I know that metereologically speaking, the current season is still Summer, but with three kids, for us, Summer effectively ends when the kids return to school. The first day back to school was last Tuesday. Our Summer ended in a whirlwind of activity. You wouldn’t know it looking at the blog postings here. It seems that for me at least, blog activity is inversely proportional to the amount of non-blog activity in my life. I wonder if this holds true for others in the blogosphere?

I finished my master’s report and have been awarded a Master of Science in Engineering (yipee!). The last few weeks of writing were an ordeal – many late nights, lots of coffee, lots of anxiety. I had planned to wrap up my paper early and head out for our annual family vacation to Corpus Christi on the Texas coast. Alas, I was not quite done when our departure day arrived (that last 10% is a bear) – and so I took my laptop (and my anxiety) with me and worked on my paper a few hours a day. It’s done now and I’m quite happy with the way it turned out. I’m going to do a little reformatting and give it another round of editing before posting it here.

Despite my paper ordeal, we managed to have an excellent vacation, I played some golf, took the boys fishing and worked on teaching our daughter to swim. She turned 3 at the coast, and we celebrated with a poolside birthday party. We made tie-die shirts, did the limbo and ate birthday cake and ice cream. As they say, “fun was had by all.”

No sooner had we returned from the coast than we dispatched our oldest son to two weeks of camp in the rolling green Texas hill country. He spent 16 hours a day outdoors doing things they do at camp: swimming, hiking, shooting, eating, singing and playing. He learned a new game, gaga, and made some new friends. When I first saw him, two Saturdays later, I was struck by how relaxed and confident he seemed. I was amazed how much my little boy had grown up in two short weeks. Instead of a homesick boy, here was this healthy, happy kid – glad to see me – but also a little sad to see his camp experience come to an end.

School started the Tuesday after we picked him up from camp – and now we are back to our usual school-year routine. The days at camp proved to be good training for waking early, and so getting to school by 7:30am was not as painful this year as in years past. I too am picking up a routine, one that, I hope, includes more frequent blog postings.

BusinessWeek covers the recent equity investment by Flextronics in frog.

Somewhere in my surfing today, I ran across a link to Scott Rosenburg’s post titled “Blogs, bosses and bucks.” This caught my eye, because in my thesis research, I’ve been thinking about the role money and power structures have on collaboration amongst virtual teams.

In my research, I’ve been studying successful “open” collaborative communities like the Apache Software Foundation and Wikipedia, looking for “new” practices that could be applied to help virtual teams be more successful in a corporate setting. But what I’ve found is that the practices used by these organizations have, for the most part, already been widely documented in business and academic literature. These include things like have a well-defined purpose, clearly defined roles and responsiblities, recognition of achievement, etc.

It is not that these groups are doing anything drastically different, yet it does appear to be the case that good management practices seem to occur more naturally in these contexts. Why? Ultimately, I think it ties back to two key things:

1. Volunteer organizations are easier to leave. Volunteers who lose interest in the project will simply move on to something else
2. Criticism and alternate ideas are freely shared, because no one is afraid of losing their jobs in retaliation

I’m sure there is more to than this, but these two factors play together as well to promote strong leadership. In these organizations, leaders emerge not because the wield the power to over someone else’s paycheck, but rather based on their ability to build consensus and the value their own contributions to the project. When leadership fails in an open organization, it is obvious if not immediate. Failing projects are identified by recurring flame wars and by an inability to keep a steady, stable group of contributors involved in the project.

My point is not that leaders in volunteer organizations are better than their corporate counterparts, but rather that the role of money can mask poor leadership in an organization. Is everyone involved because they want to be? Or are they just drawing paychecks until they can find a better position somewhere else? Is the lack of debate a sign of silent agreement or fear of retailiation?

To tie this back to Scott’s article – I agree that in many organizations, the fear of being fired is going to keep people from blogging. But I would also argue that creating an environment that punishes criticism and curbs open debate can also put a company at a distinct disadvantage.

I agree with Tim Bray’s statement that companies who don’t adopt blogging will be playing “catch-up” – not because blogging itself is inherently advantageous (though it may be), but because it is an outward symptom of a company that internally values open sharing of ideas and criticism.

