Clever Hamster

Energizing organizational Facebook pages

Here is a summary of the advice from the interview, Pimping out your Facebook Page, in which Building43 gets help from Caitlin O’Farrell, the program manager for consumer marketing at Facebook. Tips:

• Optimize the profile image: 200 wide x 600 high (tall and thin); combine/stack images for greatest visual impact
• Encourage members to post photos of each events and then tag themselves and others in them, which distributes the photos onto many walls.
• Rebrand a white label Facebook application for a custom promotional campaign, so that your members can add it to their own pages.
• Customize the page, if possible: using FBML (Facebook Markup Language) to add tabs takes some coding skills. Example: Add Video and Photo tabs (application to import Flickr content).
• Try to get as much information into your Facebook page as possible, rather than just linking off to another site; with 200 million FB users, far more folks will see and share your content.
• Follow specific FB pages that offer guidance, tutorials on presence-building, and links to what other people are building: Facebook for Influencers, Facebook Marketing Solutions, and Nonprofits on Facebook.
• Engagement is best achieved through calls to action, contests, things that require reader response.
• Go to the administrator's view for your page and use View Insights, to learn who your active visitors are, where they're coming from, how many there are, and what postings generated the most buzz.
• Look for numbers of those dropping your page: it can indicate that postings are too frequent.
• Video is the best way to authenticate your page, to convince folks of your identity and integrity.

Tools to check web accessibility

Testing and correcting accessibility problems throughout the development process is all about tools. Here are tips I've collected:

• Support the fewest back versions of JAWS you can: just as with browsers, supporting earlier versions makes development infinitely harder. Current version is 11.
• Fangs is a free screen-reader emulator, a Firefox plugin: http://www.standards-schmandards.com/projects/fangs/
• Study Juicy Studio (http://juicystudio.com/) for Javascript accessibility fixes: they've figured out tons.
• Use Juicy Studio accessibility plugins and toolbar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/320.>
• WebAIM now has an accessibility toolbar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6720.>
• There's also a free Web Accessibility Toolbar for IE: http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat-ie-about.html

Finding more tools:

• WAI lists of all manner of accessibility tools (many of which are commercial): http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/Overview.html
• SitePoint wrote up "12 Tools to Check Your Site's Accessibility": http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/07/06/site-accessibility-tools/

InnoTech Austin 2009: Oct 29

October 29, 2009 is the 6th annual InnoTech Austin event, held at the Austin Convention Center. It's a one-day blast of talks, demonstrations, summits, and expo, which is a steal at $35.

With its focus on innovation, this conference is a handy barometer for business and technology trends. This year, there is new attention being paid to start-ups ("Austin Startup Row"), and the Beta Summit will present live demos of six of the hottest technologies being developed in Austin. The Software track this year is emphasizing social networking and cost-savings, and there are sessions on Windows 7 and Google Wave.

Austin Membership Organization Leadership Series

Last week I attended, on behalf of STC Austin, the first of three seminars in the Austin Membership Organization Leadership Series, the goal of which is to bring together Austin area member-based organizations for mutual help in sharing strategy, cost-savings, and resources. There's little debate that we all need to improve how we grow membership, retain members, differentiate ourselves, engage members, and leverage social media; the idea here is that we can do all these things better if we don't go it alone.
The overall goal of the series seems to be to get Austin organizations to network directly for their mutual success. The first seminar offered a vision of how organizations fit into Austin's context by ATX Equation (ATX = Austin, TX), a group that is trying to define what makes (and, by so doing, to help make) Austin special and unique. The slides were presented by Heather McKissick and Bijoy Goswami (Bootstrap Austin). My takeaways:

• Combining the unexpected creates hip "coolness"; creating anticipation is key.
• Among metro areas, Austin is extremely young (median age).
• Paul Graham's concept of city "ambitions": Boston: be smart; Silicon Valley: be powerful; NYC: be rich; LA: be famous; DC: be an insider; Austin: (proposed) know/express/be yourself
• "Progression Of Economic Value", lowest to highest: Commodities > Goods > Services > Experiences > Transformations. So, increasing value to members is about creating transformative (career-changing?) experiences.
• Elements of Experience, per magicians: Pledge (engagement) > Turn (conflict) > Prestige (resolution/surprise)
• Social vs. Market Exchange: Focus on the relational (connection, reputation) versus monetary membership benefits
• From table conversations: Common problem for established societies is that employers are no longer paying dues and that the membership is graying -- too few young people joining.

