community

Certification schmertification! Metrics schmetrics! Measuring the Drupal social/rockstar graph

5 October 2010 - 7:06pm | Laura Scott

Certifications in software make me sneeze. Or roll my eyes. Or shrug. Yes, I'm a skeptic of certifications, and leery of motives of people pushing them. To me, certifications are a way to make money not from clients but from peers. It's like a tax. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Instead, pay thousands to some firm so you can get that seal of approval. And in the end, does it mean anything?

And yet there is this obsession with measuring people. It's a way of gatekeeping, of creating scarcity, of one-upsmanship. I don't think such things are a measure of quality. They're typically market tools employed to help one group of people compete over another group. It's part of a "there oughta be a law" approach to life.

Goodness knows there are a lot of people out there who have no business building websites, yet do. Rare is the experienced Drupal developer/themer/site-builder who hasn't been shown some unsightly mess of an implementation that hardly works, if it does at all, with unmaintainable hacked code and untold violations of best practices. But color me an unbeliever when it comes to the salvation offered by some certification system. Certifications don't measure the things that are crucial to effectiveness. They don't measure ability to solve problems. They don't measure those intangible qualities that make people worth working with.

And they can't measure the unknown. Certifications look backwards, and tend to reduce the beautiful and complex to the dry and limited. Are certifications what we want? Really?

Is "Rockstar" measured in inches or decibels?

Certified to Rock attempts to bypass certifications by disrupting them using a mysterious automagical formula. The Certified to Rock algorithm is secret. That's purportedly not a flaw but a feature — presumably because if the algorithms were known, they could be gamed. The blithe response is "if you continue to rock it, your score will increase."

Of course, all this depends upon what you consider a "rockstar". Forget Ozzy and Rod and Moon and Mr Mojorisin. Unlike old-school rock stars, who burned guitars, wrecked hotel rooms, drove cars into swimming pools, bit heads off of doves and passed out on stage, and were paid millions for it, Drupal "rockstars" participate and engage in more socially constructive ways. Yes, baby boomers, the rockstar is the new square. But is your notion in alignment with the notions behind the secret CTR algorithm? Who can say?

I confess that when I first saw Certified to Rock, I thought it was a joke — a kind of frivolous, er, let's say extraordinariness meter for geeks to see how they measured up — "frivolous" because it claims to distill what is ultimately so vague and diverse and multidisciplinary and, well, human that applying a single scale is like comparing apples and cinnamon rolls. And machines are not good at vague and human.

This challenge is not unique to Drupal. Just last week this challenge of defining and measuring qualifications arose at a data science unconference:

One of the best sessions I attended focused on issues related to teaching data science, which inevitably led to a discussion on the skills needed to be a fully competent data scientist.

As I have said before, I think the term “data science” is a bit of a misnomer, but I was very hopeful after this discussion; mostly because of the utter lack of agreement on what a curriculum on this subject would look like. The difficulty in defining these skills is that the split between substance and methodology is ambiguous, and as such it is unclear how to distinguish among hackers, statisticians, subject matter experts, their overlaps and where data science fits.

What is clear, however, is that one needs to learn a lot as they aspire to become a fully competent data scientist. Unfortunately, simply enumerating texts and tutorials does not untangle the knots.

[The author, Drew Conway, offers up a Venn diagram of his own in an attempt to illustrate the complexity of the challenge. If you're interested in data science, data visualization or other big data challenges, the linked posts above are highly recommended.]

Today The New York Times had an article on the challenge of computers understanding humans:

Give a computer a task that can be crisply defined — win at chess, predict the weather — and the machine bests humans nearly every time. Yet when problems are nuanced or ambiguous, or require combining varied sources of information, computers are no match for human intelligence.

Few challenges in computing loom larger than unraveling semantics, understanding the meaning of language. One reason is that the meaning of words and phrases hinges not only on their context, but also on background knowledge that humans learn over years, day after day.

Knowing that CTR is likely not even a mapreduce kind of app, more of a simple query kind of app, one can only ponder its validity in the wild and wooly world of open source interaction development. But the concept has stuck around. And people are starting to cite CTR measurement as a gating criterion for hiring consideration. So there it is. And by that measure, it's worth a closer look.

How does Certified to Rock square that semi-amorphous blob that is a Drupal individual?

