Weeknote 119
We got a new logo this week, by Jason Permenter. Jason also designed a suite of document templates that will make all of our paperwork shine. We are very pleased.
MediaBugs is now available nation-wide, so you can now file bugs on news reports from any publication or news source, no matter where they are located. In addition, much more information is now available about publications, including information about their correction policies. Mediabugs' launch was covered by BoingBoing!
We've been working for a few months on a big enhancement to the dooce® Community, and it is finally live: dooce Groups! Members of the community can now join together in small groups and participate in conversations outside of the main question-and-answer site. This addition to the site happened in response to how quickly the site grew, and how active the membership is. When we noticed that members were struggling to group together and organize themselves using the existing software, we knew it was time for an upgrade!
In case you missed it, we released a new version of our social SDK, PeoplePods. The new version features a redesigned and enhanced command center, as well as new plugin capabilities. Also, PeoplePods now ships with Twitter, Facebook and OpenID compatibility! We're putting lots of work into PeoplePods, and releases should now happen on a more regular basis. The latest and greatest code (and info on every change as it happens) is available on the PeoplePods Project Page at Google Code.
And finally, our awesome intern Damien has been working diligently on a Chrome version of SendTab. If all goes well, SendTab 2.0 will be released sometime this month in both Safari and Chrome versions with some much requested new functionality. Hooray!
Weeknote 79
For New Years, Katie sent out little gift packages to our recent clients and co-conspirators. Katie wanted to make sure that we didn't just send people junk - nobody needs another American Apparel teeshirt with a dotcom logo on it. Inside each package was a Pantone 232C flash drive with the XOXCO logo LASER ETCHED onto it, and a custom postcard from Moo. They arrived last week, and Amit from Photojojo and Micki from NeighborGoods documented the contents on Flickr:
Last week, we had lunch with Todd Nienkerk from Four Kitchens, another local design and development company that does work simliar to the stuff we do. Over fancy sausages at Frank, we grilled Todd about how he runs Four Kitchens and about his experience hiring people. He gave us a ton of great advice and introduced us to a few people here in Austin who can help us as we continue to grow.
As we left our meeting with Todd, Katie and I decided that we should try to have a meeting with someone outside of our normal laptop-o-sphere at least once a week. We need to keep the external input coming in so we can learn from the smart people around us. I want to stay humble and remind myself that there is always more to learn.
Somehow, we continue to trick Kristina Halvorson to give us advice as well. We had a chat with her yesterday about the early days at Brain Traffic, and how she sets goals for the growth of her agency. We are used to setting goals for projects and products, but the task of dreaming up and planning for the future of a company like ours is a bit of a mystery to me.
But the advice we've been getting from everyone is inspiring - and made me realize that I tend to over think some of these issues. Todd warned us about the bureaucratic requirements for hiring people in Texas, but he also told us that there's a good pool of talented people here in Austin who are hungry for good work. Kristina told us to stop worrying about numeric metrics and goals, and start figuring out what kind of life and environment XOXCO is supposed to create for us. It seems that our plans can be a lot squishier than I thought. Which is good, because I am a pretty squishy guy.
In terms of actual CODE WRITTEN, which is really how I measure the success or failure of a week, I am ON FIRE. We are getting ready to release new versions of NeighborGoods and dooce Community with a bunch of cool new features and updates. I am slaughtering Basecamp tasks on the MediaBugs and HDL projects - both of which should be wrapping up in the next month. With design and functionality at about 90% on both sites, we are just a tiny bit behind schedule. I am totally impressed with the work everyone has been doing on these projects.
We're travelling to San Francisco again at the end of this week, and we'll be there through Tuesday of next week. We're hoping to schedule a few face-to-face meetings with our VIPS - if you want to see us, email Katie!.
Weeknote 72
Katie and I went to New Orleans this week to attend Do it With Drupal, a great conference for lovers of the dark Drupal arts put on by our friend Jeff Robbins and his cohorts at Lullabot. I have been wearing one of their teeshirts for years, so it was quite an experience to walk through a hotel convention center and see hundreds of people wearing the same shirt.
Jon Armstrong and I gave our talk about online communities. It went well, and I had a lot of interesting follow up discussions with other attendees. dooce Community makes such a compelling case for the kind of personality filled niche communities I love to build. I really wanted to sell the rewards these kind of sites deliver, so we talked both about the traffic boost they've seen - Jon showed snapshots of his analytics that show the community users spend nearly three times as long on the site as they do on the main blog - and about the emotional outpouring they've seen from the nearly 20,000 members they've signed up in the first month. See this thread, it melts my heart.
I said a few things that people liked and tweetered about a bit. I am always mega-honored when anyone quotes a talk I give on Twitter. This time around it was "When I build a community, I'm hoping it will actually improve people's offline lives as well as online," and When you open up community access to a site you own, you're essentially selling shares in your site."
These choice nuggets are from a section of the presentation where I was discussing the responsibilities we have as purveyors of web services and online communities. The tools we have to measure our impact on the people who use our products focus on anonymized trends and aggregated cross-sections. But the communities we manage are not these aggregates! Each member is a person, sitting somewhere in front of a laptop or holding an iPhone. Each, a person who has made the decision to trust us, that we as software providers are trying to make the world a better place through technology, by connecting them and letting them speak to one another. I believe that the software we provide creates a connection between us and each one of these people, and that we need to respect that connection. So I rant about it!
While at DIWD, we got to hang out with some charming new friends. Kristina Halvorson gave a great keynote about content strategy, and then gave me some great advice about running a small business. NOTHING BUT CLASS, that lady.
We also spent some quality time with Rob Purdie, who presented about his work with The Economist and all of the magic that can be achieved using the Scrum development method. I impolitely complimented his politeness about three times, so I hope he won't avoid me the next time we're in the same city.
Our lovely client, Micki Krimmel was in town as well, presenting about the job of community manager. She gave a great presentation, and it was exciting to see NeighborGoods up on the big screen. If any DIWD attendees are reading, join up to share your old Drupal books with your pals.
In between all of the excitement, I found just enough time to upload the first baby version of Media Bugs to our dev server. After weeks of planning, it's always fun to see the software come to life. Scott has already logged in and posted the first few bugs. Meanwhile, the team at Rumors Studio nailed their deadline and delivered some awesome wireframes for our join project with Helsinki Design Lab.
The only thing I haven't checked off my todo list is to check out the newest version of Flixel. Adam Atomic has been twittering about all the improvements he's made, and I'm anxious to dig in and see what the new capabilities inspire.
I'm off to San Francisco on Monday for a few days of in-person time with our friends in PST. Katie will be holding down the fort in Austin while we prepare to close out the year. Excelsior!
Just Launched: dooce Community
We're excited to announce today that our latest project, dooce Community has launched! We've been working closely with Heather and Jon on this new branch of the mega popular dooce empire, and we're very proud of the results.
The new site will allow members of the dooce community to get to know each other in a way their semi-anonymous commenting system never did. The site is a question/answer site ala Yahoo Answers, but members will be welcome to discuss whatever they like - from babies to cameras to politics.
Like the main dooce blog, the community is powered by Drupal. XOXCO built a bunch of new social gadgets for this site, and if you'd like to learn more about how we did it, come see Jon and I give our talk all about the site at this year's Do It With Drupal conference.
Many thanks to Jon and Heather, Ben Durbin, the support staff at LiquidWeb, and our friends at Lullabot whose help with Drupal's idiosyncrasies was invaluable.