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The WELL Photo Gallery

Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link. Where it all began for me online in 88 as dbuck. Home of the Savage User Interface — character based community run in some weird thing called PicoSpan. Deadheads dominated. Some serious characters: Tom Mandel, Howard Rheingold, Hinging, David Gans. The media salon before Salon bought the place.

The Web killed it, but what I learned about community, I learned at the WELL. Best thing ever to come through a PC into my face. The ultimate proto-Blog.

Let the Good Times Roll–by Guy Kawasaki: The Art of Creating a Community

Some good insights from the master evangelist. I’ll follow with my insights on community management and getting the inmates to run the asylum.

Guy is doing great work with his blog. His post following this one is about how he blogs. Sounds a lot like the way I work — after 10 pm, TV on mute.

I’m waiting for some feckless shutterbug to publish a coffee table book of roadside shrines — those crosses that pop up alongside the interstate to mark the spot where some loved one breathed their last — and expect to immediately find it on the bargain table for $2.99. Heck, I’d write it myself except for the act of hauling over into the breakdown lane, popping on the emergency flashers, and risking my own life as the 18-wheelers whizz past just to take a picture of two pieces of wood, a garland of plastic flowers …

I first saw roadside shrines in Puerto Rico — apparently its part of the Hispanic culture to mark the tarmac where the bus plunged or the publico had its last chance power drive. Busy intersections and treacherous curves are veritable Arlington cemetaries, forests of white perpindicular planks that are more effective than Slippery When Wet signs for warning of dangers ahead.

About a decade ago they began to pop up around southeastern Massachusetts, primarily around New Bedford, a big Portugese-American enclave. Some local attorney had been taken away for offing some junkie hookers and dumping their bodies in the ditch (New Bedford is also the home of the infamous Big Dan’s Tavern, home of the pool table where the poor woman played by Jodie Foster in The Accused was raped) and I always wondered if some of the crosses were meant to memorialize his victims. Gruesome thought, but now that bucolic stretch from Wareham to Fall River is still creepy as can be thanks to the crosses.

It is strange to read a newspaper account of a particularly tragic car accident and then see, for years afterwards, the trio of little crosses that mark the spot where as wrong-way drunk wiped out a young family. And that’s the point. My father died in a head on crash on Route 130 in Mashpee just past the spot where the highway crosses under the approach path for the runway at Otis Airforce Base. I didn’t erect a cross. But I did seek the spot out the day after the accident, finding it by discovering the detritus and trash the EMTs had left behind by the roadside.

Roadside memorials went official after a state trooper was gunned down by a desperado on Route 3 in Kingston, right by where the old Howard Johnson’s stands by the muddy banks of the Jones River. It’s a big honking pink granite monument in memory of Trooper Mark Charbonnier. Apparently roadside memorials are illegal in many states, but the road crews always seem to mow carefully around them out of respect.

There are many resources about roadside memorials online. The most irreverent is PorkJerky.com — and therefore the funniest, or as the author says, “Funnier than a Retard on Fire.”

It contributes this image to the forthcoming coffee table book project:

There is a book on Amazon, Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture which will not be getting the One-Click treatment from me this evening.

As for my decision not to get out of my car to take pictures of memories, Mr. PorkJerky tells this cautionary tale:

“Here’s the gist: Jeff Frolio, a cameraman for the ABC affiliate in Omaha (KETV 9) was getting some stock footage of dangerous intersections in the Omaha area. Can you see where this is heading? Well, it happened. As Jeff was walking back to the news van he gets plowed. And where did it occur? That’s right, at a dangerous intersection in the Omaha area. Specifically, 220th and West Center, exactly in front of the Wilkins and Alfrey memorial which moments early he was shooting. That intersection is so dangerous in fact, the driver who hit Frolio wasn’t charged with a thing.”

I should get onto more important things. Like using Mr. Jerky’s interactive build-your own memorial tool.

Foldera Completes Oversubscribed $8.5 Million Series B Offering, Following $2.0 Million Series A Offering Completed in August 2005

I advised these guys when they were Taskport back in the winter of 2004 out in Newport Beach. Very interesting approach to web services in the group collaboration space — using a “smart” folder approach to sort communications and activity automatically. The appeal is to the SMB market that can’t afford an internal Exchange or Notes implementation but which needs some group collab apps such as shared skeds, document sharing, IM, etc.. SMB is the bullseye right now in all IT services, and a custom fit for a web services play like Foldera.
The cost? Free. Total viral play. You sign up for an account and then invite colleagues, customers, friends to join in.

Upselling opportunities if the user needs more disk space, premium support, etc.. Today the company merged into EXSM, and is officially in the market. CEO Richard Lusk is a fireball, entrepreneur (OANDA.com and others). Beta accounts now being offered.

• SEC filing
  
• Yahoo Finance

Full disclosure: I was compensated with shares in the company, now holding 45,000 shares, and sit on their advisory board. I made some introductions, helped with the business and marketing plans, and still do some spare-time communications work for them.