Sorry for the lack of traffic here – it’s been a very busy month for me. At work, we’ve had several projects wrapping up and new ones kicking off. Still we found time to hold a 2-day technology summit in Austin. We brought everyone in my group together to talk strategy, discuss process, share best practices, and repeatedly hurl 14lb. balls at formations of wooden pins. ;-)

On the personal side of things, I’ve got less than 4 weeks to go to finish my thesis(!), so I’ve been spending any spare time on the weekends working on it. Finishing that paper is the most important thing I’ll do all year.

This weekend, I finally found time to spend on the blog. After making sure all my old links would still work, I removed the final remnants of MoveableType from the server. I’ve started on a new look and feel template, but won’t finish tonight. Maybe check back next month?

I had planned to spend a few hours this weekend converting this blog from MoveableType (the software I was previously using to write this blog) to Wordpress (the software I am using now) and customizing my blog a bit in the process.

As it happened, I ended up having a better weekend that I had planned. The weather was terrific, and I spent most of my time outdoors with family and friends, including the better part of Sunday floating in the cool, clear waters of the Blanco river.

So I didn’t end up with much time for blogging this weekend, but I’m not complaining. Nevertheless, I’ve got Wordpress installed and my MT data converted, all in a little less than 30 minutes since I started. Very nice. Now that I’ve got it running, I’m finding there is a lot to like in Wordpress. I’m looking forward to hierarchical categorization, link management, and comment moderation in particular. I’ll being squeezing an hour here and there this week to finalize the conversion and customize the look and feel.

Warning: MoveableType techno-rant ahead…

Lately, every time I save a new post I get an “Internal Server Error” message from MoveableType. The error in my server log reads: “Premature end of script headers: /var/www/html/mt/mt.cgi”. After a lot of Googling I found a mention somewhere (can’t seem to find it right now) that indicated SmartyPants might be the culprit.

SmartyPants is a MT plug-in I use, which converts straight-and-boring quotes (") to typographically-correct curly, or smart, quotes “like so.” I removed SmartyPants, grudgingly, as I like to be typographically correct, and the problem disappeared, for a while. Now it is back.

Unfortunately, because I had set “Markdown + SmartyPants” as my default text format, when I re-rendered my site, all my postings reverted to the “None” formatting option. Blech. Worse – all my RSS feeds were updated, with raw, unprocessed [Markdown] code in them. My apologies to everyone who may have seen a “flowdelic” update in their RSS readers, only to find a bunch of old posts, but stripped of formatting.

So last weekend I planned to take a crack at learning the MT template language and finally customizing my templates. But instead, I spent my time tracking down Internal Server Errors. Sorry kids.

All is not lost however, I think I have found my solution – WordPress. WordPress is open-source blogging software that has gotten a lot of recognition of late, and it has typographical-correctness built in! The fact that it is written in PHP is appealing too, as I am much more comfortable with PHP than Perl.

So rather than investing in wrestling with/learning MT when it looks like many are leaving in the wake of the new MT 3.0 licensing brouhaha, I’ll be trying my hand at WordPress this weekend. Wish me luck!

The cover of this week’s Newsweek magazine sports a picture of a frog-designed phone of the future. The article is a fun piece about the convergence of phones and computers, and where it all might go. More about the “petfrog” concept is here. No you can’t buy it – but we can dream can’t we?

As part of my thesis research, I have been reading a stack of books, including Linked, Six Degrees, Design For Community and The Future of Ideas. At the same time I’ve been exploring and studying various online communities, trying to determine what makes them tick.

Is there a common characteristic of successful communities? So far, I’ve been nursing along the notion that “openness” is a common feature (among others) of the groups and communities that I’ve been studying.

By “open”, in this context, I don’t mean source code or software licensing, but participation. An open community is one where anyone is invited to join, provided one supports the goals of the group and adheres to the established rules of conduct. To put it another way, the barrier of entry to join an open community is very, very low.

