Empowerment's first full-time headquarters is opening in Indianapolis! This house is the dedicated development and coding collective for Empowerment and Viralink projects.

What: Come and celebrate the grand opening with the team and try demonstration versions of Empowerment's new iPhone and Facebook apps.

Why: This opening is a historic moment for the Empowerment project and we hope to see you there to celebrate our new workplace and dedicate ourselves to the cause of universal human empowerment.

Who: The Empowerment development team and community, including you!

When: August 1, 2008 2-5PM Eastern / 11-2PM Pacific. HQ will be operational two weeks beforehand, but will OFFICIALLY open for business on the 1st. Drop by all day. The party will likely rage long into the night.

Where: 952 Eastern Ave, Indianapolis, IN 46201, next store to Pugsley, 2 houses down.

SECOND LIFE: If you can't make it to Indianapolis, attend virtually via our Second Life HQ next store to Rant Hunker Downs.

RSVP if you are going to attend with Facebook

I got the first prototype version of the Empower iPhone app working with the help of jtbandes, a talented young man from freenode's #iphonedev channel.

The xcode project with source code produced so far is attached here, with SVN coming soon.

Here's a teaser screenshot of what the first hacked prototype looks like so far:

We are going to develop a world-class Empowerment interface for iPhone and win next year's Apple Design Award for best iPhone App.

Empowerment for iPhone is important because empowering missions mostly take place in the real world not at the computer at which they might be planned but not executed. So when you are in the field you need the technology at your fingertips to manage and review missions.

GTD In The Field

It will be valuable for integration with our facebook layer too, and it will incorporate or link to external GTD task management via OmniFocus or something like it.

Our implementation of GTD should essentially be socially enabled GTD. Not only can you manage your own tasks, but also you can collaborate with others on them and track progress socially with "group GTD" essentially.

Offline Data Reference

All the pages that users add to their profile will be archived for instantaneous offline viewing. This way you can reviw a skill the moment you need a refresher.

 

Empowerment Studios is a music and video production outfit for recording and developing revolutionary creative projects.

Primary Tools

• Interface: Presonus FireStudio Project Firewire
• Mic: Rode NT1A Condenser Noiseless
• Cables: Monster ProAdvantage
• Computer: MacBook Pro Dual 2.4GHz 4GB
• Software: Logic Studio, Reason, Live
• Monitors: alesis M1 520 active monitors

C and/or C++: --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

PHP: --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

Python: --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

Ruby: --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

Perl: --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

Visual Basic: --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

Other Basic: --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

Java, using the Sun libraries: --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

Java, using some other library (like .net or mono): --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

Lisp (any variant): --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

ECMA Script (Javascript, DMDScript, etc): --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

Pascal: --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

Small Talk: --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

Objective C: --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

Assembler or machine language: --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

C#: --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

ML (any variant): --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

Other (please comment).: --1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7th8th9th10th11th12th13th14th15th16th17th18th

I made two upgrades to the comment system this morning.

I completed a Drupal Development mission called "Email notification upon replies to your nodes and comments so you can follow threads and respond".

Now when someone replies to your comments, you get an email so you can continue the conversation!

I'm not sure if you get an email when someone replies to your node in the first place yet though. Comment here to test this new feature. 

I also gave comment headers a light blue background to make it easier to see which reply buttons replied to which comments. 

 

Empowerment Headquarters is the first office for Empowerment doers to collaborate on EmpowerThyself and many other projects.

Location: 952 Eastern Ave, Indianapolis, IN 46201

Facilities: 2 2-story 3-bedroom houses with street access

Previous Location: Santa Barbara HQ January 1st-June 22nd, 2008

 

A friend just sent me a link to this 404 error page and it hit me: We need great 404 pages like this. Here's one of many lists of great 404s.

I want to have multiple 404s and randomize between them so that people will continually be amused and even refresh the 404 trying to see them all. Please submit ideas for new 404s, your favorite already-existing 404 designs, or to really do a great job attach completely designed zip files containing necessary HTML and media files.

Anyone can try this by leaving comments or attaching files and the first one to do the mission gets Gold Stars credit for the mission.

