I am a founder and the Chief Executive Officer of MindTouch, a popular open source business application and collaboration platform used by millions. Read more.
At last, I have my iPhone syncing my contacts, calendars and email. How? I added Gmail as an Exchange server. How? First, enable Google Sync (you’ll only need to do this if you’re using Google Apps).
After this it’s trivial if you follow the Google help page instructions. Enjoy!
This is one of the many non-intuitive features of Facebook. If you want to link or unlink a Facebook page to a Twitter account do this:
How one discovers that short of scouring The Google, I don’t know.
Now that I migrated my self-hosted blog to hosting at WordPress.com I have complaints.
When I was self-hosting I used the excellent Twitter Tools plug-in from Alex King for posting a weekly digest of my tweets to my blog. It is important to me that my blog be a journal for my kids and family. Twitter is part of this journal. My tweets commonly overlap with my blog posts. Missing twitter at my blog is missing, at least, half my journal. I’m bummed. Suggestions please?
When I was self-hosting I was running Google Analytics. I would refer to the WordPress analytics for my personal blog on occasion and the two were never identical. The WordPress stats were always higher. Why? I have no idea. Since moving to WordPress.com I’m unable to use Google Analytics. Why? I have no idea. We allow users of MindTouch Express to modify several HTML areas. With this users can run their own Google Analytics script. Why doesn’t WordPress.com allow this? Yes, there is additional overhead in loading the page, but I don’t care.
In my sidebars on my self-hosted blog I had a few widgets that were scripts or embeds. For some reason WordPress.com disallows this too. I most miss my FriendFeed widget. Again, you can do this at MindTouch Express. What’s the problem WordPress.com?
None of the comments that previously were threaded with replies in IntenseDebate migrated correctly.
Lastly, I’ll mention the fact that you are disallowed form using WordPress plugins. Ok, this one I understand. This is a big challenge. However, there are ways to achieve even this. Check out Ning.
I’ll be speaking at the Defrag conference November 11-12 in Denver Colorado. Defrag ranks right up there with OSBC as one of my favorite conferences to attend.
Defrag is like no other conference I have attended. The format is more interactive, but not open conference style. It has a wealth of big thinkers, geek-famous and infamous.
I recommend attending Defrag. I’m so convinced you’ll enjoy the event that I will PAY $200 of your ticket price. When purchasing your ticket use the discount code “roebot1” and receive a $200 discount. Enjoy!
I’m reading a book on web analytics and I have determined my employer should be using heat map analysis of our corporate website. In fact, it’s ridiculous we haven’t been benefiting form this already. For some reason the Google Analytics overlay feature isn’t working at our corporate website. It must have something to do with how JavaScript heavy the site is. So last night I checked out www.crazyegg.com and www.clickdensity.com. This morning I attempted to login to ClickDensity and inadvertently included a comma. In return I received the following exception:
Wow, that is shoddy engineering. If the service can not provide a reasonable user experience for even the most basic boundary cases how can I trust them with anything else? What else have they ‘missed’?
Currently I’m leaning toward CrazyEgg.
While it’s still not even close to being significant relative to Google’s search traffic the traffic from Bing.com continues to grow. What is the most shocking to me is that Bing drives 364% more traffic to MindTouch.com and 10% more traffic ObLOGN.com than Yahoo! search. You read correctly, Bing drives more than three times more traffic than Yahoo! search. 
Being a nineteen year fan of Nine Inch Nails I was thoroughly pleased to read MindTouch, the company I CEO for, included in a C|Net article about Trent Reznor’s use of an Open Core business model.
The article cites a recent post I wrote at the MindTouch blog about the MindTouch Community. The Open Core business model works well in yielding exponential growth by building and engaging community. I write about this too in an article titled: “Open Source Magic Carpet Defies Recession”.
I installed the Sims 3 on my iPhone 2 where I am running iPhone OS 3.0. I was a fan of Sims 2 and the Sims 3 uses Mono, which makes me want to buy it all the more, but I didn’t want to spend $50+ for the desktop game. The iPhone Sims 3 was only $9.95 so I bought it. Like most apps on my iPhone the Sims crashes constantly. The game is cute, but doesn’t sustain my interest even through a long flight. I do like how there are new categories for your sims. I selected the maniac category. This means my sim is satisfied by using the beds, toilets and showers of other sims. I give the game 3/5 stars.
Earlier this week I wrote at Ostatic about The Future of Collaborative Networks. It’s an important post that I’ll be building on in the coming months.
Rather than focusing on socialization, one to one interactions and individual enrichment, businesses must be concerned with creating an information fabric within their organizations. This information fabric is a federation of content from the multiplicity of data and application silos utilized on a daily basis; such as, ERP, CRM, file servers, email, databases, web-services infrastructures, etc. When you make this information fabric easy to edit between groups of individuals in a dynamic, secure, governed and real-time manner, it creates a Collaborative Network.
