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.

]]> http://www.bretwagner.com/2008/10/drupal-vs-joomla/feed/ 1 http://www.bretwagner.com/2008/10/more-bcmke3-best-sessions/ http://www.bretwagner.com/2008/10/more-bcmke3-best-sessions/#comments Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:23:49 +0000 Bret http://www.bretwagner.com/?p=25

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.

]]> http://www.bretwagner.com/2008/10/more-bcmke3-best-sessions/feed/ 1 http://www.bretwagner.com/2008/10/barcampmilwaukee-where-did-all-these-photographers-come-from/ http://www.bretwagner.com/2008/10/barcampmilwaukee-where-did-all-these-photographers-come-from/#comments Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:49:47 +0000 Bret http://www.bretwagner.com/?p=21

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.