So, last night I’m reading chapter eight of Linked (a terrific book by the way), wherein a number of connections are made between the mathematical properties of man-made networks and naturally occurring phenomenon.

Up to this point, the network models presented overwhelming favor the earliest entrants into a new industry (“the oldest nodes win” in network-speak). By way of explaining the success of Google, a late-entrant into the search-engine market, Barabási injects the notion of “fitness” into his model, to measure the relative competitive quality of each node. Simple put, the superiority of Google’s technology, its fitness, gives it a competitive edge that outweighs the first-mover advantage then enjoyed by the previously-established players.

All of this takes a decidely unexpected turn, however, when Barabási draws a parallel between the quantum theory that predicts Bose-Einstein condensation – and the market dominance of Microsoft. In essence, just as a certain rare set of conditions in a network of sub-atomic particles can create a highly-condensed new form of matter, a similar set of circumstances can give rise to a monoply in an economic network. Barabási describes it as the “winner takes all” scenario.

But what factors led to the dominance of Microsoft, and more specifically Windows? When it debuted, Windows was neither the first-mover nor the fittest competitor in the graphical operating system market. That spot was held by Apple and the Macintosh. So what was it about Windows that enabled Microsoft to replace Apple as the market leader?

I propose that “openness” had something to do with it. Specifically openness with regard to hardware manufacturers. While no one but Apple was allowed to make hardware that ran the Macintosh operating system, any kid in a dorm room was able to make computers to run Microsoft’s OS.

I know that the idea that Microsoft benefitted (greatly) by becoming the de-facto standard operating system during the PC boom in the early 80’s is not a revelation. What I have not seen, yet, though is this idea captured in the context of network theory. I am neither a physicist nor a mathematician but it occurs to me that in the same way “fitness” was added to the model to explain Google’s success, a measure of “openness” could be injected to describe Microsoft’s success.

In the language of network science, openness would be a measure of the “cost” required to link to a node. In the case of hardware manufacturers, “linking” to either Apple or Microsoft is equivalent to creating products that are compatible with the Macintosh or Windows operating system. Viewed from this perspective, the cost to “link” to Apple was very, very high (approaching infinity), while the cost of “linking” to Microsoft was very, very low. As a result, despite being a late entrant to the market, and being an inferior product (at least at that time), Windows nevertheless quickly became the dominating force in the industry.

Looking beyond the operating system market, what other examples exist where the “openness” of a network gives it a distinct competitive advantage? A few examples jump to mind. Captialism vs. Communism. Democracy vs. Monarchy. The Web vs. AOL/CompuServe.

From a software developer standpoint, it also explains the advantage “simple” standards have over more complex, yet full-featured standards. For example XML-RPC vs. SOAP. The complexity increases the “cost” associated with supporting the standard, and hence the barrier to entry is higher for one rather than the other. It also shows how that barrier can be lowered via better development tools and supporting standards like WSDL and UDDI.

It is also interesting to consider that the biggest threat to Microsoft’s dominance is Linux, an operating system that is arguably infrerior (from a average user’s perspective) yet is much more open.

This model seems so simple and perhaps even obvious, that I expect I may not be the first person to happen upon it. But so far I have not run across this idea in my research.

So what do you think? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Is this an already well-worn path in the study of network systems? Or is this, in fact, a novel observation?

I am currently working on my thesis for a Master’s degree in Engineering Management. The topic I am studying and writing about deals with online collaborative environments and communities. Specifically, I’m compiling case studies of various successful online collaborations, looking for the qualities that are common among them. My hope is that I will be able to identify some fundamental characteristics necessary to foster effective collaboration across geographical and cultural boundaries.

The groups/communities I am currently investigating are the Apache Software Foundation, Wikipedia and {fray}.

I’ll be posting more on this topic in the near future.

A fun little distraction amid a very busy week…

Scripting News: “At some point in the next few months, there will be an open source release of the Frontier kernel.”

Congratulations to Dave Winer on reaching a new milestone in the history of Frontier. Another loop closes as a new door opens.

