Drupal

As a result of my little Drupal tag cloud PR blitz this afternoon, a Drupal developer asked me to pitch some features to him for a development contest that he's entering.

I threw together an elevator pitch for technogeeks of Phase 01

Here it is:

A quick metaphor would be to say that I need del.icio.us-like capabilities within Drupal.

But the way I'd pitch it would be to say that I need a toolkit for Swarm Intelligence Journalism by collecting third-party metadata on soundbite Drupal nodes so that I can collaboratively edit my investigative documentary film about how the mainstream media became an Echo Chamber to the countdown towards war in Iraq.

If I had the Phase 01 toolset that I'm proposing, then I could start to tap into the collective intelligence of a set of diverse volunteers by making their subjective interpretations of politcal material more explicit through folksonomy tag clouds.

By associating pro-war and anti-war identities to third-party del.icio.us-like folksonomy tags on my politically contentious soundbites, then this tool could be used to bring about a deeper understanding to the common ground and points of departure between polar opposite poltical worldviews.

Incorporating this Phase 01 toolkit into Drupal will also facilitate collaborative film editing capabilities within Drupal by using the Final Cut Pro XML interface.

I created a tag cloud for my website, and I'd like to see this feature added as a dynamic Drupal module. I thought I'd briefly go through the steps that I went through to give a leg up for anyone who wants to code this up in PHP.

The hardest part is the algorithm that automatically determines the distribution of font sizes based upon the frequency distribution of tags.

Below is my distribution that I used to determine the font sizes:

Notice that my tag distribution exhibits some Power Law behavior of the Long-Tail of the Internet

More technical details below...

Here is a "tag cloud" for all of the folksonomy tags used so far on EchoChamberProject.com.

You'll see all of the related posts on this site when you click on a tag.

The first tag cloud is ordered by frequency and the second is alphabetized:

New Media | Website | PR | Status | Collaboration | Drupal | Journalism | Transparency | Theory | Decentralization | Echo Chamber Project | Open Source | Film | Blog | Interview | Political | Worldview | Communications | Conference | Folksonomy | Media Criticism | Volunteer | Dialogue | International Law | Rosen | Evolution | Kent Bye | Objectivity | Plante | ToDo | Advisor | Civics | Roadmap | Wilber | About | CivicSpace | Ecosystem | Choice | Murphy | Sociology | ACH | del.icio.us | Intelligence Analysis | Science | Credibility | Distribution | Diversity | Errors | Final Cut Pro | Fundraising | Law | Philosophy of Science | Podcast | Political Bias | Activism | Analysis | CBS | Deception Detection | Editing | History | RSS | Social | Subjectivity | Vlog | ABC | AL Tubes | Economics | FCC | NYT | Sirota | Sundance | Training | Wiki | XML | Borger | Brody | Deliberation | EcoVillage | Identity | LAMP | Lobe | Maine | May | Media Logic | Metaphor | Mitchell | NBC | OHanlon | Psychology | Queen | Software | Spiral Dynamics | Strobel | Sustainability | Transcripts | Brown | Buddhism | Community | Digital Divide | Donnelly | Education | Fair Use | FireANT | Google | Human Rights | KM | Kwiatkowski | Landay | Loiseau | Math | Music | Nature | Schechter | Screencast | Sivaraksa | Skype | Social Capital | Tag Cloud | Thielmann | Thomas | Tiger | Wedgwood |

Below is the alphabetized tag cloud...

I've been categorizing all of my blog posts with folksonomy tags over the last couple of days. You'll notice categories listed next to the time stamp of each post now.

This will definitely help people surf around the site more efficiently and find posts on topics that interest them.

I've decided to go with a pure folksonomy for now -- which basically means that I'm categorizing posts by typing in the tag name instead of selecting a category from a pre-determined pull-down list of taxonomy terms.

This is a lot more flexible and allows the categories to evolve natrually since I can make up new categories on the fly.

