Tag: Northern Voice

Matt Mullenweg at Northern Voice

The opening speech at today’s Northern Voice session is Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress.

Matt discussed when he started blogging, before he created WordPress, Automattic, and Akismet. There were a number of blogging applications at the time, and he thought the platforms were already old. He started blogging, but was tired of the software. WordPress was rough in the beginning, and he took other open source software and then built upon it. WordPress is now 5 years old, and there have been 7.226,049 downloads thus far.

He has learned, in that time, what bloggers want. He believes bloggers want:

  1. Expression – the fact that people could change there themes and designs any day and time. The themes allowed people to make their online presence their own. Spammers are digital terrorists. When he discussed Facebook, he talked about how people use the Inbox and photos most.
  2. Public – that people share with people. The most successful platforms are those that publish publicly. Sometimes permission systems inhibit growth. Privacy is important, but things that increase interaction and make it easy to follow and connect can have a
  3. Validation – people check their stats
  4. Form Dictates Writing – he spoke about the Prologue theme and Tumblr, which make it easy for people to interact and add information.

Matt then talked about some of his exhortations:

  1. Exhortation #1 – We need to remove the Friction. We need Invisible Software, such as to be able to easily upgrade the software. There is an enormous amount of content that is being created, and it will increase.  We need to be able to filter things and make things more relevant. 
  2. Exhortation #2 – We have to respect people’s time – if you are doing this, you are creating a lot of value. Adds can be overwhelming, and advertising and our models around here need to evolve.
  3. Exhortation #3 – Kill the Megabrands. Look at how television evolved from the three original main channels. Our websites need to evolve just as Proctor and Gamble have evolved their brands (Tide, Head and Shoulders, etc.). The are successful and then they develop more. Danah Boyd did a great post about this.

The Achilles Heel of Web 2.0 is bad actors. People are moving away from email due to spam. Even Facebook is filled with spam, by having all the additional applications.

First generation social networks is all about making connections. In the Web 2.0 world, people congregate around Social Objects. Example, around photos, slides, videos, links, etc. People gather around common things. But then, once sites get popular, then people want to filter it and only get their own resources.

Open Source. Matt reviewed his previous blog posts, and in the long term things become noise as his tastes change. There are a number of freedoms in the open source movement. There are four freedoms, and I took a photo of them and will upload to Flickr and leave a link in the comment to this post when I have it uploaded.

As liveblogging allows me to write about what I am thinking about things, I am thinking about a comment somebody made yesterday where somebody talked about spoke about updating their liveblog posts by adding comments to their own post. It adds to comments as well as allows the information to still be done with time stamps.

The freedoms in an open source architecture allow us the right to make things different. The transparency and power of open source of some of the online systems would be powerful if added to politics and the political process.

Matt took some questions, and spoke more about the value of the freedom of open source, and then how that would be useful for government.

Matt then shared his contact information – m@mullenweg.com & http://ma.tt.

Boris Mann’s Northern Voice Introduction

Boris is doing the introduction for the session, and he announced that Northern Voice is now an official society in BC now. That received some nice applause.

He recognized the sponsors of the session, and then gave useful information.

The tags for the session is northernvoice and nv08. We figured that out from the handouts from the Moosecamp yesterday.

Very upbeat introduction, full of energy, and lively. Nice job, Boris!

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Tagging 101 In Northern Voice Internet Bootcamp

Gene Smith is speaking about tagging at the Internet Bootcamp today, and he just mentioned that he recently wrote a book on tagging, entitled Tagging.

Tagging is a simple and quick way to add metadata to stuff you’re interested in, like photos, videos, blog posts and bookmarks

I read Gene’s book and commented on it on my blog, and am really glad to be able to hear him in person discuss tagging.

He presented a screencast movie about tagging with del.icio.us, which really started the craze toward tagging. Tagging is all over the place, and in the world of Web 2.0, tagging is becoming ubiquitous. Even Windows Vista has tagging!

Somebody just recommended the WordPress widget, Ultimate Tag Warrior. Another person mentioned Simple Tags.

I asked Gene the question about how to navigate the use of multiple words in tags, such as making phrases all one word, use spaces, underscores, hyphens, and the like. I find that I often make use of all the combinations and feel I do too much work to try to cover every base. His two-step response was exactly what I was looking for in an answer — do whatever you are doing and keep doing it consistently, as well as see what others are doing and continue to follow that (such as nv08). That is what I wanted to hear. With a lack of consistent standards out there, navigate it on my own.

To get started, tag your own blog posts, and then post / tag them to del.icio.us, and then follow the tags to see other people who have also tagged them similarly. Then, begin to see communities with your tags, such as nptech. Coordinating them with others, such as what we are doing here with nv08 for use at Google or even Flickr.

Gene will try to post these slides to SlideShare. Good idea!

Wiki 101 at Northern Voice Internet Bootcamp

Stewart Mader is presenting on Wiki 101 during the nv08 Internet Bootcamp. Somebody asked him about what a wiki is, and he quoted a Business Week article that discussed various purposes of wikis. He mentioned that organizations are often hesitant to using wikis since there is fear about open access with rights.

Organizations can use wikis for keeping and updating agenda items, posting meeting minutes, and team participation with ownership of maintaining and revising content.

Stewart then spoke about a number of wiki tools and programs. I wish he would have had the names of the programs written on a slide or on the blackboard since I could not keep up with all them. I did catch wikimatrix.org, which helps people and organizations select which wiki tools to use.

He suggested running a pilot within organizations when bringing a new tool. Get a few people to begin using a tool and then spread it with a small group. This reminded me of the work in some of the quality and practice improvement work I do in my full-time position.

Wikis, to work, should begin with a BarnRaising so everybody begins together with using the new tool. This seems to be very collaborative, but my experience is that many people within organizations want the work to get done and assume others are “assigned” to do it.

He is using a number of “patterns” of wiki adoption, or rather terms that are used to describe the successful implementation of the wiki within an organization.

“If your staff is doing all this, then what value are you bringing to the organization.” If this is the case, then it seems that level of middle management is not valuable or really needed. This was in reply to a question I had about motivating hierarchical organizations to share in the collaborative environment of wikis. This is similar to the challenges of implementing and using knowledge management applications within organizations.

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Using Virtual Collaborative Spaces

I like the idea of creating space for virtual collaboration, something available within the Intranet, so everybody can access it. This is related to paramedics and having a space for them to collaborate.

They are suing SharePoint, which has a document library as well as discussion space, etc. They have issues with access to their site.

Somebody just interrupted her and asked her to move on so there could be interaction. I just shared a comment about creating content there first, and then trying to sell the system to users. People will not go to the SharePoint system unless there is a reason to go there first.

They are having challenges with encouraging collaboration on their site. A person who used to be an academic shared how there is a body of literature with suggestions for addressing these issues.

Another person shared the concept of starting with the personal and then moving to the professional.

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