I’m shocked at how quickly they’ve developed these plans, personally, given the risk of setting up their network when their right to use it was risky at best. Perhaps their willingness to push on in spite of that adversity is a sign of good things to come from them.

The really interesting, and positive, thing about their voice plans is the tendency for things to come in “unlimited” bundles. The base plan includes unlimited in-network calling. The next plan up unlimited in-province calling. And last, but not least, unlimited national calling. This is how plans should work. And it makes them extremely competitive. And they’re competitively priced at $15, $35, and $45 respectively. I’m impressed here.

Their smartphone/modemstick data plans are also unlimited, but they go out of their way to make clear that you may be throttled down to lower speeds if you go above 5GB/mo. I’m assuming this means you get deprioritized if you cross that threshold, and clients who haven’t get priority on the network. If that’s the case, it seems a reasonable approach to throttling. At $35 to add ‘unlimited’ data to an existing voice plan (including a full featured BlackBerry plan if that’s what you’re using) or $50 for a modem stick data plan, these are pretty good deals. Very competitive with existing data plans from other providers, and even good compared to the promotional $30/6G plan Rogers lured people to the iPhone with.

The phone selection is a bit mediocre, with BlackBerrys (yuck) dominating and no flip phones at all, and I suspect this is because of their use of the 1700MHz spectrum, which a lot of phones (including the beloved iPhone) don’t support. Hopefully this improves, and hopefully they aren’t too stingy about using unlocked after/graymarket phones. I don’t imagine they would be, because there’s no indication any of these prices are contract-subsidized. You may pay a little more for these phones than you would from Rogers, but you’ll also probably save a lot on your bill. Hopefully the next iteration of the iPhone supports the AWS 1700MHz spectrum too.

And now here’s the big downside: Coverage. If you look at the map on that page, their coverage is the little red splotch around Toronto. Judging from their PR, Calgary will be added to that soon. If you’re in there, all the above plans work wonderfully, I’m sure. Outside of that, though, you get some nasty roaming fees. $0.25/minute of talk time, $0.10/25kB of data. Incoming texts are still free, though it doesn’t say anything about sent texts.

Because WIND has to build out their entire network from scratch, this is going to be their biggest problem. Like Fido before it was bought out by Rogers, WIND will be stuck for a long time with only urban zones appealing. And like Fido before it, if they do succeed at that, they will become ripe for the taking in a buyout by one of the Big Three because of the massive capital investment it’ll take to actually build this network. One need only ask a former Clearnet or Fido customer how terrible that situation can become to see this possibility in the future.

So I see huge potential in this new entrant to the market, but I’m not sure if it’s all roses and puppy dogs. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes, and I look forward to them coming up to Edmonton. I don’t see myself moving away from my iPhone, though, unless Nexus One really is the second coming.

On Monday, Canadian ISPs Rogers and Shaw went up in front of the CRTC to discuss traffic shaping. Traffic shaping is the practice of altering the way packets move through the network in order to (in theory) provide a higher quality of service. If you want to consider the tired analogy of the internet as a highway (super or otherwise), what ISPs do when they traffic shape is roughly equivalent to adding bus/carpool lanes. Common targets of this are things that need to happen very quickly (VoIP — internet telephony services, games, etc.) and things that they don’t want to happen at all (torrents).

ISPs catch a lot of flack over this practice. It often allows them to do fairly shady things. For example, Shaw could (and even might) slow down Skype (a common third party provider of VoIP services) and speed up their own “Shaw Home Phone Service.” But the thing that gets them in the most hot water with consumers these days is disrupting torrent use. At the moment, Shaw in some areas at some times will slow down torrents to a 10kB/s upload speed. And until this Monday, refused to admit they were doing it.

How Traffic Shaping Can Be A Good Thing

There are good reasons for Shaw to do this. Specifically, Shaw is actually giving you your bandwidth at a bit of a discount. A business user paying for a 10Mbit connection will pay substantially more per Mbit than a consumer. This is because business users tend to be saturating their connection most if not all of the day, while consumer users are not. ISPs overcommit their networks because, on average, it makes things better for the user.

