March 10, 2014 archive

Mar 10

Crossing 300,000 Views Of My CircleID Articles

I was pleased to note recently that the number of views to my various posts on CircleID had crossed over the 300,000 mark and that along the way I'd entered the top 20 contributors to the site in terms of viewed articles. Not that viewer metrics are anything I get very excited about... but it was just kind of cool to see that mark being passed.

As I wrote about back in November 2012 and have also spoken about on past FIR podcast episodes, CircleID is one of the sites that I watch to keep up on what is happening with the infrastructure that powers the Internet, as well as Internet policy issues and, in recent years, the evolution of the "new generic top-level domains (newgTLDs)". I enjoy reading many of the people who write there - and have learned a good bit in the process. There are a lot of contributors to the site (and anyone can sign up to contribute) and so you get to hear many different voices, including some, of course, with whom you may not agree - but that is good and helpful.

Beyond simply visiting the CircleID website, you can follow the site as @circleID on Twitter and via the CircleID Facebook page as well as good old RSS.

I'd highly recommend CircleID for people interested in the evolution of the Internet!

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Mar 10

FIR #746 – 3/10/14 – For Immediate Release

Neville and Dan in London; Quick news: Omnicom's $100 million deal with Instagram, Greenpeace's campaign against Procter and Gamble, the Church of England's new Twitter account, Digg vs. Reddit for PR pros; Ragan promo; News That Fits, Michael Netzley's Asia Report, social visual in the enterprise, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, listener comments, 02's Twitter-based customer service, Dan York's tech report; last week on the FIR Podcast Network, volunteer PR pros come to Ukraine's aid; music from Drive-By Truckers; and more.

Mar 10

The Intersection of Github… and Babylon 5?

Lurkers guide to Babylon 5Back in the 1990’s I was a huge fan of the show “Babylon 5” for a great number of reasons. It remains, to this day, one of the best series I’ve ever watched on TV and I greatly admire the creator/writer, J. Michael Straczynski, for the narrative arc he used over the five year run of the series as well as the overall “universe” he created.

One of the web sites that those of us who enjoyed Babylon 5 frequently used was “The Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5“. The pages there helped in the understanding of how all the pieces fit together and frequently offered glimpses of what was coming ahead. It was a great tool and reference source.

Today a Google search brought me back to that site although I hadn’t been there in years. And in visiting I learned that as of this past December the entire source for the website is now available on Github at:

https://github.com/sgrimm/lurkers-guide

It’s very cool that site creator Steven Grimm has made his site publicly available via Github. As he notes, others can now fork the code, send him updates via pull requests, etc.

It is also a great example of how I’ve told people that Github, and git in general, can be used for so much more than simply “source code” and that you don’t need to be a programmer to use it.

Plus… if you wander through some of the pages, like this one, it’s kind of fun to see references to how we used to get our information: “Stay caught up with the Usenet B5 discussions, which are often a great source of material.” 🙂

Cool stuff!