Moving … Sort of (Update RSS)

I am moving off of hosted WordPress and onto my own hosted server this weekend.  If you come to FastWonderBlog.com directly to read this blog or subscribe to the Feedburner feed, you won’t notice a difference (hopefully). If you happen to be using the WordPress Feed, you will want to update it to the Feedburner feed.

Otherwise, expect a few hiccups. It is likely that something will go wrong, and the site will look strange for a while Rest assured that I know about it and am working on it!

Dr. Seuss 2.0

David Pogue at the New York Times wrote an interesting piece about naming in the web 2.0 era:

These days, startups take the lazy way out: they choose goofy-sounding nonsense words. They think they’re being clever by being unclever.

These are all actual Web sites that have hit the Web in the last year or so: Doostang. Wufoo. Bliin. Thoof. Bebo. Meebo. Meemo. Kudit. Raketu. Etelos. Iyogi. Oyogi. Qoop. Fark. Kijiji. Zixxo. Zoogmo.

These startups think that these names will stick in our minds because they’re so offbeat, but they’re wrong. Actually, all those twentysomething entrepreneurs are ensuring that we won’t remember them. Those names all blend together into a Dr. Seuss 2.0 jumble.

(Quote from David Pogue in the New York Times)

I will agree that some of these names are pretty ridiculous; however, naming in the online world today is pretty damn difficult. In the old days, people had to go through the hassle to register a business or trademark a name to prevent someone from using the same name. Now, any domain name squatter can spend a few dollars to register the URL to prevent people from using it.

As a result, all of the good names are “taken” and you have to get pretty creative to find a name that has an available URL and sounds good at the same time. We’ve been trying to name our non-profit for the past month, and just haven’t been able to come up with anything good. Maybe I’ll try browsing through Dr. Seuss books for inspiration. “And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo/And Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo/A Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!” (Quoted from If I Ran the Zoo). OK, maybe not.

Women Dominate Prestigious National Math and Science Contest

This is just really nice to see.

In a first for the prestigious Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology for U.S. high school students, girls walked away with top honors in both the individual and team categories.

…

Siemens Foundation President James Whaley says the percentage of girls entering the competition has increased each year; this year, 48% of the contestants were female. Eighty percent of this year’s competitors were from public schools, and one team of finalists consisted of home-schooled girls. Many of the schools whose students were represented also have close ties to nearby universities or research labs. “There are very few [high] schools that have the resources or labs to support this high level of research,” Whaley notes.

(Quote from Business Week)

I’m hoping a good percentage of them will head into math and science careers.

Props to Todd for sending me the link.

Community Presentation at PDX Web Innovators 12/5

If anyone wants to hang out, I will be leading a discussion about community at the December PDX Web Innovators meeting. I am bringing a couple of slides so that I have something to deviate from during the discussion. I’m hoping to spend no more than 5-10 minutes talking before we turn it into a discussion.

It starts at 7PM on 12/5 and is being hosted at ISITE. You can RSVP and get more details on Upcoming. I hope to see you there!

Corporate Blogging: What happens when you leave?

Om Malik posted today about how Motorola zapped the blog of the ex-CTO:

In the pre-blog world, when you left a company, they would escort you out of the building. Now they zap your blog. There are rumors that Motorola CTO Padmasree Warrior had resigned and was leaving the beleaguered mobile phone maker. Well, those rumors must be true. Suddenly all the entires on her popular blog have been zapped. And if you try and go there, you get redirected to a generic Motorola page.

Ouch.

However, when it comes to the web, deleting is merely an illusion. In the comments to the GigaOM post, Dave points about that the posts can still be found on web.archive.org.

When I left Intel, they kept all of my blog posts live. I even heard from a friend that my web 2.0 blog was still more popular than any other Intel Software blog for months after I left the company. Since it was generating traffic, there was no benefit in deleting it.

My gut feel is that removing ex-employee blogs is a rarity and is likely to hurt the company in the long run. Blogs provide valuable content and search engine juice for the company. In the vast majority of cases, keeping the blog live, but removing the employee’s access is probably the best way to handle it.

Other Fast Wonder Posts:

• Can the Average Person Get Rich Blogging?
• Everyone’s a Peer. Live with it.
• Macs, Twitter, Social Networks, and more at Defrag

Social Networks, Relationships, and “Friends”

I’ve been hearing quite a bit of discussion lately about how our relationships and the concept of “friends” are evolving as more people spend increasing amounts of time interacting with social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

In a post on the New York Times today, Alex Wright claims that

THE growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Second Life has thrust many of us into a new world where we make “friends” with people we barely know, scrawl messages on each other’s walls and project our identities using totem-like visual symbols.

…

The more time we spend “talking” online, the less time we spend, well, talking. And as we stretch the definition of a friend to encompass people we may never actually meet, will the strength of our real-world friendships grow diluted as we immerse ourselves in a lattice of hyperlinked “friends”?

Still, the sheer popularity of social networking seems to suggest that for many, these environments strike a deep, perhaps even primal chord. “They fulfill our need to be recognized as human beings, and as members of a community,” Dr. Strate says. “We all want to be told: You exist.”

(Quote from Alex Wright in the New York Times)

This implication that online interactions are somehow wrong and less valuable than face to face interactions bothers me a bit. Maybe my use of social networks is less typical due to my relatively frequent travel to conferences, but I find that I can keep in touch with people who I may only see a few times a year through these networks. It isn’t unusual for me to spend a significant amount of time with a few people during the week of a conference and then not see them for another 6 months until we run into each other at some other conference. Through Twitter and Facebook, we can keep in touch and continue to learn and keep up with each others’ current projects (work and personal). This helps us pick back up where we left off, but with insight into what each of us has been doing over the past 6 months.

I limit my Twitter feed (which is private) to people that I personally know, which allows me to Twitter more freely about where I am and what I’m doing. With Facebook, I am a little more open, accepting not only people who I know in the physical world, but also people where I have some online connection. Both of these services help me make stronger connections to the people that I know. I learn about local and remote tech events that my friends are attending and share information about community events that I am organizing. I get together with these people (the ones living or traveling in the Portland area) regularly for lunches, dinners, events, werewolf games, drinks, and more. I also learn quite a bit from these people through shared links, stories, posts, and ideas increasing my personal and work productivity as a direct result of the online interactions. I tend to think that I have stronger relationships as a result of these services, not weaker ones. These people are part of a broader community, and our participation in this online community is no less valuable because some of the interactions occur online.

I think that many people see these interactions happening online in social networks and assume that these are replacing our other interactions. In many cases, and in my case, my online interactions in social networks do not replace physical interactions with real people, they simply provide a way to augment the relationships I have with my friends.

Related Fast Wonder Posts:

• Macs, Twitter, Social Networks, and more at Defrag
• Everyone’s a Peer. Live with it.
• Ignite Portland Recap
• The Joy and Peril of Organizing Community Events