Talkathon

If #magpie or other monetizing services bother you, but you don't want to drop people because the rest of their stuff is of interest, we'll need to be able to drop messages containing certain tags.

I think this is as valid for any keyword, since tweets (or mu) are short, just allow an unlimited list of keywords which, if encountered, "drop" (don't display in main feed) that post.

So, the next time people start with the bacon or the iphone, you can avoid allt hat by having a client that culls the posts. Does TweetDeck do this? (yet?)

La nouvelle version de Chez DiDi est ici : http://didi.declic.com

Elle est moderne, se branche avec Twitter (si ça te branche), SMS, email.

Il existe une appli pour Mac ou Windows qui s'appelle Twhirl. Twhirl permet d'ouvrir une petite fênetre sur DiDi qui t'avertis quand il y a du nouveau.

Voici Twhirl avec le serveur de Chez DiDi. Il est très simple d'installer et ensuite, plus de problème pour se tenir au courant dans la journée et pour nous tenir au courant de tes pensées !

Viens t'inscrire et télécharger ton image avatar et remplis ton profil. Ensuite, rajouter tes infos Twitter si tu veux suivre tes amis or bien diffuser tes postes sur Twitter.

Marquer des mots cls avec le signe # pour les rendre plus facile à suivre, par exemple, #sujet.

A Bientôt Chez DiDi

I'm not a blogger. And now to prove it, I'll post in this blog, again.

I'm not a social media expert or a web site designer. I don't have a zillion followers on Twitter (randulo) and no one cares what I say on Friendfeed or anywhere else. So what do I know?

I know that my company got its best account, one we still service, on a Compuserve forum in about 1996. I answered a single post on that forum, emailed and went to see the person and we've been working together for the last 12 years. I know how forums work having written my own (in C and in PHP) and having set up most common open source forums. I've maintained large instances of phpBB for the last 15 years. Fifteen years on the Internet is like saying, "founded in 1855" in other businesses.

Continue reading "What do we know about ... »

Let me count the ways

#1: One real address is for known business relationships and trusted, clued friends and family. For clueless friends and family, use #2. This real address is for you. It's your professional address if you are a small business owner. It is not info@ or contact@ or any other role account. It is your name or some readable and recognizable variation of it. It can be first name only like fred@flintstones.com or the more formal fred.flintstone@test.com. Capitalization helps make it more readable such as FredFlintstone@heh.com. You do not use this address to inquire about dance lessons or sign up for the NY Times site. You'll use #3 for this.

#2: One or more generic address such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etc. or even a paid account at something like http://Fastmail.fm. Paying will get you better filtering, more options and less ads. Gmail is probably the best free option around today.

#3: A method for easily creating "throwaway" emails. One such service is http://trashmail.net which is fine. I choose to use http://sneakemail.com which costs about $3 per month but has a lot of flexibility. Sneakemail lets you make up addresses as you go. For example, a newspaper site asks for an email. You give them your made up one from Sneakemail or the one from Trashmail.net which you set to expire in one week. Since both Sneakemail and Trashmail allow creation of addresses on the fly, you can actually have thousands (hence the title). I've certainly created several hundred.

If you keep control over your email by making sure you wait until you know the level of trust of your correspondents before revealing your true email (#1), you will lead a peaceful, happy and prosperous life, at least where email is concerned. Continue reading "You need at least 1,000 ... »

If you haven't read about my microforum philosophy, look at the previous few posts to this one in this section aptly called "Microforums".

Case study: A social network on Ning with over 1,000 members. At least few hundred of them are active on Twitter. Many other people on Twitter might be interested in the professional group represented by the network without having heard of it yet.

What Twitter can do: Banter but no way to separate into subjects. Each person needs to go find and follow people and constantly update their list. Even then, during certain events where a lot of activity is not necessarily of interest to them, they need to unfollow some people and put them back later.

