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Rob Hawkins... REALinks, LLC, CIO and devoid of Responsibility, Loyalty, or ConsiderationSubmitted by Norm Roulet on Sat, 07/15/2006 - 20:22.
Now that I must waste much of my time and energy preparing to sue Robert "Okihawk"/:NEOhawk" Hawkins I must conduct discovery determining the many ways to diverted business from his employer, REALinks, LLC, and acted against all stakeholders. One place where his record is told is on REALNEO, and so I am preserving his strings of inputs here. Rob Hawkins first popped his head into REALNEO in August, 2005, in comments from his home in Japan to posting on "Let's Make NEO Open For Business" and Shortly thenafter, Rob Hawkins and I agreed he should come back to Cleveland and work for REALinks. LLC - Peter Holmes negotiated details of his joining the firm, which should have included a confidentiality and non-compete agreement, as is standard for hiring a CIO for a tech firm. Here is a sting of comments from the time posted to REALNEO... Hey Rob - we look forward to your help on this and other exciting initiatives here in Northeast Ohio - and to welcoming you and your family from Okanawa. We distributed the comuters with Ubuntu, OpenOffice, and all the other great stuff with goes with that. It'll be interesting to see how many of the users stick with OSS or reload their computers with Microsoft stuff... we'll do our best to track that and provide training and support. Ubuntu. Nice. Being a KDE user I just installed Kubuntu on my daughter's pc. It was nice enough that I am putting it on all the pcs we are selling to friends and neighbors. Personally I am a Gentoo user.... I am really looking forward to going home, and helping out with things like this. I have slept on KDE but a presentation at the Ohio Linuxfest (http://www.ohiolinuxfest.org) awakened me. I have tried Kubuntu and was impressed. These days, I install Ubuntu then apt-get kde so I can get both. I like messing with Fluxbox or Window Maker as well. Derek Arnold / d.arnold at realinks dot us Yeah, I am sorry I missed Aaron speak. My first desktop was windowmaker back in 2000 or so. Being that I was a recent convert from windows, I quickly settled on KDE though. Never did like Gnome. But who can account for taste. Being a Gentoo user for the last couple of years, I am still getting used to Debian. Apt-get is great though, and not having to compile is also refreshing in its own way. I wish I had a faster box or else I would give Gentoo a spin. I would set it up in a triple-boot with WinXP and Ubuntu on my main home desktop. Derek Arnold / d.arnold at realinks dot us It seems like we've been running through about every version of Linux available, this summer. I'm still a newbie with all of them - all better than Windows. NEO, Cleveland and REALNEO look forward to your help - give us some notice when you'll be arriving and we'll have a welcome home party! Norm, The goal is to arrive in Cleveland on the 14th of October. We were ready to go earlier, but Mom, whom is going to put up with us until we get settled, asked us to come no earlier than the 14th since she is busy. We will be in Tokyo from this weekend and will spend the week meeting with friends and family, and the Japan Zope User Group is giving me a send off - it'll actually be the first time I meet most of them. Today, my family and I are going scuba diving. First time. Friend of mine opened up a dive shop(Japanese only) this year and refuses to let me leave Okinawa without diving at least once. So today's the day. My 100Mbps net access goes away on Thursday of this week. :'( At that time it will really sink in that we are leaving the island. Did you say 100 Mbps?!?! Wow...now that's what we need in Cleveland. Darn Baby Bells... Derek Arnold / d.arnold at realinks dot us 100Mbps. Yes. I think I am going to have a very hard time getting used to the net access speeds when I move back. In Japan, basically you get 100Mbps(best effort) on a fiber-optic circuit into your home for about $50. Add on the $20-$30 dollars for the ISP fees and for $80 bucks you have real broadband. Even here in tiny little Okinawa. Additionally, they are advertising a Gbps service which isn't here yet, but may be available in Tokyo. It is the first service, I believe, that will be using IPv6. Yesterday, the took out the six 100Mbps circuits I had upstairs. Sigh. Today, the last one goes.... When there is sufficient population density, you can do stuff like that (fiber to every home). As long as people insist on living in McMansions in Medina and abandoning the innner ring, we will be behind. The telcos could have still done this though. The only reason they got off of their duff at all was because cable companies started to offer fast internet. The most I can get is 4 Mbit (non-dedicated) through my cable modem. Does cable tv have the capability to use the same fiber connections?
Derek Arnold / d.arnold at realinks dot us Derek, sorry for the delayed response. However, I am now in Cleveland so hopefully we'll be able to meet at some point. Initially the fiber-optic services don't provide TV services....yet. Some of the big news recently is the attempted takeovers by internet-based companies of tv stations. The intent is to provide TV over IP, and the battle is over who controls it; traditional media or new media. The fiber is owned by the local telephone companies(NTT East and NTT West). The basic technology is there to provide TV over IP(particularly with Gbps services coming out) though the big issue is really DRM. I will be around tomorrow so we should get to meet. You moved your family from another CONTINENT! Lag time is understandable :-).
Derek Arnold / d.arnold at realinks dot us Now on board, Rob is posting about his work for REALinks..
"We Media" Submitted by robataka on November 16, 2005 - 11:52pm.