The validity of something like CTR is impossible to check, except by anecdote. Like Diebold voting machines, you cannot review the code. Unlike in Drupal, or any open source software, there's no real accountability through openness. You just have to trust it, trust the people behind it, and hope their notions of "rockstar" make some sort of objective sense, their ideas of how to measure those attributes are sound, the metrics they choose to incorporate actually have relevance, the algorithmic factors and quotients employed are properly balanced, and the people behind the curtain stick to high values, integrity and selfless standards despite the obvious and apparent temptations to tip the scales or otherwise succumb to the conflicts of interest inherent in building a system that rates not only your peers but your business competitors.

Even ruling out the last part — and knowing and having worked with Greg, Ezra and Ben, I have no reason to doubt their sincerity or integrity with regard to CTR — that still leaves a lot of unknowns, a lot of uncertainties, a lot of fuzz out of which a single scale of numbers appears — numbers that, despite their vague provenance, are being embraced by some as qualifiers for hire.

So how does it work? The site itself lays out some general parameters:

It must be easy to automate. There are about 500,000 people on drupal.org and more every day. We can't add something to the system that is going to require much manual work. Certainly nothing that requires us to manually do a task more than a few dozen times. So, we could make a list of everyone who organized a DrupalCon and have the algorithm system use that because that's only a few dozen people (we don't currently do that and may never). But we aren't going to go through github, launchpad, and gitorious and associate people's ID on those systems with their drupal.org user ID and then have the system give credit to people who send lots of e-mails. That's not scalable. Pro tip: keep your work on drupal.org itself - if you don't like the way it looks/functions/whatever then help the redesign.

It must not encourage anything that is harmful to the community. This is somewhat tricky. If, for example, the system gave points to people who have a lot of projects on drupal.org then that would encourage the creation of lots of projects including a lot of really bad ones. That makes it harder for new users to find projects. Which is really bad. So, we don't use any metrics like that!

It must be balanced. One of the things we're really trying hard to do is measure skill and knowledge of Drupal in a way that is fair to people with different skill sets. Someone who is an awesome site builder (can't code much, can't design, but really can choose modules and configure them) should be on equal footing with someone who can design or who can code. This is...hard. In particular it is hard to measure the skill/contributions of designers/ux/ia people and site builders. So, if you have ideas on metrics that measure their skills, please share those ideas!

This last point is the hitch. It's the part that gets into the fuzzy logic of AI. How indeed do you compare apples with cinnamon rolls on a single scale? First thing, it seems, is to simply define the scope of what in fact is being measured. What makes a rockin' Drupalist (for lack of a better word)? Programming ability counts, but not if you don't appreciate the foundations of open source. Database fu is great, but is limited if you can't generate decent markup. Theming talent is fabulous, but it's only so much help if you can't build the site to theme. And none of this touches on the intangibles like professionalism, organization, collaborative skills, communication ability, sensitivity to project goals (vs nifty solutions), general mental health, etc. that are critical to effectiveness in a Drupal project.

And yet the machine measures something. What could it be?

Some objective metrics that might be incorporated into a certification algorithm for Drupal

Here are a few ideas (total guesswork on my part), any one of which would be of little use but could possibly be combined into some formula to measure a "rockstar" quotient. Note: These are in no particular order.

Top-Level Metrics

Simple numerical measurements readily at hand.