My Profile: I was unaware until Forrest pointed it out that the most important page on the entire site was inaccessible to non-admins for over a month since I introduced it!

My Profile is the page that begins to show what "Empower Yourself" really means. Everything you create and do comes together here as you empower yourself. It's not the final polished interface, but it puts it all together in one place for the first time.

Next step is to make a user's profile visible to other users just as nicely and unify it with Account Info / Interests / Etc.

Tag Cloud: Tags now have a nice icon link that goes to a tag cloud where you can see which tags are most popular and click any tag to see every node tagged with it.

Mac-like list view colors: I made table lists use alternating blue and white table row colors with just a thin line at the top to make exploring pages like My Profile on the site easier on the eyes. This gives me perverse pleasure. Why this isn't Drupal's default I don't know. I would love to have an influence on future Drupal defaults once the site gets more refined, especially with our Icons module which should become Drupal core.

Missions: I've rebranded tasks/doable actions as MISSIONS because it is a whole lot cooler and more exciting to take an important mission assignment than it is to have some petty tasks "to-do". The icon for Missions is a checkbox to represent the "as good as doneness" of a mission assigned to an empowered doer.

Ideapedia.org, Skillpedia.org, Toolpedia.org, Mediapedia.org: I've rebranded the content sections of EmpowerThyself with a consistent "-pedia" suffix naming convention. This is in keeping with our connection to the Encyclopedist tradition begun by the late Denis Diderot and the more recent Wikipedia in the question to make all human knowledge freely available. Domains are still being redirected but you can reach them all through empowerthyself.com for now. Giving each section an identity will appeal to users who come looking for specific content like how-to skill guides, tool reviews and ideological discussions. They will feel at home within the section they begin, but they will be introduced to the larger scope in which their entry point fits. I will work on adding more distinctive "branding" to each section in the layout.

New "Groups" icon: Groups is now a cool trio of empowered doers showing that the two extra doers have got the first doers' back.

New "Empowerment.tv Podcast" Icon: The generic feed icon now has waves emanating from the empowered symbol with a .TV next to it.

What's New now includes Popular Content: See what has been getting clicked the most.

I'm releasing the new and improved version 7 of the Empower Thyself desktop picture and poster and an overhaul of the way the header cityscape version looks on the site so that it will stretch to monitors as big as 1600 pixels wide. Bonus gold stars if you can spot the easter eggs in a comment.

Empowerment now has an official headquarters! I am signing rental agreement papers on a new 3 bedroom 2 story newly built house in downtown Santa Barbara with spacious gardens, garage and yard. Details and pictures coming soon. Those who want to come out to live and work on Empowerment, contact me at lxpk@empowerthyself.com.

There's some new content types in town. Create Personal Ideas and Personal Skills to figure out what you believe in and what you can do about it.

Your Personal Ideas are for defining for yourself what ideas you believe in.

For example, I saw someone posted the North American Union idea group. I not only wanted to subscribe, I posted my personal idea about this I call "Stop the North American Union". It shows up in the North American Union idea group's feed and it is a way of defining for myself what I believe about this idea.

You can already post your personal tech as inventory. 

This is not just for a list of your stuff. All of these things can be added both as things you have and things you want or thing you oppose. For example, you might add an idea you disagree with to make your statement against it, you might add a skill you want someone to teach you, and you might add a piece of tech that is on your wishlist. 

This will get much better. Right now the user experience to create and manage these things is clunky but the functionality is at least being define before the planned optimal experience is developed by our Drupal Dev Team. P

Personal Ideas, Personal Skills and Inventory will eventually be combined with the "subscribe to this group" button. There will be a button at the top right of every idea, skill and tech group that makes thinking, learning and equipping it as push-button easy as digging social news.

You will be able to click any idea to create your belief in it. You will be able to do likewise with Skill Groups to click to add your personal skill to your profile along with notes about your capabilities and eventually tracking of skill data like learning experiences and training.

Even since I've joined there have been NUMEROUS user nodes added. How many of us are networked? How many of us share geographical regions? These are questions we can answer if we choose. I, personally, would enjoy meeting and hearing about some new users and how they found out about the empowerment and what they stand for. I'll go first. 

