PUBLIC MARKS with search back-testing

an interesting conclusion about how to turn new and casual contributors into long-time community members: the key is to distribute ownership.

To wrap up, there were several things that motivated me to stay active in the Mozilla community: * A belief in the mission of the project — to create a web browser that supports and promotes the use of open standards * An interest in the technology — initially with the Gecko logo as my hook * The feeling of belonging in a community of people with similar interests * The desire to give something back to a project that gave (and still gives) me the best browser in the world for free * The experiences gained by managing a website — HTML, CSS, server configurations, and perhaps most importantly, the English language * The recognition and respect from Mozilla project members for my contributions * The pride of being responsible for an important piece of the project

It is very important to report the WTF to the developer who produced the code. Subversions “annotate” or “blame” function provides a means to blame someone for the existence of a specific piece of code. The best way to report this back is through an informative and educational discussion, where everyone could be involved. The factoring should preferably be done by the developer responsible for the code, perhaps with the assistance of the developer who reviewed it. As a result, quality awareness will have improved within the development team.

A while back I wrote a little RDF vocab that extended the 2006 vCard vocab. It introduces a few extra terms which I thought were useful, mostly taken from the vCard 4.0 drafts at the time. e.g. a "lang" property to indicate languages spoken by the person represented. One other thing it has though is a more vCard-like way of representing telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, etc.

Experiment and iterate. This is the web; you can be nimble. Risk is okay as long as you are always testing. Here’s the Iridesco process for a new feature:

1. Sketch

2. Photoshop

3. Test

4. Static HTML prototype

5. Test again

6. Working prototype

7. Test again

8. Tweak

9. Launch quietly

10. Get Feedback

11. Tweak

12. Get Feedback

13. Tweak

14. Get Feedback

15. Tweak…

Iterate constantly. You need a culture of experimentation.

Folded in Place furthers the abstraction once offered by landscape photography by removing the place itself and replacing it with a mapped construction. This method leads the viewer to re-imagine the spectacle of the foreign lands and explore the abstraction of place offered by photography. The combination of still-life constructions and the maps’ reference to large and distant lands examines the paradox of known and unknown geographies offered by the photographic image. In this manner, Folded in Place turns the abstract representation of the map back into a physical landscape using photography to look at the map as a geography of its own.

OpenStreetMap, the wiki-style map of the world that anyone can edit, is in need of a new way to add content. I've been working on a way to "round trip" map data through paper, to make it easier to perform the kinds of eyes-on-the-street edits that OSM needs now the most, as well as distributing the load by making it possible for legible, easy notes to be shared and turned into real geographical data.

Walking Papers is a working service that implements this paper idea, based on initial technical experimentation from back in February.