Moved to Zaskoda.com

I've moved all of the posts from this blog to my new site here:

• http://Zaskoda.com

I will not be posting here again. At some point, I will remove this site. Thank you.

My Latest Project Focus: The Gaia Community

It's been some 5 months since my last update to this blog. I've been somewhat absorbed in the Gaia Community project. I hired on full time at Gaiam and started this project last June. After 9 months, we've given birth to a very healthy little community.

We began with nothing. Gaiam was grown as a catalog company that grew onto the Web via e-commerce. Like many other corporations, Gaiam knew there was huge value and potential in virtual communities and social media. The company Founder and SEO, Jirka Rysavy, started with little more than a vision and the domain name - Gaia.com. The first hire was the community ambassador, Jennifer. I was the second hire.

Today, 9 months later, we have a custom built software platform developed in Ruby on Rails. The platform is a social network at the core. Community members have a variety of standard methods for interacting ranging from blogs to forums. We currently have around 160,000 active community members and gigs of contributed content. Beyond the community (my personal focus) we also have a network of original, professionally produced multimedia content. Finally, we have a section of the site that is a fully customizable homepage with drag and drop widgets for content and webapps called MyGaia. The Gaia team is currently 21 members.

The Gaia community is unique in it's character. Members of the community are conscious, pro-active individual looking to make positive changes in their own lives and in the world as a whole. This makes for one of the best vibes a virtual community can create. It's wonderful!

So that begs the question - how did we build such a large and stable community so quickly? The answer is - we didn't! We evaluated a staggering array of options. We even considered fully hosted and managed software platforms. However, we wanted the ability to provide custom features and we wanted to develop our infrastructure quickly. Thus, we decided to shoot for an in-house development team using a rapid development framework.

We then took a long hard look at all of the existing communities within our demographic. One community stood out above the rest. It was a little startup known as Zaadz. The deeper we looked, the more we realized that this team had taken the exact same path we were about to take, only they had more than a year lead time. Furthermore, the core community this group attracted was exactly the type of community we wanted to support. It was a match made in heaven.

In community development, the hardest part is the initial seed. Once you reach a certain size, a community suddenly takes off and your focus shifts from trying to grow the community to nurturing and managing the growth. Ironically, Zaadz literally means seed in Dutch. Zaadz grew and bloomed into Gaia.

Gaia is on her feet, but the journey has just begun. Jirka's vision is massive and multifaceted. Even if it were appropriate for me to share it here, I don't think I could summarize it in a single blog entry. It's been an amazing learning experience and joy to work with this company. It's also nice to look on this project as such a powerful success.

An Online Community for Spam Bots

Tonight I launched a new online community. Other than myself, it has zero members. It probably won't ever have any. The intent is to allow spam bots to infest the site and post at will. I call it:

BOTARCHY!

...only because bothole.com was already registered...

MUD Creator Richard Bartle Speaks On Virtual Worlds

This particular interview is making the rounds because of a Bartle's comments about closing down World of Warcraft. Personally, I think it's a brilliant read from start to finish. The story caries a high level of relevance to the recent rise in social websites as well as the state of online gaming worlds. I was involved in the gaming industry for about a decade; there's still a great deal that web dev and gaming can learn from each other.

MSNBC Picks Up On The Death Of Myspace

In Sept of last year, I posted Myspace: The Beginning Of The End. The post was a mix of my personal observations along with a little bit of supporting news media. Last Friday, MSNBC picked up on the trend in a story titled, "OMG! YR still on MySpace? Loser!" Awesome title, and a good read. There is a growing trend of users seeking out communities with a sense of integrity and purpose. MySpace has neither.

Virb : What myspace should have been.

I kept hearing about this new site called Virb but never remembered to check it out while I was at my computer. I've been on Virb for all of about 20 minutes and, I must say, I am overwhelmed. This site is clean, easy to use, and just plain sexy. The little light bulb to dim the page while watching a video is brilliant. The use of Ajax is excellent - it makes the site more functional in nice subtle ways. Profile modification is easy and fun. Virb is social network community done right. I'm obviously way behind on this one because my initial searches for profiles yielded massive results. To all the other social networking websites out there - the bar is now higher! I am curious what the technology is. Netcraft says they're running CentOS and Apache 2. My first guess would be Ruby on Rails. My second would be Django and Python. Here's a bit-o-press coverage. I'm off to go dig around on the site some more.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

This made it's rounds near the beginning of the year. It says it all, so I'll just let the video speak for itself:

Mugshot - Your community profiles combined.

