Difference between revisions of "DailyBuzz"

Saturday, 1 December 2007

• Wikipedia announces compatibility with CC-BY-SA, Woo-Hoo! - Ray | talk
  • Wikimedia Board Resolution
  • on Lessig's blog
  • It seems this is a huge step in the right direction because it allows both GFDL and CC to change to be compatible with each other. And, I don't think it's saying yet that Wikipedia will become CC-BY-SA. I'm hopeful that step will also happen when it's possible. TedErnst (talk) 20:45, 1 December 2007 (PST)

• Possibility of still a problem since AboutUs is still licensed different than Wikipedia. --Simon | talk 21:27, 2 December 2007 (PST)

I think that's true, Simon, but at the same time, the reason AboutUs is dual licensed is because of the incompatibilities between GFDL and CC-BY-SA, so if those two licenses are changing to be compatible with each other, perhaps AboutUs can also change to be compatibile with Wikipedia. TedErnst (talk) 08:33, 3 December 2007 (PST)

• Wikipedia will be moving to GFDL 2.0 (which if agreed by the Wikimedia community will be changed to be crossover with CreativeCommons); but, AboutUs has to stay at GFDL 1.2 per stated in AboutUs copyrights page. AboutUs & Wikipedia will never work together with the current plan. --207.6.253.72 10:23, 3 December 2007 (PST)

Friday, 30 November 2007

• Interesting domain data from Verisign.com: Growing at 31 percent over the same quarter last year, the third quarter of 2007 ended with a total base of 146 million domain name registrations worldwide across all of the Top Level Domain Names (TLDs) read more. - Ray | talk
• Join the Operations Team in celebrating another productive work "iteration". Most notably, we (John) created a very clear plan to create job descriptions and goals for all AboutUs employees. Stay tuned for more action from the ops team! Julia

Wednesday 28 November 2007

• Per our consensus on the CommunityPermissions, we just replaced the "peerrev" user group with SiteReviewer and added a new group called AutoPatroller. This is an exciting change (well, it's exciting to me) that allows us to see a person that's making good edits (you're not a spammer or vandal) and "trust" them for future edits, meaning we don't have to review them to see if they're spam. This should save our PeerReviewers quite a bit of time, and allow more energy to go to looking at all the cool ways people are using the wiki. -- TedErnst (talk)
  • Yeah on both changes/additions! -- TakKendrick 22:33, 28 November 2007 (PST)
• Check out the sweet review of AboutUs from KillerStartups.com, made my Wednesday. Kasey

Tuesday 27 November 2007

• I think the initial user page creation needs to change category monthly, similar to welcoming, with date before Category:New to Community - what do others think? ~~ MarkDilley
  • I love it! TedErnst (talk) 15:31, 27 November 2007 (PST)
  • Yes Mark, I think it's a great idea. It'll help us keep track of people joining AboutUs in any given month, just like we've been able to do with Category:Welcome to AboutUs!. Asad | *~talk~* 20:43, 27 November 2007 (PST)
  • I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this Mark. Can you expound? What original page creation? Bot pages? Human pages? Or am I missing something here. For the record, I still have no idea what this means. -- Tak sorry about that Tak - I added another word in Mark's statement TedErnst (talk)
    • Thanks Ted, but let me try to be more clear: What does "initial user page creation" mean? Are we talking about a bot? Or the template that loads when a user creates a new page? Or is this some sort of organizational page/category/template I'm unaware of? Sorry if I'm being dense, I'm still feel like there's something to this conversation that I'm missing. -- Tak
      • When a person signs up for an account, the bot uses MediaWiki:InitialPersonalPage to create their PersonalPage. -- TedErnst (talk)
• Vartan was bold and made tabs for the WikiTour - which were removed due to a prior decision to make the tour as simple as possible. However, one of the people who helped with that decision, likes the tabs. What do you think? ~~ MarkDilley
• We've ramped up our focus on fixing bugs during this iteration and a point of confusion has emerged. We have two error logs that developers track, the ErrorLog page and the Apache error logs on our servers. I'd like to remove the confusion by renaming the ErrorLog page on about us to something like AboutUsBugs. I've started down this road and welcome any help making the cutover, or suggestions for other names if this one doesn't work for you. Brandon CS Sanders
• This morning in the Portland office we're meeting to see how the ContentTeam and CommunityStaff can be working together better. Then this afternoon, we're re-convening for the InsideAdvantage process again. TedErnst (talk)
• In response to AsadButt's question about the DailyBuzz yesterday, I envision it working similarly to Community News, WelcomingToWiki, Unreviewed Edits and CommunityLog - does that make sense? ~~ MarkDilley
  • Yes it does. Thanks Mark. Asad | *~talk~* 23:12, 27 November 2007 (PST)
• There is also some interesting work happening in CommunityDefinitions. ~~ MarkDilley
• What seems like a fairly significant change in CommunityPermissions is seemingly headed towards consensus. Check it out and weigh in? TedErnst (talk)

