Blog: November 2007

In the News: Susie Talks Torrents to Jam! Showbiz

November 27, 2007

Susannah Gardner just did a short interview with Jam! Showbiz about the technology called bittorrent.

Torrent technology has been around for several years now, and Susie wrote a book about it—BitTorrent for Dummies—that was published in 2006. It’s not a sexy technology like cell phones, it’s more like FTP. But torrent data accounts for around a third of all traffic on the Internet, and that percentage keeps growing as the tools are integrated into other software.

Susie would have posted this herself, but she’s off shooting another appearance on the Leo Laporte show, “The Lab with Leo”. Ah, showbiz.

Posted by Travis Smith at 1:45 PM | Comments (0)

Sam Harris Appeals for the Defense of Reason, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

November 26, 2007

One of Hop Studio’s most prestigious clients, Sam Harris, is championing the cause of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ali is a writer, thinker and incisive critic of Islam’s traditional treatment of women. She was forced into hiding in the Netherlands after writing and providing the voice over for Submission a controversial film directed by Theo Van Gogh.

Tragically Theo Van Gogh was murdered for making Submission, and the Dutch Government arranged twenty-four hour security for Ali. She is currently trying to set up residence in the United States, but the Dutch government has ruled that it will not pay for Ali’s security while she is out of the country.

Sam has decided to take donations to aid in paying for Ali’s security while in the States. He feels that it is imperative to support her stance on personal and human freedoms. Sam asked Hop Studios set up a page with both subscription and lump sum donations using Paypal.

You can learn more about Ayaan Hirsi Ali here. If you would like to help Sam raise money for her security, or just observe our handiwork, you can visit The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Security Trust.

Posted by Matt Gardner at 3:05 PM | Comments (0)

Rose the Baker Adds Forums to her Blog

November 19, 2007

For two years, book writer and baker Rose Levy Beranbaum has been writing a blog about baking and Hop Studios has been maintaining that blog.

She’s covered her travels, her baking successes and (rare!) failures. She’s looked into new baking techniques, and discussed some of the oldest recipes in existence. And her site has grown—it get a LOT of visitors in a week, though I can’t share the actual number here.

Well, as of last Thursday, she’s baked up something brand new—she’s added a forum to her site.

Adding a forum is a perilous undertaking—you don’t to be inundated with spam, or with off-topic arguments—but worst of all, you don’t want it to flounder emptily and be quiet as a pumpkin patch.

But Rose’s blog had built quite a following, and discussions were happening, enthusiastically but awkwardly, in her blog posts themselves. So we recommended, and she agreed, that a forum would be a good experiment. Her sponsor, General Mills (which sells Gold Medal Flour) also agreed.

So we designed it and built it using Expression Engine. Interestingly, her blog is in Movable Type, so this makes the second site we’ve done that merges Movable Type and EE, to take proper advantage of the strengths of both.

In the four days since the forum launched, how’s it doing?

You can see the stats for yourself: things are looking rosey. The first bump is the monthly boost from her regular email newletter, which goes away after a few days. But since the forum launched, her traffic has doubled and looks to grow even more. She already has 110 registered members, 230 posts, photos, profiles, people sharing recipes… it’s rising fast.

We’re heading into “baking season”—U.S. Thanksgiving and Christmas is the time of year that a lot of pies and cookies get made (and eaten). I couldn’t have hoped for a better start to a forum, and I certainly have high hopes for the next two years of Rose’s blog.

Posted by Travis Smith at 12:47 PM | Comments (0)

The L.A. Times Decides to Share Travis’ Opinion

November 11, 2007

It’s not often that people listen to my opinions, even rarer when I get to share those opinions with more than a million people.

The Los Angeles Times recently decided that what I had to say about privacy online in the era of blogs and Facebook warranted a little wider distribution, so they ran in their Opinion section an article I wrote called Facebook Isn’t Your Diary (that was the online title), or “One Poke Over the Line” (the much better print headline).

The piece was syndicated and picked up in at least 15 other newspapers around the U.S., and I’ve since it ran I’ve received many interesting emails from complete strangers and old friends—even more interesting is that the feedback mostly came from people who Googled me and found my contact information, and yet not all the feedback supported my position that doing exactly that (looking people up) is something you ought to expect if you have any online presence.

I like the mixed reaction I got to the article—it shows that there really are multiple positions on this issue, and that’s what the opinion section should be all about. I do wish that the various headlines did a better job of conveying what the story was about. The headlines were different in every publication, and they really changed the tone and meaning of the piece, sometimes to its detriment.

Posted by Travis Smith at 1:50 PM | Comments (0)

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