I'm from the prairies, smack dab in the middle of the United State of Canada. Winter is approaching fast so I anticipate more time near my humming metal box below me. I found out about this gateway to power on Sean Kennedy's NewsReal a few weeks back and have since enjoyed exploring and contributing ideas when I can. I'm particularly interested in cyberpunk notions, and also the idea of Thoughts as Technology. Thoughts are one of the only free things available to me these days. (I could add more to that but I'll spare you the deep). I'm currently an uneducated fool (aside from high school), enjoying the folly of every day life working in a retail store (we sell work clothes).

I see the empowerment as a place for the most useful of viral ideas to be spread for the good of those involved and for people to get recognition from their peers for good deeds that are perhaps not understood by popular culture. Collaboration potential is GREAT here. I anticipate hearing about the outcomes of our directional chaos down the line.

-adnauseam, forever on into the future.

Oh, let's not forget to check out user profiles. Here's mine

Google (comment what the search was for)

NewsReal with Sean Kennedy http://www.rantradio.com/shows/newsreal

http://BarcampLA.org

http://BarcampSD.org

http://Noodlescar.com

Someone I know invited me (comment what they told you)

Alex Peake invited me

I saw a t-shirt, a poster or other materials (comment where you saw it, bonus points for pictures)

Agent Viralink Industries http://www.empowerthyself.com/node/1163

Something else (comment about it)

Apple's Mac OS 10.5 Leopard loginwindow process phones home to lcs.mac.com on port 443 which is only revealed by running the new Little Snitch 2 security monitoring tool.

UPDATE: It appears from Digg comments that verbose booting shows this is Back To My Mac communications and that machines without any .Mac preferences don't send anything. Mystery mostly solved, although we still don't know for sure what's in the HTTPS packets. Additionally: Chris Holland points out there's a chance this might be NAT-PMP traffic. The moral of the story is guard your COMSEC well with tools like Little Snitch.

You can reproduce and deny the suspicious unauthorized outgoing packets by installing Little Snitch 2 beta 10 and rebooting. You can tell it to deny once or forever when it tries this until we discover a legitimate purpose for this transmission.

I googled the strings and Russian hackers are the only ones I could find who have noticed so far in this LiveJournal post which I translated into English. Here's a not entirely innapropriate picture they posted in the thread:

What is going on exactly? Why is Apple contacting itself? Can anyone with more expertise in traffic analysis tell us what is being sent through HTTPS?

Little Snitch 2 For The Win

This is a potentially suspicious behavior but it does bring to our attention the importance of independent security tools like Little Snitch that are not designed by the operating system manufacturer. Without Snitch, there is no easy way for users to audit and control their computer's security independent of the manufacturer's whims.

It also highlights the excellence of Little Snitch 2, which is packed with new visual network monitoring features and a new Star Trek-esque configuration interface.

I recommend 10.5 users download Little Snitch 2 and get control over this kind of suspicious network activity. If Apple is doing it, the rest of your software could be doing worse behind your back. Buy yourself a license for Little Snitch 2 for $25 and support the indy developer because without him we would be at Apple's mercy.

Little Snitch Secures Leopard's Area

Leopard almost copies Little Snitch 1's preference pane and Allow/Deny dialogs with a new Application Firewall under System Preferences Security but they only monitor incoming connections, ignoring outgoing spyware like Leopard's loginwindow. Leopard imitates Little Snitch just in time to be dusted by Little Snitch 2 and caught in the act of apparently breaching user privacy.

Apple Must Explain: Bug or Feature?

I hope someone from Apple responds to this to show either that there is a good reason to justify it or that it will be removed in 10.5.1. Apple's overall security record is impressive compared to Microsoft but we must be ever vigilant to keep them on their toes. The obviousness of this phoning home and the inevitability of all such transmissions being exposed makes it unlikely that this is something really nefarious but even an oversight can breach privacy and great care must be taken by companies like Apple whose software is running on an increasing percentage of our computers worldwide.

 

The Inventory and Actions lists are two new collaborative Drupal systems online now for registered users to use.