The roots of blogging today can be traced back, in part at least, to the release of Aretha in May 1995. At that time, Frontier was locked away, unused, unprofitable and largely unappreciated. It could have ended there. But Dave made the software free (as in beer) and so started a chain of events that eventually lead to Clay Basket, Manila, Radio, XML-RPC and RSS. It also helped launch the career of Brent Simmons, the author of NetNewsWire.

Of course, that is not the whole story of blogging, but Frontier and Aretha are clearly high up in the Blog family tree. I’m glad to see Dave and Userland taking it a step further and I look forward to seeing where this journey takes us. Thank you and good luck. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

The cover story of this week’s Business Week is titled “The Power of Design”. It focuses on the process and practices of design firm IDEO, a major competitor of frog.

For me, it’s an interesting look into the way a competitor does things. I think this article is good for IDEO, obviously, but also good for design in general, by exposing a broader audience to some of the current design best practices (contextual inquiry, rapid prototyping, usability testing), and the real business benefits to be gained from them.

The problem is, the article portrays IDEO as if it is the only company using these practices, which is far from the truth. frog, for example, uses many of the same practices–and some others–and we are not alone. IDEO is portrayed as the 800lb. gorilla in the design industry, while its competitors (including frog) are described as if we really aren’t much competition at all.

This paints a misleading picture of the competitive landscape (IDEO is only slightly bigger than frog, and we regularly compete and win against them), though I’ll concede IDEO is currently winning the PR battle. It stings now, sure, but ultimately this will be good for frog and our clients. Nothing like some strong competition for the “world’s greatest design firm” title to sharpen our focus and create opportunities to innovate internally, improve our processes, practices, and (ahem) our PR.

Headline from the Austin-American Statesman, my local newspaper: “Rumsfeld doing ‘superb job,’ Bush says” (registration required). Apparently, Bush gave Rumsfeld a public back-patting yesterday. Atta-boy Rummy.

The Senate also approved a resolution condemning the torture of Iraqi prisoners, and apologizing to them and their families. That’s a good start, but condemnations and apologies ring hollow if they are not followed by action.

This is a great opportunity to teach the Iraqi people a core tenet of democracy–that leaders are held accountable to the will of the people. It is precisely this accountability that separates our leaders from tyrants.

Speaking of accountability, consider this statement from White House spokesman, Scott McClellan:

"The president's reaction was one of deep disgust and disbelief that anyone who wears our uniform would engage in such shameful and appalling acts."

Are you kidding me? The president is laying all the blame for this at the feet of the prison guards? What happened to “the buck stops here?”

When Saddam was in power, we didn’t blame his soldiers for the torture conducted in his prisons–we blamed him. And rightly so. Then, we toppled him from power because of it (that and some as-yet-undiscovered WMDs). Following the same logic, what right does Bush now have to remain in power?

This is no time to be shifting blame, now is the time to show the Iraqi people (and the world) the power of democracy in action.

My wife and I wrapped up another busy weekend last night with what has become our Sunday night ritual – take-out Chinese and a movie. We started this habit when we were newlyweds (we celebrate our 9th anniversary this week), but back then we were watching the X-Files with our Mongolian Beef and Lemon Chicken. These days, NetFlix has replaced the X-Files. Last night’s movie: Big Fish. My fortune cookie read: “You are imaginative in using your skills.” Ha!

Mother’s Day is a little hard for me – my Mom passed away two years ago this February. So when this day comes around, it reminds that I can no longer call her up and make her laugh, send her flowers, whatever, something… anything. And it makes me think about the past Mother’s Days I “wasted” – by missing them entirely or just leaving a message on her answering machine. I wish I could call her now, but I can’t.

So call your Mom, if you can. Tell her you love her. Make her laugh.

Still, I am lucky to have some wonderful women in my life, that are mothers or like mothers to me. So to Colleen, my wife; my step-mom Pat; my Grandma-Kaye; and my mother-in-law Sharon – today is your day – enjoy it. I love you all very much.

Sometime yesterday or early this morning, flowdelic was added to the Google index. It’s official – I’m now “in the book” as it were. Yeah.

As I expected, my site is in the top spot (easy to do with an invented word I guess), but I also found some sites that that pointed here that I didn’t see previously. Thanks and thanks.

