The other harder part was to always tell the truth. I did have a major setback in feeling confident about the experiment when, due to a combination of multiple factors, my marriage ended. While it hurt immensely, I eventually decided to resume work on the experiment. I hinted at the experiment in the weeks before it started and discussed it with a couple of my close friends before deciding that come hell or high water on Dec 21st, 2009 I would begin. My twitter account was now ground zero for a whole new type of experiment (years and years ago I lived as a homeless person in Portland, Oregon for 6 weeks because I wanted to see what the actual effects on my own personality would be).

A few people including Pete Grillo, Steven Mcdade and Thomas Brenneke came perilously close to making me ‘out’ the experiment throughout 2010. My one rule to maintain telling the truth while taking an extremist tack was the same as used by Project Alpha: If asked why I was required to tell the person asking. Thanks to a few of you for keeping it secret by the way!

Unsurprisingly the end of the year conclusions came out fairly staid:

• People under the age of 25 are vastly more likely to positively respond to reactionary statements.
• People identifying as monotheists are more likely to unfollow when their ideologies are questioned or insulted than polytheists or atheists.
• People who use their faces as avatars are less likely to deviate from a moderate tone in their tweet stream.
• The amount of unengaged accounts went up at approximately the same ratio as my daily number of tweets. While many of these accounts aren’t necessarily spam it does indicate that neophyte users frequently just follow anyone in the stream who says things that they relate to. Nothing out of the ordinary there really.
• The number of spam accounts did spike rather heavily (up 23% the first week no less) as I began using more hashtags and keyworded phrases.
• One fact I’m quite proud of is that my fellow Portlanders were the group least likely to unfollow me based on my statements. When I looked at the data closer the numbers of “loyal” followers were split fairly evenly between liberal and conservative users. Which led me to conclude that Portland is more about speaking up than it is about partisanship. Not everyone in Portland may agree but they won’t necessarily unfollow you for it.
• At the 6 month mark I ramped up to following a large number of adult performers, strippers and cam girls throughout the world, again surprisingly Portland accounts took offense at a much lower rate than other cities.
• At the 9 month mark I began cycling on a 48 hours rude and 24 hours polite rate which resulted in very little differences to the statistics over time but did cause some upheaval during the switch from one state to the other.

The few really interesting realizations occurred in the way many of my long term friends and some quiet acquaintances changed the way they saw me over that year. Especially interesting was the group of people who publicly said one thing but privately said another. It speaks volumes about how even though we’re told to tell the truth as children, between the age of being a child and being a fully fledged grownup we lose those abilities to always be honest.
Of my personal favorite responses and results were:

• An active social media using tech executive from California regularly sent me a DM whenever I took certain topics to task thanking me for “saying what he would get fired for”.
• A VP of Marketing from a NYC based company sent me an email that read in part “Some of what you say is obviously calculated to get a response but nicely doesn’t come off as blind trolling. It would be nice if honesty of the level you approach was something marketers could capitalize on”.
• A former student from my drumline teaching days called me to ask if I was really that angry at the world and if there was anything they could do to help.

After going through the data and realizing that a lot of what our parents taught us is true, that how you speak affects how well you’re listened to I realize that the greatest lesson wasn’t the specifics of the data. My experiment was never about collating the many into a grand unified theory of sociology, it was about how the circle of friends and acquaintances I have change and adapt over time. Everyday our personalities go through varying degrees of flux. It’s a natural part of being human, what we must all learn to do is be honest to ourselves and to everyone else without remorse. It’s not a real decision if you’re not invested in it.

While I’ve got much of the data aggregated now I’m not able to share the full report at this time. When you blindly involve people in an experiment you don’t have a right to arbitrarily decide how to use their public identity. I’ll try to figure out a way to sanitize it enough to not force many people to have their information shared as part of this. I should add that I also am under an NDA which prevents me from releasing anymore data at this time. I will say thanks to the very cool company that liked the idea and paid me for the researchas well as provided me excellent resources for getting the missing data restored as much as possible. Thanks guys!

I feel enriched and also deeply humbled by the gamut of emotional responses to my words, my deeds and especially the number of new friends I made during the experiment.
To those of you who helped voluntarily or as subjects I say thank you very much.

My current idea list:

1. refresh comments admin dashboard
   A simple idea that adds “refresh me” to the recent comments widget on the dashboard, and uses ajax to only refresh that widget.
2. feedburner widget for dashboard
   Integrated dashboard widget that shows the summary of feed data.
3. plugin compatibility checker
   The idea is when you try and add a new plugin it will check your plugin list against the plugin compatibility checker to see if it will fail. This one is likely to not be done by me lol.
4. mint stats dashboard widget
   I love Mint stats so much. I just don’t love always opening an external page to see it. Giving me my stats via the dashboard in widget form is a no brainer.
5. social media welcome mat with follow me message.
   If people are referred by twitter the header would say “Welcome twitter users, Like what you see? Consider adding <twitter handle> to get updated on new posts” or whatever the user decides to have the message say.
6. Referrer widget for dashboard
   show your readers where the most recent hits came from.
7. WPMU plugin installer permissions
   allow users to only install admin approved plugins from wordpress.org/extend/plugins gives users flexibility but protects your WPMU site (Not even sure if this one is possible or worthwhile)

Obviously this is just a very rough list and I’d love more input and more importantly feedback about what functions you want new plugins to serve. So take a moment and suggest something you’d like me to try and build.

