John Eckman
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Photos
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Tweets
- Gmail tells me that in the last month I've recieved 4,015 emails and sent 87, from that account anyway. And they said email was dead
- Nothing like an RFP due the day after Memorial day. Fedex here we come . . .
- Reminded this week of just how much dysfunction there is in the world of RFPs http://t.co/Zj4qkqd2 #norfps
- Checking out The Smiths - The Smiths: Complete http://t.co/dC5XpIXY via @MyPlay
- The transmittal letter must be signed in blue ink. #successguarunteed
- Nothing quite like roll call at a Pre-bidders conference call. #nomoreRFPs
- @jakedimare You do realize that's insulting to animals. #stayoutofnyc
- @circa1977 you can see my photo in the photo wall in the lobby, lower left #pdx
- @PetraGregorova Why Quincy? I'd have thought you'd be looking in greater camberville
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Recent Tracks
- Far Away Places by Mad Men
- Signal 30 by Mad Men
- Mystery Date by Mad Men
- Tea Leaves by Mad Men
- Hopelessly Blue by Kat Edmonson
- Chanson Triste by Carla Bruni
- Set Fire To The Rain by Adele
- Don't Worry 'Bout Me by Erin McKeown
- Busted (with Willie Nelson) by Ray Charles
- Between The Bars by Madeleine Peyroux
Brian IbbottNPRKEXPRay LaMontagneAimee MannR.E.M.Contrast PodcastU2EelsKEXP.org - 90.3FM SeattleDavid BowieThe Mountain GoatsMumford & SonsJohnny CashWilcoMary GauthierTom WaitsBob DylanJosé GonzálezFeistAdeleRoxy MusicKanye WestThe RootsAlison KraussColin MeloyBettye LaVetteThe CureEarlimartAndrew BirdEmilíana TorriniPeter GabrielAlison Krauss & Union StationAmos LeeThe SmithsMavis StaplesSinéad O'ConnorKat EdmonsonNeil YoungSarah McLachlanTalking HeadsBen HarperSpoonIron & WineNine Inch NailsBen GibbardGirls In The EightiesLucinda WilliamsStarsFredrik- 9 plays
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Status
- Packing for CMS Expo - hard to fit the CMS Myth cape in the carry on
- Hey Denver area vegas - other than Watercourse foods, what are my must-eats in the mile high city? Who has the best top 10 list for Denver area?
- With my own two hands . . .
- Twenty years ago I spent a Boston hurricane (Bob) with the love of my life whom I'd just met. This weekend I plan to spend another Boston hurricane (Irene) with the same . ..
- Watching @jondbishop talk about WordPress shortcodes at #bostonwp
- I just loved Music That Matters, Vol. 246 - The Future by various artists on KEXP Presents Music That Matters using #iScrobble
- Thanks all (twittersphere and Facebook-land) for birthday wishes
- Tonight, WordPress Boston Meetup - tomorrow, Refresh Boston. I love Kendall Square . ..
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ROFLCON III
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Info
- SummarySeasoned, strategic professional with cross-disciplinary expertise in user experience, project management, and software engineering. Highly effective communicator with designers, developers, and business stakeholders. Proven ability to lead teams on large-scale development projects. Experience with all facets of the software lifecycle from initial scope definition and requirements cultivation through deployment and on-going support. Passion for innovative technologies and online communities; commitment to staff development and coaching. Ability to compose multiple sequential sentence fragments highlighting skills. ;)Specialties: Open Source software, content management, online community platforms, online learning, social networking, blogging, innovation, research; LAMP, php, javascript, ajax. Drupal, WordPress, Magento, DjangoExperience
- May 2011 - PresentDigital Strategist / iSITE DesignDigital Strategy, Content Management consulting, and Account Management.
- Sept 2010 - PresentTechnical Reviewer / Packt PublishingTechnical Reviewer for Packt Publishing books, including "WordPress 3 Ultimate Security", "WordPress 3.0 for Business Bloggers" and "WordPress 3 Cookbook." "WordPress in Education" in review currently.
- Sept 2009 - PresentFounding Organizer / WordCamp BostonOrganizing WordCamp Boston 2010 (January 23rd 2010) and 2011 (July 23-24, 2011).
- Jan 2008 - Apr 2011Sr. Director, Commerce Strategy / OptarosProviding strategic guidance to Optaros clients and teams, delivering innovative web applications at the intersection of community, content and commerce.
- May 2006 - Jan 2008Practice Director, Next Generation Internet / OptarosOptaros is an international consulting and systems integration firm that provides enterprises with best-fit solutions to IT business challenges, maximizing the benefits of open source software. Whether your organization has had little exposure to open source software or has open source-based solutions currently in place, Optaros has the business and IT problem solving experience to advise on the areas where open source can be effective and how to proactively manage the use and benefits of open source software.
- May 2005 - May 2006Director of Development / PixelMedia
- Jan 2000 - May 2005Principal Consultant / Molecular
Education-
2004 - 2006Northeastern UniversityMasters in Information Systems
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1992 - 1998University of Washington, SeattlePhD in English / American Studies
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1988 - 1992Boston UniversityBA in English
Additional Information-
Websites:
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Interests:Content Management, Ecommerce, Free / Open Source Software, Online Communities, Web 2.0, Blogging
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Checkins
- MBTA Swampscott StationBurrill Street and Railroad Avenue
- MBTA North Station135 Causeway St.
- ISITE Design268 Summer St, Boston, MA 02210
- ISITE Design268 Summer St
- MBTA North Station135 Causeway St.
- MBTA North Station135 Causeway St.
- ISITE Design268 Summer St
- ISITE Design268 Summer St, Boston, MA 02210
- MBTA North Station135 Causeway St.
- Chelsea, MassachusettsAnywhere!
- MBTA Swampscott StationBurrill Street and Railroad Avenue
- MBTA North Station135 Causeway St.
- Bon Me TruckDewey Square
- Dewey SquareAtlantic Ave.
- ISITE Design268 Summer St, Boston, MA 02210
- ISITE Design268 Summer St
- MBTA North Station135 Causeway St.
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Recent Tracks
- Far Away Places by Mad Men
- Signal 30 by Mad Men
- Mystery Date by Mad Men
- Tea Leaves by Mad Men
- Hopelessly Blue by Kat Edmonson
- Chanson Triste by Carla Bruni
- Set Fire To The Rain by Adele
- Don't Worry 'Bout Me by Erin McKeown
- Busted (with Willie Nelson) by Ray Charles
- Between The Bars by Madeleine Peyroux
Brian IbbottNPRKEXPRay LaMontagneAimee MannR.E.M.Contrast PodcastU2EelsKEXP.org - 90.3FM SeattleDavid BowieThe Mountain GoatsMumford & SonsJohnny CashWilcoMary GauthierTom WaitsBob DylanJosé GonzálezFeistAdeleRoxy MusicKanye WestThe RootsAlison KraussColin MeloyBettye LaVetteThe CureEarlimartAndrew BirdEmilíana TorriniPeter GabrielAlison Krauss & Union StationAmos LeeThe SmithsMavis StaplesSinéad O'ConnorKat EdmonsonNeil YoungSarah McLachlanTalking HeadsBen HarperSpoonIron & WineNine Inch NailsBen GibbardGirls In The EightiesLucinda WilliamsStarsFredrik- 9 plays
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Posts
- May 20, 12
Finally took the time this weekend to clean up the theme on this blog and make it HTML 5 and Responsive. This basically means a mashup of:
- The WordPress Theme I picked a while back (Nameless, though my copy of it is modified a bit)
- HTML 5 Boilerplate, including modernizr. (I did think about jumping right to HTML 9 Responsive Boilerstrap JS, but wasn’t sure I was ready to “rubygem the lymphnode js shawarma module” as they say).
- Some responsive WordPress core styles
- Example media queries for various sizes from around the web
The results look pretty good in all the browsers I have access to, and all the tools I’ve tested in – but do let me know if you find something ugly or unexpected going on. You can find the whole thing at GitHub if you’re interested in the details.
- May 19, 12
Enable "deprecate offline_access" to get extended access token and be prepared for when Facebook permanently removes offline_access
Facebook’s developer roadmap is always changing. The latest change that impacts WPBook and WPBook Lite is the removal of the “offline_access” permission, coming in July:
The offline_access permission is deprecated and will be removed July 5, 2012. Until then, you can turn this change on or off using the “Remove offline_access permission” migration. On May 2, 2012, we will automatically turn the migration to “enabled” for all apps. If this breaks your app, you can turn the migration back to “disabled” until July 5, 2012 when it will be permanently “enabled” for all apps.
If that wasn’t confusing enough, check out the “Removal of offline access permission” page, which explains that:
While we are removing the use of the offline_access permission, through a migration setting in the Developer App, we are now allowing the option to use access_tokens with a long-lived expiration time that can be renewed each time the user revists your app (see exceptions below). For existing apps that are not using the offline_access permission, there are no changes required for your app, but you should consider using the new endpoint that allows the longer expiration time.
To translate a bit and summarize:
- On May 2nd, 2012, Facebook changed the setting for all existing apps so that the “remove offline_access” permission was enabled – but allowed users to change it back to disabled if this broke their applications
- As of July 5th 2012, the offline_access permission will disappear forever for everyone
- At some other point (I don’t know when) Facebook changed the migration’s name from “remove offline_access” to “deprecate offline_access” and linked the setting to these “long-lived” tokens
Ultimately, as I read the docs, this means you have to make a choice: you can either keep “deprecate offline_access” disabled, and use offline_access tokens, OR you can set “deprecate offline_access” enabled, and use “long-lived” tokens.
Long Lived tokens live for two months (60 days) and then the user has to re-authorize the application to get a new long-lived token.
I’ve updated WPBook (2.5.2) and WPBook Lite (1.4) to work with long-lived tokens. The apps will no longer ask for offline_access, and will check for token validity, flagging in the admin when a token is invalid.
If you already have a Facebook application set up and working with either WPBook or WPBook lite, you don’t need to do anything. Your tokens, which were granted under the old “offline access” regime, will keep working, for now. Per Facebook:
After the offline_access removal date, currently set for 7/5/2012 (see roadmap for exact date), all existing offline_access access_tokens will have their expiration time truncated to 60 days. This truncation will be transparent to the user and your app will continue functioning normally; Facebook will send an updated message through the weekly developer round-up when this truncation will occur.
If you don’t yet have a Facebook application, and are setting up a new one, you should start with “deprecate offline_access” enabled, and WPBook / WPBook Lite will be fine, but you will need to re-authenticate every 60 days.