Monday 26, November 2007

• I was excited this quarter at PSU to introduce my class to wiki when the task at hand screamed for it. On this page we are posting our individual reports and editing them to create our final collaborative report, all on AboutUs. Don't you love what you can do (and do better or more easily) with wiki? Kristina | **talk**
  • Awesome! - Ray | talk
• In an effort to keep things current, I dropped the DailyFun link from "useful links" (it's linked above). An idea that came up today in the Portland office was to use the CommunityPortal as the place where only the current day's DailyBuzz lives. If we do that, we'd change the sidebar link from DailyBuzz to CommunityPortal. Opinions? TedErnst (talk)
  • I like the idea. Obed Suhail
  • If only the current day's dailybuzz, is posted on the CommunityPortal, what about the rest of it? Will it be done away with? Or will it be archived on the current DailyBuzz page? I don't feel strongly for this move - chiefly because I like DailyBuzz - but I understand that it might be good from the perspective of more people joining the community. Asad | *~talk~* 01:00, 27 November 2007 (PST)
  • I'm concerned that the more advanced formatting may be a barrier for new people to edit and also that DailyBuzz/Fun is working and we're moving deck chairs? - Ray | talk
• 
  In an effort to help answer the WhoWeAre and WhoWeAreServing questions, we've been reading "The Inside Advantage" by Robert Bloom. He is a speaker I heard at the Gazelles.com conference in Las Vegas. What's neat about his approach is that he describes the most important questions a business must answer and further, he gives a very straight forward way to arrive at those answers. We spent 4+ hours today working through the first section "Who" and will be continuing the discussion tomorrow. Hopefully we'll have some good results to report soon. - Ray | talk
• Check out the different page title options for our web pages: OnMessageSearchResults - input welcomed! MarkDilley

Friday 23, November 2007

• Check out the proposal at CommunityPermissions and add any thoughts you may have. ~~ MarkDilley

Wednesday 21, November 2007

• You may be surprised, I was, to notice that the section edits are now images: - if you see residual errors, try clearing out your cache. If that doesn't work leave a note in ErrorLog. ~~ MarkDilley
  • That's part of BigCallToEdit, which unfortunately isn't very well spelled-out. TedErnst (talk)

Tuesday 20, November 2007

• The DevTeam released an image map extension yesterday and Vartan has already made the AboutUsValues tag-cloud clickable (notice that each value in the image now is a link to it's own page)! TedErnst (talk)
  • Great work! Obed Suhail

Monday 19, November 2007

• The AboutUs Homepage has undergone a redesign. As with everything wiki, things are bound to change. But, hey, it's a start; and one we've needed for a while. Many thanks go out to the whole AboutUs team, but especially to Stephen and Julia, for expertise and cracking the whip, respectively. As always, if you see errors or bugs please post them on the ErrorLog. --VinhNguyen 20:27, 19 November 2007 (PST)
• RealEstateTestBlog.com is curious about AboutUs, and is linking to RyanWardRealEstate.com -- TedErnst (talk)
• Void-Star.net is worried about, AboutUs. ~~ MarkDilley

