Phoom!

New Job. New Home.

2009-11-23T14:53:00.000-08:00

I have big news! I have just accepted the position of Director of Community for Answers.com (focusing on WikiAnswers). I'll be leading a distributed team of 5 folks who have about 15 assistants and nearly 700 volunteers across the globe who are supporting nearly 4 million registered users and over 50 million visitors a month. Whew!

As part of the job, I must move to New York. It was not an easy decision to make. I will be moving away from my mother (two hrs away in Merced), good friends, a nice cheap rental in Hayward, and many, many professional friends, colleagues and peers. I will miss seeing them as often as I do now, but I look forward to keeping connected through all our virtual connections.

On the other hand, I am moving six hours and $300 closer to Europe. Also, I will be closer to a number of places that are of interest to me such as the Philadelphia (Mütter Museum and The College of Physicians of Philadelphia) and the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, MD. I look forward to trips north and south exploring the other coast.

At the center of this, though, is the work to be done. Answers.com is pretty cool and energetic. I get to work with an existing community and staff and help everyone grow and become more empowered at helping answer other people's questions. I look forward even more to how I can help make that happen better, faster, with more people helping each other.

I NEED YOUR HELP!
If you can help me with the following please contact me:
Friends/family who live in NYC, especially Brooklyn, who can help me understand the neighborhoods.

Friends/family who are in real estate, property mgmt, or can recommend a broker in NYC who can help me find a place and understand the ins and outs of renting.

Recommendations for national movers to help me get the few very precious things I will take with me to NYC safely.

I know this is a surprise to some folks (what else is new) so I hope to answer a few questions. If I miss one you have, add it as a comment or shoot it to me and I will answer!

When do you start?
I start sometime mid-January 2010. I want to finish up some client work and there is a very special winter camping event I want to attend.

When do you move?
No later than mid-February 2010. I hope to have a place lined up by Feb 1 so I can concentrate on my move. I'm not sure if I will be able to stay for my birthday (Feb 19), though.

Do you have time to take on any online community work?
I regret that as of now, I am unavailable to accept any client work. If you wanted to talk about possible work, I do know many online community people who are looking for clients and I would be happy to match you up with one of these fine people.

Why do you want to leave California?
It's not that I want to leave California. It's that working on a project like Answers.com and WikiAnswers is a huge opportunity to be a part of something that will have an impact on people. I recognize that to do the job well, I need to be closer to the people in New York and the office in Israel.

Where are you going to live?
I'm not sure. Brooklyn looks and feels a lot like Oakland and so I am looking there first. I also am not ready for the shock of Manhattan apartment prices. If you know anyone who lives in Brooklyn and can offer me advice on neighborhoods, please let me know!

Can stay at your place when I come to New York?
Sure! As long as you don't mind that I will not be in Manhattan. I will look for a place that will give me enough room for office/guests so please come make use of the space.

Can I have your stuff?
I definitely have to shed stuff from my life. If there is something particular you have been coveting, ask!

Are you giving up the VW Thing?
Yes (sniff!). It's time I come to terms with the fact that I don't have the drive to get the poor darling restored like it deserves. She's been good to me and I'll be looking for a good home ASAP.

This is big, really big. So did I miss a question? What do you want to know that I haven't already said?

photo of brooklyn bridge by See-ming Lee

The lost origin of an online holiday

2009-08-11T21:11:00.000-07:00

For the past three years, I have been wanting to tell my version of a holiday called Fern Day that is unique to the citizens of a virtual world called Dreamscape which is coming up on its 14th year of operation (I blogged about its 10th Anniversary before). It’s the story of how something I helped start was adopted by a community and became a custom or kind of cultural norm that is practiced annually without connection to its deeper origins.

What is Fern Day?
On Aug 1, 2009, Fern Day was celebrated over the course of two days by the inhabitants of the city of Phantasus on the island of Kymer in a dream-like world called Dreamscape. Two full days of games developed and run by the world-wide community with virtual items given as prizes. And by “full-days” and “world-wide” I mean there are multiple games scheduled each hour from 1am to 11pm which implies multiple time-zones are involved. Additionally, there is a parade through the streets of Phantasus, a dance contest, a blessing of the Ferns, several ceremonies and retellings of the True History of Fern Day.

How Fern Day Started
I don’t want to take away from what Fern Day is for the citizens of Phantasus and the inhabitants of Dreamscape, I hope that this secret origin of Fern Day will help other community managers and facilitators see ways they can instigate cultural changes in their own communities that will be accepted and adopted by the community members and become part of the cultural make-up of how those communities identify themselves.

About a month before the first Fern Day was celebrated, Aug 1, 1996, I was one of three community managers (called Oracles) who was trying find a holiday to celebrate during the month of August. The Dreamscape had been operating for just under one year and we knew early on that we wanted to celebrate existing holidays in a way that separated the Dreamscape from the every day, offline and modern, “waking world”. We recognized that there would be pressure from the modern people inhabiting this virtual world to bring with them the holidays of their culture, nationality and religions and we didn’t want to become caught up in disputes (which happened anyway and is another story for another time). Finally, we wanted to recognize natural cycles we cannot avoid, the cycles of the hours, the days, weeks, months and seasons because such cycles help tie people to places, and each other. So, we planned early on to include at the very least recognize holidays on a regular basis.

It was the nature of the Dreamscape that members of the community could not create objects or artwork on their own as one can today in Second Life or as one could in Active Worlds in 1996. This meant that all artwork was created by our company. In order to avoid overloading the art pipeline with holiday artwork, we planned to celebrate holidays every two months for one year, shift one month and keep going for another year. That way, in two years, we would have 12 holidays and could recycle art each year (that ultimately was doomed because we needed to refresh or create new art every year to keep interest up). Thus, Christmas, Chanukah and Kwanza were rolled together into a month-long winter fest (which included a very secular Santa Claus (called Kymer Kringle) and a nod to C. S. Lewis’s White Witch) .

So it was in July of 1996, I was looking for a holiday or set of holidays to appropriate and remix to our budding virtual world. Not finding much, I learned about Australia’s National Wattle Day, held Sept 1. Learning that it was a fairly new (less than 100 yrs old) holiday gave me the inspiration to, uhm, appropriate it. I moved it to August 1st and latched on to the only local flora the Dreamscape had in abundance, the fern which was purchasable in a vending machine for 160 Tokens (the virtual currency).

At the next meeting of the three community managers, the question arose, "What are we going to do about a holiday in August?". I suggested we celebrate "Fern Day". My compatriots looked at me confused and, figuring that the only way this would work is to be so over the top that it will take root, I continued like a carnival barker. "It will be fernomnonal! A full day of fernvolity, celebrating the ferntastic fern-ness of the fern." I may have concluded with, "unless someone has a better idea". Having done my research into the dearth of non-nationalistic holidays for August, I figured there would be none. It took no time for them to start fern puns of their own and the idea took root. Planning for the first Fern Day started.

On July 31, we publicly announced Fern Day with this message:

What: Phantasus Fern Festival When: August 1st Time: All day Where: The streets of Phantasus Hosts: Oracles and Acolytes Come one, come all! Help celebrate Phantasus Fern Day--The Dreamscape's first "official" in-world holiday! We will be celebrating with new vendos, new items, and of course...ferns! Bring your ferns or purchase new ones! Search amongst the foliage for hidden items! Fern Fun all day long!
The main idea is to have fun with ferns. There will be improptu [sic] games and visits by all three Oracles throughout the day. Here is a schedule of a few events: 9:00 AM WAT - OpeningCeremony Outside the Temple Noon WAT - Fern Tag (Meet at Temple Street Terrance Lobby) 1:00 PM WAT - Drawing for prizes of players in Fern Tag 5:00 PM WAT \ - Blessing of the Ferns 5:30 PM WAT / 9:00 PM WAT - Closing Ceremony Outside of Temple

and got exactly the same reaction from the community that I had gotten from my teammates. Our volunteer moderators (called Acolytes) were really at a loss to explain why all three community managers had just gone collectively insane. We chose not use the rational (and real) explanation of appropriating Wattle Day and instead flooded our poor volunteers with fern-puns, silly enthusiasm, and vague references to the "ancient origins" of a holiday that, until that moment, none of them had ever heard of. In other words, we used the time-honored justification of many cultural customs, "Because that's the way it's always been done".

The First Fern Day
Come August 1, 1996, the citizens of Phantasus were tentative about what was happening, but they became enthusiastic when the price of ferns were dropped from ~160 Tokens to a mere 10 Tokens. The scheduled game of Fern Tag was simple: find someone without a fern, give them a fern and them drag them to the game host who would record both names as part of a raffle. People were buying ferns fast and furious and zipping around the world handing them out and drawing more innocent bystanders into the chaotic whirlwind of fern-ness.

Then disaster struck. It seemed that there was a memory leak with the vendos that dispensed ferns. But this memory leak was on the *server* side. That means that the more people bought ferns the slower and slower the servers hosting the entire virtual world were running until they eventually crashed booting everyone out. Even when the world was brought back, it immediately crashed again. It looked like it would take many hours before the world could be brought back up so fern day would be over before it had a chance to even exist. People were feeling left out and understandably angry (likely the most angry were the poor developers who gave us no end of grief over what turned out to be an unscheduled load test on a Saturday). There was only one thing to do: apologize and make amends.

Dear Dreamscape Customers, This is a letter to discuss the most recent and unfortunate events which occurred on Fern Day. The terrible problems we experienced with our servers on what was quickly turning into an extremely festive occasion was as emotionally draining for us as it may have been for you. The Dreamscape was unavailable from 2:00 AM WAT - Noon WAT and from 2:00 PM WAT - 8:00 PM WAT. We have been working continuously to find the source of the problem and make the Dreamscape available to you. Unfortunately, at this time, we have been unable to determine the exact source of the problem. We are still investigating the situation and have implemented some changes which should keep the service stable. We deeply regret the inconvenience and imposition on the fun promised. The Oracles have every intention of getting as much out of Fern Day as we hoped. To this end, we have extended the Fern Day Festival to Noon, August 2. We encourage you to come out as often as possible during the next 16 hours to celebrate Fern Day as we had intended to celebrate. We hope that those who had initially captured the spirit of Fern Day will regain it and sponsor or participate in the variety of games which were spontaneously popping up. At Noon, there will be a closing ceremony at the Main Doors of the Temple and soon after, the vendos will be removed from the streets. Even after this, we hope you will enjoy the ferns you have and the good memories which we will all share. The Oracles and the Forum Sysops thank you for your generous patience and support in this matter and wish you a very happy Fern Day! We would also like to thank the Acolytes and the Forum Staff who helped out so much during the times in which the Dreamscape was unavailable. Most sincerely, Oracle Uni Oracle Vaserius Oracle Teresias WorldsAway Community Forum Sysops WorldsAway Team
from SUCKUP.TXT

The next day, folks turned up amends were made, and the new closing ceremony included a recognition of the troubles we had all encountered. As an aside, it also meant that two community managers came in for an extra day of work when only one had been regularly scheduled (this is what you do when you are in customer and community service). Fern day was wrapped up, prices returned to normal and we put it away until the next year.

How Fern Day really started
The next year, in preparation for the second annual celebration of Fern Day, Marianne G, who ran one of the newspapers for the virtual world posted a story of the "true history" of the origins of Fern Day which included the nickname “Crash Day”. We, the community managers, knew none of us had a hand in her history and it took only seconds to agree that we would support and even adopt her story as the origins. To do otherwise would discourage creativity and we thought her version was as good as any so we took the same, "because that's the way it's always been" attitude. Aug 1, 2007 was my last Fern Day in Dreamscape. In another two years, the last of the original community managers who stared blankly at me that July day had also moved on.

But by 1999, the community had claimed Fern Day as their own and over the next 10 plus years, the citizen-created history, games, parades and ceremonies have evolved to include early beta testers (who never received official recognition for being pioneers – mea culpa) and even a group who call themselves Natives and claim to have inhabited this virtual world before even the beta testers. It's literally taken directions I never imagined it would. I could not be happier about it.

OCTribe Call for Participation - Tuesday Topic

2009-08-10T12:24:00.000-07:00

How OCTribe works
Each 2nd Tuesday and 4th Tuesday of the month, one of the bloggers in the loosely defined OCTribe group makes a call for posts related to a particular topic of online communities. Then the same blogger posts a summary and links to the submissions.

Write something related to the topic tomorrow (Tuesday, August 11), tag it #octribe, and your post will be linked from the recap page. This conversational project is just starting, so please join in!

The Aug 11 Topic: Fostering culture in and around online communities
Share your experiences and ideas around any of these:

fostering or identifying emerging customs or taboos in an online community (for example, here's a story of an academic who discovered "that game rules encouraging competition and varied tactics hardly mattered to gaming community members who wanted to preserve a deeply-rooted culture."
establishing or fostering culture within the organization hosting an online community
culture clashes between online communities or between community and host organization
offline and online culture influencing each other (for example, the prevelance of caste based groups on Orkut as a mirror of India's society

You might also find inspiration from Forum One's Online Community Culture study conducted Oct 2008.

How to participate:

Post your thoughts on online communities and culture sometime between now and Tuesday, Aug 11.
Tag your posts, tweets, photos, slides with #octribe
- shoot me a quick email to make sure I include your post in the round up.
Come back Wednesday, Aug 12 to see what your fellow Online Community Tribe members have to say.

If you would like to host a future OCTribe topic, email Bill Johnston.

Create value metrics for both host and community

2009-07-28T20:01:00.000-07:00

This post is part of the OC Tribe series. Each 2nd Tuesday and 4th Tuesday of the month, online community practitioners are be encouraged to explore a particular topic via blog, video blog, twitter, or whatever suites their fancy. The topic for Tuesday, July 28 is Valuing Participation in Online Communities. Check the post and tag your musings with #octribe. A recap will be hosted at the originating blog later this week. This ad-hoc group is just starting up, so please join in! #octribe

Some discussion of assigning value to members in a community tend toward how valuable a particular community member is to the host of the community (be they a brand, reseller, or even non-profit). This often raises concerns that community members are being taken advantage of. The AOL volunteer lawsuit gets thrown out as one of the third-rail types of stories -- danger! do not touch! What is often lost is that AOL ran volunteer programs for a long time before the lawsuits with few issues. What changed? Part of the answer is that AOL was using free access as a perk for their volunteers. However, when AOL went from a rated service (access charged by the hour) to a flat-rate (unlimited access for a monthly fee), the value of that perk plummeted. It's not the whole reason some volunteers stood up against AOL, but it certainly added to some of the resentment.

What if we add another level to the idea of ascribing value to the contributions of a community member? Let's say we are a bookseller. People who write reviews are valuable to our business, not because they buy books in large quantities (in fact, we might even send them books to review), but because their reviews help sell books to people who will appreciate them. Even by steering some people away from a book, the reviewer can help the bookseller build long-term relationships with book buyers. It's pretty easy to see who we might ascribe a value to the reviewer -- sales of books after viewing a particular review (or, better, after marking it "helpful" and then going on to purchase the book).

So where's the value to the reviewer? Part might be that the seller puts high-value reviewers at the top of promotional book give-aways. So reviewers get more books. Reviewers might even be allowed a small percentage of the sales of books they review. And, of course, there is notoriety in being a highly ranked reviewer.

Is there value for the community at large, particularly, those community members who might not receive a high valuation in this scheme. Perhaps so. After all, they want to spend their money wisely and so are likely to also find the high-value reviewers helpful, useful, valuable.

Granted, I cherry-picked a fairly easy business and model for my example, but I challenge my fellow community managers and facilitator. What other kinds of positive feedback loops can we create that build value for different aspects of our communities such that even if the value were quantified as a number, people would still be willing to contribute?

Tesco Bitter photo by Ewan-M / CC BY-SA 2.0

Some notes on Sway by the bros. Brafman

2009-06-18T18:43:00.000-07:00

Recently, at a webinar, Francois Gossieaux recommended the book Sway by Ori & Rom Brafman. I decided to take the rest of the afternoon off and see if the Hayward Public Library had a copy. They did and it was such a slim book and a quick read that, well, here we are.

As I read the first few chapters, the authors introduced terms such as "value attribution" and "diagnosis bias". The descriptions sounded familiar as Fundamental Attribution Error and Confirmation Bias, so I googled the terms and, lo, found very little in the way of formal definition of their terms. While I think the concepts in the book are very interesting, I admit I am a bit annoyed at dressing up known or familiar concepts in new terms without acknowledging or improving upon the terms or concepts.

So here's a very short summary of the concepts in the book with more common terms and links where I could find them.

Chapt 1 - aversion to loss - Sunk Costs Fallacy

Chapt 2 - commitment (even in the face of mounting loss) - Escalation of Commitment

Chapt 3 - value attribution - Fundamental Attribution Error

Chapt 4 - diagnosis bias - Confirmation Bias

Chapt 5 - chameleon effect - Pygmalion Effect & Golem Effect

Chapt 6 - process justice - Perceptions of fairness and The Ultimatum Game

Chapt 7 - the paradox of rewards - neuroscience of personal pleasure (Brian Knutson) and altruism (Dharol Tankersley). prospect of reward is stronger pleasure center stimulant than receiving the reward.

Chapt 8 - group conformity and dissenters - Asch conformity experiments

Epilogue - advice on avoiding each of the above "sway" forces. However, advice on avoiding being swayed by rewards was not included. I would have liked to see much more on this with the advice backed by research.

I'm glad I read Sway, it's a bit like a crib sheet of behavioral psychology and economics, so it works as an introduction, but there are deeper resources out there and I'm looking forward to digging into them.

Questions to Ask When Building an Online Community

2009-04-27T01:17:00.000-07:00

Today, I am attending the NTEN Conference 2009 and speaking on a panel, "Building and Sustaining Vibrant Online Communities".

This is the 15-20 minute presentation I will give. I recommend clicking through to the full view so you can see my notes on the slides. I'd love to hear feedback on the questions (and special thanks to Brooks Brown and Mike Rowland for feedback on the draft).

Questions to Ask When Building an Online Community

View more presentations from Scott Moore.

Update: Lessons learned. This was not a 20 min presentation. The slides may be simple, but my supporting details were, well, detailed. I guess that's good. I'm thinking about presenting this at the Online Community Unconference, June 10th. If you have an opinion on that, let me know.

Social Psychology 101 for Community Managers

2009-02-17T23:36:00.000-08:00

These are my speaking notes for my session at the Online Community Unconference East 2009. I believe the wiki is publicly available for viewing.