Inventory allows you to list the things you have, the wishlist of things you want, requests for things you need help getting, and offers for things you can give.

Actions allows you to post tasks, feature requests, bug reports and support requests into a big to-do list. Have an idea for the site? Post it. Want to help develop the site? Choose an unassigned task and assign it to yourself to work on.

Both of these listings are searchable and both are somewhat clunky to use still but they will gain much more sophisticated interfaces soon. There is already an action underway to improve the way these work!

Actions is already being used with Nihi and Doobius tackling the first Drupal tasks ever to be delegated and loads of site ideas are going up for future consideration.

Inventory is already being used to request equipment from AgentSubversion.

In researching some things on my own wishlist, I discovered a new cause I believe strongly about: Plastic bags. We waste a TRILLION plastic bags every year, a million every second. In a world at war over oil, this is completely insane and costs American and Iraqi lives.

Anyone who uses free plastic bags is LETTING THE TERRORISTS WIN!

I'm going to become a reusable bags activist. I'm going to order a 4 pack of Workhorse black bags and buy a whole bunch of cheap $1 bags to give away to people to get them to buy in.

This issue is so fundamentally black and white that it is easy to see how it will become an excellent example of starter issues we can show people how to pursue that can appeal to everyone without alienating anyone. If you can supply everyone you know with reusable bags Facebook checklist style, you will have gained immense skill and confidence in your abilities as an activist and advocate for good things. Imagine what people will be able to do next once they accomplish this.

I've added my wishlisted bags to my inventory. If you want some bags, add them to your wishlist too!

Now it is definitely time to get working on our Facebook application. 

Facebook Founder Announces 10 Million Dollar Grant Fund

Mark Zuckerberg has announced today, at the Tech Crunch 40, that the investors at Facebook have created a 10 million dollar fund to support companies that develop on the FaceBook platform.

The fund is open for application to existing developers as well as start ups. They are looking for ideas that are innovative and disruptive. No formal web site exists; however, you can pitch your idea directly at platform@facebook.com.

They do not require re-payment; however, they want first right of refusal upon obtainment of VC capital. The will fund between 25K and 250K.

 

I have temporarily reduced the list of active icons to just the main menu. Though it pains me greatly to not see those beautiful 16x16 bundles of joy, it is only temporary. The next implementation of my Icons module will inject icons server-side to reduce javascript loading time.

Comment to let me know if this improves your page loading performance.

Would you use a browser toolbar to access this site?:

yes

no

We have a Facebook Causes group now: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/view_cause/16533

Check it out and feel free to join. Right now donations go to Africa Aid, a charity that some friends of mine from Barcamp San Diego run. I need to register Empowerment as a 501c3 for-progress organization before we can be listed as a beneficiary. Yet another reason I need to get that done. The cool thing is that once we become a beneficiary, anyone will be able to create their own Facebook causes to promote what they believe in while designating us as a beneficiary. That would be totally awesome.

Facebook API Developer Help Needed

Very soon we are going to develop an Empowerment Facebook Application to extend all the work we do here into the Facebook stream and to allow us to pull our Facebook friends network into Empowerment.

If you have any knowledge or interest in Facebook app development, contact us. There is an LA Facebook Developer Group that I will attend soon to learn more.

More details to follow. Comment if you want to come, Barcamp LA is the bomb! There is an October anniversary cake party at Santa Barbara Hack Sabbath for those who can't attend Barcamp LA in November.

UPDATED AGAIN: Fawkes Night is 2 days after Barcamp so we will combine Fawkes celebrations into Barcamp instead. 

UPDATED: This was going to coincide with our anniversary but Barcamp will be Nov 3-4, somewhat later. That's not going to stop us from celebrating our party on the 14th first and then having a second merry unbirthday party at Barcamp a bit late.

But wait - there's more!

The Booth

This year we will be eating our own dogfood and practicing what we preach in the Mediapedia.

We will be staffing a tabling booth to talk to fellow Barcampers about EmpowerThyself.com and much preparation will go into making our first public outreach a great success. This page will serve as the planning document for the event.