Laconica, while it's a nice project, does not appear to want to progress in the direction I am looking for. One of the most active threads on their mailing list is whether they should keep the name laconica or change it to the slightly better-known identi.ca, aka, "Twitter clone".

Yonkly can be installed for a price, the project seems to want to progress in user-suggested features, but it's based on .NET which is out of the question. We just don't run .NET servers and never probably will.

OpenMicroblogger.org is something that bears watching, but I'm not that keen on its best features (link and image posts built in), even though I see that some would want them. I'll need to revisit them soon.

I am trying Tweetworks "in desperation" because it looks like the closest thing to what I'd like to see as a point of departure. I don't really want a hosted system and even less one that depends on Twitter, but we must use the labs we can get to experiement.

Tweetworks may be obscured if Twitter introduces groups some day, and this seems to be inevitable. I hear the have them already in Japanese. Christopher Penn suggests using Yahoo Pipes to create Twitter Groups. Another site you can join organizes Twitter contacts into a group.

Missing features

Besides being hosted and built on Twitter, here are the problems I have with Tweetworks.

First, the option to post on Twitter at the same time is terrific, it's one of the best advantages of the standard used by laconica and openmicroblogger. The problem on Tweetworks is the interface and possibilities offered to control this. I suggest the option be made a toggle or that users be allowed to select the default action. That way if you feel inspired, you check the box for this one brilliant piece of 140 character universal wisdom and it is posted on Twitter. The rest of the time, your group discussion remains on Tweetworks only.

Second, unless it can be made to work with some existing clients like Twhirl and more importantly on smartphone (read iPhone), it won't lower the bar enough.

Third, and no one is doing this anywhere that I know of except on IRC, some kind of ignore function is needed. Maybe it needs to be better than just a single person ignore. Maybe "ignore this thread" is needed. Maybe "mute this person for 24 hours"? Whatever the exact functionality might be, in a community of hundreds or thousands, you will need to ignore one or more people sooner or later.

Finally, and I think this is one of the most original features in my scenario, ignore statistics.

In its simplest form, the admin can see these and possibly whisper something in the ear of the "offender". Possibly it would be of interest to show the number of people ignoring someone on their page along with following or favorites. And for the coup de grâce, a temporary mute action based on the ratio of followers to ignorers, configured by the admin. These features using ignore statistics are all optional. They can be compared to the rating phenomenon, started by Digg, replicated in many places but little used outside of Digg-like or bookmarking sites.

Building a viable community is about member comfort. As Tower of Power said, "We Came to Play".
First, in my quest to build Twitter-like microforums for communities, I tried OpenMicroBlogger, which is interesting because it has image and link functions built in. Then I tried laconica, which is great too. Neither fills the need I see. It is starting to look like Yammer comes closest in functionality, but Yammer is hosted and branded as far as I know, so it isn't a contender for me. I'm looking into others, too.

The reason Twitter can't work is that it's too noisy and too general in interest. Let's define "community" as a group of people who share an interest. I think it was in the book The Long Tail that I read that the best-selling book at the on self-publish, print-on-demand Lulu.com is a book about one breed of dog. Talk about a vertical market! There could also be a geographical related element like neighborhoods, cities etc. Since I am interested in wine, let's say I have a tasting group that meets every Thursday night.

So I set up my laconica server and make it known that all 100 people on our list are welcome at the server. Of course in many cases, we'd be talking about hundreds or thousands of members, or more. Now, one of the critical reasons for setting up a private server is that Twitter requires you to follow those you want to "hear". Of course the public timeline can't be followed because it's too much. But in a like-minded community, it probably will NOT be too much to follow the public timeline.

Why follow the public timeline?

This is key to my own needs. This is a community. You have a strong sense of shared interests. It's too much work to find people and follow them. The microforum is the one case where I want to see opt-out rather than opt-in. With this philosophy (like IRC by the way) you enter a channel. You see every comment that goes by. You "auto-discover" all participants, unlike say Twitter.