These are totally messy. I am trying to break my desire for unattainable perfection and allow drafts of my thoughts to be out there. If there seems to be interest, I may turn these into a better formatted series.

Intro
- I am not a social scientist, just a Community Manager who has been learning as I go.
- I want to share the moments of, "I know that! It has a name?" with you.
- The format is definitions, examples and some practical applications.
- The main goal is to get you started in learning from other disciplines.
- The secondary goal is to improve ourselves as community managers and participants as community members.

(Additional notes: there is a community manager in Poland named Darek Kłeczek who blogs at Leadership in Social Networks. I came across his post, 10 Social Psychology Tips for Managing Online Communities while searching if anyone else had approached this topic yet. He's worth keeping an eye one as he develops ideas about how we can encourage leaders to develop in our communities.)

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Fundamental Attribution Error
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Definition:
People tend to presume the actions of others are indicative of the "kind" of person they are rather than their actions being caused by a situation.

Based on experiment by Edward E. Jones and Victor Harris (1967). Coined by Lee Ross (1977). Sometimes called "correspondence bias", but not by all social scientists.

Examples:
- Community makes error against their own: First time posters who make a social mistake being considered a troll.

- Community applies attribution error to community host: Considering the host uncaring/out of touch when tech changes occur suddenly or when the host makes a decision about Terms of Service (accused of playing favorites).

Reducing the Effect:
The attribution error occurs usually because there is not enough information about the situation. Studies have shown that when victims of crime learn more about the criminal's circumstances views tend to shift from desiring harsh penalties to compensation for losses.

To prevent yourself from committing the fundamental attribution error, gather situational information:
- Do people tend to behave the same way in the same situation?
- What would I do in the same situation?
- *Ask* the person for help in understanding their situation.

To reduce the effect when others are applying the fundamental attribution error to you, disseminate the situational information.
- publicly realign yourself/your org with community goals/values.
- clarify the way the situation is leading to types of behavior.

Examples:
- ask potential spammers for personal situation before assuming they are evil. (They may be enthusiastic and not realize the norms of your community)

- Explain situation behind any changes to your community before the changes are implemented. (You may also enlist aid from community to float preferable changes.)

--------------------------------------------------------
INTERMISSION: A note about conflict management/mediation
--------------------------------------------------------
I will not be covering conflict management or conflict mediation, though many examples involve these skills. I am willing to help anyone with questions about resources. For the wiki, this might be a good place to compile some resources.

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Actor-observer bias
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Definition:
We tend to attribute our own behavior to the situation, but the behavior of others to the "kind" of person they are.

Developed by Edward E. Jones/ Richard E Nesbett (1971) as the flip side of Fundamental Attribution Error.

However, Bertram F. Malle questions actor-observer bias because of a lack of evidence (2006).

Example:
- "I am not a bad person."

Reducing the Effect:
- Awareness that this may be happening (on your part, on the part of the person judging you, on the part of two community members towards each other).

- Use the same methods as the Fundamental Attribution Error: learn more about the situation.

Examples:
- This is as much about self-reflection as it is observation of others.
- I once had an argument with a vendor that seemed to be about their customer service attitude when the truth was I (and our organization) were asking more than the vendor could give. Realizing this allowed us to enter future vendor deals with realistic expectations, fewer conflicts and better results.

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Confirmation Bias
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Definition:
We tend to look for, or better remember, information and evidence that supports our preconceptions and avoid/overlook/forget evidence that counters our beliefs.

Examples:
- Good luck charms, people who believe in psychics/cold readers, belief that a computer problem is because of a virus transmitted by your web site

Reasons:
- We may be wired this way. If a successful survival strategy works, it's better to repeat the strategy than experiment. If a prehistoric tribe succeeds in hunting a deer, they are likely to stick with it rather than risk going hungry. But it's a short jump from attributing the successful hunt to a pretty stone instead and thus the good luck charm is born.
- The person facing evidence to their belief may feel shame, stubbornness or hope.
- Other factors that may filter counter-evidence may include tradition, taboos, religion, ideology.

Reducing the Effect:
- View information impartially. Welcome counterarguments. ("Strong opinions, loosely held" - ******** )
- Combating this in yourself: imagine a deamon, similar to Maxwell's Deamon that acts as a gatekeeper to your senses, allowing agreeing facts in and deflecting facts that counter your beliefs. (aka Morton's Deamon)

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Social Facilitation
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Definition:
We tend to do simple tasks that we know well better with an audience than alone. But, we tend to do new or complicated tasks worse in the same situation.

Examples:
- Performance anxiety

Reducing the Effect:
- Encourage practice.
- Provide graduated experiences such as encouraging poll voting or rating before submitting opinions, reviews or other content. Also, allow people to create content and control ever-widening circles of who sees the content.
- Compliment when a new or difficult task is *attempted*.

Examples:
- Warm welcomes without correction when someone contributes for the first time.

-----------------------------
Social Loafing
-----------------------------
Definition:
When work is pooled and individual performance is not known, people in groups tend to put in less effort.

Reducing the Effect:
Reveal individual performance for simple tasks (to avoid problems in Social Facilitation). For complicated tasks, keep performance private until proficient.

Examples:
- Badges in online game systems. Simple acknowledgment of simple accomplishments and difficult accomplishments. People sometimes complain when a game does not provide badges showing the power of revealing individual performance.

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Bystander Effect
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Definition:
Individuals are less likely to offer help in an emergency situation when other people are present.

Specific to online communities, groups don't handle conflict situations when there is a perception that someone else will handled it faster or with more authority.

Originated around Kitty Genovese who was stabbed to death in 1964 and "no one helped". The story is dramatic, but not entirely true. The media failed to contact the police for information before reporting the story and possibly committed confirmation bias in avoiding information undermining the belief in the bystander effect. In fact, the police were contacted at least once during the attack and "bystanders" heard, but could not see the attack.

The Bystander effect was demonstrated in experiments in 1968 by John Darley and Bibb Latane.

Examples:
In the late 80's the a gaming service called The ImaginNation Network was having problems with users harassing each other. There was no formal reporting process so members were a bit on their own with few ways to contact the service. The service added a "report abuse" button and, quickly, the number of reports increased. The members stopped trying to resolve the problems themselves and resorted to the abuse button first.

Reasons:
- Social influence. We tend to look at how others are reacting in situations for cues on what to do. If everyone is waiting to see what others do, no one will act.
- Assumption that others will intervene and feel no special responsibility.
- Fear of being evaluated (Social Facilitation), embarrassment, or being superseded by someone more skilled.
- Uncertain help is wanted.
- In online communities, when authority moves fast or decisively.

Reducing the Effect:
- As a Community Manager, drag your feet a little. Give the space for others to step in and encourage them when they do. (Once I had someone who was great at helping in the community in a specific way, he was so fast and so good, others were commenting on him "beating them to it". I praised him for being a great example and ask him to be a little slower off the mark. When he did, others were able to step in. This took the pressure off him and eventually lead to a strong culture of helping in a specific way.)
- As a Community manager, do not use your admin tools first or often. Resolve conflicts publicly as a way to demonstrate to others how they too can handle them. This woudl be a literal empowerment of your community.
- Instill a sense of responsibility and empower the members by following up when they help or get in over their heads. Allow the community to help you spot spam and deal with items they flag. IF someone attempts to resolve a conflict and has trouble, then step in (and later privately help the person improve their skills).

-----------------------------
Other social theories
-----------------------------
These were not covered during the session. They are presented briefly to provide some background to common terms a community manager will encounter as they read deeper into social psychology and sociolgy.

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Small World Experiment
-----------------------------
- Stanley Milgram
- Average path length for social networks
- Dropped letter with a note asking to send to person they know who is likely to know the target on letter.
- Multiple factors could have accounted for the average path length he found
- Milgram never used the phrase "six degrees of separation"
- Work in disease transmission indicates that removing the supernodes of a network has little impact on average path length.

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Dunbar Number
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- Robin Dunbar
- Theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people humans can maintain a *stable* (grooming) relationship.
- Based on primate grooming habits. Max grooming contacts seems limited to volume of neocortex.
- 1992 - Dunbar extrapolated up to human size brain and derived the number 150
- Then compared this to human groups (tribes, basically)
- Dunbar says communities must have high incentive to remain together (stable relationships). Speculated that humans may spend up to 42% of their time in social grooming.
- For a look at group sizes with numbers from online communities, I highly recommend Christopher Allen's six-part series on group sizes starting with: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes and finishing with his two-part Community by the Numbers.

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Fixing Broken Windows
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- George Kelling and Catherine Coles
- Fix small problems to dissuade larger problems and, eventually, huge problems
- NYC Experiment:
- NYC Transit Authority 1985 - 1993+
- Guliani's zero tolerance 1993 -
- Major crime *did* go down. But it also went down in cities that did not have zero tolerance policies. (See Confirmation Bias)

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Robert Cialdini - Influence
-----------------------------
(this is a mash up of ideas from Dr. Cialdini's book "Influence" and articles he has written that I blogged previously at: Community Doesn't Sell and Persuasion Revisited.)

Appeal to majority
- "Many guest waste towels. Please don't." - Little effect on reusing towels.
- "Most guests reuse towels. We thank you." - Increase in reuse of towels.

Influence reciprocation
- When a waiter brings mints with the check, there is a slight increase in tips.

Commitment
- Learned from NPO event days. If you ask people to sign up, but do not charge, attendance will be significantly lower than expected. If you ask people to pay $20 during sign up, attendance will be much closer to expected.

Conformity - social proof
- monkey see, monkey do.
- Be the alpha monkey
- Teach others to be the alpha monkey.

Scarcity
- In the midst of a credit crisis with people being told to stop using their credit cards, what does VISA do? They create a new "exclusive" card. The VISA Black Card. The exclusiveness will generate desire despite rational.

Relationship awareness (a version of commitment)
- When one member of a couple is trying to convince the other to make a change, those who mention the existing relationship before requesting the change had better success. Think to current Obama phrasing that our problems are "American problems". Reminding us of current relationship as Americans before asking Republicans for change.

Remembering my first time

2008-07-03T10:43:00.000-07:00

Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, asks "What was the first [celestial] object you ever saw through telescope" and in leaving a comment, I realized that it was pulling up some memories that strayed from the original question. So, what the heck. Here are a series of my "firsts".

I am pretty sure my very first was the moon, but what I remember more is the telescope. It was a WWII-era US Navy 16x spyglass. Nearly 3 feet long, wrapped in black cord, heavy as all get out and no tripod. As a 98lb weakling, I could hold it up to the sky for only a minute at a time before I gave up and just pointed out constellations.

Beyond of the moon, my first look through a proper telescope was in a summer class on astronomy with Dave Olsen at Merced Community College. He set it all up so we could see the sun safely during a period of sunspot activity. He also offered community astronomy viewings where I saw saturn for the first time.

Despite wanting a telescope for myself, my parents always balked at the cost. By the time I had my own paper route, I had turned back toward the earth and computers. (Actually, it was because I wanted a computer that I got a paper route. I'm not just a geek, I am a nerd!)

Tish Grier on Effective Community Managers

2008-06-13T18:09:00.000-07:00

Who says Friday the 13th is unlucky? And to underscore that point, Tish Grier, Chief Community Officer for Placeblogger and Online Community Developer for NewsTrust offers us Seven Traits of Highly Effective Community Managers

Mainly aimed at news organizations considering engaging their readers beyond being readers, there are some great observations are hidden within each of Tish's listed habits:

"...if your site's mission is primarily to drive traffic to your site, you should rethink creating your online community in the first place. Site traffic tends to be driven more by better site design and search engine optimization than by getting all interactive on the citizenry."

Online Community is not a hammer looking for a nail. Experienced folks know what community is good at and what is it not. Tish's advice to reconsider your community strategy even before you hire is sound.

"...your potential community manager should be open, congenial, and can handle difficult situations with tact and diplomacy (not like a cop or Marine sergeant)."

There are exceptions to this, but mostly when working with young teens in a competitive (gaming, sports fans) arena. I personally love Optimus Rhyme's nerdcore song "Obey the Moderator!" but I would not hire someone with attitudes of controlling the community from the top-down.

"...don't confuse liking technology with loving it beyond everything else."

This is especially true for those of us living close to cities that innovate technology. I am considered a bit backwards because I don't have an iPhone yet. When interacting with your community, your community team will likely be giving a leg-up to others who are experiencing networking, connecting, trust and community online for the first time (or giving it a second try after a bad online experience). Knowing when to dial the techno-lust back several notches is vital to not alienating valuable people.

"...any editorial work or reporting should be secondary to the community, because community work can be very demanding."

Recent discussions with people considering hosting community or networking online have shown me that people still underestimate the amount of work that can go into fostering trusting relationships within a community and with your organization.

"7. Life experience trumps youthful enthusiasm."

I quoted only the header for this last one because the entire paragraph is worth reading. In fact, it should be the first paragraph you read.

I'll add to it, though. It's not as hard as you might think to teach people how to use technology. It's harder to teach people how to manage conflict, build trust, recover and learn from mistakes. When looking for a community manager, look for activities that include group leadership, improvisational skills and the ability to handle projects with large groups. The best community managers I have seen and hired are people who had some aspect of these in their past experience: improvisational theater, leading volunteers, organizing long-term groups based on a hobby or activity.

I'm wondering if a session on hiring a community manager might be a welcome for next week's Online Community Unconference.

Open Comment Season on John McCain site

2008-06-10T23:26:00.000-07:00

While riding home from another excellent Online Community Roundtable, I read this tweet from penguinasana: "Someone left the john mccain store comments unmoderated: http://tinyurl.com/5p3b35".

Yup. Take one part political candidate, one part open review system, and two days of not moderating said commenting system and you get a repeat of the 1997 Amazon Family Circus reviews.

When I took these screen shots there were over 60 reviews along these lines:

Now Amazon eventually got the joke and cleared out the crude stuff, but left the satire up (to the tune of hundreds such reviews for several of the books to this day). I'm not sure what'll happen here. Yanking everything and killing the review system is not the message for a presidential candidate to make: "My staff is clueless in the ways of free association *and* they react by humorlessly clamping down."

Of course, there are ways to roll with this, clean it up and still keep the review system. Step one from the brand new Yahoo Design Pattern Library -- Ratings and Reviews:

"Set expectations regarding when the review will be published."

Which implies that reviews will be moderated. Not an unreasonable expectation.

UPDATE: I checked the morning after this post and they yanked all reviews and killed the reviewing system. My only comment is that you, dear reader, do not make similar mistakes because while McCain voters likely approve of this kind of authoritarian control, your customers or clients likely will not.

My 2008 Conferences

2008-05-10T16:19:00.000-07:00

If the list seems heavily weighted toward Forum One Communications, that because they tend to be local to me and, in the area of community, provide more bang for my conference dollar.

Oct 2007
Online Community Summit
Sonoma, CA
Okay, not 2008, but I lead a group discussion on "Community Growth Strategies".

March 20, 2008
Mobile Communities Unconference
Palo Alto, CA

April 14-15, 2008
Online Community Business Forum 2008
Santa Fe, NM
With Gail Williams, we led a group discussion on "Community Management Best Practices".

May 12-15, 2008
Community 2.0 Conference
Las Vegas, NV

May 27-28, 2008
NetSquared Conference (N2Y3)
San Jose, CA
I will be presenting/leading a session on "Measuring Impact in Online Communities - Lessons from Schwab Learning".

June 18, 2008
Online Community Unconference
Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA

Jul 30-Aug 2, 2008
Romance Writers of America 28th Annual National Conference
San Francisco, California
I will be leading a workshop on early modern surgery. Details TBD.

Oct 9-10, 2008
Online Community Summit
Sonoma, California
This is an invitation only event so my attendance is TBD.

Last Wednesday of every month
I'll be bouncing between two local meetings of community-minded people:
The San Francisco Online Community Report Meetup and
Online Community roundtable (links to facebook group).

Meanwhile, back on the ranch

2008-05-10T13:37:00.000-07:00

A quick post to update what I have been up to.

Getting laid off - In Sept 2007, the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation announces they will close their operating websites SchwabLearning.org and SparkTop.org. New homes for both sites are found and transition work begins. I learned important lessons about coordination, strategy, resources. Considering the parent community ultimately fragmented between the official host, GreatSchools.net, and at least 3 other community spaces, I can say I also learned difficult lessons about working within overly structured organizations and sudden losses of decision-making.

Reinventing myself as a consultant - I been keeping an eye out for jobs in online community and there are a lot of them out there. Unfortunately, most of them are for managing communities under the direction of a product manager or VP. These are too limiting given my experience in handling all aspects of communities including control over UI and feature design and mining the data for information directly. I've had a few people express interest in hiring me and I have been offering contracts for more foundational help rather than accept permanent work in a limited role.

I've had good luck so far and will be doing some work for a couple of non-profits and a health-oriented for-profit. None of it is long-term, but it involves helping the organization get the most out of a community strategy and plan for features, staff or skill sets they will need.

Attending conferences - To keep myself connected and relevant, I've been attending online community round tables, meet-ups and conferences. I'm even getting a chance to lead small group sessions at some. I'll turn that into a separate post of both past and upcoming 2008 conferences.

Enjoying myself - I got a pretty sweet layoff package and I've been taking advantage of that to sleep in, clean my house (I have half of my back office reclaimed as an actual office - go me!), spend more time with friends, and a road trip through Arizona and New Mexico (with an important stop in Bakersfield, CA, pictured right). I've been listening to The Thomas Jefferson Hour via downloads, twittering, walking and reading in preparation for a presentation on early modern surgery for a group of historical romance writers. Somewhere in there, is also losing weight (35 lbs since last Nov), roasting coffee and playing games on the computer and Nintendo DS.

Online Community Meetup in SF, May 23

2007-05-09T15:50:00.000-07:00

Susan Tenby, the Online Community Manager for TechSoup.org has been reviving the Online Community Report Meetup. When I have gone it's been a nice mix of new and experienced folks talking about their online communities.

If you are in the San Francisco area and can make it, it's a nice way for a small group to meet and talk in a relaxing environment. It's a very welcoming group.

RSVP through the official link or just show up!

