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Month: September 2008

Experimenting with Silicon Florist reddit: A reddit for the rest of us

Rick Turoczy on September 10, 2008

OregonLive doesn’t know what it’s doing with Oregon redditIt’s no secret that I think that OregonLive does a horrible job with their reddit implementation. And with the recent redesign of their site, the value has decreased even further.

Oregon reddit is now buried 2150 pixels down the page. Far below the fold. The equivalent of running in the gutter on page 19 of the dead tree The Oregonian.

Couple that with the fact that I’m still incredibly interested in making sure that people are getting their stories heard, that people are getting to see the cool stuff happening in the Silicon Forest, and that people are getting the chance to voice their opinions and share their thoughts, and suddenly it seems like I should quit whining.

And actually try to do something about it.

Back when it became obvious that composing posts was never going to be an adequate means of keeping up with all the news around here, I began experimenting with ma.gnolia.

Now, those ma.gnolia link posts have become a near-daily addition to the writing here. And a way of sharing more of what’s happening—and giving more folks coverage.

And as I noticed that the Silicon Florist group on ma.gnolia was approaching 1000 bookmarks, it dawned on me: that’s still too filtered. And it’s only really filtered by me.

So I’d like to try new experiment: Silicon Florist reddit.

How can you participate in Silicon Florist reddit?

First, you can work submitting sites and stories that you like to Silicon Florist reddit. Tech? Events? News? Cool blog posts? Good geek hangouts? They’re all fair game. Just so long as they have something to do with the Silicon Forest.

Second, I’ve already created a button that you can embed in your blog posts (and all of the Silicon Florist posts will now carry this button in place of the Oregon reddit button):

http://www.reddit.com/r/siliconflorist/button.js?t=1

And I’ve created a little bookmarklet (Silicon Florist reddit) that you can drag to your browser. This will allow you to submit pages you find to Silicon Florist reddit at the push of a button.

Third, I’m still trying to work out the widget, but this is what I’ve got so far:

http://www.reddit.com/r/siliconflorist/top/.embed?limit=10

In a perfect world, any number of Silicon Forest blogs throughout Oregon and Washington could be running something like this, giving folks more broad exposure to what’s happening and what people choose to highlight.

Is this a perfect solution? Nope. Is it a start? I think it may be.

And I’m hoping you’ll join me in the experiment.

[Update] I just noticed that reddit is running a competition for the fastest growing reddit. If we win? Friends of the Florist will be cashing in on all the cool loot. We’re already at 6 subscribers. We are so winning this thing.

OSCON? Gone

Rick Turoczy on September 10, 2008

Well, I’m sad to report that the rumors about OSCON‘s departure from Portland’s 2009 summer tech event line-up have been confirmed.

It’s true. OSCON is gone.

OSCON 2009 won’t be in Portland, Oregon

After six years, O’Reilly has decide to move its anchor conference of the summer—and the leading venue to discuss all things open source—to San Jose, California.

And I’m not alone in my unhappiness over this announcement, if Twitter is any indication.

Worse yet? This comes on the heels of O’Reilly’s decision to move RailsConf—which has also called Portland home—to Las Vegas, next year.

As I’ve mentioned before, the departure of these two O’Reilly events leaves a decided gap in our summer geek activities around here. After WebVisions wraps.

And I have to imagine that the Portland tourism industry is crying openly into its microbrewed organic beer at this point.

It makes me wonder if we shouldn’t be courting another event or two. (BlogHer?I ain’t too proud to beg.)

Or maybe, just maybe, stage one of our own.

Silicon Florist Podcast 03: ORBlogs, events, Internet Astronauts, events, Vidoop, events, Iterasi, and more events

Rick Turoczy on September 10, 2008

Links from this podcast include:

And thanks very much to Matthew Atkins for the bumper riff.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 09

Rick Turoczy on September 9, 2008

Build a Tackle Box Before You Go Fishing: A Starter Kit for Internet Entrepreneurs | Internet Astronauts :: Bootstrap Startup Blog

Darius Monsef continues sharing his insights on startups with part 2 of the post he began with a Silicon Florist guest post. Grab a cup of coffee (or beverage of your choice) and spend a few minutes with this one.