Not my picture (again courtesy of the tagaroo plugin and Flickr).

Which brings me to a little experiment I’m trying out. Every Friday between 3pm and 5pm I will be engaging in #nofilterfriday. This means I’ll say whatever pops into my head and most importantly will honestly answer any questions that I’m asked. This will be difficult and I will honestly say there are very few subjects that I won’t respond well to (too private of info about my wife and kids for example).

I’ve already had a few questions asked in the original test #nofilterfriday.

sewmyheadon: @chrisorourke #nofilterfriday what pisses you off most about the iPhone?

@chrisorourke: @sewmyheadon The fact that a progressive forward thinking company like Apple did a deal with ATT. Apple could’ve been the first successful..
MVNO. Imagine paying your phone bill with itunes? Simple. Everything apple tied together. Really surprised they didn’t do it.

verso: @chrisorourke #nofilterfriday what is the thing from High School you look back on that still FULLY embarrasses you?

chrisorourke: @verso 1992: huge screwup during the ballad at the U of O marching band show during prelims. I played loud perc notes during flute solo.

Not too much to report at the moment on that but expect:

Drumcorps talk (Did you know that the last time a democrat won the election that the Phantom Regiment won DCI? 1996 and 2008. Very cool).

Drinking (yay!) (he’s not hefe he’s my bitter)

Doctor Who (Nooo David Tennant can’t quit the show Nooooo!)

and even that thing that just happe (holy crap Obama is our next President!!)

Plus maybe a semi secret surprise announcement from yours truly. (I let it out in a few tweets over on twitter)

Alrighty tune in tonight at 10pm on http://strangelovelive.com to hear my thoughts and conversations with the awesome hosts. It’ll be stupendifying!

1. Akismet - Comment spam filtering for the masses. Comes with every single WordPress install because it’s by the same wonderful folks at Automattic who brought us WordPress. Currently it’s been responsible for over 23,000 comment spam caught on my blog. I’m in total agreement with Aaron that activating this is the absolute first step in deploying WordPress. Here’s what Akismet.com says about their plugin:

“You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again“.

Those last 7 words say a lot about their confidence in their product. Are they true? Absolutely.
2. Sociable – A quick easy way to add social media buttons to your posts (or everywhere, easily changed from the settings page, not only that but it does so easily, and beautifully (see it in action at the end of this post and feel free to submit if you like).

I can’t imagine an easier to configure rock solid way to have the social media links I want all in one place.

3. Wp-Super Cache – This little plugin will help protect your blog from the Slashdot/Digg effect of huge amounts of links swamping your server. Here’s the description WordPress superstar Donncha O Caoimh (the author of this plugin) gave it:

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.”

So far I haven’t been slammed here but if it happens I can rest easy knowing that the guy who’s done most of the work on WPMU (the multi-user version of WordPress) built a plugin to protect a blog’s uptime, which is a pretty important thing for those folks for whom blogging is their life & work.

4. WP-DBManager – This is a pretty important one. I’m often forgetful about backing up my WordPress database before tinkering with it and so with one simple plugin I get nightly backups to my Gmail account, scheduled optimization maintenance as well as the ability to repair it when ever I run into an early version plugin that may break something.

5. WordPress.com Stats – This is one that should be installed with every copy of WordPress. Quick clean easy to read stats that are supported from the WordPress.com website. Rather than rewrite what the plugin site has to say I’ll let the authors speak for themselves:

“Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.”

I love it and seeing that gorgeous little flash graph show the number of hits (right in the dashboard) at a glance is as easy as it gets.

6. Fluency Admin - I’m going to cheat and add this one these two to the list (it was a tossup between this one these two and Akismet since technically Akismet is already installed). Much like the author of Fluency says on his blog:

“Despite the huge overhaul that the WordPress admin interface has received its still not quite what I would really like. I had grown quite attached to the Tiger Admin theme by Steve Smith and when I found that it didn’t work with WP2.5 I was a little disappointed. But this gave me the opportunity to do something different, my own admin theme. Fluency is the result.”

I loved the Tiger Admin theme and was going to write my own until I discovered Fluency. They made a massive amount of changes to the admin area in WordPress 2.5 and not all of them seem well thought out or right. In short I hate some of what they’ve done (but that’s a whole other post). This wonderous little plugin changes and reskins the whole backend to make it; clean, simple and flow just like it should.

7. Wphone – I love my iPhone and the ability to surf the net anywhere on it is great. Posting to my blog via my iPhone though had always been a chore. Along came WPhone allows you to use a custom admin interface while interacting with your WordPress install via your phone. It contains two versions of the mobile admin interface, a full iPhone version and a “lite” version suitable for almost every cellphone with a built-in browser. I just noticed that local plugin author Viperbond007 (who modified rewrote and made usable my own humble CDC Clean Archives plugin into the awesome jQuery based plugin I’m now running here.

Alrighty, that’s my list of must have/can’t live without plugins. I’ll be updating with links to the other folks I invited to share their Top 5 lists with as they post them. Feel free to let me know the ones I don’t know about or somehow overlooked (I’m currently using 13 plugins total and always looking for amazing time-saving, information delivery improving plugins).