Laura Scott's blog

WhiteHouse.gov goes Drupal: can open source lead to open government?

2009-10-25T17:22:55-05:00

The news had Twitter abuzz yesterday. The official White House site has migrated from a proprietary software to open source Drupal.

"We now have a technology platform to get more and more voices on the site," White House new media director Macon Phillips told The Associated Press hours before the new site went live on Saturday. "This is state-of-the-art technology and the government is a participant in it....

"We want to improve the tools used by thousands of people who come to WhiteHouse.gov to engage with White House officials, and each other, in meaningful ways," Phillips said.

As a web developer with five years' experience working with Drupal, watching it growing up over the years, this is very exciting news.

Deborah Bryant puts in a note of caution.

Let’s be clear that this constitutes a change in plumbing – important plumbing – and not policy – but is a significant and of course highly visible sign that open source software has gone main stream.

Her skepticism is well taken. After all, what difference does a change in back-end code bring to the end-user experience of citizens? But the Post article does point to hints at policy changes.

It's also a nod to Obama's pledge to make government more open and transparent. Aides joked that it doesn't get more transparent than showing the world a code that their Web site is based on.

Maybe there's something to that. Given Drupal's strengths as software to connect people through the Internet, this is potentially exciting news for how our government works as well.

Open Source Government?

Drupal is not brochureware, it's community software that is extensible, flexible and modular. Jamie writes on Intoxination:

Given the extensibility of Drupal and existing modules that can provide anything from a full social network site to a major campaign site, including email letters, I say we can expect to see a much more user oriented whitehouse.gov.

Can we read that much into the choice of a web platform? Nancy Scola writes on TechPresident:

Let's really try to extract the last drop of possible meaning from a choice over a CMS. Squint a bit, and it's possible to see the White House's move to open-source software as a move towards the idea that collaborative programming can inspire -- or at least, support -- a more distributed politics. That idea bubbled up in 2004, when young programmers experimented with using Drupal itself to turn the Howard Dean campaign into the Howard Dean network. This idea, that a politics crafted by the people could be a powerful thing indeed, emerged in a slightly mutated way during the Obama presidential campaign, but has arguably receded below the surface during the first nine months of the Obama Administration. First the WhiteHouse.gov CMS gets more open, then the White House OS? Perhaps.

For the lay user, the White House website looks much the same as it has since inauguration day (though search should work noticeably better). But by being open source, the White House is opening itself up to all the bright ideas, powerful plug-ins, and innovative tools that the considerable community of Drupal aficionados come up with. It's a community that the White House says it is eager to tap into. "Open source is a great form of civic participation," the White House's Phillips told me this afternoon. "We're looking forward to getting the benefit of their energy and innovation."

Tim O'Reilly recently offered a vision:

Too often, we think of government as a kind of vending machine. We put in our taxes, and get out services: roads, bridges, hospitals, fire brigades, police protection… And when the vending machine doesn’t give us what we want, we protest. Our idea of citizen engagement has somehow been reduced to shaking the vending machine. But what meetup teaches us is that engagement may mean lending our hands, not just our voices.

In this regard, there’s a CNN story from last April that I like to tell: a road into a state park in Kauai was washed out, and the state government said it didn’t have the money to fix it. The park would be closed. Understanding the impact on the local economy, a group of businesses chipped in, organized a group of volunteers, and fixed the road themselves. I called this DIY on a civic scale. Scott Heiferman corrected me: “It’s DIO: Not ‘Do it Yourself’ but ‘Do it Ourselves.’” Imagine if the state government were to reimagine itself not as a vending machine but an organizing engine for civic action. Might DIO help us tackle other problems that bedevil us? Can we imagine a new compact between government and the public, in which government puts in place mechanisms for services that are delivered not by government, but by private citizens? In other words, can government become a platform?

Heady stuff. But impossible? Business is getting involved as well. On NextGov, Jill R. Aitoro wrote this Summer about Open Source for America,

More than 50 companies, academic institutions, communities and individuals formed Open Source for America to promote its use in the federal government. Open source generally refers to software code that is provided to the public to modify and download for free. Its supporters argue the method lowers the cost of software development and can provide better applications because an unlimited number of programmers are free to improve the underlying code.

"This is the right time, with the administration and the economy and the direction that open source is moving" all supporting greater adoption, said John Scott III, director of open-source software and open integration at federal consulting firm Mercury Federal. "If you read between the lines and look at what the White House is doing, they're leading by doing. The sole purpose of this organization is to answer the president's call for technologies that help government be more participatory, more collaborative and more transparent."

The coalition, which counts Red Hat, Google, Sun Microsystems, Novell and Oracle among its members, will form working groups to focus on specific areas, such as health care, cybersecurity and defense.

But let's back up a second from the do-ocracy vision of politics, and look at the pragmatic world where open source software adoption could yield immediate results....

Open Source Elections

One obvious pragmatic use case for open source software in government functions is tallying votes in our democratic elections. This is especially true considering the problems of the last decade with electronic voting machines. For example....

Initiatives behind the adoption of open source software in our elections seem to be gaining momentum. Last week, Kim Zetter writes in Wired:

The Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV) announced the availability of source code for its prototype election system Wednesday night at a panel discussion that included Mitch Kapor, creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; California Secretary of State Debra Bowen; Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan; and Heather Smith, director of Rock the Vote.

The OSDV, co-founded by Gregory Miller and John Sebes, launched its Trust the Vote Project in 2006 and has an eight-year roadmap to produce a comprehensive, publicly owned, open source electronic election system. The system would be available for licensing to manufacturers or election districts, and would include a voter registration component; firmware for casting ballots on voting devices (either touch-screen systems with a paper trail, optical-scan machines or ballot-marking devices); and an election management system for creating ballots, administering elections and counting votes....

Miller said the foundation wasn’t looking to put voting system companies out of business but to assume the heavy burden and costs of research and development to create a trustworthy system that will meet the needs of election officials for reliability and the needs of the voting public for accessibility, transparency, security and integrity.

“We believe we’re catalyzing a re-birth of the industry … by making the blueprint available to anyone who wants to use it,” Miller said.

The post is titled, "Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released," which is perhaps misleading, considering previous efforts that have not received so much attention over the years. The Open Voting Consortium (which apparently has just moved its website to Drupal as well) has been working this field for years now, and is already providing software for regional and party elections.

And a little Googling reveals first-page results for OpenSTV, open-source software for implementing the single transferable vote and other voting methods such as instant runoff voting, Condorcet voting, and approval voting, and PVote, prototype software for electronic voting machines.

But getting away from the who was first question, it seems that the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation and The Open Voting Consortium have very similar missions. As I write this, I don't know how much they work together or collaborate. In the open source world, collaboration on code is pretty much a given, but politics is a different animal. But it's good to see both organizations making strides in this area.

Participating in The Commons

In a blog post today, Tim O'Reilly comments on the adoption of open source — and Drupal in particular — by the federal government:

The net-net is that I suspect that simply using open source software won't slash government IT budgets, at least not right away. What it will do is increase the amount of value we get for our money and the speed with which new technology can be adopted. Features that would have cost millions of dollars and years of development to add will now be rolled into the scope of current contracts.

It's also important to realize that using open source is very different from contributing to open source. Despite the exaggerated claims in the AP story, that "the programming language is written in public view, available for public use and able for people to edit", the White House has not yet released any of the modifications they made to Drupal or its operating environment back to the open source community. The source code for Drupal (and the rest of the LAMP stack) is indeed available, but the modifications that were made to meet government security, scalability, and hosting requirements have not yet been shared. In my conversations with the new media team at the White House, it is clear that they are exploring this option.

Giving modifications back to the Drupal community is the next breakthrough announcement that I'll be looking for.

Indeed.

Update: I came across this video series after posting. Well done, and interesting.

Laura Scott is a BlogHer Contributing Editor (Tech & Web) and a web designer and developer. She blogs at pingVision (where this article was originally posted) and rare pattern. Follow her on Twitter: @lauras.

Previewing Google Wave and Twitter Lists

2009-10-18T17:35:50-05:00

One of the wisdoms in web application development is "Release early and often."

Google and Twitter have both released software "tests" to select hundreds of thousands of users, both with the idea that there will be problems, but let people try them out, and then improve the software iteratively, based upon real-life user experience.

This is my first blush impression of these previews I've been privileged to explore this week.

Get on my Wave!

I've been trying Google Wave for this past week now. It's been a bit hard, since hardly anybody I know is on Google Wave, and of all the people I invited, only two have received invites so far. (I got 8 "invitations" that turned out actually to be "nominations" once sent. Sorry, Google, but invitations and nominations are different things.) So I've had only limited exposure to what Wave might offer. One on one, it's pretty much a glorified instant messenger.

Then I was tipped to searching for "with:public" ... which brings in results every wave that has been posted for the public. There I found all kinds of waves on all kinds of topics.

Popping into random, seemingly interesting waves reminds me of the early CompuServe days, wandering around chatrooms, communicating with random people. Wave does afford the opportunity to get more in these wave connections than you might in a text-only IRC-style chatroom, but it takes time to engage. Do you have an abundance of time? I don't.

The biggest user experience change in what people might be used to is that you can see other people typing their messages in real time, as they type. You learn quickly can type and who bumbles around, who can do stream-of-consciousness and who is constantly editing every few words.

Shira Abel (whom I met on Wave) likes this real-time aspect:

And while some people would hate seeing what someone is writing while they are typing I’ve actually liked it from the few conversations I’ve had on there. It allows you to see the thought process – how fast or slow someone is typing shows how strongly they feel about something. Whether they take something out before pressing enter shows even more. Seeing the typing while it’s happening is the tone of the message. However, I would recommend that Google make the option to not see the typing for the Robert Scoble’s of the world – but please keep it for me. Living in Israel so far away from many of the people I collaborate with, having that little extra bit of psychological insight is actually very helpful in my opinion.

One of the biggest problems with Wave is getting drowned in wave after wave of threads (or "waves"). You have to create folders to organize them or you'll just get lost.

And call them waves all you want, it's pretty hard to surf them. Linking to other waves involves finding the other wave and drag-and-drop.

Google's help docs are their typical weak, uninformative obviousnesses that don't really illuminate much of anything. Embedding waves outside of the wave system is, so far, an arcane procedure I have not yet discovered yet. I'm still wondering how to install a robot. Maybe I'm not enough of a geek for this preview?

Bonnie Sandy seems to have made more headway:

Extending the functionality…

Apparently there are bots and robots to extend the functionality of Waves… that feature has to be simplified before the release to a wider audience.

Robots (To use robots, add them as a contact, then add the robot-contact to a wave)- that did not always work. Robots add functionality Chatbots Conversion Games Groups Integration Language Polling Search / Aggregation Utilities Wave Management figuring out if they are functioning is a bit confusing.

I NEED To Figure out how to use the Drop.io Robot. I aced the Posterous robot, which post a wave to Posterous , but I have no idea if the others are working, in process or done. So I spent a great deal of time just steering at the screen.

Gadgets directions- To use gadgets, once editing a blip, just click on the green puzzle piece, and enter the url into the bottom text box.

This was simpler not all worked but enough to truly give an appreciation of the scope of wave. Html and Iframes allow for widgets and pages to be added. From that point each wave became a stage on which I could present ANYTHING. Wave will be to designers and multimedia communicators what twitter was to those that write!

I don't know about that last part. As a designer, Wave is very hierarchical and serially threaded — not much of a canvas for visual thinking. But maybe someone will bring that in via extension or robot?

Shira concludes:

[A]t the moment Google Wave has little to no use for me. Other than the “Geek Street Cred” I get for having it, I don’t work with anyone else who is on there. It’s not open for the masses. So yes, I’m on Google Wave and I’ve checked it out a few times. But as my time is scarce, I don’t see myself using it regularly at all. In fact – the first person who invited me on Google Wave hasn’t used it. And that says it all.

If you don't quite get what Google Wave is, here's the developer's preview. It's over an hour long, but if you are sincerely curious, this is something to see.

List me!

Twitter rolled out a new feature to a subset of users: Lists. Here you can define lists and then add people you are following to the lists you create.

If you have the feature enabled on your account, you also see how many lists other people have put you on.

What becomes immediately obvious is that this will become a major recommendation engine — a reputation system. What better way to find interesting people than through the recommendations (or at least categorization) by others?

I've discovered many new people to follow just by surfing around the lists. It's neat to know at least something about what people tweet about — art, music, politics, tech, etc.

We'll see how the list usage starts to happen once everyone gets the feature. I'm sure it will start to become spammy — what easier way to spam people than to add them to a list they cannot block? But this could become a new way for people to find connections.

I'm sure Twitter Lists are going to be great fodder for the "Top X" fetishists who just love the "who's is bigger" competitions.

Rebecca Leaman offers Twitter Lists 101 that covers the basics.

Jade Craven has 8 things you should consider before creating your Twitter lists:

1. People may be offended by not being included on a list.

Some of my friends created lists like ‘awesome friends’ and ‘top bloggers.’ They used these terms as generalist lists but some people took offense at not being included on a list.

This is very similar to the follow/unfollow situations that happened before people started to embrace groups on other clients.

So, what can you do to avoid offending?

