Well folks, it’s shaping up to be a busy few weeks!

This week, my projects Twittervision and Flickrvision will be opening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in an exhibit called Design and the Elastic Mind. A press preview will be held on Tuesday morning at 10AM, and opening night will be at 6:30 or something that day. It’s pretty exciting; I never suspected my locking myself in a room and coding would lead to this sort of thing! The exhibit is open to the general public Feb 24-May 12, 2008.

UPDATE:
Opening Night Photo Report!

Beyond that, here’s what else is going on:

Jeff Pulver’s Social Media Breakfast in New York – Feb 26 8AM
Jeff’s been sponsoring these events in cities across the country (and around the world) the last few months, and I made it to the most recent one in Washington DC on February 7th. It was a blast; a chance to catch up with some old friends and make many new ones. If you are interested in social media, I suggest you seek out one of these breakfasts near you. Seek out the details for this event on Facebook and RSVP. They fill up fast.

If all goes well, I will also be appearing on Jeff’s show PulverTV as part of my visit to New York that day. Please stay tuned for the details on that.

eComm 2008 – Sunnyvale, CA – March 12-14
I’ll be speaking at eComm 2008 about open source telephony, social media and making wild and crazy things. eComm is the next version of what was O’Reilly Media’s eTel show. While no longer affiliated with O’Reilly, it should be the premier venue for telecommunications innovators and will feature a good representation from the handset, carrier, and open-source worlds. Of all the shows I attended last year, eTel was one of the most valuable, and eComm is carrying the torch forward.

There’s still time to get in on eComm. Please visit the eComm website for more information and to register.

VON.x 2008 Spring – San Jose, CA – March 17-20
This is Jeff Pulver’s big semi-annual US tradeshow about IP Communications. While originally focused on VoIP, it has expanded to cover video and social media. I’ve been attending nearly every VON show since 2003 or so and have found the sense of community and camaraderie to be very valuable. Don’t miss the party. Jeff manages to get some great bands and everybody always has a great time.

This year VON.x will be co-located with Digium Asterisk World, a joint-venture between Pulver Media and Digium. I’ll be speaking at Digium Asterisk World on March 18th. Please visit the VON website for more information and to attend.

Other Jeff Pulver Social Media Breakfasts
I’ll also be attending these other Jeff Pulver social media breakfasts:

• San Jose, March 17 (as part of VON)
• Baltimore, March 25 (it’s in my hometown!)
• Washington, DC, May 1

I’m looking forward to meeting folks at all of these events and hope to have a lot to talk about in the next few weeks. Meantime, please do stop by the MoMA in New York and check out Design and the Elastic Mind.

See you on the road!

In Baltimore, life is imitating art this week.

If you have followed the HBO show The Wire, you know that it’s not really just a “police” show, but is really about the economics of cities. It shows us in heartbreaking and sometimes humorous detail how the drug trade, police, politics, labor, education, and the media are all entwined, complicit in creating exactly the social landscape we inhabit. Good and bad, the show’s creator David Simon likes to say that, “this is as much America as we’ve paid for,” and hopes to show us how this ecosystem really operates.

I’m not much of a TV watcher, but because The Wire is about my hometown of Baltimore, I watch it with special interest. Besides the show’s already complicated fictional storyline, there are parallels to the real world that those of us who live here can pick up on. The fictional mayor is a doppelganger for Martin O’Malley; the city council president is a version of Sheila Dixon. Former Governor Bob Ehrlich made an appearance as a security guard at the State House. I could go on and on; for lovers of Maryland the show is a rich trove of on-location shoots, cameo appearances and, really, is a kind of love-letter to Baltimore.

The current season focuses on the media. In the show, the Baltimore Sun is facing outside ownership (really happened) and cutbacks (really happened) and the closure of its foreign bureaus (really happened). The paper staff is asked to “do more with less” and accept that fact that the newspaper business is changing. More focus is placed on the bottom line than on reporting, and naturally, quality suffers.

While David Simon (the show’s creator) has been criticized for creating an oversimplified caricature of the Sun and its woes (especially when compared to his somewhat more nuanced portrayals of law enforcement and political worlds), his portrayal of the media still rings true.

