Next Tech

While waiting for the coffee to brew this morning I glanced at Twitter and the first post on my screen read “Wordpress 2.7 “Coltrane” released…” (props to ijafri for being first on my radar with the news). As the song playing in an endless loop in nearly every store in New York says, “It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas.”

Seriously, references to obnoxious holiday music aside, I’ve been waiting for v2.7 ever since I met the founding developer of WordPress Matthew Mullenweg who tipped his hand to what was in store and I’m excited it’s finally here.

The most obvious change is the redesigned Dashboard, which is almost endlessly customizable to your way of seeing and doing things. In the process, this reduces the number of clicks needed to do anything: post, edit, illustrate, prioritize, upgrade, moderate comments or assassinate comment spam… one click and it’s done right from the Dashboard. Nearly every other screen can also be customized to your liking, too. How cool is that? Here’s a video that shows what I’m talking about:

You can find out more about version 2.7 from Matt’s post on the WordPress.org blog.

If you’re running WordPress give me a shout about upgrading. And if you choose to do it yourself please make a backup of the database and all the files before you go for it. Though WP code has been thoroughly vetted by our global user community some elements of your site, particularly if its older or you haven’t upgraded in a while, may not be fully compatible. We can address these issues pretty easily but it will be a lot less stressful if we’re not working under the influence of a broken site.

Is it safer “on the edge” in economically turbulent times like these?

In his recent blog post Innovate or Wither - Personal Strategy for Times of Change, my colleague Lee Wilson asserts that in times of rapid change and market disruption, “…the cutting edge is the safest place to be.”

Although he was talking specifically about educational publishing and technology, I think the underlying truth can be applied widely. Lee writes,

If there is rapid change the inclination of most people is to circle the wagons around the familiar. But, when the market is moving, breaking camp and moving forward is actually a lower risk approach. If you are taking risks in your job and trying to invent the future you are actually in a safer position than those who cling to the status quo.

Several weeks back I posted a video clip from the Dow Jones’ Media & Money conference where several media and marketing executives argued that now is a great time to start a new business. It may sound counter-intuitive but this was echoed by venture fund partner I know who feels the risk profile of digital media services and content compares more favorably to brand-name investments than it has in years.

Everyone running for cover means there is more opportunity on the edge these days. And while your 401K may have dwindled to a dot-401 remember it’s all a matter of your perception and confidence, and those are things you can control.

In this video from the 2008 Dust or Magic Institute, Warren Buckleitner talks about how children’s portable computing devices are changing childhood and comes to some insightful conclusions.

Born the same year as BF Skinner’s teaching machine (1958), Warren Buckleitner has been reviewing children’s technology products now for over half of his life. After five years in the classroom and ten years at the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, he established Children’s Technology Review earning him SIIA’s First Journalism Codie Award for “Best Software Reviewer.”

Warren is an advisor to Consumer Reports WebWatch and teaches both at NYU and the Rutgers Graduate School of Education. He is also a regular contributor to the New York Times Circuits page, and writes for Parents, PARADE, Disney Family, Scholastic Parent & Child and others. Warren founded the Dust or Magic Institute (www.dustormagic.com) and the Mediatech Foundation (www.mediatech.org). He likes to try to IM with his two teenage daughters, who are his best teachers.

For more information about Warren and booking speaking engagements and workshops, visit his media links page.

Mark William Hansen, who leads product development at Lego, talks about their transition from a toy company to developers and publishers of an immersive 3D virtual world set to launch in early 2009.

For more on Lego Universe read the Reuters story Virtual World is Lego’s Latest Brick Trick and visit the Lego corporate site. For an historical perspective, view Mark William Hansen’s 2006 presentation on Lego Universe. For more videos from the 2008 and 2007 Dust or Magic Institutes visit http://dustormagic.blip.tv.

Since I started using Hulu and more recently learned about the open-source video aggregation software Miro and the video sharing plugin Kaltura, it seemed to me that Tivo’s days were numbered. Evidently I’m not the only one.

In her Halloween post on the Wired Blog Network, Meghan Keane observes “the future of the company which defined the DVR is likely to depend on dumping the magic box altogether,” and reports that Daniel Taylor, an analyst at Yankee Group, says that the “TV-Killer” may find itself facing irrelevance long before television networks have to face up to the problem:

DVR and video on demand are struggling for relevance today. The challenge that Tivo faces — the challenge that any device-based service faces — is how they’re going to address user behavior. For every one person who plans ahead to tape shows they’ll miss, there are nine other that want to go online now that they’ve missed it.

The key words “…the challenge that any device-based service faces” is spot-on. Old media and proprietary technologies are dying, while web media and open-source is ascendent. Adapt, as Tivo is trying to by transforming itself into a web video offering, or become irrelevant. Shift happens.

WordPress — the open-source content management system that runs this site and millions of others around the world — is almost infinitely extensible, which was the intention of the development team from the beginning.

