Category Archives: my blog

Yammer

A week without a post.  Ugh!  Here are the excuses, perhaps as a form of update:

  1. I’ve been spending a lot of time at Lambda Phi of Alpha Delta Phi.  I’m delighted to report they got 19 pledges.
  2. A fair amount of time at work.  Finished Sprint 2, kicked off Sprint 3.
  3. Three Red Sox games, only one of which was a win.  I may have the worst Sox home record in the entire city this year.
  4. Saw Donna the Buffalo at Paradise.  My review: Meh.  And how could they not play Positive Friction?

My one creative output this week was a post on the HubSpot blog about Yammer.  A few thousand people read that blog; I haven’t written for an audience that size since I wrote for The Tech.

Writing about Yammer was pretty easy for me.  Yammer is trying to solve a problem that Abuzz and eRoom were trying to solve, and IMlogic was managing the same type of corporate messaging.  I could talk for hours about corporate knowledge management/messaging.  Then my audience would lapse into a protective coma.

Posting From the iPhone

At the same time the new iPhone was released, they made it possible to write apps fir the iPhone (every iPhone user knows this, but not all of my readers are techies). One of the apps is a WordPress app.

This post is written and published in my iPhone. It looks like I can’t do links. I presume that is because the iPhone lacks cut and paste. But I can put up pictures, like this one from Thursday’s Sox game.

I now have one less excuse for not posting.

US Senate Bill 1: Registering Bloggers

There’s a bill moving through the Senate updating the requirements and restrictions for lobbyists. The update includes a section that affects certain bloggers. I have contacted my senators asking them to join the oppostion to the blogger section, and I encourage you to do the same.

The change is aimed at bloggers that receive money in order to encourage “grassroots” movements. Slashdot is talking about it, so is DownsizeDC, the Center for Competitive Politics, and a number of others. When you read the discussion about this bill, the debate seems to go like this:

Jane: They’re requiring bloggers to register as lobbyists! That’s crazy talk!
Joe: Don’t worry, it’s only bloggers that receive money. Most bloggers are unaffected.

I think this dialogue misses the point. To me, a lobbyist is someone who reaches out to politicians and office holders and tries to change what they think. If someone asks voters to contact their representatives, that’s not lobbying. When (if) the voter makes the call, that’s not lobbying either – that’s a voter expressing an opinion. This isn’t activity that should be regulated.

You can see the actual language of the bill here; click on Section 220. Check out the section about “registrants” in particular.

By the way: I wasn’t paid to make this post.

Ignore the Harpoon Tabblo Post

If you read this by coming to my website, you can ignore this message.

For those of you with RSS readers, please ignore the last post I just made. I was testing some new Tabblo feature stuff, and I inadvertantly published a link to our test environment. You’d be really bummed if you made a tabblo on the test area, and then we deleted the test database. . . .

New Look and Feel

For the last three years, I’ve built this website by typing HTML by hand. No wizzy-wig editors, no composers, nothing – if I couldn’t figure out how to code it, I didn’t do it. I did it that way partly as a way to keep the website clean and simple, and partly as a learning exercise.

Lately, I’ve been writing less and less. I still have had the urge to write, but I haven’t put pen to paper, so to speak. I think that part of the the problem is that the overhead in putting up a new post has been too high. (Self-analysis of my own motivations are always a crapshoot, so we’ll see if this is a new burst of energy followed by months of silence. Only time will tell).

So, I installed WordPress. So far I’ve spent about 4 hours in configuration and settings and such, and only got frustrated twice. The old website is available through the links on the left, and someday I may import it into the regular archives.

As part of this new software, I’m doing something very new for me: I’m enabling comments! So, please make use of them. To start with, I welcome feedback on the new look and feel. Does it work for you? Is it missing something? Whatever you’ve got, I’m curious.