I care about… – Page 7

How do we take care of each other?

Strong: Kevin Burton reports that the fund raising drive has was a complete success. As a result, I’ve removed the PayPal links from this post. Thanks all who donated!

Kevin Burton IM’d me yesterday and asked if he could give me a call. “Y’know Greg Stein?” “Yeah,” I said, “I just finally met him at BarCampBlock. What’s up?” “I just heard that he was mugged on his way home yesterday.” “Is he okay?” I asked. “No.”

Apparently two guys jumped Greg (who happened to be on crutches), gave him a black eye and serious laceration that was bleeding profusely when the ambulance arrived.

All for a hundred bucks and a credit card.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, Greg is a great guy, and one who has done a tremendous amount of good for the open source world. He’s now at Google doing loads of good work open sourcing their innards while chairing and acting as director of the Apache Software Foundation, lead developer of Subversion, and all things WebDAV.

And it’s really too bad that terrible things happen to good people like Greg.

So Kevin decided he wanted to do something. And that’s why he IM’d and then called me. He’s collecting donations in order to buy flowers, buy dinner and generally prove that, even when shit like this happens, that there is still good people and humanity in the world. And that when you give so much of yourself away to others and expect nothing in return, you’re the best candidate to receive the support of the community you’ve helped for so long.

So as I talked to Kevin about what we could do for Greg, it become abundantly clear that in all the social networking and digital ephemera that we’ve wrapped ourselves in we’ve done a pretty shoddy job of creating simple or obvious ways to help each other out in meaningful and effective ways when we’re most in need. Our networks are self-healing; people are not. So what have we done to make it possible to immediately mobilize ourselves when things do go wrong in order to provide the most effective and helpful response? When it comes to taking care of one individual out of our hundreds of friends across these online networks, does the network confound or enhance our ability to pitch in and materially help out?

When I was an admin of Spread Firefox, we were able to pull in a staggering $220,000 in 10 days to put a two page ad in the New York Times. The community saw a need (a grandiose one, I might add) and responded.

When the Dean campaign needed money, they put a call out and thousands upon thousands of campaign supporters would offer up microdonations and fill up the fundraising bat every time, accruing millions.

When one of us takes a hit, how do we respond? How does the network help us give the best that we’ve got?

I’m not saying I have the answers here — I’m really confounded. When Kevin asked me to pitch in, I was ready to hit the ground running — but what the hell do we do first? And in what proportion so that the multiplying aspects of the network doesn’t overwhelm the rather mundane and essential goal of lending Greg a helping hand now, when he needs it?

Well, for lack of anything we better, we kept it simple. For donations, I suggested Donorge, ChipIn and Network for Good but Kevin ultimately just used a couple PayPal links to receive donations on his blog. He set up a Google Group to organize folks, coordinate good acts and answer questions. For flowers I suggested Podesta Baldocchi here in the city. And while I think these efforts will ultimately prove successful and bring Greg a degree of relief and a smidgeon of hope, I think it also in some way serves to illustrate our need for what Stephanie Trimble has called Giving 2.0 (and that she has currently put into action offering people who work for Web 2.0 companies [a way to] get together to volunteer for charitable organizations).

If the government’s response to Katrina proved anything, it’s that our safety and well-being is in each others’ hands. And that we have to figure out how to put these new networks into our employ, and to figure out how design them to serve our human needs in the most vital times. It’s ideas like Brian Caldwell’s Emergency Social-Repeater System or the recent thread on the coworking mailing list for P2P health care that suggest that we’re beginning the work to figure this stuff out for ourselves.

In the meantime, Kevin is just about half way through raising $2000 to send Greg out to Big Sur where he can relax and recuperate. Even though no one deserves to experience the kind of thing that Greg did on Friday, I think he’s more than earned the support of the community here. The systems of supporting ourselves and keeping each other safe certainly have a long way to go and deserve our attention; however, in the meantime, there is a more pressing need. For the moment we’ll make due, and do the best that we can, for each other.

WordPressMU: Making a smart platform choice

I recently engaged in an interesting discussion with a client about their choice of platform technology for their website and community build-out. Their current website is built in .NET and they’re getting to the point where things are about to start getting set in stone in terms of scaling and overall architecture and it kinda freaked me out that they’d continue down this path using a platform that I think offers little when it comes to organic community-building or much in the way of “doing web things right”.

I decided I’d write up my arguments for switching platforms in the hopes that I might test my thinking and in the process persuade our client to move to a more community-forward platform.