In fact, this week it seemed particularly prescient as Baltimore suffered yet another in its long line of indignities: the loss of Marc Steiner from its public radio airwaves.

Marc has been a fixture in Baltimore public radio for the last 15 years. As host of “The Marc Steiner Show” from 1993-2008, he shed “light, not heat” on the complex world we live in; on facets of Baltimore, of Maryland, and the world at large. In 2002, Marc led an effort to purchase what was then WJHU from Johns Hopkins University (my alma mater) and make it into a public radio station with significant community involvement. By all accounts, he was instrumental in helping to raise over $750,000 to help purchase the station, and to many in the public was perceived as Mr. Public Radio in Baltimore.

However, the total financing required to purchase the station from Johns Hopkins was $5 million, and other investors stepped in to fill the gap. While it was a minor miracle to have raised the initial $750,000, the remainder had to come from somewhere, and several investors, including Tony Brandon, Barbara Bozzuto, and others helped to seal the deal. Since WYPR was launched in 2002, it has been very successful. Many new programs have been launched, and it has been one of a few things that Baltimoreans could be really proud of.

The Marc Steiner Show, running from 12-2pm Monday-Thursday, has been one of its most recognizable features. Marc’s voice, his laugh, and his theme song are as much Baltimore as Natty Boh and blue crabs. Marc has been such a recognizable champion of Baltimore that he’s even been included in The Wire; once as an unseen voice on a car radio, and again as a moderator of a political debate (something that he’s also done).

The last Marc Steiner show was broadcast last Thursday. WYPR’s manager Tony Brandon cited sagging ratings as the reason for the show’s cancellation. While this may be true, a careful reading of history shows that there has been a long-standing philosophical gap between Steiner and WYPR manager Tony Brandon.

Like David Simon, who was offered a buyout deal to leave the Sun, Brandon offered Steiner a $50,000 buyout deal to leave WYPR and not speak to the media.

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that you shouldn’t try to bribe a hippie. Especially one that’s still got his integrity and that is beloved by a decent chunk of the local population.

As you can imagine, this has turned into a fiasco. It’s not clear how it will resolve itself, what should happen, who’s to blame for what, when. It’s like something straight out of season 5 of The Wire. There is a complexity at work here; however, one thing is certainly true: Marc has done a tremendous public service to Baltimore and to Maryland the last 15 years, and he deserves recognition and thanks for that service.

As a former guest on Marc’s show (I was on roughly once a month from about 1998-2001 talking about technology and internet topics), I’m a participant in the drama, even if in a small way. My friend Erik Monti, myself, and others have formed a Facebook page to help Support Marc Steiner. Whatever happens, we want to do what we can to make sure that Marc gets a fair deal out of this, and that people know how much he meant to Baltimore.

It’s a shame that David Simon didn’t get a chance to include this final coda of the corporatization of Baltimore’s media in The Wire. Now, let’s do a quick count:

We’re down The Wire and Marc Steiner. We won’t even get to hear Marc interview David Simon anymore. As WYPR’s “owners” (if they are not the public) grapple with what to give us instead of Marc, I hope they consider that ratings are not the only measurement of value.

If that was true for television, we’d have only American Idol (a ratings star) rather than The Wire (which struggles in ratings); this would surely be a tremendous loss. HBO deserves credit for allowing David Simon to create important art and entertainment that transcends the need for “ratings”.

WYPR should have allowed Marc Steiner the same freedom. Sometimes, a realistic portrait isn’t what we want to see, but we need it nonetheless.

And as for WYPR, this is — apparently — as much radio as we’ve paid for.

Judging by the fact that there are several posts about this topic out in the wild, and that I have come across a need for it more than once, I thought it would be helpful to wrap up this functionality into a plugin and put it out into the world. Give a warm welcome to ActsAsRenderer!

Before you go off on a tirade about the evils of violating MVC, let me first say I know the arguments and I agree with you. However, in a world of complex systems where not everything is done via full-stack HTTP, there are legitimate reasons to output data directly from models, and ActsAsRenderer helps you do it.

