world of enterprise software has much to do with the work we’re doing building and empowering online communities and movements. What could the world of massive databases running of 30 year old tape-based mainframes have to do with training tomorrows leaders in the fight for the environment? Surely the email servers that run the blackberries and stock tickers and acquisitions databases for the Fortune 500 companies are only similar to our online organizing campaigns in the features of their most basic technologies, with the way in which these application are made and function being like day and night, right?

Well no, not really (I’m sure no one saw that coming). Aside from the basics of development process, usability and load testing and many other technical but quite substantive overlaps between the two types of projects, a recent post on the 37 Signals blog entitle “Why enterprise software sucks” points to another potential similarity, and one that can be quite dangerous for projects aiming to empower individuals: projects in which the client is not the user can fall prey to a feature creep where “experience takes a back seat to the feature list, future promises, and buzz words.” For Jason Fried, author of that post, this is evidenced by the sprawling, arcane forms, unusable search interfaces and other hinderances to usability that tend to clog many enterprise applications to the point that they are barely usable and comprise a major drain on resources.

While the specific symptoms may not be the same for online organizing projects, the separation between client and user is often similar: most often those who determine the functional requirements that online organizing applications must meet are not those who will be using the platforms but third-party entities seeking to foster change, build awareness and connect and empower users concerned about specific issues. For online advocacy platforms the negative effects of this separation between user and client may be more subtle than in the enterprise case. Examples might be overly demanding information requirements, unclear action items and other barriers to entry.

Sites like dothegreenthing.com and (our own) changeit07.com deal with these challenges very effectively (if I do say so myself): the barriers to entry are low and the action items are clear, both due to the fact that the design of the site puts user experience first, showing only what is essential at any point and keeping the site's entire feature set focused on a small set of capabilities: those that allow community members to participate, share and recruit. That said, sites such as these indicate that it’s likely that the enterprise arena has more to learn from the online organizing community in this regard…I’m sure they’ll catch up.

For those of you who are crafters on organizing initiatives (online and otherwise): how do you take your users perspective into account when crafting your message and platform?

¡Viva la Barça, y Viva la Drupalcon! - posted by Phil Lamb

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 06:10:22 -0700

I just flew in from Barcelona, and boy are my arms tired!

Well, not really - actually I got back about two weeks ago, but what with finalizing development and launching President Clinton's newest site and the Bears beating the Packers, I haven't had a lot of time to collect my thoughts and set them down via an interblag. Well, now that things have calmed down slightly, I figured I'd give it a shot.

First of all, Barcelona is an amazing city. It's incredibly metropolitan - sort of like New York on a smaller scale and with more spanish, although most people with whom I interacted spoke great English. It's really easy to get around, which was good since the conference was taking place at CitiLab Cornélia, on the outskirts of the city.

The overnight flight was not nearly as sleepy as I would have liked. Older planes apparently don't cool off much during flight, which is bad for me, as I really prefer to sleep in a cold room with lots of blankets. I also prefer to sleep lying down, which, as any of you who've experienced transatlantic travel in coach know, is basically impossible in a 747.

Anyway, what that all amounted to was me getting in at about 9:30 and wishing I could have slept. Thankfully I was able to adjust fairly quickly to the new schedule, and things were aces from there.

It was interesting to meet in real life so many of the people with whom I had interacted via IRC and forums. A lot of them were really cool people, which was great since I had come as the sole representative of EchoDitto and didn't exactly have any guarantee of social interaction. About two days into the conference I met up with ExoDitto Justin Miller, who was there with a group of people from the DoD. They're doing some really cool open-source stuff which I'm not sure I can talk about here, but needless to say the move towards open-source is one which I think would benefit a number of existing government agencies.

The days were PACKED and to my chagrin a number of talks I wanted to attend were scheduled for the same timeslot, but someone had the brilliant idea of recording most of the sessions and posting them online, and I'd definitely recommend checking them out.

It wouldn't be feasible for me to talk in depth about every session I attended, so instead I'll just focus on the one that interested me the most: the Agile Development method.