Continue reading “WordPressMU: Making a smart platform choice”

The story of exPhone.org

At FOO Camp, we held a session on Green Code and discussed various tactics for reducing power consumption by reducing (primarily) CPU cycles through wiser platform decisions and/or coding practices.

Somewhere in the discussion we brought up the impending launch of the iPhone and it occurred to me that there really wasn’t any substantive discussion being had about what to do with the many thousands of cell phones that would be retired in favor of newer, shinier iPhones.

Thus the seed for exPhone.org took root and began to germinate in my mind — as something simple and feasible that I could create to raise awareness of the issue and provide actionable information for busy people who wanted to do the right thing but might not want to wade through the many circuitous online resources for wireless recycling.

I had a couple constraints facing me: first, I needed to get this done while Tara was traveling to Canada as I wanted it to be an [early} surprise birthday present. Second, I needed to get it done before iPhoneDevCamp so I could leverage the event to promote the site. And third, I had other competing priorities that I really needed to focus on.

I went about designing the site in Keynote (my new favorite design tool), relying heavily on inspiration from Apple’s Environment section. I did a bunch of research and posted a lot of links to a Ma.gnolia group (in lieu of a personal set) and created a Flickr group at the same time. I of course also registered the associated Twitter account.

As I went about developing the site, I felt that I wanted to capture everything in a single page — and make it easy for printing. However, I brought my buddy Alex Hillman into the project to help me with the trickier PHP integration bits (his announcement) and he convinced me that multiple pages would actually be a better idea — not to mention compatible with my primary purpose of encouraging sustainable behavior! — and so we ended up breaking the content into three primary sections: Preparation, Donation and Recycling.

We riffed back and forth in SVN and things started to solidify quickly and we quickly realized that we should make the site more social and interactive. And, rather than build our own isolated silos, we decided we’d pull in photos from Flickr, bookmarks from Ma.gnolia and Delicious and use the groups functionality on Flickr and Ma.gnolia. This meant Alex simply had to toss the feeds into Yahoo! Pipes, dedupe them and then funnel the results in a SimplePie aggregator on our end to output the resultant feeds. It turned out that Pipes was, for some reason, not as reliable as we needed and so Alex ripped them out and ended up bumping up SimplePie’s caching of the direct feeds.

Alex put in extra effort on the Flickr integration side, creating an exPhone user account on Flickr and setting up email posting to make it super simple to get your photos of your exphones on to the site. All you have to do is take a photo of your exphone and email it to myexphone@exphone.org with a subject like this: tags: exphone, ‘the make and model of your phone’ (yes, the make and model should be in single quotes!). We’re kinda low on photos on there, so we’d love for you to contribute!

Lastly, I’ve gotta give props to The Dude Dean for his SEO tips. I’m typically not a fan of SEO, but I think when applied ethically, it can definitely help you raise your relevance in search engine results. We’re nowhere in sight, but I’d love to get up in the cell phone recycling results.

I’ve written this up primarily to demonstrate an evolving design process (Keynote to HTML to SVN prototyping to iterative launch) and the use of existing technology to build a simple but rich web application. By leveraging web services via various APIs and feeds, Alex and I were able to build a “socialized” site will little original development where most of our efforts were focused on content, design and behavior. I also made sure to mark up the site with microformats throughout making it trivial to add the organizations I mentioned to your address book or reuse the data elsewhere.

I like the idea of “disposable web apps” or “single purpose apps” that provide useful information, useful functionality or simply reuse existing materials in a novel or purposeful way. I’m also thrilled that Alex and I cobbled this thing together from scratch in a matter of three days. Yeah, it’s not a long-term, high value proposition, but it was great fun to work on and is something concrete that came out of that discussion at FOO Camp.

I of course welcome your thoughts and feedback and invite you to add your own stories, links or photos to the site!

What is a DevCamp?

$DevHouse + BarCamp = DevCamp$

While the event is still fairly fresh in my mind, I wanted to take a moment to extract some of the elements that I think made iPhoneDevCamp such a success. I’d like to put down my thoughts on how others can emulate our model towards yet another extension of the community-run, grassroots-driven event known as BarCamp — into a new style of event that shall be called DevCamp^*.

You’ll note that in the original logo deliberations for iPhoneDevCamp I was very intentional about not including iPhone-specific artwork in the mark, instead choosing something more generic to the idea of building or construction. Fortunately Louie Mantia pitched in and was able to help me refine some of the ideas that I had and we ended up with the logo above — which you can download in vector form.

