B. Mann Consulting

I wrote a bit about Jungle Disk in passing. I am using it for personal archive and backup. It's been working great, and I decided to try out the Workgroup edition: you add additional accounts and can set permissions on different buckets / folders for each person / account. At $2 / account / month for the workgroup functionality, it's quite good.

Except, you have to get people to install and setup Jungle Disk (the download link for Workgroup is a bit hidden). And ... it's not Dropbox. I tried it for a bit, and it works as advertised, but you a) have to keep paying on a monthly basis and b) you have to do a fair bit of handholding and account management.

Then I tried Dropbox today. Easy. Amazing. Amazingly easy. And it does shared files, too. Share a folder, add some email addresses to invite people, and you've got synced folders / documents on multiple computers. The public stuff is actually easier ... there is a default folder called Public, and files in there you can right click on and get a publicly accessible link directly to.

Update: CAUTION! -- I didn't realize this, but according to Michael Tsai, Dropbox doesn't support resource forks on Mac OS X -- "If you use Dropbox, resource forks disappear, packages turn into folders and can no longer be double-clicked, etc. ". What this means is that some files will have issues. Basic files like Word docs and binaries shouldn't run into issues, but for applications, potentially Keynote files and others, your files may not work correctly any more.

Currently, there is a 2GB storage limit to the accounts (free). This also sits on Amazon S3, although on their account, not yours like Jungle Disk. Dropbox is offering a paid upgrade to 50GB of space for $9.99 / month, or $99 / year. Hmmm....2GB still seems enough for now...

I'll stick with the Jungle Disk Desktop edition for my backups and long term archives. I've paid the $20 for the Desktop edition and I can backup and store as much as I want on my own Amazon S3 account.

For multi user sharing of documents, Dropbox is just so much simpler. The low end pricing is cheaper than Jungle Disk (free!) while the high end of 50GB is cheaper with Jungle Disk (0.15/GB/month with S3 x 50GB = $7.50).

I think we're going to continue to see great innovation in better ways to share / sync / collaborate on files, in part driven by cheap, reliable, API-driven storage options like S3. Epd.io is a local Vancouver startup to keep an eye on...

I just created an account on oDesk and, frankly, have fallen down a rabbit hole.

Of course, Drupal was the vector once again: I had Daryl leave a comment, with his username linking to a trends page showing Drupal jobs on oDesk. This intrigued me, so I dug into the system a little more.

For starters, there is a Drupal 5 test. I haven't taken it yet, but I fully intend to kick the tires on it. The testing system is run through Expert Rating. I want to explore this more, maybe even to the degree of developing tests for modules and components ... this feels like a useful function that could kickstart a lot more items.

Finishing up the Drupal bits, it looks like the oDesk Community section is Drupal-powered. The oConomy section is particularly interesting -- you can see that $48M worth of work have flowed through oDesk, and that the odometer is part of a custom module that they've developed (view source shows you all this).

The Global Provider Map has tons of interesting information -- Canada has 3253 Providers, with an average hourly rate of $24.92, and average feedback score of 4.29. And then there's Iceland -- 24 providers, $50.19 an hour average. Where the hell is Bouvet Island? The Maldives?! 11 providers...

Do work, get paid. I'm excited to think about how this can be used by startups especially, or to prototype startup ideas. Or, for that matter, working with global communities to build their knowledge worker populations. Hey Evan, it's time to bring the world to to Whitehorse, and vice versa.

I could go on to describe some details on how this works -- a crazy desktop app that monitors your "Activity" levels at the computer, takes screenshots and webcam shots (yes, webcam shots -- wearing pants is required), and creates your time log. But, I'm really just scratching the surface myself as I familiarize myself with the system. Has anyone out there used oDesk before? As a programmer or a buyer? I'm interested in feedback from people that have actually gone through the process...

The rabbit hole? I can truly run and interact with teams, companies, and businesses all over the world. This is the ad hoc network of professionals with varying sets of skills that I've been thinking about since a bunch of university friends and I sat down in 1995 and thought about online pizza ordering for Toronto.

Update: OK, I took the Drupal test and got 92%. Not bad, and I was impressed by the depth of some of the questions.

