Thursday evening I attended the Atlanta Web Designers Group meetup held at the Portfolio Center on Bennett Street. The topic was User Experience presented by Nick Finck. Nick effectively covered topics of usability, find-ability, credibility, accessibility, desirability, and value by contrasting websites that met and failed on each of these areas. wellsfargo.com=useable versus wmu.com, bestbuy.com=findable versus fry.com, and safeway.com=findable versus costco.com are a few of the sites Nick compared. I always enjoy meetups of the Atlanta Web Designers especially when held at the Portfolio Center a very uniquely interesting venue.
Connect Because You Can at SOCON10
Saturday I attended SOCON10 which was hosted at Kennesaw State University’s Center for Sustainable Journalism. The sold out event attracted several hundred social media enthusiasts ready to network, hear keynote speakers and attend breakout sessions.
The morning consisted of back to back keynotes followed by lunch at KSU’s new “green” dining hall The Commons and then two breakout sessions for the afternoon.
Carol Kruse, the Vice President of Global Interactive Marketing for The Coca-Cola Company
First keynote was Carol Kruse, the Vice President of Global Interactive Marketing for The Coca-Cola Company. She mentioned that consumer generated content is much more effective than “corporate” generated content. So at Coke they encourage consumers to generate content in the form of photos and videos and post onto Coke’s Facebook fan pages. Often times launching promotion contests like “Show us where you drank your last Coke” to encourage participation by consumers. Carol says Facebook has been the most effective platform for Coke. And one lesson they have learned is that it’s better to just use the free features of Facebook versus creating custom Facebook apps. Notable quotes from Carol’s talk were “Fish where the fish are…the essence of social media” and “Facebook is the worlds 3rd largest country after China and India.”
Dan Siroker Director of Analytics for the Obama Campaign
The mornings second keynote was by Dan Siroker who left Google where he was the Chrome Project Lead to become Director of Analytics for the Obama Campaign. He talked about how they used social media to attract donors to raise over $500 million for the campaign. His emphasis was on applying analytics and experimentation using multivariate analysis and A/B split testing on web sites, which he did for the Obama sites to dramatically increase donor contributions. He was also asked by the Clinton Bush Hatti Fund for similar assistance with their donor site.
Dan’s presentation included discussion of five lessons learned from working on the campaign.
1. Define quantifiable success metrics.
2. Question assumptions.
3. Divide and conquer.
4. Take advantage of circumstances.
5. Always be optimizing.
Now Dan is starting a new company called Optimizely.com which provides tools for web site analysis and optimization. Doing some research I also found Google Website Optimizer which seems to also perform multivariate and AB switch exierimentation testing for web sites.
After lunch there were way too many breakout sessions from which to choose and I could only attend two. After a difficult choice my first breakout was Delivering Content Through Social Media – What works best for your message” by Kristin Parrish of Ogilvy Public Relations.
My second breakout of the afternoon was “Are You Crazy? Launching a Web Startup with 3 People, No Money and a Good Idea. ” by the three co-founders of the startup Regator.
The Beautiful Web
Thursday evening I attended the Atlanta Web Design Group meetup which was held at it’s usual location, the Portfolio Center on Bennett Street. It was a full house with 112 people signed up for the $10 per person meetup.
The presentation was “The Beautiful Web” by Jason Beaird. Jason is the author of the book The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. His talk was centered on design theory around color, typography, texture, imagery, and layout with critique of websites that exemplify these principles. I’m usually too focused on the technical aspects of a website and so Jason’s talk was a welcome and useful introduction to the non-technical aspects of web design. I immediately ordered his book from Amazon and am looking forward to reading it.
Atlanta Google Wavers Meetup
Last night was my first to attend the Atlanta Wavers Meetup, held this month at Ignition Alley. The two presenters, Andy Thornton and Rick Thomas, both provided outstanding presentations on the basics of Wave gadget development.
The important take aways for me were finally understanding key differences between gadgets and robots and gaining some insight into how they are developed. Plus a cool new (and free) development IDE called Aptana Studio which is available stand alone or as an Eclipse Plugin. As a bonus Andy provided CDs filled with software and examples for all attendees.
So what’s the difference between a gadget and a robot? In a nutshell a gadget is a program inserted into a wave that can be used by all wave participants like voting or drawing. While a robot is a program added to a wave to perform automated tasks like making the wave public.