Why did this one strike me? Well, for the most part there weren't many technical surprises at DC07, with maybe the exception of Dave Cohen's presentation on Drupal for Facebook, which shows some real promise for melding the two platforms. One of the reasons I was sent out to Barcelona was for self-improvement, and as many developers out there know, getting a great development process going is one area where many people find themselves stuck. The Agile process, to me, represents a great solution - one that will almost certainly keep the client happy and the developer sane, and that combination leads to faster development, less overhead, and more client leads.

Here's the general idea behind Agile software development:

Customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software
Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
Working software is the principal measure of progress
Even late changes in requirements are welcomed
Close, daily, cooperation between business people and developers
Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication
Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
Simplicity
Self-organizing teams
Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

- wikipedia

EchoDitto's development process is already composed of some of these ideas, but lately we've been starting to take a look at adopting a majority of them.

All in all, DC07 was an incredibly beneficial experience, reinforcing things I already knew and teaching me things I didn't. I'm not entirely sure where the next DrupalCon will be held (some are saying Stuttgart), but if you get the chance - GO!

Practicing what we preach - posted by Phil Lamb

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 10:26:25 -0700

I recently assumed the mantle of Chicago Bears event coordinator for my local (well, sorta) pub, The Gael, which meant that, with the season quickly approaching, I needed a system easy to rapidly deploy for getting the word out to Bears fans in New York. After the (amazing, fantastic) NFC Championship game back in January, one of the pub's owners passed around an email signup sheet (wonderful forethought on his part!) and invited anyone interested to give us their email address.

I managed the email addresses using Campaign Monitor, a cheap ($0.01 per subscriber) email campaign system, and set up a Drupal-based site for blogging and other user management (check it out here). We've now got over 100 fans subscribed, and have used the massive turnout to work with the owners of the bar to become the only place in New York City to serve Vienna Beef Chicago-style Hot Dogs and Polish Sausage, and Goose Island Beer - all imported from Chicago. The next step: Old Style, the classic Chicago sports beer. All in all, it's been a successful few weeks, and a lot of fun, and just goes to show that at EchoDitto we're great at what we do because we use this stuff in our daily lives.

Flickering Farmers - posted by Michael Silberman

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 00:01:10 -0700

I spent part of Saturday at the Berkeley farmer's market (well, one of them) visiting with a good friend and enjoying some truly perfect weather. One of our first stops was, of course, for coffee. The Blue Bottle Coffee Company had a booth where they were slow-brewing coffee cup by cup, as it was ordered, slow-food style. I ordered a special New Orleans iced coffee that was roasted with chicory and cane sugar -- it was pretty amazing. Something about the scene was particularly poignant, so I whipped out my Treo, snapped a pic, and dutifully emailed it up to Flickr with a simple caption before i forgot where i was.

When I logged on to check email the next day, I was stunned to find the following subject line among my messages: "[Flickr] You are BlueBottleCoffeeCo's newest contact!" I couldn't help but laugh, yet i wasn't sure why... At first, I couldn't imagine a busy coffee roaster -- or any local entrepreneur -- taking the time to even setup a google alert let alone listen to a friend opine about the virtues of the web beyond e-commerce. Then I think I laughed at my own small-mindedness and false assumptions. But finally I was just plain happy that the entire online encounter was possible. I was glad that my photo was so easily found by someone who would appreciate it and that BlueBottleCoffeeCo could so easily reach out and acknowledge me and my little customer existence in this simple way. Creepy for some; exhilarating for the rest of us.

Who Wants to Storm the Men's Bathroom with Me?* - posted by Gisele Toueg

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 20:11:45 -0700

*Overheard while waiting in line for the ladies' room at BlogHer 2007

The third annual BlogHer conference kicked off on Friday at Chicago's Navy Pier. As BlogHer founders Jory Des Jardins, Lisa Stone and Elisa Camahort told a packed auditorium during the opening session, this year's conference drew 800 particpants, making it the largest gathering of bloggers ever (regardless of gender). Wow. And what a gathering it was. Bloggers from all over the country and around the world came together to discuss the latest trends in technology, the art of self-promotion, effective strategies for building community online, and how blogs help all of us express ourselves and explore our personal and professional identities.