If you use 10Mbit in bursts, and someone else does too, and you don’t overlap, Shaw gives two people a 10Mbit connection for the price of one. They charge less than business rates to each customer, but still make more overall than they would guaranteeing each user 10Mbit all the time. This is just good business sense and until recently has worked really really well. People who were around for the halcyon days of telephone modems may recall they did the same thing with phone lines. Every now and then during peak service you’d get a busy signal. Eventually, this got a lot worse until cable and dsl internet came along.

The problem is torrents change this game. Users running torrents are often saturating their connections 24hours per day. If not their download, then their upload. On cable, especially, that upload is shared among all users on the same node as you and performance *does* degrade for those other users. When people suggest that there’s no good reason for Shaw or any other ISP to be concerned and even act to limit use of your full bandwidth 24 hours a day, they are just plain wrong. There are good reasons.

But…

However, this is where the good sense ends. In their statements, Shaw and Rogers insisted not only that consumers unhappy with the shaping of their traffic would move to competitive services (this is true — I did, for example), but that they should be under no obligation to inform their customers of their traffic shaping practices. I hope I don’t have to explain the absurdity and insanity of this position. For consumers to make informed decisions about what product they use, they must have this information. For a provider to blatantly lie about their shaping practices is absolutely unacceptable. For them to insist that there should be no obligation for them to not lie is violently anti-consumer.

And it’s clear that customers are not informed of what they may be in for in the future. I’ve had discussions with people regarding my leaving Shaw for Telus where they insist quite strongly that they are not shaped by Shaw, and that that means Shaw is still the most competitive product out there. The reality, at the moment, is quite far from that, and Shaws ads are at best only slightly deceptive. It may be the fastest service per dollar, but only if you use the services Shaw wants you to use when you use them.

I hope the CRTC sees sense and requires ISPs to inform customers about their traffic shaping policies. I also hope they require them to wholesale their service to smaller ISPs without these restrictions (to allow for true consumer choice). And while I’m at it, I hope restaurants are someday required to put caloric information on their menus, but that’s another blog post.

Most spam on Twitter takes the form of someone who has 1-3 tweets following you, the idea being that you’ll look at their profile, find one of their tweets interesting, and click on one of them. Likely you’ll be taken to something completely different, but I don’t know because I don’t click on them.

(Note: You can easily tell a spammer since they usually have a username in the format FirstLast1234. Everyone knows real people don’t tack numbers on the end if they can’t find their username anymore. Except spammers I suppose)

Anyways, it’s interesting to look at the account I linked to in the first paragraph, because it offers a rare glimpse into the success rate of Twitter spam. We can tell that this user has sent out approximately 8,814 @replies about Lavalife to a presumably random selection of people. By tacking /info/ into his bit.ly link, we can also look at the Bit.ly info page for his link to see how many hits he’s gotten over the course of his ‘campaign’.

What we come up with is that 370 people apparently clicked on his link. Out of 8814. A clickthrough rate of a whopping 4%. That might not sound very high, but it’s not unheard of for banners to have clickthrough rates below 1%. I hate to say it, but it seems part of the reason Twitter spam is so successful might be because it actually works. I was really hoping for a different result here.

Though maybe this really just says something terrible about the banner industry, that it can’t even promote its clients as successfully as twitter spam.

Purely from a financial perspective, I doubt it’s worth it. They are giving away 10 MacBook Pros. Each is worth, most likely, somewhere around $2500. So they are spending $25,000 on this promotion. This is a good $10k (or more) more than Squarespace would have spent on their supposedly ‘bad’ promotion (so labeled only because they were giving away gift cards and not actual devices), for a shorter amount of time on the trending topics list (10 days instead of 30). So if their goal was to have eyes taking in their name as often as possible for as long as possible, they’ve already done a worse job than Squarespace.