I missed it, but apparently on the Lehrer-Mcneil Report, there was a section on increased individual participation in "journalism", or what they called "We Media". A large piece of the report was focused on wiki technology. Of course they mentioned Wikipedia. Apparently, wikipedia has over 2 billion hits per month. "Subscribers" to wikipedia outnumber the subscribers to the New York Times, Washington Post, the LA Times(and maybe one or two others) combined. You can listen to the Lehrer-Mcneil Report report(redundant?) here. One of my frustrations with this RealNEO site is that there is no wiki functionality. I have been using wiki technology for years and they are a really handy collaboration tool. It would be a great tool to flesh out, for example, Keven Cronin's proposal. Okay, so its my job to make sure NEO has the functionality we want....sigh. Rest assured that we are planning a fairly large upgrade to the site which should add alot of functionality I'd like to see. And if it goes according to plans(does it ever?!), we'll have wiki functionality. Speaking of which... Submitted by robataka on November 17, 2005 - 12:14am.
In my last post, I mentioned that I want to add wiki functionality to this site. Another thing I think this site should have is trackback functionality. The issue with trackbacks, of course, is spam. I am going to turn trackbacks on and see how it goes. If we get too much spam to handle efficiently, I'll turn it back off.
Staging Submitted by robataka on November 18, 2005 - 8:06am.
We have setup a developing/staging site with the latest and greatest. As you have noticed over the last couple of weeks, we have changed some of the styling here at realneo, and we are planning more changes. We will be doing some testing prior to upgrading this site, but we have made some progress. We used a backup of this site and imported into the development site and then upgraded. It didn't go as smoothly as we anticipated, but we now know where the issues are. So when we do upgrade it should cause no, or minimal anyway, disruption to the site. One of the things I did notice, is that the customized version of Drupal that we are using does not support wiki functionality out of the box. Even the new one. So I'll need to take a closer look at what needs to happen to do add that functionality. Having a dev site makes that much easier to do. Here we see Rob "getting into the swing of things" - I thought that was his job, for which he was being paid lots of money that could have been paid to someone good:
Dinner in Little Italy Submitted by robataka on December 20, 2005 - 1:55am.
Went out to dinner with my mom and George Mateyo, Chairman of Carnegie Capital Asset Management Company. George apparently handles my mom's financial affairs and had been kind enough to take a look at my resume and We had dinner at La Dolce Vita, which was the first time for me since elementary school (we used to have pizza there when we picked up my brother from his piano lessons at the Cleveland Institute of Music). Of course there is live opera/singing. They announced that the soprano that sings there is having her debut at Carnegie Hall in February-iirc. I am not a huge opera fan, but it was a nice experience. The atmosphere of Little Italy is great, even though it was real cold tonight. Although we had no problems I get the feeling that parking in Little Italy is a nightmare. Looking forward to spending more time there when it warms up some...when's that? May? Slowly but surely getting back into the swing of things....
Not that this is necessarily relevant, but the connection is interesting...
IBM, Sherwin-Williams and Linux Submitted by robataka on December 20, 2005 - 11:32am.
Sherwin-Williams, the NEO based paint company is also known throughtout the Open Source community as one of the first major companies in the U.S. to rollout Linux for their retail infrastructure. IBM has them listed on their site with one page description of what they have done. Needless to say, IBM was the system integrator and hardware supplier for the deployment of the system. Sherwin-Williams is, as most of you already know, a 25,000 employee company with a retail operation of 2500 stores throughout the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico, and 52 manufacturing plants worldwide. The IBM marketing blurb, the system includes 9700 Netvista boxen running Linux in all 2500 retail stores. The POS system will also run linux apparently. This is a fairly old story in fact. I remember it from a few years ago while I was still in Japan. However, since I didn't know whether folks here at RealNEO were aware of it or not, I thought I would post it. If it is a repeat, my apologies.
Rob Hawkins starting to kiss OneCleveland's Ass? Make NEO the world leader in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Submitted by Norm Roulet on October 30, 2005 - 3:21pm.