When:
Wednesday, May 23, 2007, 7:00 PM

Where:
Hotel Biron
45 Rose Street
San Francisco , CA 94102
415.703.0403
Map

My interview on the Online Community Report

2007-05-08T16:59:00.000-07:00

Not that you would guess from recent posts, but I have spent some time starting and fostering communities through computers for some time. With "Online Community" being all the rage this year (three conferences to date and two more on my calendar before the year is out), I've been able to act like a grizzled Veteran of the Bubble.

Do I stand up to today's views of community? Judge for yourself as I answer questions for Forum One's Online Community Report:

OC Expert Interview: Scott Moore, Schwab Foundation

Unless you *want* to dig through odd posts about trips to Germany and, uhm, delicate medical conditions, you can skip right to the good stuff tagged as Community

Web 2.0 Expo -- midway

2007-04-17T15:17:00.000-07:00

Okay, so the post a day thing went down the tubes. Right now, I am at the Web 2.0 Expo where the wifi is overloaded, especially when sessions are on. It seems there is no limit to the underestimating of traffic at these things.

Because I can't jump on, I can't check out digg spy at the moment. I also don't have a chance to check out TruthScape.com which is a site set up to help people from getting scammed in the popular free online game RuneScape. It also has some parental advice. However, that last one comes as a recommendation from a parent in the forum I support and not from Web 2.0 people.

I know this will sound overly negative, but I'm really tired of hearing misapplications of the "wisdom of crowds" (the Net Gain of this post-bubble bubble) which most often comes out as a confusion between crowds (people who may be aware of each other, but are not influencing each others actions) and communities (where people are influencing each other through trusted relationships). Crowds are *not* inherently communities.

So far the best session wasn't even on the schedule. Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency and HorsePigCow organized a community roundtable in one of the unused alcoves on the third floor. It was scheduled from 10am to 5pm and I missed the first half, but poked my head in and saw Gail Williams and John Coate who gave it a thumbs up and said they would return after lunch. There's a set of notes and soon to be audio and video (where you can witness just how big my mouth can be).

Growing up with Charles Addams

2007-04-04T09:34:00.000-07:00

Not literally. But I'll get to that.

Last night, I woke up and couldn't fall asleep. I woke up because for the past week a muscle in my left jaw has been acting up. Any attempts to chew or otherwise close my jaw resulted in excruciating pain. It's not TMJ, but more likely just a stress knot in my Masseter muscle. It's getting better, though.

I couldn't fall asleep because I had a dozen ideas kicking around in my head again. Stuff ranging from ways to improve how we foster community at the parent's website I work on to coming to the conclusion that arguing about which is better for fostering community, blogs or message board is moot because the design of both has been rooted in one form of narcissism or another and neither are purposefully designed to foster actual conversations.

I typed all of these ideas up just to get them out of my head. Then I looked for something to read. I grabbed a biography my mother had given to me for Christmas, Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis.

As I said, I grew up with Charles Addams. Since before I was born, my father had a copy of Addams and Evil on the family bookshelf. I must have been in 2nd or 3rd grade when I first pulled it off the shelf and started flipping through the pages, reading, though not always understanding the captions.

It didn't matter though because some of my favorite cartoons were of the boy and the trouble he made: speeding a wind-up school bus across toy tracks just so the locomotive would hit, building a town in the bath tub and turning on the spigot, mixing chemicals in a Jr Scientist kit and turning into a Jr. Hyde and back before his mother arrived. Though my mother may have worried about my desire to find and hang stolen "danger: bridge out" signs on my bedroom wall, she used these moments to point out why that would be wrong.

It may have stopped me from doing it, but it didn't stop me from thinking it was still funny. These were the moments when I grew up --knowing the difference between right and wrong, but still being able to imagine the possibilities of wrong were funnier than the possibilities of right.

Today, I have only a small collection of his cartoons on my bookshelf. Whenever I read these, especially the macabre ones, I get a sense of nostalgia. They comfort me and I love to revel in his art and their twisted takes on the twisted world around us. It's Charles Addams' cartoons that warped my sense of humor -- and my sense of tragedy.

I can't see myself any other way.

I hate blogging and why I'm doing it anyway

2007-04-03T08:55:00.000-07:00

I swore to myself many years a go that I would not ever write a post about the fact that I haven't been updating my blog.

"It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it." - G.K. Chesterton (1923)

Well, there we go. Chesterton was most likely talking about broadcast radio when he said this but it seems to apply nicely to myself at this moment. The fact that I am not the first to use this quote in reference to blogging is, to me, proof of the validity of the criticism.

For a long time, I've viewed creating personal spaces on the internet (since the days of Geocities) and now blogging with an unhealthy grain of salt. Part of this comes from a few paragraphs from Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably take on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:

(1) an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;

(2) a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals.

(3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view; it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi is, moreover, right to say that looked at from the outside, she hasn't experienced anything. The mainspring that drives her to write is just that absence of vital content, that void.)

But by a backlash, the effect affects the cause. General isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from the outside.

[Later in the text]

One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

I always come to the end of reading this and have the overwhelming sense that anything I might write afterwards simply contributes to the universal deafness and incomprehension that surrounds us today.

This is why I don't blog.

However, conventional wisdom claims that in order to connect via blogging, one must produce. If one cannot produce quality, then produce quantity.

Aside from my moral misgivings about excessive blogging, I suffer from a form of mental constipation where I will read something that will trigger an idea for writing a blog post, but I have a need to look deeper before I say anything publicly. What happens is hours of reading other people's commentary, often months after I have had the original urge and often better though through or written than what I might wish to say. Then comes a day or more of thinking about all of what I have read and forming some half-baked new tangents off of that. After that, the desire to regurgitate any of it and put form to it in a way that it is even remotely comprehensible to anyone outside my skull is gone.

In the mean time, pent-up ideas needing feedback, or ill-formed opinions needing correction lie festering only to explode through my synapses at the worst possible moments.

So, I will give conventional wisdom a try and commit to writing a post a day, regardless how trite, how ill-formed, until either I form a habit or I completely solidify my view against inane writing altogether.

Fantastic. I'm clearly off to a good start on the ill-formed part.

I'm off to the GDC!

2007-03-03T17:29:00.000-08:00

So 2007 is shaping up to be the year of Online Community Conference revivals. I managed to sneak in to Community Next in February, thanks to a friend who was unable to go. Coming up in a few weeks is the Community 2.0 Conference, then there is Virtual Worlds 2007 at the end of March (it's community related and I have a past history of working in a virtual world). June Brings us the Online Community Camp and October will see the return of the Online Community Summit.

I will be bailing on the first two since I am using up a week's vacation once again to volunteer to work at the Game Developers Conference. Since 1999, I spend one week a year in a fast, intense customer service job that pays no money. Why would I do such a thing when I am not in the game industry and I'm not bucking for a job in the game industry?

I started because I was tangentially in the game industry when I was working on virtual worlds. In fact, by volunteering my first year, I got in to their job fair for free and scored a contract working with There.com before they lifted the veil to the public. I return every year because the program is a fantastic example of a service-oriented structure that really lives up to all the old theories about inverted pyramids. Add to the fact that this organization functions with 250-300 stranger (about 30% are veterans of previous years) suddenly coming together and working like a dream for a week and it's worth being in the mix and learning how it all comes together. And then there is the chance to spend a week seriously getting my geek on with several hundred folks.

And then like many group gatherings such as sports leagues, Renaissance Faire/Burning Man, message boards or multiplayer games, relationships form and people return because they know friends will be there. And if there are ways to keep the connections going outside the event through newsletters, mailing lists, gatherings or converging on social networking sites then communities form. If course I have to bring it back to communities.

This week, Erin Hoffman wrote a piece describing the GDC volunteer program. It does a much better job of describing the program and reasons why it's valuable to the game industry and to the people who attend.

Woke up at 3AM for the second night in a row

2007-02-08T07:01:00.000-08:00

I finally decided to just get up and caught a look at myself in the mirror. I felt like hell, but figured I may as well make fun of myself and have a laugh. Sure beats laying in bed grinding my teeth.

I've never had my own animated GIF. I figured it was about time.

Trauer um Soul-König James Brown

2006-12-27T05:55:00.000-08:00

This is how I found out that James Brown has died. On the front page of the Münchner Merkur that I saw on the free newspaper stand in the airport. I'm actually broken up.

This is probably because I saw the news (without sound) and figured out that Gerald Ford died. That was expected, but honestly, I hadn't been paying attention to the health of James Brown. Literally, I didn't even know he was sick.

It is less that I really loved the music or the man, but more that my best friend from high school really loved him. Part of me being all teary is that I can't call him right away and go get blind drunk on Hennessy with him.

For the moment a shot of whiskey will have to suffice (and boy did that surprise the kid behind the bar - a beer *and* a whiskey. Sweet Gibralter, y'd think I asked for the blood of a virgin.

So here's a toast to James Brown and here's a toast to Dirk, my friend. I missed meeting up with him in my hometown over Thanksgiving and coupled with a month away from familiar things and friend to shoot the shit with, I miss him.
(Oh, and the Munich Airport has free wireless that's better than my dorms' anyday.)

Christmas Memories

2006-12-26T02:22:00.000-08:00

Not mine, mind you. But here's a gallery of children who are scared of Santa.

Praise be to Respectful Insolance for posting this originally. It was a lot funnier than the series of "I insist on saying Merry Christmas and I don't care who is offended" emails from folks I know who are one of the following: a non-practicing Christian, a non-practising Bhuddist and an Atheist.

My name is Skawt

2006-12-18T16:34:00.000-08:00

The other night some of the young folks (early 20's every one of them) were having a little party in the common room on our floor. Since the dormitory where we live is all concrete walls and ceilings and the floors are tiled, it's like living in an experimental speaker system at the Bose factory. Knowing I would not be able to sleep, I dropped in. Over the salsa music the Argentinean students were, one girl asks me my name.

"Scott Moore", I reply. She gave me a puzzled look and I thought perhaps the music was too loud or I was being too quiet. "SCOTT MOORE", I repeat. Again a puzzled look, but with a head shake meaning, "I am sorry traveler of the stars, but these vocal sounds you are making don't even sound like language to me". Exasperated, I simply say, "Ich heisse Scott". Here eyes light up and she says, "Oh! Skoht!", but with a very, very short "oh" like everyone else in Germany pronounces my name.

This reminded me of being in Germany last year when I met an old follow in a pub and upon hearing my name pronounced very distinctly, "Scott. Moore. I. haff. never. heard. this. name. before!" Sigh. My name is so common in English, you can't actually google me unless you add "phoom" or "online community" and there's still another Scott Moore who blogs about online community.

So, on a sleepless night, I mulled this over. Is my accent *that* bad? I repeated my name to myself over and over. Then I thanked the fates that I didn't have a roommate who would surely be cowering in a corner wondering why the hairy mad-man was whispering his own name. Then I realized that I pronounce my name with a longer "ah"ish kind of "o" as in dog. Not dohg, but dawg. How very American of me.

Sometimes it's easier to accept what is around you than struggle against it. So from now until I leave, I will be "Skoht", but my friends can call me Skawt.

How to surf in a landlocked German city in the Winter

2006-12-14T07:12:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, as I left the Bavarian National Museum and headed toward the Englisher Garten to eventually get somem Gluhwein to warm me up, I spotted a crowd watching local surfers. In Germany. In December. In the cold (about 40 degrees F) . In the middle of a city in the middle of a land-locked state.

(Click the image to see the video)

If you do a google search on surfing the isar you will find longer videos and better pictures.

Class Picture

2006-12-14T06:45:00.000-08:00

Back Row: Don from Chicago (now living in Germany), Me, Joseph from Canada
Middle Row: Suhail from the United Arab Emirates, Aies (sp?) from Greece, Frau Schwalb our teacher, Dan from Rumania
Sitting: Sarena from Italy, Ines from Spain, Roberta from Italy, Sarah fromm the UEA.
Not pictured are Thomas from Spain and Stephano from Switzerland.

Lots of pictures, not many descriptions

2006-12-13T05:52:00.000-08:00

Although haven't been typing much, I have been uploading the pictures I take to my flicker account. I haven't been typing descriptions because I haven't found a tool that will allow me to create titles, descriptions and tags for each picture offline and then just batch upload them to flicker. For now, I pull them from the camera onto my laptop and then fromm the laptop, I can upload them (only when I have a fast stable connection) and then I have to go through them while online to change titles, add descriptions.

So, if anyone knows of a tool that let's me add metadata to my photos before I upload them to flicker (and will do it as a batch, not individually through their email service), let me know. In the mean time, enjoy this night shot of the back side of the city hall.

Aw, maw! Do I hafta blog?

2006-12-13T05:24:00.000-08:00

Wow, I didn't realize it's been two weeks since I last posted. Basically, it's because I'm too busy getting through my day to have any desire to write. Heck, I still have postcards to write and those are mostly along the lines of "No snow yet. Hope this makes it by New Year's."

So here's the 5 minute catch up. The things that have been taking up most of my time and energy has been schooling, public transportation and food.

I'm not being a super-great student, but I'm improving. I will be far from fluent when we I am done here.

When I am not sitting and doing exercises or practice tests, I'm going fromm one place to another. While the public transportation here is really great (light rail trams, suburban trains, subways and busses every few minutes), it still soaks up time waiting and sitting on the train or taking a tram to the central station so you can take a subway a slightly different direction. and it's not like it's a commuter type train where I can whip out the postcards I haven't written yet or squeeze in some homework. Nope. You just sit or stand in often cramped spaces waiting for your stop.

And finally, food. While there are a gazillion sausage stands because of the christmas markets, bakeries literally on every corner and plenty of places to just grab somem food, finding actual vegetables or fruit at the these places is darn near impossible. I wind up stopping by various small markets every couple of days to buy some water (the tap water at my dorms really is drinkable, but kills the goodness of food when you cook with it), some veggies and some fruit. It seems like I am constanly loaded down with some little this or little that. My first weeks here were trying to build up a decent larder just to cook with: olive oil, salt, pepper, basil a kitchen knife and cutting board.

When I first arrived, I bought somme fresh dates. Not dried dates, but crisp, full dates. I have never eaten fresh dates and I'm not sure why I thought it was a good idea to get a half-kilo of them. After two days of eating fresh dates, I got tired of them and had to figure out what to do with them. I checked the mighty intar-web for recipies and found lots. Lots that would require me to buy all kinds fo spices and such that I would use only once. Instead, I dug into my memories of ordering bacon wrapped dates at a tapas bar and then improvised:

Scott's Use-up-these-fresh-dates-now Recipie
- A couple handfuls of fresh dated (pitted, duh)
- A couple of crisp apples (I used a couple Galas I had)
- A couple of ounces of fatty bacon (or what passes for bacon in germany)
- Roqufort or blue cheese

In a small thick-bottomed sauce pot (the kind issued to students in my dorm), fry the bacon so the fat is all nice and melted. Cut up your dates and apples into slices to they cook quickly. Toss them in with the bacon. Salt and pepper to taste. Serve on to a plate and crumble an ounce ro two of cheese into the mix and let it melt some. Serves one. Besure to eat in a common area where a girl from South Korea can wonder with either awe or disgust at your culinary skills.

Verbs, Verbs, Verbs!

2006-11-30T07:55:00.000-08:00

So, I'm at the point, apparently where I have to learn verbs. Remember sometime in grade school learning the past tense of verbs? sink-sank-sunk. drink-drank-drunk. sing-sang-sung. think-thank-thunk. Oh, that's last one isn't right. Well, now you know how I currently sound when speaking to Germans about things that have past.

So I have a list of about 40-50 verbs that simply have to be memorized. It's a good thing I'm not here to goof off. No, that will come on the weekends. Not only does Munich have a Christmas market in nearly every plaza, but there is actually a Medieval-themed Christmas market. This should be entertaining. Be sure to follow the "Deutsch" link so you can check out the photos.

The cemetery of the living

2006-11-30T07:22:00.000-08:00

Both the wired and wireless connections at the dorm are spotty and slow. I'm lucky if I make it through a couple of pages of surfing without the connection dropping. Thus, updates here will come in bunches when I plug the laptop into the schools media center connection.

On the morning I arrived late and missed my first class, I walked from my dorm over to a cemetery. I wanted to get to know the neighborhood and it seemed like an interesting destination. When I arrived, I found high brick walls surrounding a park with many trees scattered through out. Most of the headstones or memorials were from the mid-19thC and there were a lot of professors and teachers given high honors after their passing.

The walls had several openings where people were cutting through on their way to other streets. Just about in the middle, ironically, near a the tomb of a child, was a group of mothers with four children between them. As the mothers talked, the children played on the pathway, with each other and with the nearby garbage can. I've noticed that Germans are more free in allowing their children to walk about tethered as soon as they can so it's kinda nice to see really young kids at play in their miniature adult-like fashions.

When I decided to take a shot of the kids, I really was just trying to not get caught and accused of anything unsavory. But look close. I snagged the moment just as two of the boys are pushing the third against the can. I just imagine the little girl in the foreground saying, "that's right boys, rough him up until he hands over all his gummibears".

As I walked through the cemetery towards the path circling the inside, I started seeing the occasional jogger. These weren't any joggers, but out of the half-dozen or so, only two were even close to qualifying as young. Again, it seemed ironic that the old would partake in an activity that is intended to keep one healthy and living longer, if not better, in a place that is a perpetual reminder of the one fate no one can escape. Is it because of that reminder that they are spurred on to jog? Is it out of a sense of defiance? Or is it merely a convenient place to use as a track? It doesn't matter a whole lot. After all, cemeteries are for the living in more than one way.

I have arrived!

2006-11-28T06:37:00.000-08:00

Whew! Lots to talk about. No pictures yet, I'm happy to have found a place to plug the laptop in. There is media center on the top floor of the Goethe Institut and while they don't have wireless, they will lend me a cable.

Despite Sunday the 26th being the busiest travel day of the year, I had no problems at all. My friend Amie picked me up at 7:30 and deserves a huge thanks for driving all the way down from Oakland just to drive over to SFO. Anyway, zero traffic along the way and at the airport. I checked in without a hitch, though I was thrown for a loop that United forces you to check in with their machines first. What got me was that I had to use a credit card in order to identify myself to the little machine. This worked even though I didn't buy my ticket. It made me think about the weird ways we are giving up privacy for convenience. had I been allowed to first use my driver's license or my passport, I would feel less uncomfortable about it.