It’s great to see those other links – but I wonder, why did I have to wait on Google to find them? Having been a reader of blogs for some time (okay a really, really long time), but not an author, I had thought that trackback links were more automated than they appear to be. I found the very helpful How TrackBack Works – but it really just confirmed what I’d recently discovered – trackback is a very manual, error-prone process. (BTW – I’m also using MoveableType)

That’s not what I expected. My expectation was that if I linked to another blog’s post in my blog entry, that link would be extracted when I posted the entry, and a trackback “ping” would be sent to the referenced article automatically. I understand that trackback URLs are different than permalinks – but shouldn’t the remote blog system be able to map permalinks to postings?

Why do I, the user, need to go track down a special URL? Is this how all blogging systems work – or is this something specific to MoveableType?

Before I got the hang of this I was entering permalinks into the “URLs to ping” box in my editing interface. (Why should I need to type these in at all?) MT gladly accepted these and dutifully “pinged” the incorrect URLs I had given it without a hiccup. I would have expected to see some kind of error message if the ping wasn’t accepted. At least then I would have know I was “doing it wrong” and could have learned faster how to do it right.

I see trackback as a crucial feature of the blogsphere. It enables readers to follow a conversation from blog to blog. Wouldn’t it be cool if RSS readers could organize posts by thread as well as by blog? Without that I feel like I’m missing part of the conversation (and I probably am). Why should the burden fall on users to discover and follow cross-blog threads? If any RSS readers do threading, I’d like to know, I just haven’t seen it yet.

It seems obvious to me that trackback is a useful feature of blogging – but to be really useful, it has got to be reliable. And if the reliability is based on trusting blog authors everywhere to track down and correctly use trackback URLs, well we’re going to have to continue to rely on Google to piece together strands of conversations for us for the foreseeable future.

UPDATE: I found “A Beginner’s Guide to Trackback” on the MoveableType site. There, I found that there is an auto-discovery feature that works how I would expect it to work. Nice. But – if that’s how it works, why didn’t I get trackback pings from all the sites that linked to my posts? It still seems that trackback reliability leaves something to be desired.

Also, I wish I could use the bookmarklets too, but they don’t work in Safari. (My laptop at work is Windows XP, but at home I have a G4 PowerBook with Mac OS X.)

Today I had the honor of being Scobleized. Given my measly two posts and the plain vanilla look of this blog, Robert has been most generous to point his readers in my direction. Thank you. I’ve just joined this party, and I feel welcome already.

First, I should apologize for the lack of personal information available on this site. I will fix that. I’m glad Robert was able to dig up a press release to introduce me – but it’s a shame that it is more than 6 years old.

So who is Mason Hale?

I am Chief Technologist at frog design, a highly-regarded design firm that has been consistently churning out great products and customer experiences for some 34 years now. I founded and manage frog’s digital technology consulting practice. We design, prototype and build websites and software for clients including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, General Electric, and T-Mobile. We specialize in creating rich, intuitive user interfaces using technologies such as Flash, Dynamic HTML, ASP.NET/C#, and Java.

However, this site is my personal site, and the views expressed here are my own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer. In addition, because the work we do is highly-confidential – I am generally not at liberty to to discuss the projects or clients I might be working with at any given time. So don’t expect this to be the “inside frog” blog.

That said, I am very lucky to work with some really smart, creative people on challenging, thought-provoking projects. That is bound to influence my thinking, and by extension this blog.

I am a husband and father of three – two boys, one girl. I live in Austin, Texas – and love it here. My undergraduate degree is in film production (radio-television-film) from the University of Texas at Austin, where I was a classmate of Robert Rodriguez and Matthew McConaughey. I went to high school in Fort Worth. Before that I moved around a bit, with stops in Breckenridge, Colorado; Casper, Wyoming; and Houston.

Some of you may remember me from my early involvement with Userland Frontier – the predecessor of today’s Manila and Radio Userland products. With Dave Winer, I spearheaded the development of the Frontier CGI Framework – a popular toolkit (at the time) for creating web-based applications on Mac OS web servers. I learned an amazing amount during that period of my life, and I’m very grateful to Dave and the rest of the early-Frontier community for that.

