Let me close with a final surprise, that’s more of a disappointment. I certainly expected that, by now, online tools for conversation, work, collaboration and discourse would have become far more useful, sophisticated and effective than they currently are. I know I’m pretty well alone here, but all the glossy avatars and video and social network sites conceal a trivialization of interaction, dragging it down to the level of single-sentence grunts, flirtation and ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing], at a time when we need discussion and argument to be more effective than ever. Indeed, most adults won’t have anything to do with all the wondrous gloss that fills the synchronous online world, preferring by far the older, asynchronous modes, like web sites, email, downloads etc. This isn’t grouchy old-fart testiness toward the new. In fact, there are dozens of discourse-elevating tools just waiting out there to be born. Everybody is still banging rocks together, while bragging about the colors. Meanwhile, half of the tricks that human beings normally use, in real world conversation, have never even been tried online.

Keeping track of our social relationships is a serious piece of work that runs a heavy cognitive load. It’s natural to seek out some neural prosthesis for assistance in this chore. My fiancee once proposed a “social scheduling” application that would watch your phone and email and IM to figure out who your pals were and give you a little alert if too much time passed without your reaching out to say hello and keep the coals of your relationship aglow. By the time you’ve reached your forties, chances are you’re out-of-touch with more friends than you’re in-touch with: Old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans… Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and then some. You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It’s not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please. It’s not just Facebook and it’s not just me. Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who’ll groan and wonder why we’re dumb enough to think that we’re pals).

This would make it possible to stream content from a group’s website to their Facebook group space, no extra software needed.

For example, I would really like to be able to embed the RSS feed from http://www.onenw.org/news-events in ONE/Northwest’s Facebook group page.  But I can’t.

How lame.  This would be such a quick and easy win

We define engagement as the number of users who touch your application every day (measured from midnight to midnight each day). These touch points are:

• Canvas Page Views
• Link Clicks in FBML
• Mock-Ajax Form Submission
• Click-to-Play Flash

The number of engaged users is calculated by putting all of these touch points together. We display this as the number of “Daily Active Users.” Next to it we also show what percentage that is of the application’s total number of users.

Hat tip to Jeff.

1. A Big HTML editor update: Kupu 1.4

For a lot of everyday Plone users, Kupu (Plone’s graphical HTML editor) is Plone. And in Plone 3, Kupu packs in a lot of improvements. All of the changes in Kupu could fill up an article on its own, but the highlights surely include:

• Named anchors
• Automatic image resizing
• Image captions
• Inserting of Flash and other embeddable video (e.g. YouTube)
• Span/character styles

Together with all of Kupu’s existing goodness, most emphatically including its ability to produce valid XHTML code, Plone 3 defines “best of breed” for graphical HTML editing in a CMS.

Here are a few screenshots of Kupu in action, to whet your appetite. Click on each image to see the full-size view.

Linking to an anchor — in this page or in any other page on your site!

Adding and removing anchors from a page.

Creating a table of contents from headings in a page.

A table of contents, automatically built by Kupu from headings in your document.

Automatic resizing of images using PIL.

Captioned images — a frequently requested feature!

2. Rich Text fields on Collections

Ok, so this is a small feature. But it really makes me happy. Collections (formerly known as Smart Folders, formerly known as Topics), which are simple build-your-own query listings of content, now have a Rich Text field, which means you can very easily write a nicely formatted introduction to a dynamic listing of content. This is going to make it really easy for non-technical site administrators to build polished, lively sites without knowing a lick of code.

A Collection with a Rich Text intro.

3. The new “Sharing” tab

Plone has long had a fantastic system for creating really precise permissions on content. Plone 3 surfaces a lot of that power in a simple way for everyday users. Check out the all-new “sharing” tab.

Nice! You can use this single, elegant screen to add give new users & groups the permission to view, to edit and to add new content in a folder. That’s all you need to cover a pretty huge set of intranet/extranet situations.

To see how radically this has improved in Plone 3, check out the old sharing tab from Plone 2.5:

Holy cow! That’s about 4x as large as in Plone 3, and it doesn’t even do as much! Kudos to Alex Limi and Danny Blomendaal for the big cleanup.

4. New built-in workflows

Plone 3′s elegant new sharing tab is more than complimented by powerful new workflows. Once again, the Plone team has surfaced powerful underlying systems in a friendly, accessible way. Plone 2.5 shipped with one standard workflow. Plone 3 ships wtih several simple workflows, designed to support common user stories including simple publication sites, community sites, and intranet/extranets.

Choosing among Plone 3′s new workflows.

You can associate these workflows with different content types, or use the included CMFPlacefulWorkflow add-on Product to assign different workflows to different folders. This makes it easy to build a single Plone site that has a public-facing section and a rich, private collaboration space.

Assigning a custom workflow to a folder.

5. Link integrity: no more broken links

Plone 3 has a powerful new “link integrity” feature that makes sure you never break hyperlinks within your site as you move or delete content. Here’s what happens when you try to delete an image that is used in several pages.

6. Versioning, staging and locking

Plone 3 ships with big-league document management features, starting with document versioning. Versioning allows you to save old versions of a page, compare your current version to older versions, and even to roll back to previous versions. Plone 3.0’s versioning is drawn from CMFEditions, the well-established add-on Product, spiffed up with some nice new user interface.

Plone 3′s history tab showing all previous revisions of your document.

Plone 3 can also show you exactly what’s been added and removed between versions. Nerds call this a “diff” (short for “difference”)!

Plone 3.0 is also scheduled to include document staging, the ability to work on a copy of a document while the old version is still live, via Kapil Thangavelu’s product “iterate.”