Things we need for the event:

• Materials: We need all kinds of things to hand out to people.
  • T-shirts: Its time to finalize the logo and T-shirt designs and to get some smart black shirts professionally printed so that we have enough for all our members and more to give out as we make new friends.
  • Cards: We need cards to hand out. We could do a card that has room on the back for personal contact info as well.
  • Posters: We need big glorious Empowerment cityscape posters as well as some of the other designs we have made and could make.
  • MacBook Skins: We are going to make custom vynil sticker skins that laminate the back of the MacBook Pro with the empower humanity cityscape poster such that the Apple logo's light shines through the Empowered symbol instead.
• Cake: We need to make a special cake to give out slices at our first year unbirthday party there. Late but still a good excuse to celebrate.
• Activities: We should come up with some fun activities for people to participate in like games and contests for prizes like cool schwag.
• Presentations: We will also be delivering presentations in Barcamp sessions. Time blocks are normally 30 minutes and long presentations can go on for an hour or 1.5. If you want to deliver a presentation about anything of interest to you, it need not be about Empowerment. I will prepare a sequel to the first presentation I delivered at Barcamp San Diego and there are opportunities for people to contribute to that as well.
• Site Features Working Properly: We need to have a highly functional site for people to start using it right away with our hands-on help. The more development progress we can make before Barcamp, the better.
• Special Game Idea: A game using the site somehow to win a special prize during Barcamp would be a great way to get people using the site during the unconference right away.

So come up with ideas people! Whoever can come, let us know. This will be a historic opportunity to kick ass in the first major public Empowerment team PSYOPS mission to win the hearts and minds of the people. And just THINK of all the gold stars you will be able to snag by inviting new people!

Sociopath noticed while looking at my profile that I've been a member for about 48 weeks, almost a year. That means that EmpowerThyself.com's first birthday party is approaching!

We will have a party at Barcamp LA where we'll do a Hack Sabbath Noon Cake Party on Sunday October 7.

We'll also do another Hack Sabbath Subversive Sundays At Seven Santa Barbara Cake Party on October 14th for those who can't make it to Barcamp LA.

Comment here if you want to attend in person or via internet video/audio/chat linkup. This is a great excuse to ask for donations and promises, I mean birthday presents.

Empowerment.tv is an audio and video podcast hosted by Alex Peake, founding executive director of The Empowerment. Subscribe to hear and see Alex covering the most exciting developments in our web and game projects with special guest hosts, VIP interviews and field trips to exotic locales.

Subscribe to the Empowerment.tv Podcast

...with iTunes:

Add to iTunes 

...with web-based podcatchers. Click your choice below:

...with something else (copy this address): 

 

 

You can now post news stories you find all over the web at sites like Digg.com and Slashdot.org right here on Empowerment Newsing.

Posting news is easy

Click Post a news link in the Actions menu. Add a link to a news story and write or paste a short blurb about the story. Post stories that you think other Empowerment users should see. Discuss the news stories. Build intricate wall charts showing the connections between the news stories and read between the lines for hidden Communist messages to uncover craven plots to subvert western civilzation. Be merry.

Podcasters need news

Some news stories will get picked up by podcasts like our own empowerment.tv podcast so posting news here helps gather information for all kinds of journalists.

This is only the beginning

This is just a functional alpha of an onoing project to develop an ideal Empowerment Newsing system. Check in there if you have ideas for developing the system into something revolutionary. We are developing a Mediapedia newsing medium guide to using the full spectrum of newsing outlets to get the word out about important matters to people who need to know.

I have improved the site's Top Nav and Actions menus.

• Top Nav is now integrated with the Drupal menu system properly so that it displays the same pretty icons as the rest of the site.
  • Guests see a "Create an account" link first in the menu until they login.
  • Logged in users see a "My account" and "Logout" link on the right instead of hunting below on the sidebar.
  • There's a newly prominent "What's New" link front and center with a cool green radar icon I designed. This makes it easy to see all the latest content on every part of the site in one list.
  • The forum has a prominent link on the top to make it easy for people to go there and discuss.
• The Actions menu now includes clearly labeled links to create all our major content types with a shiny icon for each one.
• The action menu's nonmenclature distinguishes between "Document a medium/audience/idea/skill" for collaborative writing to reach objective explanations of shared subjects, "Post a topic/link/entry/event" for personal writing and "Start a campaign/group" for launching collaborative undertakings.

