Tag Archives ⇒ online

Talk to the Future Video Magazine

October 1, 2008
· Martin Kelley

Talk to the FutureThese ‘pub­lic con­ver­sa­tions with today’s bold­est voic­es’ are the brain­child of San Fran­cis­co, Cal­i­for­nia-based activist jour­nal­ist Anne-christine d’Adesky. She’s trav­el­ing the world inter­view­ing pol­i­cy mak­ers and on-the-ground orga­niz­ers on issues of glob­al health and AIDS. The site uses Google Video and Mov­able Type to cre­ate an online video mag­a­zine.

Vis­it: Talk​tothe​fu​ture​.org and Acdadesky​.org

More ways to QuakeQuake in the socialscape

April 7, 2008
· Martin Kelley

For any bleed­ing edge Web 2.0 Quak­ers out there, there’s now a Quak­erQuak­er Friend­Feed account to go along with its Twit­ter account. Both accounts sim­ply spit out the Quak­erQuak­er RSS feed but there might be some prac­ti­cal uses. I actu­al­ly fol­low QQ pri­ma­ry by Twit­ter these days and those who don’t mind annoy­ing IM pop-ups could get instant alerts.

Web 2.0 every­where man Robert Scoble recent­ly post­ed that many of his con­ver­sa­tions and com­ments have moved away from his blog and over to Friend­Feed. I don’t see that occur­ring any­time soon with QQ but I’ll set the accounts up and see what hap­pens. I’ve hooked my own Twit­ter and Friend­Feed accounts up with Quak­erQuak­er, so that’s one way I’m cross-linking with this pos­si­ble over­lay of QQ.

For what it’s worth I’ve always assumed that QQ is rel­a­tive­ly tem­po­rary, an ini­tial meet­ing ground for a net­work of online Friends that will con­tin­ue to expand into dif­fer­ent forms. I’m hop­ing we can pick the best media to use and not just jump on the lat­est trends. As far as the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends is con­cerned, I’d say the two most impor­tant tests of a new media is it’s abil­i­ty to out­reach to new peo­ple and its util­i­ty in help­ing to con­struct a shared vision of spir­i­tu­al renewal.

On these test, Face­book has been a com­plete fail­ure. So many promis­ing blog­gers have dis­ap­peared and seem to spend their online time swap­ping sug­ges­tive mes­sages on Face­book (find a hotel room folks) or share ani­mat­ed gifs with 257 of their closed “friends.” Quak­er Friends tend to be a clan­nish bunch and Face­book has real­ly fed into that (unfor­tu­nate) part of our per­sona. Blog­ging seemed to be resus­ci­tat­ing the idea of the “Pub­lic Friend,” some­one who was will­ing to share their Quak­er iden­ti­ty with the gen­er­al pub­lic. That’s still hap­pen­ing but it seems to have slowed down quite a bit. I’m not ready to close my own Face­book account but I would like to see Friends real­ly think about which social media we spend our time on. Friends have always been adapt­ing – rail­roads, news­pa­pers, fre­quent­ly fli­er miles have all affect­ed how we com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er and the out­side world. Com­put­er net­work­ing is just the lat­est wrinkle.

As a per­son­al aside, the worst thing to hap­pen to my Quak­er blog­ging has been the lack of a com­mute (except for a short hop to do some Had­don­field web design a few times a week). I’m no longer strand­ed on a train for hours a week with noth­ing to do but read the jour­nal of Samuel Bow­nas or throw open my lap­top to write about the lat­est idea that flits through my head. Ah the tra­vails of telecommuting!

Steady​Foot​steps​.org

June 22, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Steady Footsteps

Blog by an Amer­i­can cou­ple liv­ing in Viet­nam and advo­cat­ing for greater motor­bike safe­ty. The tech­ni­cal aspects are pret­ty straight-forward but the neat part about it was watch­ing the client learn about blog­ging and online photo
shar­ing as we worked on the site: I intro­duced her to Fli­crk, Picasa
and Gmail! She took to it like a fish to water and the site is full of great
pho­tos tak­en by her hus­band David. Read more about their
work doing phys­i­cal ther­a­py in Viet­nam and their posts about life in Da Nang.
. Tech­nol­o­gy: Mov­able Type, Flickr. Vis­it Site.

Tweaking the blogs for hyperlocal content

September 4, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Inter­est­ing arti­cle over the Move­able­type blog. Anil Dash inter­views George John­son Jr of Hyper­local Media, who’s using MT as a con­tent sys­tem to build hyper­local com­mu­ni­ty sites that can com­pete against local news­pa­pers (see their very-cool look­ing Buf­faloRis­ing site). 

Here’s some of what John­son has to say:

Dis­tri­b­u­tion, con­tent cre­ation, and the abil­i­ty to more
eas­i­ly com­pete with estab­lished local play­ers online… blog­ging is
per­fect for that. I mean a blog is chrono­log­i­cal­ly arranged, in
columns, divid­ed by cat­e­gories and changes (in many cas­es) everyday.
That’s the broad def­i­n­i­tion of a news­pa­per, right? A blog is so much
more than that, but the basic struc­ture lends itself very well to
devel­op­ing an online com­peti­tor for newspapers.

