Ryan Joy (atxryan)

I got into a discussion with coworkers last week that reminded me that everyone does not use websites in the same way, even power users and creators of technology. What surprised me most was that their use of the same feature was almost the exact opposite of mine. Our own assumptions informed our bias for or against certain use cases.

The discussion revolved around ‘tagging‘ as it relates to user generated content. I view tags as a predominantly user-centered feature. Whether I’m viewing pics on Flickr or reading someone’s blog, I’m likely to click on an associated tag because I want to see other content that user has tagged similarly. To me, this is first and foremost. Yes, I might want to see other content that other users have tagged with the same terms, but that is almost always a secondary concern. I don’t want to see others’ photos tagged ‘party’, nor do I want to read another person’s post tagged ‘javascript’.

In an informal poll, I found that about 50% of respondents view tags as primarily serving to aggregate similarly tagged content from many users. (Ok… there were really only 6 people involved in this discussion, but it was 3-3.) I.e. they go to Flickr, view all public tags, and browse photos of ‘Europe’ from different users. Or, they read an interesting blog post tagged ‘webdesign’ and want to view what other people have written about the same subject.

I almost never want to view all items tagged similarly by a community. In most cases, I am very much interested in content in the context of that user. I want to see their pictures because I know them or I enjoyed their others. I want to read their writing because I already trust them. The exception to this rule would probably be event context items. I.e. if someone tags something ‘BarCampAustin2008′, I’m likely to want to see the aggregated content from anyone who was at that event. Another exception, of course, would be sites that are themselves aggregators like Technorati.

I’m not saying that either usage is incorrect, but I think it has the potential to affect everything from the UI to the way tag relationships are stored in the database. It boils down to an 80/20 rule and I think the 80 is user-centric.

How do you view tagging? How do you use it when consuming content?

It appears that part of Twitter’s strategy to mitigate downtime during WWDC 2008 this year is to push tracking, and therefore traffic and constant refreshing, of the event over to third-party search service, Summize. I’ve noticed before that Summize will often not return the most recent tweets associated with a search. So, it may be less than real time.

However, it could also be that Twitter is working closely with the Summize team and will allow unthrottled access to the API during the event while throttling everyone else back… and it just might work.

What do you think?

Update 06.09.2008 11:00am: It’s about an hour away from the WWDC keynote, and Twitter has removed access to archives, direct messages, and the public timeline. They’ve dropped their API request limit to 10 per hour, from 70.

In the course of researching mobile web application prototyping and testing, I came across Mob4Hire, a new service that aims to help mobile application developer with reliable testers through crowdsourcing. I went ahead and signed up. I look forward to testing out my first mobile application and checking out Mob4Hire at the same time.

With the sheer number of devices, operating systems, browsers, carriers, and geographies that may need to be tested, it can be really difficult to test against all the scenarios.

Crowdsourcing may be just the solution to this problem. Of course, the reliability of the testers probably cannot be guaranteed to be as good as, say, your in-house QA. I imagine that this service would mostly be useful to ensure that everything ‘looked’ ok in various devices leaving the functional, unit, and regression testing to the development teams.

Mozilla is attempting to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in a single day. They’ve not announced the actual day yet, but you can pledge to download Firefox 3 on Download Day 2008 here. Pledging will also ensure that you’re informed of the date to download and also of the actual results after the fact.

I can’t seem to find any article that lists which software package currently holds the record or what is the magic number to beat. Anyone know?

My coworker, Alex, posted the following tweet today referencing our fried chicken taste-off planned for tomorrow:

Setting up the rules for fast food fried chicken taste-off in the office tomorrow.

To which, Popeyes Chicken chimed in with:

@alexcc I know the winner! I know it! Do we have to wait until tomorrow to announce? (sounds like bonafide?)

Note that Alex did not mention Popeyes or @PopeyesChicken in any way. He only mentions fried chicken which must have popped up on their radar via a service like Summize or TweetScan.

Other companies such as H&R Block, Southwest Airlines, Comcast, and Zappos are actively engaging consumers, whether they’re customers or not in some cases, on Twitter. H&R Block apparently responds to people asking general tax questions, including questions about donations and the recent economic stimulus checks. Southwest wishes their travelers a safe flight as well as responds to complaints and compliments that are directed toward ’southwest’ or ‘SWA’.

