Go, Do, Be.

• ALL
• PHOTO
• TECHNOLOGY
• MUSIC
• FUN
• FOOD

I love where this goes:

Here's the whole thing for your listening pleasures.

SeeqPod - Playable Search

It's Kid Koala's Scratchscratchscratch.

A chilly sunrise greeted us this morning, it's the second of the Bay Area's three winters. Like the first one in August, this is a false winter (we'll likely have a brief summer in early November when the Santa Anna winds stoke the wildfires (and the surfers)). Still, the chill reminded me of impending bumpercrop of pomegranates, figs, and of course the harvest up in the valley,

This particular false winter also makes me think about the new crop of TV programming, specifically food shows popping up with the new season.

'Spain... On The Road Again' is Spanish road trip that has more in common with soap operas on daytime TV than Kerouac. Just look at this synopsis:

"Mark's moods swings and insatiable appetite have the road trippers stopping often as they head north to Galicia. While in Ribera del Duero wine country, Mario grills milk-fed lamb in a vineyard. While staying at a traditional county inn, Mario's competitive edge emerges and he and Gwyneth race Mark and Claudia on the Camino de Santiago, a historic pilgrimage route. Back at the inn, Mario and Gwyneth cook dinner while waiting for Mark and Claudia to get back."

What works:

• The Bittman/Batali combination is always fun.
• Claudia Basoles: she's lovely.
• The foods: they get to eat off the beaten trail.
• Batali reminiscing about his childhood experiences in Europe.

What doesn't work:

• The gang is going to seem way out of touch if they don't switch to motoring around Spain in hybrids. They swing a little too far down the bonvivant scale at times.
• The soundtrack: an ibericized-version of Willie Nelson's on the road again. Again and again.
• GP's food conflicts: won't eat meat but is still hungry all the time.

I like Alton Brown's Feasting On Waves for a bunch of reasons. Back in my youth I had my own Caribbean experience, so this show brings back a few memories.

What works:

• Alton's always good for some foodie fun.
• getting way off the beaten trail and connecting with people
• The way the show seems like one giant boondoggle. I imagine the pitch: "yeah, we're taking the whole crew down to the Caribbean to tool around on a few sailboats. We'll film the whole thing and you can edit it together for a few episodes. Oh yeah -- you'll need to pay us too."

What doesn't:

• The hand held camera-action is a little nuts. Are they trying to share the seasickness experience?
• They kinda seem rushed. Relax mon! Take it Island speed.
• The relentless soundtrack just won't, well... relent.
• The color and haze of the picture. Did the salt ruin all the gear? Why does it seem like we're watching this through gauze?
• Lay off the lat-lon stuff, ok? Seems Alton's penchant for gadgetry extends to the handheld GPS too.

Let's see if I can borrow a scene (sorry about the autoPlay, can't seem to stop it)

Gourmet's Diary Of A Foodie has turned out to be my favorite show of the moment. Another Zero Point Zero production. ZPZ produces Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations show. D.O.A.F. uses some of the same 'local experts' that have helped No Reservations get the inside scoop on foodie goodies.

What works:

• Awesome variety
• good in-depth kitchen time with some amazing chefs (Grant Achatz, José Andrés, many others)
• great insiders! Gourmet's connections have really opened up some interesting doors in these episodes
• Local connections: Plenty of action in the bay area, plus I've come across s(e.g. Saw an episode about Jersey Cow butter that looked so fresh and good, then came across fresh jersey cow butter at the ferry plaza farmers market).
• The demonstration sections: they bring technique and flavor into reach.

What doesn't work:

• those disembodied hands wailing on a computer keyboard to into each episode are a little freaky.
• Need more episodes! Looks like there are only two seasons.

Maybe I can borrow an episode for a bit:

I'm missing shows too of course. I haven't seen this Bourdain thing called At The Table. Yet. We're probably due for another excellent Top Chef series any month. Can't wait to read along with the amuse-biatch blog (often as entertaining as the episodes it covers). Of course, there hasn't been another installment of Daniel Boulud's After Hours (one of my all-time favs.). Chef Boulud, please return soon, we miss you!

Edit: Uh, so I stupidly forgot to mention on more great show that's started a new season. Stupid because this is probably my motivation for putting this post together.

Check, Please! Bay Area dished out a few new episodes to start its thrid season. This locally produced show's winning combination involves inviting 3 people to introduce and compare their favorite restaurants. The discussion and food porn are usually a lot of fun.

What works:

• Love the local focus. We watch and cheer for our favorite restaurants, debate where we'd take people, and add new destinations to our list.
• Leslie Sabracco keeps the conversation lite and fun. She's an expert with wines and drinks and usually brings an interesting factoid about a restaurant's wine list.
• The series has a bunch of good stuff online. In addition to each broadcast there are blogs, restaurant profiles, flickr streams, embeddable videos.
• Broadcasts are in true HD.

