Rachel McCormack: Avionics and White Goods

The fact that I would have to reside in Philadelphia was a drawback. I paid to live in the dorms there because I did not want to have to brave the rough neighborhood that surrounded the school. Homicides occurred at the dormitory door. It might be best to consider having to live in Philadelphia as part of the cost of attending.

Universities are going through a tough time financially. People no longer have to attend them to get the credentials they need. People inside universities think they are selling an experience and that people are turning away from that. I think universities were always selling credentials.

They're just not the only place to get them any more.

(n.b., this essay was inspired by a conversation with Patricia Anderson)

A few general observations about Twitter's utility:

• It's been a great tool for keeping up with happenings around Ann Arbor. I've certainly learned a lot more about the people at Pure Visibility who are all on Twitter.
• I've managed to reach out to other people who I knew in past lives, and that has been fun.
• In the preceding two cases, I'd categorize everyone as part of the digerati. My personal trainer is not on twitter. None of my gym pals are on Twitter. The Dean of the school where I teach is not on Twitter, nor will he ever be.
• The chief question on my mind is the extent to which twitter's mainly digierati crowd can provide me with generally applicable information. One point in favor of twitter is that I have learned alot of things about Ann Arbor I never knew, and I've been here a decade. So, it's been at least a little worth it.

I am doing a global tag search on my MT4 blog, and the entries are coming out sorted by blog. Is there a way to get them sorted by entry date alone?

I had put in a lot of work customizing search templates and just wanted a solution that would give me entries sorted by date without reference to blog. The idea is that students will have their own blogs with a central aggregation blog holding a list of their entries and organizing them by tag. Tags are used to organize conversations that students carry on in their posts. Think of it as a sort of mini-Technorati without the SPAM. I call it the Learning Remix project

Well, I had a number of responses. Mark Carey suggested his fast search plug-in for MT4. It appears to work well and solves a number of problems. However, two things caused me to remove it from immediate consideration:

1. I would have had to learn some specifics about how this plug-in worked. They're not too bad and probably worth it if you want the functionality, but I'm really feeling under pressure with some deadlines.
2. I would have had to do some more, albeit perhaps light, template work.

After reviewing this plug-in, I suggested I would be willing to pay for a drop in plug-in that would just sort tagged entries without respect to which blog they were in. In enters Nemui Ailin. Nemui suggested he could develop a quick plug-in, would I be willing to pay $20. We agreed the price with the condition that the plug-in be released under the artistic license that Perl is released under.

I comssioned it for open source because I want others to be able to do the sort of thing I'm doing with Movable Type. I'll be making a page for the plug-in on the learningremix domain shortly. In the mean time, Nemui has made it available for download here.

BTW, Nemui is located in Germany. I paid him via paypal. Welcome to global sourcing on an individual scale. I'm highly satisfied. The whole experience once we got started took well under 24 hours.

Maybe the thing that irritates me the most is Sixapart's, the software maker's, utter failure to address the higher education market. Here's a text of a letter I sent to the product manager this morning:

All through this beta process, I had been anticipating *upgrading* my higher ed. classroom license to build and extend a blogging knowledge network I had run under various guises, starting in 2004 and most recently with some donated plugins from Tim Appnel. This year, we're adding automated social network analysis, an exciting feature.

Well, 6A quietly DISCONTINUED the higher ed classroom product I had been using when they went to MT4. I now have to complete a whole formulary stating that I want a higher ed license for the classroom and wanting to know if others are interested.

http://www.movabletype.com/download/contact-us-education.html

Wasn't sure how exactly to address [the question on the form of] who else might be interested, given the apoplexy I was experiencing as I filled it out.

My simple message is this: If you want wider adoption, lower the barriers to adoption. If you are offering a product, sell it like a product with clear value for money. That means for $X you get Y. Just let people make their decision and move on.

Personally, given the hours I have had to spend debugging key components of the software (CAPTCHA with incorrect error message, any kind of install on RHEL5) and the time I expect to spend in further development (custom search template for tag aggregation), I suspect I am a pure MTOS customer.

This custom licensing nonsense has just got my goat.

Bud

In case you don't know, Movable Type is a blog publishing software you can install on your own server.  Version 4 is such a major upgrade that it might be considered almost a total rewrite.

Put loosely, the goal of the rewrite is to both make the software simpler for novice users and more  powerful for those wishing to do more sophisticated things.  I think it is this set of conflicting goals that is leading to the show stoppers.  Consider the following:

• MT4 provides a wizard installer.  The idea of wizards is to remove the complexity of installation by solving the hard parts in software.  Well, not all of MT's installation issues are solvable in software because they depend on configuring the system on which MT is installed.  For example, MT needs permission to write to the server's hard drive which in turn requires configuration of some aspects of the server which are themselves complicated to resolve because of security issues.  Installing with the MT Wizard actually leads to an installation that does not function properly due to these issues.  There is no easy way to resolve this issue.  New users, unfamiliar with the intricacies of server computing, will reach this point and be stuck.
  
• MT4 supports sophisticated article styling, but those styles are broken.  I think this one is fairly easy to fix, but it is extremely disappointing when you encounter it in the beta, giving an extremely unfinished feel to the software.
• MT4 aims to support podcasting.  Unfortunately, the default file sizes it allows you to upload are so small that they do not accomodate media files.  Again, another broken feature that seems fixable but leaves one wondering.

Well, a lot happened, and I got sucked in.  Here's a highlights reel:

• Producing videos for Michigan Innovators using the technology I had developed for MuscleVentures proved to be unworkable.  Michigan Innovators interviews were just too long, and I wanted to be able to edit them.  The short answer is that we did a significant upgrade.  That has been overall good but has taken some getting used to.
• The initial Movable Type 4 betas were more like alpha quality, hard to get to even install in some standard settings.  Not confidence inspiring.  Now, after 6 weekly beta updates, I can say that things have come along nicely, and this blog may soon move to MT4.  Lots of great capabilities (though bugs remain).  The biggest issue in my view is that the post editor is still not producing well-formed html.  This makes any sort of post processing difficult and really really needs to get fixed.
• The CASOS institute taught me enough about dynamic (social) network analysis that I am readdy to incorporate analyses into the learning remix.  That's an exciting and absorbing project. 

• Brad is a noted venture capitalist.  He doesn't make his living as a Movable Type consultant, yet he spent a considerable amount of his time on what some might consider a technical, down in the weeds detail.
• Brad is running three blogs, and he has a presence on numerous social networks for sharing things like links and contacts.
• In blogging, one of the main things Brad is concerned about is his search visibility. 

• Brad has over 1500 blog posts in three years.  That's over one post per day with no breaks for weekends or vacations.  Assuming that each post takes around 15 minutes, that's on the order of 400 hours in posting over three years, or 6% of his time.  Assuming that posts take closer to an hour, Brad is spending 24% of his time blogging.
• Looking at his entires set of operations, Brad's crew likely consists of somewhere between 7 and 20 people, in other words a small shop.
• He has an extensive technology background, having founded tech companies and serving in the role of CTO.
  

With this set of facts, it's clear to me that one of Brad's main business generating strategies is to leverage his online presence.  Looking at a search for "venture capital", a highly competed for term, Brad's blogging group comes in number 11, a respectable showing.  Looking at his series on "term sheets", a stock of the VC trade, Brad ranks number one and two.

Bottom line, Brad Feld has created an important entry way into his business via his blog.  That entry way is all through search and links.  He has built a reputation as the source of information for some of his key topic areas.  His attention to details like permalinks indicates the value he places on that asset.