Installation of gadgets and robots into a Wave is very different. Gadgets are installed by entering the URL of the gadget whereas robots are installed as contacts and then added to the wave just like you would add any other contact.
Gadget and robot development are also quite different. A gadget can be written in a variety of languages like python, php, or even c#, and are simply publicly hosted web applications. Most gadgets even those written for non-Wave containers can run in wave. The main difference between Wave aware gadgets and non-Wave gadgets is that a Wave aware gadget can interact with the wave. Wave gadgets aren’t typically complete applications but rather they tend to be small add-ons that add a piece of functionality to a wave. Making a gadget wave aware starts with a declariation in the gadget specification of <Require feature="wave" /> which serves to give the gadget access to the Wave Gadgets API.
Robots on the other hand are all created and hosted on Google App Engine, which at this time only supports Python and Java.
I’m glad to see that Atlanta has an Wave Development group. I plan to add this meetup to my calendar and attend often.
Atlanta’s First Wordcamp was hot (and cold)
WCATL was held on a brutally cold winter day during the coldest stretch of weather in Atlanta for the past 25 years. Start of the event had to be postponed for one hour due to weather. But even so approximately 400 wordpress developers, designers, bloggers, and other wordpress enthusiasts turned out. I arrived on time which meant being an hour early due to the schedule change. Luckily I fell into an impromptu one hour tour of the venue (Savannah College of Art and Design) by the SCAD director of social media, Jason Parker(@jasonaut), who gave us a great tour of this fantastic facility.
The keynote by Jane Wells covered upcoming changes in WordPress 3.0 such as the merge of single Wordpress with the multi-site version known as MU, moving key plugins into core, custom post types, and a new default theme. Automatic is adding more UI/UX contributors to WordPress development with a new mail list at http://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo/wp-ui
I didn’t attend the session by Adria Richards, “What the heck is Wordpress”, but it’s a great intro to Wordpress so here are the slides.
View more presentations from Adria Richards.
The first session I actually attended was “Building sites quickly w/ parent/child themes” presented by Ryan Imel.
Other sessions I attended included:
“You’re Doing It Wrong, How to Code the Wordpress Way,” by Chris Scott (@chrisscott)
“Wordpress Security – Protecting your WordPress from the Inside Out” by Syed Balkhi (@wpbeginner)
“How to Start Freelancing with WordPress especially if you are a n00b” by John Saddington (@human3rror)
I was having so much fun attending breakout sessions that I missed the genus bar staffed by the likes of Tessa Horehled(@tessa), Paul Stamatiou(@stammy), Dougal Campbell(@dougal), and Tammy Hart(@tammyhart) to name a few, but heard it was outstanding.
One thing I love about attending Wordcamp is all the interesting people you meet there. One person I met uses Wordpress to quickly create websites that advertise his Georgia insurance business where he has over 300 Wordpress sites each with a unique domain name representing just about every possible type of insurance coverage in Georgia. If you google virtually any Georgia Insurance coverage type one of his 300 sites will be on top of the return list. He mentioned that when he switched his platform to Wordpress from plain old html a year ago his SEO results improved substantially…thus helping to confirm something I have always heard that Wordpress is very SEO friendly.
All of the presentations are here on Slideshare.
For more insight into WCATL check out Jenny Munn’s (@jennymunn) youtube video, http://bit.ly/5M2njZ
Also sessions that were held in the main room C were live broadcast and recorded on ustream. The link is here.
Finally I didn’t attend the after party held at TAP but I did watch the video that someone recorded on a laptop…looks like much fun was had by all.
Many thanks to @tessa, @sheatsb, and @cdharrison for all their work organizing the event. I’m really looking forward to Atlanta Wordcamp 2011 (Feb 11&12).
Empty Stocking system stands the test of time
Eight years ago while running Georgia Tech’s Center for Manufacturing Information Technology (CMIT) I was approached by Don Crawford, Executive Director of Atlanta’s Empty Stocking Fund (ESF), with a request to create an information system that would automate ESFs annual toy distribution operation. To make a long story short, Kelley Hundt who also worked at CMIT and I agreed to take on the project and that same year we implemented a custom bar-code order entry and warehouse inventory system at ESFs annual operation.
The ESF operation has some unique challenges for an information system. Probably the biggest is operator turn over which occurs every 3-4 hours as new volunteers arrive at Santa’s Warehouse. Each day three shifts of volunteers must be trained within a couple of minutes to check customers in, print bar coded orders, fix any discrepancies found in the database pertaining to child age and gender, scan selected toys into the system and print warehouse pick tickets. For the entire three week season approximately 400 unique volunteers will successfully operate the system with 2-3 minutes or less of orientation.