What doesn't work:

• The DVR ends up recording everything because they never signal when an episode is new.

Hey look, they've moved all their videos onto YouTube.

I suspect someone will export this formula to the other restaurant-rich markets.

What restaurant would you bring to the show?

Just what I'm in the mood for today.

SeeqPod - Playable Search

I want change. You do too. Stand behind a candidate you can really stand behind. I will too.

I met Seth Freeman in Boston just before I moved out to California. We eventually reformed recorded and played as Little John in San Francisco for a few years. Seth's most recent move was to LA to pursue a career as a soundtrack composer. Seth was also a big contributor to the 29 Songs project we banged out in February.

Seth just tossed a pile of acoustic recordings onto snocap. Some of these turned up on Little John records. Take a peek in the Songs, Volume 1 section:

The Snocap service (founded by Napster's founder Shawn Fanning among others) connects musicians with the marketplace. Seth's store is a perfect example of how an artist can market, distribute, and sell work directly to consumers.

Check out Seth's site: http://sethfreemanmusic.com/ and the obligatory Myspace page.

I was never that much of a skater, but I wore enough road-rash on my knees to appreciate these vids that I ran across this week. The skate through a warzone aesthetic is the common theme.

Where'd they film this first one? It's good to see that the youths of todays are capable of using their dynamites for a skate movie instead of the jihad. It's from a skate vid called Fully Flared. The explosions make a lot more sense when you read that Spike Jonze is involved in the production. He gives good boom.

I thought this one was interesting too. I thought I'd see if I could steal the player from the time.com video pages since I'm working on a really fun video project right now.

I admit it. Upon hearing Goog's announcement about Chrome's public beta, I threw up in my mouth (just a little bit). My learned-reaction comes from too many years wearing the QA hat at consumer-facing websites. The last thing the world needs is another browser floating around... another platform to support... another frigging pile of test-cases to down-prioritize and never get around to running.

I got over it. I spent a day surfing with Chrome, Goog's new browser. Here are a few first impressions.

Starts with a 475k downloadable setup program.

Once it's in, you can import Firefox or IE settings (including cookies) then it starts GoogleUpdate in the background (not surprised).

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

Wow! It's nearly Safari for windows. It's using webkit, already in Safari and sounds like it's going to be used in android. Kinda makes sense to steer users toward a platform that's capable of making the leap to mobile devices.

As software goes, Chrome is handsome. In fact, Chrome is a pretty clever name since there is practically no chrome to the browser. Screen real estate isn't wasted on the borders, status bars, or any of the chrome-y bits that are likely ruining your browsing experience.

Under the hood, Chrome boasts separate process space for different operations. It's trying to get around the single-threaded way most browsers work (without clever webdev hackery). There's also a revved-up JavaScript interpreter... or virtual machine... or something. Need to learn a little more about V8.

The task manager is a nifty idea: show all the processes that are running: tabs, plugins. Kill a process if it's out of control. Be sure to hit the 'Stats for nerds' link on the Task Manager. Is that actually showing memory usage for IE (which also happens to be running on my system at the moment). Yes. Kinda neat. It'll show FireFox too (but not seamonkey!). Helps you 'place the blame where blame belongs' if/when things go wrong.

Are you on Chrome right now? Here are a few interesting views under the hood:

• about:version The official version and build info.
• about:plugins all the plugins currently installed.
• about:memory lists stats for Chrome and other browsers.
• about:network some debug info about the networking.
• about:crash no idear what this is.
• about:stats some secret page about specific performance stats.
• about:cache view all the elements in the cache.

My day with Chrome has been a surprisingly upsell-free experience. I see the Google Gears integration, but nothing compelled me to use it. I expected to be directed toward Google Docs... it never happened.

Goog probably gets all of your usage data. Chrome logs everything in your browsing history unless you're in incognito mode. The Google docs describe a scenario where a user might want incognito-mode to order a surprise birthday gift, but I think they meant to say 'download porn'.

"To browse the web without keeping a record on your computer..." I love that. You'll clearly be keeping records on other computers.

Lots more info in the comic book. Allegedly, Goog printed up a bunch of these things and mailed them out. Anyone have one?

Overall I'm impressed. It's snappy, handsome, seems to handle all the torturous pages I drag my browsers across. No heavy upsells. Seems to have a lot of open-sourced projects under the hood. I'll check back in a few weeks.

October 15th, 2008: Blog Action Day, a great idea. Here's the deal: motivate a bunch of bloggists to write about a social issue (this year, poverty). Then, here's the kicker -- donate the earnings from that day's ad revenues.

The Greacen Zone falls on one extreme (ly small) end of the audience size spectrum. But since all of netscrap.com is involved in this ad-revenue experiment, I'll donate all of the netscrap platform's revenue. Might even beat the minimum for a microloan on Kiva

What will I write about? At this point: no idear. Really. I've lived in cities. I've taken enough human geography, heard stories from peace corps veterans, and travelled enough to know at least a little about the average state of humanity in the world. But poverty -- specifically. Dunno.

