Re: ProjectPM: Do you need me for anything?

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 2:19 PM, Scott Mintz <scott.w.mintz@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the reply. Good luck with the VF piece, hopefully it goes live soon.

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

They have to pass it by the legal team this morning, then they'll be putting it up assuming the legal team understands U.S. libel law (you'd be surprised). Should hear back from editor soon on that.

Regarding the network and its nature, my understanding of the specifics based on conversations I've had is that it can indeed be distributed in nature, and that this would be preferable. I'll try to compose something with more specifics, and I haven't already only because some of this was yet to be determined. As I alluded to the other evening, I've gotten a programmer who says he can do it, and I'll have further discussions with some others this week before making a final decision. Meanwhile, I've just now spoken to Sam Apple, who's an old friend of mine from my initial stint working media in NYC and who was profiled in the NYT a couple weeks back along with True/Slant. He's founded The Faster Times, his own new media collective, and says he'd be interested in learning more about our schematic and the other things we're doing. He's also running an excerpt from my next book. I'd be happy to deal with him, even allow him to use our schematic, as he can be trusted (True/Slant is now under the aegis of Forbes, so I'm not going to be furthering those discussions) and can be useful to us in a variety of ways - for instance, has programmers and other resources we could use.

At any rate, he's asked me to e-mail him again with a better description of the schematic, so I will go ahead and do so in such a way that the description can be used to clarify this for our participants and others.

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 9:57 AM, Clark Robinson <robinsonchicago@gmail.com> wrote:
Website vs. Distributed:

I am unable to discuss this other than ignorantly, but my view is that a completely distributed arrangement is preferable to a website (other than a non-integral informational one) and I am happy to have faith that such is possible.
I too have bugged Barrett to say more about the network relationships and functionally describe the programming, mainly in the context of the manifesto, because my reaction, Scott's reaction, and some statements of others on the blog signal that there may be some skepticism of the scheme in the absence of such information.
But, do not "show it all," since that could lead the larger (outside of we 3) discussion into quibbling and carping over the details, and I suspect a lot of it remains to be refined, and even discovered, in the actual programming process.
Perhaps I should hie myself to the local community college and sit with teenagers to learn some basics.

Unrelated:
Barrett, when I got up this morning I went to VF to see if your article was up, apparently not yet, although they had put up a shallow and derivative piece by Bill somebody which was basically top five quotations from Hastings' profile. A couple of days ago they were featuring a piece called "Hamptons Essentials," jesus.
I hope your book carries you beyond them.

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 11:51 PM, Scott Mintz <scott.w.mintz@gmail.com> wrote:

I want to apologize for not reading/responding to any of these emails sooner. I've had a difficult week.

One thing I've been meaning to ask about is the technology behind the network. A major disadvantage to hosting our own site is the associated cost. On the other hand, if we're going to be adding participants that don't already write for a "partnered" blog, then don't we need to have our own site? For example, if we're going to add people such as Catalina, etc., how is it possible to do so without our own site? Are these people going to have to sign-up as bloggers on other sites?

Along those lines, I would love to better understand how the network will operate. I've had discussions with Clark which made me realize I clearly do not understand the structure. I admit that my "behavior" feedback tool is unnecessary in light of the knowledge that information will not be passed along beyond a group of 5, for example, without acceptance from that group, whereby the group is acting as that mechanism. However, there are other things I would like clarity on to best allow me to give opinions. For example, I know two goals of projectpm is to provide "accurate" information, and to provide information to the masses, but which of these goals are going to come first? How many pushes does a posting need to have before it becomes public? Should this be based on the group population size? Does information only need to be "pushed" up or is pushing required for a move in any direction? Does it work such that if I make a post to the Barrett, Clark, and Scott's group, then if Barrett likes it, then he can accept it and it gets re-posted to all the groups Barrett is a part of and so on? Are group sizes unlimited, and if so, in theory, what prevents one group from becoming so dominant that they are the whole in which case feedback mechanisms such as the one I referred to may become more relevant? I think these and other questions are important to have answers to in order to best structure the network, as well as to proceed with the design.