If their goal is to produce conversions in the traditional sense, then I suspect this sort of thing has a similar conversion rate as spam. Only they know the real conversion rate, obviously. Since this is so new a way of marketing, there isn’t even any precedent to work from. But my gut feeling is that most people who retweet moonfruit don’t care at all *what* moonfruit is. The 10 people who win may feel more engaged in the company, but the other million or so will just wander off never even googling the term (I know I haven’t). I really wonder if this will turn out better for them than buying $25,000 worth of google ads. That would get them 250 million ad serves at $0.10 cpm.

To me, for a viral marketing campaign to be done right, it must have actually engaged the audience somehow. Passing your company name along in a giant game of telephone doesn’t engage anyone, nor does it help anyone know what you are. I think if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that a name attached to nothing is worth nothing. I wouldn’t be surprised if a poll of people participating in this campaign didn’t reveal a huge portion of them think it’s a promotion being put on by Apple. Or someone in their basement who stole a bunch of MacBooks.

And in the long run, I can’t imagine these campaigns working out well. I expect that we’ll soon see another. And then another after that. And then two at once. Hopefully at some point they fizzle out, because this is going to become a far more offensive form of spam than anything Twitter has seen so far. I can easily ignore follow requests from FirstLast23423, but half the people on my feed making inane #moonfruit posts? Nope, those are a little harder.

I commend experimentation and attempts to find newer, more engaging ways to advertise to people, but I think this is just the wrong way to go. There’s no entertainment value and they’re not helping me achieve anything. To me, these are the most important kinds of engagement viral marketing campaigns should strive for.

Oh, and I <3 Bees.

According to the New York Times, Facebook will soon be defaulting to having status’ (and by extension the replies that have largely replaced wall posts), photos, and videos show up as public content.

This follows on from the previous change that stripped Facebook of all of its filtering features and made it a twitter-like spamfest where all of your friends’ statuses are posted in chronological order and their pics/videos/etc. are less prominently displayed on the sidebar below the fold.

All of this amounts to Facebook essentially acting frightened of Twitter. In an effort to stem a tide away from their site, they try to make it more like twitter. I think this is a terrible idea, personally.

Why This is Bad

Facebook is completely missing the boat. This is a bold statement, since obviously facebook is huge, powerful, and hugely successful. What has, until the last few months, been an exercise in a well planned, masterfully focused campaign to drive people to a site because it serves a real and profound need has turned into typical startup-style flailing at a perceived competitor.

On the other hand, it’s not exactly a new sentiment. Every change facebook brings on there is a large and wailing group of users who complain that they don’t want it. I’d argue this is different. The previous layout changes merely changed the look and navigation of the site. These changes go much much farther. They change the entire purpose of the site.

The thing that made Facebook really catch fire was its ability to connect people who otherwise would not have been able to find each other. Not random connections, as a dating site creates, but connections with lost friends, distant relatives, and the people who throw the parties you love to go to.

But the truth is, no one wanted to see every waking thought from that group of people. The interest was in keeping general tabs on all of those people without overloading yourself with every single detail of their lives. Facebook’s recent changes threaten to throw every detail of the life of a third cousin twice removed you’ve met twice in your life at you, and this is highly undesirable. Especially when combined with all the other distant relatives and childhood friends who are likewise spamming you.

The reason this works on twitter is because I can run my twitter follow list like a petty dictator. I will unfollow an uninteresting or noise-spammy person on twitter at the drop of a hat without any fear of consequences. This allows me to filter the noise level to an extreme level. I can’t really do that on facebook, though, because unfriending relatives or other people in my real life circle of friends carries with it social consequences that are unacceptable.

So, there are two problems with this change:

• They leave people who want to have that general overview of their friends/family/childhood friends out in the cold. There is no service that can perform this task anymore.
• By making facebook more like twitter, facebook actually PROMOTES twitter. The more they sell people on the value of a spamfeed, the more people will want to go to a site that allows them the freedom to spam without social consequence.