I'll come up with something good.

Really. It will.

Digsby is a multi-im client along the lines of Trillian, Pidgin, and the Meebo. Use Digsby to organize your IM chatter. Through a single application/interface, you can ping all your friends on the big IM services (AIM, YIM, MSN, GTalk, ICQ, Jabber). They kick it up a few notches by supporting Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace social services. They kick it up another notch by supporting email as well: gmail, ymail, msnmail, pop, imap accounts.

Updates and notifications from all these services arrive on the desktop in bubbly status messages that appear even if Digsby is minimized. You can even reply to a message by typing in the status bubble.

I love the way this blurs the boundaries between all these communication channels. A message could arrive from a person (who cares how it got here), my reply bounces back through the same channel.

Here's another way Digsby is pushing envelopes with their service. A few clicks will let you set up a widget that you can embed in your various web-hangouts, blogs, facebook account, etc.

Digsby does a stellar job of running their project with transparency and input from their users. They've managed to build a close relationship with an active user community by using all the social resources available. They go far beyond the requisite blog (even if they brag about the strange bugs that turn up in their public testing cycles). Users have a channel to reach Digsby via twitter, to get involved with an active developer community (also on twitter incidentally). The steady drumbeat of prioritization from regular public roadmap polls has kept Digsby on track to satisfy users. On top of all this, they've built in a great alert/warning system that lets folks at digsbyhq push status message out to all users ('twitter is having trouble today').

Kudos to their team involved with support and outreach. If I were running a customer-facing service, I'd likely use Digsby to manage the customer contacts. I wonder if they're eating their own dogfood over there at digsbyhq?

There are a few caveats of course. Because what software is perfect? Digsby does not yet support IRC or Skype chats. As far as I can see, the multi or 'room' chat features aren't supported on any of the IM services. All of these features are on their roadmap.

Digsby is ready for primetime and worth a try.

A friend passed on a link to this trailer today. Take a peek only if you're really brave:

This reminded me of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco's attempt to rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant to the "George W Bush Sewage Plant."

Don't you think both of these efforts will backfire in about 10 years? Stone's film will end-up glorifying W., his life becomes a redemption story blazing a path for future presidents to follow. The renaming scheme will seal W's legacy as an environmental crusader who dealt with the tough problems of sewage treatment and toxic waste.

Also, where's Will Ferrel when you really need him?

In my occasional experimentation with twitter I recently stumbled upon Twitterfountain. It's a widget-y presentation of search results from twitter and flickr. Looks like the twitter data comes from summize which was recently acquired by twitter.

One neat thing I've been doing with this is setting it to run fullscreen on a computer in public view in the office. You'll need to change the settings so the tweets arrive slowly enough and display large enough to read. I've been throwing in search terms related to products or campaigns we're working on; it's a neat way to see what people are talking about right NOW.

Unless you search for something inane like 'greacen' in which case you'll see all my tweets.

Try it with something like 'sears' or 'pepsi' or 'gofish' and you'll see that folks are talking about these brands.

I started putting notes onto this blog about 6 months ago. From where I sit: so far, so good. I've found some fun topics to play with. A few posts have even gotten some attention (visits).

Though I enjoy writing these short-attenion-span notes, I certainly haven't published 1000 posts. Here's what's going on:

The greacen zone runs on the netscrap.com publishing system. Netscrap has a few hundred posts already, thus the high numbers.

The fruit blog also runs on this jalopey.

What's the publishing system? If you've been reading, you already know that it's heart and soul is zombie technology. The netcrap.com publishing system is buggy, but it's super- efficient. Check out this month's netscrap.com comscore numbers if you doubt.

Where's this going? No idea. Isn't that exciting? Just like several of the startups I've worked for. At this point I'm considering tossing the publishing platform's core onto google code under the MSL just like I did with bashWebTest.

some thoughts:

• anyone interested in a platform like this? I suspect not. Correct me.
• what would a good codename or project name be? "NetScrap" might even work. Or "The NetScrap Platform" or "The NetScrap Thing"
• anyone have a better way of handling urls with zombie technology? I looked around a little bit, but couldn't find anything useful. I'm familiar with mapping scripts to 404 actions... I may take a stab at this during some lull.
• Syndication experiments have been fun: thanks for all the facebook clickthroughs. I'll probably work some more involved rss-streaming into this thing.

Thanks for reading!

While researching something for work I accidentally ended up on AOL's homepage. You'll be as shocked as I was to see a photo of the decaying Don Imus right there, smack-dab in the middle.

