Spotstory has been a growth experience for me.  Sometimes I’m aware of this while it’s happening, while sometimes I realize, suddenly,  that I look at certain things differently.  This is a story about the latter.

So, last month I’m checking out the website of a new company from one of the industries in which I used to work.  I was simultaneously dumbfounded, depressed, and annoyed by what I saw.

I’m not going to bore you with details.  My intent isn’t to call out these folks in particular.  Plus, you’ve already seen this website replicated countless times: stock photos of impossibly earnest or happy, diverse, and well groomed people staring intently into computer screens.

Of course there’s the obligatory press-release in press-release-ese and the marketing copy that’s relevant to, I dunno, somebody.  You know, its full of proactive language that sounds positive, but in the end you’ve got no idea what they’re actually selling.

I’m looking at this and my immediate reaction is: “These people would be much better off with a blog.”

I was surprised by this! I said “Huh, I would not have said that half a year ago.”

Then, blogs struck me as somehow possibly useful, but also sort of superficial: window dressing for your site, in the same league as rectangles with rounded corners.

Today, I can’t image how a company can not have a blog.

Though our blog has its ups and downs, I love it!  It gives us a way to communicate what Spotstory is about, explain its features at length, and keep users appraised of new releases or upcoming features.  It gives users a way to easily talk back to us.

It also allows us to give back to the communities we’re a part of by helping to promote events, and as a vehicle for contributing technical information and source code.

It makes it very easy to talk with people without having to rely on industry press or a sales force.  It’s lightweight and agile. 

Plus, All of this information on the blog attracts search engine traffic.  A lot of that traffic then follows through to our main site, that is, our product!

This is how we’ve used  blogging.  In a lot of ways, we’re a very small fish dealing with a very large audience.  Imagine what a company in a niche market serving a well defined customer base could do.

I’m not saying a blog-only website is right for everyone.  Everything I’m talking about could probably done with a traditional web site.  In fact, I’m sure we’ll have one of those too some day, though I hope we manage to avoid the bad stock photos.

So, my friends out there in the old world, think about blogging!  Sure, issue your press release, but also write an accompanying blog entry in plain (BS-free) language that your customers can understand.  Write technical white papers, but also have an ongoing open dialog about how your product can be used.  Have a bug tracking system, knowledge base, and a product roadmap, but have a frank and honest conversation with your users about the strengths, weaknesses, and direction of your product on a daily basis.

Your customers will thank you, you’ll learn a lot, and you’ll have a lot of fun.

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Update

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THE Mike Walsh did a nice writeup of Aron’s recent appearance at the Thursday Meeting at Berkman.  Thanks again to Mike for extending the invitation.

Time and place for WebInno 12 have been announced: Tuesday May 22nd 2007 at 6:30pm at the Royal Sonesta in Cambridge, MA.

They’re still looking for folks to give product demos at the event.  If you’re a Boston area web or wireless company, it’s a great venue to show your stuff.  Details of all sorts can be found here.

It seems to be an accepted fact that social media sites are powered by an inexactly quantified Creative Minority.  Such people are the lifeblood of communities like Spotstory and we spend a lot of time trying to understand what really motivates such folks.

In that light, I found this post by Dave Winer about his recent attempt to update Wikipedia interesting:

The first [article I edited] was about the MacArthur Maze. It had already been updated to include the outage, I just fixed some typos, and rearranged the words so they flowed better. Then I decided to link to my page of links about the news, expecting that would be reverted in a few days at most as the full story was documented, but it was reverted within minutes, as were all my other edits.

I’ve had the same thing happen to me, not on Wikipedia (or Spotstory!), but on another site where text is collaboratively created.  In my edit, I’d actually only changed a little bit of white space!

In both Dave’s case and my own, the reversion was executed very quickly, without any kind of discussion, and only ”undid change” as commentary.  I suspect, in both situations, the revision was made by a full-time citizen of the community, and not a more casual contributor.

It seems to me the motivation in these cases is owning turf–I’m open to alternative explanations–and in the end that’s pretty anti-social (and not very creative).

I’m sure most people are motivated to contribute by more than one impulse, but I’d still be interested to understand the relative occurrence of each.

How many folks primarily contribute so they’ll have some turf to defend?  Or because they’ve got a passion for the subject matter?  How many because they enjoy being part of a community or feel it’s some kind of social duty? Are many motivated by a sense of accomplishment?  For what portion is it just ego?

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

The other day when I wrote about the upcoming dedication of the Waverley Trail, I originally spelled “Waverley” as “Waverly.”  Not long after, in the comments, Brian Del Vecchio pointed out that he thought the spelling was actually “Waverley.”

At first, I was a little embarrassed because I was pretty sure that I had always spelled it “Waverly,” what I’ll call “the short spelling.”

So, I checked online and found that Google Maps thinks the official spelling is “Waverley,” what I’ll call “the long spelling.”  I checked with the MBTA, and the 73 bus is called the “Waverley Square - Harvard Square.”

Oh well.  I decided I had lost a brain cell somewhere and just went back and changed the post to use the long spelling.

But still!

Having grown up in Waverley Square, I found it hard to believe that I had been spelling it incorrectly all my life.  Before I went back and updated the post, I was going to make an argument that people in Waverley Square actually do spell it “Waverly!”

I did find a few people listing their address as “Waverly.”  It actually has its own ZIP code: 02479.  I went through a brief phase in my teens where I would list my return address as “Waverly, MA 02179.”  (It was changed to 02479 sometime in the last ten years or so.)

I also discovered a few local businesses that styled themselves with the short spelling.

Ultimately,  I felt these points didn’t add up to much of an argument, and I relented.

