Month: April 2008

After blogging about the new Ray Cologon FileMaker book a few minutes ago, I realized that I didn’t have FileMaker Addict on my list of blogs. A big mistake.

Very sorry I did not give Tim Dietrich his due. And worse, that I failed to let my FileMaker-interested readers know about the site.

One of the main features of Tim’s site is that he writes up online interviews with FileMaker developers. Recently he interviewed Susan Prosser and Cris Ippolite. He goes into a lot of depth. This is a great community building contribution.

Tim has also posted about Ray’s new book in more depth than covered here and he has written a couple times about the SmartPill PHP Edition that sounds really cool. I gotta read his site more myself. Its grown into an important site for the FileMaker community.

Thanks Tim. And sorry it took me so long to put you in my FileMaker blogroll!

I am very enthused and interested in the recent developments on the social web. Recently I blogged here suggesting FileMaker developers start contributing links they run across to share with other developers on Ma.gnolia.com.

Twitter is a way of posting short text messages to the web and subscribing to people’s posts of their text messages. If you join Twitter (at Twitter.com), you can get your own *page* and account for free. All you need to provide is an email address. Don’t quibble, you can always get a new free email account from gmail, yahoo or whatever if you want to keep your privacy.

My Twitter *name* is tokerud. No surprise there. My domain on the web is tokerud.com, so I thought I would stick with my last name. Come-on FileMaker friends out there, get an account and follow me or not or somehow let me know your Twitter name so I can follow you.

The idea with Twitter is that you permit people to see what you have to say — I mostly talk about my ideas and discoveries when they are short snippets. I think of it as microblogging. But the norm on Twitter is simply to say what you are doing right now. Since I have a web presence and a business, I want to provide a little value to people in most of my Twitter posts so I would not post 10 times a day when I do some routine thing. Instead, I would post something major like I’m flying to the FileMaker Developer’s conference right now. Something more than what I ate for breakfast.

There is such a thing as the FileMaker community all around us and extended out over the globe but much of it is latent. There are many more FileMaker users at all levels than you know. There are answers to questions, interesting ideas and knowledge, FileMaker tricks and friends out there that you don’t know yet. In Here Comes Everybody, a good new book about the social web, Clay Shirky talks about latent groups. Groups and communities waiting to happen.

Because the cost of communication is dramatically reduced by web tools of various kinds, latent groups start emerging. We have a FileMaker community, but I suggest it is a lot more latent than it needs to be. I want a vibrant and visible and available FileMaker community around me. All sorts of free sharing is possible. I’m not saying professional filemaker developers will take lots of time to give away their knowledge, but if each gives away a small bit and receives even more in return we all benefit.