What do you think of these menu improvements?

"I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code."

Click Here To Download Empowerment.TV Podcast Episode 2 in iTunes M4A 3.9MB 16min

Pinging all hands in the concrete trenches of the dystopian front: come out of the cold! We have common ground to build and there's monster truck loads of code to be written.

I'm Alex Peake, founding executive director of The Empowerment, and this is the second edition of empowerment.tv, your backstage pass to changing the world one line of code at a time. This is a developer podcast for developers, roadies and groupies only. If you aren't interested in Empowerment development and you still find this podcast interesting, you may be weird. Might want to have that checked out. You might be coming down with a case of aspiring developeritis.

Drupal Camp LA

I just returned from Drupal Camp LA 2007. That it was a smashing success comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with organizer extrordinaire Crystal Williams. Crystal's barcamps span the globe from Los Angeles to Shanghai, which she organized without speaking Shanghainese, no mean feat.

Check out flickr pictures from the event! This one is of our Community Building panel in which Kirk, Markus and I led a discussion about our communities and the best ways to create social spaces using Drupal. That's me with long hair (for now) on the left. I controlled the projector, so I made sure Empowerment got a lot of screen time!

I went in with two goals: Collaboration and learning. I wanted to find Drupal allies for Empowerment and to develop my own Drupal module development skills.

Collaboration happened in a rocket-assisted fashoin. I met many brilliant folks there to collaborate with, to name a few:

• Markus of OurMedia and several others who live around Santa Barbara. We're planning a regular Drupal Santa Barbara meetup to get the creative juices flowing.
• Scoobesteve from Achieve Internet is interested in collaborating on extending Organic Groups to allow complex relationships like we need for Empowerment's profiling
• Raffy who works extensively on Quiz module which we're eyeing as part of our empowered learning system
• The WorkHabit team who had a lot to say about large-scale deployments and a common interest in developing e-learning systems around Quiz
• Jacob of userpoints maintainer fame got us up to speed on the new features and roadmap for Userpoints and uploaded a parting patch before absconding until further notice to China with his wife.
• I met some folks into game development too.
  
  • Marty of MartysMind and socialsage.com spent years at Sony working on their online games and he's got a lot of good ideas about social economies and fun game design.
  • Ken Caple of Achieve is also an avid gamer and liked the idea of the Empowerment game.
  • Mike suggested we check out Gaia Online.
  • Aaron Stewart described how he came up with a dynamic reusable story engine when younger before doing things like Wayback Machine and turning into a mighty enterprise developer.
• I shared a panel with Markus introduced by Kirk Eisele of CommutyBuildrs where we talked about a lot of ways to make sites social and viral
• I set up a twitter account for empowerthyself.com that will eventually allow us to keep people posted on site updates and things. Anyone feel like assembling a guide to the twittering medium?

Learning happened too.

• I made the most progress by sitting down face-to-face with Jacob as he helped me through the pitfalls of creating my first module which you can see at work already on empowerthyself.com, the icons module.
• I'm now developing the administrative interface for icons.module and this will serve as a stepping stone towards all the other module development we have to do.

Right now we're in a very interesting phase. I am getting as many collaborators and as much hands-on knowledge as I can to assist in the critical development planning for the empowerthyself.com project. Thanks to influxes spurred by Sean Kennedy's Army of Flying Monkeys and Agent, we now have talented folks like TDH and Nihi ready to work on the project. We now also have a huge contingent of professional Drupal experts who want to collaborate on some of our key module developments.

The onus is on me to get the plan hammered out and begin actually doing my job as a project manager so that our development is purposeful and effective. I relish this challenge and I will be getting my first module online and the development plan hammered out in short order.

To everyone who inspires and assists and supports Empowerment, I salute you!