Akoha is a cool new "online gaming" startup based out of Montreal. I've traded emails with the founder, Austin Hill, for quite some time, and finally met him in person at the Banff Venture Forum at the beginning of October. At beers in Calgary, I got handed 30+ decks to recruit more people to the Akoha Beta.

Here's the quote from Akoha's release at TechCrunch 50, and the accompanying video:

Games for the Oprah crowd is how Akoha co-founder Austin Hill describes his online gaming system. The system uses “mission cards” that friends pass to each other along with a mission i.e. give someone a book or buy someone a meal. You then register that card and perform the mission. Using clever social networking tools you can see how your missions affect others, compete against friends, and generally do nice things for people.

So, if you're interested in experimenting with Akoha, come by on Wednesday night, November 5th. I only have a limited number of decks, so please do sign up on Upcoming if you're planning on coming.

Interesting Vancouver is interesting! I bought a ticket some time ago, but as it turns out, a good friend is leaving for South America and it conflicts with his going away party.

If you're interested in going to Interesting Vancouver and would like to use my ticket, email or Twitter me.

Update the ticket ended up going to Ducky Sherwood (who also happens to be looking for a programming job here in Vancouver, especially at a startup). I expect a blog report from her in exchange, and in the meantime, check out Dustin Sacks' excellent recap ... makes me sorry to have missed it...

Coming up next Monday, October 6th at the Raincity Studios offices is a Knight News Challenge info and prep session.What is the Knight News Challenge?

Want to win funding for a cool online community project?
The Knight News Challenge is in the third year of a program that gives away $5MM a year to innovative online projects that support online news, community discourse and social media in specific local communities. Come to this meet up to find out how to apply, share ideas, and get a chance to talk to KNC evangelists.

This is an interactive, hands on discussion designed to give you the knowledge to apply with a great innovative idea. All ages welcomed.

The press release from the beginning of September details the program. $5M is available for "digital media experiments to innovate journalism".

Long time blog friend Susan Mernit is running these prep sessions -- Seattle and San Francisco are the next two places on the list. If you're accepted past the first stage, you can enter the News Challenge Garage for further mentoring and feedback.

A lot of code ends up being built in Drupal for this yearly challenge. Knight took notice of this, and also has the Drupal-specific Knight Drupal Initiative (KDI).

This is a really good way to get some funding to try a true R&D-style idea, which might just be the beginning of a whole new startup. If you have ideas about the future of news, come to the Raincity Studios offices to find out more next week. (and yes, please sign up on Upcoming or Facebook).

Have you seen the new OnSugar.com hosted blogging platform? It's Drupal powered, built by the fashion / pop culture publishing empire that is Sugar, Inc. (CrunchBase link for background info).

In many ways, it is what I have often been waiting for. Drupal is a very good multi user system. This is not an install profile, spawning sites, nor is it as simple as "one" site. It is a very interesting implementation of a hosted blogging platform.

I would like people to look at it, and test it, and think about it, because this is the kind of stuff you can build with Drupal. You can theme the node forms, you can add AJAX popups / overlays, and you can add innovative features while stripping out the knob twiddling options for the person that just uses the thing.

There are two features that I see as truly innovative. The first is the image insertion.

You've got your images, and upload and image...and then you've got "Search Getty". You know, the largest commercial database of images online. And then ShopStyle and FashionWeek, two other Sugar properties. Wow: a shared platform where any one user has easy access to images across the system. That's fantastic! I had previousy done some mockups of a Flickr Search button for TinyMCE -- one can easily see OnSugar expanding the images to include (or adding the functionality to the other insertion buttons? top links? top videos? quote the top blog posts, and so on...). A mass system built on sharing (or at least shared access), imagine that.

The second innovative feature is the themes. Well, sort of. Themes and control for end users is HARD. There are a list of shared themes that you can either use directly, or that you can copy. The copy part is magic. You can copy a theme, rename it, edit it, and then even share it back out again to have someone else use (or use as a base for their own copy/edit/share). There's that sharing again! The theme layer seems really comprehensive. That is, you can edit CSS, the page outline, post outlines, and even comment outlines. Seems a bit hard for the average end user, but it IS cut and paste simple ... so some people will build cool things, and others will cut and paste it into their own creations. The template reference file shows you the snippets you can use. Is this Smarty, or did they build their own engine?

