Yesterday on the World Outline Podcast with Dave Winer and Adam Curry they mentioned me and my projects RT Proxy and TwitOPML.

If you’re interested in listening you can hear the clip or the entire episode.

RT Proxy is a little site I created to support Dave Winer’s RT standard. This is fresh on the heals of my Radio2 RT WordPress Plugin which adds RT links to a WordPress site. Now anybody even if they don’t have a website or linkblog can RT to many popular social network including Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

I just came across Dave Winer’s post Samsung is wrong about TV which is a response to the earlier TechCrunch article Samsung Not Worried About Apple’s TV: "TVs are ultimately about picture quality".

Now I’m actually with TechCrunch on this one that when it comes to TV content is king. Dave thinks the #1 most important thing is communication.

Because nowadays while I’m watching TV, I want to look stuff up on the web, communicate about the experience on the net with people I communicate with. And see what they’re saying. And who knows what else in the years to come.

I agree with him that turning the TV into a two-way medium is going to become more and more important as time goes by, but I don’t think this is how Apple is going to win.

I think the way Apple is going to win is by coming out with an AppleTV App Store. They haven’t done it yet because so far the AppleTV is a hobby for them. They are waiting for the right moment, when the public is ready for what they have to offer. This may very well come at the same time as their own TV (as opposed to the current AppleTV set top box). Roku already has this sort of functionality in their channel store. Apple could take this concept into a TV set and make it super easy for people to buy apps for their TV. If they want TWiT, Crunchyroll or WSJ Live they just install an app. Obviously if it’s premium content Apple will take their 30%.

This is how Apple will dominate the TV market. By leading with content, making a killing with TV apps and probably down the road make it more social.

Maps the Radio2 style RT standard onto the Press This URL. (see A standard for RT’ing?)

This plugin checks for any of three query string params (link, title, description). If they are present it redirects the page to the /wp-admin/press-this.php page with the params u, t, s and v set appropriately.

The purpose is so static rivers like http://tech.newsriver.org/ will be able to send a RT request to your blog.

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I’ve been very interested in thinking of clever ways to help myself and other people avoid digital sharecropping. Especially with the recent hoopla around SOPA.

The problem I have with the term Digital Sharecropper is that it represents the negative behavior. We talk about how Facebook and Twitter is turning us into digital sharecroppers but what is the alternative?

Obviously the desired behavior is for people to own their own content and their method for distribution, but what do we call it?

I nominate the term “Digital Decentralism” to be the antonym of “Digital Sharecropping” and therefore “Digital Decentralist” will be the antonym of “Digital Sharecropper”.

It has a nice alliteration going for it, it contains digital to show it’s relationship to digital sharecropping. Not to mention decentralization is a key part of the solution to SOPA style policies.

What do you think? Does digital decentralism capture the essence of what we’re trying to accomplish? Is it sexy enough? Can you think of something better? I think this is going to be a big issue in 2012. We need to get a term to rally behind.

Date Check Pro is a startup that was part of the 94 Labs tech incubator over the summer of 2011.  I was hired by Andrew Hoeft the CEO/Founder to build the site.  Date Check Pro is a SaaS product that helps grocery stores manage their expiring inventory.  We started planning the site at the beginning of June and were testing with Festival Foods by the middle of July.

I built this site with Kohana and it’s designed to work equally well on a laptop or tablet. In order to expedite development and to encourage design consistency I designed the application using the OOCSS methodology so everything in the application is designed as a reusable CSS building block.

In order to get an inexpensive professional design for the homepage we headed over to ThemeForest and picked up the Freemium Saas II HTML Theme and it only took me one night to customize it for our content.

I’m really happy with how the site turned out.  Andrew Hoeft and I have a lot of great ideas for how we will evolve this application.  Our next project is to add a mobile version so our customers who are on a tight budget can deploy using less expensive devices like an iPod touch.

At Brazen Careerist where I work we’re having a series of posts by Brazen employees with tips about how they got ahead in their careers.  My post about starting a group was just posted today.  Check it out.

Rock-It at Work: Start a Group

Today I came across a wikipedia page about the Seven Blunders of the World which was a list created by Gandhi.  As I went through them one particularly stuck with me.  That was “Knowledge without Character” particularly because knowledge is something I strive for.  The problem was although I had a sense in my gut about what character was, I wasn’t sure specifically.  Furthermore I wasn’t sure if I have character.

Of course that question led me to the page on Moral Character which describe character as:

Moral character or character is an evaluation of a particular individual’s durable moral qualities.