• Have a disclaimer on your twitter landing page

• Make your list private

• Organize lists by geographic region – ie, Melbourne bloggers.

Neicole Crepeau sees this as a good move for Twitter, business-wise:

Twitter’s growth rate has recently slowed down. According to Hitwise, its phenomenal growth rate slowed to .17%. In part, this appears to be due to an inability to retain new users (60% leaving in the first month of use, by some reports).

Lists represent an opportunity for Twitter to reignite its growth. Lists can help Twitter grow by providing three important improvements:

* A better UI that makes the stream easier for users to digest.
* A positive first experience for new users, where they immediately see the value of Twitter
* A way to spread the word to more non-users and broadly entice them, through List links on blogs, business sites, and through sharing.

She goes on to elaborate on each point.

In the second of a multipart series of posts on Twitter Lists, Adele McAlear looks at the impact of this feature roll-out on the greater Twitter development community:

In the September 30th blog announcement. Nick Kallen, the project lead on Lists stated on the Twitter blog that there will be a Lists API. “This will allow developers to add support for Lists into your favorite Twitter apps.”

It seems that developers were an afterthought on this Twitter Feature. Normally, developers are notified of major feature roll outs such as this well in advance and are afforded the opportunity to work with the API in before the launch. However, the development community weren’t even informed that Twitter Lists was on the development roadmap until September 30th, likely well after Twitter would have started working on it.

When the feature was released yesterday, the vast majority of developers (but interestingly, not all) didn’t even have access to the Lists API documentation until last night. When users like Robert Scoble started building lists and tweeting about them, the dev community cried foul and a draft of the API documentation was quickly made available, sending developers scrambling to integrate Lists into their offerings throughout the wee hours of last night.

Have you been trying out Google Wave or Twitter Lists? What's been your experience?

Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott is a web designer/developer who blogs at rare pattern and pingVision. Follow her on Twitter at @lauras or ping her on Google Wave.

Productivity and design Mac apps I use every week (or thereabouts) ... and apps I don't

2009-09-27T23:04:54-05:00

It's pretty safe to say I spend 12 hours or so a day on my Mac — or a Mac. So I thought I'd document, if not the what of the check I'm doing, then the how. Here they are. I tried to break them down by category, because nobody can really use a laundry list of 20 or 50 or 100 things presented in a blog post, just laid out there as if it were helpful.

Excuse me for a side rant:

Less is more. Please accept this! I'm not channeling Samuel Beckett here, to say the least. Less! Seems like everyone makes Top X lists these days. 35 this. 50 that. 100 the other thing. Maybe they're link-bait posts. It must be effective, because they're everywhere. But why is it that nobody seems willing or able to parse through the datamass and recommend a useful number? For example, how is the "Top 100 Tutorials" post supposed to be more useful than the "Top 5 Tutorials"?

Anyway, here are apps I find useful. Mayb you will, too.

Communications, Connectivity, Community

Dropbox — Technically not so much a Mac app as a software-as-a-service app, Dropbox is my new favorite way to share and back up certain files on my Mac. This is what MobileMe was supposed to be. Dropbox is cross-platform, too.

Mail.app — I've tried many email apps of the years, and I keep coming back to Mail.app. The others range from teh suck to leaky resource hogs to head-scratch-inducing huh? Hawkwings has nice info that makes Mail.app really not absolutely terrible.

Tweetdeck — I was using Tweetdeck for my desktop Twittering, but when I realized it was consistently missing tweets by my favorite group-focused friends, I went looking for something else. So I tried Seesmic, but it has the same problem. Tweetie doesn't seem to have decent workflows for someone following a lot of people. So Tweetdeck it is ... until I find something better, which I hope is soon.

Skype — I rarely use Skype for calls, but we use it at work for IM. It's handy because it takes no centralized setup, effectively drills through most firewalls when traveling, and encrypts the messages, making it reasonably safe for things like passwords. I just wish it didn't draw so much in resources.

Colloquy — I've had some strange buggy experiences in the past with Colloquy, but for now it's working adequately for me. #drupal et al. are my daily background channels.

Snackr — This has become my favorite RSS reader, especially since NetNewsWire jumped the shark.

Browsing

Safari — Lately Firefox has gotten to be just too slow and cumbersome for me, so I've relegated it to second browser status and shifted to Safari for my primary browsing. This would not have been the case if it weren't for Glims, which does some nice usability-improving enhancement to the Safari UI.

Firefox — There still is no better browser for web development itself. While Safari's Developer Tools are handy, the plugins available to Firefox (including Firebug, Web Dev Tools, and a few others) make it the go-to browser when analyzing and developing a website ... or any browser-based system.

Fluid — This is a nifty app that makes dedicated web browsers for specific sites you designate. I use it for Google Calendar, the mediocre CRM service we use, the mediocre ticket- and time-tracking system we use, and our own Client Support Center. Based on Safari, it keeps a light footprint on the computer resources and makes webapps somewhat easier to stomach.

Graphics Etc.

OmniGraffle — This has become almost too good to use for wireframing. Too often I find myself doing detail work rather than focusing on the information architecture and overall page layout. So lately I've started using....

Balsamiq Mockup — This is a cross-platform (via Adobe Air) desktop app for creating low-fidelity wireframes. Once you get used to the UI, which takes only an hour or so to get to where you don't have to think and ponder on how to do your next step, it actually becomes a very useful tool for fast wireframing without getting sidetracked by visual design temptations. A couple of nifty features I like are the ability to easily link a button or link to another Mockup wireframe (making clickable wireframes) and the ability to place "sketchified" images. Balsamiq also has versions for plugging into centralized systems, for collaboration.

Adobe Illustrator — Let's face it, for all of Adobe's problems, Illustrator is still a pretty nifty app. The gold standard of illustrator tools ... as long as you have the budget, and the illustrations don't have to move.

Adobe Photoshop — Another gold standard, though the specialized apps like Lightroom can compete nicely in more narrow use cases (like photo manipulation).

Preview — Again, the lightweight footprint makes this my favorite for viewing images and PDFs.

Documents

Adobe InDesign — In the end, this app does what you need it to do. Years back I preferred Quark. Since then, I've stuck with InDesign updates while Quark fell off of my usage patterns, so I have not tried the most recent Quark releases. My usage here is qualified by that context.

TextEdit — If I'm just reading a doc for content, I will open it in the lightweight TextEdit. It reads Word docs just fine (if you don't care about 100% accurate pagination, etc.).

Microsoft Word — It's amazing how such a crap word processor dominates the market today. Still behind where WordPerfect was 20 years ago, Word is the app of choice for most people dealing in documents. We end up using it because Open Office is even worse — and not quite compatible.

Microsoft Excel — Does for spreadsheets what Word does for wordprocessing. We use it for the same reasons, too.

Adobe Acrobat Pro — The UI is pretty awful. But when I need to combine PDFs, this is the only tool I know that gets the job done.

Presentations

Keynote — There is only one. A while back, I used OmniGraffle to create slide shows. No longer. Keynote has its usability problems, but in general it's pretty powerful and easy to use.

Snapz Pro X — This is an excellent screencapture tool for presentations and screencasts. I use it all the time.

Screenflow — This is another popular screencasting tool, but I've found it to be rather counterintuitive. Maybe it's because I expect it to be more like a standard video system. Speaking of which....

Video Etc.

Final Cut — Being accustomed to more professional non-linear editors, FCP has taken some getting used to. While there are programmable hot keys, it feels too much like a mouse-driven interface to make it my first choice over Avid (or the dead-and-buried-by-Autodesk Edit) to make it anywhere near ideal. That said, the quality and flexibility required in today's media production and delivery needs has generally made the trade-off pretty much necessary. I need high-definition output.

Keeping it all straight

OmniFocus — Even though I am anything but a "Getting Things Done" acolyte — I'm more of a Franklin-Covey practitioner — this app, designed primarily for GTD approaches, is how I manage my to-do lists. The iPhone app is very handy, too.

Yojimbo — I love this tool. It's my kind of everything box, for notes, receipts, all kinds of things. Very handy, and syncs across the crappy (as previously mentioned) MobileMe. The freetagging is neat, but what makes it truly powerful is the search. It's instantaneous, and a great way to drill down to the thing you're looking for.

Apps I don't use (but have for some reason)

Pages — Every time I've tried using this app, I expect it to empower me to do more than it actually does. In the end, I think Pages has the limitations of InDesign combined with the limitations of Word, without holding a candle to either at what they do.

Numbers — This app just gets a shrug from me. I ask: Why? I have it because it came with iWork, which I get for Keynote alone.

Apps I wish I had, but haven't found

The perfect music finder, buyer, player, recommender — I hate that I have found no good way to discover new music. Pandora is okay, but it won't let me listen to what I want to listen to when I want to listen to it. I guess that's the licensing deal they have with the music studios. Radio sucks. Even Sirius XM is sucking more and more, now that they're hiring DJs to talk talk talk instead of play music. (Do I really need to hear some dimwit tell me that George Harrison's songs are "interesting"? If Sirius XM continues to make itself more like ClearChannel, I'm going to skip the subscription renewal coming up.) I'm stuck finding new music only through happenstance, hearing something and, if I'm fast enough, capturing it with Shazam on my iPhone. I want something on my desktop ... and not a website I have to go to, just a lightweight app that runs on my desktop.

Orli Yakuel posts on Music sites and apps that can be helpful, noting:

So readers’ main concern was the companies’ business model. You are right. A few of the services might make an exit, and most of them are probably not going to have one, and some are just for fun. I think music services can make money by being innovative enough to get it. Anyway, I don’t want to get into the business model stuff too much, but I will tell you this: The Internet is too competitive, you may be succeed by just being simple, but you may also need to be sophisticated. The era where creating an application first, then two years later thinking how to make money from it, is bygone now, and companies will need to think how to make money sooner than later if they aim for it – This is where innovation comes in and usually wins.

Apps I haven't tried yet, but sound cool

Jing — Free screen capture. Three women blogged about this in the past few months.

Kathleen Mcready:

Jing is a piece of free software for screencasting and screen capture. It can be downloaded for both Mac and PC from http://www.jingproject.com/.

Jing allows you to take a picture of anything on your screen. You can then annotate your still image and add objects like arrows.

Cathy Oxley:

Once you have downloaded Jing, a 3-armed ’sun’ – which you use to activate the program – will appear at the top of your screen. If you”d prefer, you can drag it to the side of your screen, and you can also set it in Preferences so that it doesn’t automatically load when you open your computer.

Karla Pierce:

Say you teach online, and you want to show your students how to navigate Blackboard for their first time, for example:

1. Download Jing
2. Register for (gives you free access to server space)
3. Open it up
4. Record yourself navigating Blackboard (for example)
5. Upload your creation to the Jing server with one click
6. A web address (url) is instantly created and sent to you
7. Send the url to your students and/or embed it in your course

Sounds like something to check out.

BlogHer Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott blogs at rare pattern and pingVision. Follow her on Twitter at @lauras.

Open Wide

2009-09-13T16:31:26-05:00

This past week, Microsoft threw some of its weight into the Open Source software economy. Mary-Jo Foley reports on ZDNet:

A new, non-profit open-source foundation — one dedicated to increasing the participation of commercial-source vendors in the open-source world — is being unveiled on September 10. Microsoft is providing the initial funding and is a founding member of the new group, known as the CodePlex Foundation....

...While the CodePlex Foundation shares a similar name with Microsoft’s source-code repository-hosting site, CodePlex.org, the two are not merging. According to a FAQ on the Foundation’s site:

Microsoft’s “CodePlex.com launched in June of 2006 out of a need for a project hosting site that operated in a way that other forges didn’t – with features and structures that appealed to commercial software developers. The next chapter in solving for this challenge is the CodePlex Foundation (Codeplex.org). The Foundation is solving similar challenges; ultimately aiming to bring open source and commercial software developers together in a place where they can collaborate. This is absolutely independent from the project hosting site, but it is essentially trying to support the same mission.”

If you're skeptical, you are not alone.

(MIT's Technology Review magazine has an interesting article on open source Linux vs Microsoft. I'd share a snippet, but it's, um, not open.)

This news comes the same week it was learned that Apple open sourced Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch. Other companies like Google have also supported Open Source technologies to varying degrees.

Open Source is something of a new thing in most realms. But in principle, the concepts behind it have been around for centuries — in scientific research (before the modern proliferation of patents galore), for example, and in the practice of law (where laws and legal cases are there to be reviewed by anybody). But in many areas today, open source approaches take us out of our comfort zone.

But that's not preventing open source endeavors in all kinds of areas. Ivanka Majic writes on Balkan Witch

This week's edition of the IET magazine is The Open Source Issue. The arrival of my weekly magazine seemed to coincide beautifully with @leisa tweeting the question: "Why does open source matter"

In the magazine we have: open source biotechnology, open source cars, open source phones and the story of how AQA (a UK examination board) went open source.

"Open source biotech?", I hear you ask yourselves. Well, yes, I did wonder.

A designer on the (open source) Ubuntu Linux project, Ivanka Majic writes:

In my opinion, one of the most important aspects of open source principals is that open source represents the unencumbered flow of ideas. Imagine where the world might be if the first person to work out how to light a fire had done it in secret.