And when I got to security, it was not thrilling to see that the young non-caucasian kid in front of me had his laptop scanned three times, turned on and generally held up while my backpack loaded with computer, camera, CD player, Nintendo DS, cables and batteries went waltzing through. Maybe I've adopted the I'm-really-tired-of-this-so-let's-not-waste-our-time look that I don't get hassled. Then again, it's probably because I'm white.

The flight stunk, but I generally hate being crammed into a tiny little place for hours on end. Even though the flight from Chicago to Munich wasn't full and we were able to swap seats around so I had two instead of one, it still stunk. There are few times in my life that I have wished I was well under 6 feet tall. Flying is usually one of them.

My first day was great, though. I took the subway from the airport to the city center and had little trouble finding the G-I. Once there, I went through an interview and, because they had sent me the entrance exam ahead of time (and I barely got it back to them the Friday before), I got to skip that part. After I was registered, they handed me 500€! Part of it is to cover breakfast and lunch which I expected, but the extra couple hundred just for grins? Sweet!

I turned around and spent part of that when I arrived at my housing. It's a dormitory that is part of another school in the city. As I was checking in, I asked if I could extend my stay by one week. It turns out that my room was available for that time so no problem, I just have to pay. But wait. It's only 16€ per night, so the extra week is about 100€! Double-sweet!

But my luck ran out this morning. I arrived when I was told, in the afternoon, to check where my class was being held. My name wasn't on the list so I asked and they told me. At the correct room is a room with five beautiful young women. I'm thinking I died and went to heaven. But it was not to be! I was in the right room, but at the wrong time. Crap, that means these aren't my classmates. Double-crap! I just missed the first day of my class.

So here I am in the Mediathek (I guess that's a play on words from Library which in German is Bibliothek), trying catch up on whatever work I might have missed and rescheduling my brain to the earlier class schedule. Not that I mind that, really. Having a morning class means I have the entire afternoon to myself rather than having my day broken up by needing to be back at the city center in the middle of the day.

So ending on a few high notes. The work I missed is mostly stuff I know so that's no biggie. And I have the rest of the day free to goof off, get further settled, take some pictures and figure out how to connect to the wifi at the dorm. If so, then I will have a few pictures of a cemetery up later.

Wieder Nach Deutschland!

2006-11-13T12:55:00.000-08:00

In an unexpected turn, I am heading back to Germany. I've been taking German language courses at the San Francisco Goethe Institute for just about 2 years. Every year, they have a drawing for a 4 week course to learn German in Germany. Not only did I win the drawing, but it includes the flight, room and board (sans dinners and weekends) for four weeks. I have never won something this big before.

The catch? I have to take it before the end of the year. So I have been making sure my work is squared away and preparing for my trip. Just after Thanksgiving, I will be taking 5 hour classes 5 days a weeek for four weeks in Munich (München). And because I hate flying around the holidays, I am waiting till after Christmas to come home.

Stay tuned to this blog for what will likely be more regular updates. Not having to travel around is changing my packing. Not only will I bring more clothes (such as a suit and an overcoat), but I am also bringing my work laptop so I can write and make photo notations offline and then load it all up when I get internet access. I also picked up some a polarizing lens attachement and a rubber hood -- I will not tolerate anymore glare and reflections when taking pictures in museums. I'm also hoping my cell phone doesn't decide to die the second I arrive, too. Oh yeah, and some German grammar books with explanations in English!

I also have no real plans to travel outside the city much despite many the number of times I have heard "it's only a train ride". My main focus is to study. I want to get the most out of my time in class and the learning center. I'm even taking a workbook for the plane trip to use that time to squeeze in a few more words and practice.

Despite the preparation, it hasn't been feeling quite real yet. But today I got an email from the Goethe Institute in Munich with my placement test. I'll have to set aside 50 minutes to take the test (no cheating!) and send it back to them.

Okay, now it feels real.

Teen Titans Team Up with Dyslexia

2006-11-04T20:44:00.000-08:00

Well, sort of. The foundation I work for, the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, scored having an eight page comic featuring the Teen Titans. Actually, they scored it over a month ago, but the comics themselves have just shipped with over a million of the DC Comics youth titles such as JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED #27, LOONEY TUNES #144, SUPERMAN CONFIDENTIAL #1, CARTOON NETWORK ACTION PACK #7, and TEEN TITANS GO! #37.

This is pretty darn cool! Sparktop.org is a website that helps kids with learning and attention problems figure out their strengths and how to overcome their weaknesses. It's not just a feel-good site, we've got some very smart people answering kids questions and it's one of the few websites I know of that is COPPA compliant. Let's put that in perspective: COPPA compliant multiplayer games, message boards, picture sharing and blogs for kids 8-12 (ask me about panopticons sometime).

Comics played an important role in Charles Schwab's life. Did you know that he used comic book versions of books to pass literature classes while at Stanford? We've had the opportunity to meet with him and he really feel passionately about using comics to deliver messages to kids with reading problems. This is why the foundation also hooked up with Garfield creator, Jim Davis.

So say you don't want to buy one of DC's Youth comics to check out the special SparkTop Story. No problem! We are hosting the entire comic and a 4 page bonus mini-comic to boot!

The funny thing here is that I didn't know we were hosting it or about the bonus comic until I read it on Marc Sumerak's site. Let's hear it for internal communication! Anyway, Marc is the writer for the comic and I think it's cool that he's promoting it on his site. He did a good job on representing the fear kids have admitting they have trouble reading and how kids with Dyslexia can be successful when they get information in a different way.

Favorite words

2006-10-26T11:23:00.000-07:00

Based on a post over at History Hoydens which turned into a post here, someone mentioned their favorite word was now "imperforate". danah boyd named her blog after her favorite word, "apophenia".

You would think that my favorite word would be "phoom" which does not exist in a regular dictionary, but is well-defined in the Urban Dictionary. But it's not my favorite.

My favorite word is "contraindicate". I was introduce to this term by a former housemate, Chris, who was an English major with a Latin minor when we both worked at Logitech's Tech Support. We used it when a first tier support person would be on the verge of recommending a customer reinstall windows because their mouse wouldn't work. "That would be contraindicated." we would say which would confuse them just enough to actually hear a different approach. It was also a nice way for us to say, "that's really stupid" without being lectured to by our managers.

I need to start using it. It's very handy in situations that start off with someone saying, "Hey guys, check this out...." I can stand there with my gin and tonic in hand and say, "Attempting to catch an arrow after drinking a case of PBR would be contraindicated."

After reading "The Life and Works of Guilhelmus Fabricius Hildanus (1560Â1634)" Parts one and two, I have a new word to add to my list of favorites: "exarticulate". Not the definition involving one-jointed insect legs, but the one meaning to remove at the joint.

Many people balk at the thought of an amputation without anesthesia, but I know that surgeons of the 16th/17thC worked hard to reduce the pain involved mainly by applying enough pressure to stop blood and pinch nerve (providing some local anesthetic effect) and working as quickly as they could. However, the idea of a 16thC surgeon taking the time to separate the connecting tissue around the bones in the wrist or a knee is new to me. To have that procedure summed up in one word is even better: ex-ar-tic-u-late.

Sadly, the Oxford English Dictionary shows it being written first in 1658 so I can't use it prior to that. But I still can't wait to teach this some seventh graders the next time I present in a middle school.

Not a good start

2006-10-26T10:19:00.000-07:00

The other day, I was about to begin writing requirements for a project I've wanted to do for some time. It's a special Welcome Wagon project for the online communty of parents I help foster over at SchwabLearning.org. The idea is to alert special volunteers when someone has posted to our board for the very first time who will then be sure no newbie is left behind.

I often start documents by taking previous ones and ripping out the writing, retitling it and then start the work I need. It helps keep my documentaiton format consistent. My initial requirements docs answer these simple questions before we start working on the design: what is the problem, who is impacted by the problem, what's the solution and are there any pitfalls? Well, I grabbed a document about email subscriptions and started tearing it out to leave just the structure.

Then I looked at it again:

I'm going to Community Manager Hell.

A Woefully Incomplete History of the Treatment of Imperforate Hymen

2006-10-15T01:35:00.000-07:00

Here's something that definitely makes my head go phoom. My friend Kalen Hughes at History Hoydens, a blog by historical romance writers, wrote me asking if I knew how an imperforate hymen might have been treated within the last, oh, 500 years. It seems this came up in the comment on her post about how "first time" sex scenes in romance novels often have the guy well past where the hymen actually is before ramming into it like a runaway train.

So here comes the first bit of explanation. I haven't blogged about this, but my hobby is reading up on the history of medicine, specifically, the history of surgery. Even more specifically, the history of surgery, the techniques and social status of surgeons, in 16thC Germany. Someday, I will blog about how I got into this and why I find it interesting. When there is some weird question about how the body and it's various bits were viewed in the past, friends quiz me.

And as they have already learned and you will soon learn, I am not freaked out by any subject. I'll get my warning out of the way now. I will be linking to sites and photographs that feature vaginas because I honestly hate typing and if I can show you a picture of an imperforate hymen, then I will (and I will).

Before we delve into how past surgeons or doctors might have viewed or dealt with imperforate hymens, it's important to demystify the hymen and then clarify what we know now about imperforate hymens.

If you really don't know what a hymen is, just start at the wikipedia entry on hymen. If you think, "I don't need no stinkin' wikipedia", that's fine. The important points here are:

The hymen is *outside* the vagina. (And if that's news, they you *do* need the stinkin' wikipedia article.)
There is a wide range of configurations (see Illustrations of the hymen in various states), thickness and elasticity. Generally, the hymen becomes thin and elastic with the onset of puberty so there's no tearing or blood during sex, but that's not always so.
Because the hymen varies in how much of the vaginal opening it covers and because it is elastic, it's impossible to define what an intact hymen is and so the condition of a hymen is *not* a good indicator of virginity. (Further down, I'll point out some historical cases of women becoming pregnant despite their hymens being "unruptured".)
In some women, the hymen does completely cover the vaginal opening. This is known as "imperforate hymen". And contrary to wikipedia's authoritative "1 in 2000" occurrence, according to the emedicine.com article on the "imperforate hymen", the occurrence has been reported from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 10000.

Focusing on the imperforate hymen. Here are some quick notes from that emedicine.com article:

"Variations in hymenal anatomy commonly escape diagnosis until the time of menarche". So, even our modern medicos have trouble diagnosing this until a girl has her first period. (In some cases, mucous secretions will collect at birth and cause the imperforate hymen to bulge aiding in identification.
Even if an imperforate hymen is detected at birth and unless there is an immediate problem, it's recommended to wait until puberty when the onset of estrogen will help prevent scaring of the tissue when it is surgically cut.
When a girl with an imperforate hymen reaches menarche, the menstrual flow will have no where to go. This will cause the hymen to bulge and look bluish. If it goes untreated (it's not an emergency situation), her symptoms will include cyclic lower abdominal pain, menstrual like cramps, pressure on the bladder and rectum. If it remains untreated, her abdomen might also bulge. (See also the emedicine article on Outflow Obstructions and, as promised, pictures). This can go so far as to block the urinary tract and overflow the bladder (which will cause more abdominal pain, pressure on the rectum and vomiting). In the worst cases, fluids can build up and organs can rupture. (See Imperforate hymen as a cause of bladder perforation and intestinal obstruction.)

So now we know *way* more about imperforate hymens than we wanted to know. Let's see what we can find historically. Not as much as I might have hoped.

The 1901 edition of Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle there is a fair amount of discussion of cases where pregnancy occurred despite the fact that the hymen was not ruptured. Additionally, there are examples of women who gave birth without rupturing the hymen. There are also examples of hymen so ridged they do not allow penetration, and needed to be removed during labor in order to prevent it from obstructing the birth. Imperforate hymen is mentioned twice:

H. Grey Edwards has seen a case of imperforate hymen which had to be torn through in labor; yet one single act of copulation, even with this obstacle to entrance, sufficed to impregnate.( CHAPTER 1. GENETIC ANOMALIES.

Foucard 15.111 reports a case of retention of urine in a young girl of nineteen, due to accumulation of the menstrual fluid behind an imperforate hymen. (CHAPTER 15. ANOMALOUS TYPES AND INSTANCES OF DISEASE.

The second case fits the cases of outflow obstructions, but the first case where she became pregnant is pretty wild. Something I did not find in the modern medical literature I read so far is if the hymen membrane is porous to sperm. If anyone finds something relating to this, I'd like to know. It's not enough to assume that just because an imperforate hymen can block mucous and menstrual blood that it can block semen.

Hitting up PubMed, I came across an survey of 19thC adolescent gynecology that lists in it's abstract: "A review article in 1891 reported a 10% mortality rate associated with treatment of the imperforate hymen." (The early historical roots of pediatric and adolescent gynecology. Yordan EE, Yordan RA. Journal of pediatric and adolescent gynecology. 1997 Nov;10(4):183-91.)

Hang on a sec. There were enough instances of imperforate hymen prior to 1891 that someone could estimate a mortality rate? I will want a copy of this full article so I can read that 1891 report to see under what circumstances the surgery on the imperforate hymen was performed. (Ignore the fact that I am more curious about the possible rate of incidence than I am about mortality -- I'm used to reading about the 16thC when you were lucky if a procedure had a 50% mortality rate). I'm curious to know how many cases, what age the girls were when treated and if there are any hints about the complications that might have caused death.

Unfortunately, after this, the trail grows cold for me. Obstetrics and gynecology are not areas where I have chosen to buy books so I need some encouragement to keep researching this.

Thinking it through (often unwise without actual documentation)....

Gould and Pyle make references to stories of hymens that prevented actual coital penetration (and yet pregnancy occurred) back to the 16th and early 17thC (citing Fabricius Hildanus and William Harvey among many others). Also, it seems that depending on the nature of the hymen at the time of labor, it would either rupture during labor or it would need to be cut if it was too "fibrous" (thick and inelastic).

Knowing that surgeons of the early modern period did not hesitate to apply the knife, especially if what they were facing was not typical or ideal, I'll hypothesize that faced with an imperforate hymen, especially when it is blocking menstrual flow or obstructing a normal birth the surgeon or midwife would have simply cut it with a knife. What I cannot guess at is how much they would have cut (a single slit or circumscribe the opening) or what, if any, after care would have followed and how that might have changed with the increased understanding of circulation (William Harvey, 1628) and staunching post-partum hemmoraging.

If anyone has resources or is willing to add to the research on this topic, please add a comment. I find these specific questions interesting because they require taking into consideration societies view of the body, common medical knowledge at the moment and learning what we really know about the condition.

SecondLife for Nonprofits - Two Mixed Reality Events

2006-07-13T15:10:00.000-07:00

Two seperate groups inspired by the Net Squared gathering of web innovators who promote social change are holding back-to-back events to discuss the potential of nonprofits making effective use of the virtual world platform, SecondLife.

Both are on July 18, 2006. Both take place partially inside SecondLife at the TechSoup online meeting space. BUT they each will be holding a simultaneous meeting in the physical world with video and audio being passed between the online and phsycial meeting spaces so both sets of participants can see and hear each other.

First up on July 18 at 3:30pm Pacific/6:30pm Eastern, the Ethos Roundtable will feature an introduction to Second Life. John Lester, Community Manager at Linden Lab, (the company that created and runs Second Life), will present a tour of this online community including how Second Life can be used for educational and non-profit work. John will have slides and also give an in-world demo to show you how Second Life works.

Ethos Roundtable event physical location:
77 Huron Avenue (Yahoo!Maps)
Cambridge, MA

Soon after that at 6:30pm Pacific/9:30pm Eastern, TechSoup will present on how nonprofits can effectively use SecondLife. Susan Tenby, Online Community Manager of TechSoup.org, and Jeska Dzwigalski, Community Manager at Linden Lab will also present a tour of this online community, including TechSoup's satellite office and demo a directory of nonprofit organizations in the Second Life world. The event will feature a number of guest speakers from organizations who are actively working in the Second Life community to better achieve their organization's missions.

I'll be attending the TechSoup event in both the physical and online sense. I'm easy to spot in SecondLife as I made my avatar look like me (though avatar customization hasn't quite caught up with my actual beard growth).

TechSoup event physical location:
Net^2 HQ
322 Ritch St. 2nd Floor (Yahoo!Maps)
San Francisco, CA
415-633-9446

BOTH events take place online in the same online location. Go directly to the TechSoup area in SecondLife by following this SLurl:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/InfoIsland/52/171/33/

To ensure smooth operation of the online event, the organizers will restrict the TechSoup space to 50 members, and they will allow those in on a first-come-first-serve basis. Arrive early to secure your spot.

You will need to download (25-50MB) and register (free) for SecondLife to visit the online location. I strongly recommend you make sure you can run SecondLife early as it has some fairly strict system requirements.

Once you get started, take a look at the SecondLife Wiki for some more info on how to operate SecondLife. (Or just hit o get the chat input and start asking people for help.)

Also read what some nonprofits, innovators and activists are doing in SecondLife.

Other folks who blogged recently about nonprofits in SecondLife:

Non-profits in Second Life at Omidyar Network

Nonprofit Life in Second Life at Spare Change

Announcing the TechSoup Second Life Event: July 18th at 6:00 PM PST at Beth's Blog

Second Life for Nonprofits at sufolla - community weavers

Tech Soup to offer mixed reality event in person and in second life at Second Life Library 2.0

Are you drinking the Metaverse Kool-Aid?

2006-05-08T13:44:00.000-07:00

Over the past year, I've been encountering more and more people enthusiastic about the potential of a Metaverse in the vein of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Today, we have the Metaverse Roadmap project and an Open Source Metaverse Project. Break out the Kool-Aid because it's deja-vu all over again.

I first read Snow Crash 10 years ago as required reading for working on VZones (nee WorldsAway) and, at the time, I was struck by the dystopia that Stephenson develops in contrast to his Mardi Gras vision of the Metaverse. I was particularly mindful that what made the virtual world so alluring was that the physical world was such a economic, political and social mess. It seemed to me that people in the novel entering the Metaverse were seeking something the bleak logo-festooned burbclave reality could not offer, whether it was entertainment/distraction or connection/contacts. It was in a very palpable way a Hyperreality - an idealized imitation or simulation of reality that, through it's simulation, is better than the real thing. Disney's Main Street USA is a hyperreal vision of America. Historical reenactment is a hyperreal vision of history.