Anyway, I hope you kick the tires on the system, and think about what it means. My co-founder at Bootup, Danny, met with Brian briefly while down in San Francisco, and I look forward to continuing the conversation. You can find me at http://boris.onsugar.com, and you'll find some other Drupal folks like walkah kicking the tires as well.

NowPublic just released a MostPublic Index for Vancouver that lists 20 people ... and I come in at #3. The background for how the list is calculated is here, with the rough text below:

NowPublic’s formula gauges influence and “publicness” across four categories, including:

• Online Visibility
• Presence on User-Generated Content and Social Networking Sites
• Interactivity and Accessibility
• The “R” Factor: Presence on Microblogging Platforms (Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.)

What do I think of this? Well, Darren (as the #1 spot) got interviewed for the article in the Vancouver Sun and pointed out longevity: Darren figures he's been blogging since about 2002. I'm in that range, with my permanent presence occuring around that time, although I think I seriously started posting online about a year or so earlier, trying different systems (the very first post on this site is dated 2002-11-09).

But wait, what do I think of this?

Well, it just so happens that I still write this blog for me. Most of the topics here are about tech, or pointing at things I want to highlight or tell people about. People still come up to me in person and say "sometimes I don't know what you're talking about" -- this is my personal scratchpad, and it's for me. I've tried back and forth to be more personal here, but I tend not to be. I'm giving another kick at that can on a LiveJournal site and I write recipes and talk about cooking on my FoodLikeThat.com site.

There are comments on the Vancouver Sun and Techvibes in the vein of "these people have no lives" and so on.

No problem. I do this thing for me, and it sometimes has effects like connecting me to people that I would not otherwise have met. I'd like to do more exploratory writing and thinking here, but I've been finding it hard. I'll keep writing - or not writing - as I please. I hope that some of you find it interesting at times, and I enjoy any comments and interaction that I do get.

Congrats to the other MostPublic'rs. See you online...

Phil Wolff of Skype Journal contacted me (over Skype, of course!) earlier in the week to ask about posting something for Skype's 5 year anniversary. I didn't get to it earlier in the week, but when I was chatting with him I had some ideas around Skype and the identity space that I've continued to think about. So, here is a belated birthday wish to Skype. Check out Dan York's post for a lot of the same items that I'll be mentioning here.

I was really annoyed with Skype when it launched. Annoyed because I had spent the previous 5 years working in the VoIP standards space at Nortel, having seen MEGACO and MGCP fall by the wayside so that my favourite, SIP, could reign supreme. And here was Skype, with its proprietary protocol. That just worked. And nary a cool SIP service to be seen (other than the Gizmo Project, which is still the only cool SIP project around...).

I wouldn't say that Skype is an integral part of my work flow today (lots of people use it much more heavily than I for all of their voice communications). But it is one of the communications channels that I do need to have open most of the time, primarily for group IM chats. 3 years ago at Gnomedex, we started a Skype backchannel group chat, and it's still running today -- the "Vancouver Swarm". For various groups and companies, multi user chats are just an add to channel and bookmark away. Oh, and of course, the way that chat history "flows" to you if you've been offline for a while: persistent chat!

And I'm still not talking about the audio and video features :P

My dad is a heavy user of Skype, especially Skype Video. Whether it's sitting down and "sharing" a coffee with my sister in Italy, checking in with relatives in Germany, or showing off the snow up at the cabin at Deka Lake, he uses Skype all the time. He continues to "evangelize" Skype to people he comes across.

I started by mentioning the concept of Skype and identity. With sites like Twitter and other social networks and services exploding into general consciousness and discussion, I'm (still) thinking about identity.

Each of these services are an identity space. Systems like Facebook are rooted in your real identity -- you use your actual name and such -- while others like Twitter have you using nicknames or shortened forms. These nicknames become your identity within those spaces. Phil Windley talks a bit about this namespace federation -- in response to Craig Burton ho humming it. Yes, there is a friction with federating so that a single namespace is very valuable.

Are phone numbers, especially international phone numbers, a single or federated namespace?