But… Why Doesn’t It Matter?

In the end, though, it’s important to understand that all this doesn’t matter. Facebook right now is in the position that MySpace was in several years ago. They dominate the market so thoroughly that they can push these changes through and people don’t feel a sufficient pull of another product’s network effect for it to matter.

Twitter stands to gain from these changes, for the reasons above, because they do have a network effect in place and are growing strongly. There is a feeling of newness about Twitter that Facebook no longer has. Unfortunately, Twitter is not positioned to take complete advantage of this simply because they only supply one side of that coin. The people frustrated by Facebook turning into Twitter are not likely to move to something even worse for their needs than Facebook unless they find the appeal in that mode of communication. As long as their childhood friends and distant relatives and the only good event invite system everyone can agree on are on Facebook, there’s no point in leaving.

But if someone wanted an opportunity to take some of Facebook’s pie, now would definitely be the time in my opinion. I think it would take a company like Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo to push something like that through fast enough to take advantage, but I suspect they’re all too slow moving for that to be likely.

]]> http://www.stormbrew.ca/2009/07/02/how-facebook-is-doing-it-wrong-and-why-it-doesnt-matter/feed/ 0 http://www.stormbrew.ca/2009/06/30/how-not-to-crowdsource-or-really-how-not-to-build-an-open-submission-website/ http://www.stormbrew.ca/2009/06/30/how-not-to-crowdsource-or-really-how-not-to-build-an-open-submission-website/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:58:02 +0000 Graham Batty http://stormbrew.ca/?p=38 @ink_slinger linked to a City of Edmonton website today called “Idea Zone”. I was intrigued, so tried to find out what it was.

Go ahead, visit the site. See if you can find out what it’s all about. I can wait…

Did you visit it? What did you learn? Probably nothing, because in order to find out what this site is, you have to register. I don’t know about you, but I like to know what a website is before giving it my vitals. And its registration form is quite detailed. Although the more intimate fields (address and phone number) are not required, they are still asked for, which is quite intimidating.

So step one in how not to crowdsource is: Require me to register to find out what your site is.
And while we’re at it, step two is: Ask me for this much detail without buying me dinner first.

Thankfully, Edmonton blogstar Mack Male has a blog post that explains it all. Not a terrible idea, overall. I think they should have taken a bit more of a lesson from the low signups at the ICLEI Congress that there must have been something terribly wrong, but that’s a whole other matter.

The purpose of the site (for people who don’t want to click) is to get ideas for how to make Edmonton a better city. I sometimes think too much effort is put into finding ways to make this city better, and far too little into actually doing anything about it, but more input from a broader spectrum probably isn’t a bad thing.

So I register. Leaving out the gory details of my location, age, and phone number as I see no reason for them to have them. They do one thing right here and skip the activation step, so kudos on that. They miss the boat on the benefit of that step being skipped by not just having me logged in immediately.

So rule 3: Make me activate my account with a link in an email. Then make me log in even though I just gave you my username and password and so can’t possibly be faking who I am.

So I log in. Before I can do anything, I have to agree to this obscure set of rules about how my submission may or may not be used. I don’t really care. By now, I have gone through several forms, been frustrated and limited in what I can do at every turn, and am not really interested in submitting anything at all.

So a final rule before I sum up: Make me agree to rules I don’t care about even though this could have been a simple checkbox in the signup page.

But I go on, because now I’m on a roll and writing a blog post about it. Somehow I just can’t stop myself. I find that, since Mack’s post, there have been 10 new users and *no* new ideas posted. This comes as absolutely no surprise to me. I’m also too tired of signing up to enter an idea now.

I guess the city is using this software because they’re using a version of it internally with a stronger workflow. This is the public-facing version of that software. Well, I’m just going to come out and say it. The public facing side of it is crap.

When you’re crowdsourcing, your goal should absolutely not be to try to filter users out early. This is a super important thing for most sites to do because they’re looking to filter out all of the rough at the expense of some diamonds. Unfortunately, in crowdsourcing, you can’t afford to do this. The entire purpose of this process is for *you* to find the diamonds. That means a bit more work on your part, but it also means a less frustrating user experience.