With ActsAsRenderer, you get four cool new functions.

For your model class, you get render_file and render_string. For your instances, you get render_to_file and render_to_string.

Probably the most common (and legitimate) use of this kind of functionality is for rendering data out of a Rails script (say with script/runner). Since that environment is not a full-stack HTTP view of the world, it’s a real pain to render any kind of structured output. Not anymore! With acts_as_renderer in your model, you can render your views and give your model the voice it’s been lacking!

I’ve had this need come up several times. Most recently, I built a server configuration management system using Rails. While it is nice to preview the rendered configuration files using Rails-over-HTTP, it is also essential to be able to write those same configuration files out to the filesystem. In another case, I had a background DRb process that needed to be able to render templated output to the filesystem. I had to go build a mock-controller and do some pretty unsavory things; all of that would have been obviated with acts_as_renderer.

Now, I can simply say:

class Server < ActiveRecord::Base  acts_as_renderer

  def build_configuration    CLIENT_CONFIG_FILES.each do |f|      render_to_file("configs/#{f}", "#{config_dir}/#{f}.conf")    end  endend

The render_to_file function renders the templates located in configs (under app/views by default) and writes them to the files specified in the config_dir; it’s also smart enough to know that render_to_file is being called from a ‘server’ instance and sets @server accordingly. So my templates in configs are simply:

; Configuration Snippet for Server <%=@server.description%>

<%= render :partial => 'configs/queue', :collection => @server.queues %>

Please do think before using this plugin. It can be used for some seriously evil violations of good MVC design practice, and you are responsible for your own actions. However, this can also be used to make your existing designs *much* more robust and elegant, and I encourage you to use it where that is true.

It’s ready to drop in. Everything is there, including tests. Enjoy!

NOTE: Version 1.0 only supported Rails 2.0; I just added version 1.01 which will work with either Rails 1.2.x or 2.0.x. Please feel free to ping me with any questions.

acts_as_renderer at RubyForge

Well, folks, it’s here. The new global time-waster video art project, Spinvision.TV!

Since releasing Twittervision and Flickrvision last year, I’ve been imagining what other kinds of visualizations could be created. It was really a natural progression. First text, then photos, and now videos. It’s a trilogy of global media trivia.

Spinvision.TV takes videos from YouTube and plots them on a moving globe. The globe is provided by my friends at Poly9 and is built in Flash; since Flash includes video player capabilities, it was a matter of tweaking things to get the Poly9 FreeEarth component to work the way I wanted it to, and Poly9 was very helpful in making this happen.

We also had the idea to show night and day imagery of the earth, and I worked with Poly9 to put that together; the part of the globe that is illuminated is where it’s really day when you’re watching!

The end result, I hope, is an innovative, fresh look at “Video On Earth” and it’s a view that I hope is captivating, educational, trivial, humorous, ridiculous, and truthful.

The simple idea behind Twittervision and Flickrvision was to show the earth in a new way. I think Spinvision does that too. While there is no shortage of online video content, it seems cloistered, disconnected, and partitioned. My goal with Spinvision was to break down those walls and provide the context of place and time.

Geography may seem irrelevant today, in the age of the global Interweb, but it still matters. The content that comes from our hometowns says much about who we are. Video posted from Saudi Arabia says something that people in France or in the United States need to see. Of course, we have more in common than divides us, but we need to visualize and comprehend that. And of course, we should be aware of our genuine cultural differences, and what they really are.

On YouTube (and other video sites) it’s all too easy to watch videos from people just like you about people just like you who like the things that you like and who live in the country that you live in. While it’s possible to break out of that and watch just about anything, the user interfaces don’t encourage that.

Spinvision.TV wants you to watch outside your comfort zone.

We are seeking to partner with other video content sites besides YouTube, and would ask you to please contact us if you have video content that you would like to see presented on Spinvision.TV.

I like to think of Spinvision as a love-letter to the world, written in Javascript. I hope that you find it to be an engaging visualization of life on Earth — or at least fun!

Please help me spread the word, and thanks again for your continued support and interest!