Most of these tweets are unsolicited. But does that automatically make them spam?

This led to an interesting discussion among my coworkers as to whether or not this type of engagement qualifies as SPAM. I maintain that, at this point, it does not. In this case the message does not go into your timeline or direct messages, email inbox, et cetera… However, it does show up in your Replies tab (when it’s working!), but is that spam? Really that’s a recently added feature of Twitter to help you see when other people whom you may not follow mention you in their tweets.

So, what say you? If a company is being helpful, is it spam? What if they respond with some sort of promotional message? Who draws the line?

For a list of other companies on Twitter, check out this Twitter Brand Index from Fluent Simplicity.

Update 05.30.2008:
I’ve got to update this post because Popeyes is obviously very engaged online. This morning I saw this reply, referencing this very blog post, in my Twitter feed:

@atxryan Spam is pork, not chicken right? I’m respectively interested in your findings.

This is interesting because I never mention any of the aforementioned keywords in any of my tweets. Meaning that our anonymous Popeyes social media guru discovered this post via Google Alerts or something similar and now humorously engaged me via Twitter, even completing the circle with Alex:

@alexcc Good morning. I hope ya’ll have fun in the taste off today. Is Ryan a judge?

I salute you, anonymous Popeyes social media guru.

Andy Skelton announced that Automattic is looking into opening an Austin WordPress Professional Office. The office would be open to designers and developers who earn their living primarily through WordPress.

If this sounds like something that might interest you, head on over to Andy’s blog and let ‘em know in the comments.

Highlights for this day include:

• Listening to Charles Strickland, Jonathan Bailey of PlagiarismToday, Mark Jaquith, March Ghosh, and Matt Mullenweg joined together to live record the 39th episode of The WordPress Podcast.
• Aaron Brazell went over WordPress FAQs. Topics covered included the epic categories vs. tags, what is GPL (what is free, for that matter>), and the two different types of “hooks” (filters & actions) available to plugin and theme developers.
• Mark Ghosh, Liz Strauss, Matt Mullenweg, and Aaron Brazell covered business-blogging best practices in their panel The Business of Blogging
• Jacob Santos explained “unit testing” in his Testing with WordPress. Interested in learning how to patch the WordPRess Core?

That about wraps it up. I may end up coming back to these posts to add more information in the following days. All in all WordCamp Dallas 2008 has been great and, at only $20 registration, it’s been a steal too! Many thanks to all the folks who worked to put this event together.

Everything went smoothly and it seems that only one plugin, Simple Tags, is not working correctly. Its not causing any errors, but it is not working as expected on the Post page.

Paul Menard, Jeff Bernier, Michelle Greer, and Jen Simmons and I made the trek last night to Frisco, Texas for WordCamp Dallas 2008.

Today was day one and it’s been very informative thus far. Highlights include:

• Matt Mullenweg announced the official release of WordPress 2.5 during his talk this morning! You can download it and it’s Dashboard/Admin goodness at http://wordpress.org.
• John Pozadzides listed 45 very good and thorough ways to power up your blog. Most of his points were targeted at bloggers who write for an audience, but I believe that many of his points can be applied to a smaller, personal site like mine as well.
• Jonathan Bailey covered Copyright, Creative Commons, content theft and the detection/prevention/obstruction thereof, and everything in between. I don’t consider many of the issues he discussed to be applicable to myself, but they are definitely important to my clients. Of course, if I’m ever hit with a DMCA notice then Bailey’s talk would be very beneficial indeed.
• Listening to Lorelle share her power blogging tips (and take WordPress to task for anything that bothered her in the least bit) was great. She’s a firecracker. :-)

Austin Wordpress users: Andy Skelton announced that the May GeekAustin Happy Hour would be co-hosted with Wordpress on Tuesday, May 20th. Like the previous two GeekAustin events, this one is to be held downtown at J. Blacks on W. Sixth.

I can attest that LinearB throws a great party, so come out and have a drink with us! And, I’ll remind you, that there is a local Wordpress Meetup Group.