Since I was in the Waverley area today, I asked my mom–my folks still live in the area–how she spells it.  She responded with the short spelling.  So, at least I know why I spell it the way I do.

On the way home, I was pretty sure the Waverley post office used to be adorned with a simple sign that said “Waverly Post Office 02179.”  So I stopped by, only to find that the simple metal sign had been covered by a lit plastic sign featuring the US Postal Service logo and nothing more.

Then I spotted the window! That photo at the top of this post, ladies and gentlemen, the one with the short spelling, is a photo of the window of the United States Post Office in Waverly Square.  And if it’s good enough for the Post Office, then it’s good enough for me!

Now, I should probably try to draw some observation here, like: “this is how place names change over time,” or “now that these names are in databases instead of on paper and in people’s memories, place names might stop evolving,” or “maybe marketing interests will drive the naming of neighborhoods instead of the people in the area.”

No, that would take a long time, and this post has already gotten out of hand.

Instead, I’m just going to give reign to my wicked provincial nature, and heap scorn on all you people who aren’t from here trying to tell me how to spell things! :)

Aron pointed me to Josh Kenzer’s interview last month with Twitter Developer Alex Payne.  The newsworthy bit is that Alex states that Rails applications don’t scale well:

Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues - issues that any growing site eventually contends with - far sooner than I think we would on another framework.

We’ve actually been told this a lot by Rails folks.  Hopefully, someday the demand for Spotstory will be so great that we’ll have some first hand knowledge on the matter!

Having said that, there are already a couple of areas where we’ve already bumped into issues while using Rails.

Issue 1: Fixtures break down

A single set of fixture data just breaks down after you’ve created a certain number of tests.  I’ve talked about this before and it’s what caused us to create Isolated Fixtures.  So, we innovated our way around that.

Issue 2: The trap of CRUD-is-King

This is an issue we’ve encountered in the past couple of months, and a lot of what we’re doing now is geared towards ameliorating this condition.  But first I should probably explain what I’m talking about!

Rails lets you get a lot done quickly in the sense that you create a model, lots of code gets created generated, and you start seeing features work almost immediately.  Awesome!

Now, everyone warns you that you’ll throw away a lot of this generated code, and you do.  You refactor something here, change the presentation of something there, and you think you’re pretty much done.

But you’re not.  Because what you’ve done (at least in our case)  is expose features in a way that makes sense in terms of pure CRUD, but it has little to do with how regular people think about doing what they want to do.

I think what I’m trying to say is this: since so much of the application is automatically derived from the data model, the interface you end up exposing is tied to closely to the data model.

Maybe if we were more skilled designers we wouldn’t have gotten ourselves into this situation.  Perhaps we needed a better design methodology.

Also, I concede that Rails doesn’t force you to do this, or keep you from fixing the problem.  This is not the end of the world.  Very likely, this is also a problem in other frameworks.

But Rails’ CRUD-is-king mindset does do a lot to steer you down this path.  Again, I’m not saying this is a reason to not use Rails, just pointing out our own experience.

In closing

In closing, we’re happy with Rails and Ruby.  But we also understand that they’re tools, and all tools have their limitations.

I hope we’re not excommunicated from the Ruby on Rails community for this! :)

Google Maps Mania mentioned us today.

I’ll be attending the Waverley Trail dedication ceremony this Friday, April 27, 2007.  The event takes place at 3:30 PM, rain or shine, at Beaver Brook Reservation, 650 Trapelo Road, Belmont.

The Waverly Trail “celebrate[s] the remarkable history of the Oaks and the Waverley neighborhood.”  Beaver Brook Reservation, known colloquially as “Waverley Oaks” once housed enormous oak trees, some reportedly over 1000 years old.

This is where I grew up.  I used to catch crayfish in the brook here.  I’m really excited to learn more about the trail.

On a related note, WalkBoston will be sponsoring a one-hour guided tour of the trail on Saturday, April 28, 2007 at 10:30 PM.  It’s free, but reservations are required.  See here or call 617-367-9255 for details.

Howdy, Spotstorians!  We did a major system update on April 24, 2007 around 11:45 ET.  We hope you enjoy.  This release contains:

• KML support See your Spots in Google Maps and Google Earth!
• Rails 1.2.3 We’ve updated to the latest and greatest Rails!
• Bug fixes Always some bug fixes for you!

KML

You can now view your Spots using either Google Earth or Google Maps.  There are a couple of ways to do this.

Google Maps

Currently, the only way to see a Spot is to provide a URL in the search box.  When Google has crawled the site (the next day or so), you’ll be able to find your Spot in the Google search results.

To see your Spot right now, go to a Spot, take its URL, copy it into the Google Maps search box, and append the suffix “kml” onto it like so:

  http://www.spotstory.com/spots/show/120.kml

To see what this looks like, just click here.

As I mentioned, Google hasn’t sucked our KML into their index yet, but when they do, you should start seeing your Spots appear in Google Maps under the “See user-created content” link at the bottom of the left-hand side of the page.

We’ll let you know when this happens.

Google Earth

To see your spots on Google Earth, you can go to the Spot, and click on the “KML” link under the map.  If you have Google Earth installed, it should load automatically.  (If you don’t have Google Earth installed you can can download it from here.)

You can also right-click to save the content to disk, and load it into Google Earth from there.

Rails 1.2.3

This isn’t a change you’ll notice, but we get a lot of traffic from the Ruby on Rails community, so we thought it made sense to mention that our production environment is now using Rails 1.2.3.  For details, you can see Aron’s great post about his Rails 1.2.3 upgrade travails.

Thank You!

That’s all for this update.  Please let us know if you find any problems.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the site either with content, comments, or attention!