It is critical the people and organizations of Northeast Ohio become effective working with open source software. This will support moving all our people across the digital divide (Open Source is free) and prepare our workforce to participate in the evolving global Information Technology economy, which is increasingly build with open source. Whether hosting open source servers or coding in PHP, there is already a growing need for related talent here and, as the supply of talented open source professionals grows, more people and organizations will become aware of the opportunity offered by open source and demand for such professionals will increase. To get the ball rolling, we need to distribute Linux to students and teach them how to use it and related applications (OpenOffice, GIMP, etc.). We need to develop more informal and formal training and classes in these matters in secondary, graduate and non-traditional learning environments. And those of us working in the IT space here need to lead by example. I believe the result will be a more sophisticated, desirable, valuable workforce and lower cost public and private economies that will attract and retain people, organizations, enterprises and business, which will lead to NEO being a world center of IT ( categories: Technology )
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I think this topic makes a nice connection with the one on cirriculum change under Education. Again we talk about a paradigm shift that convinces people who are already entrenched in a culture of siloed rather than social computing. I really like Norm's suggestion of benchmarking success elsewhere as one means of convincing people - I really think education and awareness of the numerous advantages of Open Source technology needs to happen at an early age - perhaps even grade school and certainly by middle school. One obstruction to such progress would be established relationships between Microsoft and many schools - but if Open Source could be introduced in pilot programs at some of these schools exposure could be gained to an alternative. Commitments could be established with new schools and charter schools to stand loyal to open source and reap the cost savings of such an approach. We are not only talking about introducing young people to open source but to social computing as standard behavior as well. Already we see some of this in young users of MySpace or Craigslist - these sites offer incentive to enter the social computing world through the opportunity to meet other people or find a new apartment, car, etc. If schools can realize how quickly students can build community around their initiatives they might even realize their students can start making a major difference in the community at a young age. REALNEO is working with this very technology for our region here in NEO. And I believe it is only a matter of time until the paradigm shift and related transformation of our region happens. We might as well start now! Absolutely agree we can be a player. I was more picking the nit of the word "the" leader. "A" leader, yes absolutely. And it won't happen overnight, and many locations around the world and in the U.S. have a several year headstart on NEO. But the beauty of the open source mindset is exactly what you suggest - the ability to incorporate best practices from anywhere, adjust them to meet any specific needs of NEO. And then the ability for other folks to take what we have done and make it fit their specific needs. Nobody loses. I agree with your comment about the need to "speak up". Which is why I am commenting on it and blogging on it. As for the "act" piece, that is why I am interested in the effort in East Cleveland. The cool opportunity is jumping a paradigm ahead without investing in the learning curve - many communities further along the FOSS path have invested in taking the entire world forward. They do have a head start, but at great expense - many FOSS projects have failed and others have had steep curves. NEO hasn't participated or invested in much of that, so at least we don't have any burn-out and flame-outs to deal with... we can look forward to a fairly mature technology world and say "what in the open source world do we want to do today", and what resources are needed in that world for the future. Our schools and universities don't need to figure out whether open source matters - it does - so they can focus on what skills will workers need to excel in the open source world - what standards will survive - what resources are required. Determine the best practices (you suggest Case and CSU set up mirror FOSS servers, like other leading univerisites, for example) and do them, and speak up about it. Lev is starting to do this - others as well - but we still need more educating the educators. Well, I don't know about "the leader". NEO would have to move awfully fast to replace places like Munich(sp?), China, Brazil, South Africa, Oregon, and other places too numerous to count. Japan has a relatively quiet initiative at the national level as well, plus an increasing number of non-profits that are springing up to support it nationwide. I would also think that Case or CSU offering mirror servers of open source projects utilizing the "ultra broadband" (as Lev likes to spin it) network of OneCleveland would be another effort that strikes me as worthwhile. Why not seek stretch goals. Inventory best practices around the world Here is some of the Rob stealing IP process... being paid by REALinks for this insight building - what an ass! FOAF vs. XFN Submitted by robataka on December 22, 2005 - 5:43pm.
Well, that title is a bit misleading perhaps. I have been looking at the foaf thingie in the edit form for a user's I have been only vaguely aware of FOAF(Friend Of A Friend) having seen it around before but have never really looked at it closely.
Okay, that's easy enough to understand. So the next question is what good is it? For what is it used? Again, the FOAF Project page to the rescue. There is a link labeled FAQ on the site, which in reality is a link to aIBM's site and an article by
The concept of FOAF becomes very interesting when thinking in context of "social networking". For a while, "social networks" were all the rage. But they were closed systems, that in order to join required an "invitation" to somebody already subscribed to that network. The development of an /xml/rdf vocabulary that is open and free allows you do implement similar concepts but under your control and not limited to any specific "social network". The article is well worth the read if you are interested in this type of thing. However, being a wide reader of various blogs, and having implemented Wordpress for some
There is a little more detailed introduction here. So what are the differences? Not I should note that RealNEO supports FOAF, but not as far as I can tell XFN. So perhaps its not worth worrying about. ( categories: Web Technology )
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I think one of the real opportunities of building our regional social network is leveraging a common FOAF profile - developing a regional standard of what data will be collected and shared as the common FOAF file. If all sites are configured for the same FOAF profile, that data can then be shared. That, I believe, will ultimately be in LDAP. Is that what you see? Norm, Your comment suggests many thing in that very short comment.
To make the assumption, that seems to be indicated, that you were asking if
XFN and FOAF are attempting to address one problem area where as LDAP is
So you can see that as they stand today, while they are related, they are addressing different problem areas.
But I also think your comment hints at some other things which need to be fleshed out. In particular,
Here are the questions we need to answer:
Who is "we" to which "our" refers?
What is the opportunity? Or rather, what is the problem we are trying to solve?
How does regionalism affect the solution and/or the problem? Regionalism as opposed to what?
How does "social networking" address the problem?
Design Examples: What We Like, What We Don't Like Submitted by Michael Lehto on December 27, 2005 - 8:02pm.
