BretWagner.com

Online video is doing for the arts what the Guten­berg press did for the writ­ten word — super­charged it.

Check out this video from TED.  Chris Ander­son high­lights a num­ber of exam­ples where some­one doing some­thing extra­or­di­nary, takes their show to the web and all of a sud­den it goes viral.  Stadiums-worth of view­ers watch­ing a break­dancer per­form some extra­or­di­nary moves, pushes the enve­lope of dance and all of a sud­den, you have legions of dancers per­form­ing new moves never before seen.  

All it took was a per­former and their video camera.  

I’ would go so far as to say that this kind of online force will push the enve­lope of all areas in per­form­ing arts — dance, music, spo­ken word, singing — and ratchet it up to a level where each per­former tries to out­per­form the next.  This cre­ates a snow­ball effect that can­not be stopped.  Per­form­ers show off a new skill, view­ers watch this per­for­mance and demand more, other per­form­ers watch and decide to take it a level fur­ther, and again the audi­ence in increases its expec­ta­tions of what art looks like.

Too much of the world lacks access to clean drink­ing water. Every minute, seven peo­ple die from bad water or no water.  It’s an unfor­tu­nate truth that as recent as 2003, over 1.3 bil­lion peo­ple have no access to clean water.

Engi­neer Michael Pritchard decided to do some­thing about this — invent­ing the portable Life­saver fil­ter, which can con­t­a­m­i­nated water drink­able in sec­onds.  Check out this amaz­ing demo from TED­G­lobal 2009.

This cutting-edge nan­otech­nol­ogy promises to rev­o­lu­tion­ize how we deliver aid to third world coun­tries and those suf­fer­ing from nat­ural dis­as­ters.  Deliv­er­ing the equip­ment for peo­ple to purify water already avail­able in these stricken areas promises to be faster and cheaper than deliv­er­ing bot­tled water.  What’s more, the bot­tle that Pritchard has designed will clean up to 1,000 gal­lons of water with a sin­gle fil­ter.   An adult human drinks 64 oz. of water a day, which trans­lates into 182.5 gal­lons a year.  A sin­gle bot­tle could pro­vide a per­son with over five years of clean water!
 

But I think the most promise is in the 1.3 bil­lion with­out access to clean drink­ing water on a reg­u­lar basis.  Imag­ine the effects on gen­eral health of those who might now have a means to elim­i­nate dis­ease and sick­ness caused by this con­t­a­m­i­nated water.

I’ve got a beef with how feed­back is done in the work­ing world.

Our man­agers give feed­back dur­ing reviews– if you’re lucky, quar­terly. If you’re not, maybe yearly or less frequently.

And that’s about it.

Con­tin­u­ous feed­back begets con­tin­u­ous improve­ment, but I’m not see­ing any good ideas for how to get feed­back into my hands. If cre­at­ing a sys­tem for con­tin­u­ous feed­back was easy, it would be out there by now. This sys­tem should allow for con­sis­tent feed­back that is accu­rate and actionable.

From Y-Combinator:

Now that so much hap­pens on com­put­ers con­nected to net­works, it’s pos­si­ble to mea­sure things we may not have real­ized we could. And there are some big prob­lems that may be sol­u­ble if we can mea­sure more. The most impor­tant of all is the defin­ing flaw of large orga­ni­za­tions: you can’t tell who the most pro­duc­tive peo­ple are. A small com­pany is mea­sured directly by the mar­ket. But once an orga­ni­za­tion gets big enough that peo­ple on in the inte­rior are pro­tected from mar­ket forces, pol­i­tics starts to rule, instead of per­for­mance. An improve­ment of even a few per­cent in the abil­ity to mea­sure what actu­ally hap­pens in large orga­ni­za­tions would have a huge impact on the world econ­omy, and a startup that enabled it would be enti­tled to a cut.

Here’s an idea: why not cre­ate a sys­tem like what Face­book has in place for ‘Like’ing a web­site that makes it as easy as click­ing on a but­ton. Instantly, this infor­ma­tion is posted to my pro­file, and a counter adds total Likes on a site.

In a soft­ware com­pany, one has the lux­ury of see­ing what ele­gant code can do for you, and what prob­lems crappy code can cre­ate. Let’s face it– there is plenty of both.

So why not cre­ate a sys­tem that rewards the for­mer and iden­ti­fies the lat­ter. When I’m con­sult­ing with a cus­tomer and come across an ele­gant solu­tion that helps a cus­tomer, let me give props to the devel­oper and the hard work that went into it. Good doc­u­men­ta­tion? Props to the writer. A process that removes road­blocks and cuts down on headaches? Props to the implementer.

And what about crappy code? Code that is narrow-sighted or that solves one prob­lem only to cre­ate two oth­ers? That should get dinged.

Like­wise, if I mis­man­age my time and miss a dead­line, or develop code that breaks, ding me please. I like that kind of feed­back, because it allows me to adjust.

This kind of thing is more than a social net­work. It is a social pro­fes­sional net­work. Call it a ‘sopro’ net­work for con­tin­u­ous feedback.