A close second is the idea that lots of brains working on the same problem is a good thing. Very few individuals are great enough to to be brilliant in isolation....

...Open source may not be the answer to all the world’s woes but it provides a framework for a freedom to collaborate on solving problems that affect all of us.

Open source efforts can be extremely challenging, not only because they often disrupt existing power centers — market leaders in business, power-wielders in government, and so on — but also because they are still led by people, and these people are usually in very loosely structured organizations ... if there's any organization at all.

In writing about the particular challenge of designing for Open Source projects (and Drupal, specifically), Leisa Reichelt writes in Johnny Holland magazine

Ah, communities. There are so many things mixed up in being a community that make communication challenging. There’s the fine line they walk between passion and hostility. There’s the ‘pecking order’ - earning your stripes, needing to be seen to know your stuff and be an expert. There’s group think, mob mentality, team spirit. There’s the imbalance that comes from the difference between the people who choose to post and those who choose to watch. There’s history - pages and pages and pages of history. Threads and issues opened and closed and reopened and reclosed.

It is complex stuff, it is easy to inflame, and incredibly difficult to predict.

Human dynamics. Now I want to say "Open source is people" but that makes me giggle.

And yet we push on.

And what about open sourcing government? The Open Voting Consortium is waging a vastly underfunded and largely unknown effort to open source voting machines and open up the voting process to public scrutiny. Their goals are for a voting system that:

Stops Secrecy in Vote Tabulation: OVC has a team of scientists ready to program computer software for voting machines and electoral tabulation that would be publicly owned or open source. Open source software could be checked by any party or group by hiring a capable computer programmer.

Provides Paper Trail: The OVC recommended procedure for tabulating elections relies on a paper ballot that is then fed through a scanner into a locked ballot box so that all originals are saved in case of the need for a recount or audit (See Sample Ballot).

Scientifically Verifiable: In addition to open source voting machine and tabulation software, the Open Voting Consortium is also working on a database checklist for standard practices in vote tabulation that would assure transparency and accountability. Some aspects of the OVC concept will soon be enfolded into California legislation.

Saves Money: Typical voting machines cost between $2,000 and $3,000, but OVC open source software could be run on any personal computer (PC) and ballots could be printed on a normal printer. OVC envisions PCs with tamper-proof cases as the new voting terminals at a savings of hundreds or thousands of dollars per terminal.(See page on OVC Cost Analysis).

Multi-lingual, Handicap Accessible, and Ready for Non-Traditional Voting: Unlike most voting machines and systems, the OVC system can be easily adapted for ballots in multiple languages. The OVC system also provides for the capability for sight impaired or blind voters to have their votes played back to them through headphones at the ballot box. Old voting machines and systems can't accommodate non-traditional elections like proportional representation, but these changes could be easily accommodated with the OVC system.

The Obama Administration is also making some strides in opening up the government — records, making more rulings, actions, budgets and the like open for public examination — and embracing open source software as a resource in that endeavor.

Last week there was the Gov 2.0 conference. On Thursday, Nancy Scola reports:

Carl Malamud, that clarion of the open public records movement, won a standing ovation for a spirited address to the Gov 2.0 Summit earlier today. What brought the crowd to its feet was Malamud's call to "open source America's operating system" -- in other words, pulling back the curtain on the legal code by which our country runs. You have to imagine that at least part of the reason Malamud got such a strong reception is that, amid the strong but often sometimes ungrounded principles that mark the "Gov 2.0" field, Malamud has refined a detailed, tangible vision of what nirvana looks like to him. He has goals, and he has worked out ways to achieve them. In that spirit, Malamud wrapped his speech this morning with a set of core ideas that blend an activist's passion for participatory politics with a programmer's eye for how to work out the bugs that plague our legal system. Cribbed from his talk, here are Malamud's three central themes.

One, If there's a document that the government produces, inspires, or commissions that has the force of law, then the public has to be able to see it. If that seems obvious, it's not a given. There are fees for access to some court records, and in some jurisdictions statute is treated as proprietary. The bad part there, says Malamud, is that if courts don't open themselves, others will. And that has the effect of fuzzying the authenticity that the courts should see as their duty to keep clear. (One such project by "outsiders" to open the courts: Recap, a Firefox plug-in that adds a layer of transparency and access to the federal judiciary's PACER system.)

Two, if a meeting shapes law, then it must be public. And in 2009, "public" must mean online. After reaching a high-water mark a short while back, Congress has reverted to only half-heartedly posting hearings online -- often fuzzy and choppy webcasts that aren't even archived once they've finished. Again, not giving the public its rightful access has the undesirable effect of delegitimizing the institution.

And three, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in his role as chief administrative office of the judicial branch and the President in his role as the head of the executive branch should lead a top-down reform push throughout the U.S. that creates the expectation that America's legal code and court system should be, at all times, knowable to the people who live within its bounds.

BlogHer Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott blogs at rare pattern and pingVision. She is a web designer and developer working in open source, and is a member of the Drupal Association General Assembly.

Could I have my stuff back, please?

2009-08-23T11:56:58-05:00

In the beginning, the world was offline. The past was just what we could remember. Conversations faded. Introductions to others slipped into the realm of unnamed faces and disconnected anecdotes. Jokes were heard and forgotten. Photos bleached out and negative film turned to dust. News clippings crumbled. Documents misplaced were unfindable. Address books lost were irreplaceable. What happened in Las Vegas really did stay in Las Vegas.

Then there was the Internet and all that began to change. The World-Wide Web came to be, and we all became potential publishers. With few exceptions in the larger-business realm, the first websites were no more than billboards. Then they were brochures. Then in the late '90s blogging began. In the '00s, walled-off chatrooms siloed off within services like AOL and Compuserve were replaced by more open communities ... and then social networks. (Walled-off social networks like Facebook opened up into full-blown social networks.) Before we knew it, we were emailing, chatting, shopping, researching, bookmarking, socializing, podcasting, showing videos, sharing, advising, asking, boasting, laughing, crying, raging, raving online.

And as far as we knew, what happened online stayed online ... where we could find it. (And if not, there was always the Wayback Machine.)

In recent weeks, that widespread confidence — complacency? — has been shaken. Maybe it started when it was announced that Facebook was buying Friendfeed.

Robert Scoble himself made noises about quitting Friendfeed. But what to do with all the content he had shared, all the connections he had made there?

I responded thusly:

If you don't control it, is it really yours?

When we talk about where the "web" is going, we're asking the wrong question. It's not just about the web, it's about our connections with the people and information in our lives. The rapidly evolving web is but one part of that. We also have to consider things like the ongoing exponential increase in computer power, evolving applications and new apps that leverage that power and the power of the web in new ways, changing social mores, increasing expectations about access, privacy and control of information — not to mention the shifting economic tides and business agendas pursuing what investors are finding the most appealing financially.

The last part is where we find ourselves being led through affordance into new behaviors. Our connections are what marketers are after, because presumably our attention in that context is more valuable to advertisers. And of course there's always the data mining.

We do it gladly because we enjoy the benefits. And because we love experiencing new things that don't seem to be immediately threatening. The payoffs can be enriching, transformative. Thus: Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Gmail, LinkedIn, Google docs, and so on.

So the Facebook/Friendfeed deal got people's attention. Did they really want to leave their conversations, their connections, in the hands of the fickle, unpredictable hands of Facebook?

Then tr.im, the url shortening service, announced that they were shutting down. What would happen to all those link references people had created in tr.im to tweet, plurk, etc.?

Then Twitter was under a DDOS attack and that service was unavailable. The complete inaccessibility period was just a few hours, but the attack continued on and on, disrupting the service sporadically for days on. Many of us saw the strangeness of seeing SMS-generated tweets post days later. Confusing.

For Shelley Powers, designer, developer and photographer, this was all just part of a bigger picture:

I have never liked centralized systems, though I understand their appeal and worth. It always seems, though, that just when you start to depend on the centralized service something happens to it.

Yahoo is now out of the search engine business, and with its new business partnership with Microsoft, its side applications like delicious are now vulnerable. I've managed to replace delicious with Scuttle, though I no longer have the social aspect of delicious. However, my Scuttle implementation does an excellent job with bookmarks, which is what I needed.

Then NewsGator sent an email around this last week telling all of us that our NewsGator feed aggregator is being replaced by Google Reader. I don't like Google Reader. More importantly, I really don't want to give Google yet more information about me. So, I replaced my NewsGator/NetNewsWire installation with a Gregarius implementation. It took me some time to get used to the new user interface, and I've had to password protect the installation, but I'm not dependent on a centralized feed aggregator, which can, and did, go away.

Twitter, though. I was not a big Twitter fan at first, but I can see the benefits of the application, especially if you want to point out an article or something else to folks, and have it quickly, virally spread, in a nice swine flu-like manner. It's fun to have a giggle with folks, too. But the darn thing is centralized, and not only centralized, vulnerable and centralized, which gives one pause.

Shelley has blogged about this kind of thing before. Back in 2007, she likened web services to hotels, where she would always find the emergency exit.

My check for the exit bleeds over into my use of web services. No matter how clever a service, I never use it if it doesn't have an exit strategy....

...I won't use a hosted web service like Typepad or weblogs.com. It's too easy for them to decide that you're 'violating' terms of service, and next thing you know, all your weblog entries are gone. I saw this with wordpress.com in the recent events that caused so much discussion: in fact, I would strongly recommend against using wordpress.com because of this–the service is too easily influenced by public opinion.

I don't use either my Yahoo or Gmail mail accounts. Regardless of whether I can get a copy of my email locally, if I decide to not use either account I have no way of 'redirecting' email addresses from either of these to the email address I want to use. (Or if there is a way, I'm not aware of it.) Getting a copy of my data is not an exit strategy–it's an export strategy. An exit strategy is one where you can blow off the service and not suffer long-term consequences. A 'bad' email address is definitely a long-term consequence.

Instead, I have a domain, burningbird.net, which I use for everything. I will always maintain this domain. My email address listed in the sidebar, will always be good.

That was 2007 and here we are again.

I hope you don't remember what I said

Maybe there's more to social networking services than questions of reliability, control, security, privacy.... Hilary Talbot wonders if the web should be, maybe, more forgettable:

In commentary about the the real time web there seems to be a natural underlying feeling that the closer the real time web gets to replicating real life communication the better....

...What we broadcast online is also subject to our normal subconscious forgetting: we forget a lot of what we put online over time, and we can assume our readers forget what we have done too, if its not particularly important. We can also be activate [sic] in forgetting, in the sense that the web is fluid and we can revise, update and delete, as long as we have control over our own data....

...In real time flow services we can delete or hide individual updates (but only to a certain extent), whole accounts, or choose to make our accounts private. However, we don’t yet have the open unwalled services that would give us the same control over remembering and forgetting conversations that we can have with static web pages and blogs.

Her point is that there are things we want to fade away into history, just like they do in our non-virtual lives — that making something forgotten, per se, can be just as important as making it enduring. But we don't have the option. It's difficult to export or exit most services, if it's possible at all.

And if you can't do these things because in the end they're controlled by company that may or may not see things your way, are the connections and content you've built on web services really, truly yours?

Decentralization challenges

Ultimately what needs to happen is that our networks have to become decentralized — interconnected not with dependencies but with redundancies. In other words, our social networks need to become more like the Internet: if there's a blockage or failure, go around it.

One answer is RDFa — or Resource Description Framework — which is a framework to structure metadata of website content to make it machine readable. Why would we need that? Because then the relationships behind the page content, relationships whose definitions are buried down in firewalled databases, can be read and interpreted by outside services.

However, the future of RDFa is in doubt now, due to what by all accounts sounds like organizational dysfunction within the HTML5 working group. Jeni Tennison has an excellent rundown, where she concludes:

Really I’m just trying to draw attention to the fact that the HTML5 community has very reasonable concerns about things much more fundamental than using prefix bindings. After redrafting this concluding section many times, the things that I want to say are:

so wouldn’t things be better if we put as much effort into understanding each other as persuading each other (hah, what an idealist!)

so we will make more progress in discussions if we focus on the underlying arguments

so we need to talk in a balanced way about the advantages and disadvantages of RDF

or, in a more realistic frame of mind:

so it’s just not going to happen for HTML5

so why not just stop arguing and use the spare time and energy doing?

so why not demonstrate RDF’s power in real-world applications?

To which, Shelley sings the refrain,

I understand where Jeni is coming from, when she writes about finding a common ground. Finding common ground, though, pre-supposes that all participants come to the party on equal footing. That both sides will need to listen, to compromise, to give a little, to get a little. This doesn't exist with the HTML5 effort.

Where the RDFa in XHTML specification was a group effort, Microdata is the product of one person's imagination. One single person. However, that one single person has complete authorship control over the HTML 5 document, and so what he wants is what gets added: not what reflects common usage, not what reflects the W3C guidelines, and certainly not what exists in the world, today.

While this uneven footing exists, I can't see how we can find common ground. So then we look at Jeni's next set of suggestions, which basically boil down to: because of the HTML WG charter, nothing is going to happen with HTML5, so perhaps we should stop beating our heads against the wall, and focus, instead, on just using RDFa, and to hell with HTML5 and microdata.

