It's 2008 and I've done almost nothing in terms of blogging lately. Not because I don't have things to share but rather because I've been slammed with side projects so work has been work and the side projects have taken over almost all of my spare/free/nap/sleep time I have.
The first of my two projects that have kept me so busy lately has been my book, I started logging my experiences here in Germany when I arrived and I put together the first 5 years or so into a "blog" style book. The book is finished and we are adding in some photos now as my wife suggested that not everyone will know what a Döner is so it made sense to add in some photos. We are almost done and then the book will be made available for print as well as eBook.
Wife made the cover and I like it so that's what you'll soon be able to purchase here soon. We are hoping to have pictures done by the weekend and so that means by the end of the weekend the book will be available. They recommend before going pubic I order a copy myself for a real once through but I've not decided on that part yet or not.
The other side project that has me very busy lately is @eventtrack, this is a program that started as more of a thought to solve a problem and has expanded to solve a pain point currently wild in the "social media" space. There are simply too many choices for everyone to "share" their social objects. Enter @eventtrack which started inside of Twitter and has since expanded to capture and catalog (it links to the original object) all of the items associated with a "tag". So many of the Web 2.0 applications take advantage of the idea of tagging and that of RSS feeds or full blown API's and @eventtrack does that it takes the idea of tags and pulls things together around a given tag.
I've currently connected to several services and am constantly looking for others.
Connecting these services through the use of the "tag" brings about a catalog, a collective stream of related material from sites, blogs and videos to pictures and even presentations.
@eventtrack has started to take on a life lately and a few things are in the works. Second Life "text" chat integration is in the works and almost out of alpha and an API of sorts is almost ready including RSS feeds for all events, daily overall stats and those of each event. I also have in beta a new "subscription" area, yes subscription means money but at the moment it's not that far. I have a couple of folks setup to test. The subscription service will give you the option of creating a "sponsored" event from @eventtrack directly as well as moderating the stream and view the stats of who is watching the event (land, language, browser type, types of objects, etc.) Currently the subscription is looking to be:
With of course the ability to renew for more events later on, basically you have the open event slots forever as well as access to the data; each level of course offering a discount per event ;-) but this is something I'm still in plan/thinking mode about and currently no idea of when/if it will go live (public).
I need to think faster though, recently @eventtrack has been hitting the blogs a bit more, Jake over at Oracle AppsLab picks up on one of the side effects or at least one of the not mentioned uses of @eventtrack. He contacted me and asked what I thought and if I had a problem with them giving it a go actually we talked about another use but this one came up as well. So now @eventtrack is being tried as "collective product stream", which has also encouraged me to enable for multiple events per user from Twitter which I will begin working on in the next few days. I will enable this one as a "sponsored" event once Tim signs up so he can then moderate the stream and ensure no unrelated material is there. A problem with "tags", anyone can use them and sometimes some have multiple meanings.
Tim, has also published (jumping the collective stream to over 100 views)
All of this resulting in comments over on Steve's blog, Steve Clayton: Geek In Disguise : Apple, Oracle, Microsoft and Social Navigating pointing him to @eventtrack as well. A few other MSFT folks gave it a try end of last year and were quite happy with it DDD6 and CLD07 both ran quite well. In fact DDD6 pulled together the following nice collective.
# Peeps: 7
# Active: 0
# Shouts: 58
# Pics: 155
# Links: 27
# Videos: 2
# Prezzo: 0
7 people on Twitter shared their thoughts (58 of them), pictures, links and even some videos were all picked up.
Again I am on the lookout for other services people might be using that offer both "tagging" and the ability to pull an RSS or JSON feed specific to a tag or keyword via search. I don't copy the data (other than Twitter which I save the 140 characters) I simply link to the data and save some basic info.
