Mambo spreads love, all open source-like

Mambolove Looks like Mambo’s getting into the community PR business with their newly minted Mambo Love site:

This is the official community-driven site for Mambo marketing, PR and advocacy. We hope that through this site we will be able to gather extensive global community support and awareness for Mambo and it will provide resources for members of the community to spread the word and keep the project growing.

While it’s great to see more community-centricspreading projects crop up, it does seem like the flavor of these efforts don’t always capture the genuine ethos of open source. Consider this snippet pertaining to staging Mambo Days (emphasis mine):

Every proposal submission will be taken into consideration, if your proposal has been accepted, we will provide you with the information you need to start your own Mambo event, put you in touch with the people who will be able to help you plan your event and in some cases Mambo communities will offer financial subsidaries* as well.

While this in some ways is similar to how patches are accepted in open source projects, staging your own Mambo meetup is not something that should require a blessing from Mambo, even if they can offer help. Consider what a bunch of us kids did with Bar Camp. Consider what the Spread Firefox community accomplished with the Firefox 1.0 launch parties.

It’s time that these folks wanting to get into community marketing start truly embracing their communities by realizing that their users as a whole are a bunch smarter and more capable than they presently seem to be willing accept. Armed with the right tools, self-organizing advocacy communities can be far more effective than cheesy billion dollar marketing campaigns. Here’s hoping the Mambo folks, who seem a little confused lately, return to the original spirit of open source in their nascent community marketing efforts and empower the passionate grassroots advocates within their community.

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What of this silly little invite-only idea?

Google TalkI’ve received a couple invites from folks for Google Talk, Google’s new instant messaging service. The funny thing is that it requires a Gmail username and password to make use of the software, which, like other Google software, only runs on Windows. Now you’ll recall, too, that Gmail is an invite-only system. This would make for some rather troublesome exclusivity in the service if it weren’t for the fact that you can talk to your buddies on other IM services.

So here’s what’s interesting about this, and something I wonder about personally given Flock’s current “private beta”: what results are had by using such an invite-based system to grow your userbase and social network? What are the costs and benefits, and to whom? There are myriad reasons for busting out with a fully public beta but just as many for going private, which is, admittedly, different than exclusive (Flock is the former, Gmail the latter).

To limit your system to invited participants, you must certainly have something of both legitimate and substantial value to create demand… that actually incents invitees to sign up and login. But you also must not upset or invite the bitter ire of those who haven’t yet received invites.

And quite obviously, as we learned over the past week, once you’ve extended an invite, especially in the world of software where there is hardly such a thing as scarcity of resources, what you giveth, you nary can take away.

So what of all these invite-only (or formally invite-only) services where you have to know someone on the inside to get a golden ticket? Does it artificially increase desire? Does it help services grow organically and cut down on trolls and spam, creating more value for invitees? Does it create more investment from the user community and perhaps establish even minor connections between invitor and invitee? Or does it create a false hierarchy around an inner circle of well-connected geeks?

Who knows?

What I do know is that it’s a curious trend and happening rather profusely across the web. Good or bad? I can’t quite say — except that in the case of Flock, we’re using the invite system to start out slowly on purpose. We want to not only be able to scale up organically, but we also want to cultivate relationships with our brave early adopters so that we can build the best experience possible over time. And to that end — we want to make sure that when we do launch publicly, we’ve hammered out all the glaring issues — as well as minor ones — so that sum total Flock makes you more productive, more explorative, and more voraciously social on the web. So for now, Flock will remain available to few kindred souls with enough courage to shove through our bugs and dodge the sharp edges. In the meantime, do add yourself to our invite lottery so that your name will be there when the next round of invites go out!

Bar camp buzz builds; the story twists, turns, shouts!

I wanted to pipe up before this topic spiral out any further and I miss my chance to edge in my two cents.

Barcamp LogoI wanted to pipe up before this topic spiral out any further and I miss my chance to edge in my two cents.

In staging Bar camp, we, the original organizers, harbor no ill will towards Foo Camp, Tim O’Reilly or anything or anyone else associated with the project. Indeed, the original concept came to me and my roommate Andy from Tantek Celik, who suggested that there should be an alternative, non-exclusive, “open” alternative to Foo Camp. Sure, an interesting idea, but having little personal knowledge of the event, we shrugged it off to focus on more pressing things.

That was three weeks ago and Andy and I (with the Flock crew) had a browser to launch at OSCON (an O’Reilly event, mind you). Planning a second event was hardly something any of us had the bandwidth to take on, let alone the attention span to consider seriously. There was simply no time.

