Google, of course had a cute form inviting the public to apply to join the couple thousand Google employees who had been testing Wave. With all the talk of Wave replacing email, instant messaging, some social networking and some collaboration apps, I couldn’t resist.

As shown here, the invitation-application form invited ASCII art. Since this is Google and they’ll probably see it all in 10 pt Arial, I pulled out a few, small classics I knew would be well enough interpreted, including:

\__ … Star Trek TOS communicator
=====__—^— … Star Trek TOS starfleet ship, large
-_– … Star Trek TOS starfleet ship, small
=/\= … Starfleet logo
\V/ … Live Long and Prosper

Did I cute my way into testing Google Wave? I did indeed!

The partially open nature of Wave enables such feats as tweeting from within Wave, which I did while providing the instructions for same to new Wave testers in October. As I also tweeted that day, I recommend ‘11 Google Wave robots that add value in the enterprise‘ by @MarkFidelman.

Post updated in October, 2009. Here are a few videos I’d shared in the original, May 2009 version of this post:

Find Net Tuesday in your city via its parent organization, Net Squared.

Seattle Net Tuesday recently organized an Online Makeover — Nonprofit Edition. Tech savvy members volunteered to solve technical challenges and improve organizations’ web sites and social media strategies.

While at Seattle Net Tuesday and following up after the event, I advised Vote Clean Seattle on

(1) other recent, small, social media based fundraising efforts as a model, including for technology to track and show progress
(2) local organizations who may be interested in partnering with VCS, and
(3) running a WordPress based web site to simplify inclusion of other online presence in their site.

More than a dozen volunteers offered them lots of practical, mostly technical advice. It was a fulfilling and informative experience for everyone.

Seattle Net Tuesday has featured many organizations, speakers, and formats, always staying fresh, productive, and fun, too. I have updated this post a dozen or so times to highlight upcoming or recent Tuesdays, and in a few cases I have written additional posts or articles, here or elsewhere online to do the same. On Tuesday, August 25 for example, we enjoyed “two dynamite speakers” discussing their organizations’ volunteer outreach online.

On Twitter, you may find dozens of organizers, attendees, and me! tweeting about Seattle Net Tuesday. I’ve recently helped get them going with a Twitter account for the event itself @SeaNet2. That’s not getting a lot of use as of yet though, so connect with

• * Sarah Schacht @sarahschacht
• * Jessica Dally @JessicaDally
• * Sameer Siruguri @siruguri
• * or with me @brianglanz

My Seattle Net Tuesday archives include these articles:

• * The Haas Foundation
• * Knowledge As Power — Everyday Democracy
• * Online Video Service, Inc. :: Seattle Net Tuesday Notes
• * Noonhat — Toss Your Social Salad
• * Itchmo :: Seattle Net Tuesday Notes

This Net Squared presentation discusses Community Voice Mail’s use of Second Life for networking:




These are my notes from one of five sessions at a Seattle Net Tuesday event. Sessions were limited to five minutes, so I followed up with presenters as needed. The Knowledge As Power presentation was delivered by Executive Director Sarah Schacht.

Sarah Schacht has published the current version of the Knowledge As Power web site herself, for a low cost, with little technical experience, and using her personal computer. She updates the site herself, and has even depended on it for live video presentations, critical and successful first impressions, and fund raising.

Much of Seattle Net Tuesday is an ongoing discussion of better ways to connect nonprofits and technology. So how did Sarah pull it off? She used iWeb from Apple Computer. With iWeb and about $75 spent on the iWork Suite, plus Emma for email marketing at about $24 per month, Sarah’s young organization has a simple, sustainable, and professional online presence.

In this context, other Seattle Net Tuesday attendees mentioned that Windows Live Spaces from Microsoft was catching up, including that they offer a free domain as Apple does with iWeb. However, it was also mentioned that Live Spaces also still has issues with the increasingly popular Firefox and other Mozilla browsers.

For online donations, Knowledge As Power has made good use of a PayPal button, the code for which is provided by PayPal.

Sarah recommends the iWeb and Apple technologies to anyone wanting to get something started online, without too much technical fuss — provided you own or can easily access a Mac computer.

Of Knowledge As Power, I say: may it live long, and prosper.

Give Knowledge As Power’s legislation-tracking web site a try!

Try Noonhat “to take lunch to the next level,” as creator Brian Dorsey has said. The site matches you randomly with people for lunch, on a day and within an area you and they have pre-selected. This is not a dating service; you are encouraged to go to lunch with more than one other person. With its randomness, Noonhat is purely about tossing the social salad. It is what Dorsey calls “an anti-niche technology.”

To Seattle Net Tuesday and all those interested in non-profit technology, Noonhat represents what one person is capable of:

(1) in his or her spare time,

(2) using free, open source tools, and

(3) with a bit of help from the Seattle community.