These tags are treated as the normal taxonomy within Drupal which means that you can click on the "Folksonomy" category at the top of the post, and you'll be taken to the http://www.echochamberproject.com/taxonomy/term/21 page where you can see all of the blog posts or entries that I or anyone else have categorized as "Folksonomy."

I posted my sitemeter icon directly onto this domain last week and was surprised to see just how many people were browsing this site. It turns out that I'm getting around 40-50 hits a day now that I'm on Drupal, where I was just getting 9-12 back when I was on Movable Type.

Why? It appears that Drupal is much more optimized for search engine crawlers as echoed by this post on the Drupal site: Search engines love Drupal.

It's also attributable to the content about the media and Iraq I've written is still very relavant to what people are looking for on the Internet, and my blog posts seem to have compelling enough titles for people to click on them. Jay Rosen admitted at Blogercon III that most of his traffic comes from Google, and I'm adopting his type of deep thinking blogging strategy rather than a more AP-like Instapundit or Atrios...

I just wrote about the Choice and Freedom that XML provides consumers of products from software giants, and I'll talk a little bit more about some of the implications of being able to export Final Cut Pro projects into an XML format. Right now, a very limited number of Google hits on "Final Cut Pro XML" indicates that there are only a few proprietary software add-ons available to take advantage of this capability.

And what exactly does this amazing XML capability mean? Quoting from Volume IV of Final Cut Pro 5's user manual:

Because Final Cut Pro supports XML, you are no longer limited to creating clips, bins, and sequences within Final Cut Pro. This means you can create your own Final Cut Pro projects outside of Final Cut Pro, using any software or platform you want, as long as you generate a valid Final Cut Pro XML file.

This basically means that I can use an open source content management system like Drupal to collaboratively edit my film.

How? ...

Here's what I have on my plate at the beginning of today -- I'm sure it'll evolve slightly again as it did yesterday.

BLOG POSTS
* Final Cut XML & Drupal (DONE & Made additional Drupal + Final Cut Pro XML graphic)
* Background info on FCP XML post (DONE)
* Effectiveness of Posting Daily Task List (DONE)

DRUPAL TASKS
* Implement Image_Filter module in order to use a simple syntax for adding images to posts (i.e. "[image:node_id]") (Installed module, but it doesn't seem to work offhand. Look into it again later.)

Here's what I have on my plate for today.

BLOG POSTS
* Table of pictures from 13 Personal Democracy Forum interviews (DONE)
* How to do Podcast RSS enclosures in Drupal (DONE)
* Screenshots of the Drupal Folksonomy patch (Trouble Uploading Pix)
* Final Cut XML & Drupal

DRUPAL TASKS
* Figure out the Image Module -- how to name image nodes something other than the title of a blog post. (DONE)

One of the concerns that I have with a Drupal site is getting overwhelmed with traffic without the proper configuration. A link from Slashdot.com -- a tech discussion community website & "News for nerds" -- can bring a site down from so much traffic.

OurMedia.org got slashdotted on the same day it launched back on March 21, 2005.

It didn't take long for Ourmedia to be slashdotted.

Just what we needed with our servers already getting slammed.

In order to catalyze the First Phase of Development in the Echo Chamber Project Roadmap, I need to align myself with other grassroots media activists using Drupal as well as interested Drupal developers.

Based on the conversations I've had at recent conferences, I think that there is enough overlap between a lot of various citizen journalist and collaborative media efforts that a "Drupal Media Coalition" could help advance the interests of a broad range of projects and the larger Drupal community as a whole.

I initiated a working group at the CivicSpace user's summit in NYC for Drupal developers and site maintainers who were interested in forming some sort of coalition. I actually didn't have a chance to formally introduce this idea to everyone during the working lunch as I had intended because a number of interesting side conversations had evolved -- including one I was having with Brady Jarvis of code0range.net and Aaron Pava of CivicActions.