Bang! Bang!

The irony: The decentralization decision is centralized in one person.

Open is open. Closed is unavailable. Hotel California is unacceptable.

This is one reason why I work in open source. Open source can be an answer to a lot of this.

Including counting votes, which in the past decade-plus has been increasingly dominated by a handful of companies who refuse to divulge how their machines tally votes.

But it's not just open source that can answer. Open standards can also help. If I can export all of my content and relationships from your service, then your service has more value to me. I'm interested in intersections, not cul-de-sacs.

I won't deposit money in a bank that won't give it back. I won't move into a rental that will keep my furniture when I move out. I won't stay in a hotel that keeps my luggage.

Same with the services I rent online. They have to be open somehow. Because, I believe, if we can't control our own information, our own connections, our own content, then it ends up not really being ours after all.

'Relax,' said the night man,
'We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave!'

Hotel California by Eagles

And that wasn't supposed to be part of the deal.

BlogHer Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott blogs at rare pattern and pingVision. She also tweets, flickrs, bookmarks, youtubes, friendfeeds, facebooks and links in, and has faith enough in those services to continue to do so, at for a while.

The where-are-all-the-women question, this time in Open Source

2009-08-08T14:19:33-05:00

Today the United States Supreme Court adds a woman Justice. In all the history of the country, Sonia Sotomayor is only the third woman to sit on the bench. This is a big deal. Very high barrier to entry. Heavy politics involved. Media frenzy.

The Open Source software world is the opposite environment. Low barrier to entry. Petty small-time people politics at worst. Virtually no media attention, even if we want it. But sometimes, sometimes, it seems just as difficult to get women involved in Open Source software development as to get a woman named to the Supreme Court. —More so, if you consider that women comprise 22% of the Supreme Court, but only 1.5% or so of Open Source software projects.

"Where are all the women bloggers?" was the question that led to the launch of BlogHer by Lisa, Elisa and Jory. There's no question now where all the women bloggers are. But the question persists in open source tech (and tech in general). Where are all the women in tech? Where are all the women in tech conferences? Where are all the women in open source tech (conferences and otherwise)?

These questions have not gone away. Is it cultural? Is it economics? Is it sexism? Maybe a bit of each, and some other things?

"Find the women — er, woman"

This subject has become "timely" (as in "worth" talking about) because of Kirrily Robert's keynote at OSCON.

She stirred it up.

Shelley Powers writes:

One very interesting graphic in the presentation shows that 80% of women in open source noticed sexism or gender discrimination, compared to only 20% of men who noticed. This pretty much backs up what I've found every time I've pointed out diversity problems: all of the guys tell me how wrong I am.

BlogHer CE Liz Henry writes of the discussions she encountered at OSCON:

For me, one of the more depressing things that happens in this field is when women with about 100 times the status and skill level I have end up giving the (private) advice that while they agree with all this and still feel it, they think it is bad for one's career to mention sexism or feminism ever. In this case, hurrah, that just didn't happen (at least that I'm aware of.) However, I think it's still the case that the vast majority of women I know in my field do feel the effects of misogyny and sexism and are often enraged by it in ways difficult to express. I would like to go further out on a limb here and say that the intersections of geek fandom culture and open source/tech people combined with the ongoing discussions of race, class, gender etc, like Racefail '09 for example, have upped the level of awareness and of discourse and have really changed some people's perspectives.

For other reactions, put on your mudders before wading into the comments of another ilk here.

Reacting to the backlash to her OSCON keynote, Kirrily felt she had to do some "debunking," such as:

Here are some examples of widely-used open source software:

Ubuntu – desktop linux distribution

GIMP – graphic design application

Wordpress – blogging platform

Adium – IM client

Firefox – web browser

Joomla – content management system

Moodle – online education platform

Each of these projects is in an area that either has a majority of women participating (blogging, IM, graphic design), or an equal or nearly equal number as men (desktop computing, education, web browsing), at least in western countries. And yet they do not have proportional representation of women in their development teams.

It is not (solely) the female-friendliness of the underlying application that leads to women joining an open source project. If it were, the above projects would have a high level of female participation.

For DrupalCon Paris 2009, happening first week of September, Liza Kindred proposed a panel provocatively titled, "Is Drupal Full of Sexist Pigs?" Some of the comments on that session proposal are what you might expect:

tierecke writes:

I don't like the idea this session. I wish there was a way to vote a session down.

I wish there were more women interested in Drupal or CMS or programming or computers. I would definitely be happy if more women would come to DrupalCon.
But there are much more men interested in it than women.

Can I attend the session or is it open to women only?
If someone would suggest a session named "Is Drupal Full of Sexist Sows?" - how long would it take for my account to be blocked?
Are you going to gossip and bitch about men during this session?

and down the thread he writes:

I don't find how gender plays any role in a conference. I don't look to "abuse my power" as being from the large majority. I don't share any special sympathy to my colleagues from the male gender.

No, it was not a parody asking if they're going to bitch about men, because I don't see any content possible for such a session, at least not any valuable.

But it was not just men objecting to the session -- or at least its title. Kathleen Murtagh writes:

I strongly dislike the language used in the title of this presentation....

...People of both genders are guilty of gender insensitivity and discrimination. The title of this session being an example.

Drupal already has one of the highest ratio of participating woman than other technical projects. I'd prefer to explore what are we doing right? And how can we harness that better?

That's similar to my own view, at least about the Drupal community, for despite little flareups that have happened over the years — such as the kerfuffle over changing Drupal's help text and labels into gender-neutral language — I've found the Drupal community to be generally welcoming, at least once I got past asking the "dumb" (read: novice) questions and was able to start answering them instead. (Yeah, there are jerks, but they tend to be jerks to everyone and they don't define the atmosphere of Drupal.)

Yet it would be nice to have more women participating.

(Liza subsequently withdrew the proposal, citing the lack of a schedule announcement 3 weeks before the event.)

"Grow a skin!"

How much of the low visibility of women in technology, and open source technology in particular, is due to sexism, sexist attitudes or differences in gender culture?

Just this past Thursday, multiple O'Reilly author Shelley Powers writes about a "Disappointing Turn of Events with the W3C":

Do I indulge in snarky behavior at times, and get angry? Sure, but I'm not the only one. In fact, if we include IRC channels as part of the group's communication, my behavior is positively angelic compared to some other folks. But when I'm taken to task in an official W3C channel not by one guy, not by five guys, but by several, including those who responded directly in emails, then it goes beyond just telling a person to back down—it becomes abusive.

I find it ironic—not— that this happened directly after I posted a note in the HTML WG about the lack of diversity among those making decisions about HTML WG.

Even then, I could probably handle being taken to the wood shed by the men folk, if I weren't also finding myself frozen out of discussions. Not just myself, either, but other women (though I don't want to mention their names without permission, as I'm concerned about repercussions to them.)

Today is the closest I have come to giving up on everything: the Working Group, trying to have any impact on HTML 5, technology, Twitter, this web site, everything.

That's pretty heavy.

Michelle Murrain recently posted some thoughts on "Diversity in Open Source":

As a long time open source user and advocate, even though I am someone who rarely finds people like me in open source projects (i.e other women of color), I’ve always seen the open source movement a potential avenue for the greater involvement of people other than white, straight, young men, because theoretically (this is the important part) one’s involvement in a community is pure meritocracy. But so many open source communities have so far to go when it comes to being welcoming. I’m reminded of sitting in Drupalcon in DC and hearing Dries talk about the “beard length” of the developers. And of course there was the huge brou-ha-ha around a presentation at a recent Ruby conference.

Ah yes, that Ruby conference....

A couple of weeks ago there was a Ruby conference in San Francisco called GoGaRuCo (Golden Gate Ruby Conference). This conference has grabbed attention due to a talk at which the presenter illustrated a discussion of CouchDB by using sexually suggestive pictures of women.

Unsurprisingly the result has been a fair bit of heated, and occasionally offensive, debate.

The main lines of the debate are familiar. Various people, not all women, lay the charge that the images and general tone was offensive. Such material makes women feel degraded and alienated. This kind of presentation would not be tolerated at most professional events.

Defenders of the presenter point out that the slides were humorous and no offense was intended.

(Could it be that this kind of thing happens because open source events are not "professional events"? Is this behavior more prevalent in open source events and communities? I have no idea.)

Sarah Allen blogged about the session.

If he had left it at a few introductory jokes, I would be writing a very different post. Instead the porn references continued with images of scantily-clad women gratuitously splashed across technical diagrams and intro slides. As he got into code snippets, he inserted interstitial images every few slides (removed from the slides below). The first time it happened, he mentioned that he wanted to keep everyone’s attention. It had the reverse effect. This technique was distracting and disrespectful to an audience who, frankly, is turned on by code. This crowd had just watch hour upon hour of code slide shows and live irb sessions, often on the edge of their seats as they absorbed the latest whiz-bang plugin or coding technique from one of the masters.

My point is not whether pornography is good or bad. I personally have no issue with it as long as it is created and viewed by consenting adults. Watching pornography in the privacy of one’s own home or sex club is entirely different from unexpectedly sharing the experience with a couple of hundred Ruby enthusiasts. I imagine that there were many men in the audience who were as uncomfortable as I.

What most pisses me off is that I had to write this blog post, instead of one about Ruby & CouchDB, which is a far more interesting topic.

Sarah Mei blogged about some community reactions to compalints about the porn. Read the comments, too.

Here are the reportedly cleaned and scrubbed slides:

At a Flash conference, another presenter did something similar. Apparently adolescent sexual fantasies make tech so much more fun.

Who's code?

Orange Labs San Francisco has put out a study, "Her Code: Engendering Change in Silicon Valley" [PDF] that found:

2% of open source software developers are female
1/4 of proprietary software developers are female
11.8% of Computer Science bachelor's degrees are awarded to women
8.5% of Silicon Valley boards of directors have women
Only 3% of venture capital-backed companies are run by women

The report explores many potential causes and exacerbating factors, including education, media coverage of technology, and cultural factors. Their conclusions regarding the media were especially damning:

The press lags behind the reality, relegating its scanty coverage of female executives to 'women's issues' or just simply ignoring them when it comes time to ask about "challenges".

We've seen that many times in newspapers. Next time you see an article about a woman or women working in technology, check what section the article is in. Lifestyle? Fashion? Why not in the Technology section? (Or Business section, as appropriate?) Is this an honest reflection of real life? Is such pidgeonholing and stereotyping truly "fit to print"?

The report also looks at generational differences, and points to some outstanding women who've succeeded in technology and tech business.

Orange put out some video associated with the report:

Some women are succeeding. What's the secret? What makes the difference?

For my own part, I don't know what the answer is to get more women to join open source endeavors. To a large extent, I see that by the time one is working at a high technical and professional level, the low participation of women in open source seems to be self-selective. In three years of hiring, I don't think 5% of our developer applicants were women. In fact, I can count all the women developers I've interviewed on one hand. Here we are, well into our fifth year of business, and only this week we hired our first woman developer.

So why do women opt out? Is it that women never really see the open source communities as opportunities, career, educational, personal or otherwise? I don't know, but as low as the 25% figure is for women developers in proprietary software, finding only 1/10th of that percentage in open source points to something other than just education.

Women are either not seeing or are not interested in participating in open source communities. Setting aside the question of "why" for a moment, how can we change that?

So how do we get more women into the development ranks? Or even just participating in the open source communities in general?

This weekend, at DrupalCamp LA, a panel organized by Rain Braew on the subject takes it on. [I was supposed to take part, but business priorities forced me to cancel, much to my disappointment.] "Women of Drupal Please Stand Up: a panel featuring exceptional women in drupal discussing how to encourage more public participation from women" (which indeed is the title) takes on the issue from what is a positive proactive perspective.

Jenna McWilliams picks up on something Kirrily says:

Find potential users of the application and teach them programming, instead of recruiting good programmers and teaching them about the value of the application. She says:

If you’re working on a desktop app, recruit desktop users. If you’re writing a music sharing toolkit, recruit music lovers. Don’t worry about their programming skills. You can teach programming; you can’t teach passion or diversity.

I'm not sure I agree with that. I feel that a lot of the attitudes that might be considered insensitive or blind to diversity are simply the results of unexamined, unthought-through assumptions, habits and worldviews held without any particular malice. And some of the resistance we see to even discussing it I think comes more out of general stubbornness — a belief that if a guy accedes to a woman's complaints, he's somehow "backing down" and admitting he was doing something wrong.

Code is specific, and therefore relatively easy to correct. Attitudes are fuzzy, subjective, laden with baggage, and changing them can be harder. But not impossible.

Who's stopping you?

Angie Byron, aka "webchick," who started out in the Drupal community years ago as a complete n00b and now is Drupal 7 project maintainer, leading the effort (or herding cats, as she sometimes describes it), lays out her advice to women in a comment on her own blog post on the topic early in July.

