Myth has it that ‘Kilroy was here’ was the mark of a shipbuilder before/during WWII, and that it was picked up by Servicemen who found it amusing that the mark was made in supposedly unreachable places. They then spread the mark elsewhere, as locations around the world were liberated.  I love this concept, because I’m not a fan of limitations — I’m an avid gamer, but I rail against games that don’t let you stray from the path. There is no variety, or replay value because each time you have exactly the same sequence of events.

Many hopeful web developers fall into this pitfall as well. I was reading http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2009/10/27/desire-lines-the-metaphor-that-keeps-on-giving/, a(nother) look at a metaphor called ‘desire lines’, that has similarly important lessons for the web2.0 community. You can’t force people to do what you want. The lesson is simple and played out all around us, you can set down a path, but you can’t make people want to use that route. A good designer will probably preempt a lot of what people will want, but not everything, and the overnight success that all of us are searching for is a bit hit and miss. Plenty of good ideas are out there, but finding something that people actually want, and then getting the word out there that you’re product is there is tough.

Or something like that.

I accept planetmcd’s criticism of my previous post. I’m aware that I’m less than eloquent and my arguments less than logical at times.

I can’t say for sure whether anyone has ever done a presentation like that here. I do know that something like that wouldn’t be accepted not just because of the images (sexual or not), but because it doesn’t conform to corporate standards. Ruby/Rails/Web2.0 has no such standards, more,  the culture is one of being risky, on the edge, and of pushing the limits.

There are probably many ways that it could have been done better, but it wasn’t. The problem stems from not going to Matt, and expressing that they didn’t like the presentation. They could have suggested using ‘Fragstar’ next time (via Renae Bair). Instead choosing to drag Rails through the mud publicly, “Here is a professional community that doesn’t respect women”.

I’m aware that Matt has defend his position, and the DHH may have made it worse, but I don’t condone the method this was approached in the first place. It’s sensationalist and unnecessary. Do people actually think they’ve improved the community by acting in this manner?

The dress code is only one facet of what I was trying (albeit poorly) to express. If you asked a programmer whether he would prefer to wear jeans and t-shirt or suit and tie to work which would he pick? What is the dress code at the Web2.0 development houses (not having worked at one I don’t know)? If it is jeans and t-shirts then that workplace is different to mine. My current employers wouldn’t consider them very professional either – This is where it goes to the heart of the community. You can do development the traditional, non agile way, any time you want to put on a suit and tie and forget you know techniques like metaprogramming/bdd/tdd (and don’t forget how to use windows, because that’s what corporate professionals use).

I have worked for a few industrial clients where staff had nudes as desktop wallpapers (we’re not talking partial nudity either), and pinups scattered around the sheds. There were certainly females around, though how they felt about it never came up. They would consider themselves professional, in that they provide top notch solutions to their clients. Warranties & quality assurance, etc. I doubt my current employer would find them very professional either, sweaty, greasy, and not very formal.

One of the things that I’ve heard raised when Australian corporate entities deal with overseas counterparts, is that we’re a good deal less formal and respectful than they are. Socially and culturally Australians are more laid back, some might say unprofessional. Different people are always going to have differing opinions on professionalism, I find it unlikely that Matt felt he was being unprofessional in using the pictures and analogy that he did. I would hazard he still doesn’t feel he was unprofessional, though he undoubtedly realizes that it was a mistake.

Before I launch into my response to Peter Szinek, you need to know some background. Matt Aimonetti made a presentation at GoGaRuCa on CouchDB, which included sexual references and supposedly explicit images. I’ve looked over the presentation (which may or may not have the same content as the one at the event) and I have to say that I found it to be pretty tame considering the hype that had spread before it. When I first read the story (found here and here) it was framed in ‘how to scare women away from your development community’. DHH and probably many others, responded strongly to the controversy. I’m particularly fond of Renae Bair’s post.

This morning when I got to work I was greeted by another story…about how rails is still a ghetto.  I have to disagree with the argument. Yes if you go to India and go to a Hindu temple you should take off your shoes, and you should be refined enough to KNOW to take off your shoes, either that or the shoes at the door should give you the heads up. This line of reasoning isn’t relevant for a rails conference, because there is no guideline anywhere that says, ‘should not show pictures of that nature’. It may well have been a bad decision, but there without precedent, how was he to know.