Agile2009 trip report: Where it's heading

Since I didn't get to attend Agile2009 in Chicago last month, I'm glad for this trip report:

http://blog.outsystems.com/aboutagility/2009/08/agile2009-trip-report.html

These are the take-aways I'm noodling about:

• Agile is live: Most that were just studying it from the sidelines are now hip-deep in active projects.
• Agile is established: Participation suggests that it's huge, growing, and profoundly global.
• Sprint durations have dramatically collapsed, to a standard of 2 weeks (which feels optimal, per my experience).
• Agile no longer means small, co-located teams: large, distributed teams are common. For better or for worse, face-to-face is a luxury that few shops can support.
• Metrics must focus on progress; measuring people is fundamentally destructive.

New Kindle to change college reading

The Kindle DX is coming.
It seems squarely focused on winning the collegiate market, with news of textbook publishing partnerships and deals with universities to distribute the new Kindles. The much larger screen and storage capacity seem exactly calculated to support the needs of textbook content, which typically include graphics, tables, and diagrams. Given that students hate having to buy textbooks, lug them around, see them go out of date, endure the mark-ups of others, and sell them back, I see this move as almost inevitable. The Kindle offers a dynamic reading experience, where students can highlight and bookmark as they go, hypertext around, and research terms and concepts on the fly. Add to that the fact that the Kindle can enlarge text for the visually impaired and can "read" material to you via headphones, and a much larger population is now served with the same publication (although Kindle supports true audiobook formats as well). I foresee lighter backpacks everywhere in the near future.

Update: Competitors are jumping into the market, so the horses are out of the gate!

Creating a personal data cloud

I'm deeply, shamelessly in love with virtualization at work -- from any machine (and I used bunches), I remote desktop into various terminal servers and workstations, all without installing anything locally, dealing with VPN, etc. So, I've been wondering: Is anyone offering the same for non-business usage? What I want is to retire my home PC in favor of sessions on a managed server somewhere (with backups and maintenance, etc.) and access all of my files and media and work from any internet-accessible laptop or device I happen to have handy.
Until the day that type of service matures for individuals and their many peripherals, I'm using a system that at least keeps my personal data all in sync and safely backed up. I'm using Dropbox (https://www.getdropbox.com/) across all of my home machines (and I use bunches), with this twist: I change the default My Documents location to correspond to the default My Dropbox folder, which achieves the effect of working off a single hard drive in the sky, if not a single remote server. On Windows XP, you can redirect the My Documents location pretty easily: right-click, select Properties, select Move, and Apply. Because Windows keeps My Documents separated by user profile, I use this method even on shared machines.

Role of Open Source in public sector

Our family made a road trip to west Texas for the Open Source Symposium, held on Saturday April 26 at Angelo State University, in San Angelo. Its mission is to introduce open source to those working in college environments, which was why UT Austin was pleased to have my husband, Adam attend and report back to them. STC Austin's own Janet Swisher presented on how to participate in OS projects.
Adam's "ah-ha" from the symposium was the good fit between open source and the public sector, for this reason: non-salary rewards. Public sector organizations (universities, agencies, etc.) are highly constrained in how they can compensate their technical talent; the way budgeting works, money is far, far harder to free up than staff time.
As a result, open source projects become compelling not only for the promise of freedom from commercial and proprietary solutions but also for the opportunity to commit technical talent to its development. Their participation steers the projects toward your organizational goals (an important sell to management), but also this: it offers your technical elite the chance to experience choice technologies, build their own status and credibility, and work with top-tier team members, across the field and the world. Sounds like a retention strategy and thus a very practical and powerful advantage to me.