Ultimately everyone will end up having to re-authenticate every 60 days.
These implementations are just the first pass to ensure that WPBook and WPBook Lite keep working. Next step will be to actually store the expiration returned with the token and be able to inform the user before the token becomes invalid, not just let them know after the fact.
- May 10, 12
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the “Responsive Design” approach, and how the problem is we’re still thinking of it as an approach, as though the alternatives are equally valid and universal. There’s “regular” design or “responsive” design.
What if we started just calling the set of techniques we’ve been calling “responsive” plain old design, and came up with an alternative label for what people used to do? (Ok, my own sites aren’t all responsive, but they will be whenever I next get around to it – the point is that new designs should all be done this way).
So I took to the twitter stream for inspiration. Storify below, enjoy.
- May 06, 12
This weekend I had a chance, thanks to Ian Muir, to present at New England GiveCamp. GiveCamps are an international phenomena, in which developers and designers (and marketing and strategy folk) get together with non-profit organizations over a weekend to build or enhance sites (happily, many on Drupal and WordPress) for those charities.
New England GiveCamp ran all weekend (May 4-6) at the Microsoft NERD Center in Kendall Square, and feature 29 different non-profits and over 110 volunteers. You can read more about it on their news feed which is also frequently linking to blog entries by attendees.
I hope next year to be able to attend and do some development, not just drop in and chat about strategy, but it was great to be able to be involved.
Here’s the deck I used to drive the conversation.
Digital Strategy 101View more presentations from John Eckman - Mar 29, 12
While flying down to Denver for DrupalCon, I finally caught up on some of the videos in my queue optimistically labeled “watch later.” I put videos (or sometimes podcasts) there when they seem compelling but are too long for the commute or for sitting at the laptop watching.
Often these are from the Berkman Video Fishbowl or other Boston area events that I wasn’t able to attend in person. (As I’ve written before, Boston is an embarrassment of riches from the point of view of interesting events). The video below isn’t from the fishbowl, but is from iLaw 2011. In it, Jonathan Zittrain gives an updated version of a talk he’s given multiple times (Google turns up many videos from the last 2 years) called “Minds for Sale,” in which he examines “the consequences of crowdsourcing, economically, legally and socially.”
It’s a fascinating talk, though it may start out a bit slow if you’re already familiar with the basic terrain of crowdsourced labor online, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and the like. When he starts to get into the notion of crowdsourcing the identification of protesters in photos, though, it starts getting really provocative as it pushes on our tendency to call for a hands-off when it comes to ‘net regulation.
I was reminded of it again when I saw today that Google is using ReCaptcha (a crowdsourced, labor-for-free, decomposed into small parts so no one knows the whole task model similar to those Zittrain describes) to improve recognition of street addresses in street view (techcrunch).
How far off is this from using Recaptcha (or similar technologies) to decode the license plate of cars parked at an Animal Rights conference as seen from afar? Or, for that matter, at an HIV treatment facility?
- Mar 20, 12
At this morning’s DrupalCon Denver keynote, Dries mentioned the concept of the Assembled Web a number of times: how Drupal enables web applications to be assembled from component parts (both parts from within Drupal and parts from outside it).
Although his usage is a bit different than ours was (and Acquia has been using the term for some time) I couldn’t help but recall all the writing we did about The Assembled Web when I was at Optaros in 2008-2009. Specifically, I went back to “The Assembled Web: Notes Toward a Manifesto” on this blog from September of 2009, and I was amazed at well it holds up, even with the themes of DrupalCon 2012.
Some highlights from the original post I thought remained relevant:
1. You should always be thinking multi-site, multi-interface, multi-project.
Although we weren’t calling it responsive design then, we were thinking about the notion that any time you create content or functionality, you need to think about the multiple contexts in which that content or functionality might be used. We were thinking less about devices and more about contexts, perhaps, but it still sounds like pretty decent advice.
4. Design is critical, and design is not about pretty shiny objects
Well, ok, one could argue there’s never been a time where this wasn’t true – but we were right to say that its importance was only increasing as interfaces proliferated.
5. The internet itself, like the *nix operating systems on which it (almost entirely) runs, is a set of small pieces loosely joined
Other than the shameless poaching from David Weinberger’s book this one holds true too. This is maybe the closest to what Acquia has picked up and taken from the meme we tried to create, with the elaboration:
Every project you do must be composed of smaller discrete components communicating with each other. The corollary is that every project you do must also be composeable or consumable by other projects – including projects you know nothing about. This is true across multiple projects (within your organization and outside it) as well as over time within a given project.
- Mar 15, 12
Next week I’m off to Denver for DrupalCon 2012. Since DrupalCon 2008 (which was in Boston) I’ve done both SXSW and DrupalCon each year, but that was proving to be a bit of an overload, so this year I’ve dialed back, skipped SXSW, and chose DrupalCon instead. I’ve found it consistently more useful.
I’ll be attending the Drupal in Education Unconference Monday, and then the main conference Tue-Thurs. (See my schedule of sessions).
I’m most looking forward to:
- Jay Batson’s talk on Web Experience Management in Drupal
- The session on Organic Groups 7 (though it conflicts with a good session on responsive design as well)
- The Drupal Ladder – an outgrowth of an initiative in the Boston Drupal Group I’ve participated in
- The Open Academy presentation – A Drupal Product for Departmental Websites
- Designing for Content Management Systems
Though like all good open source conferences there are many time blocks where there are 5 or 6 sessions I’d like to attend.
It will also be my first year at DrupalCon as an official CMS Myth Mythbuster – looking forward to bringing some Drupal community perspective to myths about CMS.
- Feb 20, 12
I originally started this blog just before the first BarCamp Boston, back in may of 2006, and I’ve helped organize / volunteer at a number of them as well as given a few talks.
This year BarCamp Boston 7 returns to the NERD center on April 7th and 8th – hope to see you there.
Maybe I’ll give a talk on the Official.fm Feed Generator, or the WPGPlus plugin – I’d love to get some hacker help with the latter in particular.
- Jan 30, 12
One of my consistently favorite podcasts of the last few years has been The Waiting Room, a new music show out of Cardiff, Wales. The show is broadcast on a number of internet radio stations, but I generally listen to it as a podcast, so that I can timeshift and listen when I have time not when it is being broadcast.
They’ve been hosted for some time now on Official.fm, a site which allows users to post tracks and playlists, make them downloadable, make them embeddable, and the like.
Official.fm does produce an RSS feed of a given user’s tracks (there’s a little grey RSS icon at the lower left corner of a user’s page), but the structure of that feed doesn’t work for podcast clients, including itunes.
A while back I made a Yahoo! Pipe that would translate the appropriate official.fm feed into something that Downcast (my podcatcher of choice) would be able to handle, but it annoyed me that this still wasn’t usable in iTunes. (iTunes requires that the enclosure file end in an appropriate extension like .mp3, which means the /download style links Official.fm produces cannot be used in an iTunes feed).
So this weekend I hacked up the UnOfficial.fm iTunes Feed Generator (github page). It takes an official.fm username (and some other metadata used by iTunes) and creates an iTunes appropriate RSS feed.
As a sample and test feed, here’s an iTunes compliant feed for The Waiting Room:
http://johneckman.com/uo/feed.xmlYou can take this url, and in iTunes got to Advanced->Subscribe to Podcast. Paste in the feed url, and voila – TWR is back in your iTunes.
The feed gets updated every 24 hours (heck, they only post shows weekly!) via a cron job that recreates the feed.xml file.
If you’re geekily inclined, you can grab the script from github and configure it as you see fit for other official.fm artists.
(Official.fm does apparently have an API, but I didn’t see any simple way to get the path to the actual mp3 file via the API, even when it is marked downloadable).
- Jan 17, 12
Inspired by seeing comments in Google+ about the need for a WordPress cross-post, I whipped up a quick WordPress plugin: WPGPLus.
For now, since the Google+ API is read-only, I’m borrowing inspiration from Luka Puši?’s GPlus Bot and Dmitry Sandalov’s Twitter 2 Google Plus script.
This means emulating the Google+ mobile web experience using Curl.
WPGPlus adds a box to the post edit screen where you can choose yes/no for publishing to Google+, as well as a place for a message to be used in the body.
(If you provide a Google+ message it is used; if you provide a post excerpt it is used; otherwise post content is used).
Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think!
- Jan 16, 12
This last weekend I finally got drafted and posted Closing the Books on WordCamp Boston 2011 over on WCBOS site.
Planning WordCamp Boston the last two years has been quite an experience: challenging, at times high-stress-inducing, but well worth the effort. It’s only really been possible, of course, because of the first class team of organizers and volunteers, many of whom worked quietly behind the scenes getting all the hard tasks done, especially in the weeks leading up to the camp.
Thanks are due (much overdue) to my fellow organizers and all the volunteers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees who made WordCamp Boston 2011 a great success!
Now, on to 2012.
- Jan 16, 12
I was very happy to find out this weekend that I will be speaking next weekend (1/21/12) at Western Mass Drupal Camp in Amherst.
I’ll be walking through a case study of the site ISITE Design recently designed and built for the JFK Jr Forum at the Harvard Institute of Politics (The Forum site is new, the Institute of Politics site is existing).
As I wrote in the session description:
An interesting project – in some ways a very simple Drupal site with a single content type, but lots of interesting features.
Key features we’ll review include:
- Kaltura – open source (and SaaS) video platform for livestreaming, transcoding, and delivery, including HTML 5 video
- Programmatic content migration from EZ Publish, using Feeds
- Homepage feature carousel and “featured” forums: Views, Blocks, Nodequeue
- Complex Views (Headers, Contextual Arguments, rewriting)
- Taxonomy: Speakers, Moderators, Cosponsors, Subjects
- Calendar of Forums
Looks like it will be a very full day of sessions, including presentations on responsive design, Drush basics, Views, and usability testing.
- Jan 12, 12
ISITE Design created a fun iOS app, Photoblast (best on iPhone, but you can run it in pixel-doubled mode on your iPad too) that lets you add bling, facial hair, luchadors, and the like to your photos for extra impact. Forget Instagram, ours has a pimp cup!
The app itself is free, and comes with a few standard packs, but bonus packs are available (in-app purchase) for $0.99. (I’ll be first to say it: bonus packs are the new ringtones).