What are the sites out there that implement good principles of design? Are they usable and interesting? Are they stimulating and beautiful? Are they innovative? Why do they work? What sites out there are unimaginative or unusable (or both) and why? This forum is intended to generate a discussion on DESIGN for the RealNEO community. Jot down sites that you like or don't like and try to explain why you feel this way about them. We can all stand to be better educated about what makes up a good design, and looking at examples is a good way to hone this kind of perception. As an opening salvo, I'll throw out the following links:
( categories: REALNEO | Arts and Culture )
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I noticed one of the themes for Drupal was developed for nucleus CMS, so I checked out their site and realized many of the Drupal themes come from there - and each of those have some layout issues (and this explains why). I was particularly interested in their skins contest, as I'm proposing we do something like that for realneo. Check out their skins browser at http://skins.nucleuscms.org/browser/ and realize we'll start seeing the same range of creative approaches to realneo very shortly. I especially like the "Slick" skin, where you can change the background color... check it out. Greetings all, I just thought I'd point out a site I encountered while searching for rich sources of calendar content and found one: upcoming.org which you can check out here. The site appears to be a recent acqusiion of Yahoo! (it is a subsidiary) Some of the interesting design features could be considered for our own calendar functionality. They have the same vision we have always had of a rich, self-sustaining calendar open for the pubic to post events to. They also use Tags- which categorize the event to drive users to events of the same category. For example, a posted event on Russian Theater links to meta Tags for Theater, Russian, and Plays. We could be very specifc and creative in our own tag design - I like that our tags link to relevant forums though,since that can provoke rich discussion and information sharing beyond event provision. Let's design our own tag system to be creative and innovate beyond this level. We can have a more socially conscious view about this and really foster positive changes in the process. This site (upcoming.org) is pretty good, actually. There's nothing visually stunning about it, but it seems really easy to use. I really like how the mission statement is right there to see, so that you know immediately what the site is about. There is then a very clear area in the middle that answers the basic questions that any user will have (how do I start, etc.). Good, simple design. There is no doubt one of the killer aps is the calendar - the Holy Grail. As soon as we have a centralized calendar for Northeast Ohio, which communicates with the calendars of all the organizations in NEO, and all the personal calendars of the members of the virtual community, we will have a highly effective community. For now, we can accomplish much of this with realneo.us and filtering by categories (and content type). What we still need to determine is what is the best taxonomy for the filtering - we'll discuss this over the coming weeks.... it's tricky. Here are a couple of other things not to forget relating to the redesign: - Create a customized Favicon - Search Engine Positioning / Title and Description tagging - Compatibility with PDAs and Cell Phones This is a list of ideas for functional features. Please post your feature ideas as a reply to this post. My initial ideas:
One example of what can be done with Event RSS is deployed at Lawrence.com. There you can subscribe to a general event rss, or even event rss for specific bands for example. Or specific venues as another example. The Lawrence.com site is powered by a system called Django, which was specifically developed in python to power that site and the Chicago Crime.org site. It was subsequently released as open source.
There are a couple of things that are possible here. First of all, RealNEO already has event listings. I am confused as to the difference in the top menu thing between events and calendar as they appear to me to be the same thing. One order of business would be to create a rss feed out of these event listings. One cool thing about the Realneo event listing is that you can download the event listing as an ical file and merge it with your work/personal calendar. For example, I am able to download it and merge it into my Kontact calendar.
The other thing is that we also have a feed aggregator on RealNEO. It should be fairly straight forward create one for events that already have RSS feeds. We just need to know where event feeds are located so we can pull them.
Sorry, but sort of a random thought comment.... The events and calendar menus do the same thing and I'll simplify that today. We definitely want to leverage RSS to create a central calendar of feeds from all the sites we support...we'll know where the event feeds are located. I'd say this is one of the highest priorities. So who should work on that and what will it take? Offer cellphone wallpapers designed by local artists Offer cellphone ringtones developed by local musicians provide guidelines and instructions on how to create Be able to offer them free or for sale. Maybe offer a different free set every week, that would bring people back to the site to check to see what is free each week. Good creative energy. I have no idea how to make wallpaper and ringtones but if I could make them or get cool ones from here I would - so how do we do this? But as popular as it is, I'm sure there are multiple options. It can't be that difficult. Do we have any experience with these things in this group? How about implementing a Cellphone Vlog solution and feed it back out with RSS?