After the most recent Game Developers Conference, I felt the urge to pick up Snow Crash once again, just to see if perhaps the years had added additional layers to my view that the Metaverse was not a practical vision for wide-reaching socialization technology. I can say that the years did little to change my view. If anything, the intervening years of text messaging, blackberries, and other mobile connectivity devices that are incapable of rendering 3d polygons, but are great at simply and quickly connecting people reinforce my opinion that modeling after the Metaverse as technology, tends to blind folks to the social implications.

In other words, regardless if you want to bring people together online for economic reasons, political reasons, cultural reasons or social reasons, don't be distracted by blue technology such that you forget why you are doing it in the first place.

I could use your help with a design

2006-03-15T18:42:00.000-08:00

So I actually convinced my foundation that getting public feedback on designs is a good idea.

It's not an earth-shattering feature. It's just some functionality to help one registered member of a site send their email address to another registered member.

See, families of kids with learning and attention problems face more than just educational and emotional or social challenges. They are often in conflict with schools, sometimes with spouses and sometimes defending their children from law enforcement or child protective services. Any of these can lead to court, but even before then, parents are very very concerned that their lives will be *too* exposed. Over 2/3rds of our registered members have chosen to *not* display their email on their public profile. 'Nuff said.

So given that parents generally know each other only by their screen names, how can I help them make a better contact so they can have private conversations with other parents?

Before you even ask, private messaging is not one of our options.

The main reason we aren't opening up PM is that we don't want to host all those messages. Harassment, illegal behavior and all sorts of problems can occur via PM and to avoid having our time sucked up by hearsay arguments, we should keep a record of every PM and *that* opens us up to a lot of responsibility that our small shop just can't handle.

Another reason is that I am blissfully free trying to pump up our site traffic. My goals are measured in lives affected so I don't have to inflate traffic. If two people meet and go off into email to work out problems, great stuff.

So the challenge is to limit the interaction, give control over the personal information and the interactions to the members and minimize the ability to break it for nefarious purposes. Here's where my community minded friends come in.

I would really appreciate it if you could take some time to look at the design I am working on and offer your insight and feedback. Have I plugged the holes? Are there more elegant ways of handling this? Take a look at my Parent to Parent Email Exchange Design.

You can comment here, email me or join our parents in the discussion where they are offering their views something to be built for their needs.

Fight Machine!

2006-01-12T18:10:00.000-08:00

Just for fun: Fight Machine!

As you can see, the first opponents I entered have been influenced by my past three months of reading a heavy dose of skeptic blogs such as Respectful Insolence (a.k.a. "Orac Knows"), The Millenium Project, Skeptico, Bad Astronomy Blog and A Photon in the Darkness.

And what's funny about being so deep into reading skeptical writers is that I spend much of my time reading about 16th Century medical beliefs and surgical practices such as bloodletting and the four humors, cupping, herbal remedies, astrology and, hey let's not forget, uroscopy. (Sorry no link for astrology, I was trying to find a 16thC image of a bloodletting chart.) All of these survive today in some form or another as alternative therapies or as we now know to call them, quack medicines.

So I enjoy delving into the 16thC mind and have mixed up a few herbal wound salves to make 7th graders wrinkle their noses (egg yolks, rose oil, turpintine - which of course comes from a gum resin disolved in brandy) and even learned to use glass cups. And while I have learned how some of these practices had some beneficial (if slight and then misunderstood) effect which might prove interesting today such as using leeches for modern microsurgery, I'm not in the least fooled into thinking that understanding of the world 500 years ago was some how more reliable than what we are capable of knowing today.

So back to the fight.... the Quacks lose.

Virtual World Celebrates 10 Year Anniversary

2005-11-15T08:22:00.000-08:00

Today at 5PM Pacific Standard Time, the virtual world Dreamscape running on the VZones platform will be officially 10 years old.

Dreamscape circa 1995

From 1995 to 1998, I was one of the community managers and honestly, I didn't expect the place to still be around. Fujitsu had sunk several million dollars into a new version of the Habitat world. The idea was that it could be a platform which could be licensed to others who would build and maintain their own worlds. In order to convince the world that the platform was a place for viable online communities within a virtual environment, a flag-ship product was planned. The profitability of this flag-ship community was always on the mind of Fujitsu and there were times the whole project was almost scuttled before it launched.

Oracle Uni, Oracle Teresias (Me) and Oracle Vaserius welcome Brother Echo (bald man in the back) to being a World Manager (1998)

So, it's really wonderful to see that, 10 years later, much of the central planning over user created content has been decentralized. When we started, there were few objects that did things and little artwork to keep the illusion of variety fresh. 10 years ago, there were 3 Oracles inside the world "managing" the social and physical layout of the world who oversaw about 20 volunteer Acolytes helping settle dispute and handle serious troublemakers. Today, the official staff roster includes Director, World Managers, Senior Oracles, Oracles, Acolytes and Acolyte Painters, or roughly 60 people.

But that's not all, some of these staff are responsible for helping guide Pans, Proprietors, Mages, Muses, Creators, Natives, Welcomers, Security Bears, Jesters, Thespians, Sprites. I don't know how many people are on the rosters of each of these. But that's not the important bit part. These volunteer subgroups fall into two basic categories: content creators and support. Mages, Muses and Natives and the other fantasy named groups create stories of the world, often retelling events that actually happened. The Proprietors, the Welcomers and the Security Bears support the trade of objects, the integration of newcomers and crime prevention education.

While it's not fully decentralized, the inverse pyramid of support where the world director supports, the world managers who support the volunteer groups who support everyone else is much, much bigger and more capable that what we were doing 10 years ago. The key to this little virtual world hanging in there for 10 years is that the people inhabiting the world have many more opportunities to have a lasting effect on the world and others who come after them. The world is much more vibrant than when I was there 7 years ago and it shows.

Dreamscape in 2005

You've come a long way baby. Here's to you!

It is my sad duty to inform you...

2005-11-07T12:10:00.000-08:00

That I am home. Yeah, it took a week for me to post. I survived the Prepetually Screaming Child (three cheers to my mp3 CD player and rechargable batteries), jet lag and even my first week at work. For those keeping score:

- I did not check my bag once during my entire trip. It was worth all the fussing over what to pack and handwashing every night just to breeze through the "nothing to declare" gates at every airport.

- My most worrisome moment was not Berlin con-men, but having the German passport control wonder why I didn't have an entry stamp for Germany. Luckily, they make a joke about Italian passport control and let me go.

- According to my passport, I have entered the UK twice, but I have never left. I haven't left Italy, but I definitely left Germany without ever having been there. Way to go security forces of the EU!

- After three weeks of driving in Germany, I am still driving at 130km/h and highly annoyed at people who are simply cruising in the far left lane.

- My cell phone is still dead. I'm trying to swap out the battery. Grrr.

Checking out (of) Berlin

2005-10-30T08:53:00.000-08:00

I´m in Berlin for what I am guessing is my last post until I arrive back home in the states. Oddly enough, I am in the only Internet cafe I could find near where I have been exploring -- Postdammer Platz. It´s upstairs as part of a Dunkin Donuts. I´m pretty conflicted about this. On one hand, take a look at the picture from Wikipedia. When I was in Berlin in 1985, we looked out over the barren Potsdamer Platz with the wall, the no-man´s land, barbed wire and lights. That it has been reclaimed is good in my eyes, but wow, what it´s been reclaimed with. I´m hoping I happen to have overlooked some small spot of charm and life and not something that seems to cater to either tourists or trying to convince Germans what the West is like.

The old German Democractic Republic tried to use Stalin Alle (now Karl-Marx-Allee) with it´s combined residential and commercial design and use as a way to introduce visitors to the socialist ideal. While the tune may have changed, someone still wants us to dance the same old steps.

Earlier today, as I was sitting under the giant TV tower near Alexander Platz, I heard an announcement come on repeating in German and English: "Dear Berlin Guests. The Police would like your attention. Do not gamble on or play the "Find the Lady" game. You cannot win." I giggled thinking that the old find the queen card shuffle had made it´s way to Germany. Then I crosses one of the many bridges of the Spree River. They weren´t kidding. On four corners of the bridge were four setups. What suprised me was that they were literally running a shell game. Wha-huh? Isn´t that the third oldest way to turn a trick?

So I watched for a bit because I knew that there was at least on shill who plays and wins, drawing in the victims. I spotted one right away. It seemed pretty obvious to me, but I watched at least two people get fleeced out of 50€ each in the space of a few minutes. When I pulled out my camera to take a picture the crowd closed in. I looked up and one man looked at me and said, "sorry". I smiled back at the second shill but I kept my camera aimed at the crowd. We kinda faced off and I put my camera away. He walked back to his look out position by a street light. A few minutes laters, I successfully snapped some pictures (but man, they just didn´t come out) and I heard "Kein fotografieren!" and I suddenly had two of the shills looking pretty pissed off at me. I then spotted a third shill and figured the odds weren´t looking so good. I backed off under the now very watchful eye of the lookout.

Another half a block and I come across a small crowd gathered around a couple of Berlin Police officers. they are running a shell game to in an effort to show people that it´s a scam and that they can´t win. I´m not sure how effective this is when there are four such scams running and pulling people in a strong stones throw away.

I just spent the rest of the time walking around and remembering that I can´t figure out what day it is. I told someone "no problem" and that I would meet them on Saturday in Berlin. Big problem -- today is Sunday. I´m such a putz.

Loving and Leaving Leipzig

2005-10-29T09:25:00.000-07:00

While driving around Leipzig was more than a little bit of a chore, walking around without any real purpose has been a joy. Leipzig was originally recommended to me from one of the Conference Assocates during the last Game Developers Conference. She said it had a very strong youth culture. She was not wrong at all.

Leipzig calls itself the "Little Paris". I haven´t been to Paris so the best comparison I can make is to call it the "Big Berkeley". There is a range of hippies, street punks, hipsters, students and goths (called dark culture here) along with the business folks and blue collar workers when they aren´t building new streets, new streetcar stations and restoring whole buildings. There´s a lot fewer "fashionable" types and so people seem a little more down to earth than what I have had a chance to experince in Germany so far. I think the main reason is that, like Berkeley, it´s University in right in the city center.

Now all Berkeley needs is an Absinthe bar. Last night, I found my way to Sixtina where they have a lot of Absinthe. I didn´t count bottles, but I would guess over 40 varieties lined the top shelf of the bar. They had a handy chart of the top ten with or without anise and I ordered a Mr. Jekyll. After that I settled down with a beer and watched the regulars interact (I was clearly not part of the group so I was largely ignored). I had so much fun that I missed my last street car home and wound up hiking about 2 miles until 2AM. Walking, even drunk, even in the dark, is easier in Leipzig than driving.

Oh and my only picture of Leipzig. In Europe, there are a lot of things called "Mc" something. There are "McPaper" office supplies, "McNet" internet cafes. Let´s hear it for Europe not letting McDonald´s bully them around. The oddest "McSomething" I have seen yet is on the third floor of the Leipzig Main Train Station. The Station also houses a large shopping mall which my guide book called "a joy to shop in". Well, I guess they don´t have many malls in Europe so they don´t carry the same connotation. Plus, we don´t tend to build malls in 150 year old buildings. But back to the picture. Yup, the McClean are clean and safe toilets. Okay, to give them some due, they look very spa-like on the inside and you can nab a shower here for 7€. I´d have killed for something like this in Rome.

I know the city will hate me for representing them this way, but there was so much going one and so many layers of buildings, people and activity that pictures just could not do it any justice. And for that reason I love Leipzig even though I only just explored it (I rode street cars all day to the lake on the west side and the more funky south city). In less than 12 hours, I will be on my way to Berlin and in 36 hours, I will be taking my various flights toward home.

Is the fauxhawk Germany´s answer to the Mullet?

2005-10-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

If I never see another grown man with a fauxhawk again, I will be ever so happy. I realize that the guy with the biggest beard in Germany shouldn´t come down on other people´s grooming choices, but please stop with the fauxhawk. It doesn´t look cool, sexy, hip or tough. It looks as though you can´t make an actual commitment to be edgy. It looks like you snuck out of the house with a normal doo and then did it up so mom never finds out. It should be left to five year old boys with a handful of shampoo in the tub.

And women of Germany, are you really finding this appealing?

Superstraße = Superscheiße

2005-10-26T08:24:00.000-07:00

So a while back, I picked up a "Super Straße" which for those familiar with Thomas Guide, it´s a big old book of German roads. It´s been really helpful in keeping me fromm becoming utterly lost. However, it´s not really all that accurate, at least in terms fo the actual geography of the streets and as far as Leipzig goes, it´s been pretty much useless.

So, do not try to drive in Leipzig unless you have a eally good map and then it might not be worth it. This picture which I swiped off the interweb shows what is called a "Baustelle". That means "construction zone" and I can´t guess just how many of Leipzig´s streets are torn up for construction, but it´s a lot and definitely the most I have seen thus far. They are a host city for the World Cup in 2006 which explains much. With all the construction going on, the other word we get to learn is "Umleitung". This means "detour".

But the Leipzig tourist office was super helpful and tried really hard to find a cheap pension for me. They found a set of apartments about 7km outside of town. Cheap and it comes with private shower and kitchenette. I hit the Aldi and stocked up on food and coffee. No more 1,80€ a day habit! Still, getting out to the major autobahn is tricky. Luckily, I plan to spend Thursday and Friday using the street cars. There doesn´t seem to be any underground trains in the city so it´s very different with the large number of tracks all over the city.

I spent yesterday in Quedlinburg which is literally a city of half-timbered buildings. They have a museum that explains the building methods and different styles from the1300´s to the 1800´s and the museum itself is in a building built in 1310! (And let me tell you, I stuck my nose all over that building). I just came across Raymond Faure´s impressive photosite with over 570 pictures of Quedlinburg and this nice sheet of examples of half-timbered work from 1310 - 1576. Whew! That´s once less project I have to work on.

Today was Wittenberg which is where the film Luther takes place. No, there´s much more to the town, but I am about to get dinged another 1,50. I visited the Lucas Cranach (the Elder) house (where I learned that he ran a pharmacy and wine shop out of the lower floors) and the Luther House which has a really, really good presentation including many Cranach paintings and woodcuts from his workshop.

Quicky update

2005-10-23T05:38:00.000-07:00

Sorry, no pictures today. I just happened to stumble on an internet cafe open on a Sunday in Mühlhausen. Mühlhausen is well know for it´s part in the Reformation and the Peasant´s War of 1524-26. Thomas Müntzer was said to provoke the peasants into fighting and the old East Germany considered him a hero. A docent at the Peasant War Museum revealed that their current exhibit is only two years old and that while the objects are the same, the context is very different than when the communist goverment ruled. So I got to see one of the five Mark notes that the wikipedia article mentions.

Today is Sunday. I spend Saturday driving from Lennep through Kassel to Mühlhausen. In Kassel, I visited the Museum fur Sepulkralkultür which is a museum of death culture -- funeral rites and mourning culture. Sadly, they had no good catalogs and their site doesn´t have good images, but took several including some beautiful rings.

I also spent the day recovering from my last night in Lennep. I stopped in at Bei Josef again and have about a pint. I expected to leave, eat and then return, but first an older man originally from Italy came and we started talking. Then a man originally from Turkey came in and we started talking. Suffice to say, I drank about 2 liters and spent the night drunkenly trying to get any point I might have across. I think I may be hosting some guest in the next year....

Taking My Ease in Lennep

2005-10-18T05:33:00.000-07:00

My goal for Monday was to just relax. I had a late breakfast and went up to my room to write postcards to almost everyone. When I left my room at noon, I expected to check out some shops and then grab a bite to eat. A stroll around town and I found that I was encountering something I hadn´t yet in the larger cities I had been in -- every shop was closed between noon and 3PM. So I made my way to a place on the market place called "Bei Josef".

Instead of finding food, I found a group of men gathered around one table talking it up. I took a seat at this table and they asked who I was. When I asked them to speak a little more slowly, they assumed I was from Holland. I introduced myself and ordered a Schlösser Alt. I haven´t had a Schlösser Alt in 20 years when I was in Hameln and it was as good as I remember.
Pretty soon another older man came in and asked who I was. When I introduced myself as from California, he switched to English and started to tell me about his trip to the US -- Los Angeles, Utah, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas (he saw Sigfried and Roy) and San Francisco. He really, really wanted to practice his English and I figured it would give me a chance to get in some local good graces.

And how. Pretty soon we reintroduced ourselves. Paul then introduced me to his best friend Hans-Conrad and I met Karola, the red-faced, red-haired, stout barmaid and her husband Uwe. It was Hans-Conrad´s birthday and he was buying rounds for everyone. That included me after a bit. Then Josef himself came in and I was introduced again. Luckily, Josef was hip on the idea that I wanted to practice *my* German and was willing to speak only German to me. Another round on Hans-Conrad and a further round on Josef and it was a good way to spend an windy Fall afternoon. This is what I had hoped to find at least a little of while I was here.

As Paul and Hans-Conrad packed up in a taxi, I made my way to some shops. In the bookstore, I found several books on the town of Lennep and the area including one written for young teens (just a little above my readign abiliy in German so it will be good practice). Then I dropped into what I thought was a toy store, but it turned out to be a second hand shop. Better still, they had a pair of jeans in my size.

Cheap jeans have been a small but important goal since I arrived in Germany. I didn´t bring any as I figured they would take too long to dry and weigh to much traveling. However, everyone in Germany is wearing jeans and I have been feelign like a sore thumb. Particularly in my black slacks which seems to draw assumptions that I am orthodox Jewish including at least one sing-song cat-call of "Juden! Juden" by some stupid little boys. Anyway, they are classic overdone European style jeans for a mere 2,50€! So I´ll see how many stares I draw wearing them in Köln.

How could it be better? Discovering the local Aldi for cheap ready to eat meals (did I mention these are like a German Trader Joe´s) and finding a Döner place open on Sunday. I´ll do a whole post about Döner-Kabap sometime.

Finding a place to call home

2005-10-18T05:29:00.000-07:00

After my overnight in Schwäbisch Hall, I headed for Heidelberg and the German Museum of Pharmacy. They did not allow photographs and the only definitive pieces I was interested in were three morters and three wooden drug jars. Considering wooden drug jars are extremely rare, this was worth the trip. It clarified a number of Medieval and Renaissance paintings and woodcuts of apothecaries. However, the rest of Heidelberg was overrun with tourists from all over Europe - from overly polite British folks to very demanding Germans from other parts of the country.

