I get a fair amount of useful information off of my twitter feed — in fact it is often more informative than the RSS newsfeeds I follow.  But Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and the rest of the live streaming applications share a common problem.  If you want to refer back to something that floated by several days, weeks or months ago you are pretty much out of luck.   The noise factor is not an issue when monitoring the stream live.  I mean sure, there is plenty of noise, but it is easy enough to filter it out as the garbage floats by.  But try to dig through items from the past and the noise quickly overwhelms.  Anyone got an answer?  Or is do we just need to accept that we must leave the past behind — even if it is digital?

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I recently read Jaron Lanier’s new book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.  It was a gift, and while I hadn’t heard anything about the book, it looked promising.  Lanier is an early internet pioneer counting early work with virtual reality (and coining the term itself) among his accomplishments.  And the basic premise of the book — essentially a contrarian view of the current state of internet culture — is interesting.  A regular practice of challenging common assumptions and examining choices made along the way is healthy.  Unfortunately Mr. Lanier’s arguments are poorly supported, and often based on inconsequential or incorrect assumptions.  I’m not going to recap his whole argument here — check out the linked articles instead.  But here are a couple of points inspired by ideas exposed in the book: Read the rest of this entry »

Client asks “can I list multiple authors on an article in our CMS?” After a quick search and a little playing around I could give my standard WordPress answer “it turns out there is a plug-in for that!”  The Co-Authors Plus plug-in nicely met our needs.  We list both the author’s display name and the Biographical Description in the author tag line with the meta information at the head of the post.  And based on the suggestions in the plug-in’s readme.txt file I created the following function to generate the display:

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A recent Baseline article starts with the tag line “Global enterprises must develop a business process framework to ensure the success of collaboration technology implementations.”  Overall the article makes a number of good points — but it also left me feeling a little uneasy.  The whole social networking/collaboration workspace seems so dynamic I wonder if the typical time cycles of an enterprise decision process can keep pace with rapid technology growth and end-user expectations.

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Here is another session from WordCamp NYC.  The topic is WordPress-as-content management system, and the story of the transformation of the Harvard Gazette.  They took the paper’s static html site and transformed it to a WordPress powered site in just 3 months.  It is always interesting to see how adaptable WordPress is to fit various needs, and the Gazette implemention is very well done.  both video and audio versions of the session are presented below.  Watch for the discussion about their administrative interface — they have customized the edit-posts panel in a very nice way that divides the listing according to category.  Making it easier for editors to get right to their content.

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I’ve been thnking quite a bit lately about the merging domains of traditional, static web site design, and social networking.  Jay Collier at the Bates Online Media group has recently blogged on the subject, and how it is influencing the Bates College site content.  He has posted a terrific diagram outlining the Architecture of Online Engagement, which starts with “powerful organizing ideas” and moves through first impressions, shared interests, collaboration and learning, and even getting something done, on the path towards deepening personal and social impact.  Too often I find site design discussions still center around content and informaton dispersal — a more static, one-way push concept.   Engagement, ideas, collaboration and impact — these are the concepts that we need to get front-and-center in site discussions.

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