Personally, I was amazed at how many nametages belonged to people whose blogs I'd read before. In fact, the first breakout session I attended, called "The Life Stages of Online Communities," was moderated by Betsy Aoki, one of my former freelancers from my days as an editor at Amazon.com. Betsy founded the Seattle chapter of Webgrrls back when there weren't too many of us in this space. It was so inspiring to hear her and Webgrrls founder Aliza Sherman speak to a packed room of women (and a few men) about how to grow and nuture a successful online community.

Other BlogHer highlights included a session where participants worked together to create a voter manifesto for the upcoming presidential election, moderated by Morra Aarons, a track devoted to helping bloggers hone their public speaking skills and gain recognition as experts in their chosen fields, and a parralel conference in Second Life. Personally, I really enjoyed strolling through the exhibition hall, where I picked up a Butterball potholder and a t shirt from scrapblog, a very cool new company that brings the fun of scrapbooking to the Web. Oh, and I would be lying if I said I didn't eat four tins of free jelly beans at the Yahoo-sponsored Internet Cafe.

All-in-all, BlogHer 2007 was a rousing success, and totally worth spending twelve hours stuck at JFK and O'Hare airports, waiting for the weather to clear up and planes to depart. For those of you who couldn't make it to the conference, check out blogher.org, which is filled with posts from partipants detailing the events of the weekend.

Forget Shock and Awe... - posted by Gregory Cooper

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 08:23:51 -0700

So at one point or another, we’ve all heard the maxim that the digital revolution is going to change the way we do everything. Well... once again it has been proven right.

The next victim of the digital age? Ironically, it may be the art of war.

For a moment, forget Operation Shock and Awe and all the recent advancements in military technology… states have been getting better at killing people and blowing stuff up for the last hundred years. Much more novel is the concept of states engaging in “cyber-warfare", and what the implications of such actions might be. There is little doubt that an IT-savvy state could engage in cyber-warfare, but would it constitute the next ‘shot heard round the world?’ How should a state react when its websites are being shut down by another state? Complain? Crash their parliament website? File a brief with the International Court of Justice? Or maybe just bomb the bastards to hell.

Transition to a real world scenario:

Tensions recently flared up in Eastern Europe: Estonia, one of the Soviet Union’s former satellite states, moved a Soviet soldier memorial out of the city center of Tallinn. The Russian government was infuriated and provoked strong and forceful denunciations of Estonia by Russian ministers, who claimed that the removal of the statue discriminated against ethnic Russian citizens. Looting in Tallinn by Ethnic Russians ensued, and so… things got worse.

A basic international dispute over a policy slight- nothing new there.

Except…

On April 27th, a massive month long cyber-offensive began on the websites of Estonia’s banks, parliament, ministries, newspapers, and broadcasters, forcing many of them to shut down. Estonia is highly modernized and relies heavily on IT, and so the attacks remained serious problem. All eyes looked to Russia as the culprit, and the Estonian Foreign Minister even went on television to claim that one of the virus origins was from a computer in the Russian Presidential Administration and several from government computers. Nonetheless, many tech savvy Russian citizens found helpful instructions on how to conduct DDoS attacks on their own, and Estonia has been hammered now for nearly a month.

Whether or not Russia is actually ‘guilty’ is almost irrelevant given the nature of cyber attacks (they are just plain difficult to trace). I think what is most troubling is that there is still no clear idea in the international community on how to respond should a state be caught engaging in such an attack. The Economist was fortunate enough to quote a senior NATO official in Brussels: even

“If a member state's communications centre is attacked with a missile, you call it an act of war. So what do you call it if the same installation is disabled with a cyber-attack?”