My suggestion there would be to spend your time while you wait for your own questions to be answered, answering other people's questions on the forums and IRC. Sounds unintuitive, I know. You might feel like you don't know enough to answer anyone's questions. But here's the thing -- if you can get Drupal installed, you already know more than someone else. So make a game of it. See if you can find a question you know the answer to. If not, try and find a question you could possibly figure out with a little trial and error. This will have a number of positive consequences:

By answering other peoples' questions, you'll rapidly becomes much more adept at Drupal because you'll cement in the knowledge you already know, and expose yourself to new knowledge that you didn't already know.

Your name will start to stick out from the crowd as one of that 0.05% who is helping the project. This means that someone is far more likely to answer your questions, and be much happier about it when they do.

You help make the Drupal.org forums a nicer place. That'll make more people hang out there, some of which may be able to answer your questions! :)

If your business is related to Drupal, or you do freelancer work, being a constant knowledgeable and helpful presence in the forums is a great method for sending clients your way.

So don't give up. :) The Drupal community really is a great place to be. It just can take a bit to kind of find your way.

Ultimately, open source is a do-ocracy: Those who do end up not just doing but even deciding.

Get involved. Get engaged in the community, the process. If someone gives you guff, ignore him (or her). Go around him (or her). Ultimately the community is open. Nobody can stop you, except yourself.

What about the guys? I don't know if there's any redeeming the fans of porn in tech or the chest-thumping defenders of sexism and privilege.

But most guys are not those guys.

Martin Fowler offers what I feel is sage advice for all of us, not just guys:

At this point there's an important principle. I can't choose whether someone is offended by my actions. I can choose whether I care.

BlogHer Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott is Co-Founder, President and Creative Director of pingVision, an open source interactive design and development company. She blogs there, and at rare pattern. Her personal website is laurascottdotnet (launching soon).

Swine flu: being concerned is not foolish

2009-04-30T11:27:23-05:00

This is off my beat here at BlogHer, but it's bothering me, so here goes....

There's been much a-Twitter about the alarm surrounding the Swine Flu. People griping that SARS, Ebola, bird flu, [fill in the blank] didn't wind up being much, so why get worked up now? Everybody's over-reacting, they say.

I think the cynical response is overly-cynical and perhaps a bit to happy to declare "boy who cried wolf" and laugh or sneer.

Reality check:

Highly contagious? Check!

Fatal to healthy adults? Check!

No vaccine in sight before fall? Check!

Spreading quickly? Check!

This is a little thing that is very bad and could get very big very quickly. I don't see the alarm as overblown (though Egypt's destruction of all the pigs seems a bit ridiculous). We're an interconnected world now.

Shutting down the schools seems to be an obvious step. This is how you try to stop pandemic: By eliminating the mass-infection opportunities that we have.

If nothing comes of the swine flu, I think it could in part point to why such aggressive measures were indicated. It's if it gets really bad when we can say shutting the schools was perhaps too little too late.

So count me as skeptical of the proud, cynical skepticism out there. Just because you've run stop signs without consequences doesn't mean you want to continue doing it blithely.

/soapbox

Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott blogs at rare pattern and pingVision, and Twitters under the handle @lauras. This post is cross-posted at rare pattern.

Twitter confessions of a late early adopter

2009-03-22T23:22:17-05:00

Yesterday, Twitter turned three. A week before was my two-year Twitterversary. So that pretty much made me a late early adopter. And while I'm really enjoying Twitter now, back then I didn't get it. Not yet. Pretty much not at all.

I admit, these past few years I've pretty much rushed to sign up for any and every new online social or productivity service that sounded interesting. They all had strangely spelled (or simply strange) names like Flickr and del.icio.us and furl and Vox and Joost and Plurk. And those are the ones I remember, maybe even still use.

But pretty much most of them never stuck. It was just too hard to work them into my life. Too weird. Too difficult to use. And many I never tried out at all. Too uninteresting or too ... creepy, some of them.

When I signed up for Twitter, it was already something of a buzz in tech circles. I had looked at it for many months but never got around to actually signing up. It never really clicked in my head that it would be interesting. And after I did finally sign up, I found it alternatingly boring, distracting and challenging to work into my life. While I searched for people tweeting interesting things and followed them, I avoided anybody too prolific. At that point, following only people who posted a tweet an hour was about the max I could handle. A tweet or two a day was more like it. Otherwise I couldn't keep up.

In trying to make Twitter work for me, I did not follow people tweeting boring things, like "Drinking coffee" or "Waiting in line at the grocery store." (I still don't find that banality interesting. Who cares?) I was interested in people tweeting about interesting things – news, blog posts, events, or even just how they felt about that morning coffee or waiting in line at that moment.

Then something changed.

At some point, I crossed a threshold – a breakthrough point where I was no longer trying to track and read every single tweet of those I was following, and now getting a more impressionistic gestalt of the aggregate twittering. And I think that's the real trick about Twitter. You're a bird in a tree with thousands of birds around you, all tweeting. The tweets that interest you catch your attention. You may miss things, but the big stuff gets retweeted. And the more people you follow, the more sources that might toss out something interesting.

It's a liberating moment, when you reach this point in Twitter. You're freed from the need to track everything. What you catch you catch, and what you miss you miss (and likely would have missed anyway, if you weren't twittering at all).

It took a while, but Twitter eventually grew to take a place in my daily life that did not even exist before. There is no clear real-life (as in 3D, face-to-face) analogue. Twittering is communication in a way totally enabled by the technology, the applications. We simply could not be connecting transiently, ephemerally with so many people at the same time without being alone in a crowded room.

Now I'm using Twitter more and more, and while my Twittersphere has grown I've found Twitter to be ever more interesting and relevant to my life. But I was a late adopter, even after adopting, and stumbled quite a bit along the way. It can be a bit unnerving at times, especially on those occasions when someone unfollows me.

So if you're Twittering but not quite getting it, maybe you should try just diving in. Follow a lot of people. Browse. Engage.
And Tweet your passion.

And when you're too busy, don't worry about it. Twitter will be there when you're ready.

Here are some women you might want to follow:

Contributing Editor Laura Scott tweets as @lauras, and shares tweeting responsibilities for @pingv, @Drupal and @DrupalAssoc. When she's not Tweeting, she sometimes blogs at http://rarepattern.com and http://pingv.com.

Apps that make iPhone and iPod Touch game-changers in tech

2008-12-14T23:37:42-06:00

The online world changed for me this year. I discovered the handheld — or rather what the handheld promises to be. I had a Palm 700p before. It was a good phone. Qwerty keyboard. Great reception. Worked just about anywhere. But after more than 2 years with the Palm, I just had to try the iPhone, the multitouch interface, the motion sensor. But I had no idea what worlds would be opened up over the months since — mostly not by Apple directly, but by the creative minds creating some applications that strike me as almost mind-blowing.

I almost didn't go for it. For many months I resisted. I'd had AT&T service before, and did not want to go back. But that GUI tempted me.

It's a good GUI, and even the awkward keyboard laid out for 9-year-old fingers is saved by the rather smart active spellcheck.

But ever since firmware 2.0, the iPhone has been something else.

Apps.

Some are amazing. Some unexpected. Some just pretty cool. Here are a few.

[Breaking: Microsoft releases its first iPhone app: Seadragon... a game-changer? Doesn't look like it at first glance.]

Shazam

This app is amazing. Hear a song you like? Start up this app and let it listen for a few seconds, and it'll find it for you. This screenshot shows the result of a song I heard in the end-titles of an episode of True Blood, when I was introduced to a new band.

It's hard enough to be exposed to new bands in this day and age when radio sucks and the music studios don't want anyone to share their favorites with others. You gotta be able to grab it when you hear it. Shazam!

Google app

You expect Google to come up with some good stuff, but this app tops expectations, again using sound. Start the app. Speak. And Google gives you search results. Nice!

Apparently Google technically broke Apple's API rules with this app. But it's Google, and Google and Apple are friends. And so innovation happens.

OneTap

Want to take in a movie? Start the app, and it finds the movies playing in the nearest theatre by you, with upcoming showtimes and ratings. All at literally one tap.

If you want to exert yourself and go for a second tap, you can read a (very) little synopsis, or watch a trailer. Nifty!

Ocarina

Ocarina is a musical instrument. You actually blow into the mic and touch your fingers on the screen. It's like an electronic flute! And it takes practice to produce anything sounding musical.

Bloom

Bloom is another instrument. This time it's easier to make pleasant sounds, because you're leveraging the creativity of Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers. It's like a musical loop. You tap on the screen, and it chimes depending upon where you tap, and after a configurable amount of time it starts to loop back on you, while you continue to tap. There are some variations on tone and mood that you can also set. Very cool.

Asphalt4

What's a gaming assortment without a fast-car racing app? This one is cool. It takes advantage of the iPhone's built-in motion sensor to make the handset itself a controller, like a Wii. To steer, you tip the phone right and left.

The graphics are outstanding for a little handheld app, and outdo many XBox and PSP apps in that department. Shiny!

Twittelator

There are a few Twitter apps out there, but this one is the one I keep firing up.

I especially like the hot-topics search feature. This app is truly Twitter tops in my book. Tweet!

Twitterfon

If the tweets in Twittelator take up too much space for you, a stripped-down Twitter app is this one. Clean, lean, lightweight. Tweet and run!

WeatherBug

Every day starts with my reaching to the nightstand for my iPhone, and firing up WeatherBug. (Okay, I might check Twittelator first.) I want to know what the weather is looking like for the day.

And yes, it was -3 degrees this afternoon. Colder at my house. Brrr!

Maps

Apple does alright in the app development department. Maps comes pre-installed, and it is really one useful app, melding maps and search into a handy interface to find what you need and where it's at. The pin marks the spot. Doink!

HoldEm

I confess I find this one totally addicting. I love poker now! The computerized opponents are pretty tough. And they bluff!

I prefer the eye-in-the-sky view. The action is faster. All in!

2009?

Who knows? There are many new handhelds coming out next year, or are out now. And some will be running Android, Google's open source handheld operating system, which will put some pressure on Apple to open up a little.

Maybe we'll see some effective leveraging of handhelds in social media. Aside from Twitter, the offerings have been underwhelming. But the interest is out there. And every change that makes a device more entertaining to use and useful to have around starts to change how we live our lives.

A year ago I was living in Palm world. Now that's behind me, and while it's not so easy to make a phone call, I wouldn't go back. Not on a bet!

BlogHer Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott is a Drupal web developer who blogs at rare pattern. Follow Laura!

As the web changes politics, so politics change the web?

2008-11-23T18:34:34-06:00

At sixteen I believed the moonlight
could change me if it would.
I moved my head
on the pillow, even moved my bed
as the moon slowly
crossed the open lattice.

—Denise Levertov

Change is happening, and though we're weeks from the Inaugural, we're years into the change on the Internet. From web-based political action committees through web-driven campaigns to web-centered efforts at political rebranding, the web has redefined our politics. And it's still changing.

Hello, Mr. President-Elect

The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.

I will give you no more hiding place down here.

—Maya Angelou, Inaugural Poem, 1993

It strikes me as rather astonishing to see our President-Elect speaking to us directly not on television but on YouTube.

No, it's not much. 90 seconds of broad-brush statements of policy intentions. But it's a weekly address. And it's direct to us, featured on the home page of Change.gov.

When the Barack Obama Presidential Transition Team launched Change.gov, we saw for the first time what could be an entirely new political site — one that establishes a conversation between the White House and the voters.

Change.gov is an official website, not a campaign site.

This site is for the Office of the President-elect and Office of the Vice President-elect, as recognized by the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, as amended (3 USC 102 note). The Presidential Transition Act specifically authorizes the Administrator of GSA to provide services and support to the Office of the President-elect beginning the day after the election until 30 days after the inauguration to support the orderly transfer of executive power after a general election.

"Hallelujah," writes Kate Lear in the Huffington Post.

One of the many challenges facing this presidency is how to retain and grow the spirit of good will and activism that was ignited during the campaign. Building on the singular success of BarackObama.com, this new website has the ability to engage the American people as never before and become a hallmark of Obama's presidency....

...A major reason why millions of Americans became involved in the Obama campaign was because it was so easy to do -- BarackObama.com was a brilliantly efficient website. Change.gov seems to be just as user-friendly and flexible and as such has the potential to engage all Americans, not just Obama supporters. In the best of all worlds, it could be a depository of information about the issues, activities and goals of the new administration. But, more importantly, it could be used as a call-to-action and a hub of ideas about ways that we can help our country during this difficult time.

BlogHer Liz Henry writes on her blog:

This could mean real participation in government. Activism - real activism but built into our government - mobilization of people who have the most time and energy, not through churches and charities but through an organized infrastructure for nationwide civil service.

Walking the walk (one way, anyway)

you get yours
and i'll get mine
if i learn
to sit and wait
you got yours
i want mine
and i'm gonna get it
cause i gotta get it
cause i need to get it
if i learn how

—Nikki Giovanni

On the Save the Internet blog, Megan Tady writes:

His very first two points marked a commitment to preserving Net Neutrality and promoting diversity in the media.

The plan says an Obama administration will:

Protect the Openness of the Internet: A key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history. It needs to stay that way. Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet.

Encourage Diversity in Media Ownership: Barack Obama believes that the nation’s rules ensuring diversity of media ownership are critical to the public interest. Unfortunately, over the past several years, the Federal Communications Commission has promoted the concept of consolidation over diversity. As president, Obama will encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast media, promote the development of new media outlets for expression of diverse viewpoints, and clarify the public interest obligations of broadcasters who occupy the nation’s spectrum.