Can you imagine that morning editorial meeting:

• Editor: "which stories will make the main promo section?"
• Pimply intern: "that tales-from-the-crypt dude should go there"
• Editor: "Good Idea that will help our comscore numbers"

Note the similarity to the last time I came across this chilling visual on the web:

And of course the similarity to this guy:

I was hunting around the net for some info on heatmaps for a work-related project and came across a really neat toy called wordle created by Jonathan Feinberg. Wordle builds something resembling a tag cloud from a pile of text. Nice TrueType fonts and sweet color palettes help to turn a pile of wordiness into a handsome map.

I tossed the entire year's worth of blizzoggy posts from this site into wordle and this is what popped out (click the image for a larger image):

I removed the words from the GreacenZone's navigation (Fun, Music, Technology, Tagses, Leave, Category, etc.) and came up with this:

Lots more to see in the gallery.

One of the best parts of wordle is that the project seems to have come about as a personal project sponsored by Mr. Feinberg's employer, IBM. IBM owns the code, we get to enjoy the fruits (for a while at least).

I like porn: specifically, food porn. One of my favorite sources was Tastespotting which turned up dead last week. Why? The site simply says:

"In light of recent legal complications, NOTCOT will no longer be operating tastespotting.com"

What legal complications? From where will my next photo-food-feast come?

• Food Gawker (http://www.foodgawker.com/) is (nearly) a copy-and-paste job from the original
• FP Daily (http://fpdaily.net/) (because tastespotting up and went (very clever)) has nice big photos, tagging and comments. Whipped up by Robin.

Neither of these are using a feed that contains the images. Which is a big bummer. I was just skimming the tastespotting feed and checking out the articles with the best pics. This way I could digest large piles of the posts.

Anyway, holler if you have a better source.

I've been messing with the moblog-ation lately. Even went so far as to set up a twitter account. twitpic.com's service that lets me toss pics from my mobilephone into my tweetstream.

Look, I even tossed the feed over there in the left column. I'll sacrifice a little ad-revenue for this test.

What's this all about? It's vaguely work-related. Gonna see what I can do with these info streams.

We did it. For mishaps during AM surfing, we are now 3 for 3. First, I bonked my jaw on my board and earned an unscheduled trip to the emergency room. The following week, we experienced donutus interruptus due to a work emergency (unscheduled site outage). Today Ryan experienced surfus interruptus when his board split clear in two. No, it wasn't an epic day at Linda Mar.

• Ryan: Wanna buy a board cheap?
• Other guy: Looks like you have two boards.
• Ryan: Today it's 2 for 1.

Look at the anguish:

Kinda neat looking in there. No stringer, just air. The aluminum honeycomb is a neat material too.

So according to AdAge, Matt Freeman is moving to GoFish. Good news, indeed!

I was surprised to learn that he also plays a rippin' bass solo:

Let's hear it for Matt Freeman!

I happened to click over to hulu while doing some research on video players for work and came across the scene I described in earlier posts, begged the chef for some 411, and tried replicating multiple times.

Take a peek at this dish from Providence on After Hours..

Just stumbled upon this meme on youtube. Jeff Goldblum sports a unique approach to diction that I've always loved. Well guess what -- his normal voice is about 2 clicks away from sounding like a rambling rummy. Seems like this started with someone subtly stretching a timeline of an apple ad. Someone else tossed in an interview with Conan... Then there's this:

Kinda works, doesn't it? I couldn't reach Jeff for a comment on this thing.

Got a few decent minutes of video from Ryan's waterproof camera on 5/15. There's a good closeup of Marko in there. Music is by blert.

Two big surf swap meets this weekend. I might stop by them both if I can justify the $20 gas bill for the trip. I've never found anything worth buying at these things. I have a board project (thank you swaylocks) that needs some parts, so who knows -- maybe I'll find a finbox.

Both events are on Saturday, 5/17.

Log Shop
It's time again for the Fourth Annual Surf Gear Swap Meet - Come Buy, Sell and Trade on Saturday May 17th from 8AM to 12PM noon at the Log Shop Parking - 640 Crespi - Pacifica.

Aqua Surf Shop
2830 Sloat Blvd., across from the SF Zoo
415.242.9283 aquasurfshop.com

Heita3 makes musical instruments out of vegetables and performs. Yes, vegetables. He's become my recent favorite food-warrior by mixing two of my favorite ingredients: food and music.

He's taking the locavore thing to a new level. Watch all 31 of his videos and prepare to have your mind blown.

Somehow this mugshot made my day.

From The Smoking Gun.

Factoid about me: I earned a degree in geography from Boston University. I love maps, but I'm pretty lame at geo-trivia. Beat my 442K on this game:

I knew we won the cold war when I saw this:

We woke, we saw, we ate. Here are some of the highlights:

Artichokes from our garden:
The first harvest from our artichoke plant was amazing. So tender, I need to use a lighter touch steaming our next batch.

Shrimps:
This was attempt number 2 of trying the tableside salt-baked shrimp that I saw on tv a while back. The salt-baking technique didn't work out too well, but they are SO tasty. That last picture is a bowl of the shrimp roe that we collected from some of the shrimp. My oh-so-brave daughter ate a bunch of the roe as an appetizer, saying 'mmmmmmmm'.