Anyway, getting back to the event itself…

First and foremost, the event set out to capture the spirit of four successful event models before it: SuperHappyDevHouse, BarCamp, Mash Pit and Mac Hack. It helped a great deal to have had experience running those events before and we relied on our collective instincts to keep the event flowing and ensuring that the participants were both enjoying themselves and contributing to the overall atmosphere of the event.

Equally important in the success of the event were the people involved. It was a rare privilege to work with such dedicated and passionate folks and I really can’t say enough how much the model of selflessness Raven Zachary, Christopher Allen, Dominic Sagolla, Blake Burris, Whurley, Jerry Murray and countless others portrayed over the weekend. First time participants eagerly volunteered their energies to improving the event for others in incremental but crucial ways. In all my experiences with BarCamps, DevHouses and DevCamps, the lesson is consistently that these events are all about the people who come together for each other — and go out of their way to improve the experience of their fellow campers.

It’s truly remarkable to see, but I’ve seen it over and over again and I think it’s at the heart of what’s been called the “Spirit of BarCamp“. iPhoneDevCamp was no different and carried forth a tradition that’s come to define our community and the events that we host.

Moving right along…

An essential aspect of this event, like the first BarCamp, was implicitly “embracing the chaos” as we like to say. The first BarCamp was organized in six days and catered to nearly 300 people. iPhoneDevCamp was planned in only three weeks and catered to nearly 400 (if not more). We were able to cobble together an incredible venue stemming from a simple tweet. We pulled in over forty sponsors who provided. When Raven originally put out the call to Whurley and me about throwing this event, we had no idea how it might turned out — and embracing that uncertainty and being transparent about our progress lead us to be open to the twists and turns along the way that ultimately resulted in an incredibly worthwhile experience.

In fact, Christopher Allen’s participation didn’t materialize into much later into the event planning process. His desire to rekindle aspects of the original Mac Hack that he chaired in 1993 lead us to step back and encourage Chris to take the reigns and bring his experience to bear. Sure enough, he did a fantastic job of guiding the Hack-a-thon and presiding as master of ceremonies. He was able to deftly get people on the same page and describe how we were to work with one another and really join in the spirit of collaboration and learning.

It was this aspect of education that I hoped would resonate most with participants — and that with an open atmosphere where no question was off limits, we’d see some really interesting and inspiring thinking about how to embrace the constraints of the iPhone as an opportunity palette — and to really push what might seem conventionally possible with just a cell phone with an internet connection and a web browser.

I would argue that it was the imposition of external and topical constraints that lead to such enormous focus and productivity. I’d add to that the utter necessity of having a widely diverse assortment of skilled participants in attendance in order to be able to approach problems from multiple perspectives and skillsets and to not accept simple technical limitations as barriers to executing on a vision. As Kent Bye put it:

Again, I think this underscores my point that Diversity for the sake of Diversity is a good thing, simply because it enriches the fabric of the intelligence available for solving problems in new and unexpected ways. It’s no surprise that Tilt, one of the favorite apps of the camp, was developed by a small but diverse team made up of a game designer, an artist, a couple developers and a documentary filmmaker.

So the best design pattern that I would extract from this event comes, historically, from Chris Allen’s experience at Mac Hack and deserves something of a brief retelling:

On Saturday morning, the organizers were huddled in the ops room reviewing how to most appropriately award the incredible schwag our sponsors had donated. We had a bunch of iPod and iPhone add-ons, a number of tchotchkes and other ephemera, but we also had a couple iPhones, a couple Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium packs and various other top quality prizes… but we wanted to make sure that we had an equitable way to distribute the prizes. We started brainstorming:

“We could do a raffle.”

“We could have a hack contest for best app.”

Chris Allen broke into the discussion and told us that instead what they used to do at Mac Hack was reward participation and helpfulness. He proposed that staff get 100 or so total “special tickets” that we’d pass out throughout the event to people who were being the most helpful, the most constructive or generally contributing something to the event that didn’t necessarily directly benefit themselves. These special tickets were the ones that would be used for the big prizes drawing — the iPhones and Creative Suites — and the regular tickets would be dispensed as people arrived as an incentive for sticking around for the entire event.