This is where the argument that professionalism comes in. I certainly wouldn’t dare using a presentation like that at my work, because they’re card holding accountants and lawyers. The development community (in particular web 2.0) has a reputation for riding on the edge, this is not just rails (which has been pointed out by others), but many other frameworks/languages that consider themselves groundbreaking. Clearly there is a disconnect here, between being passionate and fun, and relaxing from corporate strictures. Professionalism should have had everybody there wearing a suit and tie, but I would bet they weren’t.

There has been plenty of coverage about this less than newsworthy event, so I’ll not waste any more time on it. Another couple of days, and it will have disappeared from reddit, digg, etc & and will be forgotten. The majority of people that use Rails don’t care about posturing and hype that people are putting so much effort into…that’s just a way of big noting blogs and looking important. Rails isn’t a ghetto, if anything it’s a train station, with a lot of people getting on and going places and a few people that feel the need to hang around and cause trouble. I’m not saying you don’t have a right to dislike his presentation, but don’t include the rest of us. Don’t pretend like he did something wrong just because you don’t like it. If you don’t like the way he did the presentation put together a better presentation and you be the one standing on stage.

On that note I’m going back to work.

I’ve decided to play a fairly simple game on twitter. If you follow me, then I’ll return the follow, i.e. I’ll follow you (this will probably get me more than a few spam bots). As soon as I follow you the game begins. The basic premise, you get points for how long I follow you.

As soon as you do something that I find annoying — you’re out.  Such actions might include; linking to items that you find on <insert social news site here> constantly, constant chattering without thinking,  advertising products and/or anything else I deem particularly annoying.

I will let you know that you’re out (regardless of whether you want me to or not). I will also put you in a hall of fame (if I ever get around to it). I will accept appeals, with relevant case argued or the equally funny begging and grovelling, I will NOT be accepting bribes at this time.

Finally sending an *auto* direct message when I follow you WOULD be a really bad idea if you wish to stay in the game (and the list of people I’m following)  for more that 5 minutes.

TO GET STARTED: Create an account at http://www.twitter.com and follow @vertis

NB: This post/game is inspired (in part) by randsinrepose(@rands) and @zaibatsu, the later of which has to honour of being the first person unfollowed (though the person part is questionable)

There are several ways to use social networking and social media:

* To help you connect and interact with people that you know.
* A catalyst to enhance your own thinking.
* A way of broadcasting your products and brand to a captive audience.
* There are probably other uses as well, but how long do you want this list to be?

I’ll get to what is wrong with users pushing products through social networking in a moment, but there is another group of people that use social networking: self styled experts and consultants. People that claim to know how to utilize social networking and social media, people that would be otherwise unremarkable in their careers but have garnered a following of people.
I started following @keyinfluencer and @skydiver after the former made a comment on twitter that blew up in his face, a horse which has been beaten to death on blogs/comments and twitter.  They haven’t had a great amount of interesting updates to read since, but @skydiver aka Peter Shankman has some interesting projects, not the least of which is HARO. So they both stayed on the list of people I was following, even after the drama died down.

Around the same time, my official twitter honeymoon period ended. While people are initially interested in someone new, that doesn’t last long unless you are relevant , such as the work they do or the values they represent, there is very little connection that causes interaction. I was sitting at about 25 followers, none of whom actually interacted with my tweets for the most part. I wanted to be relevant and included, and I really really wasn’t. It’s enough to make you pull your hair out.

Then I added @guykawasaki after @keyinfluencer retweeted something from him. Over the next 15 to 20 minutes I picked up another 5 -10 followers, all of them matching the above stereotype. Lots of followers, about an equal number of people they were following…social media experts. People trying to use the medium to their benefit.

I’ve been to a few presentations in the past that these people remind me of. The sales pitch, the angle:

“You too can be *RICH*, if you do what I do.”

With slicked down hair and a suit that they hope I’ll recognize is expensive, (which of course I don’t – I know absolutely nothing about suits), the presentation is a money making effort all on its own. The person up the front has no interest in making anyone else rich, or adding value to your life. And who can blame them, why should they care about you? But why should you respect them either? Aside from the fact that they’re doing well financially (assumedly) there is nothing else outstanding about them. They’re not making the world a better place, just trying to get ahead themselves.

If any of the people above feel that this isn’t fair then speak up. I certainly don’t know everything about you. Peter Shankman certainly has something that helps out a lot of people, what about the rest?

I was having a discussion about SEO and social media the other day with my dentist. We talked about a lot of things, not the least of which was the fact that businesses were increasingly trying to utilise this new platform to push their agenda. That may be effective to an extent – but it’s not real. The essence of social networking and social media is that we don’t want to be spoonfed and forcefed what we consume. Twitter is all about finding people to follow that are interesting and useful, but at what point does it become just another billboard that can be used to get your money?