We got the shrimp live at Ranch 99 which is like an aquarium that does take-out to my girls.

I wish I had pictures of the waffles we made on Sunday morning...

April in Carneros is happening this weekend. We stumbled upon a few really nice wines when we went last year. The vineyards along Las Amigas in Los Carneros is turning out to be one of our favorite spots in the whole Napa/Sonoma area.

Our favorites from the last April in Carneros included:

• Bouchaine (web became members there)
• Ceja (head there every chance we get)
• Richardson (the 'garage in the field': barrel tastings of tasty Pinot )
• McKenzie-Mueller (outrageously tasty Cabernet Franc from their library)

Just caught an interesting panel discussion on 'widgets and gadgets' at AdTech. Jeremiah Owyang moderated the panel, here are a few comments.

Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research

• On the Facebook platform: fish where the fish are
• But not all widgets are successful!
• How many Facebook widgets have business utility?

Hooman Radfar from Clearspring:

• Need to understand that widgets have different uses:
  • Public vs. Private consumption
  • Browser vs. Desktop
  • Social vs. Not
• This (widgets) is a platform
• Success metrics are tricky to identify. Treat it as a web channel.
• Cross platform compatibility and measurement is tricky (e.g. Netvibes had no uptake/usage data until recently)
• Challenge: it's a new medium. Old approaches don't always apply.

Kent Schoen from Facebook:

• "we call these applications"
• open up the field to allow other folks to design/deliver engaging interaction
• what do you want to get out of your application?
• Yes, the net is bigger than your site. Get your brand out there.
• Success depends on how you define it: reach, interactivity, installs, active users on some regular interval.
• Examples: Trip Advisor's map.. NYTimes quiz. Branded show & tell about the user.
• Success is: something that provides value.

Jane Felice from ComScore

• reach matters, we measure reach
• measurement is still evolving
  • some function of repeat people over some number of days viewed
  • started with tracking SWF (flash) files, moved toward Facebook, just starting to measure javascript.
• we can report on views, can't report on perceived value.
• FREE: tag your widget in a certain way and we'll report on it.

Ed Davis from ESPN

• 'the internet is our playground'
• widgets are inventory
• It only works if people like what you're doing. You need to see the viral usage which happens when simple useful things are found valuable.
• low barrier to entry: try things out!
• Monetize: drive awareness for other ESPN offers
• SEO lift is another amazing benefit from a rich widget offering
• For us, more frequent data updates (scores) helped drive the uptake of our widgets
• Uptake is like an impulse-purchase

Folks agree that valuable widgets tended to be successful, but couldn't really describe anything specific about what tends to constitute value. Seems also like these folks are struggling to define ways to measure the elusive 'engagement' metric that folks have been writing about recently.

...and not the police log this time. My Uncle Charlie scored a profile on their local ABC affiliates morning talk show. Take a peek at the video on their website: http://www.abcactionnews.com/

There are a few of his illustrations floating around the net too... take a peek.

Congrats Unka Charlie!

Brilliant!

So if you happen to find something in your access_log that mentions GFSearcher, it's me. Apologies if this is a nuisance. I'm running some tests with Nutch on a small number of sites for my day job.

GFSearcher/GFSearch-0.9

I'll follow up this post with some info about how everything works out.

No, not my dad. Robert Greacen was a poet from Northern Ireland. He had the same name as my father and grandfather. He lived in the part of Ireland my family left at the turn of the century. He died today.

While studying in Galway, my sister had correspondence with him: a brief letter neatly typed on a card. My brother too, several letters. But Robert Greacen wasn't really family, just a familiar name.

Here are a bunch of poem excerpts on goog-books.

Somehow it worked out. The people fell for it.

The plan was to run the Olympic Torch through a gauntlet of protesters along the embarcadero. The pro-tibet and pro-chinese folks were robed in flags and ready to meet for a chant-off. The two groups met, temperatures rose, men with shaved heads pleaded for nonviolence...

Then someone said that the torch was heading up Townsend St. The crowded headed off the Embarcadero.

Then someone said that the torch was being taken from McCovey Cove to the Ferry Building by boat, then a runner would run toward Bay St. The crowds turned and headed toward the Ferry Building.

THEN it turns out that the torch was whisked toward Van Ness by bus. The runner jogged unnoticed into a convenience store, bought a pack of cigarettes and jogged on. All the protesters (and the unfortunate few who just wanted to see the torch) fell for it.

Paige & David got all the good shots.

Some fun things noticed along the way:

• When in doubt, follow the police choppers
• How did the flashmob fail?
• Lots of cameras everywhere
• The Darfur folks all in green
• The guys chanting for the Golden State Warriors
• We missed our chance for millions: should have rented a hotdog stand for the day to sell 'doggie lamas'

Well, I did it. I tossed a little pile of code onto google's open source site.

