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Month: September 2008

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 23

Rick Turoczy on September 23, 2008

Iterasi Moves to the Heart of Downtown Portland

Pete Grillo writes “We moved here for two primary reasons: better proximity for many of our employees’ commutes to work and to get closer to Portland’s exciting and thriving high-tech community.”

Andy Baio joins Kickstarter board

Via Waxy.org “I wanted to take a moment to announce that I’ve joined the board of directors for Kickstarter, a brand-new startup based out of Brooklyn and Chicago…. Ultimately, everybody should be able to support themselves doing what they love using the web, and I think Kickstarter will be a great way to get there. Expect to hear more on Waxy.org as launch day gets closer.”

3 Tips for a Great Landing Page

Guidance from StepChange Group “every time we build a Landing Page or a Microsite, we see campaign conversion rates that are substantially higher than the main site – plus higher-quality referrals due to better targeting and qualification. Since most targeted Landing Pages can be put together in a couple of weeks, they are nearly a ‘no brainer’ for an online campaign. Based on our experience, here are some tips for creating a great Landing Page that converts well.”

Clearwire lurks – Silicon Forest – The Oregonian

Mike Rogoway writes “While walking to work last week, I passed this Clearwire truck parked on the street downtown. It’s got Oregon plates, which makes me think the company’s pretty well set up in Portland — though it’s still not offering service here.”

OTBC picks new home, new model – Silicon Forest

Mike Rogoway writes “The Open Technology Business Center has picked a new home, at The Round in central Beaverton.”

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Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 22

Rick Turoczy on September 22, 2008

Strands, students, and haXe: Taking Web development to the next level

Via the Strands blog “As you might remember, Strands has organized the Strands Summer 2008 haXe Project (also see the announcement post), an opportunity for students to receive funding for open source development focused on the web based programming language “haXe“. Today, the Strands Summer 2008 haXe Project has officially come to a close.”

Happy OneWebDay!

Via the AboutUs blog “Today is OneWebDay, an international event celebrating online life on the 22nd of September each year. On OneWebDay.org it is explained as ‘a platform for people to educate and activate others about issues that are important for the Internet’s future’ and an ‘Earth Day for the internet.’ OneWebDay was founded by Susan Crawford in 2006, and has since spread all over the world.”

Linux Plumbers Conference: Mission Accomplished

Via Still Life with Chicken “I couldn’t have been happier with how the Linux Plumbers Conference went last week. I went back and looked at the original proposal that we had Arjan, Greg, and Randy present to the Linux Foundation, and we seem to have hit all our original goals.”

Walker Tracker in the blog world today

Via the Walker Tracker blog “It’s a busy day at Walker Tracker. We were chosen as a Kim Komando cool site of the day. Thanks, Kim! We were blogged on Crooked Timber, by Eszter Hargittai. Thanks Eszter! And we signed our first Private Level in New Zealand.”

Smart Phones for the Masses

Peat Bakke writes “Which gets me thinking — in ten years it could cost under $10 to build a mobile device equivalent to the iPhone, thanks to Moore’s Law. With an open source operating system (like Google’s Android), and an open hardware platform (like the Neo FreeRunner), a remarkable new level of capability and opportunity will be available to the people and communities who can only afford bare bones mobile phones today.”

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Creating community: Tips from the community master, Dawn Foster

Rick Turoczy on September 22, 2008

Today, creating a vibrant and interactive community around your product or organization can be the difference between unheralded success and unimaginable failure. And no one knows that better than Portland’s Dawn Foster, one of the leading authorities on the subject.

Dawn has just completed a series of posts on corporate communities that is a must read for anyone attempting to work online with customers.

What’s a corporate community, you ask?

Corporate communities refer to any custom community created by an organization for the purpose of engaging with customers or other people who may be interested in the organization’s products and services. For the purpose of this post, custom corporate communities include communities created by corporations, non-profit organizations, educational institutions and similar organizations. These corporate communities can take many different forms: support communities, developer communities to help developers work with your products, customer and enthusiast communities, and many others.

See? I told you. How could you not fit in there?

