rare pattern thoughts in a blog

I got a chill reading this post from Seth Godin:

So, very soon, you will own a cell phone that has a very good camera and knows where you are within ten or fifteen feet. And the web will know who you are and who your friends are.

What happens?

What happens is that you have no privacy. Seth sees a big upside.

See a dangerous driver? Send a video snippet to the clowd. The clowd collates that with a bunch of other shots of the same driver... busted.

And the clowd also knows where you are, camera or no camera. So it can tell you when your old friend is just two gates away from you, also wasting time at the airport waiting for her flight. Or it can do Zagats to the ten thousandth power by not only suggesting the best nearby restaurant (based on your food circle of friends) but can also integrate with Open Table and only recommend restaurants that actually have room for you. Or it can let restaurant owners do yield management and find you a table at a good enough restaurant at the best possible price...

This is going to happen. The only question is whether you are one of the people who will make it happen. I guess there's an even bigger question: will we do it right?

If you do what he describes, can it be "right"?

Imagine the feeling of going to the doctor for that private medical condition, and everybody knows. Imagine being stalked by an admirer or resentful ex while you go about your day. Imagine broadcast spam being pushed at you via phone where ever you go. This adds a whole new meaning to the term "cyberbullying."

The drunk driver scenario? On one level, it's a description of being guilty until proven innocent. Everything you do is under scrutiny.

And of course, not all scrutinizers are equal. It's quite obvious that the government and big business will have more scrutinizing power than your snoopy neighbor. Is that the life we want in a free society?

There at least should be a toggle-able opt-in/opt-out, yes? Or are we to live in the Matrix, plugged in with no option, doing our duty by exposing our entire lives to the machine?

To me, the real possibility of this new age is the empowerment of the individual. That's the power of free (as in freedom) exchange of information. That's the power of open source. That's the power of collaboration, mash-ups, crowdsourcing. Empowerment, not simply a cooler, sexier sublimation to the System. Isn't that the real dream? Isn't that the un-tapped economic and cultural goldmine?

Some exciting Drupal buzz was heard yesterday when Chris Pirillo made a call for extending functionality and enhancing the shine and usability of Drupal's powerful community architecture.

For the geeks: Drupal has so much power in its core, and enough fantastic community-contributed modules, that I think it’s time to assemble an Install Profile, complete with beautiful (accessible, microformat’ed, high quality) themes, pre-set Views for any Web community to either install on their own or have hosted at any given Web host that supports Drupal with optimizations. The benefits to you should be more than obvious.

And I don’t mean just the framework for the community platform, I mean… like, it’s ready to go. “It’s not the features, it’s the implementation.” This all started when we began to migrate the existing Lockergnome community to Drupal (5.x, as 6.x had not yet been released and many favorite modules have not yet been brought up to speed). OpenSocial, OpenID, OAuth… just there.

I’m posting this because it’s my hope that I can find partnerships, angels, brain-power, etc. - either from other communities or businesses willing to take part in an open source project that could benefit everybody and themselves at the same time.

The post is quite long and well worth reading. Chris offers a kind of stream-of-consciousness list of features he'd like to see, such as:

Why don’t I have the options to set the colors site-wide, or per content type? Why don’t user avatars indicate my relationship with them at a glance (either with a tiny corner color or border change)? Why do I have to load a completely separate page to launch a contact form, to sign up, to sign in? Why aren’t my notification mails filled with more information? Why can’t I… make this relevant?

Drupal experts will see that some of his feature ideas already exist in contrib, some are more about theming approaches, and others are new and quite interesting.

There's a lot more, with ideas that can also leverage existing modules (such as the Content Recommendation Engine into accessible, usable features.

He already has a growing pool of interested parties, and has set up SVN, an IRC chatroom, and a way for people to donate cash to the endeavor. There's also a module contribution from the effort.

I hope that the discussion in the greater community is fruitful, if nothing else - and I’m also hoping that holy wars don’t break out over which platform is better, because the best platform is always the one that works well for the person or company that uses it. For my personal blog, I’m quite happy with WordPress (can’t wait for v2.5 to go final). For my communities, it’s going to be Drupal.

My biggest fear isn’t that people will talk about it - it’s a fear that they won’t.

We're talking. Having this kind of energy coming into the Drupal community is a wonderful thing -- especially now that we're really just getting underway on the Drupal.org redesign effort.

Harry Slaughter recognizes the need for some sort of evaluation system for the huge number of Drupal modules available on Drupal.org. However, I feel he gets the diagnosis wrong.