A few years ago I wrote (in my spare time) a little test harness around some simple command-line utilities. I wanted something to help me answer some simple questions about what was going on some large clusters of servers. Rather than clicking through a bunch of nicely formatted pages, I wanted something to make a bunch of http requests and give me a 'yes' or 'no' about the response. The trick (for me) was to try to run it on some server in the cluster which was running a really lean installation of Linux. No frills.

I could have probably compiled a jar & dropped it onto the server... but I couldn't edit & recompile a class on the server. I could probably have run a perl script, (geeze why didn't I just write it in perl?) but I think the WWW-Mechanize module wasn't installed. Who knows... anyway, I ended up stumbling upon curl and decided to write a wrapper around it using simple bash scripts.

Guess what? It worked. It was handy. Guess what? I used it at a few jobs since I wrote it. Guess what? It's still (somewhat) handy. So today (or yesterday) I give something back to the internets and interwebs that haz given me so much. I offer:

• http://code.google.com/p/bashwebtest/
• Installation Steps
• Example Tests
• WTF - 'what's that function?'
• FAQ

Tests are pretty simple. I'll toss a few test examples on this blizzog and onto the wiki on code.goog over the next few weeks. If you have any interest at all in using something klunky, and somewhat functional, please contact me and I'll help you get started.

Code.goog doesn't have a way to select it, but I planned on distributing the source under the 'MSL' license.

Anyway, enjoy!

I love to browse off-the-shelf tools and doodads floating around the net. Recently I was looking for a widget to publish our corporate news titles on the gofish.com homepage. Sure, I'd love have time to write this from scratch, I don't... but I have about enough time to try 5 and see what works the best.

Quick summary of the features I'd like to shoot for:

• MUST: browser compatible
• MUST: pull corp feed
• MUST: be easy to implement
• SHOULD: customize colors
• SHOULD: customize dimensions
• SHOULD: be quick to load (<3secs)
• SHOULD: not give up too much info to a 3rd party
• SHOULD: serve it in a 300x250 RECT size.(why not?)
  • 305x215 Whole corner
  • 305x40 The heading
  • 305x175 List area
• NICE: pull & mix several feeds
• NICE: sort multiple feeds
• NICE: Re-syndicate the widget

Our Raw Feed
Looks like I can grab a feed of each category. This might make for some handy intermingling of headlines. The downside is that it looks like I'm pulling a whole-article feed. I'll see if I can get this to just pull the titles. I'll set up a feedburner feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoFishCorp before using one of these doodads.

Yourminis

www.yourminis.com seems like a neat platform for building and syndicating a flash widget. They allegedly have some relationship with brightcove, I'll see if there's anything worth exploring there.

WidgetBox widget
This looks like a javascript/xhtml implementation. Kinda nice, but let me check it out in a pile of browsers first. Seems like the widgetbox is chock full of other presentations. Would be nice to find one that can handle a few feeds at once.

Some javascript doodad
It's a freebie, kinda simple: http://itde.vccs.edu/rss2js/build.php. Kinda simple, but it looks like I can style the output pretty easly.

Another javascript doodad

Nice javascript-only implementation, doesn't seem like it's working though.

Feed Sweep
Feedsweep is free for noncommercial use, handles a bunch of feeds at once, and is super-simple to put together. Creates a nice dhtml presentation of the title list. I think this

rss-to-javascript
Another freebie, not sure I can get this into the dimensions of the content area on the homepage.

What do you like? The other folks on the team here seem to like the yourminis the best. I'll put a POC together soon.

My first exposure to coppa was an amazing sandwich from Molinari's in San Francisco's North Beach. My second introduction came in 1998 while working for DoughNet a startup that provided financial services for kids. The federal government enacted the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) 15 U.S.C. § 6501-6506 during the boom years to assert some controls on the way the new crop of dotcoms collect and handle data from minors. The ftc didn't want to let the DoughNETs prey on kids.

What is COPPA?
COPPA requires that web site operators offer the following provisions to its members:

• Post a privacy policy on the homepage of the Web site and link to the privacy policy on every page where personal information is collected.
• Provide notice about the site's information collection practices to parents and obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from children.
• Give parents a choice as to whether their child's personal information will be disclosed to third parties.
• Provide parents access to their child's personal information and the opportunity to delete the child's personal information and opt-out of future collection or use of the information.
• Not condition a child's participation in a game, contest or other activity on the child's disclosing more personal information than is reasonably necessary to participate in that activity.
• Maintain the confidentiality, security and integrity of personal information collected from children.

The laws describe specific measures and remedies in order to comply. Even with the FTC-provided how-to guide they're not entirely black and white. There's a 'sliding-scale' for determining appropriate parental consent related to the type of engagement on the site. This grey-area, introduced in 2002, allows a less-thorough check for parental consent based on how the site operators want to use the user's private information.