Sunday 18, November 2007

• Chris has a great image about the groan zone - the space between identifying a problem and solving it. ~~ MarkDilley
• From WyrdWeb.eu comes a great graph regarding how people get involved. ~~ MarkDilley
• Our friends at NeedMoreDesigns.com posted some pictures from Halloween. ~~ MarkDilley
• Ward attended GOSCON.org last month I think. ~~ MarkDilley

Saturday 17, November 2007

• Mich.In Michin playing on the net, links to AboutUs and friends. MarkDilley
• Kenneth Hood take interest in AboutUs! Nice when we are understood :-) MarkDilley

Thursday 15, November 2007

• The Operations Team had a successful iteration, completing 6 tasks and making significant headway on 8 others. We completed a review of the employee handbook, updating portions to more reflect how we actually operate and changes that have occurred over the last year. John
• Article from ComputerWorld.co.nz on laws being drafted using wiki and another from News.com on Obama's campaign using blogs and wikis (thanks for the links SorceressJade!) -- RayKing

Tuesday 13, November 2007

From left to right (Mohsen, Sanwal, Raza, Ghufran, Mark, Saad, Mehrunnissa, Ward, Obed, Fatima, Mubin, Asad, Arshia, Arif, Arsalan, Asma, Laik, Ali, Saliha, Ali, Ray, Hassan, and Umar who was the photographer in the first photo)

• In an effort to improve communication - here is a task that, if folks could be so kind as to update with missing information, and do testing. The idea is that every single person have a headset and knowledge on how to make Skype work and a positive testing. SkypeConnections. ~~ MarkDilley

Monday 12, November 2007

• A weblog post from JTPratt.com that shows how great we are :-) by thinking of us in the grey hat arena - meaning, at first look people think we are scammers, but at second look we are shed in good light! ~~ MarkDilley

Saturday 10, November 2007

• In a meeting at the Lahore office with content team and community staff, we discussed the idea of blurring work between the two groups. The general consensus is this:
  • Things better done together
    • PeerReview of new edits, with IdeaBartering in IRC of edits
    • IdeaBartering of work done seperately
  • Things better done seperately
    • Specific content - like LASIK and PortlandTech; and CommunityBuilding - but in both cases, we need to figure out how to do IdeaBartering.

• Some folks might like to have a foot in both areas - making blurring part of their focus.

So for trial, Lahore content and community groups will pair on PeerReviewing new edits daily for the first hour of work of the day, with developers pairing on the first day of the week. I will talk to folks in Portland about trying something similarly structured there. ~~ MarkDilley

Friday 09, November 2007

• Kudos to Stephen for finishing a beta version of the intersect tool. We can now intersect 2+ category tags to create a dynamic list of the intersected set! Check out any subpage of PortlandTech to see this tool in action. Thanks for the good work Stephen! ChrisBabson

Wednesday 07, November 2007

• Content Team update: We've finished a beta version of the PortlandTech portal so feel free to browse around that to get a feel for things. To repeat: this is BETA! The basic framework is present, but we're still working out some kinks with the intersect tool and steadily moving through all of the pages in Category:PortlandTech to make sure they're all perfect and tagged correctly. Over the next weeks we'll be prettying this up and finishing with all of the building block work on the individual pages. Thanks to the content folks in Lahore for their great work so far, and to Tak for helping with the organization and overall look and feel. More soon! ChrisBabson
• Happy 13th Birthday Vartan! TedErnst | talk
• Article on WikiPedia, Citizendium and VeroPedia via Wired.com

Tuesday 06, November 2007

• Outcomes from October2007.2 CommunityPlan (16-31 October): Three "one and done" tasks were accomplished this iteration, UniveralWikiEditButton regroup (see UWEB), RecentChangesCamp 2008 Support Injection (see RCC2008), and Implement Email Ticket System (nothing to see here, but for those of us answering emails sent to , and , this one is really fantastic - thanks Simon!). We also made significant progress on WhoWeAre:Stage2:ImprovingTheDocument (see WhoWeAre) and New Community Hires (see Jobs), but neither are yet DoneDone, so we're rolling them over to the next iteration.