It certainly sounds promising. Beth Dunn is less sanguine.

So far, what I have seen is a certain amount of pulling back on the Obama team’s part. During the campaign there was a visible give-and-take between the campaign’s foot soldiers and the top leadership team, and the MyBarackObama.com website allowed for real participation and user contribution, through blogs, messaging, and events that brought the online world into Real Life (like the coordination of neighborhood rallies and events).

Now, however, the new Change.gov website is considerably more one-way. The only blog on the site is the one from the Obama transition team, and comments are not enabled. There’s a place for visitors to “Share Your Story” and “Share Your Vision,” but this, too, is a one-way conversation.

She adds that this "has the unfortunate effect of putting the brakes on the momentum, and stifling the part of what they were doing that really engaged with individuals, with communities." Instead of embracing social media and community building features of what has come to be called "Web 2.0," Change.gov so far lives in the "Web 1.0" world of the olden days of the Internet, when websites were not conversations but rather announcements.

Change.gov is not social media software, it is brochureware.

It's still early enough to take Barack Obama at his word, so when he said in his victory speech [interactive video + transcript] that the election "has never been about me; it's about you," maybe it's not audacious to hope for more of an inclusive website.

(Personally, I really like that Obama has a Crackberry habit. It tells me that he's not being totally "handled.")

Moving on from MoveOn.org

For if I do not hear thy foot,
The frozen river is as mute,
The flowers have dried down to the root:
And why, since these be changed since May,
Shouldst thou change less than they.

-Elizabeth Barret Browning

This whole politics-on-the-Internet thing first really flourished in progressive/liberal circles, where there are many voices. Perhaps the most notorious online community in this realm has been Daily Kos, a loud, bare-knuckle community founded by Markos Moulitsas that grew out of a general opposition to the Iraq war at a time when such criticism was scarcely heard in the mainstream media. Daily Kos has had its share of internal conflicts, with a no-holds-barred front page of polling analyses and scathing attacks on the opposition by select "diarists."

But when it comes to politics in the mainstream media, the more well-known -- and more notorious an object of derision by the right-wing partisans -- internet-based group has been MoveOn.org. Though named in fact after its website, this 501(c)(4) organization is recognizable by most Americans by its in-your-face commercials. (Remember "General Betray Us".)

Today I suppose it's only natural that this "netroots" organization takes a moment for a little gloating. Their homepage currently touts their success in the election. "Together we did it!" shouts the headline. The page includes some stats -- 428,133 volunteers for Obama, for example -- and select videos they produced for the campaign. The page is very blue, very clean and polished in look, with sans-serif typeface and lots of whitespace.

An interactive map is featured "above the fold". Click on a state and the page re-loads with the same content, this time filtered and focused on that state. ("24,790 MoveOn members volunteered for Obama".)

If you've read "The Audacity of Hope," you'll know that Barack Obama holds little credence to the idea that liberals must meet fire with fire, mud with mud, when it comes to "debate" with conservative organizations that have not hesitated to sling either. We'll see how this site continues under an Obama Administration.

Lipstick on a pig?

Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.

The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.

—Maya Angelou, Inaugural Poem, 1993

Meanwhile, on the "conservative" side, while a lot of internal re-evaluation of the Republican Party and its core message is supposedly taking place, the home page of Republican For A Reason, a site by and for the Republican National Committee, puts a happy face of optimism on the Republican "grassroots." It does not, however, seem to reflect much of any kind of real change of the Republican message.

The design tries hard to appear to be non-Establishment, employing a mix of wood textures, paper and envelope images and a hand-scrawled elephant icon. I suppose this is intended to give the site a kind of handcrafty look to distance the GOP "brand" from the image of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And maybe it's supposed to appeal to younger voters ... or maybe pre-voters?

Links in a handwriting font (no, not comic sans) invite you to "NAVIGATE" and "CREATE YOUR ACCOUNT" and "~~EXPURE~~ EXPLORE THE ISSUES" [yeah, it looks like it says "expure"].

There's video that thankfully doesn't just start playing on its own (as is the wont of many commercial websites that always have me scrambling for the speaker mute on my keyboard), so there's one point in their favor.

However, I wonder if this generally flat site holds much appeal to anyone not already sold on its message. As a registered independent, when I look at their platform, I see a Republican Party that bears little resemblance to the party of my youth. (Could Barry Goldwater win a Republican nomination for anything in this day and age?)

Certainly without the momentum of the day, it seems this endeavor is bound to languish in general obscurity.

But how will we engage in the political discourse now, after this sea-change election? Will the Obama Administration successfully reach out to the electorate by tapping into the social media tools that are engaging millions of people?

Changing Change?

in life
one is always
balancing
like we juggle our mothers
against our fathers
or one teacher
against another
(only to balance our grade average)
3 grains of salt
to one ounce truth

—from "Balances" by Nikki Giovanni

On Change.gov, there is a form where we can submit our "stories" to the new administration. But the real power of social media is not when we can talk back to you, Mr. President-Elect, but when we can talk to each other at the same time. Engage us in conversation. Hire a social media staff to engage us all in dialogue, a staff who can speak with some authority regarding policy decisions being weighed and who can bring the conversation — our conversation — to you.

Because the Obama campaign has shown a degree of social media savvy, my hope is that his nascent administration is in the midst of developing a new website that will afford a fully engaged citizen experience.

Alexandra Samuel has a fascinating post full of advice for how Obama can build upon the Internet and social media to enhance and empower his Administration. Some examples:

Use blogging and rich media to talk directly to citizens frequently and in real time.

...

Be prepared for citizens -- especially young ones -- to use your own organizing toolkit as a platform for holding you accountable.

...

Support open source tools -- after all, they are intimately connected to your bottom-up philosophy.

One suggestion kind of stands out for me as perhaps a point of concern:

Win congressional support for your agenda by using social networks to mobilize grassroots support and apply pressure on Congress.

Could Change.gov end up just being a proxy for the Obama re-election campaign of 2012? Or a partisan tool to be wielded during legislative battles? I see that as something that could potentially backfire. Kate Lear doesn't like the notion.

The Washington Post reported this week that Obama's email database of 10 million campaign volunteers and donors may be used to "to support legislation, to offer feedback on initiatives and to enlist in administration-supported causes in local communities." This is worrisome.

Change.gov is one thing if nothing else: A paradigm shift in how our leaders will communicate with us, the citizens. 48 years after President John F. Kennedy changed the White House press routine by holding regular televised press conferences, our President Barack Hussein Obama will be embracing the new medium of our age — the Internet. Whether this results in a net gain in terms of government transparency and responsiveness to citizens' needs, only time will tell.

But now that we know that Obama will be also holding regular "fireside chats" on YouTube, it seems that new technology and social media are changing not only how our politicians run for office, but also how they govern.

Good Morning

Haven't we been here before?

BlogHer Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott is a web developer who blogs at rare pattern. Follow Laura!

Things I've learned on Twitter

2008-11-10T18:18:37-06:00

As I convalesced this weekend from Day 9 of a terrible cold that just won't let go, the Thin Air Summit took place in Denver. Thanks to Twitter, I almost feel like I was there. I was tweet-reading in real-time. But you don't need to be there in the moment. A quick search for #tas08 on Twitter and you find a ton of posts. Tweets on sessions, tweets on insights, tweets on new acquaintances....

Last week I learned about the in-fighting (and quite often misogynistic) attacks from conservatives on Sarah Palin. #Palin was a trending topic after the election.

When Al Gore got onto Twitter, I saw it first on Twitter. [Update: Twitter has just changed @al_gore to @algore.]

Protests against California's Prop 8 I heard of first on Twitter.

And I found out that other people did not find True Blood tonight as much of a downer as I did. (Yeah, so it's a vampire show. Can't I have at least a little human kindness? Just a little?) When Tina Fey was going to be appearing on Saturday Night Live, I heard it first on Twitter and was able to set TiVo.

Now I'm sure that anybody reading this who hasn't actually tried Twitter probably has no idea what the heck I'm talking about. There are plenty of explanations of what Twitter is, but what strikes me as being important is less of what Twitter is and more of how Twitter is used.

Because you can follow whomever you want, you can listen just to tweets by people who interest you. Of course, as they tweet with others (using their Twitter handles) you can stumble across other people who also are interesting. Soon you have a metaphorical tree of Twitterers tweeting up a storm of miscellany that quite frequently can surprise you, astonish you, and inform you.

Twitter is as the Twitterer does

Some people seem to live on Twitter. For professional bloggers, Twitter becomes a way of building their online presence, connecting with others, sharing links, and picking up on things happening.

Me, I can't spend that kind of time Twittering the day away. But I don't consider Twitter to be simply a distraction. I learn too much from it. And I catch wind of things friends and acquaintances are doing elsewhere.

Heck, it's gotten to the point where people don't have names any more, they have Twitter handles!

Amber Rhea posts regular updates on what she's tweeted.

Earlier, in these pages, Beth Kanter (or @kanter) wrote about the importance of Twitter.

When I'm asked questions that I don't know the answer to, I admit it and use it as opportunity to demonstrate the value of the social brain or having a good network on Twitter. Unfortunately, I did not have my laptop accessible in that moment.

In reflection, I've been thinking about how much richer it is being social - how you don't have to know all the answers when you have a good network (and a decent Internet connection.) It made me think about another digital divide - for those who don't have the Internet connection or haven't yet engaged on Twitter - the knowledge divide.

Heck, in this age when, according to Wired, blogging is somehow no longer something to do, bloggers like Kristen Lowe are blogging about what they're seeing on Twitter.

Paal Hivand asked a question on Twitter this week, which had me thinking about a recent conversation on ... eh ... Twitter. Thing is, Paal said (in Norwegian) that he was contemplating an article about how knowledge used to be individual, but now is social. I'm not going to go into that statement, just offer this anectdotal evidence for how knowledge in some respects is easier available than ever before (click on the image for a readable version):

She then pastes a screenshot of a Twitter exchange....

I'd just jumped into a conversation between Adriana and Freecloud here - which started with the Albigensian crusade and ended with the Twitterian crusade - and it's also worth keeping in mind that we probably wouldn't be having this conversation if it wasn't for Twitter...

Amy Gahran's post a couple weeks ago illustrates how Twitter can even facilitate conversations among disparate people who may not know each other and likely don't even have each other's email address.

The Twitter Insurgency

The adoption of Twitter has been evolving over the weeks and months. Last spring, you would have been hard pressed to find dominant tweet topics outside of tech geekery, or the personal experiences of tech geeks. But by the time the general election was in full swing, politics had come into its own, with Sarah Palin (or #palin) frequently rising up in the topics. (The Next Women report that Barack Obama is the first presidential candidate -- and presidential elect -- to use Twitter.) Now you see a wider variety of topics, including sports, television and news events spreading across the tweetscape.

From the way things look now, it's only inevitable that the trend will continue. Unless you yourself are watching something happen right in front of you (or on live tv), odds are that the news will hit Twitter far sooner than it can get noticed, digested and spat out by the mainstream media.

In fact, the mainstream media have started to adopt Twitter as an important outlet. (And they haven't always been the smoothest about it. Witness the eruption over the Rocky Mountain News' live-Twitter coverage of a funeral.)

My favorite part of Twitter is still what I first got into it for last year: interesting insights:

@agahran. People don't know they care about the quality of writing, they just stop reading poorly written things. #tas08
#

"Wasilla's all i saw" - a Palin-drome
#

My 10-weeks-into-Twitter-world review: it feels... I don't know, *kinder*, than blog world. Less incentive for trolls, stalkers, etc.
#

Friendster informs me that they now have faster slide shows. I can save even more time by continuing to not log in there.
#

Of course, there are darker views of Twitter....

“Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,” according to the report.

“Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,” the Army report said.

So if you do venture onto Twitter, watch out for those vegetarians.

BlogHer Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott blogs on rare pattern and pingVision. Follow Laura!

Barack Obama, John McCain and Net Neutrality

2008-10-19T16:25:31-05:00

Change is coming. In fact, if you look over the past 15 years it's already here: the Internet. What it is now, with blogs and social networks, software-as-a-service and 'net-enabled applications, bears scant resemblance to what it was like in 1995. Think about how much it has changed just since you got on the net. No question: the Internet is evolving faster and faster. Do we know what it will look like in 15 years? Ten years? A year from now?

No. The Internet is changing too fast too fast.

Why Net Neutrality is important

The phrase "Net Neutrality" itself is unfortunate because, alliteration aside, it doesn't really have punch, but it's very important. Liza Sabater describes it as "digital civil rights." It's a clear concept when you talk about governmental control of the Internet. China, with the collaboration of its state-run ISPs and American search engine companies, has already demonstrated that control and censorship of the Internet is already possible.

Alistair Croll points out that ISPs have increasing capability to control what users can access:

There are a lot of bad things on the Internet: spam, child porn, malware, phishing and so on. Until recently, it’s been up to people to protect themselves, using security software or web site blocking. Lately, however, governments and legislators have been calling for service providers to limit where users can go, both to stop criminal activity and to protect naïve surfers from straying onto malicious sites. Recent advances in DNS may soon let carriers comply with such regulations.