I wrote two blog posts at the MindTouch blog today that I think are of import. The first is about Open Core models. The second post is about my belief in open source.
80% Of The Functionality For 500% Of The Cost
The title of this blog post could be: Why open source matters to me, but I like the former because it’s racier and I hear that gets readers. Anyway, I was prompted to write this because of a comment and question posed me by a MindTouch open source community member that really is best answered/satisfied by me explaining this and also sharing my ideas about Open Core. At any rate, to answer why open source matters to me I really have to respond from two distinct perspectives. First I’ll answer it on a personal level and then as the CEO of an enterprise software company.
Here is my “Aaron hat”. I received my degree in Computer Science from UNC-Chapel Hill where I did pretty much all my course work, like most CS students, on an open source stack. I’ve helped to start several non-profits tasked with bridging the digital divide in under-served and predominately minority communities where I primarily used an open source stack. I’ve owned a couple small businesses in which I benefited a great deal by building on, guess what, primarily an open source stack. So, let me tell you on a personal level I have very strong convictions about open source. There are many reasons, but I will present you my top two.
My God, this is retarded:
By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.
via Facebook Isn’t Private, and 7 Other Things You Should Know « Legal Andrew.
This is bizarre. You’re agreeing to give Facebook license to do whatever they want with your content? What if I post photos of my children? Oh Gee, they can include that in a cigarette advertisement or some other offensive product. This is insane. They also do not make any guarantees about security or privacy.
Damien Howley created this image in jest:
The proliferation of social media “experts” amuses me too. Evidently if a person has registered accounts at Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, WordPress, etc…, and records videos of oneself this makes them an expert in social media. Yay! Well, no. Actually, this makes you a software user. Gold star!
Are you really an expert in social media? How does one know? Here are some indicators:
Bonus:
Factors that do not indicate you are an “expert” in social media:
If you’re still wondering if you or someone you know is a social media expert watch this video:
I authored a substantive article on the evolution of consumer social media tools into new enterprise software tools at the MindTouch blog. I put some sweat into this one. Give it a read.
There can be no doubt that one of the hottest spaces in enterprise software today is collaboration. It’s no surprise collaboration is getting a lot of interest. The old metaphors for capturing, authoring and sharing information are stale and inefficient. As such, there is a lot of room for achieving productivity improvements through improved user experience. This has been true for all software, but especially so in the enterprise software space where collaboration is essential to daily operation and where every ounce of productivity translates into big dollars.
In the last several years a software renaissance has been taking place in the consumer space that has begun seeping into, and benefiting, business and enterprise systems. The innovation in software during this renaissance, more commonly referred to as Web 2.0, has been almost entirely about improving user experience metaphors. AJAX, new social metaphors, lessening of the file/file system metaphor, making structure implicit rather than explicit and just generally simplifying user interfaces are all trends evidenced in this new wave of software. While most pundits think “Web 2.0” has been about making the Web participatory, enabling social connectedness and conversations these are but side effects of the improved ease of use and increased stickiness (fun of use) software has experienced.
I know, I know. I’ll stop tooting our horn, but I checked in at Sourceforge to look at the MindTouch project rank tonight and I noticed MindTouch Deki currently bests even Azureus, arguably the most popular torrent client. You know what this means? MindTouch is more popular than porn and piracy. 
It comes as no surprise to me that MindTouch is a topped rank open source project and a fast growing business. We have an amazing product. What is surprising to me how quickly we did this. In addition to the impressive expediency with which we’ve achieved our many impressive milestones it is also impressive how little resources that we’ve achieved this with. I look at the competitors we’ve surpassed, one in particular that has raised $16+ Million in tier one Venture Capital investment, had a three year head start on us, is stacked with weblebrities, is a darling of many A-list bloggers…and yet they don’t hold a candle to our community, our distribution and are likely barely beating us in revenue. I expect this year will change the last point. Anyway, I can’t help but smile and look to the next competitor to draft and surpass.
Next topic. I’ve been using Microsoft Live Writer periodically to post to WordPress. Because I’ve consistently had problems with stability and buginess with Live Writer I’ve abandoned it. For the time being. Again. As such I needed a Flickr plugin. A Google search turned up “10 Amazing WordPress Plugins for Flickr“. I’ve installed a few of these. I can report the only plugin that’s worth installing is WordPress Flickr Manager. It works great. Makes embedding your Flickr photos a snap.
Need a free AVI player for Windows? I’ve plugged a couple players on the open source applications page here, and I finally got around to trying VLC Media Player. Superlative! I’m merrily watching ChiRunning.
Rion just turned me on to NuevaSync. ROCK! At last, I can sync my Google calendar with my iPhone. But wait, there’s more. It’s bidirectional! I can add appointments from my iPhone and these post to my Google Calendar. And it’s free (still in beta).
“God Bless Us, Every One!” – Tiny Tim (the gimp, not the creepy guy with the ukulele)