Nick & COPPA
Nickelodeon describes in detail how they use this sliding scale to gain consent appropriate with their site: watching vids, interacting with Nick. characters, and playing games. For example, Nick wants to offer "points" or incentives to kids for playing games, this requires an account with a login, which can be created without any personally-identifiable information.

Additionally, Nick employs two "email exceptions" which say prior parental consent is not required when:

• an operator collects an e-mail address to respond to a one-time request from a child and then deletes it; and
• an operator collects an e-mail address to respond more than once to a specific request. In this case, the operator must notify the parent that it is communicating regularly with the child and give the parent the opportunity to stop the communication before sending or delivering a second communication to the child.

More information like the comment from Nick is collected on the ftc website, worth a peek.

Further reading...

• Wikipedia mentions a few companies who have been fined by the ftc for failure to comply.
• More detail on the ftc site.
• A site the text of the law and tips on complying.
• The text of the law on law.cornell.edu:
  • http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/6502.html
  • http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/6503.html
  • http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/6504.html
  • http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/6505.html
  • http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/6506.html

I'll write more about COPPA in future posts and how it relates to specific features common to popular websites.

St. Paddy's is an important time in the Greacen household. Our family was started right around St. Paddy's, Netscrap.com was started on St. Paddy's too. A good friend considers it his new year, performing all the retrospection and top-10 lists that you'd expect on new year's eve.

Though the beancounters will remind you that Saturday was really St. Patrick's day, celebrate it tonight if you haven't already.

We'll have a netscrap birthday sometime this week.

I've heard the word "widgets" mumbled around the office a few times in recent days. Seems like we're ready to put some thought/planning into publishing content on our sites (a few new ones in the pipeline) as well as syndication ofcontent to sites across GoFish's network.

Social features aren't super-high on our priority list, but since I have a bunch of info on-hand I'll start with a quick survey of a few 3rd party social widgets. Subsequent posts will include more info on content syndication and other publish-y widgets.

JS-Kit: http://js-kit.com/
I installed JS-Kit on http://greacen.com and http://29.netscrap.com in about 15 minutes. I didn't do anything tricky with the styling, but it looks really easy. The admin is simple and clean.

JS-Kit is a "social widget" with these main features:

• comments
• ratings
• navigation (featured content)
• reviews
• polls
• user accounts (extremely minimal)
• user avatars
• user reputation management
• spam filtering
• email notifications
• platform: javascript/css-based
• syndication: rss
• admin: ban
• admin: remove comment
• integration: EASY

Negatives include: not a lot of reporting info available out of the box. Also, I'm unable to participate in the discussion with the lame browser (palm blazer) on my phone (opera mini works however). No ad-units anywhere in these community features.

Can't beat the price or the ease-of integration though. Seems like they're open to white-labeling the feature for some undetermined fees.

All of these features seem COPPA-friendly since there is no requirement to provide personal information.

Intense Debate: http://intensedebate.com/
Another threaded discussion widget like JS-Kit's comment tool.

• threaded discussion
• top commenters
• stats (comment count)
• user accounts
• user profiles (avatar, links, etc)
• user reputation mgmt
• user relationships (friending)

Neat use of openid! This is much more profile-y than JS-Kit, since users can add links to their blogs & social media pages, etc. They get their own profile page on the intensedebate site as well.

Does it play well with COPPA? Not sure, need to dig a little deeper.

Kickapps: http://www.kickapps.com/
A whole platform for widgety syndication. This seems pretty rich. I need to look at this much more closely. Looks like Brightcove's storymaker on steroids. I'll cover this more when I get into publishy widgets.

• ad units
• media players
• user accounts
• user profiles
• blogs
• videos
• photos
• threaded discussion
• platform: Java, customizable.
• syndication: embeddable in other sites
• syndication: rss

Kickapps has existing partnerships with some big content producers (like Rachel Ray!). They claim to have some reporting info available to publishers. The pricing model is interesting: they run ads (and keep the rev) or you buy out their costs on a CPM basis. Seems like a turn-key social media solution.

Tangler: http://www.tangler.com/
Another "social widget" whose main features let a publisher quickly integrate a forum:

• real-time chat
• threaded discussion
• user accounts
• user profiles (avatar, homepage)
• user relationships
• notifications
• embeddable (social syndication)
• privacy controls

Seems like a more immersive and 'whole page' presentation than the discussion widgets listed above. Users get their own profile page

Cocomment: http://www.cocomment.com/
Seems like a browser plug-in first, but it's integrated with their "social widgets". Similar features:

• comments
• tag cloud
• user accounts
• syndication: rss

Kinda neat stuff, I'll get into Brightcove Story Maker, Kickapps, and some of the doodads I've seen on Widgetbox in a future post to this blog.

Maybe I should toss these into my last post about the get-together. Just a few mire words on this before I return to posts about vertical ad networks, qa and the like.