Are peo­ple actu­ally fol­low­ing what I have to say? I’ve got 24 fol­low­ers, none of whom I know. I have trou­ble believ­ing my four tweets of the past two years (that aver­ages to an update every six months) is enough to keep people’s attention.

Sure, Twit­ter is great for celebri­ties. If only there were celebri­ties I cared enough about to war­rant receiv­ing an update every time they posted a tweet. But there aren’t. Sorry MC Ham­mer, I do not care what you had for breakfast:

I caught the “Red-Eye” and now it’s time for “Shut-Eye”!!! I had a lit­tle break­fast.… wait.. I might mess up my hair ! oh, Le coconut !!!

So what IS Twit­ter good for? Prob­a­bly some­thing, but what, I don’t think any­one knows. Since its incep­tion in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, it hasn’t turned a dol­lar of net profit.

I just fin­ished upgrad­ing my site. Took 45 min­utes total (most of that spent wait­ing for back­ground jobs to fin­ish up), which isn’t bad con­sid­er­ing I hadn’t spent any sig­nif­i­cant time on the site maintenance-wise in the last 6 months.

So where was I? Turns out you can cram an awful lot into 6 months.

It’s been two years since I dis­cov­ered the Joomla! com­mu­nity.  Back in 2006, the core devel­op­ment team had just split from the Mambo group and set off to take the CMS in a new direction.

How­ever, I have been hear­ing more and more about the merit’s for Dru­pal as a CMS.  Actu­ally, it turns out it is more like a con­tent man­age­ment frame­work.  I decided to give Dru­pal a chance to win me over with it’s flex­i­bil­ity and grow­ing com­mu­nity of devel­op­ers / design­ers.  I spent a few evenings search­ing out what I would need to develop some­thing com­pa­ra­ble to ScienceForAmerica.com.

I’m aware of the fact that Dru­pal is more exten­si­ble than Joomla!.  How­ever, after the release of Joomla! 1.5, this advan­tage shrunk con­sid­er­ably.  With the MVC frame­work of Joomla, devel­op­ers can cre­ate plug-ins with con­sid­er­ably cleaner, more com­pli­ant code.

Groups man­age­ment is an area where Dru­pal is a clear leader.  It seems like Joomla! assumes that every­thing on a par­tic­u­lar site will be done with an admin or super-admin.  This is annoy­ing, as it seems a short-sighted assump­tion.  Besides cre­at­ing con­tent, there’s not much you can do.

The other clear win­ning area is for SEF URLs.  Joomla has never han­dled these well.  In fact, many of the com­po­nents devel­oped for Joomla to accom­plish SEF still fail to fully enact unique, well-formed URLs.  Dru­pal has Joomla beat, with the code opti­mized and lean.

When it comes to design and ease of use, Joomla wins hands down.  The larger num­ber of free and pay-for tem­plates, com­bined with the well doc­u­mented how-to’s for edit­ing tem­plates, show that Joomla is really for the design-minded developer.

So I guess at this point things are a bit of a wash.  I don’t see a need to develop SFA any fur­ther– it’s got a decent forum (although severely under­used), a good down­loads man­age­ment sys­tem, and can han­dle mul­ti­me­dia rel­a­tively well.  I’ll keep an eye on Dru­pal, how­ever, for future projects.  If it ends up I need an ecom­merce solu­tion, the Uber­cart mod­ule appears to be a strong Virtue­mart competitor.

I’ll admit — from the moment the intro ses­sion started at Bar­Camp­Mil­wau­kee, I was hooked.  Peo­ple throw­ing around names like Word­Press, Joomla, Dru­pal, and Rich Inter­net Appli­ca­tions and I knew I was in good com­pany.  Granted I’m not very expe­ri­enced in the last, but I can rec­og­nize the poten­tial and am try­ing to grasp the con­cepts of Adobe’s AIR devel­op­ment platform.

The ses­sions I got the most out of were the ones I could use that day.  My pro­fes­sional web site (you’re here, obvi­ously) was stale and the Word­Press ses­sion inspired me to tackle a redesign that made main­ta­nence 100 x eas­ier and post­ing 100000 x easier.

The second-most use­ful ses­sion was Dru­pal.  I’ve never used Dru­pal to build a web app, but when I was try­ing to decide between CMS’s it was Joomla or Dru­pal.  Armed with some new ammu­ni­tion, I might do some more explor­ing of Dru­pal as a robust CMS that has solid code and some cool fea­tures that Joomla doesn’t offer.

Note to self: I need a Nikon SLR.

I just got back from BarcampMilwaukee3, the tech­nol­ogy and cre­ativ­ity “un-conference”.  I wasn’t pre­pared for the cre­ativ­ity side of it, but I found this to be more refresh­ing than the dis­cus­sion about web tech­nolo­gies I had through­out the two days.

It seems inter­est­ing to me the sheer num­ber of pho­tog­ra­phers in the crowd.  I would put this num­ber at one out of five par­tic­i­pants either had a cam­era at the con­fer­ence or were active flickr users for their blogs.  The pho­towalk was one of the most pop­u­lar ses­sions.  Maybe this is a release for the some­times mun­dane tasks of writ­ing code.  But the cre­ative side is impor­tant for pro­gram­ming, so maybe this is another means to fos­ter that creativity.