So grab a cup of coffee (or some bubble tea if you want to be even more like Dawn) and dive into this great series of posts:

  • Custom Corporate Communities: Planning and Getting Started
    Before jumping in to create a new community, you should think carefully about the purpose of this new community including your goals and objectives, fitting your community efforts into your organization’s overall strategy, measuring success, and committing the resources required to make your community flourish.
  • Maintaining a Successful Corporate Community
    I decided to follow up my post on Monday about Custom Corporate Communities: Planning and Getting Started with this post containing tips about what to do and what to avoid doing if you want to have a successful corporate community. While some of these tips are specific to corporate communities, most of them also apply to other types of communities as well.
  • A Structure for Your Corporate Community
    I thought that it would be a good idea to also spend a little time on the things that you should be thinking about when coming up with a structure for your community. It is important to keep in mind that every community software package is likely to have unique strengths and limitations when it comes to configuring your community. From a design and architecture perspective, I strongly recommend looking at this strengths and limitations of the platform and taking them into account before starting any design or architecture work.
  • Promoting Your Community Efforts the Right Way
    In this final post for the corporate community series, we will spend some time on the right and wrong ways to promote your community efforts. Some of this advice also applies more broadly to promotion of other social media efforts as well.

For more from Dawn, head on over to Fast Wonder Blog.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 21

Rick Turoczy on September 21, 2008

WhereCampPDX Blog » Equilibrium: The Human Mash Up

Via the WhereCamp PDX blog “To kick off WhereCamp PDX, on Friday night, October 17th, we’ll be taking part in an interactive art installation entitled ‘Equilibrium: The Human Mash Up’ taking place at the Olympic Mills Building at 107 SE Washington St Portland, OR 97214.”

Success as an Entrepreneur: Why It’s Not About You

Via Get Rich Slowly “Peter Hamilton is not alone. In interview after interview throughout Japan, Asia, and North America, successful entrepreneurs told me the same thing, in different words and in different languages: ‘It’s not about the money.’ What, then, is entrepreneurship about? Exploiting a market opportunity? Fame? Fortune? Proving yourself? “

451 CAOS Theory » Pressure, progress flow at Linux Plumbers Conference

Jay Lyman writes “This week’s Linux Plumbers Conference in Portland was a great opportunity for many of the Linux kernel community people to get together, challenge one another, hash out some differences and hone their similarities and synergies. What strikes me as perhaps most interesting is that while there was some discord felt throughout the event among the different Linux camps, this conglomerate of developers representing a range of different vendors in a variety of different ways all do one thing common to all of them: push the kernel forward.”

Creating Startups in Gray Areas

Via CenterNetworks “I am by no means some kind of business rock star. I didn’t attend Stanford or know anybody. I just focused on creating what didn’t exist, both then and now. Many refer to this as ‘gray areas,’ and they can be very good for business. Here are my five rules for finding them”

Win Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6

Via the ExpressionEngine blog “We’re giving away 2 copies of Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6. To enter all you have to do is post to the Discussion thread linked at the top of this post before Tuesday (September 23), 3pm Central.”

Strange Love Live – a set on Flickr

Curious about the inner workings of Portland’s favorite tech podcast? Let the lens of Aaron Hockley take you behind the scenes of Strange Love Live.

All of My Flickr Photos Now Have Creative Commons Licensing » Hockley Photography

Aaron Hockley writes “After some consideration, I’ve changed the licensing on my Flickr stream; all of my work there is now available under the Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial – No Derivative Works license. In short, you may use and share the photos for non-commercial purposes, unaltered, as long as you provide attribution to Aaron Hockley as the photographer. A link to hockleyphoto.com is always appreciated.”

We got a map | Clicky Blog

Via the Clicky blog “We re-organized things a bit, you may notice a new ‘Locale’ tab. This is where all the country, city, language etc stuff has been moved to. We also added a new sub-tab, called ‘Regions,’ but data only started tracking yesterday for it.”

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Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 19

Rick Turoczy on September 19, 2008

OEN honors achievement in entrepreneurship – Silicon Forest – The Oregonian – OregonLive.com

No Web startups won this year, but AboutUs was in the running for a couple.

