Recently in Teh Internets Category

Greta "Princess of Positive" Perry of Kiss My Gumbo and YatPundit

After going to Orleans Parish Juvenile Court to pay a two-year old traffic fine for my now-19 year old son (how does an attorney not send you trial notices for a year and a half??), I hung out downtown for the rest of the morning, because I had a lunch date with Greta from Kiss My Gumbo (and nola.com). She was chaperoning a field trip for her son's 6th grade class at House of Blues.

If I may digress for a moment, any of you who have elementary-school-aged kiddos should take a look at Greta's story about the field trip. I had no idea that HoB had that robust an education program. The cost was reasonable, and it sounds like the kids enjoyed the heck out of the morning. the other thing I really like about this sort of outing is that it put a busload of kids from the north shore into Da Quarters for a morning.

Anyway, back to lunch. Since the group was at HoB, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce Greta to Napoleon House. It was a lovely day, and fortunately we were able to sit outside on the courtyard. Like many buildings in the Vieux Carre, Napoleon House is built around a central courtyard. I haven't dined outside at NH in years, mainly because the courtyard was their smoking section for a long time. I'm no rabid anti-smoker, but I also don't like being in smoking sections. The smoke and tobacco smell is just too concentrated to properly enjoy a meal.

I ordered my usual, half a muff. Greta had a tuna sandwich that had olives on it. It looked yummy, and has inspired me to do something soon at home with grilled tuna and olive salad. Washing down a muffuletta with an Abita Amber on a gorgeous spring day while chatting up a hottie. I thank goddess for living a charmed life!

Our lunchtime chat focused on two cities, New Orleans and Boston. Sticking to the old Southern rule of not discussing politics, sex, or religion in polite company is often a good idea when someone as liberal as I am is getting to know a conservative blogger. When it comes to politics, there's not much upon which m'lady Princess and I agree. Sex was pretty much off the list of discussion topics, given that her son was in attendance, but we did talk a bit of religion, since both of us were born in metro Boston.

But our New Orleans chatting was a good reality-check for me. I believe in and work for social justice daily, but I refuse to wake up and go to bed angry.

El Reg has it wrong, smut is still the worry:

A survey of 300 security pros by security firm Webroot found that workers frequently visit travel, webmail, and social networking websites while attempts to surf smut or gambling sites are less common. Users are effectively policing themselves, the survey revealed.

Travel, webmail, and social networking websites are more a threat to productivity than smut, but smut will get the workplace in much deeper shite. If an employee is tweeting all day or playing on LiveJournal, it's not likely that what's on their screen would be considered as creating a hostile work environment for a colleague. Watching porn, however, opens up that harassment door in a huge way. The fear is not about productivity as much as litigation.

Frankly, I can live without voice communication for 6-7 hours across the Atlantic. What I'd want is e-mail/toobz access:

That Air France in-flight calling trial is now well underway, and it looks like there's still some kinks left to iron out. The New York Times hitched a ride on a recent flight featuring tests of the system, and found that things weren't quite working up to snuff: voice quality was said to be like "talking to a small robot," only six passengers could get a signal at a time, Blackberry email didn't work, and calls placed from the ground to cell phones in the air went straight to voicemail. That's a pretty long list for a system that's been talked about for a couple years now -- let's hope OnAir manages to clear up some of these glitches before angry passengers revolt over not only having to listen to other people's conversations, but also their screaming over bad connections.

I will say this, though, we're past the notion that cell phones will take down the plane. That was always a stupid thing.

When the weekly market or bazaar opened in a town, the owners of the stalls who were selling their wares anticipated that people would come into town from all over the region, so they would have a large customer base. The last thing they wanted to do was to stand around and have coffee with the other stall-owners all day. It's the same thing with an online community. A NOLA community is not about a bunch of established bloggers reading and commenting on each other's blogs; that's going to happen anyway. A community site is like the market; the goal is to attract a wide audience.

A more modern metaphor to the bazaar would be the shopping mall. Even established stores with other locations will open up in a mall, because the concentration of options for the buyer means (hopefully) a lot of customers. Again, the store owners don't want their employees standing in the entrance chatting with the folks who work down the mall, they expect the location to attract a wide range of customers. A shopping mall offers a number of options for a business owner. You can open up a very small storefront, or lease enough space for this to become your primary location.

The "stall owners" in an online community site have the same options. They can maintain a minimal presence on the site, say one blog entry every couple of weeks. Perhaps they'll go further than that and post every few days, or even post the one-per-day blog entry maximum. Unlike the mall, there are no financial limitations here; everyone can post the maximum if they choose. The site's FP bloggers may even post more frequently, depending on scheduling.