Not only should users be able to see what the hell this site is without logging in, they should be able to see submitted ideas and even submit their own ideas with either a minimal (username/password) account creation or no account creation at all. It should be moderated, filtered on the level of word-triggers (no one will suggest to improve the city with anything to do with penis’ for example), but it should be *easy* to submit ideas.

Championing those ideas, commenting on ideas, there you can increase the barriers. But if your goal is to find new ideas, you must make this process much easier. It’s important to realize that internal and external tools rarely work well from the same package (see for example the dreadful WebCT — great for teachers, terrible for students).

To sum up all the rules in one sentence: Make it hard for users to submit ideas!

]]> http://www.stormbrew.ca/2009/06/30/how-not-to-crowdsource-or-really-how-not-to-build-an-open-submission-website/feed/ 6 http://www.stormbrew.ca/2009/06/30/drizzle-the-future-of-mysql/ http://www.stormbrew.ca/2009/06/30/drizzle-the-future-of-mysql/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:58:22 +0000 Graham Batty http://stormbrew.ca/?p=31 Brian Aker, one of the main engineers on mysql at Sun, has posted a presentation he did on the project he’s been working on for the last year and a half: Drizzle. I highly recommend anyone who’s interested in the state of the art of database technology watch it.

To summarize:

• Scalability: A large part of the effort so far is along the lines of making it so that the system can scale to massive numbers of threads (and processes). They’re removing locks wherever possible and aiming for systems with 100+ cores.
• UTF-8: This is a hugely important move. Drizzle talks exclusively in UTF-8 and bytestreams. This pushes all the character set insanity out to the client, which is really where it belongs. Unfortunately, this will probably be a stumbling block for some apps that have data that can’t be easily converted.
• Protobuffer replication streams: Using google’s protobuffer protocol to put out replication information makes it really easy to write applications that do things based on the replication stream. With mysql binlogs, this was a fairly tedious thing to do and resulted in fragile code.
• Async protocol: This is really useful. A page load should be able to spam the server with a bunch of queries and then fetch results as needed rather than doing them one at a time. This is a big part of taking advantage of higher concurrency and reducing pageload times.
• Built in sharding: This is also really useful. I’m not entirely sure what their plan is, because this is the first I heard of it being part of the project, but if done right this will be so valuable. Sites that need to shard often wind up implementing this from scratch. I’ve been involved in doing so myself. It certainly isn’t as scary as a lot of people think it should be, but the fear is palpable among other devs and a solid baseline implementation would raise the state of the art a good deal.
• Plugins: Plugins are a big part of drizzle’s re-architecting. The goal seems to be to completely ground up make it as simple as possible in the core (slides say 350k loc as opposed to 6.0’s > 1m loc) and push all extra functionality out to plugins. Areas subject to becoming plugins include:
  • Pluggable client protocols: Making it so that the client can talk in an HTTP/REST protocol for simplicity, or any protocol desired.
  • Pluggable logging: Have it log out to syslog, for example. Or to an analysis app that does custom slow query logging, etc.
  • Pluggable authentication: Turn off auth altogether, use the system’s user accounts through PAM (yes, please!), LDAP, HTTP AUTH, or just something custom. This also helps remove locks for scalability apparently.



I can’t stress enough how this is the real future of MySQL, far moreso than any future versions of mainline mysql are. As the world of the web moves towards simpler databases like couchdb, drizzle is the only way that mysql will manage to be competitive on the web. Mainline mysql just keeps getting bigger and heavier, growing towards enterprise use (towards being an Oracle replacement, really) leaving those of us who don’t need or can’t afford those features (not in $, but in response time) out in the cold.

Personally, I think that object/document store databases are the future of databases for the web as a whole, but Drizzle is the future of the particular subset where schemas are still important. And for the time being, it will come out of the gates as the most mature product among next-gen web databases by the simple fact of its inheritance of mysql architecture.