Related posts elsewhere:
- Instagram filters not cutting it anymore? Maybe it’s time to bring the bling with PhotoBlast (Silicon Florist)
- A Recipe for Innovation (ISITE’s Gene Ehrbar in ISITE Insight)
- Photoblast App (ISITE Design’s Petra Gregorova on building the app’s marking site with responsive design)
Try it out, and let me know what you think.
- Jan 10, 12
Over the last year I’ve served as a reviewer for a few books for Packt Publishing, focused on WordPress:
All three have now been published and are worth checking out. Details of each below.
The earliest of the three to be published was Olly Connelly‘s WordPress 3 Ultimate Security.
Connelly covers a broad swath of general web security while honing in on WordPress: everything from securing your home wifi to setting up ssh on a remote linux server. Though the advice is most deep for people on dedicated servers or VPS’s where they control the whole stack, there’s a lot of useful info here for folks on shared hosting as well.
He also covers troubleshooting, recovery, backing up (sometimes necessary for recovery!), and many of the plugins available aimed at making WordPress more secure.
The second (in publish order) was WordPress 3 Cookbook by Ric Shreves and Jean-Baptiste Jung.
This one takes the familiar form of a cookbook, presenting a series of “recipes” for how to accomplish specific tasks using the WordPress platform.
The recipes range in complexity from very simple tasks requiring no plugins or code editing (just using WordPress’ built in settings) to complex theme development and plugin configuration.
The current sample chapter on the Packt site is Chapter 5, “Building Interactivity and Community” which gives a good sense of the style of the book. (Though I found Packt’s free chapter function non-functional in Chrome – try Firefox instead).
I won’t even hold it against them that they chose to suggest Simple Facebook Connect over my own WPBook as a way of doing WordPress Facebook integration. ;)
The third was WordPress 3 for Business Bloggers by Paul Thewlis, which, as the blurb has it:
shows you how to use WordPress to run your business blog. It covers everything you need to develop a custom look for your blog, use analytics to understand your visitors, market your blog online, and foster connections with other bloggers to increase your traffic and the value of your blog.
It’s got a case-study format, based on a kind of individual-consultant-professional style blogger using his blog to show his professional knowledge and spread a personal brand – but the lessons are applicable to a wide variety of different kinds of bloggers.
- Jan 04, 12
OK, no more testing, no more publishing and unpublishing this page.
WPBook 2.3 is released. This uses the same Facebook SDK (3.1.1) as WPBook Lite which I just released last weekend – this will make it easier to manage both.
It will also let me start work on adding more features to the plugin- a more stable base to work from.
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Third test. Should publish just to WPBook page.
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Oops. That’s why we test. Typo in publish_to_facebook.php fixed.
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Sorry for the testing post. Just working on an update to WPBook 2.3, including an update to the Facebook SDK, and need to make sure in the process I haven’t busted anything.This should post to personal profile and to page wall.
—- - Jan 03, 12
Over in the WordPress Support forums for WPBook, WPBook user TheCitizen was asking about the absence of “share” links on Wall Excerpts posted via WPBook. I responded that in my experience posts made via the API (by an App, rather than by the user directly) don’t get “share” links inside Facebook.
He pointed to Facebook Page Publish, a WordPress plugin which also cross-posts to Facebook (though it does not import comments). Posts made via this plugin do get a share link.
Digging in a bit, I realized that Facebook Page Publish uses the Link object in the Facebook Graph API, whereas WPBook and WPBook Lite both use a Post object.
What’s the difference? That’s what I’m trying to determine now.
Links are posted with these fields (ref):
- link
- message
The rest of the values “are taken from the metadata of the page URL given in the ‘link’ prarameter.
Posts are created with these fields (ref):
- message
- link
- picture
- name
- caption
- description
- actions
- privacy
- object_attachment
So Posts are more complex than Links, whereas Links rely on getting the Facebook metadata from the page returned by the link.
How does each appear, on the timeline and in the news feed?
Here’s the same link, posted twice, using the Facebook Graph API explorer – the first time (the lower box) is as a Link, the second time is as a Post:
That is how they look on the timeline – logging in as another FB user and looking at News Feed, I could not even see the Post type, only the Link type:
Though I’m certain that in the past I have seen items in the newsfeed which were posted as Posts. (Maybe it was that I’d just posted the same link as a link, so Facebook was hiding the second item as spam? I’ll retry with something different).
(Update: here’s what a Post type object looks like in the Newsfeed – the item for this blog post):
A few things to note:
- The nicer excerpt – “We are an interactive agency . . . ” was pulled from the page being linked to by Facebook themselves, not entered by me. In the case of WPBook or WPBook Lite posts, we want to provide the full excerpt, not have it pulled from the link destination.
- The image – again, this was pulled from the link destination. In the case of WPBook or WPBook lite posts, the image would be provided by the app (the featured image from the post) not grabbed from the destination link – but it looks the same in both.
- In the case of the link type, the “via the Graph API Explorer” is next to the poster’s name, but in the Post type it is down at the bottom above the action links
- The Link type gets a “share” action link, while the Post type only gets “Like” and Comment.”
Given all this, plus the fact that I found it hard to find the Post type in the newsfeed of an account I know follows me, I wonder if we shouldn’t switch to posting blog posts as the “Link” type.
The challenge is that the “link” type depends on the target blog having the right open graph metadata in place already (unless wpbook / wpbook lite try to actually provide that metadata).
When Facebook visits the link, it looks for Open Graph Metadata – which your blog’s theme may or may not provide.
Using the “Post” object allows WPBook / WPBook Lite to control the message being sent to Facebook more explicitly, rather than relying on metadata.
The part that worries me though is how frequently “Post” type objects get into News Feeds. Since Facebook controls the algorithm which decides what, out of the hundreds or thousands of possible posts in any given user’s feed, to show that user, I have no way of knowing whether object type (Post vs Link) has any impact.
Anyone have data on that to share?
- Jan 01, 12
A few months ago I discussed the Future of WPBook in this space, specifically what to do about Facebook’s new requirement that all applications providing canvas pages or page tabs had to be accessible via SSL. As I outlined it then, I saw the options as:
- Eliminate the canvas page and tab altogether – make WPBook just focus on cross-posting and comment import, thus potentially eliminating the SSL requirement?
- Make it optional – keep the canvas page and tab, but make them optional – only for users who want them and have the necessary SSL certificate
- Fork the plugin – make a version of the plugin which works like the current model, but also a second (WPBook Lite?) that only does cross posting and comment import? That way we could have separate directions for each to simplify setup confusion
- Stop developing WPBook – There are a number of other plugins which do Facebook posting, and at least one which does Facebook comment importing (probably more). Is it worth continuing to develop WPBook if better alternatives exist?
Ultimately, I settled on Option 3: Fork the plugin, and create a lighter-weight version which did not include the canvas page or tab. The result is WPBook Lite, available now in the WordPress Plugin Repository.
Should I use WPBook, or WPBook Lite?
I suspect this will be the main question folks will face, so here’s a quick comparison table:
Feature WPBook WPBook Lite Cross Post WordPress Blog Posts to Facebook X X Post WordPress Blog Posts to Facebook Profiles (Walls), Pages, and Groups X X Import comments made against Facebook Excerpt Posts to WordPress as native comments X X View WordPress Blog inside Facebook as Canvas Page Application X Add WordPress blog as a tab to a Facebook Page X Requires WordPress blog be accessible via SSL (HTTPS) X Basically, if you are able to access your blog via HTTPS, and you WANT the view of the blog inside Facebook as a canvas application, or you want the page tab feature, you should use WPBook.
If your blog is not accessible via HTTPS, or you don’t want the view of the blog inside Facebook / page tab, then you should be happier with WPBook lite.
I’ll be updating the instructions over at WPBook.net shortly to reflect Facebook’s new look for developer settings shortly, and will also differentiate between WPBook and WPBook Lite. In theory, configuring WPBook Lite should be significantly simpler for most users.
If you’re already using WPBook and shift to WPBook Lite, you will need to regrant permissions.
Migrating from WPBook to WPBook Lite:
- View your WPBook settings page, and write down your profile ID as well as the IDs of any pages/groups to which you want to cross publish.
- Deactivate WPBook (but don’t delete it yet)
- Install and Activate WPBook Lite
- Set up a new Application for WPBook Lite – this time you should only need the “Website” settings under Integration, not any of the “App on Facebook” section settings
- Visit the WPBook Lite settings page in WordPress, fill out the required fields (APP ID, Secret, your profile ID), and save the form
- Re-visit the WPBook Lite settings page, where you should now see an opportunity to grant appropriate permissions
If done correctly, WPBook Lite should pick up right where WPBook left off.
If you run into problems, please comment in the appropriate WordPress Support Forums: WPBook or WPBook Lite.
- Oct 04, 11
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the future of WPBook, and wanted to give a quick update. There are two key factors making me rethink the whole approach.
The first is a change Facebook has made, requiring SSL certificates for “all Canvas and Page tab applications.” (They announced this change earlier this summer, as part of the bizarrely Orwellian “Operation Developer Love” but it went into effect as of October 1st).
This is a problem because many WPBook users’ blogs are not available via https connections (including my own), and with this new Facebook change their WPBook implementation will fail, though how exactly that will be manifest isn’t clear to me yet (see below). Getting an SSL certificate for your blog isn’t an insurmountable task, but if you run your blog on cheap shared hosting, the costs of an SSL certificate (and the dedicated IP it requires) can be nearly as much as you’re paying for hosting! It’s also a task that the non-technical user will find horribly confusing.
The second is a recent report showing that:
Using a 3rd party API to update your Facebook Page decreases your likelihood of engagement per fan (on average) by about 80%
The study results suggest that one of WPBook’s core functions – posting automatically to your wall (or the wall of a fan page, group, or application) whenever new blog posts are published – might not even be a good idea to begin with.
If third-party automated postings get de-prioritized by Facebook, you might be better off using a Facebook share button and manually cross posting to Facebook each time you publish. On the other hand, maybe the reason third-party automated postings get less attention is because people post more
crapweak content that way. (If what the 10 most popular third-party apps post is lots of nonsense about games, thinly veiled ads, and self-promotion, maybe that is what the study results show people are ignoring – not that good relevant content posted by automated applications gets ignored).So, what’s the way forward?
The scenario I’m imaging is to split apart the functions of the current WPBook and make some portions optional.
WPBook currently does four main things:
- Expose a view of your blog as a Facebook application (a canvas page or set of pages). Basically this is an iframe inside Facebook containing your blog content, drawn by WordPress in a theme supplied by WPBook, to make it look more like other Facebook pages.