Every once in a while a system developer is fortunate enough to create a system that lasts for years. When this happens it’s always gratifying as well as unpredictable. Some systems never get off the ground, others last only a few months, a few make it for 2-3 years, and on the rare occasion a system will last for a decade or more. I only have one “decade” system to my credit…a paperless shop floor system for aircraft assembly which I and a team of engineers who were working for me at that time built in C++, Ingress, and Motif on Vax and Unix servers and 19 inch X-terminal color graphic touch screen clients (yes this cost millions) for Lockheed’s F-22, C-130, C-5B, and P3 assembly lines. That system was built more than 16 years ago and last I heard is still going strong in Lockheed Martin’s Marietta Georgia assembly plant. I’m hopeful the Empty Stocking Fund system will become the 2nd “decade” system of my career in December 2011…we’ll see.
Recipients check-in to verify they are in the database, along with children’s age and gender. Bar coded orders are printed with one child per page showing toys in sets that are available for selection by parents. Each set represents a group of toys appropriate for a specific child age/gender. For the 2009 season I loaded over 105,000 children into the database from a dataset provided by Georgia DFCS.
Toys are selected in Santa’s Workshop based on child gender and age
Toy’s selected by parents are scanned into the database from the bar-coded order and a warehouse pick ticket is printed
Pickers line up at the scanning station waiting for pick tickets to print. Toys are picked from the warehouse using shopping carts and then delivered to waiting parents.
Is Google Wave Succeeding?
This is an excerpt from a Wave posted by John Blossom. (jblossom@googlewave.com). I don’t think I can link to a wave from my blog so I had to copy/paste and give John credit. It’s a good review of Wave pros and cons that I wanted to make it available here (outside of Wave).
While Google Wave is only in a technical preview, it’s an aggressive program to expose its capabilities to a wide range of everyday people – and, in the process of doing so, building buzz to get people excited about its possibilities. This, in turn, is expected to drive the development of applications and gadgets that will enhance the value of its API and underlying protocols. As developers see an audience growing, more functions will be available through Wave APIs.
It’s easy to forget that what we see in Wave today in this preview is just that – an HTML 5 application that helps Google to exercise the underpinnings of the Wave protocol and API. For those of you viewing this wave on Apple platforms via Waveboard you already have a taste of how Wave apps, like apps used to extend the capabilities of platforms such as Twitter and WordPress, can accelerate the power of Wave to adapt to many uses.
Still, what most people will encounter as their “hello world” experience of Wave will be the standard Web browser-based application. What are some of the early pros and cons that Wave is showing from this general debut? Here are a few thoughts:
Pros
- Rapid and effortless collaboration. While Wave as it exists today is not a replacement for every type of collaborative communication, it is truly amazing how effective it can be for 80 percent of what most people need out of a collaboration platform. Simple messages can turn into document repositories and in turn become knowledge repositories as people edit those document and add their comments. After years of trying to get other collaborative platforms to succeed, Wave’s instant ability to attract participation will be one of its strongest powers.
- A unique blend of real-time messaging, applications and online documents. While it can be frustrating at times dealing with Wave’s flexiblity, the ability of Wave to support a number of styles of publishing and communications simultaneously in a single document is perhaps its greatest strength. In an instant you can embed an application into a wave to gather data or share multimedia, video and voice exchanges. A comment can become a chat instantly. Casual notes can be structured into more formal documents rapidly and collaboratively. Best of all, many of these can happen in ways that the originator of a wave may have never expected when it started. It’s the closest thing to what really happens in natural collaborative settings yet invented, in my view.
- No reason ever to use email. Is there some reason why we’re forced to use a communication system in which 90 percent of the content is about drugs and physical relationships that we really don’t ever want to think about? Even when email works, the idea of sending a communication “to” someone is entirely different from the Wave concept of inviting someone “into” a communication. There will still be a place for “to”-style communications in a Wave-centric world, but Wave represents a better way to communicate, more like popping your head into someone’s office than sending a memo.