SplashCast and Clearspring Partner to Create Social Advertising Network | CenterNetworks

Allen Stern writes “SplashCast and Clearspring have announced plans to partner together to create a social advertising network targeted towards consumer brands. SplashCast provides content management services while Clearspring is a widget distribution service.” (P.S. SplashCast hosts Portland Lunch 2.0 next week, September 17)

TC50: IMINDI Wants To Get Inside Your Head

As I mentioned on Twitter, IMINDI seesm to be the only Silicon Forest company launching at the TechCrunch 50. Here’s what they had to say. “IMINDI’s mind map is chart showing thoughts and those that branch off from them. Users can click on thoughts to see which thoughts on connected to them. IMINDI calls it the ‘journey of thought’ that will help connect people and share their information.” Mark Cuban’s comments are classic Cuban.

GREAT VCS RESPOND, FAST: Pick investors who give you unfair share of time and mind

Professor of entrepreneurship at Cornell University, John L. Nesheim writes “BOTTOM LINE: Pick your board members carefully. You get more than money with a venture capitalist. And you have to live with that person for half a decade or more…. [L]ook for their characteristics in the VCs and angels you are planning on using. When you find the right ones, they’ll help you build power into your unfair advantage.” (Hat tip Carolynn Duncan)

Honey, I Shrunk the Startups! | Redfin Corporate Blog

Via the Redfin Corporate blog “Venture capitalists are racing to miniaturize themselves toward the vanishing point. One of my favorite bloggers, Fred Wilson, recently asked why not ‘back 10 teams at $25,000 each instead of one team at $250,000’? Just last week a Seattle venture capitalist boasted that ‘we are seeing impressive companies being built for under $100,000.'” (Hat tip James Whitley)

GadgetTrak appears on Good Morning America

GadgetTrak was featured on Good Morning America, where the topic of tracking technology for gadgets was discussed. GadgetTrak provides theft recovery software for mobile devices including laptops, mobile phones, portable storage devices and more.

Shizzow Widget Contest

Via the Shizzow blog “Now that the RSS feeds for Shizzow are public, we would love to have a widget that takes an RSS feed from Shizzow and makes it look awesome in a blog sidebar. Yes, yes, we know this isn’t hard to do, but would you rather have us spend an hour on a widget or spend an hour working on SMS support and m.shizzow.com?”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Got bookmarks on those social bookmarking site thingees? Now, you can import them into Iterasi

Rick Turoczy on September 8, 2008

[Full disclosure: Iterasi is a client of mine. I was aware of this feature under development, but I was not involved in this release. Quite frankly, it took me by surprise. But it makes sense that they’re pushing it while they’re down at the TechCrunch 50.]

IterasiBack when I discovered social bookmarking, the way I used the Web changed.

Okay. That may be a little hyperbolic, but there’s a lot of truth to that.

With social bookmarking, I was able to save site locations, tag them in a meaningful way, and get to them from any browser with an Internet connection.

It may not seem like a big deal now. But back then? It was “You mean my bookmarks aren’t beholden to this one browser on this one machine? Oh my. Very cool.”

But my bookmarks always suffered from a problem that I couldn’t solve with just a link.

And that was? Well, sometimes the page just changed. The story or the thing I thought was important or—worst of all—the cool design that I wanted to rip-off save for inspiration.

Screenshots were a workaround. But they were never really what I wanted.

What I wanted was to save the page.

Fast forward to today.

I’m sitting on a ton of bookmarks. I use social bookmarking sites like ma.gnolia and del.icio.us every day, if not several times a day. They have become so much a part of the way that I use the Web—and the way that I share and glean information from others—that social bookmarking would be an incredibly hard habit to break.

But I still worry about losing the page I actually wanted.

Well, now, that problem is solved thanks to still just barely Vancouver-based and ever-so-close to being Portland-based Iterasi and their new “import bookmarks” feature:

This feature imports bookmarks from Firefox, Internet Explorer, del.icio.us and/or from any app that exports to the standard bookmark export format. So you tell it where your bookmarks are, we import them and make permanent copies of the pages the bookmarks point to. No more lost articles. No more link rot. No more Error 404s. But we don’t just import them. Import Bookmarks is built on top of the iterasi Scheduler – released last month – so one-by-one you can choose to archive each bookmark once, every day, week or month, or not a all.

Now, granted, that’s not going to do much for the links that have already aged. But from now on? I can be sure that I’ll have exactly the page I wanted to save.

Saving bookmarked pages in Iterasi is great, but not using Iterasi is even better

As excited as I am about this feature to extend the use of Iterasi, there’s one thing I’m even more excited about: not having to use Iterasi.

Huh? Stick with me here.

I’ve developed a workflow for saving links and—as chagrin as I am to admit it—Iterasi isn’t part of that workflow.

It’s an afterthought. A habit I’m trying to force.

But with this feature? That problem is solved, too.

How?