- Expose a view of your blog as a “tab” for use on Facebook pages. This is also iframe based, but a bit different in terms of what is allowed in that tab.
- Cross-post to Facebook whenever a new blog post is published. (To your personal profile wall, or to the wall of a Fan Page, Group, or Application, or some combination thereof).
- Import comments made against those wall posts, and make them WordPress comments
I believe that the Facebook requirement of SSL only affects numbers 1 and 2 of this list. Even in the current WPBook, if you set “use external permalinks” then users never need know your application canvas page exists – they will just click on the links in wall posts and be taken to your (external) blog. Users without SSL certificate capability (or interest) could still get the benefits of 3 and 4 without having to worry about 1 and 2.
(It’s not clear to me right now how this would impact setup of WPBook-based applications. Facebook’s developer blog clearly indicates that canvas and page-tab applications will require SSL, but that would seem to imply other kinds of applications will not. Is it just a question of choosing a different application type during setup in Facebook? The whole app creation flow has changed so many times it is hard to keep track – maybe it is a question of unchecking some of the boxes in the dialog below?)
So the question becomes, is it worth it to keep WPBook trying to do 1 & 2 above?
Originally this was all WPBook did, and it seemed to me quite useful and distinct from any other Facebook related plugin. In essence you could use WPBook this way to drive a whole in-Facebook experience and never require (or even let!) users go to the blog outside of Facebook (though preventing them from accessing the blog outside Facebook would require some extra work on your part).
But most users, it seems to me, were confused by this “Facebook view of my blog” approach. They wanted cross posting, and comments import, but didn’t like the application view of the blog (which required all users viewing blog content to consent to application permissions) or worried about it taking traffic away from their external blog.
Should I:
- Eliminate the canvas page and tab altogether – make WPBook just focus on cross-posting and comment import, thus potentially eliminating the SSL requirement?
- Make it optional – keep the canvas page and tab, but make them optional – only for users who want them and have the necessary SSL certificate
- Fork the plugin – make a version of the plugin which works like the current model, but also a second (WPBook Lite?) that only does cross posting and comment import? That way we could have separate directions for each to simplify setup confusion
- Stop developing WPBook – There are a number of other plugins which do Facebook posting, and at least one which does Facebook comment importing (probably more). Is it worth continuing to develop WPBook if better alternatives exist?
My concern with option 2 (“make it optional”) is just that configuring WPBook is already too complex for many users, given the variety of ways Facebook can be used and the variety of ways WPBook can be configured. Adding yet another set of variants (which would change not just what you have to set inside WordPress but also what choices you make when setting up the corresponding Facebook application) will only increase complexity and therefore support requests, which I honestly just don’t have the time to answer as quickly or extensively as I’d like.
My concern with option 3 (“fork the plugin”) is similar – more work for me, when I’ve had difficulty keeping up with plugin maintenance and maintenance of the instructions as Facebook constantly changes their application settings pages. If maintaining one plugin is difficult, maintaining two will be more so, even if they share some segment of the code base.
So option 1 (“eliminate”) is perhaps the simplest. (I say “perhaps” because I haven’t looked into it in depth yet – how hard will it be to untangle all the permission setting and checking logic, which is currently using a canvas page to display the current permissions? How will that change existing applications built using WPBook?).
But once that’s gone, what distinguishes WPBook from all the other Facebook posting plugins?
The fourth option would be to just declare WPBook obsolete. Existing WPBook installations work, if the user’s blog supports SSL. Currently if users browse Facebook in https mode, my own WPBook-powered applications just don’t work, because I don’t have SSL certificates for any of my blogs – just not worth the effort. But I’m ok with that.
It
may beseems that new WPBook users will find they can’t set up a Facebook application (necessary to use WPBook) without an SSL certificate, and if they want to have cross-posting and comment import they’ll need to use an alternative approach, but a quick search of the plugin repository suggests other options are plentiful.I’d love to hear from you all – especially if you are WPBook users (it’s had over 100,000 downloads, but I’ve no idea how many are in active use).
- Are you using the “Canvas Page” or “Tab Page” views inside Facebook? If so, do you have an SSL certificate for your blog? Would you miss these views if WPBook were revised to eliminate them?
- Have you evaluated other WordPress plugins for accomplishing the same thing? Did they work, or what issues did you run into?
As always, comments (and patches!) welcome.
- Sep 27, 11
Cathy Davidson, whose new book Now You See It I wrote about last week, was also a guest speaker at the Berkman Center. (Coincidentally, on the same day!).
Here’s the video, including Q&A:
Wish I’d been able to make it!
- Sep 26, 11
Made it in Saturday for the opening of Podcamp Boston 6. (After a few working weekends in a row, I couldn’t do two full days so I just came in for Saturday morning).
While I was only able to catch three sessions, each would have been worth the trip on it’s own. All three were led by dynamic, engaging, even charismatic presenters who clearly know their stuff and know the Podcamp audience.
First up was Dave Wieneke (@usefularts) on the “Seven Sins of Digital Innovation,” aka “Stuff that F*#@s up your work, and what the hell can be done about it.”
Dave invited the assembled crowd to co-present, opening up a discussion about how projects go wrong, how to manage change in organizations, how to build buy-in, the dreaded ROI, and how to build sustainable digital strategies. Lots of great quotable moments here, many can be found in Dave’s own Storify recap).
Second, was Chris Brogan on Google+ (with guest assistance from Christopher S. Penn running the laptop). I’d just seen Chris talk about why folks should be on Google+ during the Inbound Marketing summit a few weeks back in Boston, so many of the themes in this talk were the same. Why are so many in digital marketing / social media collectively whining about having to learn a new network? Did they really forget orkut, friendster, and myspace? Are they still rocking an @aol.com email address, and a compuserve dial up account?
Chris has become a superstar but still manages to make himself so accessible that everyone thinks he’s their good friend – that’s a skill. (And I don’t mean that as a criticism – he’s authentically interested in everyone he meets in a way that seems entirely natural to him – and he listens, and remembers things you’ve said).
Finally (before I ran off to lunch) I caught Tamsen McMahon‘s (@tamadear) talk about standing out in a bell curve world.
While “personal branding” topics can devolve into hokey admonitions to “be yourself,” McMahon was funny, compelling, and insightful. She used real, understandable, and approachable examples, including reality tv for humor and local social media celebs for color and context. She’s used labels for herself like “intellectual magpie” and “personal cartography“: simple, clear, suggestive, but also entirely unique. (Almost feels like personal branding via google bomb, but those were generally meaningless phrases where hers actually make sense and suggest what she does and is).
I left Podcamp feeling energized, enthusiastic, and smarter than I’d gone in. Not bad for 3 hours on a Saturday morning.
- Sep 23, 11
In support of our higher education practice, ISITE Design sponsored a panel at FutureM titled “Beyond the University Website: The Future of Digital Marketing in Higher Education.” Jeff Cram moderated, and participants included (from left to right in the photo):
- Perry Hewitt, Chief Digital Officer, Harvard (@perryhewitt)
- Gene Begin, Digital Marketing Director, Babson College (@gbegin)
- Tom Baird, Vice Chancellor, University of Michigan Dearborn
- Mike Petroff, Web and Technology Enrollment Manager, Emerson College (also a writer for .eduGuru) (@mikepetroff)
I’ll update this post with the video from the session as soon as it’s available.Videos from the session have been posted, and below is a quick Storify list of tweets from the event:
(See also Erik Devaney‘s coverage in New England Post: Inside FutureM: Digital Marketing and Higher Education) - Sep 22, 11
Podcamp Boston (6) is this weekend (Sept. 24th and 25th) at the Microsoft NERD center.
Here’s the schedule (which they haven’t yet published except as a google doc):
My friend Dave Wieneke will be presenting Saturday am on “The 7 Deadly Sins of Business Innovation” and again Sunday afternoon on “Applying Digital Strategy Across your Business.”
As though that weren’t enough reason to attend, other speakers will include Chris Brogan and Christopher S. Penn (the original founders of Podcamp Boston) as well as a who’s who of Boston’s digerati.
Will I see you there?
- Sep 22, 11
Intrigued by Jon DiPietro’s Klout’s Konference Kalculation, I took a look at my own Klout score to see what impact all the events of the past two weeks (FutureM, Berkman Center “Vast Wasteland” session, Inbound Marketing Summit, and DrupalCamp Montreal) might have had.
That’s a big bump in my supposed influence – but doesn’t it really show just how artificial the whole mechanism is? Did I become more influential by attending and tweeting about conferences?
DiPietro pointed out a significant dip in his Klout score, exactly 30 days after WordCamp Boston, where he was busily live-tweeting. I don’t see the same dip (I’ll have to check back in 30 days), though maybe my numbers were never high enough to show the impact in the first place. I did see this weird pattern in the “true reach” segment:
The first bump up corresponds to Aug 29 – Sept 1, then down again, then up on the 7th and 8th of September. Why? I’ve no idea yet, but it doesn’t seem correlated with being 30 days out from anything.
What does any of this prove? Algorithms can only be as smart as the data they have access to and the assumptions of their authors. Klout has access to the number of tweets published by an account, how often those tweets are retweeted, how many twitter followers that account has, etc. Klout doesn’t account for multiple twitter accounts (the official tweets coming from @wordcampboston for example, which has its own Klout score but no impact on mine). Klout also can only indirectly differentiate between the speaker on stage being tweeted about and the person doing the live tweeting – all those listening to the speaker but not tweeting about it don’t count as “reach” for the speaker.
In the end the only conclusion I can draw is that Klout favors the noisy – though if you are so noisy that people unfollow you or report you as spam that may come back to haunt you.
So, want to raise your Klout score? Tweet early and often. Go to events with popular hashtags and post quick snippets from key speakers.
- Sep 22, 11
Last week the Berkman Center hosted an event for the 50th anniversay of the “Vast Wasteland” speech, when Newton Minow (then chairman of the FCC) was publicly critical of the assembled National Association of Broadcasters for not doing more to serve the public interest:
We all know that people would more often prefer to be entertained than stimulated or informed. But your obligations are not satisfied if you look only to popularity as a test of what to broadcast. You are not only in show business; you are free to communicate ideas as well as relaxation. . . . It is not enough to cater to the nation’s whims; you must also serve the nation’s needs. And I would add this: that if some of you persist in a relentless search for the highest rating and the lowest common denominator, you may very well lose your audience. Because, to paraphrase a great American who was recently my law partner, the people are wise, wiser than some of the broadcasters — and politicians — think.