“There is no viral marketing”

Tom Turnbull writes “Brian Solis recently spoke at the Web 2.0 conference in New York. He provocatively stated that “There is no viral marketing.” Marketing in the age of social media, rather, is an ongoing, and necessarily authentic, effort. It requires more than putzing around on Twitter, slapping up a Facebook fan page or pumping out some goofy widget.”

Please excuse our dust

Cory Huff writes “This Blogger to WordPress migration was supposed to go very smoothly. WP even has a button built in to do it, but for some reason it didn’t work. I’m re-posting each article by hand as we speak, so it looks like there’s going to be a day or two of down time for the site. I’ve had some really great experts look at this thing, but it looks like there’s nothing to be done but do it all by hand. So much for ease of use, eh?” (Sounds like somebody has a good unconference topic for WordCamp Portland.)

Color-Based Social Networking – ColourLovers.com Celebrates All Shades

Via Trendhunter “This is a brilliant user-generated site where you monitor and influence color trends online. In brief, Colour Lovers is a social network built around color palettes.” (Hat tip Todd Kenefsky)

Hazelnut Tech Talk Special | An Interview with Virtual Architect Eric Rice | Hazelnut Tech Talk

Cyborg Anthropologist Amber Case Interviews Virtual Architect Eric Rice at Gnomedex 2008. “After an amazing post-conference dinner with a bunch of exellent people, Dave Olson was kind enough to lend his excellent podcasting equiptment. I was able to capture a minute percentage of the Sweetopian existence of Eric Rice. Rice is incredible. I wish I had better adjectives in which to describe him, but I’ll let him do the talking.”

Portland Infects Seattle With Hoppy Goodness « The Pursuit of a Life

Justin Kistner’s brainchild, Beer and Blog, makes the leap to our sister city to the north, Seattle. Thanks to TeachStreet (and something tells me Brian Westbrook). “He says it was inspired by Beer and Blog, a Portland gathering which I’ve seen Rick Turoczy tweet about time and again – proof that in some essential alcohol- and startup-related respects, Portland is further advanced than Seattle!”

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Blog like a pirate: Beer arrrrr Blog in St. Johns

Rick Turoczy on September 19, 2008

Beer arrrr BlogIt’s an impromptu field-trip day for Beer and Blog as the head to St. Johns to celebrate Blog like a Pirate Day. Or Talk like a Pirate Day. Or whatever.

Um. Ahoy?

On this glorious day, Beer and Blog will be taking a field trip to the Leisure Public House. Here to tell you all about it is our St. Johns correspondent, mediaChick.

For mediachick’s five fantastic reasons for making the not-so-arduous trip north, see the Beer and Blog, um, blog. My favorite?

The miscellaneous, yet delightful, discoveries: jukebox, generous outside patio, ping-pong table, bocce, wifi, and a sleepy and snuggly pub cat.

For more information, details on the location, and to RSVP, see Beer and Blog on Upcoming.

Calagator documentation sprint this Saturday

Rick Turoczy on September 19, 2008

CalagatorPortland’s favorite calendar aggregator, Calagator, continues to improve, code sprint after code sprint.

And it’s drawing ever nearer to its 1.0 milestone.

But before Calagator gets there, it’s time for a different kind of sprint, as Audrey Eschright shares:

We’ll be meeting tomorrow starting at 10am at CubeSpace, to kick off the Calagator documentation sprint. I really encourage anyone who has been involved in the development of this project, on any level (including lurking on the mailing list) to stop by, even if you only have an hour or two free. We’ll be working on the Calagator User Guide, and talking about what’s next for the project after we reach our 1.0 milestone.

More details, time, and location for the Calagator documentation sprint can be found, well, on Calagator, of course.

Calagator is an all-volunteer effort to provide a unified calendar for technical communities and user groups in Portland, Oregon. Anyone can contribute information by importing, creating, and editing entries.

For more information, join the mailing list or visit Calagator.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 18

Rick Turoczy on September 18, 2008

Automattic to Preview WordPress 2.7 at WordCamp Portland

Aaron Hockley writes “I’m excited to announce we have a great addition to our lineup of speakers for WordCamp Portland. Jane Wells from Automattic will be offering a look at some of the new features and changes that will be coming in WordPress 2.7.”

