Difference between revisions of "DailyBuzz"

For people that are logged in to share information.

Template:CommunityPortal/Archive Welcome to Community Portal. This page operates under the theory that "A wiki, like a ship, or other transportation mode, needs a log of activities." Use this as a general place for members of the active AboutUs community to share conversation and just say, "Hey I saw this thing, and I think the AboutUs community would get a kick out of it." If you're looking for a places to make suggestions, comments, ask questions, go to the ContactUs page.

What defines "community"? Well, if you're here then you're part of the community. If you already have a log-in, go ahead and share your thoughts. New users will need to create an account first.

• If you have a specific idea, try adding it here Features and Fun, Ease of Use and Function Brainstorming There are standing pages for the community to collaborate and create running lists of ideas on.

23-Mar-2007

• Ever wonder why those McDonalds Chicken McNuggets are so gosh darn tastey? Check out AlNyeTheLawyerGuy.com's latest blog post on what goes into making one of the most popular staples of the fast food diet. Also check out The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan at Powells.com

• Are you passionate about increased levels of participation? See RiskParticipation
• Is there an easy way for someone to point their entire domain to a wiki page? in aboutus.org or somewhere? g

22-Mar-2007

• AdBrite.com is our next expiremental step on how to become a self sustaining website. Look for ads in the next day and leave comments on the AdBrite.com page about what your experience with the ads are.
• Just created a new DidYouKnow page for common "advanced" wiki techniques that many users might not know about. The idea is that every once in awhile, we'll push one of these tips to the home page as a quick community learning opportunity. I've populated DidYouKnow with just a few things to begin with, but please feel free to add things you find helpful or tricks for common problems we might be seeing in Recent Changes. Also, if you think there's a tip that needs to be written, throw a note there as well. -- [[TakKendrick]
• Today is World Water Day as designated in 1992 by the UN General Assembly. MarkDilley

21-Mar-2007

• After a month or two of hard work AboutUs has developed its first portal! The LASIK Portal began as an organizational experiment and quickly morphed into an exploration into, and demonstration of, the possibilities of the AboutUs wiki. The initial idea was to synthesize encyclopedic information and commercial listings into a richly interlinked framework. Building off of a generic portal concept, we set to work researching the LASIK procedure and building out pages on its history, the surgery itself, after care, equipment, etc. Once these general informational sections were complete, we built out a location-specific segment of the portal for Manhattan (sections for other cities are being built as we speak). To make our resource truly unique, we personally interviewed every available LASIK center in Manhattan to garnish as much information as humanly possible. After filling out individual profiles for each provider on their respective AboutUs pages, we migrated the information into a comparative matrix for all LASIK centers in Manhattan.

Now that we’ve accumulated what we believe to be a substantive resource, we’d like to open it to the community. Come visit, read, and—most importantly—EDIT! We’re going to continue to build out individual cities within the LASIK Portal, so we’ll keep you posted on that. Ultimately, we hope that LASIK can serve as an example on how to build out other portals. Many other portals! Let us know if you want to help! -- ChrisBabson

• 527 Pine is available for $8-$12 square foot, 4600sq ft. Nice space, front windows and skylights. Anyone interested in looking at it in the next day or two? MarkDilley
• Good post over at the DomainTools.com weblog: Stealing domain name research. So while it is important to get the right TLD, it is also important to be careful when researching any domain name. Really folks, this is real estate type behavior. MarkDilley

20-Mar-2007

• Starting Thoughts On Messaging - Ray
• Owners of Topix.net pay a cool $1 Million for Topix.com, goes to show the importance of securing the .com name before building a significant venture. Read more here. - Ray
• From the devs: The custom tag that we use to hide email addresses from potential spammers has been slightly changed. You can now use the custom tag "hiddenemail" in addition to "graphic" to replace the text of your email address with an image. User:Jacob

• Will the "graphic" one still work? Will it stop working? Why the change/addition? --Simon | talk 14:44, 20 March 2007 (PDT)

• Quick note: "hiddenemail" was decidedly too long to type out a billion times a day. It has been changed to just "email". To answer you question, Simon, the "graphic" tag will not be going away any time soon. The motivation for the change was to make the purpose of the tag a little clearer. User:Jacob

• Want to learn more about Presidential candidates Dennis Kucinich or Mitt Romney, but don't know where to start? You may want to check out YouTube's You Choose '08 as a way to view Presidential ads from each candidate.