(Full text of the speech, including audio recording)
To commemorate the event, Berkman brought Minow, along with Ann Marie Lapinski, Jonathan Alter, and Yochai Benkler for a panel moderated by Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey, with responses from Susan Crawford, Perry Hewitt, Ellen Goodman, Virginia Heffernan, Reed Hundt, Kevin Martin, Nicholas Negroponte, Ethan Zuckerman, Doris Kearns Goodwin (a surprise), and comments by Terry Fisher. (More info on all those folks)
Left to right: Jonathan Alter, Ann Marie Lipinski, Yochai Benkler, Newt Minow, Jonathan Zittrain (back to camera).
It was really a fantastic collection of smart people and the kind of event only the Berkman Center can pull off successfully. (Time for a redefinition of Cognitive Surplus? Interestingly, the ship on Gillgan’s Island, one of Clay Shirky’s examples of where the cognitive surplus used to go, was named the S.S. Minnow in reference to Minow and this speech!).
I only wish there’d been more time to explore the value that the diversity of media channels has brought since that speech – the value in the productive capability each of us now carries in our phones, laptops, and internet connections. There seemed to be a bit of nostalgia for the moment in which Minow really could “shake the lapels” of the assembled broadcasters and have his one voice carry so much weight. But is the loss of the bully pulpit such a bad thing when it is compensated for by multiple alternative avenues for the protection of the public interest, including some arguably commanded by “the public” themselves? I haven’t yet read Benkler’s newest book (The Penguin and the Leviathan: The Triumph of Cooperation over Self-Interest, though it is on my nightstand waiting) but it seems a missed opportunity that we didn’t hear more from him on the positive side of this shift away from 3 national broadcast media channels into a profileration of voices. Instead we got lots of pessimism about the Tower of Babel and broad references to the Arab Spring. I’d similarly love to have heard more from Ethan Zuckerman on global voices and the role of independent media. Maybe a few fewer celebrity respondents would have allowed the panel more time?
The most unexpected part of the evening was hearing Doris Kearns Goodwin learn that she too could edit wikipedia – I wonder if she’s made her first edit in the last week?
The video of the event is embedded below. Note that at roughly 4:33 yours truly interrupts the camera view just as Minow is being announced – coming in late. My 0.15 seconds of fame?)
Other coverage:
- Ethan Zuckerman liveblogged the event
- The ‘vast wasteland,’ reconsidered (Harvard Gazette)
- Harvard’s Berkman Center hosts star-studded forum on media and the “vast wasteland” (O’Reilly Radar)
- A Vast Wasteland, Five Decades Later (Josh Stearns on Storify)
- Harvard Law School coverage
- “A Vast Wasteland Revisited”: A Berkman Center discussion on the state of television and media (Joshua Benton, Nieman Journalism Lab)
- Sep 21, 11
DrupalCamp Montreal was this past weekend, and the videos are already posted! The event venue was McGill University’s McIntyre Science Center, which is equipped with an automated system to capture lectures at specific times.
The system captures the video output being projected as well as video of the lectern where the speaker is standing, and makes the files available on a predetermined url. (I found that the “webcast” view with slides and speaker both visible sometimes failed in Firefox but worked in Chrome – unfortunately it’s silverlight based).
Definitely Worth watching:
- Jen Simmons on HTML 5: webcast | mp4
- Angie Byron (Webchick) on Getting involved in Drupal: webcast | mp4
- Educational Roundtable: webcast | mp4
My own video is embedded below, or you can see the webcast version (includes slides in one window and me talking in another – may not work in some browsers) or download the mp4.
Thanks to the organizers and sponsors for a great camp!
- Sep 20, 11
Cathy Davidson‘s Now You See It argues that the educational system in the US is failing to prepare graduates for the work they will be doing in the 21st century. While I found myself vigorously nodding at the general argument of the book, there were also some places I wished Davidson had developed in greater detail.
The best part of the book for me is the description of the roots of our standard educational approach going back to the early 20th century: Taylorism, the IQ, and standardized testing on a large scale. These approaches made sense when education’s focus was the creation of disciplined, managerial, bureaucratic middle-managers for hierarchical, command-and-control corporations.
Unfortunately, while the workforce is adapting to new realities of globalization, the digital revolution, and commons-based peer production, the educational system has not kept pace.
She’s definitely on to something, and I agree with much of her rant in both its aims and its general tenor. She’s also generally compelling when she talks about the variety of approaches they’ve taken at Duke (distributing iPods, how to crowdsource grading) and that she’s experienced as director of the HASTAC program (and as an all-around digital humanities evangelist).
The book’s a bit weaker, for me, when she tries to describe alternative educational approaches which embody the values and approach she wants to promote: collaboration through difference, game mechanics, and creative expression over standardized testing. They end up resonating as anecdotes but don’t provide a true alternative program which could be managed at any broad scale.
I also found the sections on what the modern workforce is like rang a bit hollow. It’s easy to critique Prof. Davidson as an academic – the old “Ivory Tower” versus “real world of work” contrast – but I think it’s fair to say that Davidson doesn’t reflect deep lived experience here in describing the “average” office worker, whatever that might mean.
If you have a job just about anywhere but Google, you are most likely working in a space designed for a mode of work that is disappearing. . . . We’ve just begun to think about the best ways to restructure the industrial labor values we inherited in order to maximize our productivity in the information age.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve spent the last 12+ years working in interactive agencies, on web projects, and with open source communities, but the descriptions Davidson offers of all the signposts of the new felt immediately familiar to me, as I suspect they would to anyone working in web strategy, design, and development. Global conference calls supplemented by a digital backchannel (irc / IM, over public networks or internal intranets) and web-based collaboration environments (maybe we don’t all use Second Life, but the specific technology isn’t really the point), working toward consensus and community-driven decision making over command and control – this is how everyone I know works!
Again, I don’t think this takes away from Davidson’s primary point about the organization of the educational system in relation to the way work actually happens – I just think the new mode of work is even more widespread than she suggests. It isn’t just the denizens of the Googleplex or Big Blue who are working in a collaborative, technology-embedded, continuous partial attention world. (It’s also not just agencies, based on what I’ve observed at clients).
The second place where I wanted more from Davidson was in what industry likes to call “the solutions space.” Other than reducing class sizes, and decreasing reliance on standardized tests (which drives the behavior of teaching to the test rather than the kind of critical thinking, research, and collaboration skills Davidson emphasizes), what path should educators (or parents) take?
Davidson gestures in the direction of solutions with a few specific cases of schools and a broad discussion of game mechanics (cue Jane McGonical). Would substituting boss challenges for end of grade (standardized) testing be both radically productive in improving education and sustainable at large scale? If every university starting giving students iPods (or perhaps now iPads) and eliminated letter grades, would that magically shift the conversation back to creativity and collaboration?
I was also concerned at Davidson’s fast and loose use of “crowdsourcing” and “open source” as though they were interchangeable or nearly interchangeable references to work done by large groups. (The simple fact that she’s talking about cooperative production and there isn’t a single mention of Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks or The Penguin and the Leviathan or, for that matter, the Public Library of Science, or Open Courseware). There’s one quick nod to Creative Commons but it’s dismissive: “it’s not always a simple matter in a collaborative endeavor to agree to ‘share alike’” (232).
Instead we get broad references to “open source” via Linux and Mozilla, and crowdsourcing via Wikipedia, but with no clear definition or explanation of how free software and open source communities came to be or organize themselves. There doesn’t really seem to be any recognition of the core freedoms open source is really about. She cites the Cathedral and the Bazaar, but never really explores why or how this mode of production compares to traditional software (which is very much still present and arguably even dominant in education). There doesn’t seem, for example, to be any concern about the involvement of companies like Apple and in driving educational initiatives. What does it mean to train students on a proprietary platform when free platforms are also available? What impact might the free software and free culture movements have on institutional education (elementary on through tertiary) if we took seriously their challenges to proprietary software and big corporate media?
(Starter Recommendations: Chris Kelty’s Two Bits: On the Cultural Significance of Free Software, Gabriella Coleman‘s research on the ethics of hackers and hacking.).
The last major gap I was surprised to see Davidson not explore further is alternative educational approaches. There’s no mention of homeschooling or diy education: increasingly used by significant segments of the population to opt-out of the institutional part of the educational system. Would she support this approach, as it is inline with adaptive learning and flexibility and anti-standardized testing, or would she bemoan the approach as it doesn’t provide enough collaboration? (Of course, home-schooled students could collaborate online with others, which might pretty closely mirror the life of the new IBM consultant – some have said IBM stands for “I’m By Myself”).
In the end, Now You See It is a compelling read if you’re interested in the failings of standardized testing, and exploring more creative, internet-era-appropriate methods of education. The challenge it raises to educators is a signal one: how are we checking our own institutional biases in favor of really exploring what students will need in the workforce, and how can we make school more like the new workplace?
As someone who’s argued that Lolcats belong on your corporate intranet, I’m sympathetic to Davidson’s desire to recuperate the reputations of internet “distractions” and recognize that it is ok that kids like video games and that students might spend part of their school day on thinking that is not immediately measured on a multiple-choice test. I just wish there was a more specific program of actions we could take to get there, as I want to play along.
- Sep 14, 11
- Drupal or Django? A Guide for Decision Makers — scot hacker's foobar blog
Drupal Django comparison
- Drupal or Django? A Guide for Decision Makers — scot hacker's foobar blog
- Sep 12, 11
- Drupal SEO Tools | drupal.org
Drupal module for SEO with a Dashboard, google analytics integration - Introducing Drupal SEO tools
Intro video overviewing the Drupal SEO module LevelTen has released
- Drupal SEO Tools | drupal.org
- Sep 09, 11
- Drupal or Django? A Guide for Decision Makers — scot hacker's foobar blog
Drupal Django comparison
- Drupal or Django? A Guide for Decision Makers — scot hacker's foobar blog
- Sep 07, 11
Just found out I will be speaking at DrupalCamp Montreal in a few weeks, on the subject of Open Source Video, using Kaltura with Drupal.
We’re doing some work with an institute at a local university involving migration of a large video archive and design of a video microsite, so the research for the presentation will line up nicely with the ongoing effort.
Look forward to seeing Montreal – I haven’t been in years – and also hope to run a BoF for Drupal in higher education.
Already planning some restaurant visits on Vegan Montreal. (It’s very strange to my anglophone ears that “végétalien” means vegan in French, but “végétarien” means vegetarian – what trouble that must be for native Japanese speaking vegans trying to visit Montreal, given this).