SplashCast has Politics

Tom Turnbull writes “The channel is a massive clearing house for some really great political content. Yesterday afternoon, I listened to a series of recent political speeches while working. Without divulging my political leanings (not that I hide them) some of the content fires me up, while some raises my hackles a bit – which is part of the fun of politics, after all.”

An Interview About WordCamp Portland

Aaron Hockley writes “Portland area freelance writer Kerri Buckley interviewed me about the upcoming WordCamp. Since it’s a blogging conference, I suggested the interview be posted on a blog.”

A case study in poor authentication: Palin’s Yahoo! email account

Greg Hughes writes “Vidoop uses a system like this for resetting information on their OpenID accounts. It’s simple and it works. It requires me to have the correct device (my phone), uses a different communication channel (the phone network, hence “out-of-band”) to contact me and then verifies I am a legitimate user. It requires me to interact as part of any change.”

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Cooking up a Story takes us from Farm to School

Rick Turoczy on September 18, 2008

It’s “using technology for the greater good” day here at Silicon Florist.

First we had the Collective Software Initiative’s TriSano story, and now we’ve got news that Portland’s favorite online show about people, food, and sustainability—Cooking up a Story—is going to be live streaming an interview with Debra Eschmeyer from Farm to School.

What’s Farm to School?

Farm to School brings healthy food from local farms to school children nationwide. These programs connect schools with local farms with the objectives of serving healthy meals in school cafeterias, improving student nutrition, providing health and nutrition education opportunities that will last a lifetime, and supporting local small farmers.

Cool hunh? Sounds a lot better than that freeze-dried salisbury steak and reconstituted mashed potatoes they had when I was a kid.

Tricia over at my OurPDX has joined in the fun with this challenge:

Before the broadcast, I’d like to get a discussion going about the Food to School concept. Personally, I think many of the worlds ills could be solved if people knew where their food came from and how it actually gets to the table. If we as a society could become more connected to the farms and farmers that grow our food, maybe we would make very different choices regarding our eating habits. And, if we REALLY knew how our food was produced, would we still eat it? Ok, don’t answer that.

So take a few minutes out of your lunch hour tomorrow to sit in front of your machine and listen to the interview. It will be held at 12:15 (or so) via UStream.

And if you like, you can join in the conversation, either on OurPDX or at Cooking up a Story.

Collaborative Software Initiative launches TriSano, an open-source means of tracking disease

Rick Turoczy on September 18, 2008

TriSanoIn the world of technology, we complain about having to deal with “viruses” and “infected systems” all of the time. And, as such, we have any number of tools at our disposal for tracking, managing, and eliminating these viruses.

But what about using technology to deal with the impact of disease in the real world?

Portland-based Collaborative Software Initiative may have the answer with its newest effort, TriSano.

TriSano is designed to help communities collect and share disease information within and among communities:

To provide Public Health organizations freedom and choice when tasked with making an applications decision to support their communities. We offer the opportunity to scrap the monolithic development process and custom built solutions traditionally provided through system integrators and traditional software companies. Our suggestion: engage in the power of community building and open source technology to solve complex health technology challenges for the good of public health.

It’s like your own private Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And, Utah already has plans to go live on TriSano.

But Dana Blankenhorn sees TriSano reaching much farther than that:

TriSano is written in Ruby. Rather than building 75 forms, TriSano built a form-builder. The system can be maintained by doctors, regulators, or through TriSano in the form of Software as a Service.

What it means is a faster, flexible, less-expensive system for creating and maintaining infectious disease reports. Utah will train its people first, CSI will seek to roll it out nationwide, and everyone (including you) will reap the benefits.

For all the appreciation I have for cool Web 2.0 tools, they remain—quite often—a frivolous applications of technologies that hold unlimited potential. And that’s why it’s especially exciting to see a local company tapping into that potential for the greater good of humanity.

Collaborative Software Initiative was founded in 2007 by Stuart Cohen, a veteran IT executive and former chief executive officer at the Open Source Development Labs. Cohen has partnered with Evan Bauer, financial services technology veteran and former chief technology officer at Credit Suisse, to bring together like-minded companies to build software applications at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. The company introduces a market-changing process that applies open source methodologies to building software collaboratively. For more information, visit Collaborative Software Initiative.

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