I’m going to be keeping my eye on Drizzle, and I think other people should too. Brian Aker has a blog and a twitter, and Drizzle itself is on LaunchPad.

]]> http://www.stormbrew.ca/2009/06/30/drizzle-the-future-of-mysql/feed/ 0 http://www.stormbrew.ca/2009/06/30/why-you-shouldnt-really-be-using-qmail-anymore-or-how-i-found-a-license-i-hate-more-than-the-gpl/ http://www.stormbrew.ca/2009/06/30/why-you-shouldnt-really-be-using-qmail-anymore-or-how-i-found-a-license-i-hate-more-than-the-gpl/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:48:15 +0000 Graham Batty http://stormbrew.ca/?p=28 I’ve long been a fan of djb’s method of writing software. Over the years, three of his tools have served me very well: djbdns, daemontools, and qmail.

But djb has a dark side. He has some strange views on filesystem layout (I’m no booster of the linux standard layout, but his views on layout are just plain strange) that I can get over if not work around. More importantly, though, are his views on licensing. The GPL makes me cringe (another blog post for another time), but djb goes a whole other direction: You can’t modify his code and redistribute it. You can distribute patches, you can distribute his pristine copy, but you can not and must not distribute an altered version wholesale, in source or in binary.

Which would be fine, if it ever got updated. But it’s been years now, and the world of internet mail (and spam) has changed drastically since then. Namely, backscatter. To a lot of people familiar with email tech, this is nothing at all new. But to qmail, it’s like it’s still 1999.

For the uninitiated, backscatter is when spam sends to known-bad addresses with a reply-to that goes to their real target, a known-good (or plausibly-good) address. The known-bad bounces back to the known-good, giving someone spam from a sender who didn’t actually mean to do anything bad. This results in a very bad reputation for the previously innocent mail server.

Think of it like sending a letter with no stamp and the address of the person you’re sending it to to get around paying for postage (note: I have no idea how this works and am not endorsing any form of mail fraud).

The right thing to do, nowadays, is for a mail server to immediately reject an undeliverable email with an error (like a 404 code from a web server). Because of a quirk in how qmail is designed, it can’t do that, though. It will accept all mail for all domains it knows about and then reject it later if it can’t deliver through a bounce. Which makes it a prime target for backscatter.

The process for solving this with qmail involves a fairly tedious and possibly risky set of steps. You have to patch your copy of qmail to add scriptable hooking to the e-mail accept phase. You then have to add a script to this system, written in probably bash or perl script, that will go through and do all the processing qmail intends to do later on to figure out if it’s deliverable. If it’s not, it’ll return an error code. If it is, it’ll let it go through the normal qmail process.

This completely breaks the rather beautiful design of qmail. At this point, you may as well be using postfix, which is less beautiful but actually designed for plugins and has more modern notions about what to do about backscatter anyways.

So from being a djb booster, there’s now only one product of his I recommend: djbdns. Still the simplest, cleanest little dns server you can run. Daemontools has fallen out of favour to runit, which has similar modernizations and a less restrictive license.

So postfix seems to be where it’s at for email servers these days. I always felt I had a better understanding of how qmail worked, though. Maybe someday someone will ground-up rewrite it like they did with daemontools/runit.

]]> http://www.stormbrew.ca/2009/06/30/why-you-shouldnt-really-be-using-qmail-anymore-or-how-i-found-a-license-i-hate-more-than-the-gpl/feed/ 3 http://www.stormbrew.ca/2009/05/27/participatory-democracy-and-twitter/ http://www.stormbrew.ca/2009/05/27/participatory-democracy-and-twitter/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 19:16:57 +0000 Graham Batty http://stormbrew.ca/?p=11 I was up late last night (not unusual for me lately) watching something kind of amazing unfold. The Alberta Legislature was debating a new version of their human rights legislation that included two major changes:
- on one end of the spectrum, the addition of sexual orientation to protected status’. Technically, this was just a gesture, as sexual orientation has been a protected status in common law for years due to being read in by the courts.
- on the other end, they added the rights of parents to remove their children from classes with content relating to religion, sexuality, and sexual orientation. A right that, by my understanding, was already present in the school act.