19-Mar-2007

• Here's blog post by ChrisGoupil.com (hist).

Aboutus.org, new way to find websites?

I've seen this someone before on AboutUs? -- Simon | talk 18:10, 19 March 2007 (PDT)

• Making The case for case - Ray
• TheRegister.co.uk

Truths, half-truths and Wikipedia

"Wikipedia comes in for a fair amount of criticism these days from El Reg and other publications, but I can't help wondering if we're missing the real point regarding its status as an encyclopedia. Most of the arguments hinge on its accuracy, or lack of it. But if our criteria for an encyclopedia is a guarantee of 100 per cent accuracy, then there are no encyclopaedias now, and there never have been. So is Wikipedia an encylopedia, and, if not, can it ever be one? Reluctantly, I think the answer is a resounding 'no', and here's why."

• I see the MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning changed today! TedErnst
  • Yes! Brandon is making the changes now.

18-Mar-2007

• Homopolar Motor shown at SpikedHumor.com is pretty cool. This is a sister site of TorrentSpy.com. Ray
  • That's awesome! You can skip the video ads and view instructions for making the homopolar motor, as well as several other cool projects at DangerouslyFun.com Scott
• Rhoda, wiki caricaturist extraordinaire, added her pic to DigitalPainting.com and I added some of her work there as well. Ray
• The Better Automation For Groups and Communities BetterAutomation

17-Mar-2007

• Wiki officially became a part of the English language, as it has made its way into the latest update of the Oxford English Dictionary. OED Principal Editor of New Words, Graeme Diamond's comments on new words can be found here.

• TheRegister.co.uk Article here

The OED's principal editor of new words, Graeme Diamond, explained: "That the word acquired a new meaning is attributed to the fact that commenting and editing on internet websites became faster."

• ICANN today issued a formal notice of termination of RegisterFly.com's Registration Accreditation Agreement (RAA). Article here
• Hope this generates some engaging dialog for the community, Process Transparency

16-Mar-2007

• Here's a blog post [1] who wants to organize the Users that are creating all this "User Generated Content." She wants them to read the user agreements and only use sites that have good ones. I'm certain AboutUs will qualify once the license and tarballs are fully implemented. She registered WeTheUsers.org and WeTheUsers.com for this new effort. TedErnst

15-Mar-2007

• A synopsis from the AboutUs Quarterly Stakeholder Meeting: In order to really live our core idea of transparency, this meeting was open to the community to call in, ask questions via our AboutUs IRC Channel or just follow along with the meeting notes which were being updated in (nearly) real-time on the AboutUs wiki.
  • The meeting itself was attended by about 20 stakeholders, advisors and AboutUs staff, along with another 5 people or so following along via conference call, IRC and reading the real-time notes.
  • Ray King started the discussion after a brief intro with an update on the Thoughts On Vision and Thoughts On Licensing conversations happening on the AboutUs wiki, along with our general direction these conversations are leading us to.
  • MarkDilley and TakKendrick discussed a number of community building opportunities and successes, including the WelcomingPeople initiative as well as the CommunityPortal.
  • ChrisBabson, Kasey Goltra and Ian Schray talked about the movement towards organizing content into portals, starting with the LASIK Portal as our sample.
  • Brandon CS Sanders then discusses some of the development initiatives including User Interface ideas, the Topsoil model/plan for where we think AboutUs will evolve to (as well as how we're going to get there by extending MediaWiki).
  • The meeting concluded with a Q&A session, and a number of people went on to a casual conversation over dinner at Eleni's Estiatorio, which was really incredible Greek food. (Check out the meeting notes for more.)
• This afternoon we will have our quarterly stakeholder meeting. Notes will be available here for anyone who is interested. - Ray | talk (Click "talk" to leave me a message)