After that, I found the A1 Autobahn and headed north as fast as either the Renault or traffic would allow. My goal was to get to a point on the map somewhere near Köln but not too close to the city where prices would be high and the pace of life fast. I took a chance on a road side "Rasthof" which turned out to be a fairly American-style hotel. A bit more than I expected but it was definite shelter for the night. A bonus was that it has a local yellow pages with maps of the area and listings for (hurrah!) hotels. This areal shot of the town of Lennep caught my eye and it turned out that half of the hotels listed were in that town. Actually, the town is a suburb of a larger town called Remscheid, which mostly lays on the west side of the A1 while Lennep lies on the east side.

The next morning (a Sunday morning when *nothing* is open), I parked on the edge of town and walked around the old city. It´s very quaint and was utterly dead. I saw maybe a dozen people and that was only because I walked by the train station and near the newer part of town. The only accomodations I could find were hotels which tend to be a bit pricer than I really wanted, but the town was growing on me. When they started to open up, I picked the "König von Preußen" and it seemed like a good price. I was led up to an upper story room overlooking the market square. I unloaded the car and drove up to Münster where I hoped to find the Leper Museum (open only on Sunday from 3PM to 5PM).

Trying to find it turned out to be a bust and I spent most of my time there sitting in front of a beer cellar enjoying the really fine Fall weather and some equally fine beer. I´ll need to remember to write about the planned community I did find at Kinderhaus. It was so planned and nearly desserted on a Sunday that it felt creepy.

Neuberg and Schwäbisch Hall (or why I went Germany and skipped out on Rothenberg)

2005-10-15T06:39:00.000-07:00

When I was in Nürnberg, I picked up a flyer for an exhibition called "At the Kaiser´s Pleasure" (Von Kaisers Gnaden) -- feel free to dispute my transation. So I headed south to Neuburg on der Donau a town that happens to be celebrating it´s 500 anniversery this year. Which got me thinking that the next 10-20 years will be good times to visit Germany for those interested in the early 16thC Germany. There should be more general interest in the period which means more accessible information and relevant events. Book your tickets kids!

Neuberg itself was built during the years 1535-45 so it´s a good example of a Reniassance palacial home. It was added to over the years including some mosaic grottos during the mid-17thC.

However the exhibit was wonderful. I arrived just as it opened and while I had to swim through school group after scool group, I was allowed to take pictures (without flash, of course). So some of them are a bit fuzzy, but being able to zoom in on a painting of Kaiser Karl V´s camp and pick up details of camp life that both the art and military historians tend to overlook. Of course, I picked up the exhibition book for non-fuzzy images. In addition to the works they normally have at Neuberg, they borrowed excellent pieces from all over Germany. I was able to look at examples of books from the Munich State Library Archives and some weapons borrowed from the Germanisches National Museum where I had recently been.

The old city is up on a hill and the rest of the town lies below. This makes the old town very quite and easy paced. I had a picnic lunch in the square surrounded by Baroque facaded buildings. While I ate, I looked at my map. It would take me at least an hour and half to get back up to Rothenberg. What I really wanted to do was find the "bone room" of 4000 monks under the St. Micheals church in Schwäbisch Hall. Taking the back roads, I figured I could make Schwäbisch Hall by 4 in time to catch the church still open.

I made to Schwäbisch Hall easily enough, but finding the Altstadt was a bit tricker until I just started going forward, trusting there would be a sign pointing me there. Wow. What can I say about Schwäbisch Hall? It´s beautiful. If you are interested in the 16thC Germany, put this on your list of places to visit. The church was built in stages during the 1400´s and it contains beautiful sculptures and altars pieces.

When I arrived, some children were practicing for a play - Joeseph and his Brother. Imagine walking up a hundred (or so) steps to a great stone church with one seriously pissed off Archangel over the door and hearing a soprano voice echoing out the door. It simply added to the experience. I entered and bought a guide boom. I asked about a bone room under the church, but my German must still need work since I was told, this is it. I decided to make the best of it and looked around. That´s where I found, behind the altar, an iron railing surrounding a large piece of plexiglass on the floor. I had found my monks and some of them were gracious enough to smile for me.

Stepping out of the church and into the light of the western sun, I decided I would stay and walk around some more and explore what alleyways it had to offer. I found a not-so cheap place near the church and explored. I didn´t take many pictures because at one point, I got tired of carrying the camera. So I put it away and watch some students set up backlit sheets across the ruins of some old part of the city and walked the maze of streets until well after dark. In the morning, as the fog lifted from the surrounding river valley, I watched the Saturday morning market get underway in the plaza under the church steps.

Auf dem Autobahn

2005-10-15T06:11:00.000-07:00

Yup! I got me a car and I´ve hit the road. Well, except it´s not much of a car. It´s a Renault and it´s like driveing a delivery truck. The seats are way too high and built like truck seats so I am not comfortable with how it handles curves any higher than 140 km/h (86mph). I´ve been driving on both regular raods and the autobahn and I can´t always say that the autobahn is faster. See, it´s a myth that the Germans are speed demons. If the speed limit is posted at 100, 80, 60, 40 km/h then they pretty much adhere to that limit. As soon as there is no limit or the magic 120 sign comes up, then they go for broke. It´s not hard driving here at all.

I spent my first day in the car driving far south to Mindelheim, the location of Mindelberg and the birth place of Georg von Frundsberg. The castle is closed, but I was able to get a good view of the town and walk off my typical German breakfast of bread, butter, cheese.

The drive home was an education in reading German road signs. My map has tiny numbers indicating the road number (and then there are hundreds of small towns and roads it doesn´t show). On road signs, there are typically 3-8 city names and sometimes an equally small number and color indicating what road takes you there. So if there are 15 towns between you and your destination, read quick! It´s not that bad. I missed only one turn taking the winding roads across Bavaria in the dark. (Oh yeah, no signs are lighted here, that´s one reason they are extra big.) But I made it home in one piece, found a free overnight parkign spot and in the morning, found my way out of Nürnberg and heading south....

We have pictures!

2005-10-12T10:27:00.000-07:00

Today, I met with Dr. Johannis Willers, the curator in charge of the medical display at the Germanisches National Museum. He explained (very quickly and in German) that there are very few surgical tools left from the 16th C. He recommended that I check two surgical manuals from the period and I explained that I already had both. I was able to ask where the very cool surgical tool case was and he said it was being photographed. I will write to him latr and see if I can obtain detailed photographs.

Yesterday, I went to Ingolstadt. I got off late and so I had to cool my heels while waiting for them to reopen in the afternoon. I stopped in the Das Bayerische Armee-Museum. For my friends who know, this is the Museum that has the Turkish tent and the full Fähnlein of 500 tin soldiers all painted differently. Well, they also have a very nice display of guns and artillery.

Here´s a handmortar ("Kat´s Head) from the late 16thC. There´s appearantly been a discussion of drummers being armed so this one is for you.

The Armee Museum is seemingly endless. Just as I turn another corner, I was asked to follow a docent. I followed him out the door, through a courtyard, into another building and them up three flights of stairs. He gave me a courteous bow and turned on a light to another exhibition. I was in a room of photographs documenting the destruction of Ingolstadt by American bombers early 1945. This has been a sobering aspect of visiting Germany as an adult. To realize just how much we bombed, how much history was destroyed and then to walk the same streets and see how much was rebuilt and even restored.

Suddenly, the "US World Tour, Bombing a Country Near You" tee shirt that I picked up on a lark didn´t seem nearly as smarmy.

But I came here for a purpose. Not to have my concept of the world and my place in it altared (that´s a joke, son). Off to the Medical Museum! I had tried to write to the Museum before I left (and I have recieved an answer from all I contacted by now) so I took my chances on trying to meet someone. No luck. The nice woman behind the counter could not quite understand who I was seeking and since I didn´t have a name, it was a bit futile. So I resolved to look and if I had questions to press for information afterwards.

I asked if I could take pictures without a flash which has been allowed so far (I was allowed to take photos of Dürer and Cranach paintings!). Not this time -- no pictures at all. Crud. Luckily, the 16thC instruments were in a small case, laying flat which made it pretty easy to sketch and measure. Again, it´s less than a dozen instruments, so I sat down and got to work.

Until a woman came by and was photographing every thing in site -- with a flash! So I let her go through and the decided to just screw it. I´ll take as many notes and measurements as I need and then start snapping. If they throw me out, it´s more than I would have gotten. So, to the director and all the staff at the medical museum in Ingolstadt, I apologize. But it was worth it to
be able to get detailed close ups of construction like this.

Im Praxis

2005-10-10T23:48:00.000-07:00

I got a taste of the German medical system on Monday. It seems Italy left me a parting gift in the form of a insect bite that became infected. I had a six inch red streak running from the bite down my chest. By coincidence, "Gift" in German means poison.

Here´s how it works here. Pharamcists (Apotheker) have the ability to make diagnoses and prescribe medications without the need for a doctors prescriptions (in some cases). Figuring this was the best triage I could have, I went to "Spital-Apothek" which takes it´s name from the Heilig-Geist-Spital a Mediveal Hospital built on the river that divides Nürnberg. There, they looked at my shoulder and decided to call a doctor upstairs. He was worried that it could be infected and wanted to take a look.

I went upstairs to a private practice (Praxis) and waited in a line. When I reached the desk, they sent for someone with good English skills. I thought I was doing pretty well, but in this case, they probably wanted to be sure. It was explained that this is a cash only system so I should probably cash up at the nearest bank. This got me worried that I might be paying US type of prices for a simple visit.

Back downstairs, I stopped by a cafe for a shot of espresso and was pleased to find it was a little Italian spot. As far as coffee goes, Italy consitently has better coffee than Germany. Then I went back up stairs to wait some more.

I didn´t have to wait long. Dr. Weiler, an energetic, but friendly man with a cherubic face, found me and brought me in for a look. Between his English and my German, he explained how it was likely some kind of wasp that got so hungry it decided I was a good dining spot. That infected the wound which I learned is called "Wundrosen" and then leads to further "Infection" (spelled the same). I was given a prescriptions for some powerful antibiotics and send along with out being charged.

I guess we both got a good story out of it.

Oh, and I spent an hour photographing a dozen medical instruments at the Germanisces National Museumand more time being blown away at the collection of Masterworks where they put the best of the 16th - 18thC in ust a few rooms.

Right now I have to catch my train to Ingolstadt for the Medical Museum there plus the worlds largest fresco.

Me and Rome aren´t on speaking terms

2005-10-08T09:19:00.000-07:00

So far, any minute I have spent in Rome has been painful. I left Cortona early in the morning and Amie and Issa dropped me off at the station. By my guess, I would have nearly three hours in Rome to wander just a little, maybe catch one sight and then head out. It was not to be.

It took 45 minutes of waiting to get my bags checked. I still have no clue where the lockers are located. I guess it´s the best theft deterrent when the people with the bags can´t find it. Then I wanted to buy some stamps and mail four postcards. The tourist info desk said to buy them from a Tobacconist. The Tobaconnist I find says no and points me across the street to the Post Office.

Guess what? There´s no machine. The only way to buy stamps is to wait in line. For a week, I´ve been getting used to the "Italian Line" which isn´t so much a line as it is a mob with people constantly jocking to get up front. And all I want are four stamps -- quarto stampe. Instead, the Italian Post Office (at least this Roman one) has you take a number where you will be served by ONE window. This one window also seems to be where government forms, paychecks or anything involving a small stack of papers on the part of the patron and a whole bunch of typing on the part of the clerk.

So I have my number, 78 and I watch as we s-l-o-w-l-y count up. Occasionally, the numbers zip by and I realize that if I am not up and out of my seat within 10 seconds of my number coming up, I lose my spot. I watched the counter like a hawk.

Needless to say, all I have seen of Rome is the main train station, gypsies and police telling me I´m not allowed to sit on the ground and eat lunch. Well, I did get a chance to see the temple of Minerva from the train as I left the station. Maybe another time when I´m in the mood for the bustle of that big city, but until then, Roma, don´t bother calling.

A visit to La Specola

2005-10-05T06:32:00.000-07:00

When I arrived in Camucia on Sunday, Amie mentioned that everyone was excited about going to La Specola to see the Wax Anatomical Models. Oh, won't poor Dr. Marta Poggesi be suprised when, instead of two people, there's a whole group. No problem, it should make our visit all the more memorable to her. *g*

The anatomy pieces are actually just a small part of the zoological display they have there. They have many, many preserved animals dating to the 17thC so there was a little of Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe to the museum. There was little or no effort to show the habitat of animals that is a popular form of display in american museums. That made the display all the more impressive with cases and cases of birds, fish, insects, large and small animals.

During our walk through, an older man who worked there asked us, "How did you learn about this? No one comes here!" Then came the real question, "Why?". Indeed, why would six loud Americans come to a part of Florence that most people just pass through. Why would they find their way through the parking garage and up three flights of stairs to visit a museum with 250 year old displays?

We came for the wax collection. Wow. While they allow photographing (sans flash) of the rest of the displays, they do not allow any photographing of the wax models. While I have a copy of the Taschen book of the models, there is nothing quite like being able to see the displays from a variety of angles and truely appreciate the meticulous detail and huge amount of effort that each piece required. The pieces showing the lymphatic system or the circulation were stunning, I found the one piece that showed a fetus in the womb with a translucent layer just as impressive. I have had a chance to see the Body World exhibit and I can honestly tell you that these models looked very, very close to the corpses Dr. Haagen displays.

After our walk through, we meet with Dr. Marta Poggesi who turned out to speak not much English so she called one of her students to come help. We got to hear a few additional stories such as how one of the displays of a torso was the winning entry of a competition seeking out new wax artists. Celmente Susini, who you can read about on the La Specola site, did that whole torso model himself. We also learned that the cases, including some of the glass, in which each set of models is displayed are the original cases. We thanked Dr. Pogessi and her student for their time and left to explore Florence our seprate ways.

Live from Cortona's Community Center

2005-10-05T06:10:00.000-07:00

Unortunately, my plans for adding pictures to my blog as I go along isn't panning out. I keep forgetting to pack the memory card => USB dongle. So you will have to bear with my words.

Right now, I am in Cortona's Community Center. It's upstairs through some small doors (I just kept following signs that said "internet"). The first room is a dark bar which in Italy, supplies the hourly coffee, water, wine and occasionally liquor. The next room are for the pool tables. And the third large room is where a group of men are playing parcheesi. Four computers, a bookshelf of used books and a table with checkers is in a small room off that.

Oh, I'd just like to say that every guide book needs to be updated. Hey guys, it's not www.cortona.net. It's www.cortonaweb.net. Thanks.

Oh and a note to all world travelers.... if you can't understand the language of the window that pops up when you enter your username and password, do not, I repeat, do not hit anything that looks like "yes". Firefox fans will know that this is the window asking to save your password information. Firefox fans will also know that there is an option to reveal these saved passwords. Yes, someone decided to connect to their Bank of London account and saved the password. I took a picture which I will granulate later to prove my point.

Quick Catch up

2005-10-04T02:56:00.000-07:00

Let's see how fast I can do this. 19 Minutes left on my hour here in Florence. I haven't had a chance to get to a computer or post anything because there's no cell phone access along the hilss where our house is and I have found only one computer in Cortona that is available for connecting to the internet. It's in a travel agent/sweets/soda shop near one fo the main tourist entrances.

So, here's the quick update. I Hope to have more time to fill out the details of these stories:

- My flight into Europe was uneventful, but hitting Italy it all went out the door. My flight came in after the last train from Rome to Cortona came in, but I didn't realize this until I was at the Rome station. I was able to drop my bag off at a baggage claim, but was too tired to try wandering the streets hoping to find a hostel to stay in. So I stayed in the station on platform 1 with the rest of the homeless (some waiting for trains, some permanent residents of the station). I got on hour of sleep and it wasn't deep at all since I had someone scoping out my boots and jacket when I did finally laydown.

- Poor Amie and Issa (friends I am staying with) had their luggage misplaced in a transfer in Madrid so they spent 3 days alternatatly dealing, fuming annd calling the airport in Pisa.

- Sunday Market in Arezzo. It's flipping huge. I really should have taken pictures, but I was still running on one hour of train station sleep so sitting on the steps of the church and soaking up the sun seemed the best way to get back in tune with Italy. It must have worked because so far I have had two sets of old women start speaking to me as if I was Italian.

- Monday in Cortona. This place defines the term Tuscan Hill town. It's a Etruscan walled city with some main touristy thorough fares and lots of side streets. I was shopoed out of the Church of St. Marghareta (I'll deal with spelling later), by the nuns being called to mass. I randomly came across a very meaty lunch (rabbit, duck and chicken for 6€) that appearantly every other American knew about too. It rained off and on all day so between walking up hill and up more hill, I hide in covered alleys and watch umbrella-wielding tourista walk by. Then I walked down the hill to the large Cemetary and took some photos back up at the hill town.

- Tuesday in Florence. We all just got back from La Specola and everyone agreed that it was worth the 7AM train trip. We met with Dr. Marta Poggesi (spelling?) and one of her students who explained more about the collection. I dicovered that there is a museum of pathological anatomy (think Muetter Mueseum in the US). I'm not sure I will make it. I have four hours before we all meet up at the train station and head for home. I'm really thinking that me, lunch and several espressos just before siesta are more of a plan.

Just a few minutes to post. More hopefully tomorrow (if I can get on that one machine in Cortona).

Done with work!

2005-09-28T15:58:00.000-07:00

In less than fifteen minutes, I shut down the old work laptop and hand it over to someone to hang onto for safe keeping. It's safer than leaving it in my house for a month. The only things I will have left to do in the office is tidy up and make a few phone calls. I need to double check that my normal data service for my phone will work automagically while in Europe.

Then I have to play the packing game. I'm trying to make it with only check in luggage, but my airlines are limiting me to 6kg (13lbs). Zoinks! I'll be stuffing the pockets on my jacket like mad trying to squeeze 6 or more extra pounds in.

I'll post pictures of the process later.

The Vacation Blog?(!)

2005-09-26T16:38:00.000-07:00

I originally wanted to stick on one purpose with this blog -- online community musings. However, there are several people who do a better job at posting regularly than I do. And those who don't post regularly, do so with quality. So it's time to loosen up the restrictions I've put on myself.

For the next month, I hope to blog a trip I have been planning for many months now. There are several reasons for my trip:

I haven't taken a "real" vacation in 5 years. Working at the Game Developers Conference or watching every film Toshiro Mifune made with Akira Kurosawa at the Pacific Film Archive while also reading
The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune
don't count).