One of the core philosophies of WordPress is to keep the core code as light and fast as possible but to provide a rich framework for the huge community to expand what WordPress can do, limited only by their imagination. Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine…

But there are more than 3,000 WordPress plugins to choose from so if you’re new to this, where do you start? After building several dozen WordPress sites, from simple one-page blogs to complex web-zines, we’re finding these 10 plugins among the most useful:

Akismet	Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
All-in-one SEO Pack	Automatically optimizes your page titles for search engines (SEO). Generates META tags automatically andavoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs.You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want, and can fine-tune everything to your hearts content.
Contact Form 7	Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Google XML Sitemaps	This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.
Lock-out	This plugin will allow you to put your website into Lock Out mode to prevent access while you preform upgrades or maintenance. Includes the ability to upload a pre-made html file for use as a placeholder page while in lock out mode or build your own online. The login page is still accessible and will allow only the user role you set to view the site normally while in lock out mode.
Reveal ID’s	With WordPress 2.5 and later the IDs on all admin pages have been removed, probably due to the fact that the common user don’t need them. However, for advanced WordPress Users/ developers those IDs are quite useful. This plugin makes them easy to find.
Stat Press	We love Google Analytics but their reports lag 24 hours and sometimes you want to see what’s happening right now. For that you need Stat Press. This real-time plugin is dedicated to the management of statistics about. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers etc. and reports them as they happen. Think your site is slow because traffic is spiking? Here’s how to find out.
WP Polls	What do your visitors think? Ask them with WP-Polls which is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.
WP Super Cache	This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
WP Automatic Upgrade	WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade their installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org in 5 steps that include complete site and database backups, deactivation and re-activation of plug-ins.

Don’t see what you need? Search the Plugins Directory or learn to write one yourself.

At the Dow Jones Media & Money conference last week, a panel of executives representing digital media developers, investors and advertisers debated whether it’s possible to start or grow an advertising-supported web service at a time when even huge corporations are challenged to survive. With the market down yet again today, some of their answers were refreshingly optimistic:

The inspiration for my post Burning Down the TV came from Jen Simmons presentation at Wordcamp New York last Sunday. The other speakers that day included Matt Mullenweg, co-developer of Wordpress and a partner in Automatic, bloggers Aaron Brazell and Shay David, Jeremy Clarke on running a blog network, and Jen on Wordpress and video.

If you’re curious about where Wordpress is going in the next release (due out in November) and what else you can do with this CMS besides writing text-blogs you’re in luck: videos of Wordcamp NY are now online. Here’s the beginning of Matt Mullenweg’s introduction and below it, a link to videos of all of the presenters.

Click here to see the rest of Matt’s talk and the other presenters sharing the Wordcamp New York stage, with thanks to Jonathan Dingman for posting these videos and to Sun Microsystems for the generous use of their conference facility.

David Byrne sang about burning down the house and now it’s time for burning down the TV thanks to Miro, the open source video player.

Think TIVO for web, but without buying any hardware or software (sorry AppleTV). Think millions of programs packaged as pre-programmed channels, or search the web and make a channel with the video you like — Grateful Dead TV? TED Presentations? Knitting for Dachshunds? You got it. Finally, think open source and open format — Miro plays MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media, Flash Video, and almost every other major video format. And those are only some of Miro’s features and specs.

But don’t take my word, go and download it (free, fast, stable for PC, Mac, Linux) and you’ll see why Miro vision for the future of web video is so compelling. Want to hack it? Download the source code too. Want to program and brand your own channel? Miro converts any media RSS feed into a channel you can put your name on. Once you search the web for the content you want, Miro displays an iTunes like listing with program details and links to download, save, organize, or share the video.

Where did Miro come from? It’s the core project of the Participatory Culture Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit based in Worcester, MA and founded in 2005 with a mission to build tools and services that give people more ways to engage in their culture.

Television is the most popular medium in our culture. But broadcast and cable TV has always been controlled by a small number of big corporations. We believe that the internet provides an opportunity to open television in ways that have never been possible before. Miro is designed to eliminate gatekeepers. Viewers can connect to any video provider that they want. This frees creators to use the video hosting setup that works best for them– whether they choose to self-publish or use a service. It’s the kind of openness that the internet allows and that we should all demand.

Lastly, special shout outs to Jen Simmons of Milkweed Media Design who talked up Miro in her presentation on web video at last weekend’s Wordcamp in New York, to Bill Sobel of NY:MIEG and to Bob Sokol at Sun who promoted and hosted the event.

I trust you all tuned in last Friday night to see if McCain was going to show up?

After such a tough week for the old maverick — suspending his campaign, parachuting into Washington, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative,  and keeping everyone guessing if we’d be watching Barack debate himself — it made for quite the drama and a weird preview of a McCain presidency. As Gail Collins wrote in her Times op-ed piece yesterday:

Imagine what would happen if a new beetle infested the Iowa corn crop during the first year of a McCain administration. On Monday, we spray. On Tuesday, we firebomb. On Wednesday, the president marches barefoot through the prairie in a show of support for Iowa farmers. On Thursday, the White House reveals that Wiley Flum, a postal worker from Willimantic, Conn., has been named the new beetle eradication czar. McCain says that Flum had shown “the instincts of a maverick reformer” in personally buying a box of roach motels and scattering them around the post office locker room. “I can’t wait to introduce Wiley to those beetles in Iowa,” the president adds. [And] on Friday, McCain announces he’s canceling the weekend until Congress makes the beetles go away.

But I digress – this began as a post about Twitter mashups. Maybe you’ve been at a conference recently where the presenter invited the audience send text feedback, projected on a screen above. What if that happened on a national level?

We saw that in the pre-convention debate sponsored by CNN (who’ve been out front on weaving Twitter into news broadcasts). Now Current TV, the independent cable television network founded by vice president Al Gore, has broken new ground by incorporating audiences’ 140-character commentaries from the microblogging service Twitter into their broadcasts.

How cool is that? For the whole story go to Wired for their post Current TV Hacks The Debates and visit Current TV’s Hack the Debate for more episodes. I can’t wait to watch this during the VP debate on October 2nd.