Why you need an ignore function
In any group there are going to be people you want to ignore or just temporarily shut out. IRC handles this beautifully with the ignore function. Depending on your client setup, ignore (plonk lists on newsgroups) the ignore list may be permanent or just for the session.

My own, admittedly subjective and maybe selfish vision of the microforums (damn it they are not microblogs!) is simple. The simpler the better. The average person isn't a geek delighting in OMB or whatever other acronyms and technologies and they frankly do not care about whether they are on open source or commercial technology.

I want a server that can quickly and easily be set up on our *nix-based shared hosting with these qualities:

• An ignore list as well as a subscribe (follow) list
  
• Simple admin controls that allow putting unpopular users on a subscribe-only basis
  
• Groups (Yammer now has this)
  

Here's my "dream" scenario:

I send people invites to the server. They register and follow the public timeline. Most will do this, checking from time to time, contributing to the talk, using all the existing mechanisms. They have available the option to look at topic groups. These would be decided by the server owner. The members can also opt to follow people and watch only their buddy (subscription) list.

In this day and age much is made of Digg and the rest of shared rating systems. I would like to see the ignore list as data on the server. On the member's profile page, "ignored by" stats next to the subscriptions and "followed by" stats would be interesting. If some percentage of the users (determined by the owners) is ignoring someone, the site admin could be notified by email. Likewise for subscriptions.

What I am suggesting isn't born from a wish to dominate, it's really how most forums are set up. phpBB3 has pretty much all of these tools and communities live comfortably with rules and admin tools.

I believe there's a wonderful future out there for the software that eventually provides the flexibility that makes it easy and fast to enjoy a community microforum.

I believe in the future of microforums. Laconica needs an ignore function for them to work.

While it's sad to want to exclude people rather than communicate with them, let me explain why this would be the next desirable feature IMO, and why I'm ready to start the bounty off with my own money.

First, I've seen a spam campaign ripple through Leo Laporte's TWIT Army. No one was happy with the poster sending a stream of several Engadget RSS items per hour robotically with no other participation. In fact, (s)he only became human to come and taunt people who commented on how sick they were of it. Eventually, the TwitterFeed was disabled for the entire site. Now who's penalized?



Secondly, I see the microforum as a like-minded community. Instead of searching for people you might want to follow like you do on Twitter, you should be able to watch the public timeline and ignore individual posters.

Thirdly, statistics would be available in real time of the ignored posters. That makes it possible to display unpopularity, discouraging odious behavior. Should posters with to score high at being obnoxious, there could be a limit beyond which their posts were invisible except to people who subscribed to them (one mans's meat is another's poison).

Microforums will make real time community discussion easy.
As a longtime forum denizen, I have a few issues with community forums. They are often used for the kind of banter that needs only a line or two. "Anyone had the 1989 Haut-Brion?" or "How do I boot Windows in safe mode?" are typical. In the thread that follows, untrimmed quotes, non-sequitor answers, and long-winded useless opinions often follow. This was great fun in the days when we used 14kbps modems, LOL, and had an available attention glut. Today, only people with serious time on their hands can really do this, and only in one or two places, probably. We need to streamline our forum activities, not to go faster but to give more and get more out of them.

Continue reading "Forget Microblogging, Build ... »

Back from vacation in California. After a few days, I suddenly received a huge credit from Kiva which I re-invested, of course. I don't really know where the credit came from, but a friend mentioned that they are now crediting partial payments of borrowers to allow us to pump more into the system. Fine with me!

Talkshoe is a company I've always admired tremendously for several reasons. Oh, they always had a few things I didn't care for like the design of the site and their spammy emails, but all in all, they built a community of folks that really helped each other. A lot of them have dropped by the wayside since the "old days" of September 2006, but still it's a fun place.

On around May 29th, the statistics counters that show downloads and participants stopped moving and someone posted this to the forum. The response was a real surprise. I paraphrase Dave Nelsen, Talkshoe's amiable home-winemaking CEO here:

We decided to stop paying out and that decision is retroactive beginning May 1st.