By focusing on helpfulness and enculturating a spirit of coopetition, we avoided zero-summing the event by encouraging and refocusing energy on sharing, co-educating and building things collaboratively. Eventually people were having so much fun doing pure experimentation and hacking that they forgot all about the prize tickets… providing the perfect opportunity to swoop in and reward their participation. All in all, this approach worked extremely well and is a pattern, again, that I think should survive iPhoneDevCamp and carry forth into other such DevCamps.

To bring this all together — what I’m most proud of out of this event is how it brought people together to solve (or at least hack on) some pretty challenging and vexing problems and to do so with utter abandon, wearing one’s passion on her or his sleeve. It was an opportunity to learn in an open environment where diversity and raw talent were at a premium. There was no room for posturing or pretentiousness. And I think for folks not familiar with the camp community, like Michelle Quinn of the LA Times, this was a novelty and not something that she’s used to at conferences or events.

And I think it’s a testament to those involved and those who helped organize the event that we’ve set the bar exceedingly high for subsequent iterations. Like BarCamp and SuperHappyDevHouse before it, DevCamp offers a free, compelling, low-cost event model for organizing people around their passions. While there is already talk of subsequent iPhoneDevCamps, there is also interest in extending the model already. I’m excited to see how people can take this original design and stay true the values of openness, diversity, education, and the passionate pursuit of ideas and expertise.

DevCamp Miami came before Raven’s creation of the iPhoneDevCamp name. I believe Raven coined the name independent of the prior event but seems like a good idea to extend the name outward, while we have momentum.

My default WordPress setup: 17 must-have plugins

WordPress is my favorite blogging platform and has been for a long time. It gets the basics right and never overwhelmed me as I grew up in my blogging experience. However, like Firefox, WordPress is also eminently extensible and makes it easy to both get more out of the platform the longer you’re on it and the more plugins you add to customize your experience.

Recently I took a look at the numerous WordPress blogs I maintain and decided to extract some of the best plugins I use across them. They range from spam management to reporting and stats to authentication and better overall functionality. Here we go:

Akismet: the best comment spam protection this side of dodge. It fortunately comes pre-installed, though you’ll still need an API key from WordPress.com.
Clutter-Free: a simple plugin for customizing the WordPress composing interface. If you never turn off comments or worry about editing the slug, this is a handy plugin to keep things nice and tidy.
Comment Timeout: I just started using this one recently when it turned out that 90% of my comment spam was showing up on older posts. This one’s a life saver.
Diagnosis: this is a really useful plugin for finding out information about the server that you’re hosted on. Essential for debugging compatibility problems (like which version of PHP you’re on).
FeedBurner FeedSmith: Steve Smith originally wrote this plugin to make it easy to use FeedBurner for syndicating your blog and now FeedBurner has taken over its maintenance. Super easy to use and super useful.
Maintenance Mode: whenever I need to upgrade WordPress, I always flip the switch on this plugin giving my visitors a pleasant down-time message. It doesn’t come with LOLCats out of the box, but you can customize it to be if you’re feeling adventurous.
Share This: Alex King creates incredibly useful plugins and this is one of them. If you want to make it easy for your visitors to share your posts on bookmarking or social network sites, this is the one plugin you need.
TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter: Matt is skeptical about this plugin, but I find it useful. Essentially you can blacklist certain words and this plugin will delete any comments found to contain those words, as well as pre-filter comments as they’re being submitted. Whether it’s redundant to Akismet or not isn’t important to me — I need all the anti-spam kung fu I can get!
Trackback Validator: this plugin is part of a research program out of Rice University. I don’t know how well it works, but I certainly have very little trackback spam since installing it!
Subscribe To Comments: unless you’re a co.mments or coComment user, it’s often a pain to stay on top of comments you’ve left on other blogs. Subscribe To Comments adds a checkbox below your comment box to allow your readers to subscribe to comment followups via email.
WordPress.com Stats: like Akismet, this is another Automattic product. If you have a WordPress.com account, this plugin will gather visitor stats on your blog and integrate them with your WordPress.com dashboard.
WordPress Database Backup: this one is also pre-installed by default and is recommended as part of the routine for upgrading WordPress. Every time you increment your install, you should do a backup with this plugin.
WordPress Mobile Edition: Alex comes through with another hugely useful plugin for converting your site to be mobile-phone friendly. I’m currently working on a skin for the iPhone, but for everything else, this one works wonders. Highly recommended.
WordPress Reports: If the WordPress.com stats aren’t enough for you, Joe Tan has written an awesome plugin that merges your FeedBurner and Google Analytics stats into a very readable page of infographics.
WordPress OpenID (+): of course if I’m going to be running multiple WordPress blogs, I’m not going to want to remember multiple usernames and passwords across them. Instead, I use OpenID. Will Norris‘ work on Alan Castonguay original plugin fixes some bugs and update the JanRain library to avoid a number of compatibility errors.
WP-Cache: if you get any kind of traffic whatsoever, this plugin is a lifesaver, especially in spikes from Digg and elsewhere. Turn it off while testing but otherwise, leave it running.
WP-ContactForm: Akismet Edition: I used Chip Cuccio‘s WP-ContactForm for some time but found that it was a bit too restrictive with its spam fighting tactics. I switched to this version, which uses Akismet rather than regex rules and have found that it’s a better balance for me.