Part of my motivation behind the expansion of this to where it stands now is the fact that,
I also love the aspect of how services like Twitter are bringing people together and giving them the chance to engage and share,
There are just so many services out there it's becoming almost impossible to know where to look. Twitter is one I would says tends to sit "on top", but not at the uppermost level because micro-blogging like many of the other services has multiple choices. But still micro-blogging in itself sits there helping to collect objects together.
Enter @eventtrack, a first of it's kind I think - life streaming but only streaming the moment of interest. I might share a moment with some people and afterwards decide that I have little in common with them beyond that moment thus @eventtrack helps me to share that moment as completely as possible.
There are similar services that aggregate multiple types of objects as well but none so I think in the way that @eventtrack does, I'm biased though. It also means that sooner or later @eventtrack might get competition so I of course have a desire to push harder and faster to ensure it stays unique and a step above the rest. For that though your help is needed, usage and of course suggestions on what to link to are very important to take this to the next level.
Still not sure about it? Why?
My current "use case" as it stands and that together with this blog should give a clearer idea of the current direction of this project.
I have several surprises in store for the future but those will need to stay that way for a bit while I work through my thoughts, ideas and hesitations. This I guess is the closet I've been to a "startup" and it's quite a new and interesting situation a bit scary, a bit exciting and quite stressful.
Stress of course is something that has resulted in more back pain from a collapsed disc I suffered a year ago and so more of that ever vanishing spare time is now being dedicated to ensure that health is a priority and being taken care of as well and most importantly family is being taken care.
Still I move forward, either I am a glutton for punishment but I think it might be more that "I believe in this project!"
Link to original post
The first of my two projects that have kept me so busy lately has been my book, I started logging my experiences here in Germany when I arrived and I put together the first 5 years or so into a "blog" style book. The book is finished and we are adding in some photos now as my wife suggested that not everyone will know what a Döner is so it made sense to add in some photos. We are almost done and then the book will be made available for print as well as eBook.
Wife made the cover and I like it so that's what you'll soon be able to purchase here soon. We are hoping to have pictures done by the weekend and so that means by the end of the weekend the book will be available. They recommend before going pubic I order a copy myself for a real once through but I've not decided on that part yet or not.
The other side project that has me very busy lately is @eventtrack, this is a program that started as more of a thought to solve a problem and has expanded to solve a pain point currently wild in the "social media" space. There are simply too many choices for everyone to "share" their social objects. Enter @eventtrack which started inside of Twitter and has since expanded to capture and catalog (it links to the original object) all of the items associated with a "tag". So many of the Web 2.0 applications take advantage of the idea of tagging and that of RSS feeds or full blown API's and @eventtrack does that it takes the idea of tags and pulls things together around a given tag.
I've currently connected to several services and am constantly looking for others.
Connecting these services through the use of the "tag" brings about a catalog, a collective stream of related material from sites, blogs and videos to pictures and even presentations.
@eventtrack has started to take on a life lately and a few things are in the works. Second Life "text" chat integration is in the works and almost out of alpha and an API of sorts is almost ready including RSS feeds for all events, daily overall stats and those of each event. I also have in beta a new "subscription" area, yes subscription means money but at the moment it's not that far. I have a couple of folks setup to test. The subscription service will give you the option of creating a "sponsored" event from @eventtrack directly as well as moderating the stream and view the stats of who is watching the event (land, language, browser type, types of objects, etc.) Currently the subscription is looking to be:
- Normal - 3 events
- Gold - 10 events
- Platinum - 25 events
- Radioactive - 60 events
With of course the ability to renew for more events later on, basically you have the open event slots forever as well as access to the data; each level of course offering a discount per event ;-) but this is something I'm still in plan/thinking mode about and currently no idea of when/if it will go live (public).
I need to think faster though, recently @eventtrack has been hitting the blogs a bit more, Jake over at Oracle AppsLab picks up on one of the side effects or at least one of the not mentioned uses of @eventtrack. He contacted me and asked what I thought and if I had a problem with them giving it a go actually we talked about another use but this one came up as well. So now @eventtrack is being tried as "collective product stream", which has also encouraged me to enable for multiple events per user from Twitter which I will begin working on in the next few days. I will enable this one as a "sponsored" event once Tim signs up so he can then moderate the stream and ensure no unrelated material is there. A problem with "tags", anyone can use them and sometimes some have multiple meanings.