As a hobby, I portray a 16thC German surgeon. My interest is in how surgeons (who were trained as a trade, not in universities) started to follow the empirical evidence before them rather than rely on ancient incorrect theories based on belief rather than evidence. At the same time, the printing press allowed them to publish what they read in the common language of their peers and not Latin required by the academics which, in my view, helped advance the medical arts. As part of all this, I'm interested in obtaining reproductions of accurate instruments to perform demonstrations of procedures. To that end, I am going to medical museums through Germany to document the size and construction of instruments.

It's been 20 years since I have been to Germany and I do like the place and the people, not to mention the beer.

First I need to decompress
But before I begin my Bildungsreise ("educational vacation"), I'll be unwinding in Cortona, Italy. The only reason for this is that friends of mine have rented a villa there and I just have to show up and cover my share. Of course, there will be a side trip to "La Specola" to see the 250 year old anatomical wax works.

Three weeks, too many cities?
Have I bitten off more than I can chew? In this map of Germany, my rough route is highlighted in yellow. I'll be making side trips to the typical tourist places such as Rothenburg, but also some side trips to the family home of Georg von Frundsberg in Mindelheim and a Peasant's War Museum in Mühlhausen (I should find a link to that before I go, huh?). It might be more than I can do, but I'm not going to push it. The medical museums I linked to above are my main goal. They will take me to many cities where I will have an opportunity to get away from the main tourist areas and find a small beer garden to relax. I've been learning German at the Goethe Institute since January and can easily navigate my way through daily life and might be able to hold up a basic conversation.

I fly on Friday. That leaves 2 days of work and 1 day of packing....

Community Indicator - Unconditional Support

2005-09-23T17:39:00.000-07:00

I really wanted to keep going with my Darkside Community Indicators, but this is something that was hard to ignore.

While discussions with titles like, "I need a hug" aren't uncommon, they tend to have an explanation of why the person is seeking support. Not this time, the entire entire first post of this discussion is, "Can I ask for a hug without posting in details what I'm going through? Thanks....". What follows are 27 messages of unconditional acceptance and support.

It's moving in it's simplicity.

The Dark Side of Community Indicators

2005-08-31T18:09:00.000-07:00

For a while Nancy White has been blogging about Community Indicators - "patterns of group member behavior that help us pay attention to the emergence and life of a community".

In that post she says,

Indicators are not all strength-based. Like anything, there is the light and dark of community and light and dark of a community’s indicators. This is not the utopian view. Dark indicators might include signs of exclusion, power and control struggles, banning and red-lining.

In other words, "lynch mobs are emergent behavior too". (And profound apologies to the well spoken sociologist who blogged that about two years ago, I can't seem to find the reference.)

I'd like to propose a few community indicators that, on the surface, might seem to counter idea of community, but if we back off from the light/dark binary descriptions, we may see people working together to foster community among themselves.

Community Indicators: Petitions
Online petitions have a bad reputation as not only futile but dangerously becoming a substitute for action. In a large context, they may best serve as raising awareness of an issue, but in a smaller context, they can help strengthen the ties of individuals and their group identity even when they are unsuccessful.

Community Indicators: Protest
Protest is about a group of people coming together with a unified purpose to join their voices and actions to affect change. This one is from my personal archives:

In February 1996, users on Worlds Away got so riled over delays in getting private spaces ("turfs") that they staged a sit-in. Fed up with many delays from WorldsAway's then owner, Fujitsu, avatars filled the locales where new users first arrive in the world, standing and chanting, "No turfs, no peace . . ." (the words scroll up above the game's window)-while paying per-minute online charges. To Kollock, that protest was a sign of WorldsAway's success as a community. "The simple fact that they had a protest speaks volumes about the space-the commitment and collective action."
-From Chapter 2 of From Anarchy to Power: The Net Comes of Age by Wendy Grossman,

Community Indicators: Mass abandonment
How can leaving a group be an indication that there is a community? When it's done by a group:

"So many of us don't have a gathering place that feels comfortable and communal," [Sherry Turkle] said. "For those who found that on Flickr.com, its transformation into a 'service' on Yahoo is a loss; they are losing something important to them.

In this case it's the loss of community feeling that is prompting some to protest against. I think the true test if this really is a community indicator is if those who leave, group together again somewhere else.

The Internet's a drunk librarian who won't shut up!

2005-08-26T14:46:00.000-07:00

First read this comic:
Cat and Girl: Large Mediums

Now check out the links:
Candlepin Bowlers Forum

But don't bother signing their petition to save the Local TV Show, "Candlepin Stars and Strikes", it got canceled anyway:
A bad split? Channel 50 puts candlepin bowling 'on hiatus'

You didn't think I would let you get away without meme of the year, tagging:
candlepin tags on flickr.com

I guess it's not suprising that a search for "candlepin" on del.icio.us turned up nothing (as of this writing). Within a system of folksonomy, you only get to see what people using the system see.

(Oh and, of course, there's a Wikipedia page on Candlepin Bowling, but that's like asking a pedant to explain a joke).

Corpse Cake

2005-07-19T22:13:00.000-07:00

Recently inspired by the Thorax Cake made by the cunningly creative and talented Barbara Jo at theyrecoming.com, a friend of mine insisted she wanted one for her upcoming birthday (themed as a wake for her passing youth). It's weird, disgusting and just too much fun so I agreed to make some kind of corpse cake. Just one problem.

I've never baked a cake in my life.

It's not as though I've never baked, but living off of Jiffy Mix Muffins in college doesn't quite cut it as experience. And I have never made frostings, glazes or worked with chocolate.

First, I gathered my resources for inspiration. I was worried that if I couldn't pull off delicious from-scratch cakes, I could at least work on accuracy and hope people would be either so put off by the organs or so drunk by the time the cake was cut, no one would care.

Not your usual cookbooks

About two weeks before the party, I baked a series of cakes. I needed the practice and I needed to make sure my oven would heat properly and evenly. It also gave me an opportunity to experiment with colors. This worked out great even though I used boxed cake mixes. After baking for a day and shaping the organs, I placed them in a tray to get a feel for how it would all come together.

A heartless display

I was really happy with the way it looked and now I could think hard about trying to get the tastes right. The list of cake flavors changed as I thought about them, but ultimately, this was the plan.

Heart - chocolate with seedless raspberry jam filling
Lungs - dyed white cake with pureed and rinsed blueberries swirled with plain white cake
Stomach - orange cake with lime custard filling
Liver - whiskey soaked "pound" cake (dyed a pale post-mortum orange)
Intestines - red velvet cake with lemon filling for the upper intestine and chocolate pudding for the lower intestine.
Ribs and Sternum - dark chocolate with white chocolate coating. I have to thank Barbara Jo for pointing out the troubles she had with solid white chocolate ribs/

Originally, I was going to make additional shoulder, abdominal and hip muscles and place a layer of marzipan skin over the whole thing, but this idea kept getting pushed aside as my energy and patience got sucked up in dealing with the ribs.

My friend, Holly, helped out with the shaping of the ribs. I bought 25 pounds of modelers clay and she suggested casting the whole front as one piece. At this point, I should point out that other than a horribly misshapen ashtray in 5th grade and an odd looking frog in 9th grade, I have never sculpted before. So, Holly sculpted the sternum and ribs and later I covered it in plastic wrap and cast the ribs in dark chocolate. I failed to take pictures of this process because I was hoping it would turn out perfect and all we needed were photos of the finished ribs.

Three days before the party, it was time to get the ribs out of the mold. I had all kinds of ideas ranging from flipping the mold over and pulling the clay away to magically lifting the ribs out. In the end, I decided to dig the clay out from under the ribs. This quickly went all wrong. Every time my hand went in to dig into the clay, it push about 25, then 20, then 15 pounds of clay against the ribs. By the end of the process, all but three ribs had snapped from the sternum.

How am I going to get this back together?

It was more than I could think about. I stuck it all in the freezer and worried about setting up the kitchen for what was about to happen. At this point, I have thank Tonda who made the Lime and Lemon custards, Jessica who shopped for the food colors and powdered meringue and Amie who lent me her Kitchen Aid and lots of cake pans. I popped up an extra table in the kitchen and started baking the cakes. While the cakes cooled, I went to work on the ribs.

I'll make this fairly short. Just imagine a some cursing, a little whining and many heavy sighs. I trimmed extra chocolate off each of the ribs using clay sculpting tools and did a quick test to see if the white chocolate would destroy the ribs. It didn't, but I found that once I got the white chocolate melted, it didn't need to stay at 200 degrees to still be workable. This prevented the dark chocolate from melting too much as I applied the white chocolate. To keep the rib cage supported during the rebuilding, I used some soda cans and aluminum foil. I was able to dip the broken ends of the ribs and literally glue them to the sternum. This took several hours of working with the chocolate for 10 minutes then putting it back in the freezer for 10 minutes.

Great! But can I get them off the foil without losing them?

In between dealing with the ribs, I succeeded in making a royal icing for the whiskey-soaked liver. The liver was baked with about a 1/2C of whiskey. I didn't realize that would make the cake collapse, but having it be very dense was okay. For the soaking, I wrapped the cake in a clean cloth and dribbled a little whiskey over it. Then the whole thing was wrapped in plastic wrap. I added a little more whiskey each day. When it came time to frost the liver, it had turned into a brick. A whiskey soaked, pale orange brick. It was perfect.

That's one pickled liver! (Pre-cirrhosis glaze)

The lungs came out so good, it seemed a shame to cover them in frosting, so attempted to make a simple sugar glaze. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing and made a messy not-so-simple syrup. Despite the problems, it turned out alright. A friend who is a former EMT said, "the lungs are actually disturbing because they are glistening." Yay!

While I wanted to shape the cakes, Holly has experience at frosting so she came over and made the buttercreme frosting. Holly is an actual Artist so she turned the pink stomach into this horrifically distended organ and rolls of cake into the most amazing intestines. Then she frosted the heart and piped some veins on it. I know if I had attempted it, it would be all crumbled and possibly destroyed.

For the display, we used a 13" x 17" artists butcher tray. First the stomach went in, then the heart, Then the liver and the lungs. Then Holly worked some magic on the intestines. While I was working on the ribs. By this point, I was obsessing on the ribs, but prepared to just snap them all and shove them into some cake.

What was the cause of death? Smoker's lung? Cirrhosis of the liver? Enlarged heart?

Amazingly enough, the ribs didn't break at all as we got them off the mold and onto the cake. They were hanging a bit off the sides, but I had baked an extra red sponge cake for random meaty bits and so I simply stuffed it under and around the bottom layer.

The cake went back into the refrigerator and we got dressed. On the way over to the party, only one rib crack cracked and I ignored it. I had made up some simple syrup using corn syrup, red food dye and molasses and gave it an extra drizzle once we got to the party.

Cake delivered. Happy Birthday. Now it's time to soak my liver in whiskey.

Unfortunately, nobody got ill looking at the cake, but there were a couple of wrinkled noses. The most important part was that the Birthday Girl loved it. At one point she said, "The heart is black--like mine!" The liver, the lungs and the heart turned out the best in my opinion, but someone made off with portions of the ribs so I guess that was popular too.

It definitely looks more cake-like. I'm not sure if it looks more appetizing.

That's it. I'm done with this whole cake business. Well, until my birthday. I want a whole leg I can amputate....

Beyond Threaded Conversation

2005-04-06T16:24:00.000-07:00

I find it disturbing that the BlogPulse Conversation Tracker represents conversations between blogs as threaded conversations. What I find disturbing is that after years of message board formats being the same, the same, the same, visualization tools are trying to cram blogs conversations into a message board visualization.

Of course, I find it useful because it highlights that the fundamental difference between message boards and blogs is simply one of distributed hosting. The basic structure is still that each post is an object with one of it's properties being connecting data. That connecting data might be of a comment to a parent post or a post on blog B trackbacked to blog A. This, believe it or not, is the same underlying structure of a message board.

That's not to say that switching an object ID in a database for a URL isn't significant. It's insanely significant. Distributed systems are far more interesting that centralized system. But I think that a system that didn't ultimately wind up as a threaded discussion system would be far more interesting.

Some much smarter people than me are already thinking about this. Paul Resnick mentions his Beyond Threaded Conversationworkshop held in conjunction with this week's CHI 2005 Conference. They set up a wiki which includes the original submissions by the workshop participants.

Straight to the point, Marc Smith's Enhanced interfaces for threaded conversations(MSWord file) outlines what data is useful for creating enhanced threaded views and shows an example of a Thread Tree:

Another view of grouping replies comes from Ka-Ping Yee and Marti Hearst in A Visualization to Facilitate Productive Discussions(pdf):

Derek Hansen's Health FACTS: From Conversation to Archive and Back Again(MSWord file) caught my interest because it identifies a problem in my current work. I'll be interested to see how people respond to his peer-pressure model of getting people to clean up their posts for archiving, but I like the idea of a nomination system for identifying and archiving the best discussions. It's something I have done by hand, but it was labor intensive and not scalable. The lyrics to the swan-song of many good ideas.

Yevgeniy Medynskiy mentions ways we can derive Implicit Links in Asynchronous Communication Spaces(pdf). There has already been a number of visualizations of explicit links of social networks. In fact, Conversation Tracker uses explicit trackback links to create a visualization of the blogosphere. However, implicit links can be far more interesting. A comment on a blog mentioning the blogger's birthday implies a relationship beyond the blog. The number of times fark is mentioned on boingboing vs. the times boingboing is mentioned on fark reveals what we already know--that boingboing picks up a lot of content from fark, but not the other way 'round. I see many interesting applications such as revealing who posts more comments than original blog posts (across the blogosphere) or determining the strength of ties between folks. Who are the main posters and trackbackers? Who are the people engaged in dialog? How do these groups interact and bridge?

Even within the confines of threaded discussions, there is a lot of room for innovation. If you have additional examples beyond threaded conversations, please comment and share them.

Yes! I am the "worst"!

2005-03-30T17:40:00.000-08:00

Forbes.com's Best of the Web Directory picked SchwabLearning.org as a Forbes Favorite in their Special Needs Resources section. But this part obviously caught my eye:

WORST: The unwieldy general message board would benefit from splitting into subsections devoted to specific issues.

I can't deny it. We don't have any subsections on our message board. Right now, it feels that any attempt to explain how this came about will sound like pure defensiveness. Instead, let me simply say that it was a conscious attempt to not succumb to a major pet peeve I have with message boards (as they currently stand). As Lee LeFever has pointed out, message boards are good Flows, but poor Stocks:

The question is: How can we ensure that flows are being stocked effectively? What makes a good stock?

Websites that flow will find that the management of stocks becomes very important over time. As the flows create new information, the stocks grow to become a rich, but often unwieldy resource. For this reason, website owners should pay particular attention to how stocks are being archived for reference. Easily accessible stocks compliment engaging flows.

- from Introduction to Stocks and Flows (3 of 3): Back to Basics

During the process of parents connecting to support each other, there is a flow of valuable support in both emotional support and informational support. However, getting that valuable flow that back out is the key problem. It gets complicated by the fact that (for me) the information isn't neatly categorizable. School issues blend into home issues. Attention issues blend into reading issues. Even distinct Federal Education laws (Section 504 and IDEA) touch on similar issues (specifically classroom accommodations). Right now, there is a lot of benefit from parents interacting with a diverse range of parents. So how do I keep the discussions flowing, but derive some kind of sense to the stock that is four years worth of parents helping each other?

At the beginning of March, I knew that some kind of bottom-up categorization was what I needed. "I have all this data, there must be some way to highlight specific topics so people can dive in an swim around in the areas they want while having seamless access to the other parts." It will look like subcategories, but it just be one facet of the large complicated jewel that is the world of learning disabilities. Once I got into the idea of thinking in terms of categories as a property of messages instead of categories as buckets for messages, I thought my solution was meta-tagging or some kind of folksonomy. I did my best to keep up with the debate around folksonomies and I was thinking up complicated ways to address the "people are bad categorizers" and "people are lazy" problems.

At this time, I attended the NHVA Innovations Conference. Actually I spoke and, good gravy, they have an mp3 of it (I'm not linking that on purpose). There I met Peter Kaminski and he gave me a new perspective. He pointed out that our messages have all the contextual data I needed. What seemed more appropriate was a search tool that would group the data together by similarities much the way Google News is able to group similar news stories based on the text in the story itself. Man, talk about a *phoom* moment. Thanks, Peter!

What tool would that be? Vector space searching. I'm learning about it and here's where I'm starting:

Building a keyword vector space engine in ColdFusion: adding an extra dimension to your keyword searches

Building a Vector Space Search Engine in Perl

It's not that I think metatagging is right out. I just realize now that with large amounts of text data, more hand-entered text data probably isn't the right direction.

The Corporate Goddesses of 580 California Street

2005-02-06T15:59:00.000-08:00

Corporate Goddesses,
originally uploaded by Scott M.

I love these statues. They are at the top of 580 California Street and were made by Muriel Castanis. She described them as "corporate goddesses" in a 1999 San Francisco Chronicle piece on window washers. These empty figures seem to be a theme of hers.

The building itself was designed by the Philip Johnson/Alan Ritchie architecture firm. They have a brief description of the project with images of the whole building.

Update (Oct 2008): Since I first posted this Muriel Castanis died. Her Obituary is in the Nov 2006 New York Times and the LA Times did a story on the statues in Jan 2007.

Update (May 2009): I was contacted by someone in New York who has a 4 foot hanging ghost sculpture by Muriel Castanis for sale. If you are interested, contact me (my email is at the right) and I will pass your interest on.

Under 13 blogging update

2005-01-31T17:47:00.000-08:00

Foe Romeo posted last week about LiveJournal for under-13s and in it, I find two corrections to my little post about bogging services and age checks. First, it looks like Blogger does have some check on age, but it is pretty much as Foe describes--hey kids, please lie to us.

Second, it looks like Live Journal has updated their Privacy Policy with a section entitled, "Information Relating to Children". Considering the other toothless "no one under 13" policies I found, I had to give it a check.

The result of registering as a 10yo was being stopped, explained the under 13 policy and sent on to an electronic verification. That turns out to be a credit card check and I didn't bother following through. A much more reasonable attempt at preventing the collection of information by people under 13.

Of course, what I said earlier about who falls under COPPA and for what reasons still applies and Foe's comments about the need and ability to build kid safe online places still holds--and goes largely unanswered.

