Gregory Heller Get in touch

Writing

The blog

725 posts on careers, communication, technology and civic life, since 2005.

  1. Drupal Shop Talk Conference Call for November 14th 2006

    This morning we had a really good Drupal Shop Talk with about a dozen participants. These calls are really great for getting to know other people working in the sector and find out what kind of development is going on. You can read the back channel transcript and my notes at groups.drupal.org The next Drupal Shop Talk will be on December 19th at 10am PST. And I do intend to record that one. If anyone is interested in working on editing the shop talk conference calls, please do let me know.

  2. Via Tech Crunch: Confabb the conference website

    Just learned of Confabb via TechCrunch Confabb is a new service launching today that offers a centralized place to find information about all kinds of conferences. The site offers everything from speaker and event reviews to photos of the events after the fact through integration with Flickr. It’s an impressive full service site that could become the go-to spot for at least tech conference attendees and possibly a wider audience. This is an exciting development, I was just thinking to myself that it is so hard to stay on top of what conferences are happening where and when. It will be interesting to see how folks react to Confabb and if it gains market share outside of teh tech world. Many conferences could use help with their web presence, and if Confabb has nailed it that’s great!

  3. OOPS: AOL Exposes Search Data Of 658,000 People

    Is it about privacy or transparency? Or just colossal failure of judgement? On Monday, AOL admitted making a 2-GB file with the search records of 658,000 people available for public download — exactly the sort of information the DOJ sought, and failed, to force Google to provide under the guise of protecting children. Recall that AOL, MSN and Yahoo all buckled to the pressure and released the information.

  4. Tom Waits: Road to Peace

    I just downloaded and listened to the new Tom Wiats track “Road to Peace” (i got it free from eMusic.com , you can also get it from Pitchfork Media for free (Waits has released it for free along with a few other tracks). I had no idea what I was in for. The song is a ballad about the conflict in the Middle East, particularly the Arab Israelli conflict and the resent war between Israel and Hamas. It is defitely worth a listen. It seems like there might be a resurgence of the “political ballad”. Earlier this year, Neil Young released an entire album of “war protest” songs called “Living With War”. I’ve got to say though, as much of a Neil Young fan as I am, I found “Road to Peace” to be far more compelling.

  5. YouTube Named Time’s “Invention Of The Year”

    Time magazine named YouTube “Invention of the Year” saying: What happened? YouTube’s creators had stumbled onto the intersection of three revolutions. First, the revolution in video production made possible by cheap camcorders and easy-to-use video software. Second, the social revolution that pundits and analysts have dubbed Web 2.0. It’s exemplified by sites like MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr and Digg – hybrids that are useful Web tools but also thriving communities where people create and share information together. The more people use them, the better they work, and more people use them all the time – a kind of self-stoking mass collaboration that wouldn’t have been possible without the Internet.

  6. See the connections between corrupt Republicans

    The DCCC launched a cool website that visually displays the links between corrupt republicans. Have any friends or family who are Republican voters? or who might be wavering? Send them this link. In other news, last night I saw Bil Clinton stumping for Patricia Madrid for New Mexico’s First Congressional District. The man is genius. He spoke articulately for nearly 40 minutes without notes. He is a rock star.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.