Coming up next Monday, October 6th at the Raincity Studios offices is a Knight News Challenge info and prep session.What is the Knight News Challenge?

Want to win funding for a cool online community project?
The Knight News Challenge is in the third year of a program that gives away $5MM a year to innovative online projects that support online news, community discourse and social media in specific local communities. Come to this meet up to find out how to apply, share ideas, and get a chance to talk to KNC evangelists.

This is an interactive, hands on discussion designed to give you the knowledge to apply with a great innovative idea. All ages welcomed.

The press release from the beginning of September details the program. $5M is available for "digital media experiments to innovate journalism".

Long time blog friend Susan Mernit is running these prep sessions -- Seattle and San Francisco are the next two places on the list. If you're accepted past the first stage, you can enter the News Challenge Garage for further mentoring and feedback.

A lot of code ends up being built in Drupal for this yearly challenge. Knight took notice of this, and also has the Drupal-specific Knight Drupal Initiative (KDI).

This is a really good way to get some funding to try a true R&D-style idea, which might just be the beginning of a whole new startup. If you have ideas about the future of news, come to the Raincity Studios offices to find out more next week. (and yes, please sign up on Upcoming or Facebook).

Dave Olson sat down with me at the beginning of this week and did a long (50 minutes) podcast over at Raincity Radio.

We covered a lot of ground. Here are some short notes with related links on what we talked about:

Well, contrary to the lack of posting here, I actually have a ton of stuff tumbling around my head right now. And so, an Omnibus post that covers a couple of different items.

I've been heads down busy and haven't been attending (or organizing!) any social media type events lately. I did get out Wednesday night to attend the Freshbooks / Redwerks BBQ. Look, there's me holding a puppy (photo by Ianiv)! It was a beautiful sunny evening and the Redwerks rooftop patio is awesome. I ended up manning the grill, my secret ploy to meet everyone (at least, everyone that was hungry). It was nice to meet some new people and catch up with a bunch of regulars.

I'm trying Jungle Disk for my personal backup. In short, it's a cross platform app that both serves as a kind of iDisk as well as some simple backup operations, except that your data is actually stored on Amazon's S3 service. You pay a one time license for the application (and you can install it on as many computers as you want), and you pay as you go for storage. And can get your files from any machine.

I'm currently backing up my Documents folder to a Backup area, and then I also have a second "bucket" (that's actually Amazon tech talk, but it makes sense) that is a true archive -- I copy old stuff there and delete if off my local disk. I'm still debating whether it's worth it for me to put my entire iTunes collection online -- it would solve being able to get my music from anywhere, and it would cost about $12 / month (for 60GB). Not sure what the calculation is for streaming that music some of the time? And yes, this is like MP3 Tunes music locker.

So that's my use, but Jungle Disk *also* launched the WorkGroup edition -- which is the same thing, but lets multiple users in a company use it from a single Amazon account, with things like their own storage space as well as granular user permissions. So you can have a Finance folder that only senior management can access. And if you don't have senior management, then just think about how great it would be to have a small business shared file system that you can access from any computer, anywhere. That's $2/month per employee, which I think is a good price.

WordPress! I've been mucking about in WordPress core and theme code. Once was with Rachael's site, which I upgraded using the FTP dance. I really hate not having command line access.... The second was for the Bootup Labs Blog, which I moved off of WordPress.com so we could add some more plugins and do stuff like have a feed for every category / tag. Except, when I went digging around, it seems that the main feed is the only one that is ever injected into the link rel header. So, here's my feature request if you're interested in the gory details: http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7190 -- heck, I might even submit a patch :P

I just wrapped up my presentation at the CCI2008. Here's the slideshare for it:

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A much longer post is up at Raincity Studios.

See you all on the other side of the weekend, I'm going completely offline...

A few highlights from posts elsewhere. Yes, I have to figure out a combined feed strategy.