- A second Read/Write Web. In its early phases it’s perhaps hard to think ahead to the full impact of what Wave offers the world, but in a sense I see Wave as a new communications environment not so different from the early World Wide Web. You can link to Web content in Wave, of course, but mostly people seem to wind up referring to content in Wave itself. Wave isn’t just email or messaging on steroids, it’s a new publishing environment that can have global, enterprise or cross-enterprise impact as easily as the Web itself. In this I think that Wave may have a substantially more powerful impact on the Web overall than Twitter or, probably, Facebook, which offer very specific types of content that cannot be expanded or referenced all that easily.
Cons
- Poor “day one” orientation. Granted, the preview version of Wave is really not meant for your average novice, but even many social media veterans invited into wave take one look, say “Huh?” and are never heard from again. The basic videos that Google provides are useful enough, but in general the lack of pre-populated contacts for many people, no documentation supporting the public channel and the still-restricted invite system have limited participation to just a few enthusiasts for the most part.
- Immature interface. Well, we have to be fair, what was email like forty years ago when it was invented? Google Wave’s preview app is years ahead of primitive email systems, but it still lacks a lot of basic usability and control options. This discourages people from using it productively. One of my ongoing complaints: why can’t I have a checkbox feature in the inbox that will allow me to apply an action like “archive” to multiple waves? Come on, Google, get us productive on this ASAP.
- Poorly deployed public communications. The ability to publish and access content on a public channel on Wave is perhaps one of its most powerful features, enabling any conversation to turn into a global conversation very rapidly. But it’s also one of its most poorly implemented feature, kludgy at best to use and not tied into any sort of permissioning service. That’s good enough for a preview, but far from good enough for production versions of Wave applications. Hopefully the “Requests” channel becomes more useful as a way to filter public waves for consumption and participation.
- Major privacy issues. To get things going Google has made it easy as pie to grab people’s Wave addresses to put in their Contacts list. How long will that stand the test of spammers looking to build up mailing lists, inviting everyone they can into their waves? Judging by some of the addresses and bots already on Wave, I think that the seeds of spamming are already sown. There needs to be a permission-based method for people to communicate with one another on Wave when they expose their participation in a channel outside of their trusted network.
- Lackluster performance. While each day brings some modest improvements to the overall performance of Wave, in general any wave of any size tends to choke at some point or another, either in pulling it up, editing or archiving. Perhaps the new release of the Chrome browser is intended to mitigate some of those performance issues, but in the meantime if you click on a document to have it go out of your inbox, well, it should do that pretty lickety-split. All in time, but in the meantime first impressions abound of a poorly performing platform.
Overall, I do think that Wave is headed towards a major success, though. Its strategy is sound, aimed squarely in the gaps between other offerings such as the Web itself, enterprise services like SharePoint and CRM services and real-time messaging and social networking services. Google seeks out the “80 percent” solution oftentimes, leaving the other 20 percent needed to satisfy people to niche products or applications that can be driven by Google content and services. With that in mind, I do think that Wave will represent one of the most powerful 80 percent solutions available since browser-based Web access was introduced in the mid-1990s. In other words, it’s huge.
—- Wave posted by John Blossom
Google Wave is starting to click
The first time I opened Wave I had no contacts of course. So I was immediately struck with the thought “What now?” I had a bunch of invites available so I started sending them out to co-workers and friends who requested one. But we were all unsure what to do.
Then I discovered public waves, which can be found by entering with:public in the Wave search window. After browsing a dozen public waves things finally started to click for me. Waves are conversations. Conversations about things like projects, events, vacations, proposals, reviews, places, or whatever.
Today when you start a conversation you dial up somebody on their cell, send them emails, post/comment on a blog, IM, post/reply to twitter, edit a wiki, etc. With Wave all these different communication techniques are combined into a single experience….a threaded message exchange containing functional elements from email, wikis, blogs, and instant messaging and can also include embedded documents, photos, video chats, and even conference calls.
So whenever you want to start a conversation, instead of emailing or dialing or posting, you start a wave. You then invite others to participate. Wave participants have the option to contribute to the conversation in either synchronous or asynchronous mode. They can see your message in real time if they are online, similar to IM/chat. Or they can view your message later when they login, much like traditional email and wikis. With Wave all of the messaging from multiple participants is threaded and conveniently available for future reference (who said what when) and can even be archived.
So I’m finally starting to get it.
Much of our technology is about communication and convenience, and Wave seems to be a major improvement to both.
Over the weekend I started a wave for the organization I work for because I noticed other companies and government organizations are doing the same. If the trend in web presence and marketing is towards more dynamic and personal communication as with blogs, wiki’s, and micro-blogging, then it’s easy to see how Wave can be the next evolution of these technologies.
