Category: I care about…

CivicSpace Announces Hosted Alpha Test

CivicSpace LogoMy buddy Zack Rosen over at CivicSpace Labs has announced an alpha testing period for hosted CivicSpace sites, along the lines of WordPress.com or Bryght. Back when I worked there, this was something that we spent much time discussing, and I’m thrilled to see this available:

Yes, that’s right, we are going to begin alpha testing a hosted CivicSpace service shortly. To say this has been a long time coming is quite the understatement. Three years, 30+ major software releases, thousands of sites, and the shared vision of thousands of supporters have gotten us to where we are today and have (hopefully) prepared us for this next giant leap forward.

The service will be similiar to Drupal hosting offered by Bryght but will provide the CivicSpace 0.8.3 Drupal distribution. In the future we hope to launch the ASP publicly as a low cost service for the non-profit & advocacy sector, but for now we are looking for a few brave CivicSpace community members to help us test it. Please fill out the form if you are interested in participating and we will be in contact with you shortly.

Go sign up!

The jaywalking podcast (GlitchNYC)

Jaywalking podcast - photo by Miss RogueBarcamps NYC and Austin veteran Eric Skiff captured a pretty decent interview with me touching on Flock and microformats while we made our our way back to SXSW from the Spaghetti warehouse yesterday. Give it a listen and then subscribe to GlitchCast. Good stuff — and really good audio quality given the circumstances!

Flock 0.5.13 released with 100% more Photobucket

Flock 0.5.13.2 released

Though we’re still struggling with speed issues on the Mac, we were able to squeeze in our second photo service for uploading and browsing photos: Photobucket! Download the latest release and check it out.

To give this new functionality a go, do this:

Open up Flock’s Preferences dialog, click the Web Services tab, choose Photo Sharing and then select Photobucket from the dropdown menu.

Switching photo services requires Flock to be restarted, and you’ll be prompted to do this after making your selection. After switching services, the Photo Browser and Uploader interfaces will change to reflect the feature set of the new service.

Oh, and we also took care of a nasty bug that would mangle title, description, and tag fields when using multibyte UTF-8 characters in the Photo Uploader.

EFF this, I’m moving to France

EFF the RIAA (clean)

PARIS (Reuters) – France is pushing through a law that would force Apple Computer Inc to open its iTunes online music store and enable consumers to download songs onto devices other than the computer maker’s popular iPod player.

Under a draft law expected to be voted in parliament on Thursday, consumers would be able to legally use software that converts digital content into any format.

It would no longer be illegal to crack digital rights management — the codes that protect music, films and other content — if it is to enable to the conversion from one format to another, said Christian Vanneste, Rapporteur, a senior parliamentarian who helps guide law in France.

French plan would open iTunes to other devices — by Astrid Wendlandt

There’s been a lot of interesting discussion related to DRM and Creative Commons (especially this morning’s Commons-based Business Models panel). If France moves forward with this kind of law, I think it’s only going to make this situation better, more open, more transparent and actually… better for Apple.

While perhaps not hugely impactful over the long term (in a globalized world, one country’s laws really don’t make a massive difference in WTO-scheme of things), setting the example (especially given the path to darkness France was previously on) will be tremendously didactic for the various and soon-to-be-obsolete DRM industries (ok, "soon" as in 5 to 12 years).

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Flock ETech presentation available

Flock eTech 2006 slides available

I exported a Quicktime movie of my slides from ETECH (click to advance each slide). I’ll be doing a vidcast of the presentation in a week or two so you can get the full effect (and hopefully I’ll be able to share it in multiple formats).

For the two Demo Time slides, here’re the scripts I would have used if the network would have been less flaky:

Demo One

  1. on a friend’s page, hit the star
  2. rss reading
  3. topic aggregation (om and techcrunch)
  4. now click through to a one of the pages
  5. open the technorati topbar to see what’s going on

Demo Two

  1. open photo browser — look for etech
  2. photo uploading — ok i want to upload my own photos
  3. history search (to find something to blog — like the techcrunch page we saw before)
  4. blogging workflow (of page found through history and then drag in uploaded photo)

Leave me comments if you have any questions.

Update: By request from the management, I decided to remove 3 slides at the end of the presentation about “getting laid” since without context from the in-person presentation, it may seem a bit more lewd than intended.

Bar Campfire blog, Bar Camp Austin, ETech

Bar Camp ETechHeya Matt, here’s another one to add to your list: the Bar Campfire blog is now on WordPress.com.

And don’t forget, tonight is the kickoff for Bar Camp Austin! Blog it, share it, spread it — it’s going to be a crazy time. I mean, we’ve got a press release — how easy can it be?

Before leaving ETech today, I stopped by set up at the last minute… dude.

Drupal Camp NYC is looking for a venue

Drupal Camp BoyAnother offshoot of Bar Camp, Drupal Camp is looking for a venue in NYC. As Amit can attest, finding a venue, especially in NYC, is the hardest part of organizing a camp.

So, if anyone has ideas for May 13-14 — Node 101 folks? — please let Noel know on the wiki. More details on their planning page.

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GoodStorm looking for a GoodDesigner

In case you were on the prowl for an important job doing open source interface and design work, boy have I got the opportunity for you.

GoodStorm (host of the meager FactoryCity store) is looking for a GoodDesigner to help improve their brand new open source store (which is built on Drupal).

Drop Marc) a note and tell him I sent you!