"Speaking of which, Tim Hall, Andy C and Tim Dexter have all recently jumped (back) in to Twitter. Twitter's signal/noise problem has been getting worse for me, so I'm going to start an experiment with Craig's eventtrack. Because eventtrack aggregates all the tweets of anyone who sends the start command for a keyword, it could be used to create a stream of tweets.
For example, assume Tim wanted to aggregate and publish the tweets of his BIP pals on Twitter. They would each tweet @eventtrack start*bip to turn on tracking and then tweet as normal. Eventtrack then would aggregate all the tweets (on and off topic). To step out of the stream, all you would need to do is tweet the @eventtrack stop*bip command.
The advantage here is that eventtrack publishes a feed of all the tweets; check out the oow stream, which is still going, albeit not on purpose. Craig also aggregates photos, videos, presentations, events and bookmarks for a given 'tag'. Up to now, eventtrack has been used for events (natch), but a never-ending stream of tweets on a given product could be a great support and information resource. Dan blogged a sweet example of this earlier this week."
(Via Oracle AppsLab » Oracle-Related Facebook Apps and Twitter Updates.)
Tim, has also published (jumping the collective stream to over 100 views)
"The tweets are pushed out in one long stream, so how to find the BIP content in all the noise? Twitter does support the concept of you being able to 'follow' people so you could build up a loose knit group that could follow each other and tweet about BIP - but the casual reader would be lost in that stream of tweets, we need some way to tag the BIP messages. Use 'eventtrack' says Jake - this little nugget of gold comes from as a side project from Craig at SAP, yes that SAP. It was developed to allow folks to register an event that everyone thats interested can tweet to. This opens up specific content to the casual reader via a browser or RSS. Cool!
So, after Jake ran it by Craig, I have setup a 'bippers' event - now this is not an event as such, we are abusing eventtrack a little to bring together the BIP community and allow us to share 'tagged' content that anyone can access for a longer term than a typical 'event.'
If you are tweeting already or are interested in starting and want to share read on. First you need to register with Twitter - very straightforward, everything you need can be found on their server at http://www.twitter.com - once you're signed up you can start tweeting to the web collective. You can do this in a mutitude of ways on your PC/laptop. The twitter site offers a page to send your messages or there is a mass of clients and plugins that you can install. Im currently using 'twhirl', you can even 'tweet' from your phone.
The next step is to enable the 'bippers' part of the puzzle. Just tweet '@eventtrack start*bippers' on your twittering device of choice and eventtrack will 'tag' your messages so that they hit the 'bippers' stream. Now, there is one drawback here - all of your messages will be picked up by eventtrack and 'tagged' whether they be BIP related or not. You can turn off the tagging by sending '@eventtrack stop*bippers' at any time, thats going to get annoying very quickly. Personally I think its small price to pay to get a BIP stream - I dont mind if you want to share your dinner plans with the group."
(Via Oracle BI Publisher Blog.)
All of this resulting in comments over on Steve's blog, Steve Clayton: Geek In Disguise : Apple, Oracle, Microsoft and Social Navigating pointing him to @eventtrack as well. A few other MSFT folks gave it a try end of last year and were quite happy with it DDD6 and CLD07 both ran quite well. In fact DDD6 pulled together the following nice collective.
# Peeps: 7
# Active: 0
# Shouts: 58
# Pics: 155
# Links: 27
# Videos: 2
# Prezzo: 0
7 people on Twitter shared their thoughts (58 of them), pictures, links and even some videos were all picked up.
Again I am on the lookout for other services people might be using that offer both "tagging" and the ability to pull an RSS or JSON feed specific to a tag or keyword via search. I don't copy the data (other than Twitter which I save the 140 characters) I simply link to the data and save some basic info.