I'm attending the CCI2008 conference here in Vancouver, and did a first post about it on the Raincity Studios blog. I'm speaking on Friday, covering data silos, content sharing, and open source.

Looks like I'll be on BNN tonight, with my first TV appearance representing Bootup Labs. See the BUL blog for the details, 6:45PM EST on cable.

Mobile post sent by bmann using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Mobile post sent by bmann using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Update: so, yeah, if you type in JUST "Boston" into Apple's Accuweather widget, you'll get weather for Boston, Georgia. It's nice and warm there this time of year, apparently :P Turns out we're going to need to go to Target and buy some sweaters and stuff.

Here's me in a snowbank in Boston, MA and a screencap of the Boston, GA, forecast:

Hi, you may remember me from such roles as the first Drupal Association Board of Directors. This is a bit of a recap of my year's involvement with the Association, along with an explanation of my current feeling about it, and that I won't be applying for a Board position this next year. Oh, and if you're a current or prospective Permanent Member, you should probably read this.

I just did my first post to the Raincity Studios blog, about Dries announcing his Drupal startup Acquia.

I really am pleased for Dries. I know that he's had a number of different offers and ideas that he's had to think through. Doing your own thing is exciting. Doing it well-funded is even more exciting :P

I think there are a number of different business models around open source that need more examples and experimentation. I've seen a lot of companies trying to make installing open source applications easier, but that's a "do once" operation that, to me, is not particularly high value.

Distilling the knowledge of lots of smart people into a focused distribution is a great thing, and upgrading / maintaining an installation over time is the much harder thing that I'd like to see more solutions around.

So, Dries, congrats on Acquia. I think we've got a few more adventures to go on together, and I'm looking forward to it.

In joining forces with RCS and going from 7 people to 22 people, I'm diving back into tools and process. It's actually quite enjoyable, and I've got some partners in crime that it's been fun to work with.

Highrise is something that I'm warming to. Ostensibly it's a contact management tool, but it also does CRM and task management. I like it because it gets rid of giant CC chains in keeping multiple people "in the loop" -- you just BCC the dropbox in Highrise and everyone can follow along, including grabbing attachments sent in email and so on.

But, it wouldn't be a 37 Signals product if it didn't have certain infuriating things about it. Well, maybe not infuriating, but it just leaves me scratching my head. Number one is having to hit "edit" to add an email to a Case (why isn't there just a nice big "Add to Case" button like there is for other activities?). The other is lack of LDAP. Adding LDAP support so that I could easily use my local mail client to get access to all shared contacts just seems a no brainer. I keep wondering when Gmail will do something like this (or, at least, a Plaxo-like "sync" functionality).

Oh, right, and it lets me add new contacts with email addresses that are duplicates of existing contacts. Yeah, there are a couple of things that bug me about it :P

Anyway, on a whole, Highrise is a plus. Lead tracking and pre-project business communications (contracts, scoping, hiring, etc.) are going to be its main tasks, plus "soft" tasks -- e.g. follow up with so-and-so, review this contract, give me your thoughts, etc. I call out soft tasks specifically because there is ALSO Basecamp which has to dos (but not dated to dos, which Highrise does do...oh 37S, how you confuse me and leave me in a puddle of love/hate...). Wonder to what use we can put the API.

The other tool is Merlin2 -- a Mac project management app that Djun and I had settled on previously. Scoping, estimating, budgeting, resource allocation -- seems to do a pretty decent job in a nice intuitive way. I keep thinking it would be great to hook it directly into trac so you can easily get high level overviews of tasks. This MUST be scriptable in some way, but would need some dedicated time to sit down and work through...

Oh, and what the heck, while we're naming tools, don't forget about hosted SVN / ticket tracking with Unfuddle. I think our trac install is going to go away and be replaced by per-project hosted Unfuddle (for easy hand off to clients -- main uses are developer-granularity tickets and client bug reporting) and an internal Drupal-based wiki/doc repository for the wiki component.