In June, three major carriers agreed to purge child pornography hosted on servers their customers operate in their data centers. Having signed New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s Internet code of conduct, every major U.S. ISP has also agreed to eliminate access to certain newsgroups. It’s not just in the U.S., either: Australia’s hotly debated Plan for Cyber Safety blocks content that isn’t child-friendly. Subscribers can opt out, but they’ll still be blocked from content the government deems illegal.

What about in cases of control and censorship of Internet content by corporations for non-government-manded reasons?

Claire, of the Hawaii LRB Library, gives a thumbnail:

Network neutrality is generally the concept of ensuring "unfettered access to the Internet" by regulating owners of Internet networks. CRS notes that the two most common discriminatory actions against net neutrality are "the network providers’ ability to control access to and the pricing of broadband facilities, and the incentive to favor network-owned content, thereby placing unaffiliated content providers at a competitive disadvantage."

It's this latter part -- "incentive to favor network-owned content, thereby placing unaffiliated content providers at a competitive disadvantage" -- that explains the concern of every website owner who does not control a piece of the Internet backbone.

Alice Marshall puts it in the context of the tech economy:

I am very concerned that the whole Web 2.0 crowd and the entire tech community are way too complacent about net neutrality. It is true that articles about net neutrality are regularly featured on Slashdot's front page and tech publications have done some great reporting on this, but I think too many people take the point-to-point architecture of the Web for granted and don't realize the entire basis of their business model could be destroyed.

QU writes:

Just what would be left if in fact corporations were left to create the content we see every day? They may edit and put their own spin on items in order to create a more favorable view for certain topics. When *we* create the Internet, we are able to put our own opinion on things, yes but people are also allowed to create their own opinions after reading multiple ideas from multiple people.

This isn't just about being able to hear political statements by Pearl Jam.

In a post about how "Verizon Wireless plans to tack on an extra 3-cent charge for every SMS message sent by Web information services to any of its mobile subscribers," Erick Shonfeld points out that Net Neutrality is not just about politics' effect on business, but also business' effect on politics:

The other way this could backfire for Verizon is that it could raise some serious Net neutrality issues. If it does not apply this charge evenly across the board, or starts carving out exceptions to do biz dev deals (and Verizon made some indications to Silicon Valley startups it was moving in this direction prior to the rate hike announcement), then it will be giving preferential treatment to one source of information over the other.

What if Verizon were charging the Obama campaign 3 cents per SMS message right now, but cut a deal with the McCain campaign to charge one cent per SMS? That is just a stark example, but you see where this can go. What if it charges the New York Times one rate, and the Wall Street Journal another? It becomes a freedom of speech issue.

The candidates' stances

Recently Slashdot pointed up the issue:

"For all their incessant bickering in the first two presidential debates over conflicts of interest and government regulation, PopMech columnist Glenn Derene is puzzled that the candidates have yet to be challenged on a vital issue directly related to both those topics: Net neutrality. John McCain and Barack Obama have stated elsewhere their opposing views on the issue, with McCain being opposed to Net neutrality and favoring light regulation of the Internet, while Obama is in favor of neutrality and seeks Government involvement. In any case, since there is no standard accepted definition of 'network neutrality,' until the candidates elaborate on their positions (which they both declined to do for this piece, nor anywhere else so far, for that matter), 'both sides can make a credible case that they're the ones defending freedom of innovation and open communication.'"

Here's Barack Obama speaking on Net Neutrality:

I think it's fair to say that John McCain unequivocably opposes Net Neutrality. John McCain has a tech plan, for which Susan Crawford offers up some perspective:

First, here’s the fact: We don’t have a functioning “free market” in online access. John McCain thinks we do. That kind of magical thinking takes real practice.

Instead, we’ve got four or so enormous companies that control most of the country’s access, and they’re probably delighted that McCain is promising not to regulate them.

The “net neutrality” movement is not about “regulating the internet.” That’s twisted.

You can think of the internet as a conversation being had by more than a billion people walking along a sidewalk. Big sidewalk. Net neutrality would require that the sidewalk keep out of the conversation - not limit it, shape it, charge it based on how interesting it is, or butt in. Right now, our sidewalks are in the business of deciding what kinds of conversations can happen, and they’re no longer required by law to just lie down and act like sidewalks. That’s a problem. We’d like the sidewalks, those basic transport elements, to be separate from the conversation.

Just as the power companies can’t dictate what kinds of purposes people use electricity for, the providers of basic general-purpose communications transport shouldn’t be able to dictate how we communicate.

Danny Weizner notes

McCain’s record in promoting innovation on the Internet and in the large information and communications marketplace is terrible. Mostly, he can claim credit for supporting incumbents over innovators and for failing, in his time as Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee to do anything at all to support the innovative and socially beneficial aspects of the Internet.

What about the running mates? leahpeah says:

Biden’s support is ambiguous and I’ll be watching to see how that plays out.

In Wired, Sarah Lai Stirland writes of Biden:

Biden's most-recent reputation in D.C. on telecom issues is more ambiguous, particularly when it comes to net neutrality. Though he ostensibly supported the concept as a presidential candidate during this election cycle, in hearings on Capitol Hill he's been a hesitant supporter for pro net-neutrality legislation.

I don't know if Sarah Palin has said anything about Net Neutrality.

A non-partisan (or bi-partisan) issue?

You might ask why protecting freedom of speech on the Internet has become a partisan issue. Says Techory:

I don’t like to get political on here, but I don’t really see that this is really a political issue, or at least it shouldn’t be one. It really shouldn’t matter what political party you follow, it’s more about getting the most out of the Internet, and not being beholden to your service provider for a certain type of content. This image is an obvious exaggeration, but shows what I mean. This might not matter if there were true competition for internet services, but in many instances there are maybe one or two high speed options in an area (usually phone or cable). If they both happen to do what they please with your traffic, you’re out of luck.

And it's not just about Republicans' opposing Net Neutrality. Democratic New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has been pushing through an aggressive government program that threatens Net Neutrality:

Obviously, stopping child porn is a good goal, but Cuomo's approach actually makes the problem worse and sets a dangerous precedent....

...[A] recent look at the details of Cuomo's highly publicized campaign found that Cuomo clearly exaggerated the extent of the problem for political benefit, forcing ISPs to block all of Usenet, despite 99.9997% of the 3.7 billion available Usenet articles being perfectly legitimate content. But that's not stopping Cuomo. In fact, he's going even further.

He's been sending ISPs a presentation from a company called Brilliant Digital that's offering a "deep packet inspection" system that could scan every file sent across an ISP's network and try to determine if it was child porn. Yes, Cuomo is suggesting that ISPs spy on every single file sent over their network now, 4th Amendment be damned....

...Last week, we wrote about Paul Ohm's suggestion that we should create a stronger privacy law that outlawed deep packet inspection, as that would pretty much stop any attempt to break net neutrality without requiring special net neutrality laws. It's worth noting that such a law would also have the added benefit of making it doubly clear to Cuomo that such a program is quite illegal.

I don't know about you, but all of this sounds a bit scary to me.

It's a public policy issue, and we all should get involved

Do we want corporations, or our governments, restricting what we can get to on the Internet? That seems rather Orwellian ... or perhaps more like cable tv. I certainly do not want my access to the Internet be controlled like the cable companies control what shows are available on tv.

But that's me. Maybe most people really want the net to be more like tv?

Stacey Higgnbotham encourages dialogue:

I am curious to hear what the Pew survey says consumers think of the cloud. I would have guessed they don’t think much about it all, unless it’s bringing rain. I’m also curious as to what Google thinks regulators should focus on when it comes to running pools of virtualized servers. Bandwidth improvements and ensuring Network Neutrality are one obvious issue for cloud purveyors, other regulation that should be talked about is how laws and regulations govern the physical location of certain data. Indeed, one interesting side note to Google’s patent for running data centers on the high seas is the lack of jurisdiction in international waters.

On the consumer side, a fair issue to consider is how consumer content stored in such clouds can be used. Witness the kerfuffle over Google’s terms of service regarding Chrome, which tried to claim the right to use any content uploaded or displayed via the browser. But when storing files and data in a cloud, ownership and usage rights are essential, as are clear policies that lay out how such content might be accessed, tracked and monitored. Another issue is whether or not such data could ever truly be deleted from clouds, as former Facebook users had discovered. Not all of these issues require regulation, but it’s worth educating lawmakers about them in advance of more services being offered via the cloud.

No matter where you stand on this, the question seems to be not only where the candidates stand on Net Neutrality, but how the policies and laws enacted over the coming months and years might end up affecting, or even controlling, our conversations on politics.

Who controls the information pipelines? Will you be able to get to this website a year from now?

BlogHer Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott blogs at rare pattern and pingVision, and supports Net Neutrality.

It's the end of the (music) world as we know it, and I don't feel fine at all!

2008-08-24T19:33:57-05:00

If new music is created and nobody can find it, does it make a sound?

Time was you could listen to alternative radio and discover new tunes. Time was you could spend hours browsing the record store, digging up arcane and obscure artists. Time was the music could be found. But now it seems like all the radio stations are playing the same 20 songs (and a zillion commercials). Now CD departments are shrinking and disappearing from the stores. And now internet radio may be about to disappear. If that happens, how will you discover new music?

I had tried Pandora back when it launched. It was ... okay, but not great, and I let it go. But last month, when the iPhone apps came alive, and I found the Pandora app sitting there, I ended up revisiting the "music genome" service ... and found that they are doing much better at finding music I like than they ever did a year or so ago.

In fact, Pandora now is fabulous! After years of living in a music wasteland, with crap on the radio, worn-out "classics" on satellite, and pretty much nothing to be found on iTunes or in the local store, I rediscovered new music (and even ended up buying some). Pandora has been an incredible resource for introducing to me new music I never would have encountered otherwise.

Of course, that means it's too good to stick around, right?

Via the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Last year when the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board substantially hiked the royalty fees for songs that are Webcast, online broadcasters sounded an alarm. At the very least, they said, the raised fees would force some online radio stations to cap their audiences. At worst, the broadcasters warned, the royalty board could end up writing Internet radio’s swan song.

Now it looks like those grim predictions may come to pass. The founder of one of Internet radio’s leading lights, Pandora, tells The Washington Post that Web royalties may soon force his station out of business. The fees now soak up 70 percent of Pandora’s $25-million annual revenue, according to Tim Westergren. “We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,” he says.

What’s striking is that Pandora is no fly-by-night operation: The Web-radio service, which lets users build radio stations to match their own tastes, reaches about a million listeners every day, and its recently created iPhone application has become one of the most popular downloads for the device. But the rules of the marketplace, as currently drawn up, are none too favorable to online broadcasters. Terrestrial radio stations don’t have to pay per-song royalties, and satellite radio providers pay only small fees. But by 2010, Webcasters can expect to pay between two and three cents per hour per listener.

Michelle Wolverton offers some context:

Pandora faces closing the lid on it’s popular streaming radio service after the CRB, earlier this year, tripled the fees due to SoundExchange. Each time a streaming service plays a song they have to pay a small fee to Soundexchange. Soundexchange is deeply associated with the RIAA, who continuously acts like the bully on the playground. Making all the rules and taking your lunch money to boot....

...I support 100% that artists make money from being played ANYWHERE. I know musicians who are struggling to keep up in the daily grind. I also know that there are a few who have passed along their music to Pandora so that new fans can be reached. I’ve also discovered new music over at Pandora and would hate to see them close their doors. I don’t think that anyone in internet radio objects to paying fees for playing songs, but suddenly requiring internet radio to pay 3x the fees that the did for streaming is unbelievable. Yet, it’s done.

Oh, and your regular AM and FM stations? They aren’t getting hit with the same outrageous fees. SoundExchange and RIAA are acting unfairly because they are scared of what internet radio is doing for independent artists at the same time being damn greedy with what shouldn’t primarily go to them, but to the artists that they “represent”. A lot of the time that money doesn’t reach the artist because Soundexchange “can’t find them“.

Techdirt has a dark analysis of all this:

The RIAA knew exactly what it was doing in pushing these higher rates: it was killing off alternative routes to promoting non-RIAA music. The RIAA labels have always thrived off a very limited distribution and promotion channel. After all, distribution and promotion are where record labels really make their money. Competing methods of distribution and promotion are threats to be killed off -- and the RIAA may have succeeded here (with Congress' and the courts' help, of course).

Jenn at BlueCherryDoughnut is upset:

Pandora recently also released an iPhone app, allowing iPhone users to tap into their stations via their phones (which, if I could afford an iPhone, would definitely be an app I would be utilizing). What’s more, a federal panel delivered the order to increase the fees. Ah, our government hard at work in bed with big business. Ain’t it grand!?

I listen to Pandora at least once a week (and usually more often), and have found tons of new music/musicians that I enjoy through listening to it, music I might not have discovered otherwise. I will endure pop-up ads, onsite ads, ad breaks between every couple songs, whatever….just to continue to have access to this online service.

But if Pandora falls, how long till all the other internet radio stations fold as well?