In the past, our phone number was a large part of our identity. e.g. my parents have had the same home phone number for 29 years. I still remember the last 4 digits of my childhood friend's phone number (the whole island has the same 6 beginning ones, so the "local" identity space only needed the last four...). Now, less so, in part defensively. I give out my Vonage VoIP number which rings all the numbers I need it to. Of course, when I then switch to text messaging, my cell number shows up (and shows up as "unknown" for those that know me by my home number). Traveling between countries and switching SIM cards, you have multiple numbers.

Skype is a portable voice identity. It doesn't care what country you are in or what SIM card you happen to have inserted. It is Internet voice. One could argue that federation and open standards are needed (and I would agree ...), but no one else has reached the same "just works" level of functionality. Here's hoping that we get at least another 5 years of innovation and disruption out of the Skype juggernaut. Happy birthday!

Dave Olson caved and got an iPhone, so the Nokia N78 he was testing for Roland has now made its way to me (my previous phone has been the Nokia N80). Thanks to both for making it available to me.

Here is the Nokia N78 on Nokia's website for full tech specs etc.

First reactions:

• much slimmer! almost half the height of the N80
• not a slider ... I had gotten used to the convenient / easy lock and unlock that the slider activates. Guess I'll be download AutoLock again.
• wow, the keypad on this is incredibly annoying! bye bye high speed texting ... I feel like my fat German peasant fingers have to use the edge of my fingernail to use them
• speaker and sound is awesome. Regular headphone jack, yay! FM tuner, very cool, I'm going to make a lot of use of this. Dedicated volume buttons, also great. There is much more music functionality to explore here...
• comes with FM antenna headset thingie with remote volume and playback controls, as I said, music quality is very good, although the ear plugs are slightly small for my ears
• lightly tapping the back button seems to not close the app you are in, but bring you back to the menu. The menu / app switching seems easier, but at the same time confusing. Why not make the funny asterisk symbol the same as the Nokia "menu" button that is on all their phones?
• the camera is much fancier -- only slightly more megapixels, but all sorts of autofocus features that make it feel more like a "real" digital camera; the flash is three times the size of the N80's
• video much improved -- now at 640x480, with excellent focus and sound quality
• USB data connection -- yay! not using standard USB mini connection -- boo!
• can the USB connection also do charging? don't know, it did come with a charger
• comes with a 2GB even-smaller-format memory card (I've given up on remembering the names for different formats ... I have three or four different "mobile" memory cards, plus SD for my camera...)
• there is Share Online which lets you connect to Flickr, Ovi, and some other stuff out of the box. Not quite set up yet.
• GPS! Haven't wandered around outside to test yet, but first impression is that it is very slow to get a GPS lock. After installing Google Maps app, the cell tower only location put me in the middle of Howe Sound (I'm on Bowen at the moment) -- I actually still consider that pretty good. Definitely going to be doing more experimenting with this.

My other "first reaction" is that it's clear that I've been a Symbian S60 user for a long time: there are certain apps that I always download / setup. I'll be cataloging those in another post, in part for my own use so I can go to one page and quickly download all the apps that I want on every phone. Like my experience in setting up a fresh install / new Mac, this would seem to indicate a certain level of maturity in S60. Or perhaps a clear line of what they will include and won't with the base OS, so there are distinct areas where third party apps flourish.

For those on the Mac, the N78 is not supported by default. You'll need to download the N78 iSync plugin from Nokia Europe (thanks to Carniumology404 for being the first hit for that).

Back to installing apps...

Just as Drupalcon Szeged is kicking off, I'll be talking at this coming week's Net Tuesday event, "How Drupal can help you save the world!". Boy, that Joe Solomon really does like catchy titles :P

I'll be kicking things off with an intro to Drupal. I'll talk a bit about open source and how it relates / meshes with the mission of non profits. Or rather, why the heck aren't you using your non profit DNA to work together with other organizations?! I'll also do lots of my "question" tactics -- asking people in the room to think about their strategy, their use of the web, their use of open source software, and their approach to engagement online.

Following me will be the folks from Fearless City and Agentic talking about some case studies.

The event is this Tuesday, August 26th, at 5:30pm at WorkSpace. The Meetup event is now closed, but you can show your attendance on Facebook or upcoming.

P.S. yeah, I said I wasn't really going to post event stuff here much anymore, putting most of it on the Bootup Labs blog. Well, this is an event that I'm doing "solo" as it were. And never fear, I'm going to post over on Bootup about the Expression Engine Roadshow.