A little while back, a friend of mine registered hasaportal.com and started working on a site. The site was designed to help people setup portal pages that kept track of all of the communities they're members of. Basically, when someone asks what sites you're on, you could point them to your portal and then they could find you on any sites they happen to also be members of. At the time, we couldn't find anything like that. I was stoked about the idea, but I think she's all but given up on it. Meanwhile, I found something similar, but far more feature rich. Mugshot takes the idea a step further and aggregates each site into one... sort of. The company line is as follows:

Share content from MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, blogs and more. Why go to a ton of different sites every day when you can check out just one?

Now how long until I have a site to sign up for that will aggregate all of my sites that aggregate other sites?

Corporate Websites Are Irrelevant by Jeremiah Owyang

On the same journey that prompted my previous post, I ran across a good read by Jeremiah Owyang titled, " Voices from the Community, Corporate Websites are Irrelevant". It was a follow up to his previous post titled, "Web Strategy: How to evolve your irrelevant corporate website". The basic point of the original article is that consumers don't need to concern themselves with the company line as authentic product information is available from real (virtually) people. I must say, Jeremiah does support his notions with singular incidents instead of larger scale statistics. Still I think he has important and relevant things to say. For example:

They use instant messaging, facebook, (and other social networks) and rarely directly type in a domain name to corporate website. If this holds true, then it’s assumed that prospects make decisions on other websites BEFORE they come to the corporate website to get factual information.

I don't think this is a new notion. I would say that most people I know will ask around before making a product purchase. They key is how the modern web makes it so accessible. I can research dozens of opinions on most products with a minimal time investment.

Community 2.0 post by John Hagel

I've read a slew of great community articles today. A post titled Community 2.0 by John Hagel stood out as a particularly important read. He has an excellent high level view of virtual communities. Here but one of many excellent quotes:

push programs treat people as passive consumers even when they are producers like workers on an assembly line. In contrast, pull platforms treat people as networked creators even when they are customers purchasing goods and service. In this context, virtual communities have the potential to become kernels of massive pull platforms.

I really loved the term "networked creators". Have you ever noticed how our history is full of heroes and inventors? I've often found it interesting how credit is often given to one person for an accomplishment or a idea that really took the involvement of many. I like this notion of "networked creators" because it takes away the hero... or perhaps, it's the community itself that is the hero.

Off Topic: Don't Use Ameriprise

I'm getting bad about off topic posts. I really should start up another blog somewhere. For now, I'll rant here. Today's rant is about Ameriprise Financial. Back in 2004, a friend of a friend went to work at what was then American Express Financial Services or something like that. She called herself an advisor and promised to help me invest my money for a small (re: huge) fee. I wanted to support her, so I jumped in. It turned out to be a front to sell a bunch of their own investment options. She would promise to research other "options" I brought to the table, but she never seemed to really even know what she was talking about. She just gave me a sales pitch.

Since then, I've met many of these financial advisors. They throw little get togethers where they will buy a group lunch or drinks if they'll listen to the company line. I've been to meetups where one person in the group used his turn to introduce himself as an opportunity to pitch the group on Ameriprise, dropped off some business cards, and bolted for the door.

Used car sales tactics aside, I thought I would blog about the actual performance of my investments. Every single Ameriprise investment I put money into performed extremely poorly. I only have two left - the VUL I'm locked into and the SIRA that my last company was matching me on (instead of a 401k). You can read more about what a VUL is on wikipedia. Let me tell you how well it has performed.

I bought into the VUL in early 2004. I've made 27 investment payments of $350 each. In addition to those payments, I paid $52.33 a month for the insurance policy. (note: there was one more oddball payment in there.) The idea is that once the balance of the investment gets high enough, it will yield more than $52 in interest and the insurance policy will begin to pay for itself. So, how's that working out?

Gross Invested: $11,255.60
Cost of Insurance: $1412.91
Net Invested: $9842.69

Here's the kicker... Current value: $9058.86

That's right, the investment itself has lost almost $800! That's not accounting for the $1412.91 I've put into an overpriced life insurance policy. That's over $11k that I could have been investing in an account that gained interest. The part that confuses me is how Ameriprise investments have continued to perform so poorly in a market that is supposed to be doing so very well.

This has been the case with every investment I've made with them. Additionally, there are a variety of hidden fees. Everyone gets their cut. My account was mismanaged by my first advisor costing me about $150 in overdraft fees. She quit weeks after I made my yearly payment of over $500. The new advisor was better, but relatively unresponsive. Through him, I was able to close out most of my short term investments and consolidate some of the loss.