So there you go. That’s the list that I use for every WordPress blog that I start. I should ask: how many of these do you use? What’s your favorite list of WordPress must-adds?

Oh, and bonus! I start every theme I work on with Sandbox. It’s extremely flexible, fully classed (including native support for microformats) and now there’s a contest for best skins on until the end of the summer. Definitely a must-have for any new blog I work on.

OpenID is for small business

I’ve had this opinion for some time but felt that it was time to memorialize it: OpenID is not only the domain of grassroots developers, but it also (and should be more so) is the domain of small and independent businesses.

What better way to know and serve your customer than to be able to both identity who they are consistently and, where appropriate, hook up complementary services between sites through on uniform authentication experience?

Blinksale announced its support for OpenID today, only two weeks after 37 Signals upgraded Basecamp, their flagship collaboration app, to support the protocol following a successful trial on Highrise, their contact management web app. In the comments, Jason pointed out that the Open Bar feature of Basecamp enabled by OpenID will eventually be present in all their apps, hinting at how OpenID helps you better serve your customers across disparate applications.

I think that this is where OpenID will really shine — where you can have web applications like Basecamp, Highrise, Harvest, Blinksale, Freshbooks, Pownce and others all working seemlessly together even if they’re provided by different vendors, simply because they’re able to treat you as the same person as you move from one to another.

Screw big business adoption; the place where OpenID wins is with the little guys in small business — and with the grassroots folks who are agile, who can move to adopt this technology and who realize that this is the best chance they’ve had to really start treating their customers like real people instead of isolated records in their user database like all the big guys have for so long.

And I’m absolutely thrilled that business likes Blinksale and 37 Signals are starting to see this and turn this into a reality.

Why I’m involved in iPhoneDevCamp

While I’m planning to write a lengthier piece about why I think the iPhone and its constraints are important to the future of the open web, I did want to take a moment and talk about my involvement in co-organizing this weekend’s iPhoneDevCamp with Raven Zachary, whurley, Blake Burris, Dominic Sagolla and Christopher Allen and touch on its relationship with BarCamp and other similar camp-style events.

In particular, I received questions about my involvement in the event and calling it a “camp” from Jay Fichialos and Evan Prodromou, two BarCamp community members. I think that their concerns are valid and are worth answering, especially in public, as it gets at the line between commercial interests and community interests — and to what degree its okay to mix “business and grassroots” especially when, to date, BarCamp and the majority of *camp-styled events have avoided most the trappings of commercial endorsement.

Here’s essentially what I told them:

For me, iPhoneDevCamp isn’t really about the iPhone. Personally, I could care less about the iPhone. What I am interested in, however, is the opportunity that the iPhone affords to promote the development and building of open web technologies in the conspicuous absence of proprietary technologies like Flash, SilverLight et al.
I see my involvement as primarily to “keep it real”, to provide contacts and facilitation and to weigh in on issues of commercialization of the event. I think I represent a conservative perspective in this regard whereas my fellow co-organizers are more open to various forms of sponsor involvement. My goal is to keep the vibe community-centric and make sure that the event remain true to the spirit of prior camps, putting the participants first above sponsors.
I like the idea of a productive and educational DevCamp model and would like to see this meme spread further. While this event is product-driven in name, I feel that subsequent events can morph into more product-agnostic events, extracting the base components of a “DevCamp” (part DevHouse, part BarCamp, part Mash Pit, part Mac Hack) into something more general. As with other events that I’ve been involved with, the event itself is non-proprietary and is open for reinterpretation and remixing. I would love for this event to enculturate new thinking, new ideas and new appreciation for using open web standards, open web technologies like microformats and OpenID and other non-proprietary web design methodologies. I’m sure other similar learning possibilities will emerge, but what’s important to me here is that the model of the DevCamp persist as yet another way for independents to gather themselves and self-educate.