- Sep 06, 11
I finally got around last month to reading Adam Greenfield’s Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing.
I was concerned at first when I picked it up, thinking that any book written in 2005 and published in 2006 that claims to cover ubiquitous computing would obviously be horribly out of date, and at best interesting for historical perspective, but I was wrong.
It’s a fantastic book, and as timely as ever.
It’s not a “how-to” guide (more of a “how-not-to guide” in fact) or a technical reference to the hardware and software of ubicomp, but an extended essay, delivered as a set of 81 theses, all but the last of which is followed by a brief explication.
The theses themselves are broken down into sections:
- What is everyware? (Theses 1-8)
- How is everyware different from what we’re used to? (Theses 9-23)
- What’s driving the emergence of everyware? (Theses 24-33)
- What are the issues we need to be aware of? (Theses 34-46)
- Who gets to determine the shapre of everyware? (Theses 47-51)
- When do we need to begin preparing for everyware? (Theses 52-69)
- How might we safeguard our prerogatives in an everyware world? (Theses 70-81)
Greenfield’s writing is masterful: this is the kind of book I would like to have written. He’s neither technophile nor luddite: not falling into technical determinism but also not oblivious to the impact technologies can have on the societies which make them. He’s careful not to claim to have all the answers, yet still establishes by iteration a clear way of understanding the changes and challenges that make up ubiquitous / pervasive computing in all its possibilities and threats. It’s a theoretical book, to be sure, but never feels far from practice, and is clearly rooted in a strong understanding of how things actually get designed and made (and sold, and resold, and imitated, and used for unintended purposes . . . ).
The theses-based approached can come across at times as a bit too mystical for me – as though they’re trying to be modern-day Zen koans. For example, the concluding thesis (81):
These principles are necessary but not sufficient: they constitute not an end but a beginning.
The reality though is that throughout the primary text of the book the thesis have a kind of epigrammatic relationship to the chapters they announce, and are simple and clear: telegraphing meaning, not obscuring it. A few other examples:
Thesis 01: There are many ubiquitous computings.
Thesis 34: Everyware insinuates itself into transactions never before subject to technical intervention.
Thesis 48: Those developing everyware may have little idea that this is in fact what they are doing.
In the end Greenfield stakes a claim that in essence ubiquitous computing / pervasive computing necessitates a design intervention: that if we’re not careful about how we design and develop pervasive computing systems we’ll end up taking everything bad about desktop computing and making it ubiquitous, making systems that get in our way as much as (or more than) they help us. Pervasive computing will force re-evaluation and reconsideration of notions of privacy and appropriate behavior even more than the internet has, as everyware essentially drives the ongoing blending of the digital into everyday life.
As I said at the beginning, it’s a masterful book, densely packed with careful but suggestive ways of understanding a process that is simultaneously just getting started and (perhaps) already too far along. I don’t consider myself a ubiquitous computing or pervasive computing person – I’m generally focused on digital strategy, content management, and open source software in the web world – but I’d highly recommend everyware to anyone involved in any kind of software development, design, digital strategy, architecture, sociology, urban studies, space planning, etc. In fact I’m hard pressed to imagine a discipline or practice that wouldn’t benefit from a close reading of this book.
Further reading:
- Adam Greenfield on Everyware (UX Podcast)
- Everyware (Fabien Girardin)
- Hiding in Plain Sight (Boxes and Arrows – where I think I first heard of Everyware)
- Speedbird (Adam Greenfield’s blog)
- The Introduction to Everyware published on A List Apart
- Designing for Everyware: An Interview with Adam Greenfield (AIGA)
- Everyware: Interview with Adam Greenfield, Part I (ReadWriteWeb)
- Why the iPad May Save the Internet Fridge (Part II of the Inverview at ReadWriteWeb)
- Greenfield’s current venture: Urbanscale, and their project PERRY
- Urban Computing and Its Discontents (PDF, by Adam Greenfield and Mark Shephard, from the Situated Technologies series)>
- Sep 03, 11
- Drupal SEO Tools | drupal.org
Drupal module for SEO with a Dashboard, google analytics integration - Introducing Drupal SEO tools
Intro video overviewing the Drupal SEO module LevelTen has released
- Drupal SEO Tools | drupal.org
- Aug 29, 11
- Making a Media site in WordPress
custom post types, media handling - History of adding land to Boston
- How To Set Up a Brand Page on Facebook Without Needing a ...
Set up brand page without link to personal page - 8 Superior Wordpress Plug-ins for eCommerce
WordPress eCommerce options - Send Money, Receive Money, Money Transfer - Amazon Payments
Send and recieve money via Amazon - paypal without fees - Uncommon App | College Consulting Services
College application consulting services
- Making a Media site in WordPress
- Aug 24, 11
Last weekend I went down to New Haven for DrupalCamp CT 2011, at Yale. It was a smaller camp (compared to Design4Drupal Boston, or DrupalCon) but had excellent content and showed there is a strong Drupal community in the heart of the nutmeg state. (We did take a group photo but I haven’t seen it surface yet).
Even at a smaller camp there were multiple parallel tracks of presentations, and I found myself wishing talks had been recorded so I could see some of the ones which overlapped, my inability to be simultaneously two places at once hold me back yet again.
My favorite sessions of the day were Benjamin Melançon‘s “When there isn’t a module for that” and John Zavocki‘s keynote “From the Margins to the Center.”
Ben’s talk, which was an updated version of a talk he gave at Western Mass DrupalCamp (which I was not able to get to, but for which slides are available), covered the basics of Drupal module development using the x-ray module as an example. Nothing new for an experienced developer, but presented with clarity, color commentary promoting the community ethic, and humor, including this graph of “Community Karma Required to Escape Punishment” for specific crimes:
He was also the lead author (coordinator? driving force?) of The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7, and brought a copy to show. That is one serious tome of Drupal knowledge – over a thousand pages! (Ok, I’m including the index – but it really is massive).
One of Ben’s core themes – the ethics of contributing back to the community in multiple ways and at multiple levels – also ran through John Zavocki’s keynote. (John uses a mindmap to present rather than slides – he’s put two versions of the mindmap up on his site).
Zavocki – an engaging presenter with more than a touch of self-deprecating humor – starting by announcing this was his first keynote, and therefore was either going to go extremely well or suck entirely: turns out it was the former. A self-described fourteenth-century Venetian painter with post-modernist and feminist tendencies (or was it sympathies?), John focused on what professional ethics might mean to those in the Drupal community, the number of web developers who get to open source via non-traditional or ad-hoc career paths (what, my PhD in literature isn’t standard training for web development?), the need for project management and specialization (“find out what you’re good at and do that – hire people to manage you”), and the importance of reputation and long-term relationships.
In the end, the five-point outline he posted on his blog captures all the right themes, but misses all the crucial energy:
- Your reputation is the most important thing that you have in our development community
- If you are not allocating human resources for Project Management, you cannot say that you are doing have ethical business practices
- Clients want software engineering (results) not Computer Science (theory)
- Get the right person for the right job
- The most important thing you can do is contribute back to the project.
After the “formal” section of the keynote was over, the audience kept feeding on his energy, asking questions and engaging with him on his sense of where the Drupal community is going. I wish I had some video of Zavocki jumping up and down on stage pointing to the mind-map projected behind him, if only to convey some essence of the experience.
It was also good to see such a strong Drupal community at Yale – yet more evidence of how Drupal is enabling higher education institutions. During the lunch break I had a chance to walk a bit around campus. The camp venue – Luce Hall – is on Hillhouse Avenue, a very storied street which Wikipedia tells me both Charles Dickens and Mark Twain declared “the most beautiful street in America.” Luce Hall itself doesn’t quite fit the description, being instead one of “Yale’s architectural embarrassments.”
It’s Henry R. Luce Hall, of course, after the Yale Alumnus, founder of Time, Life, and Fortune, also, later, the staunch anti-community and author of “The American Century” – I wonder what he would have made of the impact of the internet on mass media publishing, as well as the open source movement and its core ethos of cooperation?
What would the “Lord of the Press” have made of citizen journalism, the rise of the hyperlocal, and a real-time web in which nearly anyone can become the source of news?
- Jul 25, 11
Here are the slides and speakerrate info for the talk I gave yesterday at WordCamp Boston.
Although the slides themselves are less entertaining without my voiceover, video from the talk will be made available – and I will link to it here as soon as I have the url.
Slides:
SpeakerRate:
Thanks so much for those of you who came, and gave feedback via Twitter. Those who didn’t – see you at next year’s WordCamp Boston?
-
Posts
- May 06, 12
This weekend I was lucky to attend ROFLCON III, the third (and reportedly final) version of the internet culture conference at MIT.
One of my favorite sessions was “Drunk Vegan Black Metal Scanwiches,” featuring Hannah Hart of My Drunk Kitchen, Brian Manowitz from Vegan Black Metal Chef, and Jon Chonko from Scanwiches in a live demo.
Although Hannah confessed she wasn’t actually going to get drunk during the demo (it was only 11am on a Saturday morning), she was funny and engaging throughout, helping Brian (in full Vegan Black Metal Chef garb) make a Seitan Buffalo Wrap. Jon from Scanwiches did scan the final product, and showed the crowd, but I haven’t seen it show up on the site yet. Not sure it will make the cut – he seemed very particular about what he will or won’t post.
I was obviously most interested in the Vegan Black Metal Chef, who shared some interesting details. First, he films everything at night, by candlelight, so he doesn’t start taping an episode until like 10pm, and tapes through the night until the following morning. He also creates (writes and records) all the music for each episode, and does all the video editing. Guess this is why the episodes don’t come very frequently!
Check out episodes of Vegan Black Metal Chef on YouTube.
- Apr 15, 12
Spaceward Ho! was one of my all-time favorite games on the Mac in the 1990s – and now it has been released for the iPad!
It’s a very faithful port. Dispatching ships to other planets by dragging with your finger almost actually feels more intuitive than the original mouse-based versions. The AI is just is difficult to beat as always, and the sounds and graphics are just as they were in the original.
I’ve been playing it on my commute home, and an more than one occasion nearly missed my stop due to the infamous “just one more turn” feeling the game inspires. The game was ported by Ariton and they are on twitter at @spacewardho.
Definitely the best game I’ve found for the iPad so far.
- Feb 06, 12
Excellent live session on Audiotree Live from The Giving Tree Band.