As far as I can tell, the primary reason for not having a rating system for modules is fear. Module developers in particular are concerned with the fairness of ratings. They are concerned with "gaming" of ratings. They are concerned that inexperienced or "dumb" end users may unfairly give a bad review of a module simply because they don't understand how to use it. These are all reasonable concerns. But they are concerns shared by other OSS projects as well. Sure you will see "bad" reviews, giving a module the lowest possible rating along with some inane review such as "tis modules sukcs BEWARES" :) But who cares, it's just noise that will be drowned out by valid reviews. It works for other OSS projects, and it can work for Drupal.

It's not fear, it's time and energy. Configuring ratings on Drupal.org takes work -- volunteer work, so far. Regarding ratings, it's also a matter of figuring out the proper metrics for evaluating a module. Some measures that come to mind immediately include scalability, ease of use, ease of administration, extensibility (interaction with other modules), as well as aggregated metrics of the status of issues (how long they're open, how many, etc.), number of downloads....

How do you measure that with basic ratings? It's not so easy. Even the architecture and business logic of a ratings system has to be well thought out.

I feel Harry also gets the remedy wrong:

John Forsythe has released what I believe is the first site dedicated to rating and reviewing Drupal modules drupalmodules.com. No doubt this site will be a source of controversy as developers voice their concerns. But we need this resource now.

I encourage my entire audience (hi, mom!) to register at drupalmodules.com and to submit reviews for both your favorite and most hated Drupal contributions. This is a great way for non-techies to contribute to the community. The site is young, and there is naturally a shortage of ratings on the site now, but that will change as the site brings on more users.

Maybe this database will eventually make its way to Drupal.org. For now we can show our support for this type of system by helping build out the database at drupalmodules.com.

I don't think private metrics efforts will get imported into Drupal.org, for risk of skewing the results. And I feel there's some downside to splitting community dialogue into disparate sites scattered around the web. I suppose perhaps it's inevitable -- "scratch your own itch" and all -- but my preference is for Drupal.org-focused efforts.

We're having open discussions about redesigning Drupal.org on groups.drupal.org/drupal-org-redesign-analysis, including implementation of some ratings system.

Angie is co-leader of this effort, and has been putting a lot of energy into making it rock. Kieran is also a leader in this effort, and is looking for team leaders.

I've signed on, as have a number of others. While stop-gap sites that fork and fragment module discussions may have some value to some, I feel we benefit most from gathering the resources of the full community. Rather than build out a remote pantry, let's fix up our own kitchen. Drupal.org is our collective home. Redesign is a lot of work. But as Jack Aubrey would say, "Well, then, there's not a moment to lose!"

Join us!

It has taken me a few days to recover from the intense energy and excitement of attending, participating in and speaking at the OSCMS 2007 (and sundry adjunct events of equal intensity and delight), and so I've been publicly quiet so far about the obscene and possibly illegal cyberbullying that has happened in the past several days regarding one of my favorite bloggers, Kathy Sierra.

If you've somehow had your feedreader in the sand this past week, here's a brief snippet of what Kathy wrote about it on Monday:

We all have trolls--but until four weeks ago, none of mine had threatened death. (The law is clear--to encourage or suggest someone's death is just as illegal as claiming you intend to do it yourself).

At about the same time, a group of bloggers including Listics' Frank Paynter, prominent marketing blogger Jeneane Sessum, and Raving Lunacy Allen Herrel (aka Head Lemur) began participating on a (recently pulled) blog called meankids.org. At first, it was the usual stuff--lots of slamming of people like Tara Hunt, Hugh MacLeod, Maryam Scoble, and myself. Nothing new. No big deal. Nothing they hadn't done on their own blogs many times before.

But when it was my turn, somebody crossed a line. They posted a photo of a noose next to my head, and one of their members (posting as "Joey") commented "the only thing Kathy has to offer me is that noose in her neck size."

The horror gets worse. For more background on this, I refer you to Kathy's own post on the thing, and these various excellent posts on BlogHer here, here, here, here, here and here.

On a couple of email lists, I've expressed the feeling that to respond to trolls is to feed them -- to give them the validation they so crave. They're online terrorists, in effect, who behave the way they do to get attention, and in general I believe it's counterproductive to elevate their status to some sort of Public Enemy, for that gives them exactly what they want, and has the unfortunate effect of elevating them to your status. My sense was that with regard the Mean Kids garbage, the best response was to respond by ignoring these depraved individuals, encouraging the prompt deletion of such content, and moving on.