Now, to be clear, I certainly do not care to hype the iPhone any more than it already is. I don’t own and iPhone and I haven’t decided whether I will buy one or not. Still, I feel like its release provides a grand opportunity to shift the thinking on developing for the iPhone towards open web technologies. Given the work I’ve been involved with from Spread Firefox to microformats to OpenID, this seems to be an opportunity not worth missing, regardless of the commercial implications. The web will survive the iPhone and will be made better by it. To what extent that is true, however, is entirely in our hands.

Why I screenshot

Three months ago, Sarah Hatter asked me a question that I had intended on answering then and there. In fact I did, but I had intended to expand upon these thoughts in a longer post:

Actually, I take shot primarily for my own purposes — research, learning and as a repository of interfaces that I can dig up later and imitate.

If I had to go out an search for a specific UI everytime I needed inspiration, I’d be a *much* slower designer than I already am! This way I can capture the best of the web *as* I come upon it, when the moment of inspiration hits.

I think this hints at what I said the other day about cleverness: she is the most clever who is the sum of everyone else’s cleverness (Ok, I didn’t say that exactly, but that’s kind of what I was getting at). On top of that, it’s rather inefficient to try to “innovate” your way to the next big thing when most “inventions” are actually evolutionary improvements to what’s come before. As if social networking and Web 2.0 was new! I mean, the version got ticked up from one-point-oh right?

But that’s not really what I’m saying. What I am saying is that I screenshot for history, for posterity, for education and erudition, for communication, to show off and, heck, for my own enjoyment. Call me twisted, but I really get off on novel approaches to old interfaces, clever disk images or fancy visualizations. Jacob Patton once called me the pornographer of Web 2.0. Nuff said.

Still, there is more to be said. For one thing, I don’t screenshot everything that I see or come across. Just like my blog posts, I tend to like to write about things that are interesting to me, but that, if I’m going to share to the wider world, will probably be of some interest to other folks, one way or another. I never assume interest, but, y’know, I do try to make this stuff look good in the off chance that someone takes inspiration from something I’ve uploaded… as in the case of Andy Baio‘s work on the redesign of Upcoming. According to his own recollection of his design process, he relied more heavily on my shots of the Flickr-Yahoo Account merge than on any other online resource for figuring out how to implement the same for Upcoming. So yay? Go team!

This is the perfect example of why my screenshotting of design patterns can be really useful for clever people. When other smarter people have already solved problems, and start repeating the solutions or interface in consistent ways, it becomes a design cow path. These are most interesting to me because, as the patterns emerge, we start to develop a visual language for web applications that can be used in the place of verbal descriptors like “adding friends” or “upload interfaces“. Rather than speak in the abstract, we can pull from an existing assortment of solutions from the wild that have already been proven in place, that you can interact with, and that you can evaluate on a case by case basis as to whether any given pattern is worth emulating in a new design.

I also screenshot as a way of in-between blogging, I guess. Y’know, like Twitter, Tumblr, Ma.gnolia, Plazes and Last.fm (among others) are all forms of in-between blogging. They’re where I am in the absences between longer posts (such as this one) where I record what I’m up to, what I’m seeing and what’s interesting to me. My Flickr screenshots are probably more often than not more interesting than what I have to say over here, and certainly less verbose. And, most significantly, the screenshot is the new photograph, allowing me to connect through images of what I see with other people who are able to see things the way I see them. Imagine life before the original camera, where everyone’s depiction of one another was captured on canvas in oil paint; before screenshotting became a first class citizen on Flickr, we were living in a similarly blind world, cut off from these representations of our daily experience. But fortunately, as of a few months ago, that’s no longer the case:

And, following off that last observation, I screenshot for posterity. Now that this internet thing has caught on and it’s been around a bit, it’s fun every now and then to reflect and go back to the days of the first bubble and take a look at what the “it” shine was back then (now it’s the “floor” effect — formerly known as the “wet floor” effect — but back then maybe it was the java lake applet?). Which is all fine and well, but once you start poking around, you’ll notice very quickly that the Wayback Machine is way incomplete. And while Google’s cache is useful, it certainly tends care more about the textual content of a page rather than how it originally looked. And that’s where screenshots could make up the difference, just as photographs of real life offer us a way to record the way things were, screenshots provide a mirror in time into the things we see on screen, into the interfaces that we interact with and the digital communications that we consume (check out this old view of the QuickSilver catalog compared with its current look or how about the Backpack preview or when Gmail stored less than 2GB of email?).