In our recurring tasks, some highlights include welcoming 1037 new wiki editors with a new way of keeping track, with a category by month, we peer reviewed about 50,000 edits!, ...

• Click here to view the Ignite Portland Poster!

Monday 05, November 2007

• I turned on the "NoFollow" property for all external links as part of a test to learn more about the "bad neighborhood" effect that google doesn't like. We plan to turn "NoFollow" back off at the end of the week. Brandon CS Sanders

Sunday 04, November 2007

Saturday 03, November 2007

• I'm hosting the first Chicago WikiWednesday this week, and because I'm on the web for that, I got an invite to the first Lunch20.com in Chicago on Friday. Maybe AboutUs could host one in Portland, to give it a wiki feel? Maybe even do it as a WikiWednesday combo? TedErnst | talk 21:33, 3 November 2007 (PDT)

AboutUs Dashboard widgets made with the new Safari Web-Clip capability

• Recent press release from Brooks Lindsay on DebatePedia, looks like a great project! - Ray | talk

• Mac Leopard users can make Dashboard widgets by using the new Web-Clip feature in Safari. This is a great way to keep track of who is on AboutUs and what they are editing (see picture). Just go to our Front Page, click Safari's Web-Clip icon, select the Currently On-Line box, then click Add to see your Dashboard spring to life with a brand-new widget. - Ward 14:41, 3 November 2007 (PDT)
  • Neat! Is that automatic, or did it require code? 75.148.54.233
    • No code required. You just need the latest Mac OS X "Leopard" installed. Launch the Safari web-browser and there's a new "clip" icon in the top menu bar. You then select the area of the web page you want to do and click "Add". The clipped piece will then appear in your Apple dashboard in a few minutes. We'll be doing up a weblog post with screenshots later today in the next couple of days if you need more instructions. -- TakKendrick 5 November 2007
      • Weblog post just added. -- TakKendrick 12:20, 8 November 2007 (PST)
  • One other cool thing about this, is that even though you create the clips in Safari, they are active in your default browser, so if you click a link in the widget, it opens in Firefox, or whichever browser you prefer. TedErnst | talk 12:30, 5 November 2007 (PST)

Friday 02, November 2007

• AboutUs is mentioned, Ray King quoted in an Oregonian article by Mike Rogoway. (Note: the Oregonian aggessively archives their stories away from public access, so this link may not work after 90 days.) -- Llywrch 08:23, 2 November 2007 (PDT)
• Acknowledgments by AltarOfOrion.com in Thank you List for creating publicity and building fan community via Portal:The Underground Act: Lahore -- Mehrunnisa
• The LaptopContribution consensus poll is done! Obed

Thursday 01, November 2007

• The Operations Team completed several milestone tasks this past iteration, including the Health Insurance Plan Selection, Shades for the Portland office, VentureNorthwestWikiPage and most importantly completed the Convertible Note Extension. John
  • The Content Team also had a good "iteration" (which is just a fancy way of saying last half of the month). Among tasks complete are the Venture Northwest 2007 page (in correlation with the operations team) and filling out content for all of the related participants, sponsors and venture firms attending the conference. We also made significant progress on the PortlandTech Build Out as well as several LASIK portal listings. Cheers to all that have helped on these tasks over the past couple of weeks. -- TakKendrick
• Having talked it over with several folks, the beginning of a ActivityLog for community has started at the CommunityPortal. What do you think of it? ~~ MarkDilley
• Food for thought:About the Caricature Portal, it would be a good idea if all of you took out a few seconds to go over Portal:Art Talk and perhaps, caricature artists over here can contribute to it or add their own links over there as well! -- User:Salihawaqar

Wednesday 31, October 2007

• Cool thing to do with location and edits from Mashable.com - WikipediaVision as the example. ~~ MarkDilley

