Well, I have to say, PMatty is turning out to be quite the quintessential capricorn. On the day that he turns twenny-two, he lands a CEO for Automattic, his new WordPress startup.
…Yeah, and not just any CEO… Toni Schneider of Yahoo, OddPost(read: Yahoo Mail), Konfabulator (read: Yahoo Widgets), et cetera and so on.
And speaking of Yahoo, I take it back. Google doesn’t own my life. Turns out (quite to my surprise mind you) it’s a Yahoo! Yahoo! Yahoo! . . . Yahoo! … world after all. Weird.
Firefox set a good model for the rest of the open source world when it infused simple, clean design into a very useful tool. Seems to me that this trend is tantamount to what is coming up next in the world of technology and online living. Of course, you can’t really have one or the other, but the core differentiator that will set one app above the rest or result in widespread adoption will be rooted in user experience, not in the number of features or power.
So, I hate making predictions, but I think I can make a few observations about how design might well change the software/webapp landscape in the not-too-distant future:
But these are just my humble observations, and given that I’m no analyst, are subject to change, revision, contradiction and further extrapolation.
This is getting to be a regular thing!
So check this out. Scott Kveton of the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University is streaming in from Oregon to spread open source cheer and good will! Come join us Monday, January 9th, 8pm at Thirsty Bear Brewing Co. in San Francisco for a beer or three with one of the guys who makes sure that you can download or hack Firefox, Gnome, and a slew of other open source staples whenever and wherever you want!
And yes, who’s also one of my heros. Awww….
Chris Pederick‘s excellent Firefox/Flock compatible Web Developer Extension 1.0 is out. Don’t code without it!
So the truth is, Kent Bye is a radical badass mofo. And he deserves, nay, demands, your respect and attention.
You just might not know that if you bumped into him in a supermarket, causing him to drop the peanut butter and fumble the newspaper his nose was buried in.
Yet, Kent is a revolutionary of the here and now, creating a documentary that will hopefully, once and for all, set the record straight on how the media hog-tied us into submission on going to war in Iraq in an echolalic orgy of repetition and fake news (naw, I ain’t biased or nuthin’). Pulling from, gosh, 60-80 hours of news footage from the days and weeks leading up the war as well as 76 interviews, he’s using open source methodologies and software to transcribe, tag and splice this content into usable and reusable chunks of video and metadata that will eventually be used for feature-length documentary.
So, anyone who gives a lick about open source media, vlogging, democracy, babies crying in puddles, Radiohead or coffee needs to show up tonight at 8pm at Ritual Roasters in San Francisco.
Kent flew all the way in with his wonderful wife from Portland, Maine. Don’t stand him up!
And yes, full disclosure, he also interviewed me at length about my plans for open source world domination when I visited him in Maine this past Thanksgiving. It’s only fitting that I return the favor and buy him a latte.
To avoid confusion and any potential trademark issues, I’ve decided to redub my previously monikered Mashup Camp as Mash Pit (naming honors go to the original Bar Camp chaperon himself Ross Mayfield).
This decision was made after a discussion I had today with David Berlind of ZDNet, who is planning the real-deal Mashup Camp sometime later this spring. Details will be forthcoming on his blog.
Anyway, our events are different enough to warrant the name change anyway. Whereas my event is more of a one-day micro-hackathon, David wants there to be many more participants (on the order of 25 times as many!) as well as host a number of mashup based contests with cool prizes and whatnot. So hey, I say, the more the merrier. No one can own the camp meme, so the more it spreads and gives regular folks the opportunity to get involved with all this new fangled techie stuff, the better!
If you’re interested in the Mash Pit, drop me an email at barcamp at gmail dot com or give me a couple days to get a wiki setup. Or feel free to start something on barcamp.org. Whatever floats your ship.
So yes, finally, thanks to the good folks at GoodStorm, I’ve set up a store and will be selling my shirts for the low low low price of $12.94ea + corkage.
Get this — I make 70% of the difference after cost on these bad boys. Seventy. What? What’s that Mr. Zazzle? What? You only offer 10%? Yeah? You only thought Puff was a boy’s magical dragon?
And oh yeah, GoodStorm runs on open source… CivicSpace and Drupal specifically so you can finally put your money where your code is!
And yeah, this wouldn’t be complete without some shameless plugs for some worthy causes since I’m thinking that any money I make off these shirts, I’ll put towards orgs that support open media, open culture and open thinking.
Not surprisingly, my proposed event has some precedents, notably in architecture, called charettes (“a charette is an intense effort to solve any architectural problem within a limited time.”) (via Brad):
There are two main advantages to working in the context of a charette. The first is that a charette operates in a highly collaborative atmosphere. Instead of an architect taking ideas and plans and going away to develop them on his or her own, a charette allows for the participation of everyone involved with the project, resulting in a highly charged and creative atmosphere. The inclusion of many points of view results in well-rounded and realistic proposals, with everyone satisfied that they were able to contribute. Secondly, Charettes are fast, and relatively inexpensive. In the intital stages of a project, the venture is necessarily highly speculative. It is important to keep costs at bay, while also moving forward quickly to take advantage of changing situations and often prohibitory deadlines. Charettes offer the opportunity to work safely and effectively within both of these boundaries.
Not only that, other people have thought hard about this kind of event before (also via Brad):
So it’s clear that we’re tapping into a model that’s already well established. It’s just futzing with the details that makes what we’re doing remotely unique. It brings me back to my ultra geeky days in high school when I was helping to build robots for FIRST: we’d get a bucket of parts, an interdisciplinary team with mentors from local companies and for a couple months we’d get our team prepped for the real competition by building robots collaboratively.
And what was significant about the design of the program were the contraints imposed upon us; we had a box of random metal gadgets and that was it. And yet every year, bigger, badder and more creative solutions would emerge in spite of those limitations. Nay, I daresay, because of them.