Drupal UID [lower is better] — Some assumption of some degree of familiarity or knowledge could be applied based upon duration of membership in the Drupal community. On the other hand, plenty of people joined the community ages ago but haven't been very active. Or maybe you joined in 2003, tried Drupal and moved to Mambo.
Drupal.org number of posts [higher is better] — Because participation is good. But maybe you're a help vampire or offer not-very-helpful input.
Drupal.org number of comments [higher is better] — Because engaging in existing conversations shows interest in what the community is doing. But how many comments actually contribute to the conversation?
Drupal.org number of Issues [higher is better] — Because one can assume that people participating in the issue queues are more engaged in improving Drupal. However, if you're posting a bunch of duplicate issues or build-this-for-me tickets, maybe that's not helping so much.
Groups.Drupal.org number of posts [higher is better] — Because this shows engagement in more focused subject or regional areas. But if it's a bunch of job spam, who cares?
Groups.Drupal.org number of comments [higher is better] — Because commenting on existing discussions shows engagement with the community. On the other hand, chatty comments are common on g.d.o and do they make the "rockstar"?
Drupal.org number of documentation posts [higher is better] — Because if you can teach it, you probably know something. That is, if you do know something and aren't just adding cruft.
Drupal.org number of documentation revisions [higher is better] — Because making documentation better reflects some understanding of that Drupal subject. But some revisions are (sometimes incorrect) typo or grammar corrections, which speak to one's writing skills but not one's Drupal-fu.
Drupal.org number of Projects [higher is better, to a point] — Because maintaining a module, theme, feature or profile demonstrates a willingness to contribute, which is an important part of being a Drupal "rockstar". On the other hand, let's face it, there's a lot of crap contributed to CVS.
Drupal.org number of patches [higher is better] — Because if you're offering patches, your nose is not only in code, it's sniffing out actual solutions to make things better (hopefully). But if your patches are no good, or get ignored because someone can't be bothered, then what does number of patches prove?
Drupal.org number of core patches [higher is better] — Because if you're working in Drupal core, you're paying attention to the heart of things. There's no knocking this (Drupal core developers are my heroes), but there's a very great oodles more to Drupal than core code, so many are missed by this measure.
Drupal.org number of core patches in current and impending releases [higher is better] — Because working in the real world of today and tomorrow probably carries more relevance than working on the real world of five years ago or three years from now. Of course, this doesn't mean they're good patches … and the same concern above applies here.
Drupal.org number of commits by you [higher is better] — Because your projects are actively maintained, which shows engagement and desire to make things better. On the other hand, split out your projects into a bunch of files and you have more commits, and does that make you better, by definition?
Drupal.org number of commits by others of your patches [higher is better] — Because if others find your patches helpful, all the better. Undoubtedly this is cool, but narrowness of applicability is an issue.
Recency of all of the above [higher is better] — Because Drupal knowledge can grow stale fairly quickly. On the other hand, if you're really new to this, odds are you have a lot still to learn. (Don't we all!)

Reductive and Social Metrics

These are metrics that would need to be gleaned from some data mining more involved than your basic query. Quantifying these things is what is known as "hard to do":

Groups.Drupal.org up-ratings of posts [higher is better] — What do others think of your posts? Probably only of low value, as the more pointed remarks generally get the upratings, and this may not reflect any particularly deep Drupal knowledge or engagement at all.
Drupal.org and Groups.Drupal.org mentions of "thanks" and similar words with your username [higher the better] — This would take some Big Data-type parsing, but could yield some helpful social metrics.
Drupal.org and Groups.Drupal.org "+1" to posts and patches — This could be difficult to figure, though, as sometimes the +1 is for someone else's comment.
IRC "karma" points — Although this skews very heavily to the in-crowd, the inner circle talking to the inner circle, as many, if not most, people on IRC don't know about "username++", especially in #drupal-support and #drupal-themes.
Twitter tweets about Drupal — Because you are probably working with it if you're tweeting about it.
Blog posts about Drupal — Same deal.

Those Intangibles that Defy Measurement

How effectively the designer leverages affordances provided by the Drupal UI.
How well the architect matches Drupal solutions to project challenges.
How appropriately the themer uses clean html and semantic markup.
How scalable the developer's solution is in a high-demand application.
How efficiently the project manager directs resources towards needs in a Drupal project.

And these don't even touch the non-Drupal-specific intangibles that apply in every Drupal project:

How collaborative a person is.
How professional a person is.
How hard-working a person is.
How responsible a person is.
How intelligent a person is.
A person's work ethic.
A person's attention to detail.
A person's adaptivity to change.
A person's poise under pressure.
A person's values and empathy towards others.
Honesty.
Punctuality.
Reliability.
Focus.
Discipline.
Insight.
Critical thinking.

And so on.

How many is a flower?

I don't know the answer to that. Is orange greater than salty? Is platinum better than mitochondria? Yes. No. Maybe.

And?

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Previewing Google Wave and Twitter Lists

18 October 2009 - 3:38pm | Laura Scott

One of the wisdoms in web application development is "Release early and often."

Google and Twitter have both released software "tests" to select hundreds of thousands of users, both with the idea that there will be problems, but let people try them out, and then improve the software iteratively, based upon real-life user experience.

This is my first blush impression of these previews I've been privileged to explore this week.

Get on my Wave!