Now I'm faced with what I need to do with the failing VUL. Do I keep investing hoping it will turn around? Do I just continue to pay the minimum for the insurance? Do I take the penalty, close it out now, and reinvest elsewhere? I need a new advisor who can actually advise me! Recommendations would be appreciated.

My advise to everyone, read sites like the Motley Fool and invest your money by yourself.

Choose Wisely

I love any company that's willing to self deprecate a little. It shows they have enough confidence that they don't have to try to spin public opinion. Check out comment number 11 on this blues news thread. After you've read it, swing over to the official Gearbox Forums and look at the header. Gotta love it!

Community Concept - Debate

I just read this quote after following a reddit link:

“I’d just like to see thinking come back in style. I haven’t heard a new idea in eight years. Let’s get ordinary people arguing and talking again. I want to trigger new circuits in their nervous systems. That’s the philosopher’s job and I am the most important philosopher at this time.”
- Timothy Leary

I've long held and idea I wanted to execute on, but like so many good ideas, I never got around to it. I've decided, since I probably will never get around to doing anything about it, I'd just talk about it instead.

In a nutshell, the idea is a virtual community built around the one thing everyone loves to do on the interweb - argue.

Debate was one of my favorite UIL events in high school. It was a structured way of having an argument and the victor was decided by a third party. I suppose high school debate is the breeding ground for many would-be politicians. Anyway, unlike your typical interweb argument, debate has structure.

Personally, I would model a debate site after the structure I used in high school UIL debate and modify the format a bit. This structure included opening remarks, rebuttals, cross examinations, and closing remarks. Where UIL limited participants in time, a good online tool would also limit them in word count. I suppose it would be even more interesting if such a site allowed for the use of video, but that's a tangent I haven't considered much.

All debates would be tied to topics. Just like UIL, each topic would be binary in that it would have two predefined sides. In UIL, the pro would support a notion such as, for example, the need to reduce the homeless population in the US. The pro would also be responsible for presenting a plan to do so. The other side can attack from any direction - either directly against the notion or just the proposed plan.

I would rank winners and losers in a typical tournament method with winners moving on and losers starting over. I think I might use a reddit style public (registered users public, that is) voting system to pick winners.

The weakness would be the bias for voters to vote their hearts on the issue, and not the debate skills of the participants. However, that might not be such a bad thing. The real motivation for a site like this isn't to find people who can argue well. The motivation is to create a virtual community where ideas are refined and the best ideas can float to the top. The dream is that something like this could spawn real change in the world. After all, we can't really change until we build consensus for change. We can't build consensus unless we have a way of sharing and refining ideas together.

Verizon Fios TV and Daylight Savings Time

Today we started to notice missed recordings on our Verizon provided DVR. Some shows weren't recorded while others were cut off. Then we noticed that the time on the box was off - way off. It wasn't just the wrong time, but several hours too far ahead. It looked to us that it was the result of a botched daylight savings time change. Not entirely sure where the box gets the time from, we tried powering cycling the unit. This did not work.

I called Verizon's technical support. I found it really tough to locate the phone number for their support. Somehow I kept landing on support pages that were void of phone numbers. Anyway, I finally found it and called. Before any other recorded message - aside from selecting your language preference - a message came on apologizing to customers who are having difficulties with their DVRs as a result of daylight savings time and telling us that they are working on a solution.

This is not the only case of large companies not being prepared for this type of change. Earlier today I read that GoDaddy's DNS was down for a while. At least they got things fixed quickly. I'm hoping to get Battlestar Galactica recorded tonight.

One more thing I have to mention. I noticed that the Verizon support page had a 'Special Notice' regarding a marketing promotion, yet no mention of the system error. Typical.

Dallas Snowboarding Update (L + 4 Months)

It's been about four months since we launched DallasSnowboarding.com. With the initial launch, we did a lot of promotional work. However, that lasted about a month and then we got distracted. Since then, we've merely used the site as if we were just community members - aside from some moderation here and there. Here are some stats on the community's growth and development:

100 Users Registrations - A lot of users are banned spam bots. We have a little more than 20 users with 3 or more posts and several users with hundreds of posts.

We have 1881 articles and have had up to 10 users online at one time.

About 35,000 page loads in the month of January. We had over 5,200 page loads in one day during December.

We're almost 50/50 split between Firefox and msie.

We have a google page rank of 2.

We'll be looking at an overhaul of the site probably during the off season (spring/summer). The software platform is weak at best - but that's an entirely different blog post.

Portable Video Wikipedia

How handy would this be? - A rich media based version of Wikipedia where all the content was video based. No, I don't mean a flash website. I mean a huge organized archive of video clips that present useful information.