Who will occupy the stalls in the bazaar? Initially established bloggers will share their content with the community. Think of this as the restaurant that opens up a small outlet in the mall food court. They cook everything up at their main location and bring it over for sale at the mall. If "business" picks up (indicated by the number of recommendations and comments received), a blogger will no doubt put more time and effort into the writing they do for the community.

The hope here is that others will come into the community to read and comment. There's nothing that says they have to blog themselves, just come in and participate. As a reader's interest level increases, no doubt they'll be inspired to start blogging. For example, if an established blogger does a post on Da Saints, a community member might realize that they have enough knowledge to chime in and be as credible as the blogger. Eventually we may even see Front Page bloggers who have "come up through the ranks" in this manner.

It's not about bloggers, it's about people. With a platform and structure that facilitate community participation, non-blogger users of Teh Internetz will discover that the community site is more attractive than the foulness of nola.com.

If you've ever worked on a group project, you know how difficult it is to produce a quality product when everyone is an equal. Even on a jury, someone is elected foreman, to facilitate communication with the judge. Successful developments in many fields are solo efforts, dual-partnerships at best. Development by committee rarely produces a quality product.

This project will be a sole proprietorship from a business standpoint. That doesn't mean this is will be a top-down dictatorship, mind you; I see two roles of the site owner. The first deals with the legal/financial aspects of any business. Because I'm using my bandwidth (seashell software's business account with Cox), and my server, initial startup costs are small. This is one of the reasons I can move forward quickly. I'm going to continue to lay out the vision I have for the site in more essays, but the short version from the business side is that I'd love to see it make lots of money from blogads/adsense/whatever, as well as contributions from the community. The ultimate goal here is to generate the revenue to be able to do what Markos does, sponsor paid fellowships for FP bloggers and have a paid tech support person.

The second role is the whole buck-stops-here thing. Again, I don't see this role as a top-down dictatorship, but rather as an ultimate arbitrator for the community. There will be times when decisions will have to be made, and I'll be the ultimate court of appeal in those circumstances. The goal here is for me to be the ultimate appeal; hopefully the decisions will work themselves out at the community level first.

To return to the bazaar metaphor, I'm the guy who owns the property where the bazaar is set up. You own your stall, and the contents in side it. The rules of the bazaar are worked out amongst the various stall-owners. They also (for the most part) set the standards for conduct amongst themselves. When they cannot work things out, they turn to the owner of the property.

In terms of site management, I welcome input. The process will always be transparent.

Comments are once again turned off; go to the Forums to discuss, please.

It may come back to haunt you like it has Hizzoner of Detroit:

The mayor of Detroit has been charged with perjury, obstruction of justice and misconduct in office, stemming from a sex scandal six years ago. Kwame Kilpatrick, 37, who says he will fight the charges, could face up to 15 years in jail if convicted. He was charged after sexually explicit text messages surfaced that appeared to contradict his sworn denials of an affair with a top aide in 2002.

As soon as your stuff enters the "telco cloud," it's no longer yours. Never forget that.

...but there are exceptions to every rule:

Notorious spammer Robert Soloway faces an extended spell behind bars after pleading guilty to fraud and tax evasion charges last Friday. Soloway, 28, from Seattle, has previously been found guilty of sending spam in several civil cases, most notably when Microsoft won a $7.8m judgement against him back in 2005. But he's always avoided paying fines. Now, however, the man authorities have described as the "King of Spam" (arguably one of the most overused phrases in computer security) is in far more serious trouble. As well as facing a maximum sentence of 26 years behind bars, Soloway faces the indignity of being questioned about where he's stashed his ill-gotten gains while being monitored by a lie-detector.

Now, put this clown in REAL federal prison rather than Club Fed for six months to a year. If he survives, parole him, making one of the conditions that he go around telling other wannabe spammers, phishers, and other assorted geek-criminals what it's like to be a prison bitch. Maybe that will stop some of them.

this article in El Reg amused me:

As far as I am concerned, the Google fellas - what with their creepy brain replication goals, ads on your eyelids and we know more about you than your colon goals - should have unseated Gates. The public, however, refuses to grant Sergey Brin or Larry Page most hated status. Some colored balls, jeans and donations apparently go pretty far toward engendering goodwill. Aspiring dictators please take note.

But now we have Zuckerberg who combines arrogance, robot-like anti-charisma, immense paper wealth, creepy software, youth, intelligence, casual attire, calculating behavior, a spoiled child background, charges that he stole ideas from acquaintances and a general ignorance about why any of this matters to anyone in just the right quantities.

to quote the ole perfesser (who is so Web 1.0 these days), heh, indeed.

hell, I was just getting into the old Facebook, now we've got a new one?  Well, there's always going to be a cutting edge.  One neat thing about hanging out on-line with the NOLA Blogging crowd is that several are further ahead of the curve than me, so I can go along for the ride.