Check out: http://www.mobvcasting.com/wp/ __________________ More info: http://www.walking-productions.com/slop/cat_vlog.html "I have been doing something that I call MobVCasting for some time. Essentially, it is video blogging with a twist. My vlog posts are created, edited as well as posted directly from my mobile phone. I use MMS (or Multimedia Messaging or picture messaging or whatever your provider calls it) to post videos to my vlog. You can see what I do by visiting http://www.mobvcasting.com/wp/ I am almost to the point where I feel comfortable offering this capability to all who are brave enough to try. Although I am not ready for offering personalized service (which would entail posting to your blog though mobvcasting), I have opened up a test MobVCasting vlog that anyone is free to post to. I am calling it OpenVlog at MobVCasting. You can see it at: http://www.openvlog.mobvcasting.com/ Anyone is welcome to use their mobile phone to post to this "open" vlog. You will need a video capable phone and the ability to send MMS (multimedia messages or picture mail or whatever your provider calls it) to an email address. The address for this service is openvlog [at] mobvcasting [dot] com. The subject of your message will be the title of the post and any text in the body of the message becomes the body of the text. One last thing, your mobile phone provider may charge you to send MMS messages. So if you give it a shot, don't go overboard until you get your first bill. Please feel free to send any questions or comments my way: shawn [at] mobvcasting [dot] com" You can learn more about vlogging at http://www.ourmedia.org/node/128116 here is a link to someone who began writing this for Drupal, and has been asking for help in finishing it: http://moblog.nullcraft.org/?PHPSESSID=09bea10208ee8bed3bde314635721b9f
"It was a bear to get working - it's a Drupal module called moblog that seems to be still in development and is not too well documented. Info here: http://drupal.org/node/10477 To get it to run, you need to install the following modules in your Drupal site: The module dowloads are here: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/contributions/sandbox/javanaut/ I think you also need the Image upload module: Some install info is here: One tip on something that tripped me up for a while: if you don't use the mail alias module, the email address for your Drupal account must be the same as your phone's email address, i.e. 4155551212 [at] tmobile [dot] com. The reason is that the moblog module uses that email to authenticate that the incomming MMS message. With the mail alias module you can keep your real email address in your account info and make the phone email address an alias. Another caveat is that moblog only works with TMobile MMS messages. Each mobile phone service uses a slightly different format for their MMS messages, and moblog only has code written to parse TMobile MMS messages. With a litte work you could look at the file that parses the MMS message and write a version for another mobile phone provider. Good luck! Let me know how it goes. RE: the phpcraze site you metioned, it doesn't look like they are using the same drupal modules, but I could be wrong" As a side note, the site that Rob posted www.ourmedia.org (which is also a Drupal site), has a video blog. Check it out! Our Media is definitely another excellent Drupal site - I think their focus is largely video. Check it out! Okay Karen - you've got all our support to go after development of the vLogging module. Get in touch with everyone who has worked on this in the past and figure out how much work is ahead to do what (e.g. write versions for other mobile phone providers), and see whether there's anyone else willing to help on this. Once we know what is involved, we'll figure out how to pay for it. Ball's in your court. http://www.openvlog.mobvcasting.com/?page_id=2 If you have a cell phone you can send a video to this and actually try it out. I'm going to try to contact the person who put this together. http://www.cctvcambridge.org/mediarss "Media" RSS page for cambridge community tv. This is the part that excites me the most: iPod Video Player: Download
So, to make a long story short, we could allow registered users to transmit cell phone video to our vlog via email, and then feed that vlog back out to video ipods (as well as to other clients).
Sounds like the start of an interesting movement - I'm interested in the art of low res video so I could see something cool coming of this. I've been looking for something to work with on with Robert Banks... the extreme opposite of his medium but I think the outcomes will fit his style and vision... to be determined. Check into the technology side of all this. This is a great idea, Karen - are you leading the implementation? What will it take, including time for documentation and some hands-on training of staff I believe we have the right team to be able to do this. I think RealNEO would be the first Cellphone Vlog for Northeast Ohio, but I need to verify that. I'll look into this further and give more details at tomorrow's meeting. vlog or video blog is a blog (short for weblog) which uses video as the primary content; the video is linked to within a videoblog post and usually accompanied by supporting text, image, and additional meta data to provide context. Blogs often take advantage of RSS for syndication to other web sites and aggregator software (RSS readers). With the inclusion of RSS Enclosures, which provides the ability to attach media files to a feed item/blog post, it is possible to bypass the mainstream intermediaries and openly distribute media to the masses via the Internet. Vlogs typically take advantage of this technological development, just as audioblogs have in recent years via the podcast boom. Videoblogging gains popularity with each passing month, especially since the release of the new Apple Video iPod and the availability of iTunes Store's video content. iTunes uses the term video podcast to describe a video blog. more info: Here are the comments I emailed to everyone earlier: Here's my 2 cents.... Somewhere along the way I heard someone, maybe David Moss, ask what the goals are for the site. I would think that needs to be defined before we make any design decisions. For example, Who will visit this site? Why? How will they find out about it? What will we do to get them to come back again? How do we keep them from moving on to something else after the first 3 seconds as opposed to being pulled into the site? Which pages will be likely entry pages...only the home page? Or will other pages end up containing commonly needed info and be indexed, thus becoming entry pages?
As far as the designs, I like the first and third designs - very impressive. But as a Macromedia customer I really don't like the new Macromedia design. Macromedia used to be one of my favorite websites - yesterday is the first time I saw the new design. I found it to be homogonized - at first I couldn't understand why I couldn't find what I was looking for (nice implementations of Flash video) - and then I realized that they were assimilated into Adobe and that is how they got that new design. So there's one customer's perspective - a company that specializes in artsy products should look artsy. What does RealNEO specialize in? Maybe defining that will help us to know how we should look. The reason I suggested Flash Video and Vlogging is because these are things that are new enough to still have "wow" factor. I think its important that we get that "oooh" when someone arrives at the site, but it is equally important that they can quickly get down to business and find whatever it is they came to the site for (e.g., event listings, discussion of community projects, whatever).
