Since Backboard first launched red pen annotation, I’ve been amazed by all the creative ways to leave feedback.  Each member of the Backboard team expresses themselves differently: circles, underlines, big cross-outs, arrows; you name it, we’ve seen it.

Like Carlos, a new Backboard user that posted on our feedback Backboard last week, sometimes you need a little more structure to your drawing.  If you’re not into free form annotation, you can hold down Shift while you’re drawing to create a straight line or the Option (Mac)/Alt (Windows) key for an oval.  The perfectionists out there can use both for a perfect circle.

Lately, the Backboard team has taken annotation to the next level (whether it’s a level up for its creativity or a level down for its ridiculousness is up to you to decide).  After feedback is closed on team Backboards, small red-pen animals, vehicles and other doodles often show up.  Here’s a sample for your enjoyment:

And my personal favorite, TROGDOR the BURNiNATOR burninating the countryside.  On the original Backboard, this is an animation.  Mouse over the first part of the feedback and see TROGDOR brighten.  Mouse over the second part, and see his burninating.

We’d like to share the fun with the Backboard community.  Link me to the Backboard featuring your best feedback art (in the comments) by Wednesday, February 11.  I’ll set the best annotation artist up with a complimentary month of a premium Backboard account.

Spam is a constant problem — I would guess this not news to you — and there are countless software packages and tools available to fight it with varying success rates.

One common technique is to use a temporary or disposable email address when signing up for online services so that it doesn’t matter if the company turns around and spams you or, worse yet, sells your address. You could use your old Hotmail address for this purpose or even a custom service like Mailinator.

Often, you have a better technique right at your fingertips that requires no extra effort on your part: plus-addressing.

Let’s say your email address is:

john.doe@gmail.com

You will also receive email sent to:

john.doe+anything@gmail.com

That is, you can add a plus sign and then any word to your email address, and it will still be delivered to you!

Next time you sign up for an online service, use a +servicename sub-address. If you start receiving spam at that address, not only can you hold the service accountable but you can easily set up a rule in your email program to delete it all.

Email providers vary in their support of sub-addressing and some (such as Yahoo) use minus-addressing instead (where the plus sign is replaced by a minus sign), but with a few quick test emails you should be able to figure out what works for you.

With Backboard, we promise to never disclose your email address to anyone and we have gone to great lengths to make sure you get the smallest amount of email required to make the service work.

If you want to test us though, sign up for Backboard with a +backboard sub-address and see for yourself!

Over at The Apple Blog, I was debating what it means to collaborate on a document with some other The Apple Blog fans. In reference to Apple’s iWork.com, a reader remarked:

…the “collaboration” falls a bit short. True collaboration is online editing, something this service lacks.

It’s a common misconception that collaborating on a document can only mean group editing. In fact, as you consider the situations you or I encounter on a daily basis, very few call for group editing of a document:

• Asking your boss to do a quick once-over of an important client proposal — you want high level feedback, not a re-write of paragraph 3.
• Getting feedback from your peers on the design and contents of a product brief — the last thing you want is three people to move the screenshot to three different locations on the page.
• Obtaining the ‘ok’ from engineering that all the technical details in a report are correct — do you really want the engineering manager rewriting your carefully crafted prose?
• Getting feedback from a client on a contract, proposal or other project — like another commenter on The Apple Blog entry mentioned, you don’t want clients editing your work. It’s not easy to explain why you didn’t make their changes. After all they are hiring you because you can do a better job.

Even if the work case is a group of people equally responsible for producing a document, documents produced through “editing by the masses” are often inconsistent in style, tone, or even facts. There is a strong possibility some edits even introduce backward progress, undoing decisions made earlier. Even after the group finishes, a publishable document likely requires a large amount of post-production individual editing. There is huge value and time save in a gatekeeper, passing around each draft for comments or feedback and then making only the changes he or she deems relevant.