I actually found The Giving Tree Band via a feature on them in the January VegNews, which highlights their commitment to the environment (the article itself doesn’t seem to be on the web yet):
Much like the memorable Shel Silverstein book that inspired their name, this septet aims to meld accessible artistry with a powerful message about interconnectedness with the environment. While many artists and musicians fancy themselves sustainable for driving a Prius or buying organic carrots, GTB takes it to the next level—biodiesel-fueled tours, biodegradable CD packaging, and a tour manager who moonlights as a vegan chef are just the tip of the iceberg.
Their discography includes:
- Great Posessions – 2009, recorded in a carbon-neutral facility (the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center in Baraboo WI)
- Unified Folk Theory – 2009 (2CD)
- The Joke, The Threat, and the Obvious – 2011
Right now, on the band’s site, you can get a bundle of all three albums for digital download for just $24.99.
They’re also among the (planned) contributors to Home on the Range, a benefit CD for Compassionate Farming Education Initiative:
Home On The Range is a benefit compilation CD presented by CFEI. Our mission is to raise funds for several non-profit farm animal sanctuaries including Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary, Happy Trails Farm, Animal Acres, Catskill Animal Sanctuary, Sasha Farm and Kindred Spirits Sanctuary. Proceeds from the sale of this CD will be donated directly to these organizations that depend on private contributions to rescue, feed, care for and provide a safe shelter for abused and neglected farm animals.
Home on the Range Features songs by Yoko Ono, Moby, Chrissie Hynde (of The Pretenders), Nellie McKay, Matisyahu, Howard Jones, Dead Stars On Hollywood, Bare, Princess Superstar, The Giving Tree Band, Joy Askew, Dropa, Kim Drake, Early Melodic Animals and exclusive songs by members of The Buzzcocks, Crass, Spiritualized, UK Subs and Coil.
The benefit CD is unique in the fact that it is comprised entirely of established vegetarian and vegan recording artists, promoting compassion while raising public awareness and helping educate people about these issues on an unparalleled global scale. Featuring eco-friendly packaging and includes CFEI’s exclusive “Compassion 101”, an accompanying comprehensive educational booklet and resource guide. The CD will be released internationally with both physical and digital distribution in Spring 2012.
Check out the Audiotree Live session (above) and the download bundle, the Home on the Range CD, and look for tour dates near you.
- Nov 21, 11
(This post is a bit more geeky, in the coding sense, than the usual goatless fare – but it is about music in the end).
One of my long time favorite podcasts is The Waiting Room, by One Half of Drunk Country and The Woman of the House. They were on WOXY.com, they were on error.fm, they used to be hosted on Podbean.
For some time now, though, they’ve been hosting The Waiting Room on Official.fm, which is a nice enough service but doesn’t offer a true podcast feed. You can get an RSS feed of tracks, but it doesn’t offer the tracks as enclosures and therefor your podcatcher doesn’t know what to do with it.
Here’s what 2 episodes (“items”) look like in the “tracks” feed you get from twrhq.official.fm (I’ve cut out some non-essential stuff):
<item id="322806" downloadable="true" private="false" sharable="true">
<track_id>322806</track_id>
<title>The Waiting Room - Syndication #069 w/c 11.12.11 SAMANTHA CRAIN in session</title>
<link>http://official.fm/tracks/322806</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:16:25 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item id="319523" downloadable="true" private="false" sharable="true">
<track_id>319523</track_id>
<title>The Waiting Room - Syndication #068 w/c 11.05.11</title>
<link>http://official.fm/tracks/319523</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:50:35 GMT</pubDate>
</item>So each item has an id, which is also its track_id, as well as a title.
I noticed, from browsing the page, that the download link for each episode is basically just the “link” provided in the feed with “/download” added to the end of it.
So, I created a Yahoo! Pipe which takes the tracks.rss feed from Official.fm and transmogrifies it into a proper podcast feed with enclosures.
Here’s what the Pipe looks like:
And that outputs items which look like this:
<item>
<title>The Waiting Room - Syndication #069 w/c 11.12.11 SAMANTHA CRAIN in session</title>
<link>http://official.fm/tracks/322806/download</link>
<description>The Waiting Room - Syndication #069 w/c 11.12.11 SAMANTHA CRAIN in session</description>
<guid isPermaLink="false"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:16:25 +0000</pubDate>
<enclosure url="http://official.fm/tracks/322806/download" length="http://official.fm/tracks/322806/download" type="audio/mpeg"/>
</item>
<item>
<title>The Waiting Room - Syndication #068 w/c 11.05.11</title>
<link>http://official.fm/tracks/319523/download</link>
<description>The Waiting Room - Syndication #068 w/c 11.05.11</description>
<guid isPermaLink="false"/>
<pubDate>Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:50:35 +0000</pubDate>
<enclosure url="http://official.fm/tracks/319523/download" length="http://official.fm/tracks/319523/download" type="audio/mpeg"/>
</item>Because the “” bit is there, my podcatcher therefore knows how to get that one.
Stick http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=44ff84a6ca0e11dc30398c7688856b41&_render=rss into your podcatcher and let me know if it works for you.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work in iTunes, because iTunes ignores the mime type (audio/mpeg) and looks for the “mp3″ file extension on the enclosure url. Luckily I don’t use iTunes anymore, having found Downcast for the iPad far superior.
If you’re trying to get some other official.fm feed, you can clone the pipe and edit it – just look at the four “fetch feed” items which feed into the “union” – each of them represents 1 page of items from the feed, 20 per page. (Not sure of official.fm lets podcasters choose how many items per page to show – just looking at what the feed output was). The key pay part you need to change for a different podcast feed is the userid:
http://official.fm/tracks.rss?user_id=113174&page=2
Leaving the other bits in place.
Then, save your pipe, run it, and grab the “Get as rss” link – that’s the link you need for your podcatcher.
- Oct 11, 11
I’ve long been a subscriber to Floss Weekly, a video/audio podcast in the TWiT network focused on Free/Libre/Open Source Software. One of the occasional co-hosts of that show, Dan Lynch, also does an audio podcast (weekly) called Rathole Radio. I’ve just started listening but so far I’m loving it: he mixes genres (french instrumental hip-hop, dance, heavy metal / hardcore), and mixes in live performance.
The most recent episode, Rathole Radio 62, included all (assuming that includes the live performance) creative-commons licensed music from Jamendo. (There’s also a Rathole Radio Sampler EP you can download on which all tracks are creative commons licensed).
Two quick links to share from that episode. The first is an EP by “8in8,” a supergroup including Ben Folds, Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman, and Damian Kulash. Dan played the track “Because the Origami” on the podcast, but the whole EP is embedded below and downloadable for just $1 USD.
The second is from Bad Panda Records, a creative commons record label.
Back in September when they announced their 100th release, they also put out a downloadable 1.1GB archive of all 100 releases. Be sure to also check out the Big Panda Store for merch.
- Sep 25, 11
This weekend during PodCamp Boston I took a trip down the red line to Central square and checked out Veggie Galaxy, the new Vegetarian Diner and Vegan Bakery from the folks who run Veggie Planet.
The place looks fantastic – hip, modern but retro, clean, and inviting: I love seeing vegan restaurants get the ambiance right, since so many have failed on that front. The place was packed, so I sat at the counter, diner style. Luckily I was positioned right next to the station where the waitstaff picked up food for deliver, so I saw lots of plates prepped and handed off. (Open kitchen means you can watch the staff doing much of the cooking – also a good step forward in a vegan establishment, though I did unfortunately see a fair number of eggs going out as well).
The counter at Veggie Galaxy. Not a fancy instagram effect, just bad focus on my part - but I like the way it turned out.
The food was fantastic, too. I had a burger (they offer both a chipotle black bean version and a portobello chickpea version – I had the latter) with vegan cheese, homemade seitan chorizo, and carmelized onions. It was messy – ended up eating as much with a fork as with my hands – but delicious and filling. The red cabbage and dressed arugula were a nice touch too, though if you’re going to go diner food why not fries on the side?
I do wish the menu were a bit more explicit about vegan/vegetarian. Essentially the menu notes that items are vegan except where explicitly said to contain eggs or cheese, and even in those cases vegan substitutions can be made. That’s great, but what about the sandwiches listed as having mayo? (I overheard a waitress saying they use a vegan mayo, but it would be nice to have that clearer on the menu itself). Are the eggs and “tofu eggs” cooked on the same grills? Toast buttered with earth balance? Just feels better to me to have a specific notation, even if it’s just a footnote somewhere on the menu.
For that matter, of course, I’d be happier if they just went all-vegan, instead of perpetuating the idea that eggs and cheese are somehow exceptions to the institutionalized animal abuse that is the “animal foods” industry, small and large.
The desserts are all vegan. I was too stuffed to enjoy any there, so I got two chocolate items to go: A slice of chocolate cream pie and a piece of chocolate layer cake. Both were excellent, even 8 hours later.
I definitely plan to make it back to Veggie Galaxy. (I think next time I’ll try the breakfast menu – a tofu scramble with that seitan chorizo would be wonderful I bet). It’s not the cheapest diner you’ll find in the Boston area, but the food was well worth the trip and the wait. Fill up on lunch / dinner and get the desserts to go for later – you can’t go wrong.
Right now they are open 11am-3pm and then 5pm-10pm, but they’ll soon be changing to 7am-3pm, 5pm-10pm. Best to check their site for updates.
- Sep 21, 11
Cathy N. Davidson’s new book, Now You See it: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform thw Way We Live, Work, and Learn (see my review on Open Parenthesis), takes one of its core inspirations from an experiment by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, which you may have seen:
In the experiment, users are told to count the number of passes made by either the team wearing white shirts or the team wearing black. The experiment, however, isn’t really about the counting. Instead, the experiment is about selective attention, and how our focus on one specific task (counting) makes it impossible for us to see another phenomenon (the female student in the gorilla suit who walks into the center of the frame and strolls causally out). As Davidson puts it in the Introduction to the book:
He’d set us up, trapping us in our own attention blindness, priming us for his lecture. . . . By concentrating so hard on the confusing counting task, we had managed to miss the main event: the gorilla in the midst. (pg. 2)
The point of the anecdote, for Davidson, isn’t so much that most people missed the gorilla in their attempt to count accurately, but that she saw the gorilla (largely because she made no attempt to count accurately, knowing that kind of task was not well suited to her). Rather than reading the event as a failure of attention, Davidson uses it (here and throughout the book) to represent the positive opportunities of collaboration through difference:
If we see selectively, but we don’t all select the same things to see, that also means we don’t all miss the same things. If some of us can accurately count basketballs in a confusing situation and some can see the gorilla, we can pool our insights and together see the whole picture. That’s significant. The gorilla experiment isn’t just a lesson in brain biology but a plan for thriving in a complicated world.