Monday 29, October 2007

• WikiPrayer from WritingWiki.org is fabulous. ~~ MarkDilley

Friday 26, October 2007

• Web 2.0 Web submission form via Terry-Freedman.org.uk ~~ MarkDilley

Thursday 25, October 2007

• Ward is mentioned in this weblog post Collaboratively Testing Enterprise Management Webware at Snurb.info
  • Ted is in this post What Makes Wikis Work? also via Snurb.info ~~ MarkDilley

Tuesday 23, October 2007

• Interesting article via Webware.com on human reviews being included in search results. Perhaps an angle for AboutUs? ~~ ChrisBabson
• Linking as a crime, hum... TVLinks Shut Down, Owner Arrested! via ZeroPaid.com. ~~ MarkDilley
• Interesting use of AboutUs from and equally interesting someone at Wikipedia: link search ~~ MarkDilley
  • This appears to be part of the "spamlink" template on Wikipedia. Have a look at "Template:Spamlink" there. -- Llywrch 10:07, 24 October 2007 (PDT)
• ScienceDaily.com has a great article on the Power Of Altruism Confirmed In Anonymous Contributions. Thanks Ward. ~~ MarkDilley
• For those of you in the Portland area, Danny O'Brien, International Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will be giving a talk entitled "Copyfight! Are you a copyright criminal?" tomorrow, Wednesday, October 24th 7:30 at Reed College, Vollum Lecture Hall. Come out, hear something intelligent about the file sharing issue for once, and meet some cool local wiki people, too. :-) Get directions to Reed here or feel free to contact me about questions. Dmcdevit 03:10, 23 October 2007 (PDT)

Friday 19, October 2008

• We'll be participating in Venture Northwest 2007 on Friday November 2nd. Kudos to Tak for making a great page for it! - Ray | talk
• Article regarding W.L. Gore & Associates ~~ Julia, MarkDilley
• Just published a new weblog post called Universal Wiki Edit Button version 0.1: a work-in-progress. [Check out the front page!] TedErnst | talk
• Please join the DevelopmentTeam in celebrating the tasks that got to DoneDone during the October 1-15 iteration. We're especially pleased that the final details for the NewSkin have been worked out and we've reached DoneDone on this huge effort. The following items are now DoneDone: NewSkinProject, Further Log Analysis, BlockedTalkPageAccess, Social Media Tags. During the October 16-31 iteration we're focusing on cleaning up lingering issues that are affecting our velocity. This includes streamlining the development and deployment process, fixing bugs, and knocking off the huge WhoisRefresh project that has been on our queue for several months. Check out what we're doing, pitch in if you like, or leave us some commentary in the discussion sections on each task! Brandon CS Sanders

Thursday 18, October 2007

• An update from the content team: we're working hard to perfect the 300+ articles we've amassed in Category:PortlandTech as the building blocks for the PortlandTech Portal. Check out this period's task to get an idea of how we're developing the pages and the overall organization. As the Lahore team runs through these articles Tak and Chris will be focusing on the development of the portal page. We should have something up for everyone to see by the end of the current period! Check out what we're doing, pitch in if you like, or leave us some commentary in the discussion sections on the task! ChrisBabson

Wednesday 17, October 2007

• I just created a new template: Template:InternalExternalLink (yeah, it's not a great name feel free to change it) which will allow people to easily and elegantly create both internal and external links on their WikiPages, so that {{InternalExternalLink|Google.com}} looks like this:

{{{2}}} (visit)

Feel free to mess around with it, I used the same lingo as the "go directly to site" on the thumbnail box for consistency, but I'm not sure it's the best line either. TakKendrick | Talk 23:25, 17 October 2007 (PDT)

• • Thanks to TedErnst for a minor tweak to make it even more efficient/elegant!