I've been trying Google Wave for this past week now. It's been a bit hard, since hardly anybody I know is on Google Wave, and of all the people I invited, only two have received invites so far. (I got 8 "invitations" that turned out actually to be "nominations" once sent. Sorry, Google, but invitations and nominations are different things.) So I've had only limited exposure to what Wave might offer. One on one, it's pretty much a glorified instant messenger.

Then I was tipped to searching for "with:public" ... which brings in results every wave that has been posted for the public. There I found all kinds of waves on all kinds of topics.

Popping into random, seemingly interesting waves reminds me of the early CompuServe days, wandering around chatrooms, communicating with random people. Wave does afford the opportunity to get more in these wave connections than you might in a text-only IRC-style chatroom, but it takes time to engage. Do you have an abundance of time? I don't.

The biggest user experience change in what people might be used to is that you can see other people typing their messages in real time, as they type. You learn quickly can type and who bumbles around, who can do stream-of-consciousness and who is constantly editing every few words.

Shira Abel (whom I met on Wave) likes this real-time aspect:

And while some people would hate seeing what someone is writing while they are typing I’ve actually liked it from the few conversations I’ve had on there. It allows you to see the thought process – how fast or slow someone is typing shows how strongly they feel about something. Whether they take something out before pressing enter shows even more. Seeing the typing while it’s happening is the tone of the message. However, I would recommend that Google make the option to not see the typing for the Robert Scoble’s of the world – but please keep it for me. Living in Israel so far away from many of the people I collaborate with, having that little extra bit of psychological insight is actually very helpful in my opinion.

One of the biggest problems with Wave is getting drowned in wave after wave of threads (or "waves"). You have to create folders to organize them or you'll just get lost.

And call them waves all you want, it's pretty hard to surf them. Linking to other waves involves finding the other wave and drag-and-drop.

Google's help docs are their typical weak, uninformative obviousnesses that don't really illuminate much of anything. Embedding waves outside of the wave system is, so far, an arcane procedure I have not yet discovered yet. I'm still wondering how to install a robot. Maybe I'm not enough of a geek for this preview?

Bonnie Sandy seems to have made more headway:

Extending the functionality…

Apparently there are bots and robots to extend the functionality of Waves… that feature has to be simplified before the release to a wider audience.

Robots (To use robots, add them as a contact, then add the robot-contact to a wave)- that did not always work. Robots add functionality Chatbots Conversion Games Groups Integration Language Polling Search / Aggregation Utilities Wave Management figuring out if they are functioning is a bit confusing.

I NEED To Figure out how to use the Drop.io Robot. I aced the Posterous robot, which post a wave to Posterous , but I have no idea if the others are working, in process or done. So I spent a great deal of time just steering at the screen.

Gadgets directions- To use gadgets, once editing a blip, just click on the green puzzle piece, and enter the url into the bottom text box.

This was simpler not all worked but enough to truly give an appreciation of the scope of wave. Html and Iframes allow for widgets and pages to be added. From that point each wave became a stage on which I could present ANYTHING. Wave will be to designers and multimedia communicators what twitter was to those that write!

I don't know about that last part. As a designer, Wave is very hierarchical and serially threaded — not much of a canvas for visual thinking. But maybe someone will bring that in via extension or robot?

Shira concludes:

[A]t the moment Google Wave has little to no use for me. Other than the “Geek Street Cred” I get for having it, I don’t work with anyone else who is on there. It’s not open for the masses. So yes, I’m on Google Wave and I’ve checked it out a few times. But as my time is scarce, I don’t see myself using it regularly at all. In fact – the first person who invited me on Google Wave hasn’t used it. And that says it all.

If you don't quite get what Google Wave is, here's the developer's preview. It's over an hour long, but if you are sincerely curious, this is something to see.

List me!

Twitter rolled out a new feature to a subset of users: Lists. Here you can define lists and then add people you are following to the lists you create.

If you have the feature enabled on your account, you also see how many lists other people have put you on.

What becomes immediately obvious is that this will become a major recommendation engine — a reputation system. What better way to find interesting people than through the recommendations (or at least categorization) by others?

I've discovered many new people to follow just by surfing around the lists. It's neat to know at least something about what people tweet about — art, music, politics, tech, etc.

We'll see how the list usage starts to happen once everyone gets the feature. I'm sure it will start to become spammy — what easier way to spam people than to add them to a list they cannot block? But this could become a new way for people to find connections.