thanks,Karen What we specialize in is a good question. We provide a free, open source virtual community for people to collaborate and communicate, and we have driven people to use that for raising awareness around economic development in Northeast Ohio. We specialize in providing the capabilities to develop virtual communities, and we develop world-class virtual community capabilities, and we enable and deliver world-class virtual communities, like realneo.us. Another virtual community we are enabling is for Voices and Choices, which will have 10,000s of members, generating lots of traffic and activity. Ultimately, the community of voices and choices, and realneo, and the sustainability and arts communities, and all others interested in this region and using technology well will all use realneo and many other internetworked virtual communities. I think one thing that will draw people in will be the events calendars - both the content and the filtering are very useful... there are lots of enhancements and design opportunities to come with handling this. I also find the realneo content is very good, even though it only represents input of a small group of people. The community and content are growing, and this forum is a good example of that. The content - the dynamic of interactive content - will keep people coming back. Many people will use the blogs and image galleries, just as they are intended. As more people use the site, more people will rise up as leaders of forums, will add events and other content, and the site will become increasingly interesting. I think good design will add wow and oooh. I'm counting on our design community to make that happen. I'll offer my feedback but it's up to you artisits to make this happen. I do want to feature local art in the design and content, and encourage local artists to use the technology and develop themes. I think this will help them gain more market awareness and sell art. We'll soon have many themes people can choose from - Rob wants something very fast and stark while you want something very graphical - my 12 year old daughter wants something light - and doesn't want a bunch of boring adult RSS feeds but wants to see what her buddies posted. So we need to quickly knock out a nice redesign of the current realneo.us site - and fix some module and CSS issues - and update the taxonomy - and at the same time we will work on future wow, oooh, and artsyness. ASAP, we want to deliver a bleeding edge experience that will bring millions of people together from around the world this one is similar to the NY times but not quite as dry. Here are two sites that actually run drupal. Note that you can login to ourmedia using your realneo account information, e.g.:
The Onion is a perfect example of the type of content management we need, running in a Drupal environment. We need to change the taxonomy and look but the layout and structure are near perfect. One big difference will be our implementation will be interactive - we'll have lots of other cool differences. That's great that these sites are running Drupal - but why is this structure and layout near perect? Looking at the HTML code for the main page of the Onion, my computer counted something like 189 links! It has a 4-column newspaper-like layout, but there is stuff everywhere - an assault on the senses. I'm not trying to criticize taste, but to get us to hone our ability to understand why it is we like certain things. Happy New Year!!!! Right now, we need to restructure and enhance the design of realneo. It seems we can organize the content into categories - arts/culture, environment, economy, education, health, technology - which would allow us to present it in a newspaper type format, like the Onion. That is logical to me, as I'm used to newspaper interfaces. I can go into details on what I like about a newspaper layout - we should have a design meeting on that. That said, consider this is just one theme concept, which should be pretty easy to execute (assuming we can copy lots of their code). I like some of the features, I agree with you about some of the flaws. What do you have in mind, that we can execute by the end of break? ...was always one of my favorite movies, and favorite titles of a movie.
Good questions Michael. As you are well aware, I stay away from design....I have no sense for it. I actually posted those to links for two specific reasons...
As I mentioned, I stay away from design as I have no sense for it. Trust me...I have enough problems matching my clothes....Hence, I cannot answer *why* I like them, I am not even sure I do since I really was posting both sites as what is possible with drupal.(Run on sentence...ah, I need more coffee!) http://www.blogger.com/start - Very easy to tell what you are supposed to do. http://cdbaby.com/ - A really fun friendly site. If you buy something they send you really cool funny email about the status. Makes you want to come back. http://cafepress.com - Again, its really easy to figure this site out. I especially like the way they pitch "membership" right on the home page, and I like the wording they have used.
tribe.net is an interesting one to look at. There is a tremendous amount of information on it and despite the shere number of links, it still works pretty well to navigate through and find what you want. But is it innovating in any way? Not really. Is it important that it innovate? Maybe not, but I think the visual design of it could be improved drastically. Take a look at this site: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ Burners-Lee has been an amazing proponent of the web over its life and has done wonderful things for it, but his site is one of the worst I've ever seen (very ironic, since he's credited with 'inventing' the internet). I bring this up because it shows an extreme example of the model of web design from about 1993... a model that still prevails today, although sites like Terminus and others are starting to break it. As a counter-example, take a look at the MIT homepage (http://web.mit.edu/). By no means is this a stellar page, but it emphasizes one key design idea: everything of importance has been compressed hierarchically onto one page in a visual format that is easy to understand at a glance. I don't need to scroll down or read through endless text to find what I want. It's simple and easy to use. Tim Berners-Lee's site is an example of the belief that information is paramount. For the most part, I agree. Sure, this site could use some dolling up but the site is what it purports to be: a page with info about the creator of the World Wide Web. It isn't pretty, but it works. I am not thrilled about scrolling but sometimes it's necessary. The same with Tribe. The true skill of web design is making a site usable and pretty. Derek Arnold One thing that is for sure is realneo will be an information overload - the site is full of 1,000s of pages of content, and probably 100,000s of links. We can build a front end that is more graphical and Flashy, but one step in most people will be there to read and write so will expect a "newspaper", blog or forum type format. When I come to realneo now I check to see who's online and new, see the block of my buddies' recent posts, and then whether there are new comments or postings. I check back a few times a day, and interact if there's anything new of interest. Once the calendar gets filled up, I'll get in the habit of checking that. Once more people I know are using realneo, I expect to use private messaging more. I see it becoming very useful to help me manage information overload in many ways. There are three I think are important.