Also, I think it's ideal to own our own site so that it can be best customized to our needs (this isn't to say that we don't start off with something else due to the associated costs but then grow into our own site). Also, this way we don't need to worry about dealing with an excessive amount of blogging sites (not saying this is definitely the case either, but I would prefer ProjectPM to have more control/ownership over what is produces). I think the created knowledge is a major selling point of ProjectPM and may require something more tangible. (My opinion on this can change at any moment as my knowledge of the structure improves.)

I'm sure one way that has already been discussed to lower the costs would be to not have dedicated servers but rather partner with a company. With regards to coders, I have an old friend who is big into programming. I don't know if his skills would perfectly meet our needs, but he always told me in the past that he knows people and since they're young guys the cost would most certainly be less than that of your average company. His website is here: http://www.mattinsler.com/. Also, he has a start-up company which may be flexible on price in order to add to their portfolio. http://lowereastsoftware.com/

Things bring me to another subject, compensation to website developers. Especially at the beginning costs for development will be very high versus base, so I think Kickstarter is a great vehicle to raise funds for these efforts. Whether or not we should separate the legal aspects from the development costs is a whole different debate. For example, I can see one angle where showing the project in progressive steps as an advantage. Also, as Barrett has pointed out before, due to the nature of KickStarter, it is wise to err on the conservative side when requesting funds, so separating the two causes may make more sense.

I do believe the costs to maintain a website i.e. a person to fix any problems we may incur such as downtime would be small relatively speaking since we can hire someone or a company that does it for multiple sites, and I expect it would be customary to include this as overhead costs which are paid for out of donations. If we can find a reliable volunteer than that's ideal, but I'm not holding my breath.

I apologize for the rant. I blame the medications.

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 4:33 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Howdy-

I've been discussing our options regarding the software element and wanted to keep you two up to date. Andrew Stein has told me that, contrary to my expectations, his software project is not going to do what we would need it to for our basic functions, and that he hasn't made much progress anyway. Our options, then, would seem to be either getting together a group of volunteer coders to make us something basic over the next couple of months, or having someone such as Joe Neal here (who will probably do our website for us) build the software himself in exchange for some deferred compensation. Let me know what you think; our conversation is below (and don't worry about his tone, he apologized later and noted he'd been drinking; I'm a drinking man myself so I don't really mind, and at any rate I'd prefer that sort of personality from a programmer than the sort I'm used to).

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 4:29 PM
Subject: Re: ProjectPM: Do you need me for anything?
To: Joe Neal <vlvtelvis@speakeasy.net>

Hi, Joe-

Finally have a chance to get back to you on those questions; sorry again for the delay.

The software on which both the media and legislative network was to be run was being written by a colleague of mine in XMPP as a sort of side project to something he was doing in his spare time. A few weeks ago he informed me that, in fact, his project won't actually support the simple capabilities I had asked for; as of now, the new plan entails getting a couple of guys who have already volunteered to write a basic version, as well as recruiting a few more coders as necessary. If you'd be interested in getting involved on that front, I'd be happy to provide a share of any funds we bring in - we're in the process of preparing grant applications now. Of course, you'd probably want to know more before committing yourself; feel free to give me a ring. As for your other questions:

1. What is ProjectPM at the software level? What language is it written in?
What database does it use?

As I noted above, XMPP was going to be the language, but now we're open to anything. I don't have the expertise to make any decisions in that regard but I'm going to be talking to a couple of people we've brought on this week about that.

2. What traffic load do you expect off the top?

The bloggers who have expressed interest in using our widget so far have a combined readership of several hundred thousand uniques a month. I will be doing additional recruiting this summer in line with the release of my next book in August, which will give me a chance to bring in a great number of other bloggers and other media professionals.

3. What plans have you made for promotion and SEO?

We don't plan on implementing any SEO as our participants already have large readerships. Promotion will be advanced by my own book tour this August as well as announcement by participating bloggers and a series of articles I'll be writing for Vanity Fair and my other outlets. I'll also be using such outlets as reddit to target the demo that would be particularly interested in our project, either as readers or participants in our non-blogging efforts.

4. Where are you going to host the thing? Are you going to try and run it on
a shared web host and hope they don't rape you for CPU use if you ever get
popular? I couldn't get an answer from you on this earlier and it concerned
me because it leads me up to question 5

The nature of the project is such that, aside from an informational website that is unlikely to get heavy traffic, the actual content will simply be hosted on the blogs of our participant bloggers.