And so that’s why I want to limit the coworking event. Yeah, I could get a bigger space, but it wouldn’t be the same. And in the original ethos of creating these events to be repeatable, low-cost and sustainable, I want other people the world over to run their own mashup days…. With their own backchannels. With different communities and projects being represented and brought into the mix. C’mon, the Bay Area chapter of the Brat Pack 2.0 is cool and all, but these events are relevant the world over and we all need more reasons to travel for work. 😉
Whether you’ve got three people or three hundred, you can make an event like this happen. Seriously. And there plenty of people and a litany of historical resources out there ready to help get you started.
Remember the one thing that’s essential to the ongoing life and success of these things (just a little Canterian didacticism): anarchy still reins supreme in the valley of camps
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So it serves me right that serendipity scooped me on this one, but I’d had this long post thing that I was working on about the Death of Web * Dot Oh but well, as it was boring and even longer than my other tomes, I never got around to finishing it. So I’ll summarize, since my point was extremely simple, if not pedestrian:
Whatever you want to call it, the point is, we’ve got some pretty decent technologies at our disposal now. And some of them are open, as in open source or open APIs. It’s about time that we stopped futzing around and built tools that worked for ordinary folks, yeh, the ones who don’t have time to live and breathe tech like the rest of us seem to. Most of the world is not like us (surprise!) and at some point, yes, we must break free from our autistic cocoon and realize, “Gee Spudsky, there are other people in the world who still don’t know what a web browser is. Well I’ll be. Dang nab it!”
(I probably should podcast that so you can hear the thick southern drawl on that endquote.)
Whatever, so that’s the premise and the treatise of my defunct rant: build good stuff with what we’ve got for ordinary, good people!
Um, so why do I bring that up? Glad you asked.
So I mentioned open tech stuff. Stuff that you can use without having to ask for permission because it’s granted or presumed granted or licensed that way. These are the tools of what’s coming next. (That which shall remain nameless. Grr.)
So what I want to do is two things. And I’ll be totally honest about this:
So here’s the deal. January 17 we’re going to have a Mashup Camp at the Coworking space. No, it probably won’t be exactly David Berlind’s concept, even though he gets credit for blogging the idea first (goddamn procrastination!). Rather it’s going to be a day of intense GTD.
There will be 12 of us, mixed and mashed from a superlative cadre of geeks. It’s open to apply, but we’ve got limited space and time, so, 12. Anyway, we start in the morning promptly at 10am (after informal coffee, etc). We do brief intros, discuss our project, what we’re bringing to the table as far as knowledge, know-how and passion. We then break up into a couple groups based on what we want to get done and the utility of our offerings. …Spend the next couple hours drawing, writing, designing, architecting… getting to something with teeth but not code. Break for lunch and cross-polination.
Here’s where we could get tricky (it is a mashup camp after all). Maybe after lunch we play musical chairs with the projects. Y’know, mashup the teams? This means that the folks early in the day really need to be clear about what they want since it’ll be someone else’s fingers actually punching the keys and juicing the code.
Wait, do you mean that want a decent spec?
Uhm, yes.
Don’t worry, we’ll make something up. So after the mashing of people, a coding melee ensues and by the end of the day, we’ll have something. Scratch that, we’ll have a few things. Probably not all that pretty, but beginnings. And, I’ll tell you this in advance, one of the projects will be to construct the website that will host these projects moving forward… what shall become a proverbial open source treasure trove of mashups. Oh yes my friends, this is going to be good.
Ning, eat your heart out. No offense, but a bunch of passionate geeks in a room can run blindfolded circles around any prefab solution any day. Remember? this stuff is for real people. And for that, well, you’ve gotta have heart.
So a bunch of us at the newly opened up Flock HQ were discussing the Performancing extension today, wondering how we could both support and benefit from their work… It’s clear that we need to improve the quality of composition tools available in browsers, period. Doing this by elevating the experience and smoothing out the behavior of the Mozilla editor (which both Flock and Performancing use) seems like the way to go, creating value for the open source, Flock and Firefox communities.
As it is, Firefox ships with this editor built-in. Thunderbird uses it too, as does NVU (though I believe that they forked awhile back). You can imagine that refocused effort on this editor could potentially lead to an alternative to plain textarea that’s both stable and adequately featured (as opposed to hacking on an embedded solution).
So the thing is, how do we go about defining and building out the specs for the next generation Mozilla editor? How do we better collaborate with folks like Performancing to make this a reality?
As for Flock, well, this effort really needs to exist as a community-wide project. We’re all already pretty focused on other aspects of the browser and while making changes the editor are essential long term, it’s not in our immediate roadmap. Sure, Anthony makes incremental changes here and there (replacing the span tags, for example), but we just don’t have full time resources to allocate at the moment.
And that’s where the work that the Performancing community is doing comes in. Ideally if we can collaborate and coordinate on the needs we both have, we can begin to craft a list of user experience and development requirements to support our comingled goals of bringing blogging to Firefox and Flock users.
Ajaxian recently posted an Ajax Office Roundup that provides us some insights into how people are trying to use editing in browsers. The reality is, we don’t need Word for the web, especially when it comes to blogging, but we do need some established basics, like bolding, italics, blockquoting, linking and so on. And while those are already fairly well accounted for in the existing editor, we’ve got to look beyond formatting to natively supporting rich metadata in microformats and other forms of structured blogging.
I’ll be pinging the Performancing folks to see if they’re down for working together somehow. Maybe we start be cross-polinating each other’s forums.
After all, this is about choice and working on building awesome tools. This is what open source is all about. So hey now, here’s a quintessential opportunity for us to get some benefit and promotion for the work we’re doing anyway.
Factory Joe 