Cyber-warfare is not going to replace regular warfare or change the entire international balance of power, but it does pose a new problem to an already troubled international system. As countries continue to modernize, it creates new weaknesses and vulnerabilities that can be taken advantage of… especially in cyberspace.

Facebook and Web 2.1 - posted by Phil Lamb

Wed, 30 May 2007 12:18:46 -0700

Remember when Facebook first hit the scene? I sure do. I had heard about the MySpaces, and had in fact set up a profile, but I was peeved with not only the overall quality of the pages, but also the length of time required to get profile pages to load. This, kids, is what happens when people with no HTML skills try to use spyware-laden tools to be creative.

And then, there was Facebook. And it was good: MySpace, with its heavy-handed marketing focus, was the annoying, belligerent 13-year-old screaming at everything and everyone that walked past, begging for attention. Facebook was the 20-year-old wunderkind waiting patiently to meet the King of Sweden.

I remember, specifically, the easy, intuitive nature of the Facebook interface, and was especially pleased with the fact that I didn't have to listen to some stupid Emo song any time I looked at someone's profile. And now, just three short years later, Facebook is about to make a quantum leap into coolness: they've debuted the Facebook Application platform.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington writes that with this release, Facebook is now the "Anti-MySpace,"(follow-up post here) but I think we're way past that. Facebook is moving from Social Networking into a new and different frontier, and can no longer be compared to NewsCorp's baby. What the new platform promises is a sort of "Web 2.1" that takes all of the awesomeness of Web 2.0 and puts it in one place, waters it, and lets it grow into something spectacular. Matt wrote about this occurring on a smaller scale a couple months ago when FB added its status feature, a Twitter-like add-on that allows users to keep friends up to date on what they're doing at any given moment. But now, the Status tool is outmoded, because Twitter itself has written an application for Facebook that can effectively replace the Status tool. (And, in an awesome display of Meta, Micah Sifry used the Twitter widget to say, "wondering whether Facebook just got feature creep.")

So now, the fundamental question raised by Facebook's move is, how is Web 2.1 different from Web 2.0?

I think the key to answering this question lies in nature. Web 2.0 applications like Social Networking Sites or youTube or Flickr are associated with viruses. Ask any marketing director what the hot new term for this decade is and they'll say "viral marketing." How did youTube get so huge? Flickr? Viral marketing. The concept is simple: "infect" people with what Seth Godin, during his talk at PDF a few weeks ago, called an "ideavirus" and, assuming you have something that people are interested in (a 100% infection rate), you get a very predictable exponential growth.

So you've got these ideaviruses. And they're out there in the ether, floating around and infecting people. You occasionally come across the equivalent of equatorial jungle with sites like BoingBoing teeming with Internet versions of Ebola, SARS and Small Pox - superbugs like Vote Different and LOLcats. But once they're out there, they don't change much; there are currently very few good examples of ideavirus mutation.

This is, I think, where Web 2.1 comes in. When you open up a platform and encourage development in the way Facebook has, you give ideaviruses a chance to mutate, a chance to become more efficient. Then, their growth is much more life-like. You can still have the exponential growth of infection, but with all of Web 2.0 in one spot, and with people being able to easily change or mashup multiple aspects of software, the genetics of these applications can evolve at the same time they replicate, and natural selection can occur online by people choosing to install the better application. A parent, like Facebook's Status app, can evolve into a more efficient app, like Twitter, and then, because of the greater appeal of its increased efficiency, spread more quickly. Suddenly it's no longer just an ideavirus but an ideaecology

Of course, there are drawbacks. Facebook has often been compared to the "walled gardens" of the early Internet - Prodigy, AOL, Compuserve - and with that lack of outside influence, the chances of mutation and improvement from cross-pollination are greatly reduced, and nature is echoed online. The real-world problem of Medieval monarchs marrying within the family and producing offspring with genetic defects might be seen on Facebook: five different versions of applications with different names that basically do the same thing. That's pretty boring.

Whatever the repercussions of this move may be, it's obvious that Facebook has done something really cool, and we're sure to see a lot more coming out of this in the future.