On The Open Piehole, Sister Joyous Whip of Enlightenment has one word to offer on all this:

Crap!

Via Read/WriteWeb, we learn that, despite efforts by Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.) to arrange a few last-minute deals between web radio stations and SoundExchange, the organization that represents artists and record companies that would reduce the the recent fees, Pandora CEO Westergren does not sound optimistic.

"The moment we think this problem in Washington is not going to get solved, we have to pull the plug because all we're doing is wasting money." We don't blame you Tim.

In a comment on a Gizmodo thread, Bobbee offers a simple problem:

I think the RIAA just wants to count the money made for them directly through Pandora (things like click-throughs from Pandora to Amazon or iTunes, etc). Since there is no easy way to tell that I bought a CD down at my local shop because I'd been turned on to that music from Pandora, it doesn't count. Typical corporate thinking: if you can't produce direct numbers to prove it's making money then, at best, it's not worth the effort/resources. At it's worst, it's losing money...forget the "intangible" benefits.

Jill Sommer suggests that Pandora change its business model:

That’s sad, because I have been turned on to several new groups and artists through Pandora and even recently attended a concert by “Over The Rhine” because I enjoyed some of their songs through Pandora. I wrote about Pandora back in June in a post about music in the workplace. I for one would pay to make sure they don’t close their site, so hopefully the people at Pandora will reengineer their business model to fee-based accounts....

...Most of you overseas readers probably don’t understand why this is such a big deal to U.S.-based companies, since foreign radio stations have always paid fees for public performance of music. Let’s just say that no one likes change, and this presents a big change to the status quo in the United States. Unlike European countries and other countries around the world, the United States did not collect payment for public performance of artists’ work prior to 1995. Users of music, the digital music service providers, freely performed these works at will, without paying the owners of those recordings or the featured artists who performed the songs. The Digital Performance in Sound Recordings Act of 1995 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 changed all that by granting a performance right in sound recordings. As a result, copyright law now requires that users of music pay the copyright owner of the sound recording for the public performance of that music via certain digital transmissions. Conventional radio stations don’t pay these fees yet, but that should change soon.

What do you think? How do you find new music?

BlogHer Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott blogs at rare pattern and the pingVision blog.

Open doors in Open Source

2008-08-04T06:38:37-05:00

I spent last weekend at DrupalCamp Colorado 2008, where 100+ Drupal enthusiasts gathered to meet each other, share knowledge, and spread the word about Drupal. And I always come away from these events with a charge of energy from being around so much enthusiasm and passion for open source. But I also come away with a bit of wonder at why there aren't more women involved, at least in a public way. The only barriers to entry are self-imposed. No gatekeepers. No glass ceilings. I haven't figured it out yet. But maybe others have.

Look Who's Talking

Emma Jane Hogbin recently did a presentation (notes) at OSCON 2008. Slides:

Form an orderly queue, ladies (OSCON, 2008)

view presentation (tags: oscon2008 women foss)

In comments, emmajane writes:

I think there are lots of reasons why women don't participate in FOSS projects (and each reason will be unique to that individual). I think we need to start looking forward to find new ways to encourage women into being comfortable using software instead of focusing on where the problems have been in the past. For example: there are lots of jobs available now to work on open source projects. It's no longer just a hobby!!

Her slides are much more ... unambiguous, e.g.:

My vagina is not relevant to the functionality of my computer or any other computer.

Slide 39 is especially surprising:

72% of proprietary developers are male
98.5% participants of FOSS projects are male
Source: FLOSSPOLS

[Aside: For a good laugh, check out slide 50. Emma Jane blogs at emmajane.net.]

I wasn't at OSCON and did not have a chance to peruse the presentations. This find was via Shelley Powers on Burningbird:

I want to spend more time with Drupal, because I've only scratched the surface of this application. I am extremely pleased, nay tickled to see Angela Byron from Lullabot win an award for Best Contributor at OSCON for her work with Drupal—affirming that my move to this software was the best move for me. In fact, in sounds like women made significant inroads in the open source community at OSCON this year, aided, in part, I think, because of software communities, such as Drupal, which are decidedly woman friendly environments.

In particular Emma Jane Hogbin's Form an Orderly Queue, Ladies presentation at OSCON provides details of a dastardly plot to infiltrate women into the ranks of the tech through open source. I love evil plotters, like Dr. Horrible, and evil plots, like women invading open source through innocent seeming applications like Drupal.

Feel the Sunshine

Maybe times, they are a changin', and yes, you have come a long way. In a slightly different context, Liz Henry maybe summed up the picture best:

So who are we and what are we? Women who are speaking, who are consumers who talk, sort of like journalists, sort of like authors; we are conscious, individually and, more and more, collectively, of our power to speak and be seen in the world of public discourse. We have jobs and we're in public, we're out of the domestic sphere, but our thoughts, the way we're framed in public conversations, in the media, isn't yet all the way out of the domestic sphere. My point is that we are no longer containable by old style media. We aren't an elite of "influencers" to be courted and co-opted. We're journalists who write about who we are, not what we're told to write, like a million mommy-blogging Hunter S. Thompsons writing The Curse of Lono instead of their assigned sports article.

And we're women who are designing and coding and architecting, and we don't need to ask permission to do it.

Cheers to the Inspirers!

Let's pause for a moment to restate what Shelley mentions above: Angie Byron was named Best Contributor of the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards. Check out the comments on the Drupal.org announcement last week.

Angie was at BlogHer, you may recall.

If you ever met Angie, you would know why she has garnered such accolades. Congratulations, Webchick!

Act

In case you missed it, Emms Jane's notes are posted on the Geek Feminism Wiki. There's stuff there. Check it out!

Brenda Wallace has built Geek Speak Women. Are you registered as a possible speaker?

Have you taken the A List Apart Survey yet?

BlogHer Tech & Web Contributing Editor blogs at pingVision and rare pattern.

Tweet tweet, follow me! (Is this thing on?)

2008-07-13T18:32:39-05:00

(About this interwebs tubes thingie: Part Two)

Twitter has been having a lot of problems lately. In the past few ~~weeks~~ months, the Twitter servers have been buckling. The Fail Whale has become something of a pop icon. (Buy the t-shirt!) Ironically, Twitter's problems may have actually helped Twitter.

After all, what have people been Twittering about? Twitter. Twitter's up. Twitter's down. Twitter was down but now it's up. Twitter is partly up but some features are down. Twitter Twitter Twitter Twitter Twitter....

As Mary Hodder Tweeted this morning:

i really wish one twitter client would get the whole thing right. then we could concentrate on making tweets.

Screenshot: Scoble

How may other web services could possibly seem to get more popular by having so may problems? Twitter stands out because there really is no other web service that

has the service
has the apps ecosphere, and
has the community.

That last one is a biggie. Plurk, FriendFeed, Pownce, Tumblr, and others have their angle on the microblogging thing, some with features or interfaces that can add a lot to the experience, but they don't have the flock that flies to Twitter every hour of every day. In fact, one could argue that for most of these other web services, their existences are, to a large extent, propped up by their ability (thanks to the Twitter API; see below) to aggregate users' Tweets.

Twitter wins for losing. Or something like that.

It's about the Twittering, not the Tweets

In the past few months, Twitter has snuck into my life like a prairie horned lark. Twitterstats tells me I've found my call only recently [stats available until 20 July 2007].

I actually joined Twitter early in 2007, but got overwhelmed early. First I joined and started lurking on the main feed homepage and finding people who were tweeting interesting things. But as I added people, I had trouble keeping up, and so I started not following people who Tweeted "too much." But that's not what Twitter is about. You see, my mistake was trying to keep up with each and every tweet.

You can't keep up. Or you don't have to, anyway. You can miss a Tweet. If it's that important, the person will have blogged it and you can find it there. Tweets are more incidental, more passing, more spur of the moment. And if the Tweet is hot, people will retweet the news.

Twitter moves quickly. For may people, it's a way to follow personal friends. Not me. I'm following over 100 Tweetpeeps, and to be honest, I have not met the vast majority, and am hardly acquainted with the non-Twitter online lives of many others. But it's not about the Twitterer, it's about the Twittering. The Tweetchorus. And, of course, the Tweeting of one's own thoughts. The Tweets themselves are almost disposable.

Meanwhile, my Tweetreach is not that great. I'm not about to make an appearance on Twitterposter (see below), that's for sure.

A meta-community driven by the API

One telling tidbit about Twitter's success is that it's not about Twitter.com. Thanks to the accessible Twitter API – which, for those non-technical readers, means documented ways to get, post and update the Twitter data from outside the system – Twittering has migrated across the internet landscape, with tweets heard, indexed, graphed, aggregated, categorized and commented on far away from the home tree.

Tweeter apps

Once you have your Twitter account, the first thing to do is finding and setting up easy ways to tweet. Each of us is different, so we all won't settle on the same solutions.

Twitter "core" offers the ability to tweet via SMS. However, since most phone plans charge 5-15 cents per txt – incoming and outgoing – that puts a hefty tax on your participation in the Twitter meta-flock.
On the iPhone, there are two apps available in the newly launched app store that facilitate all you can tweet to your heart's desire, with nary a tweet tax. And these apps are free:

Twittelator is a nifty little app that gives you pretty much all the Twitter functionality you may need, including search via Summize (see below). One stand-out feature, which you may love or hate, depending upon your dexterity, is the emergency tweet button. If you find yourself being arrested in Egypt, for example, that button could be a beautiful thing.
Twitterific is an app that comes in both an iPhone and cross-platform desktop version. There is a free version that has occasional ad-tweets, which are not intrusive but to pop up hourly or more right there in your stream. There's a paid version for both desktop and iPhone, but you will have to pay for both separately.

Twitkit is a Firefox plugin for Twittering right from your browser.
Twiddict is there for one of the frequent occasions when Twitter is down.

Searching Tweets

Summize is probably the most elegantly presented Twitter search site. See what BlogHers are Tweeting.
TwitterSearch is another search website, and it has a pretty hummingbird design by Marlo leading the way. Related is Twist, which tracks trends in keyword mentions.
Tweet Scan is another search site that has a tag cloud showing what's popular. Like Summize, Tweet Scan has an API that's used by other apps wanting to pull Twitter search capability into their feature set.

Other Tweetables

Twubble searches who the people you're following are following, and through some sort of algorithm makes recommendations for people you might want to follow, too.
TweetWheel graphically shows connections between the people you're following. Those of you who remember Spirograph (see the commercial) may appreciate this one! [Watch the commercial!]
Twitter Friends Network Browser lets you click through on connections and follow them and on and on. Careful: Your screen can get packed very quickly!
Twitarcs does some pretty graphing of your last 100 tweets.
Twittervision will show you a dynamic plotting of Tweets on a world map. TwitterSpy is similar.
Twellow is a Twitter Yellow Pages, where Twitter profiles are scanned and indexed into a directory. You can claim your own profile if you want to update your info.
And if you're into lists, there's Twitter Poster, which shows Twitterers by popularity. Oh, joy!
Twitscoop has a living, breathing tag cloud of hot words in current Tweets.
Twitter Friends Stream presents friends floating upwards or downwards. Try clicking on a name to see her or his latest Tweet.
And to top it all off, there's TwitterFone. Yes, that's right. You talk, it tweets for you!

Lots more Twitter apps linked here.

Whether for the desktop, handheld or web service, if you're technically minded, you can build your own app.

All Twuttered out?

Twittering can be exhausting, distracting, annoying, addicting. It's not for everyone, at least not all the time. Check out Super Jive's confession here on BlogHer some weeks ago:

With blogging, I could sift through my archives like a diary and see where I was and what I was doing with meaningful context and reflection. Much like a diary, I could see patterns of my successes and failures. I could cringe at awkward phrasing, and laugh at something that I had forgotten I'd written three years before. Since I post pictures, I could also see cute haircuts and fashion disasters, or be horrified that I had posted myself eating bacon cake. What the Hell was I thinking?

I started losing some of these snapshots of my life because the energy needed to create them was being funneled into the Twittersuck. I was blogging much less, and I missed it. I think I realized I was getting to the breaking point with it sometime in February at about two in the morning. I am often sleepless here in Seattle in January and February because of the low levels of light (something, interestingly, I discovered about myself through blogging for several years about cleaning or writing papers at three a.m. in the winter months.) I was having a tweetversaion with this guy in New York who I only knew through Twitter. We were batting one-liners back and forth because he was up very early, I was up very late, and no one else was around. What was the point of all this? Around the same time, I had read about Ariel Meadow Stallings' challenge to spend 52 nights "unplugged," which made me think about doing some unplugging of my own.

I told myself that if I pulled the plug I would lose these new connections I had made to people who were previously unknown, or who I didn't know as well. This was real. I was in the thick of the shiny new world! But I asked myself, what could I say in 140 words that was so REAL? "I ate a peanut butter sandwich." Really? Who cares? I didn't even care. Is this a special memory I would reflect on in a year's time, if I went back through the archives? Would I even go through my archives? I wasn't sure.

For a little perspective, I leave you with two hilarious videos....

Twitter Whore, Part 1:

Part 2:

Follow me!

BlogHer Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott's Twitter handle is lauras. She blogs at rare pattern and pingVision.