Finally, Plone 3.0 includes locking, which prevents two people from making changes to a document at the same time. Together, versioning, staging and locking will make Plone 3.0 very appealing to folks who are managing sophisticated sites with multiple people editing content at the same time.

7. Automatic full-text searching of Word and PDF files

Plone 3 automatically indexes the entire text of Word and PDF files that you upload. (You can index other kinds of documents, too, with simple add-on Products.) Again, this is a killer feature for intranets, and for any other site that has a lot of document-centric content to share with the world.

UPDATE: Thanks to Daniel Nouri for pointing out that this only happens auto-magically if you have wvware (for Word) and pdftoext or xpdf already installed on your system.

8. User control of portlets

Plone 3 has a entirely new “portlets” system. Portlets are those little chunks of content that appear in the sidebars of a site. You used to have to go into the ZMI backend to manage them. Now you just click on “Manage Portlets,” then drag and drop your way to glory.

Plone 3 ships with one new kind of portlet, an RSS feed portlet. There’s lots of room for add-on Product developers and site integrators to develop interesting and innovative new portlets.

This feature alone is going to make a lot of our clients very, very happy.

Summing Up

Plone 3 is the most ambitious, exciting release of Plone ever. It pushes Plone to an incredible new level of power, and continues the ongoing processes of polishing Plone’s legendary ease-of-use to a high gloss.

Plone 3.0 RC1 is meant for testing, not production use. There are still a few weeks of fast-paced bug-hunting ahead. That’s where you come in. Download it. Install it. Play with it. Report bugs. Fix ‘em if you can. Plone 3 should be released sometime in early/mid August. I’m excited.

Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Continues…

Definitions:

1) “Tags” – keywords that are stored per-item and per-user, ala del.icio.us. Plone doesn’t provide out of the box support for tagging. That’s probably OK, because tagging doesn’t really work well unless you have a LOT of users.

2) “Keywords” – keywords that are stored per-item, but not per-user. Plone provides this out of the box.

How Things Work Now, And What’s Wrong Plone’s current Keywords user interface is really clunky. So clunky as to be nearly useless, in fact. (Sorry.)

The main problem is that as the list of keywords in the site grows (which it does, very quickly, because keywords are not per-user, they’re global across the site), it quickly becomes very difficult to find and choose the keywords in the scrolling window.

Worse, you can’t easily see at a glance which keywords have already been selected.

How to fix it Fortunately, I think this should be fairly easy to fix.

I would do the following things

1. Move the Keywords widget from the “Properties” tab to the “Edit” tab. (Plone 3.0 fixes this quite a bit, by making the schemata refresh without page reloads, so this may ultimately be a moot point.)
2. Show the list of keywords assigned to a content object above the keyword widget. (Bonus points for making them clickable to a search!)
3. Change the widget to an Autocomplete widget. (Note: I need to check whether the Autocomplete widget will let you add new items to the vocabulary.) Del.icio.us uses an autocomplete widget like this for tag entry, and it’s really efficient.
   
4. Make keywords part of the default content view templates (again, with clickable links to other items with the keyword). It’s easier to remove them (especially in Plone 3.0 with the viewlet manager) than to add them, and having them there by default will signal that we value keywording.  UPDATE: Shane Graber below points out some instructions he wrote for doing just this, in Plone 2.0-2.5.   Zope 3 fans might prefer this as a viewlet, but that’s a pretty trivial implementaton detail.
5. We should build a screen that allows one to very quickly assign keywords to many objects in a single operation. I think I’d want to execute a search (or build a smart folder), then see a list of all found objects, their descriptions, the keywords they currently have, and an autocomplete widget for each object. Rip through the screen, assign keywords to a bunch of objects, then hit save once. That would be really fast and efficient.
6. Finally, we should make sure that permission to assign keywords to content is separated from permission to edit the object itself. (I’m not sure if this is already the case, please leave a comment if you know!) This would make it possible to create a “tagger” role which could be used to let site members keyword content items.

OK, that’s it. All of this stuff seems like it would be pretty easy to do without any major changes to the underlying plumbing.

What do you think? Would this be more sensible, more “humane” behavior for Plone? Is there more low-hanging fruit that I’m missing?

Update: It also might be interesting to look at auto-generating keywords by using Yahoo’s Term Extraction API.

I’ve been reading my ~150 feeds in Google Reader the past few days, and I have to say, I think I’ll be sticking with Bloglines. 

Google Reader looks a bit slicker, but it wastes a lot more pixels on the screen with superfluous lines and boxes that distract me from the text.  It also doesn’t show as many feeds in the left column, wasting space on the “all/starred/shared items” controls that I don’t use. 

It’s harder to mark things as read in Google Reader — one has to manually scroll through the items or remember to click the “mark all as read” button.  That’s annoying.  I can’t adjust the width of the left column in Google Reader.

I guess the grass isn’t greener after all.

The Tyee just launched its new commenting system yesterday, and it’s been a very interesting ride so far.  Overwhelmingly positive feedback, but of course some disgruntled commenters who don’t like the changes.  Lots of good constructive feedback from readers so far, both on the experiment in general, and on technical details that we could improve on.

 

Check out our editor’s two pieces about the changes:

 

1) “Can We Still Talk Online?  Push is on to improve reader forums on the Net.  First in a series.” http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2007/05/15/TalkOnline/

 

2) ” Tyee’s New Approach to Comments: A system designed to promote thoughtful posts.“ http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2007/05/16/NewComments/

 

We see the changes we’re making as part of a wider trend in online forums, not just with online publications, but with blogs and other open forums as well.