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Using Semantic MediaWiki as a Social Network Contact Management System
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 05/03/2009 - 08:49Back in March, I started writing about building a social network contact management system. The idea was to keep track of whom I am contacting on which social networks, similar to how salespeople use a customer relationship management system.
I started writing some simple programs to gather data from various sites and I expanded on the idea in a blog post about gathering people details. I touched upon the idea again in a post about selecting blogs to read and graphing their relationships.
Then, last Wednesday when I met with some old friends and made some new contacts at a networking gathering, and then made even more contacts at a Mojiva Party, that I felt I really needed sit down and try to come up with a good package.
One friend had just asked me if I have done any work with Django, so I set up Django to see how it would work. Django looks like a very nice platform for building powerful websites. However, it looked like the learning curve would be a bit steep and that there wasn’t a lot of building blocks to work off of.
On a whim, I decided to give another look at MediaWiki. MediaWiki is the wiki that Wikipedia uses. It is very powerful and I’ve set up a few MediaWiki sites in the past. I really like the free form way of being able to enter data into a wiki. However, the issues of permissions and how best to tag data remained a stumbling block.
In the preventing access section of the MediaWiki manual, they provided a few simple lines of code to add to a LocalSettings.php file to lock down the wiki. The documentation suggested that MediaWiki was not originally designed for private wikis and other software might be better if that is what you are looking for.
However, it appears to have worked nicely for me. If you go to my contacts wiki, you should be able to see the front page, but to see anything more, you need to get a userid and password from me. Since this is my rolodex on steroids, plus a bit more, I’m not likely to give that out.
The second problem was how to tag data. I’ve used categories before, but that didn’t really work well for me. What I wanted was something like an attribute value pair. As an example, I wanted to tag my own entry with the value ‘ahynes1’ for the property ‘twitter’. Then, I wanted to be able to see the twitter ids for everyone in my Wiki.
It turns out that there is a wonderful extension to MediaWiki called Semantic MediaWiki. The instructions on installing it were fairly simple and worked nicely, so very quickly, I had a secure wiki with the ability to add attribute value pairs.
I’ve started using this, and have developed a few standard tags that I use for people. These include city, state, zip, phone, email, twitter, friendfeed, dig, party (as in political), and so on. What is nice is that the freeform nature of the wiki allows me to add whichever properties I want, whereever I want to in the wiki page.
Using the query abilities that comes with Semantic MediaWiki, I’ve created simple pages display the twitter contacts I’ve entered into my wiki as well as contacts from Woodbridge, from Connecticut and so on.
Since all the regular wiki features work, I am also using it as a reporter’s notebook, where I list ideas for coming blog posts and information for these blog posts.
I’ve also added a property, contactdate. With this, I can see a chronological list of whom I’ve contacted. I hope that as I learn my way around Semantic MediaWiki better, I can find ways of constructing more sophisticated queries, such as showing the first or last contact date for a group of people, or the total number of contacts for each person. I hope to find ways of displaying dates in a calendar and making people’s Twitter ids, Friendfeed ids and so on, functional links.
Most recently, I’ve added another tag, called upcoming event. With that, I can have a good wiki style calendar that is very easy to change.
Further down the road, I hope to figure out how to import data, such as FOAF or Portable Contacts data, and how to export data in formats like vCards or iCalendars.
So far, I’ve entered a couple dozen people, two events, and made good use of my reporter’s notebook. Stay tuned for further ideas and results, and let me know your thoughts on using Semantic MediaWiki as a Social Network Contact Management System.
Ning, Elgg, Twitter, Flickr, etc
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 04/11/2009 - 11:12One of the mailing lists I’m on has gotten into several interesting discussions about Ning, Elgg, Twitter, Flickr and related sites. I've been busy working away on other things and quietly listening to the discussion in the background. However, I have had a little time to digest things and wanted to share my thoughts. I wrote this initially as a response to the list and have edited it to be a blog post here.
Ning: One discussion was about changes to the Ning Terms of Service that many people found offensive. As best as I can tell Ning is just as evil as Yahoo, Google, Facebook, MySpace and the rest of them. When you are essentially giving your content to someone else for their cost of providing the service, it seems to be up to the terms of service they provide about what they will do with it, and pretty much all of them are in it for a profit. It makes sense to push back at times, and this might be a time to push back at Ning, but I'm not a big Ning user, so I'm not getting active in that cause.