Norm is correct about internal site organization (taxonomy in Drupal nomenclature) and making a site useful / attractive. Sites become instinctive when you understand how things are organized. They become like grocery stores. When you want to find something, look at the overhead signs (navigation menus) and try to relate what you are looking for to one of the broad categories. If the information is well organized, you should be able to navigate the web / grocery store efficiently and come back again.
Derek Arnold Hey Derek - good to see you. Happy holidays. I like the grocery store comparison - we're working on a flow chart for the taxonomy for realneo so should make some progress in the coming weeks with usability - will appreciate your feedback. Improving the Media Submitted by More Better on November 8, 2005 - 11:37am.
Post thoughts on improving the Media (TV/publication/internet) in NEO ( categories: Economy )
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On Ed Morrison's Blog, Ed writes of the role of the Plain Dealer in defining the conversation of the region. I agree with that premise but also feel the internet allows every individual to have a voice in the media. The challenge is determining what voices are worth listening to or even responding to in conversation. Considering there are now millions of voices on the Internet, and so many of them are speaking up and louder, and the virtual world-cafe has just begun, the noise of the maddening crowds will become maddening. That is where I see virtual community becoming important. Ultimately, we want ways to manage the content and communications already flowing through our virtual universe, and we want the future outcomes better. All that is in our control. Thanks Norm - well put. Because the vitual universe include's everyone's voices and opinions - good or bad - we need to manage the content and offer the community spaces in the virtual world where information presented is not summarily accepted as fact but can be put to the test and challenged by others. Such systems can and would have greater levels of accountability - people would give much more thought to the material they post before they posted it. There is danger with blogs that are not so open - people can become fans of a blogger and take that individual's word for gospel truth. I like the premise of a system to allow for transparency of blog content between different blogs as well. The conversations would not stay as localized and encouraging fresh perspectives and continually wooing new visitors whose voices can be heard would mitigate groupthink. Groupthink, incidentally, is a phenomenon whereby members of a group or community begin thinking more alike and in more biased ways over time. Regardless the proliferation of blogs has created a blogosphere which allows for any individual with enough moxie and heart to start their own media resource. As for accountability on a higher system level, politiicans and corporations alike realize there is a new media outlet out there to keep them in check. One can liken this effect which the non-profit / activist community has had over wayward players in the government, civic, and educational sectors. Talking about better future outcomes brings to mind the betterment of ideas through virtual dialogue that either 'builds a better mousetrap' or possibly reinvents one. We need to ramp up the dialogue and intersection of ideas by thought leaders (within and across sectors) who can create a wellspring of innovation and herald in a 'virtual rennaissance' for NEO. There are many areas which I feel the media could improve and do a better job with. Perhaps most important would be the presentation of unbiased facts and issues. One thing I believe most of the country is not acutely aware of is how disliked the current U.S.- led Bush administration is overseas - especially in Europe. In the summer of 2004 I traveled throughout Europe on a 14 country expedition - and aside from the U.K. I was overwhelmed by the passion and intensity with which people follow U.S. news and policy in relation to the rest of the world. Eyes were glued to TV sets all over Europe during the Bush - Kerry election and I could feel the tension in the air and subsequent mass-mourning by most of Europe when results were announced. Interestingly enough - very little of that was transparent to Americans. It is my belief that this is because network media (TV and Radio) is corporate-run and sponsored. Many of these corporations are big contributors and supporters of Bush. Hence it is very diffcult for media to be truly unbiased. Some outlets which are certainly more conducive to unbiased representation are those funded more independently - NPR and PBS come to mind. News is also about ratings - and often stories that have tremendous mass appeal or tug at the heartstrings of viewers can be given undue weight and air time. I also believe so much of the news (ratings-gathering) is focused on negative events that stimulate fear or depress people. The fear element is especially noteworthy: Marx called religion 'the opiate of the masses' but I'd nominate the media as another agent of mass influence. How do we influence the media to present more positive stories and present them in an unbiased way? One way would be to discourage linkages between corporations and their alterior interests and/or connections between media moguls and campaign/political support. This becomes very tricky - but I think nonpartisan ownership would be one solution. Whatever body is the final say on content should be nonpartisan or have equal representation along party lines. Some sort of checks and balances need to be instituted. Government-run media would foster propaganda. Corporate-run media indirectly does so. So what's the answer: grassroots media? credible blogs? Thoughts? Sudhir Check out this post over at Brewed Fresh Daily. Are you aware of what Meet the Bloggers is doing? They are doing what I heard some guy on TV last night said about TV not being able to do a complex subject justice. For example, they have a full hour interview with Bryan Flannery and other candidates for the Governor of Ohio. They had interviews with Jane Campbell and Frank Jackson. They'll be interviewing Sherrod Brown, and are taking people's suggested questions. And the have an interview with David Abbott about Voices and Choices with which you, Sudhir, are involved