Davidson uses this central principle to drive a far-ranging discussion: how humans learn (more brain science), how institutional education tries to teach (via rote memorization and standardized testing of a very specific kind), how modern workplaces are transforming based on the internet and globalization, and how collaboration through difference represents a way of adjusting education to better match the realities of the new world of work. Our modes of education need to be changed in order to produce the kind of workers needed in the 21st century: capable of complex, cross-cultural understanding, multitasking at a high level, and collaborating through difference on cooperative projects at large scale. (cf. the Internet itself, linux, wikipedia, open source, etc.).
Reading Now You See It as a vegan, though, I couldn’t help but notice that my own attention also often goes to places the author does not intend. Being vegan in a world of carnists means constantly seeing and recognizing animals as sentient beings with interests we are ethically bound to respect. Being vegan means seeing the gorilla in an entirely different way than Davidson intends the metaphor: seeing as fellow beings animals that others see as food or raw materials.
In chapter 2, “Leaning Ourselves,” for example, Davidson describes the scientific discovery of mirror neurons:
They placed electrodes in the ventral premotor cortex of macaque monkeys to see how their neurons were firing when they were picking up food and then eating. By doing so, the neurophysiologists were able to record the activity of single neurons when the monkeys were feeding themselves. That, alone, was news.
Then, one day, something really interesting happened. The Parma scientists began to notice that neurons were firing in exactly the same pattern whether the monkey was picking up a piece of food and eating it or was watching a human or another monkey pick up a piece of food to eat. (p53)Of course the point Davidson is trying to make is about how mirror neurons work in primates (ie, in humans and macaque monkeys) and not about the monkeys themselves. But reading as a vegan, I can’t read that passage without stopping short on the line “placed electrodes in the ventral premotor cortex,” interrupted by visions of the horrors of vivisection and institutionalized animal abuse flooding my peripheral consciousness. (Cue Peter Gabriel’s “Shock the Monkey” video in your own peripheral consciousness).
In Simons and Chabris’ experiment, the female student in the gorilla suit walks undetected through the basketball passing crowd, by observers too focused on counting to notice. In Davidson’s retelling of the Parma experiments, the unnamed macaque monkeys with their implanted (“placed?”) electrodes, bred for scientific experiments, live their entire lives in cages but go essentially unremarked, serving simply as a data set because her attention is elsewhere.
Now, I’ve no idea how Giacomo Rizzolatti and his fellow scientists at the University of Parma treat the animals on which they perform experiments (though I’ve seen enough video of animal experiments to have a good guess). I’ve no idea what Davidson thinks about the ethics of animal experimentation (though her discussion of brain science suggests that a minimum she finds it acceptable). But it certainly seems to me that this time she’s missed the gorilla in the midst.
One of the largely positive role models in the book is Inez Davidson, the mother of Davidson’s first husband. Inez Davidson taught in a one room schoolhouse in the Canadian Rockies:
She rode half-wild horses to school each morning, alone in the dark and cold through grizzly country, “putting miles on them,” as she would say, before they could be sold to local ranchers as well-trained working horses. (p.82)
Inez is described (romanticized?) as a kind of prototypical cowgirl but also a budding environmentalist and prescient supporter of physical education for kids:
She was concerned about both food additives and contaminants in the air and drinking water even in cattle country, where the water supply was tainted by runoff from oil and smelting plants far away. She was also shocked at how parents were driving to school instead of having them walk or ride horses in; these were forms of physical exercise she believed were important to kids’ health, well-being, and concentration in the classroom. (p.83)
Confronted with Rodney, a student other teachers have written off as “slow,” Inez Davidson teaches him to use his hands like an abacus, becoming a kind of savant with arithmetic:
He could put his hands under the table and, without anyone seeing, do “rapid calculation” instantly. He did so as a kid, acing math tests, and he did so as an adult, gaining a reputation for uncanny speed and accuracy in the brawny, take-no-prisoners arena of the cattle auctions. Rodney was no one’s fool. (p.83)
Again, Davidson’s point is meant to be about different learning styles. Inez Davidson saw that Rodney’s learning style was better served by a different teaching method, adapted, and made success where others had seen only failure. Take too narrow a perspective on what success looks like – standardized, end-of-grade testing in the public schools for example – and you alienate significant parts of the student population for whom that style of learning is ineffective or impossible.
But I can’t help reading it without wondering about the cattle auctions, and the half-wild horses. Would the passage have the same resonance if it were a story of an antebellum schoolteacher whose student went on to make a name for himself at the slave auctions? I realize to some readers that sounds like hyperbole, or risks invoking Godwin’s law, but buying and selling slaves was once common practice too.
Later, in a section on the origins of letter grades, Davidson writes:
The first school to adopt a system of assigning letter grades was Mount Holyoke in 1897, and from there the practice was adopted in other colleges and universities as well as in secondary schools. A few years later, the American Meat Packers Association thought it was so convenient they adopted the system for the quality or grades, as they called it, of meats*. (112)
The asterisk points to a footnote – the only footnote in the whole book, the rest being all endnotes and mostly references:
It’s interesting that if you dig at all into the U.S. Department of Agrilculture literature you find that even grading slabs of sirloin or chuck is a less clear-cut matter than meets the eye. There are uniform standards of meat quality that are debated regularly and changed occasionally. A truth-in-labeling law had to be instituted to guard against misrepresentation of what the grade even means. If it’s that tough grading beef, imagine what’s behind testing our kids.
Why is it “interesting”? (I used to write this in the margin of my student’s essays, as “it’s interesting that” is often a construction that buries the lede, as it were – better to start the sentence with what makes it interesting, or what point you’re trying to make by identifying some kind of contradiction or complication). It’s interesting, presumably, because the assumption would be that grading beef is simple and straightforward: nothing to worry about in the meat supply. Discovering that the “uniform standards” actually get debated, challenged, and changed occasionally suggests that maybe it isn’t all that simple. Never mind the serious and substantial concerns even among omnivores and carnists about the dangerous levels of e.coli, salmonella and related bacteria in the U.S. Food supply, or mad cow disease, or the over-use of antibiotics on livestock leading to the development of antibiotic resistant strains, or the fundamental inability of inspectors to actually regulate the industry. Nothing to see here, just more proof that grades are artificially concealing complexity by oversimplifying the task of evaluating students or the carcasses of slaughtered animals.
Trouble Puppet's production of The Jungle based on Upton Sinclair's novel (Photo by Stephen Pruitt, cc-by-nc-sa license)
Ultimately Davidson concludes that:
If I were to distill one simple lesson from all the science and all the stories in this book, it would be that with the right practice and the right tools, we can see what we’ve been missing. . . . From infancy on, we are learning what to pay attention to, what to value, what is important, what counts. Whether on the largest level of our institutions or the most immediate level of concentrating on the task before us, whether in the classroom or at work or in our sense of ourselves as human beings, what we value and what we pay attention to can blind us to everything else we could be seeing. (p.291)
Shifting one’s perspective to embrace veganism often means becoming suddenly and painfully aware of things you previously managed to shut from consciousness if not from view. It is important, however, to keep that perspective: to keep pointing to the gorilla in the midst, the macaque in the lab, or the cattle being prepped for auction. It matters because what we can bring to the “collaboration through difference” opportunity is a sustained ethic of paying purposeful attention to animals otherwise considered merely as raw materials.
- Sep 20, 11
Spent last weekend in Montreal – had a great time at DrupalCamp, and visited a number of great restaurants.
The Green Panther / La Panther Verte (Yelp)
The Green Panther was just down the street from my hotel, near Concordia, at 2153 Mackay Street. I got there close to closing, so they were already starting to wrap up for the night. I had the BBQ Tofu Wrap, an excellent smoothie, and a hummus platter. Excellent food with a focus on local, organic, and vegan. Definitely a spot I’d be visiting regularly if I lived in Montreal.
Aux vivres was quite a bit further, but was well worth it.
I had “Le complet” which was a tofu scramble, tempeh bacon, sweet potatoes, cornbread, and a salad. Everything was excellent – again I think I’d be here every weekend for brunch.
Chuch is the express version of Chuchai – thai style cuisine with an emphasis on faux meats. Not always my favorite approach to vegan cuisine, but Chuch really makes it work. I had a fried mushroom appetizer, some tom yum soup, and fried tofu with chiles.
Chuchai, the sister restaurant (they share a kitchen and broadly the same menu) next door is fancier, but I found chuch quite nice as well (reading it was the buffet I expected even more casual).
- Sep 06, 11
So I’m sometimes convinced I should just turn this blog into an auto-re-posting feed of everything that comes into my podcast client: between KEXP‘s Music That Matters, Live Performances, and Video of the Week; KCRW‘s Morning Becomes Eclectic; and NPR Music‘s All Songs Considered, Tiny Desk Concerts, and Live in Concert, I’m never going to run out of things to share.
When the streams cross, so to speak, and the same artist pops up in the multiple feeds, I know they’re worth checking out. That happened recent with Other Lives, who were (in my somewhat delayed podcast viewing anyway) on KEXP’s Video of the Week, did a Tiny Desk Concert, and were on Morning Becomes Eclectic recently.
Here’s the KEXP Video of the Week (more videos from the set or MP3 from the Live Performances feed (will expire eventually)):
Here’s the Tiny Desk Concert:
And the Morning Becomes Eclectic episode:
- Sep 05, 11
Discovered this wonderful new duo via Morning Becomes Eclectic. Imagine The Swell Season if Glen Hansard was from Alabama rather than Ireland, Marketa Irglova from LA rather than the Czech Republic, and they’d met in Nashville rather than in Dublin. (They even have a song called “Falling” which reminded me a bit of the Swell Season’s big hit Falling Slowly.
The duo is Joy Williams (California transplant to Nashville) and John Paul White (Alabama to Nashville). Unlike The Swell Season, at least until recently, and Jason Bentley goes into this during the interview segment of the above, they’re not a couple. (Married, but to different people). It’s easy to see how people make that assumption, though, given how well they work together and the way their presented in their own tour photos.
Checkout the album Barton Hollow (properly pronounced Barton Holler), and look for them on tour. You can also get a free download of the title track single (video below) in exchange for signing up for their mailing list.