I don’t tend to think about the historic value of things when I shoot them; I do tend to evaluate their interestingness or contribution to a certain series along a theme. And yet, I’m curious to see, over time, just what these screenshots will reveal about us, and about the path we took to get to where end up. For one thing, web application development has changed drastically from where it was just a few years ago and now, with the iPhone, we’re embarking into wholly undiscovered territory (where it’s unclear if screenshots will be possible). But these screenshots help us learn about ourselves, and help us see the pieces-parts of our everyday experience. If I screenshot for any reason, perhaps it is to collect these scraps of evidence to help me better understand and put order into the world around me, to tie things together visually, and to explore solutions that work and others that fail. Anyway, it’s something I enjoy and will probably keep doing for the foreseeable future.

Thoughts on Mozilla

http://www.viddler.com/player/9af5f4d6/

You can now directly download the video or the audio.

Spurred by a conversation I had today, I thought I’d post some wide-ranging and very rough thoughts on Mozilla. They’re pretty raw and uncensored, and I go for about 50 minutes, but it might be somewhat thought-provoking. At the least, I’d love to hear your thoughts — in agreement or vehement disagreement. Educate me!

And, here are the basic notes I was working from:

the future of the web: silverlight, apollo, JavaFX — where are you?? where’s mozilla’s platform for the future?
build tools. xul tools are in the crapper. look at webkit and xcode.
dump spreadfirefox; get your focus back. power to the people — not more centralization. where’s the college teams? run it like a presidential but stop asking for donations. events, mash pits… MozCamps… whatever… I know something is happening in Japan with Joi Ito… but that’s about all I know about.
out reach… mitchell is out there… but i feel like, with all due respect, she’s too coy… i think segolene royale — who recently lost the french election set a very good example.
and, the press have no idea what mozilla is up to… where the money’s going… there’s work and a roadmap for FF3… but it’s all about FF3.
joe six pack is not your audience. look at africa, non-profits, international audiences. green audiences. MozillaWifi… work with Meraki networks! Firefox + Wifi in a box. Bring the web to everyone stop being a browser company.
Mozilla the platform… stop thinking of yourself as a browser company. stop competing with flock. start promoting platform uses of mozilla and treat these folks like GOLD! think of joost and songbird. as Microsoft has done, build an ecosystem of Firefox browsers…! And build the platform of support to nurture them. Make it possible for people to build sustainable businesses on top of Mozilla… provide all that infrastructure and support!
CivicForge… like an ethical Cambrian House… the new sourceforge that works for non-developers… where’s the mozilla social network? sure they’re on Facebook, but it feels like a chore.
leadership opportunities… Boxely… microformats… openid…. start prepping web designers for HTML5 if that’s the future.
IE has caught up in the basics. They have tabs. They fixed popups and spyware. Firefox as an idea can sell; as a browser, not so much.
Browsers are dead. They’re not interesting. Back to Joe Six Pack… he doesn’t care about browsers. He’ll use whatever is pre-installed. Need to get Firefox on Dells.. on Ubuntu… on the Mac. Songbird too. OEM for Joe Six Pack.
Browsers are a commodity. People are happy with Safari, Firefox 2 and IE7. What comes next goes beyond the browser — again, Adobe, Microsoft and Sun are all betting on this.
mobile. minimo is used by whom?
Firefox as a flag — as a sports team… rah… rah! where’s the rebel yell? where’s the risk? where’s the backbone? Why can’t Firefox stand for more than web standards and safety? I don’t think Mozilla can afford to be reluctant or to pull any punches. They need to come out swinging every time. And be New York’s Babe Ruth to IE’s Boston Red Sox.
open source is immortal; it’s time that mozilla starting acting open source. at this point what DON’T they have to lose? the world is not the world of 2005. i want to know what the mozilla of 2010 looks like. we’re blake ross? where’s parakey? where’s joe hewitt? where’s dave barron? there’s so much talent at mozilla… are things really happening? thank god kaply is in charge of microformats now. (but, firefox is NOT an information broker!)
lastly… great hope for the future of firefox, despite what sounds like negative commentary.