somehow. "MSM" is business. They do what they do to make money, no more no less. Listening to the special report on Tim whazziz name whom(who? ah, english grammar will be my downfall) is retiring as the local news anchor(forget the station), he calls it a "business". And talks about "competition". And that is not necessarily a bad thing, but the format and business decisions do impact how things are presented. What Meet the Bloggers is doing is providing a mechanism to more fully allow thought leaders, mostly politicians so far, to answer questions in more depth. Allowing the public to think and reflect on their positions at their leisure. Thanks for the thoughts and links, Rob. The blogosphere certainly seems to represent the greatest hope for unbiased media reporting. The key, I suppose, is to find a credible and trustworthy media outlet that holds itself to standards that all good journalists and media sources do. I'll definitely explore these links and get back to you subsequently with some further thoughts! Let's also work to raise awareness of the best blogs out there - I love the potential of what RealNEO can become as a media source over time, given its unique platform and open source infrastructure. The internet offers new dimensions of media reporting. One thing I find fascinating is the ability to access first hand insight - dialogue with you or Ed on a forum and be able to build real knowledge. For example, right here within realneo we explore how to enhance the value of realneo - the knowledge building is entirely transparent. Determining what knowledge you will see in the everexpanding virtual datawarehouses of the Internet will increasingly be handled by artificial intelligence that will analyze everything that is known about you and everyone you know, and their reputations, and vast public and private content. Agents will use that to provide you with efficient access to the information and people you need to know, as fast as available. Until that intelligence is all in place, we create our own filters, a significant one being whether or not we are really capable in cyberspace. Using virtual community is an important new benchmark of engagement. Rob didn't post again after December 31, 2005, which was a betrayal of REALinks, LLC in and of itself. Just to keep things real, and protect this fun posting in case Rob deletes it, here's the most interesting insight into the mind of the Okihawk...
Jean Luc Picard?! Submitted by robataka on December 8, 2005 - 8:52am.
Saw a link to a personality test over at Japundit, which matches you to a science fiction character. I normally don't do these things, but being a science fiction fan, I figured what the heck, let's give it a whirl.
hmmmm. here are my results.
I'll say it again...hmmmmm.
Click on the pic to take your test.
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This is freaky - in preparation for legal action against Rob Hawkins for diverting business business from REALNEO's parent company, REALinks, LLC, where rob was an employee, I was just going over Rob Hawkins' REALNEO postings and I revisited a posting he made about what SciFi character best matched you, based on a personality profile test... I took the test again today and came to the same character, being some cat named John Sheridan, from some show I've never seen, called Babylon 5 - this description is right on so I'd say the survey is pretty clever... give it a try and post your result... Here's about Norm aka John Sheridan: John Sheridan An experienced survivor who has maneuvered around many obstacles, you are looked up to by those who rely on your good judgment. In the last few years, we've stumbled. We stumbled at the death of the president, the war, and on and on. When you stumble a lot you tend to look at your feet. Now we have to make people lift their eyes back to the horizon and see the line of ancestors behind us saying, "Make my life have meaning," and to our inheritors before us saying, "create the world we will live in." John is a character in the Babylon 5 universe. You can read his biography at the Worlds of JMS fansite. Here's Rob Hawkins character, which he should really think about: Jean-Luc Picard An accomplished diplomat who can virtually do no wrong, you sometimes know it is best to rely on the council of others while holding the reins. There are some words which I have known since I was a schoolboy. "With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." These words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie -- as a wisdom, and warning. The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. Jean-Luc is a character in the Star Trek universe. This The Next Generation fan site has an outline of his career. Disrupt IT The test of personality very interesting results have found... so says Yoda, anyway.
Very interesting - Charlie at AJ Rocco's is a Yoda as well. I think as part of the user profiles we should offer the SciFi character test... eventually we'll know if Galadriels and Sheridans make a good love connection, and who goes better with Yodas. It is interesting that the survey matched me with a female character even though none of the questions should have revealed my gender. I'm not very knowledgeable of scifi. I have never read the Lord of the Rings but I liked the movies. I wish I was an elf. They were the most admirable characters
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I started on a mac, you know the one with no hard drives, and you had to swap out the floppies. I moved to windows in the 90s since I wanted compatibility with work.
I have tried a whole bunch of linux distributions and about 2 years ago settled on Gentoo. Although I must admin, Kubuntu is kind of catching my fancy lately. I installed it on my daughter's pc(we have no windows machines in the house), and I gotta admit that binary updates have their attraction for me recently. Particularly apt-get.
I originally ran a japanese site along the lines of news4neighbors but in Japanese. I was using squishdot, a take off of slash for zope. I eventually burned out doing the site after about three years. I have been on Zope/CMF/Plone since about 2000/2001 frame. I have tried out a bunch of different systems(slash, phpnuke, etc), but have never tried drupal.
I recently found REALNEO. Being from Cleveland originally, it was nice to see. I will hopefully be participating more from here on out. よã‚?ã?—ã??ï¼?