Thought Experiment: CommunityCamp

Posted on May 6, 2007 by Thomas Purves

Rules of CommunityCamp:

Rule 1: You must actually have a vibrant community to present at CommunityCamp. Like, for real.
Rule 2: You are not allowed to present your own community at CommunityCamp
Rule 3: You must find an (unpaid/volunteer/enthusiastic) member of your community to present your Community/Application for you, explaining why -to them- your community is great/exciting/important, what they think it is, what they think is neat about it.
Rule 4: You are encouraged to provide all sorts of other commentary (but only stuff that isn’t obvious by inspection) such as metrics, lessons learned, future plans etc.
Rule 5: No Tag Clouds.

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The catch with Wufoo – got data… what next?

Posted on May 4, 2007 by Thomas Purves

I’m still liking wufoo but now that people are actually using my form to make submissions, I’m running into the next obvious problem: Now What? Just collecting all the underpants information is -at best- only half the business problem anyone is ever trying to solve. Wufu does support a handy number of export options rss, excel, cvs. But if I’m going to do anything with this that isn’t just manual (like say format and spit the info back out to a consolidated webpage) I’m coming dangerously close to breaking the original assumption – that it’s super fast and I don’t have to know any php (god forbid).

What I really need is a oofuW service (Wufoo backwards, heh) that takes csv/rss/data and easy ajax/wizard like formating, does “stuff” with the input and spits out a pretty webpages appropriately (exactly the wufoo in reverse).

Interestingly, I also have the exact same problem with the eventbright ticketing service where I want to strip out certain fields and republish a “who’s coming” feed to my enterprisecamp.org website. So far I tried a csv to feed43 rss to drupal aggregator to try and semi-automate this. “semi” being the operative word, and “pretty ugly” being the other operative word.

suggestions? Is this a problem set that cries out for yahoo pipes? (I never did quite figure out what yahoopipes does)

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Most interesting flickr photostream, 941 years on.

Posted on May 3, 2007 by Thomas Purves

I bet it would have racked up lot of views and favourites since the twelfth century. If only they were counting. Check this youtube video for a wonderful animation of the Bayeux Tapestry. It strikes me how it reads just like the personal photostream of young William and his once fateful/adventurous summer trip to the south of England. It’s interesting to consider what parts they found most memorable – the making of the preparations, candid party shots from the big dinner the night before (heh, I’m not the only one who taking gratuitous food pictures), the time they blew up that old house etc.

I like these reminders of how all new media retrieves some archetypes of old dead media that came before.

Aside: remember that this is very much the Normand side of the story. Harold’s photostream would of course shown a whole other story had he lived to be the own writing/weaving history. (poor Harold assailed by Norway and the Normans that same year)

Dead Media doesn’t really die. It’s just pining for the fjords.

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