All good snow days must come to an end, and so I unplug for the balance of the afternoon to make my snowy way to the Triangle of Research.

Things are heating up at work in a big way. So much for vaunted First Ninety Days. More like the first 90 minutes. Warp speed Mr. Sulu.

I dropped the Status gizmo in the right column when I upgraded to WP 2.0. Not that anybody cares.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Jaws author Peter Benchley dies This man, and Spielberg, insured I would never swim in the ocean unless I was thrown in, fell in, or had my boat sink out from underneath me.

Creativemods.com PC Mods & More!Link thanks to BoingBoing picking up on Gizmodo. Who says PCs have to be beige boxes? Dang. This is a work of art.

Blizzard. A foot or more of snow is forecast. Wife and child arriving in Boston at 10 pm from Beijing via Newark. I wake Saturday morning, check status. The Flight is in the air but Boston leg cancelled. Wimps of Continental! I jump in car and drive 267 miles from Cape Cod to Newark. Sstarted snowing as soon as I arrived.

One hour until they land. Maybe we hit the road for home at 7, exactly when the storm is supposed to hit.

Will we be nailed on Rte. 95 or will we make it?

Anyway, when I asked the ladies at the airline how to let my wife know I was here after driving four hours from Mass. they asked: “Are there any more men like you up there?”

[update: We fled Newark at 7 pm, driving was on verge of atrocity status. Hunkered down for the long haul, images of the Donner Party meets Westport in my head. As soon as we cleared that post-apocalypse highway -- the Cross Bronx -- and crossed into halycon Greenwich, the snow ceased, the roads were clear and we sailed home to hearth, home, and dogs at 11 pm. Awoke to six inches and more on the way. NYC buddy says a foot on the ground and six more to come. I will not be travelling to the Research Triangle tomorrow -- snow day!]

The topic of tags came up yesterday and I could tell from the listener’s expression that I was treading into “so-what?” territory. I admit, whenever the dreaded taxonomy word comes up in conversation, I go MEGO (My Eye Glaze Over), a throwback from participating in an effort at a global management strategy firm to taxonomize its knowledge management system, a process that redefined Soviet Process, like none other I’ve ever seen*.

Taxonomy? The craft of stuffing dead animals? Tags? The things you cut off of new clothing? How to explain to someone the important of tagged content?:

The Analogy Approach: this one is fun. Make an analogy that won’t make the listener feel like a toddler, but at the same time won’t plunge them into semantics: A tagging system is like the Dewey Decimal system. It makes things easier to find.

Tags are categories, bins, slots, silos ….

The Outcome Approach: if you do a good job tagging then your stuff is easier to find, and the easier your stuff is to find, the more people will buy it or read it.

This appeals to the boss. Especially when you’re proposing to spend the company’s money developing a tagging/taxonomy project.

The Linneaus Approach: orders, families, genera, phyla … snore.

Pedantic. Wear a bowtie and horn-rimmed spectacles when adopting this approach.

The Metaphor Approach: the Man says that the object is a canine, specifically a dog, more specifically a terrier, most specifically a Yorkshire terrier. A user might call it a “Yappy Dog” or “Cute Dog.”

Once you get someone onboard the syllogism — tagging makes stuff easier to find, and easier to build relationshops between, and finding stuff means more people will buy or read it — then you need to introduce the dreaded del.icio.us effect.

Here’s my confession. I tag everything with del.icio.us and I still can’t find a reason to introduce it an noviate. Okay, folksonomies. It ain’t a Yorkshire Terrier, it’s a Yappy Dog, and if you call it a Yappy Dog, someone else looking for Yappy Dogs will find your del.icio.us tag and be directed to the right spot. Sort of like walking into the Modern Museum of Art, avoiding the docent, and asking any random museum goer where the “weird pictures” are.

I’m looking for help here in making the case that a tag-driven content management process — not the tool like Interwoven or Vignette — but the act of tagging, the discipline, the opening of content to be tagged by del.icio.us, the promotion of tag sharing, is a good and beneficial thing worth investing in. I know it, I sense it, I use it, and I live it, but in the end, like the question of when RSS will go mainstream, or the world adopt Firefox, or (insert your favorite improbable lost cause here) will win the World Series, how do you make the case that tags are fundamentally at the heart of a search-driven Internet?

I’ve tried handing out David Weinberger’s excellent issue of Release 1.0 (which informed most of my thinking), I pore through Matt McAllister’s blog (he is my personal patron saint of tag driven strategy), but I have yet to come up with the concise “aha!” elevator pitch to get the uninformed onto the bandwagon.

What’s the desired outcome? How to turn someone from an old-world browser into a new world tagger. I predict there will be a tagging breakthrough — but it will come from the browser, not from a service such as del.icio.us.

For a great screencast demo of del.icio.us, visit Jon Udell’s excellent screencast on the subject.

* Process, to quote the long forgotten columnist in The Industry Standard, is for people who step out of the shower to piss.