Today, I am in the final throes of completing my master’s degree in engineering management. I’ve completed all the coursework and am working on my thesis now. You can be sure I’ll be floating some of my ideas here.

That’s a brief, but more current and well-rounded introduction. I look forward to connecting with old friends and making new ones. Sorry I didn’t get here sooner.

I’ve been reading with great interest recent posts by Robert Scoble and Tim Bray about blogging in a corporate context.

As Scoble and others have shown, blogs are a powerful way to quickly react to negative publicity, to establish real credibility, and build lasting bonds with customers and the community. For all the millions upon millions of dollars that companies have poured into customer relationship management (CRM) systems, it is surprising more haven’t encouraged their employees to blog. Companies seem to willing to talk the one-to-one talk, but when it comes to empowering, and trusting, their employees to connect directly to customers on a mass scale, the commitment usually whithers away.

Isn’t it ironic that companies will spend big bucks to build “relationships” by compiling and cross-indexing information about their customers, without realizing that a relationship, by definition, is inheritently reciprocal? Does having a website greet me by name make me feel like I have a closer relationship with that company? No it doesn’t—in fact it kinda spooks me out. Why? Because it lays bare the fact that my “relationship” with said company is out of balance—they know a lot more about me than I know about them.

While CRM systems may help you know more about your customers — they don’t build relationships because they don’t help your customers know more about you.

And that is the beautiful thing about employee blogs. It is one way to bring some much-needed parity to the customer relationship. All companies are ultimately organized collections of people. And by getting to know some of those people a little better, we (the customers) get to know the company better.

I can think of no better example of this than the Channel 9 site at the Microsoft Developer Network. I feel like I know infinitely more about Microsoft now because of this site. Getting to listen in on interesting conversations between people who have built and are buliding tools I use everyday is very valuable to me. I am so glad Microsoft decided to do that instead of making sure I see a “Welcome, Mason Hale” message everytime I visit their website.

Welcome to flowdelic, Mason Hale’s weblog. I am finally getting off the bench and jumping into the game. Yet another weblog has entered the blogsphere.

So what’s with the name “flowdelic”? It’s something my Dad told me years ago…

I was in Fort Worth with my wife, Colleen, and our son Connor, staying at my Dad’s house. We were visiting him and other family. I was stressing out about all the commitments we had made to various family members. I come from a large family—most of which is dispersed throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth area. My wife is also from Fort Worth, and between her family and mine, we had a lot of people to see in one weekend.

I was rattling through our hectic schedule, trying to figure out the most efficient route that would take us to each stop on our itenerary.

That’s when my Dad said “Mason, you need to be more flowdelic.”

“Flowdelic?” I said.

“Yeah, don’t worry so much. It will work out. If you make it, you make it; if you don’t, you don’t. Just relax and go with it.”

And that was it. At that moment my Dad imparted a bit of wisdom (one of many) that has stuck with me since. To this day, if I get stressed out, over-worked or over-committed (which I have a tendency to do), when it feels like it’s just too unbearable my wife tells me “Mason, you need to be more flowdelic.”

So when I decided I wanted a blog, and needed to name it—flowdelic jumped to mind.

I did a whois lookup to see if the domain was available. Check.

I searched Google for “flowdelic”. Zero hits?! Wow—Super-check!

I would expect not to find “flowdelic” in Webster’s—but Google? No way. I had accidentially discovered new territory. I felt like the first skier down the mountain after a fresh snowfall. I was looking down an unspoiled run of white, fluffy new powder. I had the opportunity to “own” a word on Google. So of course I took it, or rather am taking it—now.

Through this blog, I hope to be a little more flowdelic. To get into the flow, make new interesting connections and just see where it goes. Letting things happen, good and bad, without worrying about what may or may not come to pass.

And if I can not only be more flowdelic myself, but also introduce others to flowdelic-ness, then all the better. And if you get something out of this—then you can join me in saying “Thanks Dad.”