Elgg: Someone on the list mentioned Elgg as an open source competitor to Ning. I forgot who mentioned it, but to whomever did, thank you. I've now installed Elgg on my machine. It was a fairly simple install, at least for someone who has a VPS account and experience setting up other open source packages.
Elgg is current at version 1.5 and it acts like it. The parts that work, work very nicely and cleanly. I really like the parts that work. Other parts that they talk about that I'm interested in exploring just don't seem to be there. The OpenID client portion seems to work, but doesn't have the ability, as far as I can see, to add OpenID to an existing user. I couldn't find any way of getting FOAF to work, and it looks like it may take a while to figure out how best to change customize a theme.
It also has it's own microblogging and its connectivity to Twitter. It is pulling in Twitter feeds nicely but I haven't been able to get it to send feeds out yet.
The support community looks fairly sparse as of yet but as more people start experimenting with Elgg I expect to see the community grow.
All of that said, it looks like a fun tool to play with. Anyone who wants to play with my Elgg setup is free to join at http://elgg.smartcampaigns.com. It is a test site, and may go away abruptly. Feedback is appreciated about Elgg and ways to make the best use of it.
So far, I don't have a need to set up Elgg for any group, but I think it is a good tool to have in the toolkit.
Twitter: Another discussion was about FollowCost. I follow lots of people on Twitter and have lots of followers. I find followcost interesting, but only a very minor factor. Put simply, it gives the sum of the signal and the noise of a person's twitter stream. For some people that can be very high, and it might be because they have a lot of information. For other people it can be fairly low, but they have no useful information.
I do agree with everyone else that talks about the importance of Twitter clients. I end up using a large mix of many Twitter clients. Right now, I use PeopleBrowser as a primary client.
Flickr: Someone asked about Flickr. I use the simple aspects of Flickr a lot and have often recommended it to organizations for these aspects. It is nice to have a place to put your photos that other people will come look at. Beyond that, I use ability to mail pictures to Flickr, so when I take a picture from my cellphone, I send it to a special email address that Flickr sets up. This allows my picture to show up on Flickr right away.
On my cellphone, I can send an email to a list of people, so I send my pictures to Facebook, Flickr, Utterli and Zannel. As an aside, I do the same thing with videos, sending them to blip.tv, facebook, Utterli, Youtube and Zannel.
I also have a special account where I send a picture and text to Flickr. Flickr stores the photo on their site and the sends the picture and text to my blog as a blog post. It provides a great way to blog when you are off at some event. If your group organizes events, I strongly recommend this. You can build buzz about events as they happen.
I have added people as friends on Flickr and joined some Flickr groups, but that isn't really an important part of the discussions I'm part of.
There are a lot of different sites and services that can suck up every minute of your time. On a different list, one person mentioned Retaggr as a way to keep track of all these different sites. I'm http://www.retaggr.com/Page/ahynes1 there. It is a pretty nice site. For another similar, and very nice site, check out DandyID. I'm http://www.dandyid.org/users/ahynes1 there.
These sites can be good at helping people find all your content online and they’re probably worth looking at.
However, the key thing to come back to is, what are you trying to do anyway? How are you using social media to support your mission? For me personally, what I'm trying to do is to know as much as possible about as many different social media tools so I can help others make good use of them. So, I'm on just about every service I can find. Others have very different purposes, raising awareness about a cause, fundraising, etc. Figure out what you want to do, and then look for tools that help you do it.
OpenSim Takes a New Direction – April Fool’s Day in Perspective
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 04/03/2009 - 20:55I was stunned to read more of the reactions to the The Great 2009 OpenSim April Fool’s Prank. There have been people threatening legal action on the OpenSim Users mailing list. The most thought out reaction that I’ve found so far is OpenSim, You’re Losin’ Me, Punking is for Punks. I must say, I take a very different perspective.
I’ve already made my comments about being thankful for developers that give us something for free, even if they include a April Fool’s day pranks in the version of the software intended for developers. Yet the reaction seems to be so over the top, I thought I would try to put it into some context.
Back in 2007, I wrote 1994 all over again where I compared OpenSim with the dispersion of text based virtual worlds called MOOs back in the 1990s. People interested in understand online communities often read articles about LambdaMOO, the grand daddy of the MOOs, and, at least in my mind, the precursor to the three dimensional virtual worlds we now visit. Usually, they end up reading some variant of Julian Dibbell’s article A Rape in Cyberspace.