14-Mar-2007

• Have any comment on talk page etiquette? TedErnst
• I'm involved in a "review" of AboutUs.org over at omidyar.net [2]. All comments welcome! TedErnst
• LogoDesign
• Happy Birthday Albert Einstein

13-Mar-2007

• Rita Maloney has a song in a FAMECAST.com contest.. if you are a member there, please consider voting for her. I gave it a listen and like it. Rita Dain: In My Life
• Do we have a publically editable spam blacklist? Where is it? If not, could someone please add "bottle-in-ass" to whatever list we do have, wherever it is. That picture is truely offensive and I'm tired of reverting it. TedErnst

12-Mar-2007

• I've begun DesignerSearch to re-start our search for a designer. The goal is to have a designer hired by Monday, April 9th. For the first stage we need contributions to the what we are searching for part of the page. This stage will last until Thursday the 15th. Scott
• There's a current discussion about replacing the word 'Portal' in favor of something else. We'd like something more human/accessable/etc... Two terms that have come up are 'Topic' and 'Area'. Thoughts?
  • Wikipedia has the Village Pump. How 'bout the Water Cooler? TedErnst
    • I like The Water Cooler ... but it is probably trademarked or copyrighted. 8-) Ttocsmij 19:37, 14 March 2007 (PDT)
  • What about Community Roundtable? Might be too Arthurian, but I do love the legend/idea of a community space with no head and where all are equal. Maybe Community OpenSpace?-- TakKendrick
    • I like Community OpenSpace. Maybe shorten it down to OpenSpace or WikiSpace. Scott
    • Actually, on second thought I don't like using the word 'space' since it brings to mind MySpace.com, but I do like the Roundtable idea. Oh, and I was talking about all portals, not just the Community Portal. Scott
• Thoughts on Advertising --Simon | talk 10:28, 12 March 2007 (PDT)

11-Mar-2007

• Kudos and a hearty welcome to new user Mucbarney, who joined the community just a few days ago, but jumped in today when he saw a spam attack and started reverting the malicious edits. Thanks so much for the assist and welcome to AboutUs! In addition to your watchful eye, we hope you keep up the great edits you are doing to a few different German language articles like you did with Fahrschule-Christine-Timmer.de. -- TakKendrick

10-Mar-2007

• Bot problems? ptplus.com TedErnst
  • Hmm.. that would seem to be the case Ray
    • two possible explainations. 1 - there is a robots.txt blocking our bot. 1 - the lower case first letter issue. MarkDilley
      • PTPPLUS.com also TedErnst

09-Mar-2007

• Yipes, we were experiencing some technical difficulties and had to take the site down for almost a day. Very sorry for any inconvenience ... it is back up now Ray

07-Mar-2007

• I spoke with Kachina Katrina (EvolutionaryCenter.net) today, community organizer par excellence, and she told me she loves using AboutUs.org to look up contact information for various organizations! She said about 8 of 10 quick searches at AboutUs.org give her the mailing address and phone numbers she needs to get in touch with organizations for her work. Very cool! TedErnst
  • Great! Also moving your comment to the top to remain consistent (put new stuff on top) Ray
• Mark and I are attending SEMpdx Searchfest 07 today - Ray
• Check out Brandon's logo concepting here! (it's the top one in the 3rd round) Ray

06-Mar-2007

• Kaliya blogs about our bot gone bad TedErnst
• FYBIGMI.com finds us and blogs about it!
• Starting Thoughts on Adult Content - Ray
• RecentChanges patrol question --> Does anyone remember aproving these changes? [3] - I think they are a little spammy, see InternalLinkingGuide. Let me know what you think. Best, MarkDilley

• I saw those and made note of them for future discussion. I wasn't sure if there was the potential there for portal development or not. Drew

• Pics taken by Scott of the BikePortland.org friendly B&O building which is being renovated by Beam Development. Space will be available in July 2007 and we're considering it!