It was three years ago that I fol­lowed Brad Choate’s instruc­tions for using Move­able Type as a whole-site con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem.
What start­ed as an exper­i­ment became a way of life for me. The MT
inter­face lends itself so well to con­tent man­age­ment that I’m now using
it for my non-techie clients: Quak​er​song​.org and Quak​ery​outh​.org
are both put togeth­er by MT and I’ve been sur­prised that there’s been
almost no learn­ing curve for the clien­t’s adop­tion of this software. 

Giv­en this, it seems odd that the kids at Move­able Type haven’t
tak­en MT in this direc­tion (even more sur­pris­ing since they hired Brad
him­self a few years ago!). I see a big mar­ket in my niche sites for
this sort of func­tion­al­i­ty and three years lat­er I’m still hav­ing to
tweak tem­plates to get this to work. Anil, what’s up? If Dru­pal had bet­ter doc­u­men­ta­tion and smoother instal­la­tion it would have been the brawn behind Mar​tinKel​ley​.com.

It would be fun to fol­low Until Mon­day’s exam­ple and cre­ate a
hyper­local site (hint hint to VW if she’s read­ing this). Of course,
local­i­ty is not just geographically-based any­more. Quak​erquak​er​.org is a local por­tal of a dif­fer­ent kind. I’m a big believ­er that the hyper­local­i­ty of niche and geo­graph­ic sites are the cut­ting edge in the next-wave of the social web.

There’s a lot of pio­neer­ing to be done in this regards. The net has
a lot of pow­er to take down cul­ture monop­o­lies by con­fronting old boy
net­works and business-as-usual think­ing with inno­v­a­tive social networks
that har­ness the tal­ents of the out­siders. The smart newspapers,
mag­a­zines, church­es and cul­tur­al orga­ni­za­tions will come on board and
leap-frog them­selves to twenty-first cen­tu­ry rel­e­vance. Too many of the
Philadel­phia (and/or) Quak­er insti­tu­tions I know respond to change by
shuf­fling job titles and putting blind­ers up against rec­og­niz­ing the
ever-narrower demo­graph­ic they serve. 

More classic Quaker books available online

August 30, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Geeky read­ers out there might want to know that Google Books is now mak­ing many of its out-of-print col­lec­tion avail­able as down­load­able and print­able PDFs. They list 42,500 entries under “Soci­ety of Friends”:http://books.google.com/books?q=%22society+of+friends%22&btnG=Search+Books&as_brr=1 I’m unsure whether this is books with that phrase or pages inside books with that phrase, but either way that’s a lot of read­ing. A quick breeze turns up some good titles. Thanks to “Tech Crunch”:http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/30/google-allows-downloads-of-out-of-copyright-books/ for the Google news. Old­er online book projects worth a men­tion: “Project Gutenberg”:http://www.gutenberg.org the “Chris­t­ian Clas­sics Ethe­r­i­al Library”:http://www.ccel.org/ and the Earl­ham School of Reli­gion’s use­ful but clunky “Dig­i­tal Quak­er Collection”:http://esr.earlham.edu/dqc/.

Must read: G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide

March 21, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Read
a fab­u­lous arti­cle last night and this morn­ing by Diana Boyd, a PhD
stu­dent at UC-Berkeley and a researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley.
She’s writ­ing about the inter­ac­tions of cul­ture and tech­nol­o­gy and it
speaks a lot to some of the online and offline con­ver­sa­tions I’ve been
hav­ing lately.

Here’s the link: G/localization: When Glob­al Infor­ma­tion and Local Inter­ac­tion Col­lide. And here are some snip­pets to entice you to fol­low it:

On cul­ture:

When mass media began, peo­ple assumed that we would all
con­verge upon one glob­al cul­ture. While the media has had an effect,
com­plete homog­e­niza­tion has not occurred. And it will not. While some
val­ues spread and are adopt­ed en-masse, cul­tures form with­in the mass
cul­ture to dif­fer­en­ti­ate small­er groups of peo­ple. Style-driven
sub­cul­tures are the most vis­i­ble form of this, but it occurs in
com­pa­nies and in oth­er social gatherings.

Techies will like her take on “embed­ded observers”: 

While the cre­ators have visions of what they think would
be cool, they do not con­struct unmov­able roadmaps well into the future.
They are con­stant­ly react­ing to what’s going on, adding new fea­tures as
need­ed. The code on these sites changes con­stant­ly, not just once a
quar­ter. The design­ers try out fea­tures and watch how they get used. If
no one is inter­est­ed, that’s fine — they’ll just make some­thing new.
They are all deeply in touch with what peo­ple are actu­al­ly doing, why
and how it man­i­fests itself on the site.

On online communities:

Dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ty par­tic­i­pants some­times find that they
“acci­den­tal­ly” meet some­one. Peo­ple col­lide on Flickr because they took
sim­i­lar pho­tos; the find won­der­ful blogs through search. These ad-hoc
inter­ac­tions typ­i­cal­ly occur because peo­ple are pro­duc­ing mate­r­i­al that
can be stum­bled across, either through search or brows­ing. They may not
intend for the mate­r­i­al to be con­sumed beyond the intend­ed audience,
but they also don’t see a rea­son to pre­vent it. In essence, they are
invit­ing moments of syn­chronic­i­ty. And syn­chronic­i­ty is energizing.