I'm sure Twitter Lists are going to be great fodder for the "Top X" fetishists who just love the "who's is bigger" competitions.

Rebecca Leaman offers Twitter Lists 101 that covers the basics.

Jade Craven has 8 things you should consider before creating your Twitter lists:

1. People may be offended by not being included on a list.

Some of my friends created lists like ‘awesome friends’ and ‘top bloggers.’ They used these terms as generalist lists but some people took offense at not being included on a list.

This is very similar to the follow/unfollow situations that happened before people started to embrace groups on other clients.

So, what can you do to avoid offending?

• Have a disclaimer on your twitter landing page

• Make your list private

• Organize lists by geographic region – ie, Melbourne bloggers.

Neicole Crepeau sees this as a good move for Twitter, business-wise:

Twitter’s growth rate has recently slowed down. According to Hitwise, its phenomenal growth rate slowed to .17%. In part, this appears to be due to an inability to retain new users (60% leaving in the first month of use, by some reports).

Lists represent an opportunity for Twitter to reignite its growth. Lists can help Twitter grow by providing three important improvements:

* A better UI that makes the stream easier for users to digest.
* A positive first experience for new users, where they immediately see the value of Twitter
* A way to spread the word to more non-users and broadly entice them, through List links on blogs, business sites, and through sharing.

She goes on to elaborate on each point.

In the second of a multipart series of posts on Twitter Lists, Adele McAlear looks at the impact of this feature roll-out on the greater Twitter development community:

In the September 30th blog announcement. Nick Kallen, the project lead on Lists stated on the Twitter blog that there will be a Lists API. “This will allow developers to add support for Lists into your favorite Twitter apps.”

It seems that developers were an afterthought on this Twitter Feature. Normally, developers are notified of major feature roll outs such as this well in advance and are afforded the opportunity to work with the API in before the launch. However, the development community weren’t even informed that Twitter Lists was on the development roadmap until September 30th, likely well after Twitter would have started working on it.

When the feature was released yesterday, the vast majority of developers (but interestingly, not all) didn’t even have access to the Lists API documentation until last night. When users like Robert Scoble started building lists and tweeting about them, the dev community cried foul and a draft of the API documentation was quickly made available, sending developers scrambling to integrate Lists into their offerings throughout the wee hours of last night.

Have you been trying out Google Wave or Twitter Lists? What's been your experience?

[This post also appears on BlogHer.com.]

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Will Variety and Hollywood Reporter paywall gambit pay off?

17 September 2009 - 11:20am | Laura Scott

Yes, subscription membership revenue models can pay well, but only if you can get the subscribers. So when I read that Hollywood Reporter and Variety are going for the paywall model, I wonder if they're missing something. Writes Nikki Finke on Deadline Hollywood:

I've known that Variety spent 6 months intensely studying all its options. Now toppers Neil Stiles and Brian Gott have decided to go to a paid strategy right after the first of the year. That means the website will no longer be free. So online and print content will both be subscriber-based. Exactly which combination of content and services will be offered has yet to be determined. But this is being done in recognition of the sad fact that, ever since Variety pulled back that paywall in 2006 (back when all that mattered was traffic numbers at the expense of subscription dollars), the trade has lost a ton of money. Meanwhile, sources tell me that The Hollywood Reporter is about to dump its daily print version. The date considered was October 16th, but now that's been moved back. So this means THR will pursue a paid web-only strategy for its content.

The thing is that Hollywood of all industries is a community, with gossip, rumors, insider tips, deal-makers, wannabees, and a very insider, insular, provincial social graph, often colored with a healthy dose of cynicism. What better place to leverage community participation in a trade publication?

This wouldn't preclude Variety from setting up freemium approach, with a paywall around their hottest news. But maybe they could build some traffic by leveraging the open source tools out there to build an online community. It's a tough pond with plenty of sharks, but if anyone has an advantage, it's the industry insider Variety.

Or maybe not.

Comments on the Deadline Hollywood post are interesting.

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(Psst! It's all one platform)

16 September 2009 - 5:28pm | Laura Scott

That's the message that Robert G. Picard seems to miss in "Blogs, Tweets, Social Media, and the News Business":

Judging from their widespread adoption, it’s hard to find a technology that news organizations don’t embrace. Read the Los Angeles Times on Kindle.