• Thanks Scott for the pics. The space was simply incredible, it's unfortunate everyone couldn't see for themselves. Great views, lots of light, a lot flexibility in space design, it was very cool. I could imagine AboutUs being very happy there myself. -- TakKendrick

05-Mar-2007

• A good weblog post by BlogAllAlong.com Another Wiki Wonder - yea! :-) MarkDilley
• Cool testimonial in my talk page today: "Thanks for your message it is really encouraging for us to come back to AboutUs to write about our domain subject because of the personal interaction." ( from IndiaForensic.com). Kudos to everyone who's been helping with welcoming everyone and just being generally available for help on IRC and through ContactUs -- TakKendrick
  • Do we have a page to put these type of notes in? I'm creating AboutUsTestimonials to put this in there, if there's already another page, feel free to move. -- TakKendrick
• To clarify that our site contains AboutUs wiki pages which are separate from the actual site, I'm thinking that we should add the text "AboutUs.org wiki page on:" before the domain name in the page title. For example the page for Microsoft.com would be titled "AboutUs.org wiki page on: Microsoft.com". Thoughts? Ray
  • Seems fine for Microsoft, but not so good for Intentional Networks. TedErnst
  • Yeah, I see that, we'd probably have to do some code to exclude Intentional Networks and similar sites. But the reality is that 99.9999% are in the other category right now. Ray
  • My first thought is that I don't like it. I'd rather take away noise than add more. It would also put "AboutUs wiki page on:" right next to the AboutUs logo, so AboutUs would be written out twice right next to each other.Scott
  • My first thought is no. I think the problem exists before people get here. I think that the meta data should be AboutUs wiki, so search results start to clarify that fact. If we must code the actual page, to solve the .0001% and the redundancy, it should be Google.com wiki page. my 2 cents. MarkDilley
  • Ok, I can agree with that, we should change the meta data, let's get that onto a card tomorrow Ray
  • I don't like it at all either. Another thing, if you title the page differently, won't you loose some SEO? User talk:Gregory

• Check this out! http://www.intentionalnetworks.com/ goes to IntentionalNetworks.com. TedErnst
  • That's sweet! Ray

04-Mar-2007

• Some of you might have noticed in Recent Changes we've got a whole new system for nominating new featured wiki pages. The gist of it is if you see an article, user page or whatever that you think should be a featured wiki page, there's a little tag you put in the discussion area that flags it. Community members are welcome to look at various pages that have been nominated and leave notes in the discussion on the worthiness of the nomination. Please keep comments constructive, eg. "Wow, this is great, how about adding a screenshot to really top it off," or "I love what you did with the testimonials. Great page!" For more information see the instructions.
• Some of us absolutely love the game of go and it made me so happy to see that JC back in New York edited the BrooklynGoClub.org page. I wonder if he even remembers me, but I used to play with those guys years ago. Ray

03-Mar-2007

• We're beginning to notice a few bad actors who are going through and deleting "Community Reviews" and "Discussion" items that they don't agree with. Obviously, these are easy to revert, but Drew and I also created a Template:ConflictNotice to put in the sections when people just aren't getting it. -- TakKendrick
  • I think the idea isn't to just use this notice at all times, but if we've reverted a few times and tried to open a dialog with the bad actors to no avail, it's a good way to flag the activity for the rest of the community as well.
  • Just improved the notice with input from Ray as well. --Tak
• Long but really cool fishy magic trick at Glumbert.com Ray | talk
• Say adiós to RegisterFly.com. eNom has dropped them as a domain reseller and ICANN has given them 10 days to correct their operational problems or lose their license. This comes after reports that former CEO spent company funds on liposuction and escort services.

02-Mar-2007

• Having Virtuous Vegan withdrawls? While not a perfect reproduction, for $3.95 New Seasons makes a pretty good substitue. Just order tomatoes, lettuce, red onion, olive tapenade and hummus on toasted bread. You can fax or email in orders as well. Scott
  • We ate at Bewon last night, yum yum Ray | talk
• Adding Community Features and Fun, Ease of Use and Function Brainstorming Pages for the community to collaborate and create running lists of ideas on. Gregory | talk
  • Greg - these are great ideas!! MarkDilley

01-Mar-2007

• Adding Thoughts On Licensing Ray | talk