Late night Flickr Experiment

2005-01-08T22:32:00.000-08:00

,
originally uploaded by Scott M.

It's been a long time since I have posted, but I am determined to feel no guilt. Tonight I finally had a chance to get up to the Mormon Temple off Hwy13 in the East Bay. It has been raining off and on for two weeks and I tried twice already.

Well, the third time, it poured on the way up to the place, but stopped by the time I got there. I'm pretty happy with some of my shots (all on Flickr).

Catching up with Jenny Preece's work

2004-11-05T16:55:00.000-08:00

I got the opportunity to meet Marc Smith a month ago at an Online Community Summit (where I also got to meet Lee LeFever face to face for the first time). Marc mentioned that Jenny Preece, who I already knew through her book, Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability, had been doing some work on evaluating communities. It took me this long to look up what she was currently up to and I now have about a months worth of reading. Papers on lurking(pdf), on empathy and trust(pdf) and examining a stalled online community(pdf). And much of her recent work have been in small communities that focus on health or technical self-support. So there is the potential this can have a direct impact on my daily work. Wow.

Wait, there is more! Dr. Preece mentored Diane Maloney-Krichmar whose disertation is an ethnographic study of mutual-aid health community. I haven't had a chance to find contact information for her to see if she has published that disertation yet. It's late on Friday and I have to wisk down to LA tonight to see the Body Worlds Exhibit. In the mean time, if this stuff tickles your fancy and you find some specific interesting things, please post them in comments or on your blog and I will link to you (damn blogspot and no trackback).

Hello Kitty MMORPG

2004-11-04T13:15:00.000-08:00

I recently read Richard Bartle's Soapbox: Why Virtual Worlds are Designed By Newbies - No, Really! wherein he argues that the pressure to appeal to newbies creates a downward spiraling cycle of Massively Multiplayer Online design. (Also reference Clay Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy which I boil down to as "just because it's good and efficient for one member, does not mean it's good and efficient for the group as a whole".) But this post is not about that, at least, not directly.

No, this is about potentially the mother of all branded MMOs/virtual environments, the Hello Kitty World! Looking past the uber-cuteness, the worldwide brand recognition and the cute and fluffiness of it all, Richard's words seem like and an epitaph of a world that hasn't even been born. Even though I doubt there will be a direct connection between the newbies of Everquest II hoisting their expectations onto poor Hello Kitty and fluffy friends, the feature list is clearly influenced by the generations of MMORPGs (and their newbies):

"Special in-game telepathy". In other words, global shouts continue. I wonder if they will also have teleportation within a city or country. (An example from Richard's article.)
Players will be in one of three countries which are in competition with each other. That gives us shards (though players can travel between countries) and instanced in-world games (I'll bet money they are).
The economy play. Play games for in-world money, trade items, open shops. I'm guessing that running a brothel out of your in-world house might be frowned on. I'm personally more curious if they will try to squelch any emerging eBay market for in-world items.

This is not to say that Hello Kitty World isn't going to be huge and healthily line the pockets of Sanrio. It is to say that I highly doubt we are going to see much innovation advancing the art of virtual environment design. And with it's potential to give so many people their first impression of large scale multiplayer gaming, that's a shame.

(Original Hello Kitty World link from Tom Coate's plasticbag del.icio.us feed.)

Speaking to your in-group

2004-11-02T13:00:00.000-08:00

Judith Meskill digs into the past and finds a gem, in Social Hindrance or Social Necessity? Her post focuses on the 14-point "Social computing checklist" from At what cost pervasive? A social computing view of mobile computing systems. I admit my eye was drawn toward this:

At a fundamental level, humans think about social groups in terms of "us" vs "them," or the groups that "I am in" (in-groups) and those that "I am not in" (out-groups). Members and markers of an in-group are often favored and those of an out-group are often disparaged. Individuals may resist adopting a technology if it is associated with an out-group, and the technology itself may be a powerful marker in identifying group membership.

This seems obvious, but it's worth keeping at the forefront when designing for or interacting with a particular group. Group markers can include the language, patterns of speech and writing, colloquialisms, world-perspectives (religion, politics) and all the artifacts that may be associated with the group (hair, music, transportation, technology devices). Getting too many wrong and you can isolate members of the group you are trying to reach.

Once, I misjudged the marker of a group by a long shot. I was fairly new to managing online groups of any size and I had a group of volunteers helping out. One night, I wanted to talk to two (they had just handled a pretty sticky conflict resolution issue and I was all hot to get a report), but blew past two others and asked to be left in private. I should mention at this point that this was in the WorldsAway virtual environment so there was a physical presence. The social marker that had developed among my volunteers was to always stop, take a moment to say hello and let each other know what they were currently doing. Because I sped past two without a word and asked for privacy without explaining why, I had behaved as an outsider and undermined some of the trust they had in me. Well, I wound up spending several hours late that night sorting things out, apologizing and immediately changed my behavior to include writing markers (which included a *lot* of smilies and gestures that I was not used to using).

Luckily, this lesson has stuck and now, working with parents, I've learned that formal language is the language of the school administrations, lawyers, and officials--definitely an out-group. I've dropped formal language in all my communications with parents on our boards. I make sure that I participate in group congatulations (births, school placements, child successes) because it's a behavior that marks the in-group. On the other hand, I use very formal (but not disparaging) language when I am writing to someone so blatantly advertising or antagonizing others to establish they are not welcome.

Updating my feed link

2004-10-28T11:52:00.000-07:00

I just found out that my Atom site feed offered by blogger is some how stuck pointing to the previous name of this blog "halfpublichalprivate" which is what I was using when I was experimenting. No amount of resetting, republiching or reindexing seems to have actually done anything so I had to manually force the link to the right feed.

If anyone is actually checking in, please use this link for your Atom feed.

http://phoom.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I'll look into using feedburner for RSS at some point, but I admit it's not my highest priority.

Persuasion revisited

2004-10-25T19:58:00.000-07:00

Funny, I just discovered Monkeymagic last week through some process I have utterly forgotten, but Piers Young's double-whammy posts of Sparklines and The Sting in the Tail made me add him to my "keep checking for good stuff" feed. Funny, I say because a few days later, he was kind enough to point to my first attempt at a worthwhile post and expanded my brief mention of Robert Cialdini's article.

We might need just-in-time relationship reminders too. It's not natural for us to see commonality, and as a result our reliance on neutral disinterested "facts" may rule out our noticing relationships.

This very accurately describes the dilemma that parents of children with learning problems face in every aspect of their lives. They are driven to find information to help their child (how does my child's brain work, what programs work best, what laws apply) to the point that sometimes they forget relationships with teachers, spouses and other parents. I already strive to inject a human touch in the work I do online because I think it has a positive influence on behavior. All too often have I seen the bad effects when people forget they are interacting with another person online. Once the other becomes an object, there is an expectation of control which will be frustrated and the reaction is usually an attempt to force control by virtually "killing" the other via flame wars, player killing, denial of service attacks or other stunts. Word by word, bit by bit, I'd like to mitigate as much of that as possible that before it happens.

To that end, Piers also points out that Cialdini wrote a Scientific American article on persuasion that calls out "six basic tendencies of human behavior [that] come into play in generating a positive response: reciprocation, consistency, social validation, liking, authority and scarcity." Piers applied these to blogs, and I am seeing ways to apply this to a variety of on and offline communites -- message boards, chat, virtual worlds, schools and civic engagement.

Blogging for kids under 13

2004-10-25T19:25:00.000-07:00

Update Feb 2010: This blog post is really out of date and I have closed off the comments because this is not a topic I am following. I recommend folks check out the same question on Answers.com | WikiAnswers: Are there blog sites for kids under 13? where anyone can add information and keep it up-to-date. Cheers, Scott

Original Post

One of the very cool projects supported by the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation is SparkTop.org, a website for kids with learning and attention problems. One of the goals, to reduce the isolation this group of kids suffers by connecting them with kids going through similar problems. The rub is that the site is aimed at kids 8-12 making privacy and safety a constant concern.

I don't get to work directly on this uber cool site, but I get to be blessed with great conversations with the team about kids socializing online. Today, a break room chat came around the topic of kids, blogs and journals. We wondered if kids who are coming to SparkTop.org would also blog. Then we immediately wondered if kids under 13 would be able to find a place to blog.

So I made a little survey of under 13 policies at blogging/journaling sites. My list of sites is by no means exhaustive, but I found enough variation that it seems worth posting. I was looking mainly for free services that allowed public viewing of entries. Only when I dug into the policies did I realize that I needed to call out the country where the domain is registered since US sites may fall under COPPA rules.

Xanga
www.xanga.com
Domain registered in: US
Policy: under 13 not allowed to register
Policy Posted: At registration and in Terms of Service

If you enter an age under 13, they actually stop you from registering:

"Sorry, Xanga is intended for people who are at least 13 years old

Children under 13 are not permitted to join or participate in the Xanga Community. Sorry for any inconvenience... please feel free to come back on your thirteenth birthday :-)"

Live Journal
www.livejournal.com
Domain registered in: US
Policy: under 13 not allowed to register
Policy Posted: At registration and in Terms of Service

"LiveJournal currently has a four-tier account structure. All accounts are available in accordance with local law including the Children's Online Protection Privacy Act (COPPA) which restricts children under the age of 13 from registering."

Journal Space
www.journalspace.com
Domain registered in: US
Policy: Site "not intended" for children under 13
Policy Posted: Terms of Service

"This site is not intended for children under the age of 13." No means of enforcement is obvious.

Blogger
www.blogger.com
Domain registered in: US
Policy: under 13 not allowed to register
Policy Posted: Terms of Service

Updated 06/26/07: "You must be at least thirteen (13) years of age to use the Service." I have not checked if this is enforced, yet.

Diaryland
www.diaryland.com
Domain registered in: US
Policy: Not apparent
Policy Posted: No mention of an age policy found

Registration asks for name, location and year of birth, but it gave no notice to me when I signed up as a 10-year-old. I could not find anything in the terms of service or privacy policy about age restrictions.

Diary-x
www.diary-x.com
Domain registered in: US (but through a European domain registrar)
Policy: Not apparent
Policy Posted: No mention of an age policy found

Registration required email and first name, but birthdate was optional. When I entered a date that put me at 10 yo, I got no special notice. I could not find anything in the terms of service or privacy policy about age restrictions.

Upsaid
www.upsaid.com
Domain registered in: Belgium
Policy: Not apparent
Policy Posted: No mention of an age policy found

No mention of age in the Terms or Privacy Policy. It does ask for age, but I did not get any notice when I signed up as a 10 yr old.

Blog-City
www.blog-city.com
Domain registered in: UK
Policy: Under 12 need parental/guardian permission
Policy Posted: Terms of Service

Registration required an email address, but nothing else. The service is based in the UK and, as such, is not held to COPPA. However, this line is in their Terms, "Members under the age of 12 years old must have permission from their parent or guardian before agreeing to these terms and conditions." though no means of enforcement is obvious.

It's important to point out that just because a site does not have a policy regarding children under 13 that it is not compliant with COPPA--see "How to Comply With The Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule". COPPA is concerned mainly with a business collecting personally identifiable information from children and not as much what happens if a child reveals such information as part of their journaling. The only conclusion that I am willing to draw based on what I found is that children under 13 can indeed find places to publicly post journal entries.

I should add that back in February 2004, Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText discussed kids and blogging, with mentions of Foe Romeo's Etech talk, Oracle's Think.com and his own 7yo daughter's enthusiasm for her (private) blog.

I need to see how much our kids team knows about Think.com which provides website, email, social networking and group collaboration tools and hosted space for free to primary and secondary schools with the aim of connecting students and classes across the country and the globe.

Internet demographics not from Pew Internet

2004-10-21T16:11:00.000-07:00

FutureWire did a nice summary of the USC Annenberg School's Center for the Digital Future report trends associated with the Internet, "10 Years, 10 Trends". I haven't dug through the whole thing, but I really am interested in the new digital divides they see emerging and notice that there is a lack of mobile and IM data. But 10 years ago, whooda thunk?

Significant day

2004-10-21T15:57:00.000-07:00

Ugh. What a day. Suffice to say that I will remember today as a turning point in some of my work.

On the upside, I had one of my moms write that she is applying for law school. She was asked to write an essay about her community work and wanted to include what she has been doing on our message board for several years, now. She was worried that she would sound like a flake spending all her time online. So I wrote back:

Some folks still consider using computers to communicate as "not real", but I think there are ways to present your work as very real.

You are serving the needs of parents who are otherwise isolated from local assistance

You have made local contacts and assisted parents via phone and in person based on initial connections developed online

You are able to spend time reading, comprehending and asking follow up questions before you craft carefully worded messages

Via the board, you are able to advocate for local and national actions across the country

The commonality of these is that you are bridging the online with the offline. What you do online has a very real and positive effect offline.

She was worried that she was imposing on me by asking, but it's really nice to take a moment to reflect on the good that is coming out of my work.

Community doesn't sell

2004-10-13T11:13:00.000-07:00

Last week, I got an mass email from There.com a virtual environment I once contracted with while they were just starting. I haven't really dropped in since they went public so I really don't consider myself a part of their community. But I am still on their mailing list.

From: The There Fun Times
Subject: Community Building In There!

Dear Scott,

Help build a stronger community by becoming more involved in the daily happenings in There! Welcome new members to our world or just do your part by nominating someone for the Member Advisory Board. It's a small world and you are a big part of it!

Unfortunately, I think this message misses the intended mark on several points. My point is not to pick on There, but to voice some thoughts I have on communicating about online communities.

Don't market the word "community" - community is a term that is subjective to the people who are participating in that "community". It's not up to the host of any social space to declare that someone else is or is not a part of the community. My recommendation to organizations hosting community spaces is to ban the use of the word community in all communications. We've followed this edict at SchwabLearning.org for the four years I have been there. It's forced us to be direct about what we offer and what value it can have for parents.

When you can, target your audience - There knows that I haven't logged into the system for at least six months. It's obvious that they are trying to drum up visits to the service, but why ask people who have not been in the world for a while to come in and start welcoming new people? And since I haven't been around, how do I find out about this mysterious (to me) Member Advisory Board. The message seems targeted for people who haven't been in the service for a couple of weeks, not months. It would not take much to tailor three messages: one for people who are there all the time, one for people who haven't been back in a few weeks, and one for people who have been gone a very long time. Pull the mailing lists based on the last sign in date and send out three batches. No complicated systems needed. Just a little more effort.

Use inclusive language - The newsletter is all about me. What about them? Are the There Fun Times editors part of the community? Why even allow the distinction to be raised? It sounds like a good idea, but I've recently come across the work of Dr. Robert Cialdini who studies influence and persuasion at Arizona State University. His recent article, What Lovers Tell Us About Persuasion is aimed at the use of inclusive language by people in negotiation, but an earlier work, Crafting normative messages to protect the environment examines persuasive language in signage at national parks. These are probably worth a separate post at another time. For now, I offer that "Come visit us daily", "Join us in nominating people to the Members Advisory Board" are a little more inviting.

Giving Blogger another spin

2004-10-09T20:51:00.000-07:00

I've thought about blogging for a while. I'm not much of a writer and I don't have the energy to mess around with setting up databases, editing HTML and what not. And I sure as hell don't want to pay for that privilige.

But after two days getting a chance to meet folks such as Lee Lefever, Tom Coates and Ross Mayfield, and I started getting the itch again. Take note--I bow easily to peer pressure.

I'm also a cheap bastard. I'm not yet willing to fork over the money to TypePad, though they do have categories. So, I'll give this another whirl privately, get that "hello world" and "hi mom" out of my system, delete all these posts and try a little serious writing.

I'm still not a writer.

Comment this!

2003-09-09T11:59:00.000-07:00

Okay, just for TL I went and signed up to blogger, got my very first blog and figured out how to post comments. It was nearly three easy steps.

2003-09-09T11:37:00.000-07:00

Obligatory first post.

Phoom!

New Job. New Home.

The lost origin of an online holiday

OCTribe Call for Participation - Tuesday Topic

Create value metrics for both host and community

Some notes on Sway by the bros. Brafman

Questions to Ask When Building an Online Community

Social Psychology 101 for Community Managers

Remembering my first time

Tish Grier on Effective Community Managers

Open Comment Season on John McCain site

My 2008 Conferences

Meanwhile, back on the ranch

Online Community Meetup in SF, May 23

My interview on the Online Community Report

Web 2.0 Expo -- midway

Growing up with Charles Addams

I hate blogging and why I'm doing it anyway

I'm off to the GDC!

Woke up at 3AM for the second night in a row

Trauer um Soul-König James Brown

Christmas Memories

My name is Skawt

How to surf in a landlocked German city in the Winter

Class Picture

Lots of pictures, not many descriptions

Aw, maw! Do I hafta blog?

Verbs, Verbs, Verbs!

The cemetery of the living

I have arrived!

Wieder Nach Deutschland!

Teen Titans Team Up with Dyslexia

Favorite words

Not a good start

A Woefully Incomplete History of the Treatment of Imperforate Hymen

SecondLife for Nonprofits - Two Mixed Reality Events

Are you drinking the Metaverse Kool-Aid?

I could use your help with a design

Fight Machine!

Virtual World Celebrates 10 Year Anniversary

It is my sad duty to inform you...

Checking out (of) Berlin

Loving and Leaving Leipzig

Is the fauxhawk Germany´s answer to the Mullet?

Superstraße = Superscheiße

Quicky update

Taking My Ease in Lennep

Finding a place to call home

Neuberg and Schwäbisch Hall (or why I went Germany and skipped out on Rothenberg)

Auf dem Autobahn

We have pictures!

Im Praxis

Me and Rome aren´t on speaking terms

A visit to La Specola

Live from Cortona's Community Center

Quick Catch up

Done with work!

The Vacation Blog?(!)

Community Indicator - Unconditional Support

The Dark Side of Community Indicators

The Internet's a drunk librarian who won't shut up!

Corpse Cake

Beyond Threaded Conversation

Yes! I am the "worst"!

The Corporate Goddesses of 580 California Street

Under 13 blogging update

Late night Flickr Experiment

Catching up with Jenny Preece's work

Hello Kitty MMORPG

Speaking to your in-group

Updating my feed link

Persuasion revisited

Blogging for kids under 13

Internet demographics *not* from Pew Internet

Significant day

Community doesn't sell

Giving Blogger another spin

Comment this!

Internet demographics not from Pew Internet