"Technology Diminishes Journalists’ Value"Watch ABC News on YouTube. Leave a comment on a blog about media and marketing from the Chicago Sun-Times. Listen to a podcast of “On Science” from National Public Radio. Participate in a discussion board hosted by The Washington Post about college admissions. Receive SMS news about the Dallas Cowboys from The Dallas Morning News. Get features from Time on a PDA and tweets of breaking news from CNN.

The mantra for news organizations is to be anywhere, anytime, on any platform. But is this strategy really a good idea? In an era when the business models for news are stressed, hard thinking should be done in assessing the opportunities that various technologies present. It isn’t the time merely to be copying what others are doing.

Tough questions must be asked to figure out which of the new technologies is beneficial for journalism and the business of journalism. Is each one equally useful? What are the real costs in staff time and the operating costs to be on the various platforms? What is actually achieved for the news organization in being there? Does every news organization need to be active on all of the platforms? Finally, how can a news organization achieve optimal benefit across platforms?

The answers we find might lead to deciding which of these technologies to employ.

I beg to differ. The way I see it, it's all one platform, one technology. What Picard is talking about is really a matter of context, not platform. These things he's describing are not things, not platforms, but merely doors into the big platform.

After all, all of these digital means of consuming news feed off of the Internet, and the Internet is a lot more than just a delivery system. We connect with each other in this realm. We share information in this realm. We recommend to each other in this realm. And what we do in one context appears elsewhere. It's all interconnected. Networked. Internet-worked.

In fact, the Internet is not even the thing. "We" are the thing.

It's a mistake to think of Twitter and Kindle and blogs and so on as different "platforms." They are all tools of one big machine. Different levers and buttons on the big machine.

And this is all the more true when you consider that peer-to-peer is a strengthening paradigm into the future, as Andy Oram wrote recently:

Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were mysteriously dropped for days at a time, have led many people to challenge the centralized control exerted by companies running social networks. Whether you're a street demonstrator or a business analyst, you may well have come to depend on Twitter. We may have been willing to build our virtual houses on shaky foundations might when they were temporary beach huts; but now we need to examine the ground on which many are proposing to build our virtual shopping malls and even our virtual federal offices.

Instead of the constant churning among the commercial sites du jour (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter), the next generation of social networking increasingly appears to require a decentralized, peer-to-peer infrastructure.

What is a "platform" if you don't have a centralized nexus? Peer-to-peer is really people-to-people. And even on centralized systems working the net, the people are the content. We value our connections as much or more than the information.

If Twitter goes down, do we miss the news? Or do we miss the messages from the people we follow and trust? We are the machine indeed. Speaking for myself, the news I miss is the news those I trust are passing along. And the news I find interesting I want to share and recommend to others, and on and on it goes.

In other words, distribution of news is increasingly done through people, not "platforms." We are the distribution machine.

So should newspapers just continue to stumble around, blindly and awkwardly trying out distribution and promotion on all these different faces of The Machine? Probably not. But it's worth looking at these contexts, these faces, not as separate things but rather access points or doorways to the same thing ... us.

I don't know, what do you think?

Update: Chris Messina has a great post that explores this theme of a people-centric web.

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Things I've learned on Twitter

10 November 2008 - 5:32pm | Laura Scott

[Cross-posted from BlogHer.]

As I convalesced this weekend from Day 9 of a terrible cold that just won't let go, the Thin Air Summit took place in Denver. Thanks to Twitter, I almost feel like I was there. I was tweet-reading in real-time. But you don't need to be there in the moment. A quick search for #tas08 on Twitter and you find a ton of posts. Tweets on sessions, tweets on insights, tweets on new acquaintances....

Last week I learned about the in-fighting (and quite often misogynistic) attacks from conservatives on Sarah Palin. #Palin was a trending topic after the election.

When Al Gore got onto Twitter, I saw it first on Twitter. [Update: Twitter has just changed @al_gore to @algore.]

Protests against California's Prop 8 I heard of first on Twitter.

And I found out that other people did not find True Blood tonight as much of a downer as I did. (Yeah, so it's a vampire show. Can't I have at least a little human kindness? Just a little?) When Tina Fey was going to be appearing on Saturday Night Live, I heard it first on Twitter and was able to set TiVo.

Now I'm sure that anybody reading this who hasn't actually tried Twitter probably has no idea what the heck I'm talking about. There are plenty of explanations of what Twitter is, but what strikes me as being important is less of what Twitter is and more of how Twitter is used.