Group editing also demands significant time from those providing feedback. If you’ve ever been asked to provide feedback on a child’s report for school, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It doesn’t take much time to suggest a change in paragraph order or point out awkward sentences. The time consuming part is suggesting an example of how a sentence could be more clear or rewriting the introductory paragraph. In short, feedback is quicker than rewriting.

Effective, efficient collaboration is all about speeding up the iterative cycle, making it easy to get input and guidance throughout the development process. Group editing opens up the document to the inefficiencies of consensus, but feedback, using a tool like Backboard, provides the benefits of early-and-often input without the dangers of committee editing.

When I joined Increo it was an entirely Mac shop. I was the only one who would be developing on a PC. Rather than worrying about potential compatibility issues and setting a development stack up from scratch, it seemed that the best approach would be to use a Virtual Machine running Ubuntu as my development platform.

The Pros of Virtualization:

1) Develop on the same stack as the production

This means that you can avoid running into issues with line endings, cross-platform quirks in parsers, etc. You know that you’re getting the same behavior locally that we will get on the server.

2) Portability: Single setup run from multiple locations

The VM is just a small set of files. You can pick up these files and copy them to another machine (or run them from an external drive) and always have access to your development environment. If you want to work at home on another computer, no problem.

3) Saved state

When you shut your computer down you normally have to close all open windows losing any state (unless the program itself saves it). You can simply shut down the VM and it will save the entire state of the guest OS, meaning next time you open it up, it’s exactly where you left off.

4) Don’t pollute the host OS with dev tools

Your computer stays clean. It doesn’t need a local web server or a local SQL server for development since that’s all on the VM.

5) Cross platform testing on a single computer

You can launch the product and test on either the host OS or the guest OS with a few simple clicks.

The Cons of Virtualization:

1) Lots of RAM needed

You should allocate at least 1GB to the guest OS if you are going to be developing on it. This means you’ll probably want 2GB or more in your computer.

2) Speed, some lag since not running natively

The guest OS isn’t quite as snappy as the host and you always notice a little bit of lag.

3) Mouse support

The back button on the mouse doesn’t work and it took a couple tries at editing config files to get the mouse wheel to be recognized. The mouse doesn’t behave the same way in the host and guest (although tracking speeds are thankfully the same) which can sometimes be frustrating.

4) The VM can’t use multiple monitors

There just isn’t a clean way to have the guest OS occupy two monitors, especially if your monitors aren’t identical. You can avoid this by running a browser, email, and other non-programming tasks on the host OS (on the second monitor) and leave the guest OS to use one screen for coding.

5) Focus can be confusing

Every one in awhile while working in the browser on the host, you’ll probably look over at the VM and see the cursor flashing in a text document and think that it is active. Then you try to type something only to realize that the host OS has focus and the VM does not.

The second-largest source of Backboard traffic is the Japanese blog 100shiki. We’ve also been written about in Chinese at Darksdream and at Bitelia in Spanish.

One of the more interesting parts of running a software company today is that you never know where your software will make a splash. Telephony service Jaxtr has a huge user base in India. Google’s Orkut dominated the Brazillian social networking scene after a few of Brazil’s VIPs joined. It seems like the instantly global phenomenon starts as instantly multi-regional, then fills in the gaps. Our key takeaway: founding teams must be flexible enough to adapt to the regions where users begin adopting their software.

Increo places a high priority in making our software available for use wherever you are. While we are not quite yet ready to translate Backboard, keep watch for multiple language availability and support in the near future.

Before I started working with Jeff full time on Increo, I used to go over to his place with all my ideas. I would literally open up my little red notebook and explain how we were going to build a network to connect ideas with resources, or spark creativity in small businesses by delivering boxes of inspiration. We would toss ideas back and forth, good ones, bad ones, and some terrible enough that they still inspire laughs at Increo headquarters.

I have found that it is extremely important to have people surrounding me who can provide feedback on my ideas and initiatives from many different angles. Generally, I look for some optimists and some pessimists, and people who thoroughly understand the feasibility of many different technologies and models. By asking people with different perspectives, my initiatives get that much better.