Tuesday 16 October 2007

• Site was down roughly between 2-3PM (PST) today due to a problem with the router at our provider. Sorry for the inconvenience. - Ray | talk
• Smile-inducing response to a welcome message here. KristinaWeis | **talk** 12:54, 16 October 2007 (PDT)
  • (Sidenote: Thanks to Kasey, John, Mark, Ted and everyone we have a new simpler and more efficient alternative to the WelcomingPeople Log: a category tag to place along with the message on the welcomee's talk page... check it out at Category:Welcome to AboutUs!.)
• Exciting thought about using this site! Hours of operation: 6am - 10pm. - needs some tweaking, like time zone, but I think it is interesting. ~~ MarkDilley
• May have heard that the location for the 2008 Wikimania Conference has been selected: Alexandria, Egypt. What you may not have heard is that since some folks feel that it would be prohibitively expensive to travel there, efforts are also underway to convene a Wikimania Conference of the Americas in Atlanta, Georgia. -- Llywrch 08:58, 16 October 2007 (PDT)

Monday 15 Oct 2007

Gerard Meszaros explores tool ideas with John Dunham as other workshop attendees help out

• Last week I had the pleasure of participating in the Agile Alliance sponsored Functional Testing Tools Visioning Workshop held here in Portland. The blog posts are beginning to come out. One that caught my attention is Brian Marick's telling of a concept John Dunham has dubbed Crowdware. In short, Brian captures tests from pictures, and I capture pictures from tests. If we combined the two parts and added some community support we might, as Brian concludes, "entice users to collaborate in application development the way wikis entice readers to collaborate in the creation of, say, an encyclopedia." -- Ward 16:53, 15 October 2007 (PDT)

Sunday 14 Oct 2007

• Vartan Christopher Simonian is rocking the last few days! He has created some cool templates, input boxes and added images to TheWikiWay pages! Also exciting is his venture into automatically translating AboutUs pages, Google Translate! Bryan Daugherty should like that idea - he was thinking about it a few weeks ago. :-) Check out his great work! ~~ MarkDilley
• Also of note is the great work Rfc1394 is doing with upper level domain names. ~~ MarkDilley

Tuesday 09 October 2007

• Category:MarkDilleyWantsThisCategory is a category I created to re-add categories from the cull bot. Add any that you want! ~~ MarkDilley

Friday 05 October 2007

• A couple more recent weblog posts: in spanish from JavierAroche.com (translation attempt from Google) and a reference in Bryan Alexander's Infocult. ~~ MarkDilley
• With great help from the AboutUs Community and Staff, The Evolution of Thought Institute (ETI) has eclipsed over 100,000 Visitors! This can be directly attributed to the constructive editing of an AboutUs Domain Page! So for those who look to improve the traffic to their websites, blogs and products, start editing today! Bryan Daugherty

Wednesday 03 October 2007

• An older Caydel.com blog post mentioning AboutUs.org: Trusted Wikipedia and AboutUs.org Links! TedErnst | talk

Tuesday 2 October 2007

• Everyone is invited to take a look at potential Featured WikiPages and add comments and suggestions to improve the individual WikiPages and their nominations. I added a bunch of back-logged nominations today (there's just a few more to get to tomorrow and we'll be all caught up). -- TakKendrick

• As part of buttoning up the NewSkinProject the DevelopmentTeam is about to flip the switch that converts everyone to the new skin the next time they log in. Goodbye old skin! We're also cleaning out the errors that have been reported on the NewSkin page. If you're still having problems using a feature, or if something doesn't look right in your browser, please add it to the NewSkin page.

• 
  Astute AboutUs visitors will notice the dev team added a new feature today. The AddThis.com "Bookmark" pull down menu allows users to bookmark pages with Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and a variety of other social bookmark/tagging sites. As always, if you're experiencing problems with the AddThis widget (or really any other problems on AboutUs), let us know in the ErrorLog. -- TakKendrick
  • This is awesome! Great work guys! ChrisBabson

• Please join the DevelopmentTeam in celebrating the tasks that got to DoneDone during the Sept 16-30 iteration. We're especially pleased that the Lahore developers contributed 4 out of 5 DoneDone tasks. Well done team! The following are the items that made it to DoneDone: CAPTCHA For LinkSpam, AdSense for Search, Working Topsoil Wiki, CAPTCHA for Add Spam, UberPatrolFixes. This iteration we are focusing on early closures of tasks.

for previous content, see September 2007