Yet upon returning from Portland, and with our launch out of the way, our conversations suddenly returned to the idea of the alternative conference. Listening to details of previous Foo Camps from Tantek, I decided that yes, he was on to something here… and the more I researched and discussed Foo Camp, the more we believed that O’Reilly’s ad hoc model would work beyond the limited boundaries of Sebastapol. And would not only work — but needed to be freed!

And so this past Saturday, over IRC, we initiated a face to face meeting of the BarPlanners and got the ball rolling.

When we embarked on this strange and fantastic journey, we knew that we had a week. We had no money, no sponsors, no venue and no idea if just the five of us or 50 random folks would show. But we knew that we had to stage BAR Camp and that, among other things, it would serve as a demonstration of the decentralized organizing potential of the Web2.0 Generation. We set out to prove that what the good folks at O’Reilly could pull off in a year with a couple years’ experience and tens of thousands of dollars, could be cobbled together in a week by a crazy gaggle of savvy geeks, leveraging only the web and the our reach into our social networks.

So here we are, five days later and two days from the event. We’ve had a venue donated to us. We’ve got a fabulous logo (thanks Eris!). We’ve got some sponsors lining up up and a bunch of great advisors. And we’ve got buzz. This is turning out to be the exact kind of unprecedented success we were hoping for — and from here it can only get better as we lead up to the kickoff.

Tomorrow I’m planning on giving Tim O’Reilly a ring to see what we can do to join forces (hopefully beyond coordinating on FooBarCrawl). I’d love to see the ideas he’s baked in Foo Camp spread even beyond Bar Camp. Next year I expect to see multiple satellite Bar Camps happening the world over, loosely joined via the web, bringing distributed collaboration and culture building to a much, much wider audience. Podcasted, Flickered, wikified, videographied and blogged like mad. At the very least.

Whaddya say, Tim, think we can do it?

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BAR, the alternative to FOO

Today a bunch of us met to plan out Barcamp, an open invite alternative to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp. We don’t have much time, money or space at the moment, but we’re scrappy and committed to making this happen.

So check out the wiki and go sign up. While we’re not doing the whole invite thing, we are asking for RSVP’s in advance.

And yes, this should be a seriously good time. Really.

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New Internet Explorer logo… and product name?

IE7 Gets Rebranded Scant on details, the IEBlog announced that they’re updating the Internet Explorer logo for version 7: As part of this update, we’re refreshing our icon and logotype.

What’s most interesting about this “refresh” is the change from”Microsoft Internet Explorer” to the ominously embedded “Windows Internet Explorer”. The marketing folks will probably tell you that they changed it simply to “better reflect the fact that IE is so nicely integrated into the desktop” but I have strong doubts that the world’s largest software manufacturer makes such a change on a whim. What do you think this means?

More than likely there’s some legal reason for this, about which I can speculate little. However, while I’m pointing out curiosities, I noticed that the new typeface is anything but a normal font. I’m sure someone will point me in the right direction, but it’s none of the new Vista faces, so I have no idea what it might be. Seems to be some Helvetica/Calibri combination, but more than likely it’s something entirely different.

What’s so interesting about this — similar to Mozilla’s use of Font Shop’s proprietary Meta – is that it becomes nearly impossible for the community at large to make derivative works that look anything like the official logo. Convenient for the trademark holder, but rather inconvenient for folks wanting to promote the brand, non?

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Why we went to OSCON and ended up with XXL and XXXL shirts

Flickr PhotoIn the interest of eating more dogfood and possibly blogging more often, I’ve fired up a nifty new gadget we’re calling Flock to write this entry. We launched Flock in private beta at OSCON and are now pushing through our second private release. If you want in, hop on over to flock.com and signup for our invite list. We’ll be handing these bad boys out in the weeks to come — so the earlier you get in, the sooner you can get your hands on our hot new property.

So back to the lecture at hand.

Here at Flock Flock World Headquarters, I’ve been getting a lot of grief lately for the fact that we ended up with so many XXL and XXXL shirts after OSCON. I felt compelled to set the record straight or forever live in shame. Here’s a transcript of the actual dialog that lead to this predicament between me and Ken Mickles of GiantRobotPrinting.com:

11:31:39 AM ken: want to do these flock shirts 20 s, 40 m, 30 l, 10 xl?

11:32:36 AM chris: damn, ok i guess i’m wrong about this

11:32:44 AM ken: hmm?

11:32:51 AM chris: i’m getting interesting feedback

11:33:15 AM chris: ok damn

11:33:22 AM chris: lemme rework this for you

11:33:28 AM chris: because i was totally off

11:33:37 AM chris: first, we want 150 shirts

11:33:37 AM ken: ok. about which part?