Although it was never actually announced, the reasoning behind it was posted in their blog.

Fair enough, but there was absolutely no mention of this which makes it look like the server bills can't be paid or something. Dave has promised to reveal nothing on his "sharing" show next Thursday, but the show will certainly go through the roof in participants. Too bad he won't be paid for it!

More here

Note: there have been comments on this post, but comments are disabled, and I'm truly sorry about that. This isn't a real blog (gee... really?) and comment maintenance is a huge time sink with zillions of spammers out there. If you feel compelled to weigh in on this thread, click on "More here" above.

Thanks to Stefan Wintermeyer for sending these.

First, it was over too quickly. I originally was going to be able to remain calm and have fun, but a travel conflict with my partner's trip to the USA, incidentally ruined by DHL France losing the box of books she was to take over with her, made we really want to get back before she left.

Sunday evening, I was able to spend some time with a community pillar, Olle, the Godfather of chan_sip (or something like that). There's a huge difference between these things:
1) Reading messages on the asterisk-users mailing list
2) Waiting for oej on #asterisk IRC channel
3) hearing Olle on http://voipusersconference.org
4) seeing 1 minute Olle's presentation on http://asterisktv.com (domain name will change RSN)
and
5) Having dinner with Olle, talking about SIP, asterisk, Digium, life and family and the relationship between these different galaxies.

Which is better?

Answer: 5 if you have decent wine.

Day One was well-organized by Stefan Wintermeyer with a nice pace. Beginning with his own intro, and he has a great sense of humor, then Mark Spencer's keynote, several other presenters not the least of which Kevin Fleming, Michelle Petrone-Fleming and the one and only Olle but wait - there's more - ending with an encrypted video phone call between Phil "PGP" Zimmermann in California and the 100+ audience in Berlin.

Even Stefan repeatedly telling Phil the cocktails were waiting for us in the other room didn't stop Phil from doing his "Columbo imitation", "oh, wait look, here's another thing, hit the 'clear' button and show what it looks like to start and stop encryption". More on why you care about encryption here.

On to the drinks. But here are a bunch of people standing in front of the bar and nothing happening in spite of the two bartenders standing behind it. It only became obvious when some disco music started and the barmen started juggling and tossing around cocktail shakers what was happening. It was a great ice-breaker (pun intended) and we all know what goes on in the hall is more important than what goes on at the conference. Also a terrific way to limit both over drinking and the costs since each drink took like 15 minutes to make and serve

Tuesday was hectic, my own presentation sucked because I love to improvise and I did not update my slides. Too bad since there were two cute photos of iJustine in them and I know that would have woken up a few of the snorers. What does iJustine have to do with all this? It was they way she managed to master the Internet rather than the Internet using her. At the time, I had something coherent to say, now I'm too tired from the trip home to say it as well. Anyway, the point is, what didn't kill me, I learned from.

See you next year in Berlin for an event with a new name, a new randulo and full live and on demand video.

I've been on this case for about 15 months and so far, 92 individuals or groups have been given the chance to see their dream come true. At this rate, I'll reach my goal of 100 before our summer trip to California.
Every podcast we produce and everything we do at Talkathon.org is for one purpose: to help restore dignity to hard-working entrepreneurs in the third world.

Here's the Talkathon Lender Page

Here's why we use Talkshoe as our platform.

 

Dean Collins hosts this week's VOIP Users Conference. The purpose of this call is to discuss the community’s feelings about an Asterisk 3rd party developed commercial software sales licensing platform.

The plan is that some form of documented published schema be implemented that will allow for 3rd party software developers to sell their software applications using a common licensing model similar to the way G729 licenses are sold by Digium.

Get details on how to join the group any Friday at 12 Noon or to listen to archive recordings at the

VoIP Users Conference

IRC: Freenode.net on #voip-users-conference

Social Network: Forums, blogs