Voxeo Talks

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new weblog: “Voxeo Developer’s Corner“. In this weblog we will be giving you tips, tricks and tutorials to help you develop applications on our platforms. As you are probably aware, there is a huge amount of information available in the documentation and forums found on our Evolution developer site. What our goal is with this blog site is to point people to some of the nuggets of gold buried within the pages of Evolution. Members of our staff will highlight some of the great tips they have found and other information they think might help you build even better voice applications on our platform.

The blog is off to a great start already with Matt Henry’s initial post, “Certified Tech Tip: Using SISR-formatted grammars with Prophecy 8“, where he demonstrates what SISR-formatted grammars are all about. The post attracted some comments and Matt is already planning a follow-up post. Expect to see more along these lines from Matt and his team in the weeks ahead.

I also kicked off a series on voice mashups and Twitter today with a post “Voice Mashups with Twitter, part 1: Who will win the 2008 SuperBowl? (A mashup in CallXML.) where I show how you can create a voice application that sends its output out to the Twitter micro-blogging service. Over the next few weeks I’ll be adding more articles in that series.

If you are interested in developing voice applications, we do encourage you to check out the “Voxeo Developer’s Corner“. There’s also an RSS feed if you would like to subscribe and stay up-to-date with our posts.

Technorati Tags:
applications, voxeo, developers, callxml, xml, voicexml, mashups, ccxml, apis

What do you think of our new “Comment Policy” for our blog site?

When we launched the site a few months ago, we didn’t put up a “comment policy”, largely because I’ve been blogging for now almost 8 years and have never had such a policy on any of my blogs (although I’m going to be adding one to my other blogs now). It simply didn’t occur to me to do so. However, some of the recent comments we’ve received have made us concerned that we don’t have a policy in place. We’re all for “free speech” and we want strong opinions to be voiced, but we also want to keep our corporate blog portal “work safe” and “family friendly” (i.e. we want people to be able to browse our site when they might be at home with a young kid looking over their shoulder) and encourage an atmosphere of civil discussion.

Obviously, this site is ours and we can realistically do whatever we want to do with it, including deleting/censoring comments we don’t like. But that’s not the spirit of the blogosphere and certainly goes against our interest in having open and honest dialogue. Bring on the negative comments… we’re glad to hear them. (We definitely like the positive comments, too!) Our intent is to continue publishing any and all non-spam comments we receive… but we also want some guidelines in place so that if we do some day feel the need to delete or censor a blog comment, we have a publicly stated rationale for why we are doing so. We may never choose to do this, but then again we may have someone leave a comment that we feel goes too far over one of the lines we’ve stated.

So I’ve put together our first “Comment Policy” and would love to hear any comments about it. We’re definitely open to feedback. Is it reasonable? Are there things there you think we should delete? Are there things that we should add?

FYI, in creating this comment policy, these were some of the resources I looked at:

• “Does Your Blog Have a Comments Policy?”

• “The Legal Issues with Comments”
• The Blog Herald’s Comment Policy
• EFF’s “Legal Guide for Bloggers”
• Cisco Blog Site Legal Disclaimer
• Microsoft’s “Rules of Conduct” (more than just about blogs)
• Neville Hobson’s “Terms of Use”

Comments are very definitely welcome. (If you know of blog comment policies out there that you particularly liked, those would be welcome as well.)

Technorati Tags:
blogging, voxeo, comment policies, comment policy, comments

I am pleased to note on this final day of 2007 that we’ve recently added a new blog to the site. With “Behind The Blog“, our goal is to tell the story of what we had to do make this blog site work using WordPress MU - and to continue to write about what we do as we improve and enhance it in the time ahead. We’ll write about the plugins we add, the modifications we make and the challenges we deal with - and answer any questions raised by readers. More details - and information about why we are publishing this blog - can be found in the introductory post to the blog. If you are interested in creating a blog portal like blogs.voxeo.com, or are just interested in the technical details behind a site like this, feel free to join us as we explore the world of running a corporate blog portal using WordPress MU.

If you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to the direct feed for the blog or simply get new posts as part of the “all Voxeo blogs” feed. (Behind The Blog posts also appear in our new Twitter feed.)

Come along and join in our little adventure… we know there are bound to be challenges ahead!

Technorati Tags:
voxeo, wordpress mu, wpmu