11:33:43 AM chris: for flock

11:33:49 AM ken: haha, ok

11:33:52 AM chris: and then

11:33:55 AM chris: we want…

11:34:23 AM chris: ok, calculations being made

11:35:06 AM ken: ok

11:35:08 AM chris: do you have xxxl?

11:35:18 AM ken: yeah

11:35:21 AM chris: ok

11:35:27 AM chris: apparently geeks are bigger than i thought

11:35:42 AM ken: haha, they tend to be very small or very large

11:36:02 AM chris: apparently

11:37:25 AM chris: 10S 20M 35L 55XL 20XXL 10XXL (PLUS girlies)

11:37:41 AM ken: ok

11:46:50 AM chris: cool

11:46:53 AM chris: drupal quote?

11:47:33 AM ken: i’ll get you that in a second, just wanted to make sure the sizes are solid on the flock stuff so i can get the order in before 3

11:48:23 AM chris: ah

11:48:24 AM chris: yes

11:48:29 AM ken: ok, cool

11:48:32 AM chris: what i just gave you came from the CEO

11:48:40 AM ken: ok, sounds good

12:15:27 PM chris: OMG

12:15:33 PM ken: hmm?

12:15:38 PM chris: drupal wants 100 shirts…

12:15:42 PM ken: haha

12:15:45 PM chris: is it too late?

12:15:49 PM ken: nah

12:15:51 PM chris: awesome

12:16:01 PM chris: so maybe do a similar ratio to the flock shirts for sizes

12:16:04 PM chris: but no XXXL

12:16:07 PM ken: ok

12:16:47 PM chris: ok, so that should be it then… sorry about all the back and forth!

12:16:56 PM ken: no problem

12:16:56 PM chris: but we’re good on 100 shirts for drupal?

12:17:15 PM ken: yeah, i’ll give you the price in a minute

12:17:24 PM chris: k

12:17:26 PM chris: awesome

So now that my name has been cleared and the truth is out there, does anyone want some Flock schwag?! No really, lemme know and we’ll see what we can do to hook you up.

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Why microformats are the glue between web content and a richer online experience

Why microformats are the glue between web content and a richer online experience In response to my introduction, Andy Hume asked me on the Microformats-discuss list:

What kind of microformat support are you looking to get in to these publishing tools? Obviously wordpress has built in support for XFN. What else are you trying to get happening?

So now it’s time for me to put on my visionary cap and mention a couple ideas I’ve been stewing on about why microformats make good sense for web publishers and web tool builders. I won’t get too pedantic or preach to the choir. Rather, I’m just gunna outline some of the obvious things to me that make creating the lowercase “semantic web” worthwhile, assuming, of course, that certain enabling technologies and innovations occur.

First, let me point out that the cost of implementing microformats is less than minimal and in fact, in some cases, can give you a net gain given the reduction on time spent figuring out what CSS classes to use. As a former-web-developer-junkie, it was my job to come up with unoriginal ways of identity bits of content on webpages so that I or someone else could come back later and figure out what the heck I was doing.

This lead to me to do things like code lists of people with a container that specified that, indeed, I was working with a list of people and not dates, dogs or envelopes. Why would this be useful? Well, what if you wanted to use a different icon to denote a person, date, dog or envelope? You’d need to know what class of object you were working with. (Just bear with me here.) This becomes a pain when you have to do this over and over again and or work on someone else’s code. However, with a sufficient store of standard microformats at our disposal, such situations could theoretically be avoided. Rather than having to reinvent a classing system everytime, I could simply turn to the related microformat standard and call it a day.

So that’s great and all, but why do you bother touching code anymore anyway with such able CMS and blog tools available? Why not just bake it into those publishing tools and be done with it?

The short answer is that that’s happening, and we need to see more of this work get done. The problem seems to be related to chickens, eggs, carts and horses, in no particular order. And until they all get sorted out, there’s a great deal of developer apathy best captured in lines like, “Why should I care?”

Well, better than just spouting out about the practical benefits for web developers, there are functional benefits which I expect to see available in the coming months. As a prelimary example, check this out:

I created a Greasemonkey user script that will find those hCalendar events and provide a link to import them into any calendar program that supports the iCalendar format (most notably Apple’s iCal and Mozilla’s Sunbird). What does this mean? Well any time you see an event on the web that has hCalendar information, you can click a link and it’ll be added to your calendar so you don’t have to copy the information by hand.

unmediated: Greasemonkey and Microformats

So just imagine once this kind of support becomes native in the browser… that’s when really interesting things start to become possible. And soon, I’ll outline just how I see this happening.