Part of my motivation behind the expansion of this to where it stands now is the fact that,
"I have a secret desire to build something that proves to be quite useful to a lot of people and at the same times lets everyone participate without having to change what tools/services they already use - hence the passion and effort I'm putting into @eventtrack, I simply hate being unable to participate because 'only this' or 'only that' works with it. They are called API's for a reason." (Via Craig's Rantings....)
I also love the aspect of how services like Twitter are bringing people together and giving them the chance to engage and share,
"Today I received notification someone called @yojibee is now following my updates on Twitter, the 140 character social networking service. As a general rule I go and check out anyone that is following me. That is not to say I follow everyone that follows me: Twitter is asymmetrical as well as generally asynchronous. But yojibee's short bio really caught my eye:
into it all, having fun being a busy bee .. mostly consulting â€" a blend of SAP/social media/marketing"
(Via James Governor's Monkchips » The new SAP: evidence in the Twitter cloud.)
There are just so many services out there it's becoming almost impossible to know where to look. Twitter is one I would says tends to sit "on top", but not at the uppermost level because micro-blogging like many of the other services has multiple choices. But still micro-blogging in itself sits there helping to collect objects together.
Enter @eventtrack, a first of it's kind I think - life streaming but only streaming the moment of interest. I might share a moment with some people and afterwards decide that I have little in common with them beyond that moment thus @eventtrack helps me to share that moment as completely as possible.
There are similar services that aggregate multiple types of objects as well but none so I think in the way that @eventtrack does, I'm biased though. It also means that sooner or later @eventtrack might get competition so I of course have a desire to push harder and faster to ensure it stays unique and a step above the rest. For that though your help is needed, usage and of course suggestions on what to link to are very important to take this to the next level.
Still not sure about it? Why?
Quite simply this is your very own way to discover those sharing the same moment as you.
The idea behind @eventtrack is quite simple really. Normally at an event with lots of people you may never know who is there, or who is watching , following and interested in it.
Enter @eventtrack - you now have a central location where anyone can follow the collective stream of information - be it videos, photos, links, blogs, or conversation (Twitter is there, we are exploring others options). So now all of a sudden you instantly see others associated with the event through the use of a simple and single tag, a keyword that brings everyone together. Perhaps many of these people you may not be interested in afterwards but while at the event you are sharing a moment together so their input is relevant to you at the time.
The second aspect of @eventtrack is what it brings value to the people organizing the event. @eventtrack tracks each event (RSS or Web) and tracks basic information (browser, OS, country, browser langauges, etc.) - which @eventtrack will soon be able to offer as a downloadable report through a subscription service - giving event organizers and idea of how many links, blogs, images and videos around their event is being organized as well as what people are saying about the event - all nicely put together with charts to give a visual indicator of activity over the course of the event.
For the users who register on @eventtrack they are able to define tags for themseleves and are alerted (via user account on the site) of events taking places that might be of interest to them - expanding awareness of individual events.
For the users, they all don't need to use one of the services were are already connected to (yours not there? contact us!) and simply tag the photos the same way. So users are free to continue using their photo and video sharing sites of choice but still be able to involved and thus complete the collective stream of what is happening around that shared moment.
My current "use case" as it stands and that together with this blog should give a clearer idea of the current direction of this project.
I have several surprises in store for the future but those will need to stay that way for a bit while I work through my thoughts, ideas and hesitations. This I guess is the closet I've been to a "startup" and it's quite a new and interesting situation a bit scary, a bit exciting and quite stressful.
Stress of course is something that has resulted in more back pain from a collapsed disc I suffered a year ago and so more of that ever vanishing spare time is now being dedicated to ensure that health is a priority and being taken care of as well and most importantly family is being taken care.
Still I move forward, either I am a glutton for punishment but I think it might be more that "I believe in this project!"
Link to original post
