Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for August 10

Michelle “mediachick” Anderson writes “Last night I spent a couple of hours at Beer and Blog, a weekly get-together for those of us in Portland, Oregon. The premise: Bloggers helping bloggers over beer. We usually meet at the Green Dragon (who love us). Sometimes we work together, and sometimes there is a specific (and tasty) topic of discussion. Suffice to say, it’s a popular event among local bloggers, and when you have a popular local blogger/author/startup entrepreneur leading the discussion, you can be sure lots of people will show up.”

Bram Pitoyo writes “Beer and Blog is undoubtedly the best way to meet members of this growing [Portland tech] community in an informal, relaxed environments—if by ‘informal’ and ‘relaxed’ you mean ‘meeting local Tweeters and bloggers that you followed and subscribed to 24/7, but could only see in 48×48 pixel avatars.'”

Scott Kveton “We have evaluated our myVidoop OpenID provider and have determined it is not vulnerable to this attack. Additionally, based on your feedback we have updated our SSL certificate on myVidoop.com to support secure redirection for identity URL’s (for example, going to https://username.myvidoop.com by default as an increased measure of security).”

Dawn Foster writes “Jeremiah Owyang’s recent post about The Many Challenges of the Social Media Industry got me thinking about how social media requires a different approach from the way that many companies approach traditional marketing or customer engagement. Jeremiah’s post seems to be more targeted at companies whose main products and services are based on social media, but I’m going to take some of the ideas that he discusses and outline how they can be applied to companies using social media as part of their strategy for engaging with customers or communities or users.”

Welcome to the Panel Picker voting interface. This web application gives you the power to browse all programming proposals and give us your feedback on which ideas you think are most appropriate for the SXSW Interactive Festival (scheduled March 13-17, 2009 in Austin, Texas). You will need to create an account to begin voting.

Janet Lee Johnson writes “I’ve been fortunate lately, learning the Art of RSS Mixology from Marshall Kirkpatrick, in one of his last extended consulting contracts before he begins writing for ReadWriteWeb full time. Marshall is an RSS and ‘market intelligence systems’ (I like that phrase) guru who’s helping me figure out how to efficiently and completely monitor the social web – including forums, social networks and the blogosphere – for the Academic Network and one of their large pharmaceutical clients.”