Now, Alberta’s legislature is a perpetual majority government by the Progressive Conservative party, and that party is capable of essentially controlling all legislation that passes through the house. They really wanted the latter and seemed to think the former would be a good olive branch to prevent argument.

But that’s all politics as usual. Simple background information. What happened last night was that somehow, people on twitter were rallied to watch the debate unfold over the streaming video the Alberta government provides of legislature proceedings. If it had just been people on there bitching and moaning, it also wouldn’t have been very special.

But last night, there weren’t just average citizens participating. There were actually MLAs on twitter discussing and debating with the twitter users. Granted, most of the MLAs participating were backbenchers or otherwise not taking direct part in the debate on the floor, but they were there and they were talking to the very people they represent while making law.

I know that there are people concerned at adding distractions to people on the floor of governing bodies, but I honestly think this should be encouraged. I couldn’t help but think I was seeing some element of the future here, where people are moved closer to their representatives in government and able to influence them more directly. And anyone who’s ever watched CPAN knows there’s plenty of zoning out, reading magazines (one MLA last night was reading a magazine while the MLA next to him was debating), chattering, etc. If their time is going to be wasted, I’d rather it be wasted on us.

I do think the MLAs could stand to learn some of the twitter conventions a bit better. If they’d used hash tags, it would have been easier to follow their discussions. Also, if more of the left side of the house (Libs and NDP) had been on that would have been nice too. I’m a little shocked to see the Conservatives on the forefront of this trend.

If you want to read the discussion on twitter about bill 44, you can go here.

]]> http://www.stormbrew.ca/2009/05/27/participatory-democracy-and-twitter/feed/ 0 http://www.stormbrew.ca/2009/03/15/demoing-bittablog-at-democampyeg/ http://www.stormbrew.ca/2009/03/15/demoing-bittablog-at-democampyeg/#comments Sun, 15 Mar 2009 07:32:26 +0000 Graham Batty http://stormbrew.ca/?p=9 So tonight, for the first time in about 4 years, I did public speaking. Back in college there was a fair amount of public speaking and presentation giving to do, and I enjoyed it then. I always come away from doing public speaking feeling like I’ve done a good job, and I hope that perception is accurate. I find myself able to get my thoughts across clearer in presentation form (even though I always wing it) than I often can in just direct discussion.

What I presented was, of course, bittablog, which has been my pet project for the last little while. I knew from experience that last minute additions to a presentation are a bad idea, so the feature where you can post a bitta directly from your twitter account didn’t make the cut as something I could present, but the bonus of cutting it out was that nothing in my presentation failed. And I think that’s pretty important.

I won’t get too much into what bittablog is here, because I already covered it here in my first post on here, and the front page manages to do it concisely in 140 character bitts. Suffice to say that I really enjoyed presenting bittablog tonight, and I think a lot of the audience got a kick out of it too.

One interesting thing that I experienced, which was reminiscent of RailsConf last year, was the way in which people were twittering as I presented. After I was done, I pulled out my iphone to read what people were tweeting as I was talking. I have to say, it was really gratifying to come back and see the really nice things people said about it while I was up there talking.

At RailsConf I got to see this from the audience side through IRC (there was also twittering, but I was unconverted at the time), and one thing that I said I wanted to do then at some presentation was have a cohort twittering/ircing at the same time, answering people’s questions and talking back.

One difference though was that there was no silent heckling going on, and I think that’s good. A lot of the railsconf presentations had some really viscious talkback going on on irc. Some deserved, some not, and it was actually kind of intoxicating and hard to resist falling into the same trap. None of that at #democampyeg, which is great. This is a very supportive community, and I hope it stays that way.

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