A perfect example of the corruption of social media is the spamming that goes on. Because of the explosion of available services (there are now several twitter clones for instance). It has become common for people to spam ALL the available services, in an attempt to get your name out as hard and fast as you can. A recent issue on Etsy.com highlights the problem that comes when you force an advertising campaign into a format that is designed for personalities, not products. Timothy Adam Designs was recommending that people use a service called socialmarker.com. SocialMarker is a service which lets you post the same URL to up to 160 social bookmarking sites instantly. Timothy’s instructions were embraced by the Etsy community, and subsequently all linking to etsy from propeller.com was banned as it was considered a spam site.  He was at a point the social media expert on the Etsy forums. The kicker is, Timothy’s instructions were posted to the Etsy forums as his method of getting blog hits, which would increase his popularity, which would sell his product. His angle: “You too can be rich, if you do what I do.”

Social media is not designed for products. If you are pushing your products by announcing them on twitter, or bookmarking them on the plethora of social bookmarking sites then you’re not doing the right thing. Another interesting forum post on Etsy deals with the fact that a lot of these sites have rules in the Terms of Service against this very action.

There is a place for /Social Products/,  but don’t misunderstand me. Social Products should not be mistaken for self promotion. Social products(or services) are when someone else recommends your product or service. Social products are more commonly known as word of mouth, someone buying your product or using your service and feeling so strongly about it that they have to share it with other people. There is only one way to get into that category; be outstanding in what you do.

Stop falling in with the wrong people. I’m still being ignored on twitter, but I’ve had this realisation that it doesn’t matter. On one level, I’d like to be relevant on twitter and have people read my blog, because that may help me get more consulting work long-term. But what I really have to do to get work is follow my own advice. Be outstanding.

I’ve avoided using twitter for quite a while (for who knows what reason). But I finally relented and signed up for an account while I was looking for good ruby and rails blogs to follow and stumbled across a post that had a complete list of famous Ruby people (Rubyists). I have to say that so far I haven’t been disappointed with it.

It reminds me a lot of IRC but without the having to join lots of channels and check all of them for discussions (when mostly their idle with spurts of discussion). I’ve wanted to be more involved with the ruby and rails social aspect since I took part in Rails Rumble 2008.

I will be interesting to see how my usage of twitter evolves over time.

I found this question as a quote on slashdot, and couldn’t resist responding.

Lemmings? Lemmings as popularised by the game by the same name are supposedly creatures that follow each other and just keep going regardless of dangers enroute to their destination. Being a lemming is equated to being one of the Herd or not thinking for yourself. This is an unfair and baseless accusation. Linux users by their very minority are not followers, until recently there were no computers that came with linux installed by default. Clearly if you wanted to run Linux you had to leave the Herd.

Well-engineered commercial software? That would be a stretch considering the issues that Microsoft has had over the decades since it started working with operating systems. I’m not saying that Linux has it all worked out, because it most assuredly doesn’t, but the difference is that if you’re not happy with something in Linux you have the power to do something about it. With all commercial software you are at the mercy of the company that owns the software to be dilligent.

Now I’m not saying that Windows doesn’t have good things, on the contrary there are features that I miss very much when using Linux, but the downsides are far outweighed by the benefits of an extremely stable OS. More importantly Linux is an OS that given enough time and dedication will run rings around anything Microsoft can field to compete with it.

hadn’t really noticed it until recently but I was reading a post on RubyInside about RubyMine – a preview release of a Rails IDE by the people that brought IntelliJ IDEA to the java IDE market. Later on the same day I googled RubyMine and discovered much to my surprise that there was now a multitude of other blog posts out there about the same topic. Its all very well to want to share this type of information but it gets a bit tedious reading the same thing over and over and over. If you’re not the first person to share the information in a given community at least have the sense to make sure that you’re blog post is different to the last one.

I’m participating in Rails Rumble 2008 I got in a bit late because I only came across it the other day. I’m a bit of hermit when it comes to development so its a great idea participating in an event and getting to know some people. The project is currently top secret but once its finished I’ll open source it.

The other thing I’m going to try and do is record really closely the steps that I take during development. So I can post the videos as podcasts (ala railscasts), but also so I can go back and evaluate my own processes. I haven’t done anything like this in the past but if it goes well then maybe I’ll make it a regular thing.