They move on to learn about how LambdaMOO dealt with community and governance issues. If they are diligent, they read LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction and the follow up LambdaMOO Takes Another Direction. One of my biggest criticisms of the folks at Linden Lab and also perhaps of many others going out and setting up their own OpenSim based virtual worlds is that they haven’t read what happened in the early text based days of virtual worlds and seem destined to repeat many of the mistakes.
Indeed, the uproar about The Great 2009 OpenSim April Fool’s Prank reminds me of so many discussions in LambdaMOO ages ago.
There is another aspect of history that people need to be aware of, and that is the history of April Fool’s pranks online. Perhaps Amy Bruckman said it best in the syllabus to a class she taught, The Design of Virtual Communities, back in 1998.
On the Internet, the most important holiday of the year is April Fools Day! Poke around the net today and gather your best April Fools' pranks. Bring them to our next class. On LambdaMOO, please note *ballot:AprilFools!
*ballot:AprilFools! starts off:
RATIONALE:
We used to have a lot of fun on April Fools Day, but now the wizards are afraid of being disputed, and wizardly pranks are minimal.THEREFORE:
On April 1st each year, the LambdaMOO Wizards may freely make any temporary changes they like to the database and server for the amusement of the populace. These changes must be reversible, and will be undone on April 2nd. The changes also must not compromise the privacy of any individual in any way.
While @ballot:AprilFools! does not apply to OpenSim Developers, perhaps it should. I, for one, hope that every April 1st, there will be some developers prank, meeting the criteria described in the ballot.
So, with that, let’s go back to the earliest prank in a virtual world that I know of. In The Incredible Tale of LambdaMOO, Pavel Curtis, the archwizard of LambdaMOO wrote:
On the morning of April 1, 1992, when I first got to work, I checked out the transcript of my perpetual connection to LambdaMOO. Amid the usual paged questions and the like, there was a cryptic little message about how a major fire had just swept through the house. Curious, I began wandering around the core of LambdaHouse; it was marvelous. Clearly, some of my staff of wizards had been very busy preparing for this wonderful April Fool's Day hack.
At some point in my wanderings, a worried player paged me to say that it really, truly wasn't his fault, but he seemed suddenly to be a wizard! I didn't believe it, of course, but I checked it out just the same and discovered to my shock that it was true; when I inspected his player object, it clearly had the "wizard" bit on! He pointed to the latest article in the LambdaMOO newspaper; that article, written by my wizards, described the fire and said that, in order to hasten the repairs, all players had been made into wizards so that they could help out. I was utterly aghast.
There may well have been other great virtual world pranks prior to 1992 and I’m willing to bet my Google Chrome 3D Glasses and my Google TiSP spindle that there are going to be more great pranks in the virtual worlds to come.
I’m also willing to bet that the humor impaired will gripe as much about them as they have about The Great 2009 OpenSim April Fool’s Prank, and the many directions the wizards of LambdaMOO have led their community.
Meanwhile, I’ll sit back, observe, comment, and try to have as much fun myself, as I possibly can.
#FollowFriday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 04/03/2009 - 09:00@acarvin @blogdiva @stevegarfield @jillmz @tishgrier @waynesutton @ chuckumentary @mlsif
Each Friday I try to highlight some of the interesting people that I follow on Twitter. Since Twitterfeed puts the beginning of my blog post on Twitter, I can just post my #FollowFriday post here, along with my thoughts about it and it will show up on Twitter.
This week, I highlighting some of the people I really like in the social political media complex. Some of the names are very well known, others less so. I’ve also not included some of the obvious big names because they don’t need highlighting, and also, in part, because I don’t feel like I’m in a conversation with them, the way I feel that I have been in conversations with some of the folks above. With that, let me talk about the people in this weeks #FollowFriday
Andy Carvin @acarvin is the social media swami at National Public Radio. He has highly informative tweets, nicely mixed with the personal experience. He’s gotten people like Scott Simon and Dan Schorr onto Twitter.
I don’t recall exactly when I first met Liza Sabater, @blogdiva. It was probably around 2003 or 2004 and had probably had to do with the nexus of politics and technology. Like Andy, Liza’s posts are informative and nicely mixed with personal experience.
Steve Garfield, @stevegarfield can be described as the father of videoblogging. I think I first met Steve at MediaGiraffe a couple years ago. You should follow not only Steve’s tweets, but especially his video work.