Now that Iterasi can import bookmarks, I can work in my preferred social bookmarking tool and still have Iterasi saving the pages for me.

I can fly around willy nilly tagging things in del.icio.us or saving them to the Silicon Florist group on ma.gnolia. All the while, knowing that I can bring those over to Iterasi to make an archived copy.

And that’s pretty cool.

I can work where I’m comfortable working without losing the ability to save things I really want to save. And that makes this new import bookmarks feature very powerful indeed.

The feature, however, does come with a caveat:

If you have lots of bookmarks, it is best to schedule it to run when you are away from your computer. Think about it; we are feeding dozens and dozens of bookmarks down to the browser who is one-at-a-time loading, notarizing, and shipping each up to your account. In other words, we are torturing the poor browser. As you might expect, the browser can lock up under this kind of load. We find this situation to be unavoidable.

For more information and a short video on the new feature, see the Iterasi blog. Want to test drive it yourself? Download the latest version of Iterasi and then click on the “leaves” to access the feature.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 08

Rick Turoczy on September 8, 2008

 

Biff! Ka-Blam! Shizzow! | Our PDX Network

Betsy Richter writes “Shizzow has roared out of the Batcave and taken on a life of its own – it’s now the creation of four local PDX tech gurus, and it’s billed as a ‘location-based social web service that we built with the goal of helping you build quality relationships through face-to-face interaction.'”

ReadWriteTalk: Google Chrome

Tune in to this ReadWriteWeb-produced podcast to hear Portland’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, Vidoop’s Chris “Factoryjoe” Messina, and others discuss the new Web-browser darling Google Chrome.

CyborgCamp 2008

Our favorite cyborg anthropologist, Amber Case, and a number of other locals are hard at work on Cyborgcamp, “an unconference dedicated to exploring cyborg technology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy.” (Please don’t tell Josh Bancroft. This will give him nightmares for weeks.)

ExpressionEngine 2.0 Delayed

Rick Ellis writes “I apologize to all who have been anxiously awaiting 2.0, but I can assure you that we are as anxious to get 2.0 released as you are to get it. This has been a huge project for us, so we need to get it right. Rushing it to market before it’s ready would be irresponsible, so we ask that you give us a bit more time. We promise the wait will be worth it.”

Monitoring Dashboards: Why every company should have one at Fast Wonder Blog: Consulting, Online Communities, and Social Media

Dawn Foster writes “I cannot put enough emphasis on the importance of using monitoring dashboards to understand what people are saying about you, your industry, your competitors and more. The information obtained can be used as ideas for blog posts, marketing messages, competitive analysis, product feedback and much more.” Not only is she wicked smart, she’ll be on the OEN PubTalk panel this Wednesday.

Greasemonkey Scripts for Flickr

Aaron Hockley writes “I use Firefox as my browser for Flickr, primarily because I can use several Greasemonkey scripts which add usability features to the Flickr pages. If you’re not familiar with Greasemonkey, it’s a Firefox add-on which allows scripts to be run which alter the display of a web page.”

JPV PDX: Unpacking InVerge ’08

JP Voilleque writes “InVerge is in the books, and there were a lot of amazing presentations and takeaways – and an equal amount of space for critique and comment. Everyone’s a critic, of course, but in this case I think that my (thoroughly informal) polling of audience and presenters, the Twitterstream, and Eric’s chats with people at the W + K reception, all combine to give me some standing to make some points about the conference as a whole.”

Announcing Clicky for your iPhone | Clicky Blog

Via the Clicky blog “We released a sneak peak of our new iPhone interface on Friday to some of our users, but we are announcing it officially today. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you can point it to m.getclicky.com and use an interface designed specifically for the iPhone.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

ORBlogs 2.0: Where we stand

Rick Turoczy on September 8, 2008

Save ORBlogs Now!The outpouring of emotion, passion, and volunteerism that erupted last week—upon the news that ORBlogs was shutting down—has been nothing short of amazing. And I’m honored to have been part of it.

Thank you very, very much to everyone who read about the situation, commented, blogged, spoke, and wrote about the effort to save ORBlogs. The response was incredible. And please, to paraphrase Betsy Richter, don’t take the lack of communications as any sign that things aren’t happening.

Rest assured, things are moving.

And in an effort keep everyone in the loop and to keep the momentum going, I thought it would be wise to provide an update.

In short, John Metta of Hood River has taken up the gauntlet and is moving forward—at an accelerated clip—on figuring out how to bring an Oregon blog aggregator back online. He’s got a great plan, he’s working on creating a project site, and he’s established a mailing list to discuss ORBlogs 2.0. You can also follow John on Twitter as Mettadore.

