Daily Beta

Twitter converts URLs into TinyURLs. Why? My URLs have the titles in them:

http://thinknola.com/post/a-phone-call-from-the-road-home-with-angelo-silvestri/

When Twitter TinyURLs them, then I loose the title. I do not get to use the space that Twitter harvests with the TinyURL. I need to create a TinyURL of my own.

I’m using a Chip In control to gather some money to incorporate Think New Orleans. It quickly raised $250.00. Then it scrolled off the page and people cannot see it. I’m impressed with how quickly it gathered as much as it gathered, but I am not suprised. This is a great way to raise money.

Last night at the Bayou Boogaloo meeting, I showed the control to the Bayou Boogalooers, the Mid City and Faubourg St John folks. We talked about how to use Chip In to raise funds for the Bayou Boogaloo.

At first, upon seeing it, we talked about raising a large sum. Keep the Bayou Boogaloo free. We can’t do it without your support.

Then I made the point that creating a Chip In control is free. You can create as many as you like. The idea switched to having different neighborhoods create a control to sponsor a band.

From there, I noted that rather than try to get the neighborhood to raise the money within the neighborhood, why not set a larger goal, and challenge the neighborhood to raise the money by asking anyone. They take on the task of nudging their friends in Lakeview and Gentilly, or nudging their Jazz Fest guests.

My final thought is this: Send out a $600.00, $1,200 or $2,400 challenge. Help raise money for the Mid City Bayou Boogaloo. How much do you think you can cajole out of the people you love to support the festival you love in the city you love?

When a group takes on the challenge, you create a Chip In control for them on in a post on The Bayou Boogaloo website. You choose their name and a band they will fund. They go to work nudging and cajoling.

On a separate post, you create a grid of the controls, and you can see who’s winning their races.

Update: One of my concerns is how do I get this started. Do I have to assign a band to each neighborhood first? I was pretty sure I had to, because I’d need to create the Chip In control, and I’d want to have the band name be the title, and the neighborhood or organization doing the cajoling would be described in the copy that you enter for the information part of the widget.

A quick peek at Chip In, and it turns out that you can adjust almost every aspect of the widget. You can change the title and the information copy.

Perfect! Now I can get this project rolling by creating the Chip In controls, laying them out in the grid, and then start cajoling myself, to find people that will take a band and run with it.

You can also change the deadline and the PayPal account. Cool. I can give myself some more time to raise funds to incorporate Think New Orleans.

From Ryan Vis at the Daily Beta Wiki:

I love the idea of a site dedicated to the review of beta software, especially one that takes the tack of realistic evaluation of that software. With the Web 2.0 hype machine at Warp 11, the concept of the Daily Beta is certainly alive and kicking. So, I believe the first step is to define what, exactly, the Daily Beta should strive to accomplish. For you corporate types, we need to pinpoint our synergies in order to maximize our potential. Let’s distill our energies and draw laser focus on the newest and brightest around the Web.

Ryan asks some further questions. Including one about the theme. What makes Daily Beta different from anyo other technology web site? I’ll join Ryan in the comments section.

Here is a breezethrough of Google Analytics and the Invitation. It doesn’t work to well, since Google Analytics is a complicated applications with lots of charts that may or may not mean something. Difficult to convey in a Screencast, the reading of the tea leaves.

• Google Analytics Invitation Walk Through.

This is an goofy breezethrough. It turns out that I’m unable to record the audio played by the operating system when I use my USB mike. Thus, in the course of this breezethrough, you are unable to hear the audio playback.

• Bonkers Odeo Breezethrough.

Odeo is quite amazing, though.