Ok, fellow peeps, tweeps, lurkers and whoever else out there on da Interwebz - April 3, 2008 is officially Good People Day!

I could not possibly compile a list of all the awesome people out there in my life and my new and quickly growing social media friends on Twitter and other networks, since it would crash Firefox from taking up terabytes of memory! Gary Vaynerchuk, the most awesome host of Wine Library TV, came up with the idea for Good People Day (see the video below calling us to action!). It’s all about spreading the love and positive karma. For me, this includes all my tweeps and fellow twitterati, all my fantastic social network friends, and many nameless people that hang out in the numerous IRC channels and lend help to those like me who often cry out for it when we can’t get something to work. Gary is truly a role model for this spirit of helping and generosity. He literally answers hundreds of emails and tweets a day to people he doesn’t even know who ask about wine. Just the other day I was asking him advice via a tweet about a certain 1997 Merryvale Profile and whether I should drink or cellar it. His direct message to me within minutes, “DRINK IT.” This is at 10:41pm his time on a Saturday night! How much love is that? And he doesn’t know me from Adam other than as a fellow twitterati (though you certainly don’t have to be a top twitterati to get a quick response from him!).

So I’m sending out much love and positive karma to all those who save my bacon and otherwise lend a helping hand, and to those who follow me on twitter, read my blog or have any interest in what I have to say. This goes to all my close friends, family and total strangers (whom I hope to meet someday at a tweetup or meet up or camp)! Try not to complain or be negative and extend the golden rule to the maximum to everyone you interact with, on line or off. I vote we make April 3 Good People Day every year!

PASS IT ON and keep showing the love!

“Ooh, sexy title,” is what you’re thinking, I know. Anyway, with my compulsive habit these days of installing WordPress plugins, I downloaded Social Bookmarks Reloaded. A great start, mind you, but lacking in a couple of areas. The great thing about open source is you don’t have to sit around griping about software not doing what you want. You can go in and fix it to make it do what you want! In this case, my complaints were really nit picks. I didn’t like the fact that the mouse over text (i.e., the alt text) for each bookmark was hard-coded and basically said the same thing for each site (e.g., “Add this to Digg” “Add this to D…e.l.i.c..i..o.u….s…”). I wanted the Digg bookmark to say, “Digg this,” for example. So I added an extra parameter to the xml file that described the bookmarking sites which allows you to put in your own alt text if you wish. Then I invoked the mighty Vi and made code changes to the plugin to incorporate the new parameter and dynamically create the new alt text for each image. Voila! I’ve got lots more changes I want to make to the plugin, such as adding this description interface to the plugin options interface, and a way to edit the bookmarking sites dynamically, among other things. Once I’m done I’ll re-release the plugin so others can take it and add even more functionality. Vive la Open Source!

I thought this post was very interesting, especially given the fact I told my dad he should think about using a blog for his university classes that he teaches. The thought was he could put his syllabi, curriculum, assignments, learning material, tips and much more in a well-suited environment. And he wouldn’t even need to learn HTML (to date he has created online content in MS Word and uploaded the file after saved as HTML; we know what that markup looks like)! It makes perfect sense to me.

I co-founded an online backup company a couple of years ago which targets schools throughout the country to back up their data. As I traveled around to all the big trade shows to see the latest technology tools available to teachers and the education marketplace, I left feeling much of it was the same old, rehashed stuff. In fact I was actually involved several years ago in funding and launching an e-learning company that had a different twist to address this void. Unfortunately our timing was really bad (though there were certainly other issues as well) and it closed its doors. I really think OpenCourseWare built around the WordPress core makes tons of sense. It’s extensible, scalable, and easy to use. I will be keeping an eye on their progress . . .