Here are some good Wave resources:
Google Wave List of Extensions
A Clinical Infusion of Google Wave
Wordpress Meetup in Atlanta
Attended my first Wordpress meetup in Atlanta last night. Location was a new co-working facility just off Ponce called Ignition Alley. The presenter was Brett Bumeter, former corporate whistle blower and now Wordpress theme designer and evangelist for Artisteer, a new and popular Wordpress theme development tool. I saw Brett deliver a similar presentation on Artisteer back in September at Birmingham WordCamp so I made the effort to see him speak at the October Wordpress meetup in Atlanta. The title of Brett’s presentation is “Design Your First Wordpress Theme in Minutes” and covers the basics of Artisteer as well as some advanced techniques like automatically switching themes depending on page. I have not previously considered applying multiple themes per site until hearing Brett’s presentation. Artisteer makes using multiple themes per site easy since you can simply tweak a saved theme in Artisteer and save it as a new theme. And then using a short php code snippet provided by Brett it’s a piece of cake to switch themes depending on the page being displayed. Pretty cool. Due to the holidays the Atlanta Wordpress meetup won’t meet again until 2010. I’m looking forward to future meetings.
Design Your 1st WordPress Theme IN MINUTES!
View more presentations from Brett Bumeter.
WordCamp Birmingham 2009
Just got back from Wordcamp Birmingham. I have to say was one of the best events I’ve attended in years. It was a 2 day event but I was only able to attend the first day on Saturday September 26th. The venue for day one was a place called the Innovation Depot in downtown Birmingham. ..an incubator for startup companies. Sessions got underway around 9am with 2 tracks, one advanced and one “non” advanced I suppose. Although new to wordpress I tended to stick mostly with sessions in the advanced track as they seemed to match my interests.
Twitter hash tag is #wcbhm09 if you want to check out tweets for the event.
The first session was “Jumping into WordPress Plugin Programming” by @Dougal, one of the original Wordpress core developers.
Jumping Into WordPress Plugin Programming
View more documents from Dougal Campbell.
One of my favorate sessions of the day was “WordPress and Your Brand” by Sara Cannon. Sara’s presentation included a lot of useful information on branding, selecting a theme, and useful plugins.
Wordpress and Your Brand
View more presentations from saracannon.
Next up was “Essential SEO and Analytics for WordPress” by Jeremy Flint. Jeremy’s session was packed with tips for SEO performance.
SEO and Analytics for Wordpress
View more documents from jeremyflint.
One of the most useful aspects from all the presentations I attended on Saturday was advice on which Wordpress plugins to use. There are so many from which to choose it’s good to now have a list of the most essential and know all these Wordpress experts are using them too.
Lunch was outstanding with tons of BBQ (leftovers were available for the remainder of the day) and the highlight, Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of Wordpress. During lunch Matt led a town hall style meeting opening up the floor to any and all questions regarding Wordpress.
Afternoon sessions I attended were “Beyond the Blog: Setting up a Full Dynamic site with WordPress” by Mitch Canter, “Plugins to Die For” by Tammy Hart, and “Design Your First WordPress Theme in Minutes” by Brett Bumeter.
All of the afternoon sessions I attended were really packed with useful information to jumpstart my Wordpress efforts. However my favorite was Brett’s session which highlighted a tool for theme development called Artisteer, which I’ve already purchased and used to create my first theme…and like Brett said in his presentation it only took a few minutes.
Design Your First Word Press Theme In Minutes Word Camp Birmingham Brett Bumeter Softduit Media
View more presentations from Brett Bumeter.
The final session of the day deserves special mention. It was an example of the power of blogging (using Wordpress of course) to create political change and express free ideas in spite of opposition by repressive governments. A young woman, Esra’a El Shafei, from the middle east who operates the website, mideastyouth.com, spoke to us about her efforts to promote understanding and knowledge of government repression especially against freedoms of speech in that region of the World.
All in all Wordcamp Birmingham was awesome and I’m already looking forward to next year.
I should also mention the hotel where my wife and I stayed was a great experience. An old renovated hotel in downtown Birmingham called theThe Redmont Hotel. This place had great atmosphere, friendly helpful staff, two bars, and affordable prices. And if you’re in Birmingham sometime looking for a place to eat I can recommend J Clyde, located in Birmingham’s historic 5 Points South Entertainment District, a laid back tavern and ale house my wife and I greatly enjoyed visiting Saturday evening.