Because you can follow whomever you want, you can listen just to tweets by people who interest you. Of course, as they tweet with others (using their Twitter handles) you can stumble across other people who also are interesting. Soon you have a metaphorical tree of Twitterers tweeting up a storm of miscellany that quite frequently can surprise you, astonish you, and inform you.

Twitter is as the Twitterer does

Some people seem to live on Twitter. For professional bloggers, Twitter becomes a way of building their online presence, connecting with others, sharing links, and picking up on things happening.

Me, I can't spend that kind of time Twittering the day away. But I don't consider Twitter to be simply a distraction. I learn too much from it. And I catch wind of things friends and acquaintances are doing elsewhere.

Heck, it's gotten to the point where people don't have names any more, they have Twitter handles!

Amber Rhea posts regular updates on what she's tweeted.

Earlier, in these pages, Beth Kanter (or @kanter) wrote about the importance of Twitter.

When I'm asked questions that I don't know the answer to, I admit it and use it as opportunity to demonstrate the value of the social brain or having a good network on Twitter. Unfortunately, I did not have my laptop accessible in that moment.

In reflection, I've been thinking about how much richer it is being social - how you don't have to know all the answers when you have a good network (and a decent Internet connection.) It made me think about another digital divide - for those who don't have the Internet connection or haven't yet engaged on Twitter - the knowledge divide.

Heck, in this age when, according to Wired, blogging is somehow no longer something to do, bloggers like Kristen Lowe are blogging about what they're seeing on Twitter.

Paal Hivand asked a question on Twitter this week, which had me thinking about a recent conversation on ... eh ... Twitter. Thing is, Paal said (in Norwegian) that he was contemplating an article about how knowledge used to be individual, but now is social. I'm not going to go into that statement, just offer this anectdotal evidence for how knowledge in some respects is easier available than ever before (click on the image for a readable version):

She then pastes a screenshot of a Twitter exchange....

I'd just jumped into a conversation between Adriana and Freecloud here - which started with the Albigensian crusade and ended with the Twitterian crusade - and it's also worth keeping in mind that we probably wouldn't be having this conversation if it wasn't for Twitter...

Amy Gahran's post a couple weeks ago illustrates how Twitter can even facilitate conversations among disparate people who may not know each other and likely don't even have each other's email address.

The Twitter Insurgency

The adoption of Twitter has been evolving over the weeks and months. Last spring, you would have been hard pressed to find dominant tweet topics outside of tech geekery, or the personal experiences of tech geeks. But by the time the general election was in full swing, politics had come into its own, with Sarah Palin (or #palin) frequently rising up in the topics. (The Next Women report that Barack Obama is the first presidential candidate -- and presidential elect -- to use Twitter.) Now you see a wider variety of topics, including sports, television and news events spreading across the tweetscape.

From the way things look now, it's only inevitable that the trend will continue. Unless you yourself are watching something happen right in front of you (or on live tv), odds are that the news will hit Twitter far sooner than it can get noticed, digested and spat out by the mainstream media.

In fact, the mainstream media have started to adopt Twitter as an important outlet. (And they haven't always been the smoothest about it. Witness the eruption over the Rocky Mountain News' live-Twitter coverage of a funeral.)

My favorite part of Twitter is still what I first got into it for last year: interesting insights:

@agahran. People don't know they care about the quality of writing, they just stop reading poorly written things. #tas08
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"Wasilla's all i saw" - a Palin-drome
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My 10-weeks-into-Twitter-world review: it feels... I don't know, *kinder*, than blog world. Less incentive for trolls, stalkers, etc.
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Friendster informs me that they now have faster slide shows. I can save even more time by continuing to not log in there.
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Of course, there are other views on Twitter....

“Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,” according to the report.

“Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,” the Army report said.

So if you do venture onto Twitter, watch out for those vegetarians.

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Brave new world? The creepy "clowd" and the loss of privacy

7 June 2008 - 9:47am | Laura Scott

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?

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Chris Pirillo's big Drupal itch (and the call for some collective, collaborative scratching)

27 March 2008 - 11:56am | Laura Scott

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.

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On rating Drupal modules ... where

16 March 2008 - 5:04pm | Laura Scott

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!

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Cyberbullies and Community Standards

30 March 2007 - 8:49am | Laura Scott

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.

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