I didn't really make it to 29 songs as planned, but I'm ok with it. I have at least 10 (ok, maybe 6) decent songs to refine which is way more than what I had at the start of the month.

I uploaded a bunch of tunes from the wrap party to the 29 site (finally). I have stereo versions of the full band experience. Email me if you're desperate to hear those recordings (then please turn yourself in to the kookoo police).

Soon I'll lock down the files that make up the 29.netscrap.com site. Derek's comment about keeping the record of the month in tact is right on. I'll move those things somewhere else. The site will continue to work of course. In fact, it needs a few changes.... Gotta have better control of the player:

• play in order (as opposed to random)
• play a single artist if you want
• play a single song if you want
• make it easy to embed all of these into other internets.

So what's next? I'll be spending some make-up time with the fam (and work) in the meantime. I also need to rehab my leg which was bonked one recent Saturday when I should have been finishing some songs. After that? I learned that I like recording tunes and I need to keep rolling with this. I learned that my main blockage with songwriting is more in the commitment department than the execution (except maybe the verboligization that accompanies the rock guitar). Even if it's just a slow simmer of experimentation, I need music to be happening. Maybe some 29'ers will get together to jam. Maybe we'll get to collaborate in each others studio to help get Greenberg's recordings recordings LOUDER... I DEFINITELY need to thaw out and finish a few blert songs that haven't been heard by many. Maybe I need to launch http://52.netscrap.com to be home of our new song-a-week lifestyle.

Who's in?

We're almost done. I just have a few more things to upload. The whole 29 songs/days crew came over on Wednesday to listen & play some tunes (and wake up the neighbors). I'll upload those songs soon.

I REALLY had a great time chatting about music struggles & successes with folks. Couple of things I learned:

• Peter's gear (sweet tube amps + scumbacks + vintage prs) sounds as good in person as his blog claims.
• My If You Ever is really in 7! Even though I played drums for this I hadn't counted it out.
• Seth rocks on bass!
• Bruce really plays all that stuff! It's amazing!
• The Chorus from Derek's Warriors was based on the exact way the actor delivered the line in the movie (repeated in the bizarrely authentic Warriors video game).
• Peter puts a LOT of thought into his tunes. They still rock.
• A few folks noticed my bird on some of my recordings. Bruce claims that he buried some sounds in a bunch of his recordings. Listen with headphones.
• Seth's been focusing his songwriting on soundtracks, he got his pop-song-hat back on just for this month.

Here's everything so far.

Take a listen!

We're getting near the end of February and the 29 Songs project. We're planning on having a get-together this week to listen to or play a few songs in my garage. Email me if you want to come by. Wow, what have you missed?

• Creeps Out - is a ditty about a guy I saw on the bart. He looked like the usual nerd commuter until he started blathering about some nonsense. This promptly made everyone around him get up, move to the other end of the car, and call the cops.
• love - so everyone else was doing it, banging out these love songs. Now, if you know me (and if you're reading this you probably do) you know that the verbal arts do not come easily. I am but a brown belt in verbissitude. Anyway, I always loved the direct allular intensity of Decendents' "ALL", so I borrowed it. That and the 'one love' from Bob.
• digberg - is a pet name for Ginger. I put the rhythm together on the bart ride home, recorded the noise around it and fell asleep before I could deal with anything lyrical.
• the day - well. This isn't really a ballad, but that's what I was shooting for. I completely stole some harmonic thing that I used to play on piano. What was that stuff? I'll find out.
• that girl with brown hair - more lyrical help from Eve. We were playing with polly pockets. Eve's a little aggressive about determining the rules of our doll playing. Tonight, I had to be 2 girls who saw her girl, didn't know who it was, and had to figure it out. Eve gave me some clues, "She looks like she's been to Spain and France."
• break it down - More from the rockpile. What was I thinking? Dunno. I started writing this on the bass, I was thinking about Jawbox. The rest falls a little flat, but it's fun. I made the lyrics up on the fly and just recorded with a SM58 because I was too lazy to set up the condenser mic. The rest of the Engineering (and playing for that matter) is all Greacen formula. Have I spelled this out? Should I?
• nu - (not to be confused with nude you up) It's a riff I was playing on the acoustic guitar for a few days. Boy I wish I could keep a consistent tempo when I toss these out. I think I poured on the distortion a little too thick on this take, but it was fun. I gave myself 2 minutes to write something down lyrically, which seems to have helped the sitchmo. Used the SM58 again due to lazyness.

Why all the rock, Chris? In all, I think I'm taking a slight (I like creeps out) quality nosedive, but what I lack in quality (and variety for that matter) I'm trying to make up for with VOLUME. Also, that kinda comes easy to me. The wall of sound comes easier than writing a clever or pretty lyric.

Peter brought up a great idea about trying to get these tunes into the hands of similarly masochistic filmmakers for a 31 films in march marathon. Who do we talk to about that?