David Weinberger really has a way with describing web phenomenon. Here he talks about the context of tagging (think delicious) and what we are doing collectively with it:
So, we’re creating this context-free realm of free-floating metadata, like word magnets on a refrigerator door, that we will paw through and assemble, and, most important, do things we haven’t yet thought of.
The web still delights me even after working with it full-time for the past 6 or 7 years.
Ben Martin passed the CAE exam. Congrats! Ben blogged his experience preparing for the test over the past year.
Google just launched another search appliance: the Google Mini. It costs $5,000 which seems to be a good price point for a lot of non-profit organizations to make an investment for their site or intranet. It will index up to 50,000 documents, which should be plenty for most needs in this market as well.
Here is a nice guide to comment spam and how to fight it, provided by Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type.
Six Apart Guide to Combatting Comment Spam:
This document describes how malicious or unwanted comments (‘comment spam’) affect weblogs, the techniques spammers use to abuse weblogs, and the tactics that can be used to prevent and defend against these attacks. Also included is a review of the strengths and weaknesses of each tactic, instructions for implementing them on your weblog and ones which we recommend for the best protection.
Kevin Holland and Lucia Lodato are blogging prior to their presentation Blogging for Associations which will be held at the ASAE Great Ideas conference in Orlando this December. Lots of good stuff on the blog so far. I hope they both keep writing here after the session is over!
Kevin and Lucia both work for the Air Conditioning Contractors of America, which is one of the first associations that I am aware of that publishes an official organization blog (ACCA Buzz).
Here is my good idea for the week: web traffic analysis reports in RSS. I’d love to have a package that can report daily and weekly stats for a site in RSS so I can add it to my subscription list. That sounds like a much easier way to keep tabs on a site than remembering to go view an HTML report daily.
Some cursory searching in google didn’t turn up anything yet. Hopefully some enterprising scripter will get on this and extend one of the existing packages out there.
Eric Meyer has released a simple standards-based slide show system, or S5 for short. This is a very slick way to create a slide show in HTML. I may give it a shot for the next presentation that I do. What I find very exciting about it is that it should be pretty easy to adapt a bunch of existing tools in order to author S5 presentations. In fact, someone has already created a City Desk template that does so.
The Maryland State Board of Elections web site has made excellent use of CSS and HTML to create a lightweight web design that is completely accessible. The total page weight for the home page is just over 7 kb and the stylesheet is a tad over 4 kb. That should serve them well during the election as their traffic spikes over the next day or so. Having such a small file size for the pages allows them to serve more people more quickly while conserving bandwidth.
I think the content of the site is pretty well designed as well, since it answered my question (what time do the polls open) very prominently on the home page.
I’ve been using del.icio.us to store my bookmarks lately. If you haven’t seen it yet, del.icio.us is a social bookmark application. You can add your bookmarks to the site and store them under specific keywords. You can then easily browse your stored links by the topics you have added.
Where it gets extra-nifty is that you can also see what other users have been posting under the same keywords. Each keyword provides an RSS feed of new entries, so you end up with nice feed on a particular topic. For example, here is the feed for KM. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed for all the links posted by a particular person. Here is my del.icio.us feed.
Del.icio.us also provides web service access to its data, so you end up with tools like Foxylicious, which is a wonderful extension for the Firefox browser that imports all of your del.icio.us entries into your Firefox bookmarks. Excellent.
IEEE has a portion of their web site dedicated to their volunteer leadership, providing links to training and reference material they need to fulfill their duties in the governance of the association. Nice example of how to provide simple self-service support to the big kahunas.
C. David Gammel, CAE 