Gregory Heller Get in touch

Archive

October 2006

8 posts

  1. Homophily in Social Networks

    Thanks for the tip Arthur , the article you mentioned on O’Reilly about Content Relationships is an interesting read. I’m not sure where to begin, but I did very much like this: The methods I gave earlier for advertising interests (“Did you know … Joshua Schachter also competitively whittles Persian cats”) let you learn more about the people you already know. That’s an important difference from the prototypical serendipitous recommendation: “you and X should become friends!” As Liz Goodman pointed out, we’re grown-ups and have lots of friends already. What else can the software do for us besides making it even harder to keep up with all the people we know? People are conversational animals, give them more things to talk about.

  2. Worldchanging, the book!

    I am a frequent reader of the blog Worldchanging . It is really a wonderful source for very detailed and informative commentary about issues of sustainability from farming to autos. I’ve been waiting for Worldchanging the book to come out, and just today I got an email from my friend Sarah Pullman over at DeSmogBlog.com . It was a request from the folks at Worldchanging to make the forthcoming book a success by buying it before it comes out.

  3. Some more thoughts on Mass Mail: Formatting

    Complex formatting in mass email is bad. There. I said it. I just don’t like it. When I look at a message (and I look at messages in a preview pane that is less than a 3rd of a screen high) and there are complex headers that mimic the website through the use of tables and all the image elements are suppressed by my mail client, it looks ugly. If the point of the message is to… well… to convey a message, I should be able to see/read that message easily. The website mimicry interferes with me getting the message. So how do you make your email look pretty? If you think it matters, use simple HTML formatting that will be easily interpreted by mail clients. Don’t use embeded images images that will be suppressed by the mail client, and link back to your site often throughout the email if you want people to come back to your site.

  4. Rollingston: 10 Wors Congressmen

    Rollingstone has an article on the 10 worst congressmen . It is great that a music/culture magazine like RS has takes up some big political issues, and, especially before the election, takes the ink to highlight some of the worst folks out there. it would be better though if they actually directed their readers to ways they could get involved in defeating these hacks, or highlighted their alternatives. Now on a technical front, it would be helpful to readers if they could search the 10 worst by state (at least) and send just a single profile to a friend (rather than the entire article). A TOC would also be a nice feature….

  5. Mass Mail: Thoughts on “From” addresses

    On a recent flight from San Francisco to Seattle, I took a few minutes to organize my personal email in box. Recently I noticed that some of my filters had stopped working. What I discovered as I cleaned them up, and added some new ones was that many of the “non-profit-y” types of lists i was on has no little consistency in sender names and addresses (while most of the totally commercial ones were standard). For example, one political action committee sent me emails from no less than three different addresses, and none of them were from a particular “person” so that was not the reason for the differences. A major national non profit rights group similarly used more than one sender address. A few organizations were even using “free” email addresses as the sender (think @gmail.com).

  6. I'm now a "member" CivicActions, LLC

    Yesterday I signed a membership agreement with CivicActions,LLC and I am now one of 5 members of the LLC. In addition to me, George Frost, our General Council, is also now a member. "Member" is kind of like "partner" but we are not a partnership so we are members of the LLC. I am…

  7. Return of the Drupal Shop Talk Call

    Last fall or winter I convened a few “Shop Talk” conference calls to bring Drupal development shops together on the phone to talk about projects, modules and other things related to the work we do with Drupal. The idea stemed from my discussions with Phillip Smith, Mike Gifford and Joe Murray at Web Of Change in 2005 . Since then those discussions have morphed into what I call “The Three ‘C’s”: Communication, Cooperation, Collaboration. There is a continuum of interaction that starts with communication and hopefully ends in collaboration. But you have to start talking first. This is why DrupalCon, Drupal User Groups, Drupal Groups and the Drupal Shop Talk are all important. They bring together people who are, despite the opensource nature of the Drupal Project, often isolated so that they can learn what eachother are doing, and avoid duplication of work (for starters) and collaborate on bigger and better things.

  8. DefectiveByDesign.org and Cardozo Cyberlaw Society

    Last week I particpated in a discussion of DRM and the DefectiveByDesign.org campaign at a meeting of the Cardozo Cyberlaw Society in New York City. It was interesting to hear these law law students talk about DRM and engage with each other on both sides of the issues.