Tish Grier @tishgrier is perhaps not as well known in the Twittosphere as Andy, Liza or Steve. Yet she has been making her voice heard for many years and it is great to hear her voice on Twitter. I’ve met her at several news media related events.
Like Tish, Jill Miller-Zimon @jillmz is also not as well known as Andy, Liza or Steve. I’ve only met Jill once face to face, at election night coverage at NPR Studios last November. However, we’ve known each other online for a while and I now live in the town she grew up in. As with others, I first ran into Jill online some place other than Twitter. Again, I don’t recall the details, but it was probably when one of us commented on the others blog.
Wayne Sutton @waynesutton. Like Jill, I’ve only met Wayne once face to face, which was at a conference about news media in Lowell, MA. Like myself, Wayne seems to experiment with just about every online site that comes along, and I’ve enjoyed interacting with Wayne on many of these sites.
Chuck Olsen @chuckumentary I believe I only met Chuck once, which was at a media event when John Edwards was first entering the 2008 Presidential Primary. While his own blog and twitter stream are well worth the read, the real reason I mention Chuck is his work with @theuptake which provides an important and fascinating glimpse into Minnesota.
Let me end off this week with Micah Sifry @mlsif. I believe that the first time I met Micah was at the inaugural Personal Democracy Forum back in 2004. PDF has grown over the years and continues to be a focal point of the social political media complex.
So, that’s this week’s #FollowFriday. See you on Twitter.
The Great 2009 OpenSim April Fool’s Prank
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 04/02/2009 - 11:25I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about April Fool’s pranks. There have been some great ones, but too often, they aren’t that funny, or end up making someone look like a fool. I missed most of them this and if it wasn’t for a flame war that erupted on the OpenSimulator mailing list, I wouldn’t have heard about The Great 2009 OpenSim April Fool’s Prank. But a flame war did emerge because some people apparently did end up looking like fools. Normally, I’d let the flame war pass without comment, but I think there are important things to be learned.
So, let me start off somewhere near the beginning. OpenSim is an open source project to create server software for virtual worlds, similar to Second Life. The idea of open source software is that anyone can get the source and make modifications.
Part of the culture of Open Source is that if you are getting something for free, you should try to contribute back whatever you can to the success of the project. Another part is that if you are really concerned about security or reliability, you can read the underlying program yourself to see if there is anything hidden in there that you don’t want.
For example, an April Fool’s prank.
With that, folks in the Open Source movement take appellations like ‘alpha code’ and ‘beta code’, and ‘svn branch’ much more seriously than most people. Beta code is software that is currently being tested. There may be some bugs in it, but it is probably fairly reliable. It is something worth giving to early adopter users who will test it, not flip out about bugs, and will report bugs back to the developers. ‘alpha code’ is code that is still in development. People who want to test a project in development, and give feedback to the developers about what features would be really nice or thoughts about how they might work might want to use ‘alpha code’.
The ‘svn branch’ is the place where the developers do their work. ‘svn’ is short for ‘Subversion’, a software versioning program. It is where developers store the code as they are working on it. It is sort of like a developers workbook. It is assumed that the only people using the svn branch are other people actively involved in the development process.
Well, apparently, some of the developers thought it would be a fun thing to put some code in the svn branch that would make OpenSim based regions running off of the svn branch act weird on April Fool’s day. If, in fact, it was only developers using the svn branch, this would be a cute, harmless little prank. I would have liked to have seen it. However, since I’m not actively doing development on OpenSim, I don’t have the svn branch.
Well, apparently, some fools have been using the svn branch for more than just participating in development and their grids experienced the prank. As best as I can make out from the flame war, some of them were even showing the svn branch to funders, who when they saw the prank, pulled their funding.
I have mixed feelings about this. Funders ought to have thicker skins. They should know that they are funding something in development and things like this will happen. On the other hand, I would be leery of funding a project where the project team does not appear to understand or appreciate the difference between ‘svn branches’ and ‘beta code’.
Then, to top it off, people then come on to an OpenSim users list calling the developers assholes. I’m sorry. You don’t call someone who is providing something to you for free an asshole, especially if the problem you are experiencing is of your own making.
Perhaps some of these people will leave the OpenSim community. I kind of hope so. Open Source project work better when people are committed to working together within the standards of an open source community.
You may have missed The Great 2009 OpenSim April Fool’s Prank, but hopefully this blog post will get some people to think more about their relationship to open source development, get them to behave within the norms of the community, and perhaps even give a little bit back.