It is a test of proper behavior and determining what is right and wrong.

So now the questions is what does it mean to be moral?  I’ve always considered myself a consequentialist which has led some people with differing beliefs to think of me as having questionable morals.  The interesting thing is that through my research I came up with two other approaches to morality.

Deontological Ethics are rule based morality.  Something is right or wrong.  Growing up Catholic I have a lot of experience with this one.  This one doesn’t jive with me because it leaves open the question of “who writes the rules?” Of course religious people would have an answer to that question, but that leaves me something to be desired.

Virtue Ethics gets a little more tricky because that article leads with the definition:

Virtue ethics describes the character of a moral agent as a driving force for ethical behaviour, rather than rules (deontology) or consequentialism, which derives rightness or wrongness from the outcome of the act itself rather than character.

Which leads to the meta answer of “Having character means being moral and being moral means having character” although a later example seems to slightly clarify:

As such, lying would be made in a case-by-case basis that would be based on factors such as personal benefit, group benefit, and intentions (as to whether they are benevolent or malevolent).

So now I’m not really sure where to go from here.  What are your thoughts on character and morality?

Recently I’ve been reading the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck and it’s really making me think.  According to the official website:

In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort. They’re wrong.

In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. Virtually all great people have had these qualities.

Of course when I read those descriptions I think “Well I’m clearly operating with a growth mindset” since I know that any skill can be developed and if you work hard at something you can do amazing things.  However as I go through the book and she goes over examples of people in similar situations where one is operating with a fixed mindset and the other with a growth mindset I’m starting to wonder if I may be subconsciously operating within the fixed mindset.

One part that really resonated with me when when they mentioned that someone with the fixed mindset “depended too much on his talent instead of hard work” and I realized that’s like me.  I haven’t had to challenge myself for a long time and when faced with something difficult, I frequently procrastinate, preferring to work on projects that come easily to me.  Heck, even when I play video games I don’t last very long before I go looking for the walk-through.

Thankfully I don’t show all the negative traits of the fixed-minded people in the book.  Many of them are very defensive and arrogant, where I’m typically self-deprecating.  But even my self-deprecating attitude can be linked to the fixed mindset.  If I’m self deprecating and people don’t expect much from me then when I do something well they are impressed.

So one of my goals moving forward will be to see what I can do to transition to a more growth oriented mindset.  I should not shy away from things that are challenging and I shouldn’t be afraid to put myself out there. It was a good thing for me when I shipped my TwitOPML app, everybody seemed really happy with it.  Now I should try to one-up myself and ship something more challenging.

The first step in solving a problem is to identify the problem.  I’ve done that, now I have to do something about it.

I’ve been working as part of the blork community lately.  What is a blork?  It’s basically a decentralized Twitter like app that runs on RSS.  You post status updates that get posted to your RSS Feed, then you follow other RSS feeds.  The problem? RSS is not particularly user friendly.  You have to find the RSS feed, copy the URL and paste it into your RSS aggregator. Some sites make it easier, like with Dave’s blork software you just copy a little bookmarklet into your toolbar and when you find a site you want to follow you just click the bookmarklet and it takes you to your blork with the url filled in.

One reason Twitter and Facebook have become so popular is that it’s so easy to follow people.  You just click the follow button and you’re done.  How could we make it that easy for blorks while still keeping it decentralized?  This is where OPML comes in.

OPML is in it’s generic sense a format for outlines, however it’s also used for RSS subscription lists.  Unfortunately there aren’t too many RSS aggrigators that let you subscribe to a live OPML list.  Instead you typically import a list which defeats much of the power of this technology.  Fortunately Dave’s blork software supports subscribing to a live OPML list.

What if we had a service that worked like this:

1. You sign up and get an OPML subscription list and instructions on how to put this URL into your blork.
2. Websites could put a “follow” button on their site that works as easily as a Like or Tweet This button.
3. When you click that button you’re communicating with the site you signed up with and it adds the feed to your OPML subscription list.
4. Since  your blork is subscribed to your OPML list, you’re not automatically subscribed to the site you’re following.

There is no reason why we couldn’t have more then one of these services.  Maybe there could even be a way they could play nice with each other.  They would also have to have a bookmarklet like on Dave’s blork so you could somewhat easily follow blogs that don’t have the follow button.  There could also be browser plugins that make this even easier for people.

I still think this process will be too complicated for the average user but this is an interesting place to start thinking of a solution.