Coming soon: The first empowerment.tv video podcast episode featuring an interview from Burning Man with Fireseed, the founder of Topians. We'll take an in-depth look at his Topians vision and explore how Empowerment can best realize our common goals.

Until next time, empower yourself.

NOTE: Actual podcast audio will be recorded later!

In a few hours, I will be on the road to Burning Man. I will gone for a week. I'll be back Monday, September 3rd. If anyone wants to find me at Burning Man, go to 3A's Terminal Village and Apokiliptika to ask around for me. Things will be quiet around here till I get back and development will return to its usual frenzied pace.

DOWNLOAD EMPOWERMENT.TV PODCAST EPISODE 1: DEV BLOG: MISIONS ACCOMPLISHED

2.9MB iTunes M4A Format

(Listen to my first crack at podcasting. There are things in the podcast that aren't in the news post. By the way, I created all the music for the show. You're listening to works in progress for the Empowerment Soundtrack and there's lots more to come.)

Tonight's global SITREP on my headspace and timing: It's 1:36 AM and I'm going to bed to heighten my mastery of timing, despite my insanely inspired headspace. I've been thinking heavily about chronicide and how life's too short to let those timesharing mind parasite memes hijack us into neglecting purpose.

I worked for 9 hours on EmpowerThyself.com after putting in 8 hours at work programming up a storm without even eating lunch, so focused was I on the code. I didn't even play more in the Bioshock demo, which I bittorrented on Zero Day last night. It was incredibly tempting, but the real world is the most exciting game of all when you're winning.

Missions Accomplished:

Messages have Target Audiences. Editing those Target Audiences shows cool help text with actual iconlinks to open new tabs with the relavent guidance information needed to create good content. The help text in the create page actually provides guidance and tips such as recommending using empathy rather than confrontation to target audiences.

You can define Audiences! Audiences are target groups with shared ideas.

I created a funny test message called "Atheism: Attack The Darkness!" and defined its audiences: atheists and internet humor fans.

Newsing. I began work on the the DrupalDev Newsing System Project with the help of Agent Pugsly, coder Tinkle Doom Hammer and our newest contributor, Pfhorrest, the creator of a very cool Marathon mod called Eternal. He had some very interesting ideas about a newsing system that emphasizes your friends to filter your news. We're making it possible to post news stories (you can post storylinks already, but we're going to do something much more sophisticated). If you post stories now, we'll do our best to migrate your content to the new system, so don't let waiting for the project's fruition stop you from posting news!

I made a nice comment voting up/down widget spaced to the left of comments you can see here.

Progress. I also got to know another new member, Cid Viscous, yet another NewsReal listener we are grateful to have with us thanks to the SKTFM NewsReal interview.

Future perfect. Lots more things accomplished, lots of work to be done on the unified What's New dashboard, the fully realized ideas/skills/tech/groups Profiler, the Newsing system, and the whole dev roadmap to give all our coders some concrete pieces to tackle.

At this pace, we'll be out of beta and opening the Spread Empowerment floodgates in no time.

We are developing a Newsing system for Empowerment users to post news stories collaboratively in Digg.com-like fashion.

The Newsing Medium

Newsing is a communications medium skill described in Empowerment's Mediapedia. This project aims to develop a system for newsers to post to Empowerment itself, as well as existing major newsing networks like Digg.

How to Participate

To participate in the development of the project, just join the group and address your posts to the group. All posts and comments in the group will be emailed to all subscribing members.

NewsReal News Gathering

Gathering news for radio hosts like SKTFM to use on shows like NewsReal is an immediate use for the newsing system.

There's a term SKTFM uses to describe his listeners who do research: The Army of Flying Monkeys. It has a nice ring to it.

 

If you haven't listened to my NewsReal Defcon Edition interview yet, I've posted 2 smaller clips to make it easier to hear what I had to say about EmpowerThyself.com with these handy MP3s:

Listen to the excerpt where I explain Empowerment project (6 minutes) or an excerpted version of the show (15 minutes) or if you have time download the full Newsreal episode (53 minutes).

This is the first time we've introduced EmpowerThyself.com in media so we're kind of excited about it. We also did a presentation at BarCamp San Diego 07 which should become available in video form soon.