Now how cool would it be if you could sync your iPod style device to this database at any time and keep it up to date with the database?

As an example, you could hook it up to a GPS and it could tell you interesting things about where you're at in the world. Imagine driving past a national monument and the kids in the back seat are treated to a history lesson on the flip down video screen.

Another example, you're laying on your back with your significant other and looking at the stars. One of you asks about a constellation so you pause that romantic background music long enough to get the low down on those heavenly bodies.

Dallas Snowboarders: Two Weeks Later

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned DallasSnowboarders.com. We did some basic promotion by announcing the site in a few places online and started spreading the word of mouth. In the past two weeks we have had about 15,000 page loads. As of the time of this post, we have 29 registered users. If we can maintain such a good pace, we should be a very respectable looking community in a few months to a year. I bet we outgrow our software quickly.

Only time will tell if such an oddball nitch for a community will work out. We're having our first get-together this Thursday. If nothing else, I'm glad to meet more local snowboard enthusiasts.

Open Source Social Networking

Social Networking is easy. Any user can jump online and join one of hundreds of social networking sites. The "friends list" concept is popping up all over the place. You can find social networks for posting pictures, videos, and even finding dates. Perhaps it's the ease of use that enables them to be so popular.

What I would like to see happen next wouldn't be as "easy" as our current batch of social networks. Because it's not easy, I don't expect the idea to ever take off. Still, I would like to see it happen just as much.

I would like to abstract the friends list concept entirely. This would also require abstracting the identity concept entirely (see OpenID and Sxip). Anyway, the concept is such that you manage a mast friends list somewhere. This would contain considerably more complex information than what most social networks offer now. It would allow for grouping, would show number of hops between you and another person, and would allow for public/private view management. Above all else, it would be build such that you are not locked into any one platform. If you build a personal home page, you could write an app that enables your social network. If you installed a piece of popular web software for content management on your personal site, it would include plugins to activate your social network.

Basically, what I'm getting at, is removing the social network from the walled garden of a service provider. Now instead of having a profile on a service, you have your own website that you can develop as you see fit.

I think that this concept will eventually happen in one form or another. It's taking a while for the identity management stuff to catch on so I'm sure it will be a long time. I've thought about the problem in a few different ways and I'm not sure what the best method of solving the problem would be. Maybe it's built on something as simple as defining relationships in your anchor tags.


Just thinking out loud about this one. If anyone knows of projects of this nature, please let me know.

A New Virtual Community: DallasSnowboarders.com

There's nothing particularly unique about the virtual community I helped launch recently. The community is for the small but quickly growing group of snowboarding enthusiasts in the Dallas area. Thus, the site is appropriately called Dallas Snowboarders.

Here's our banner:

As I said, there's not much unique about it. We used PHPBB as our forum software with a few extra mods for a photo album, calendar, and ability to post video. We stacked Wordpress up front for a very basic content management system. We didn't take the time to integrate the authentication databases so we turned comments off. We'd rather keep user interaction inside the forums right now anyway.

An important topic came up while working on the site... Wordpress and PHPBB are almost exactly the same concepts in software with a slightly different delivery. What PHPBB would consider to be a thread, Wordpress would call a blog entry. Someone posts a topic, other people reply. The differences are slight, but have a heavy impact. On the blog, posts are always ordered by the date of the original post, not replies. On a forum, threads are bumped to the top when new replies appear. Blogs are usually setup with only one or just a few people making new posts. Forums usually allow anyone to start a new thread.

Given that the data management for both pieces of software are so close to the same... We talked a long time about building one piece of software that did both. It would be very easy to use PHPBB as backend software for a blog. Create a forum where only select users can start new threads, write some new scripts to display the content in a blog style format, and you've got a blog. Once you get this setup, you can create unique forums for every user that wants a personal blog.

I'm curious if this is a good way to create two conceptual interfaces for the same data.

Anyway, I digress. DallasSnowboarders.com is one of the first communities I've been involved in launching in a while. The last time I checked, we were up to 14 users. We announced the site 4 days ago. I hope it catches on, I'm eager to meet local boarders.

Of Course You're Being Sold - What did you think would happen?

When Flickr sold to Yahoo, some users were concerned about the fate of their community. More recently, Google bought YouTube and now users are complaining:

"Since it was the `people' that made YouTube, why aren't they being paid billions?"

What did you think was going on? That some how people with lots of investment money just wanted to provide you with free bandwidth and tools to put your media online for fun?

Anyway, I got a huge laugh out of that quote... I said it before, so I'll say it again... communities are big business.