Dorsey spends $15 per month on hosting, and Noonhat has no other cost except his time. Noonhat is free to its users. Brian Dorsey works full time as a software developer, but not on Noonhat! He spent what he calls “50 software guy hours” to build Noonhat from its beginning to being featured in mainstream media and industry leading conferences, including Seattle’s KING 5 TV News and Gnomedex 2007.

Clearly there are great possibilities for building with free, existing software, and the opportunities for starting something new in Seattle are promising, too. Dorsey’s other essential message for starting a new venture was: be willing to do things before you’re entirely ready. His Noonhat home page went public before there was automation for matching people to lunches. Even though he had to manually perform matches in the early going, by opening the site early on, he proved the concept. Ultimately the Noonhat process was improved through a trial by fire that forced Dorsey to be practical.

Especially let a practical, timely opportunity lead you into taking the next step when the time is right, even if that is before you feel ready. Brian Dorsey and Noonhat were voted from a small Ignite Seattle event into presenting a few days later at Gnomedex, an internationally attended social technology conference. Within that one week, visits to the Noonhat site went from dozens per day to more than 1,000 per day. Dorsey took advantage of the Gnomedex spotlight to launch Noonhat nationally — not that he was ready for that, either!

Dorsey also mentioned that in the span of its first few days of mainstream exposure, large companies had approached him regarding use of Noonhat internally by their employees. Take one opportunity, and look for others to open. Not only KING 5 TV News and other network news, but the Seattle Times, the Seattle P-I, and other print media gave Noonhat increasing attention. If Noonhat had waited to launch until everything was perfect, or if it had missed its opportunity to shine, who can say the spotlight would have come again?

Noonhat is a liberating way to meet new people. To paraphrase Dorsey’s words: in a time of increasing professional specialization, narrowing and shrinking social networks, and pick-your-perspective media sources, this is social networking turned inside out and with no strings attached. If you’d hesitate to meet someone new alone, just bring a friend or two along to guarantee a good time, but with a twist.

Of Noonhat, I say: may it live long, and prosper.

In other words, give it a try at Noonhat.com. Pick your location, date, and cheers!

These are awful, alpha-version names for something so easy to use. After you plug in all the parts — Firefox, Twitter, FoxyTunes itself, and your music source(s) — publishing your play list is a two-step process.

1 — Listen to music while you use the Internet.
2 — As you hear a track you want to share, click a link.

When you click a link in the FoxyTunes area of Firefox, FoxyTunes publishes linked tweets in your Twitter. Each tweet links to a super-page for the track you are sharing, and from there also publishes shared tracks to a fully connected, public play list.

On your play list page, each track you publish is again linked to its super-page. What’s so super about the track pages? Track pages are automatically populated with data from Wikipedia, YouTube, Last.fm, Yahoo! Music, Flickr, Amazon, and more, including videos, lyrics, musician profiles, related artists, etc. For an example, see the page for “Maria Maria” by Santana — it’s super!

The main feature on your play list page is a big, simple link that says “play all.” When you play all, a player opens in a panel over top of the same page. The player is fully loaded with top YouTube videos matching the tracks in your play list. You can listen and watch at the default size or full-screen, one track at a time or run the whole play list with no further interaction required. Here again for examples are my FoxyTunes Twitter DJ play list page and the official FoxyTunes Twitter DJ page.

Once you have FoxyTunes hooked up, then with just the minimum effort, you can share your music in style. There are many other means to this end, but they are all more labor-intensive. This is by far the laziest, most legal way to nicely share your favorite tracks with people you know and everyone you don’t.

The default content, connections, and wrapping are all state of the art. The track pages, YouTube videos, and audio are all as good as the wisdom of the crowd and cloud, so it’s not always perfect. For so little work on your part though, it’s far better than you could do alone.

Of FoxyTunes, I say: may it live long, and prosper.

Give it a try by starting with the official FoxyTunes Twitter DJ page.

Update: Since I began using FoxyTunes, FoxyTunes joined Yahoo! and FoxyTunes runs on Internet Explorer 7+ in addition to Firefox 2+.

For DJs who want more control, it’s easy enough to trade more work for better results while still riding FoxyTunes. You can easily add your own text per track that you publish to Twitter — that ability is built into FoxyTunes. You could also bypass FoxyTunes in your browser, but otherwise publish to Twitter using a combination of your custom content and FoxyTunes’ syntax, which then triggers the play list building down stream. You could edit Wikipedia and publish custom videos to YouTube, connecting those dots to tracks you associate with in FoxyTunes.

In the end, you could take your play list and restyle it on your own site, blog, or profile page. With all the tools and samples available to developers, designers, hackers, crackers, makers, bakers, and hangers-on these days, you can publish your FoxyTunes Twitter DJ play list just-so. I found enough magic in all the defaults, but someone publishing more professionally could get still more from FoxyTunes Twitter DJ.