Mine was not the popular sentiment. In fact, there has been an incredible groundswell of push-back against the Mean Kids trolls, to the point of declaring today, March 30th, as Stop Cyberbullying Day. For better or worse, and I prefer to think it's for the better for now, what has happened to Kathy, and untold other women and men who've been subjected to this kind of online abuse since USENET days, cyberbullying has become the topic of the day.

It's an essentially important subject in this "web 2.0" world of online communities. How do we "police" (for the lack of a better word) such patently offensive and possibly illegal behavior while at the same time while keeping the internet free?

In my session on Building Online Communities, held Thursday last week at OSCMS 2007 (video), we arrived at the subject of dealing with trolls about 2/3 of the way through, and stayed there long past our hour we were allocated. And it became clear that there was no single way. Some folks had more permissive attitudes -- let the trolls vent and be ignored -- while others said it's best to be more proactive, and suspend or ban trolls to protect the community in question.

One thing was agreed: It's essential for the community to have clear standards of behavior, standards which are publicly posted and there for anyone and everyone to refer to in case of any questionable behavior.

What's clear about the meankids.org case is that we're not just dealing with any ordinary trolling, but rather posts that seem to threaten violence, posts that strike me has hate speech. I don't see how we, as a civil worldwide web society, can accept such behavior, and we're long overdue for a public discussion on what really is "acceptable" online.

Personally I'm against any new laws, as threatening violence already is a felony in most jurisdictions, and I hate to see efforts to make the web less like a jungle turn it into a zoo. But I hope the special day today helps start a serious discussion of online community standards.

And maybe, just maybe, some of the misogynist twits out there will realize that their self-indulgent kicks result in real harm of others.

[More via Technorati.]

...and by choice I used paper. Maybe I know too much about computers to trust them for elections.

One of the challenges of launching a new community or social networking site — or introducing new users to an existing site of more-than-modest complexity — is turning people on to the various features and areas. Any community site owner can rattle off a dozen "How do I — ?" questions that came flooding in to them in the first days and weeks of a public launch. (Even worse are the expected questions nobody is asking, because nobody has discovered that cool new widget or feature that apprently is languishing in obscurity.)

Ideally, good design can avoid the more obvious questions like, "How do I sign up?" But even the best-designed social networking site or online community is going to need some sort of introduction to its (hopefully) rich features. After all, new tools, ideas, widgets and usage trends are emerging every day, to the point that new sites almost always reach into feature areas that, for many, if not most, users were until that point largely unknown.

The flip side is that these days even 1-year-old sites and software can seem almost stale. People have come to expect almost any new community or "social networking" (which itself is a relatively new buzz phrase that reflects features that largely did not exist not all that long ago) site is going to offer new frontiers to explore, be they the as-yet-unknown features mentioned above, more common features offered in new ways, or both offered to existing online communities that have been under-served. As someone who develops Drupal-powered sites, which almost always embody myriad powerful features, I can say that, from my experience, this is a challenge that arises with almost every website launch.

The catch-all solution for the challenge of introducing a new site and/or new features to new and prospective community members is the site tour.

Creating a good site tour is always an editorial challenge. The site administration team has to come up with a good, clear, instructive, and hopefully entertaining (or at least certainly not boring) introduction to the site. Usually that consists of your basic page of text with a few graphics. More ambitious or resource-flush groups might produce a video or flash animation that gives an animated presentation. (My own personal bias is to largely avoid these presentations, as they almost always are boring, they almost always take a lot of time to plow through, and they almost always instruct by emulating reality, without any chance for folks to actually do anything — and there's no topping learning by doing.)

Enter Amberjack, a new open source JavaScript library that makes it incredibly easy to create site tours that walk users through the actual site. Licensed LGPL, with a fabulous online wizard that even a Luddite could appreciate, Amberjack is a way to create annotated site tours on actual site pages.

But don't take my word for it. Check out this quick site tour.

Oh, the irony of posting this on my obscure little blog....

Slashdot is having a competition to redesign the site. Cmdr Taco sets up the criteria so:

I will pick the winner based on a series of arbitrary and random criteria, many of which I will list below. The list is by no means comprehensive, but it should give you a good starting point.

I'm sure there are ultimately things that I'm forgetting. But the key goal here is to create the new look & feel for Slashdot. The winner is the one who creates what gets us the closest to a new site design.

This contest will be highly subjective. Ultimately tho, it falls upon me to select the winner based on arbitrary and subjective factors like aesthetics, as well as more tangible ones like implementability and compatibility.

Guidelines follow. Check it out.