B. Mann Consulting

My cab should be here in minutes, so this is going to be a quick and dirty post. I'm just getting over a cold and trying to be in top shape for Drupalcon Boston 2008 so apologies for the last minute posting.

I'm running a session in the site building track on Mapping business requirements to Drupal modules - a gap - fit process. This could as easily have fit into the business track, and really it will bridge both. I'm looking forward to making this, in part, an interactive session, a way to raise some interesting questions, and ideally to share best practices. Expect everything from project management, scoping, to Boris' gold star module development. Oh, and I'm going to yell at people for not expanding their business models.

The good folks at Palantir asked me to help sit on a panel to discuss getting your team up to speed in Drupal. I don't have a good outline of that yet, but I have lots of ideas around that concept. Anything new? Perhaps not, but working with the larger team at Raincity Studios has been a joy, especially in the mentoring department.

Lastly, I'm moderating a birds of a feather (BoF) session on RDF and the Semantic Web...but really, I'll just be a remote mouthpiece for Arto Bendiken the architect and programmer behind this latest wave for Drupal.

I'm using a couple of different tools to broadcast messages out about happenings at this event. A forum post on the Drupalcon site talked about one way to use Pownce / Twitter. I also like Twemes, something built locally in Vancouver to track stuff on Twitter using hashtags. Simply use the hashtag #drupalcon and all your twitters will end up on this page: http://twemes.com/drupalcon -- there's also an RSS feed on that page. For Jaiku, I figure we can re-use the #drupal channel, since it's not that high volume in any case. Posts here on this blog will be using the Drupalcon Boston 2008 tag (again, there's a feed on that page). Any Utterz* I will tag with that as well.

I've posted also on the Raincity blog and over on here. See you soon!

I fully blame Chris Heuer. I signed up for an Utterz account, after trashing him quite thoroughly over Skype some time back :P

What is Utterz? Well, it's mobile blogging, sort of. The only capability I've taken advantage of so far is the audio. You get a local (yes, even in Canada!) phone number that you can call, hit a few buttons, record whatever you want to say, hit some more and your recording will get posted. It posts (within 10 minutes) to the Utterz site, but can then also be set up to auto post to a number of other different places, like your blog or send out a Twitter notification. And yes, of course there is an RSS feed of your Utterz, so it's easy to pipe into Jaiku as well.

Aside from audio, you can also send pictures, video, and text to a special email address, and it will associate that with any audio Utterz you made in a 10 minute period.

So, you'll notice an Utterz widget in the sidebar top right, and I've also embedded a horizontal widget right in this post. Tonight, sore throat and all, I opened up my delicious bookmarks page and talked about the last 10 bookmarks I made.

I finally took a little time to update to the latest Feed API and start sucking in my Delicious links. I'm not quite ready to mix it into my Feedburner feed, since I want to do mapping of the link field to my "native" weblink type, as well as the tags aren't transferring across.

The big thing this enables is commenting on my delicious notes. Meta observations on the link in question. As Richard has previously noted, my Jaiku instance actually also provides this: a second permalink where comments are enabled.

All Consuming is the other web service that I'm definitely interested in sucking back in here. I've been keeping it fairly up to date with my reading, and I know lots of people that also like to read similar books. RSS as the simplest systems integration format. Fun times!

My usage of Facebook has dropped. At the same time, people messaging me / contacting me through there has increased. At least the message shows in email now.

What I am still using quite a bit is the SMS integration for status messages. I know that updating my status sends out SMS notifications to a bunch of my friends, and vice versa. Yes, this is not new -- it's microblogging / Twitter / Jaiku, etc.

The mobile integration grounds the social in the "real world". There is an element of serendipity in sending a ping out to the world, and wondering who might respond back, who else is wandering the streets, cellphone in hand, ready to go for a drink or join an activity.

I imagine when Jaiku gets their US / Canadian mobile integration up and running, I'll use that more.

What SMS services are you using in Canada? Travis' description of SpinVox sounds great -- except for the whole Rogers is the devil and expense of it :P