5. Do you know what the fuck you are doing? In our prior email exchanges you
didn't seem to know the difference between a web host and a DNS host. That
concerned me greatly and alone almost made me write the whole thing off.

If you've never run a website before I can show you the ropes but if any money
ever comes out of this I want in. I'd also accept flat payment for services.
I don't have much of a resume. My work history consists of porn sites, mental
health support sites, and a couple failed startups, not much you can put on a
resume. I work for cheap.

I'm not well-informed on the specifics of servers and hosting, but we have people who are. I would indeed be interested in having you handle the website for us in exchange for a portion of any money we bring in, although it will be another week at least before I can make a final decision on that.

6. Who's on your tech / coding team so far and what have they put together?
If you want you can put me in touch with them and let us get up to speed and
we'll inform you of where I can fit in.

I guess this was answered above; originally, we just had one guy doing it, but he's proven not to be useful to us, so we now have to check into the viability of gathering a couple more volunteers to compose the basic software versus having someone such as yourself do it in exchange for some form of compensation.

Anyway, let me know if I haven't managed to answer your questions adequately, and do feel free to call if you'd like to discuss at greater length.

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 2:30 AM, Joe Neal <vlvtelvis@speakeasy.net> wrote:

I got the latest invite for the project PM Blogger thing but I'm really not
interested in writing.

I apologize for dropping the ball on the wiki thing but we were displaced for
a while by the flooding in Nashville and had to wait for phone service and then
DSL to get hooked back up again so we could get back online.

It was my understanding you had people working on authoring a web application
that would become ProjectPM. What you were talking about would require some
kind of specialized software. You could probably make Drupal do if you can't
get someone to code you a custom site from scratch without charging an arm and
a leg. What I was offering to do was help with was administration of the
machine hosting it because with a project on the scale of what you were
talking about I assumed you'd be needing dedicated hosting.

I'm pretty much a web swiss-army knife. I can do a lot of shit but if you
want it done really well there are better people to go to. I can run a LAMP
server no problem and secure it. I'm proficient in linux in general but prefer
Debian based distros. It's been a while but I can admin a BSD box too. I'm a
shitty web designers with aesthetic sensibilities right out of the early 90s
but I can do basic design. Unless you want the most spartan of logos you'd
best look to someone else for that.

Bottom line, I've got some questions for you:

1. What is ProjectPM at the software level? What language is it written in?
What database does it use?

2. What traffic load do you expect off the top?

3. What plans have you made for promotion and SEO?

4. Where are you going to host the thing? Are you going to try and run it on
a shared web host and hope they don't rape you for CPU use if you ever get
popular? I couldn't get an answer from you on this earlier and it concerned
me because it leads me up to question 5

5. Do you know what the fuck you are doing? In our prior email exchanges you
didn't seem to know the difference between a web host and a DNS host. That
concerned me greatly and alone almost made me write the whole thing off.

If you've never run a website before I can show you the ropes but if any money
ever comes out of this I want in. I'd also accept flat payment for services.
I don't have much of a resume. My work history consists of porn sites, mental
health support sites, and a couple failed startups, not much you can put on a
resume. I work for cheap.

6. Who's on your tech / coding team so far and what have they put together?
If you want you can put me in touch with them and let us get up to speed and
we'll inform you of where I can fit in.

I've been doing this stuff since the original .com boom of the late 90s and got
burned by pretty much every project I ever signed on with. If you're for real
I need more than a list of writers. I wanna see code. I read your
description of how the whole system is supposed to work. Where is it?

If you've got nothing, I used to do Drupal development. It's the same system
RedState used to use. You can make it work like scoop or do a bunch of other
things with it. I can use it as the backbone of a system to deliver something
that works according to your original description. It would take 2-3 months
because I've not done it in forever and would have to learn a lot of new stuff.
You might need to get someone else to tweak the design. I'd want payment and
/ or partial ownership. If I were to assume administrative duties over a web
server, you'd need to pay for the box. If I were to pay for it I'd need
compensation.

anyway,

can I help or should I fuck off?

later,

Joe

--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302