John is in touch with Paul Bausch, ORBlogs creator. So hopefully, we’ll hear more soon.

And as I’ve mentioned before, while John has graciously offered to take the lead on this project—and has already been exceedingly active in that regard—it will still be important to figure out two things:

  1. How do we thank Paul for five years of supporting ORBlogs, our blogging historical landmark?
  2. How do we, as a community, support John as he works to transition to ORBlogs 2.0?

Getting involved and staying involved is the first step. I’m really looking forward to see where this goes.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 07

Rick Turoczy on September 7, 2008

Portland, Ore.-based Company Vidoop Moves Headquarters Along Oregon Trail…Literally – MarketWatch

“Portland presents a strong economic environment and talent pool for our company,” said Joel Norvell, co-founder, president and chief executive officer of Vidoop. “Our headquarters are now closer to our customers, partners and West coast engineering talent, which will further drive the development of our products and solutions.”

Welcome to Portland, Vidoop. Time to Party

Via eROI Days “You’d swear these guys were rockstars with all the attention they’ve been getting for moving their software company from Tulsa to Portland. But, the reality is that it truly is something special with their company, Vidoop.”

strange love episodes: betsy & ourpdx

Cami Kaos writes “Friday night we chatted with Betsy Richter of OurPDX about the site and oh so many other things.”

[Roll your sleeves up and] Get Dirty [working]. ORBlogs.org is born. | Positively Glorious!

John Metta writes “Can you believe anyone would be so presumptuous as to register ORBlogs.org and just assume that people would accept it? I did. It’s not a replacement for ORBlogs.com. It’s a place to discuss rebuilding ORBlogs.com. It’s a wiki. The idea is that we can get software specifications, organizational structure, and general feelings about other aspects of the site and the community. Make it what you will.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Get ready for busy week in the Portland Web and startup scene

Rick Turoczy on September 7, 2008

I’m happy to see that our beautiful summer weather continues to hang around. But from an event standpoint? It looks like summer’s over.

If this week’s event schedule is any indication, people are clearly ready to get back to business in the Portland Web and startup scene.

There’s a lot going on, so I thought it might be helpful to provide a round-up of what I’m tracking. And if I missed your event (it happens), please take a moment to comment below so that we can get it on folks’ calendars:

  • Monday at 6 PM, it’s Mobile love, Android style #5. This meetup is an informal opportunity to discuss all things android-related. The android space is heating up again. The HTC Dream phone received FCC certification in August and will be sold by T-Mobile by November if not earlier. 0.9 of the SDK was released with 1.0RC1 around the corner.
  • Tuesday at 9 AM, you’re invited to watch startups pitch at the FundingUniverse Portland LivePitch. The audience at LivePitch receives $100 of “fake money” to “invest” in their favorite entrepreneurs, with prizes awarded to both a panel and audience favorite. There will be 60 minutes of pitching, and 30 minutes for general networking.
  • Tuesday at 7 PM, the Portland Python User Group will be meeting, featuring Leo Soto, a Jython GSoC hacker, will be presenting his DjangoCon 2008 talk “Django on Jython.”
  • Wednesday at 5 PM, it’s the OEN PubTalk “Becoming socially responsible: Understanding your company’s role in the world of social media.” I’ll be hosting a panel featuring Josh Bancroft from Intel, Dawn Foster from Fast Wonder, and Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb. Rest assured, I’ll be letting the smart people talk while I nod and smile. Not interested in coughing up the dough to attend? I’ve got a few free passes that I’ll be giving away, so stay tuned.
  • Oregon Entrepreneur Network not your style? Sorry, you don’t get to take a night off, because there’s also the first Refresh Portland starting at 6:30 PM. Refresh Portland is a monthly talk (held every 2nd Wednesday) about design, front-end development, usability and web standards. Sound interesting? Check out the new Refresh Portland site.
  • I don’t see anything on Thursday, for obvious reasons. But if that changes, I’ll let you know. I knew it. Thanks to Joe Cohen for the tip that Calagator lists a Thursday event to include in this list: Thursday at 5 PM is the Luz Codesprint. Luz is a Ruby music visualization playground, aiming to create a simple, beautiful GUI for artists, and simple, beautiful code internally! This event is open to Everyone, from coders to artists to musicians, everyone’s input and contributions will be super useful.
  • Friday, a bunch of local venture capital types will be gathering out at the Intel Jones Farm campus in hopes of seeing a Tesla Roadster. I hear there may be a conference there too. It’s called the Silicon Forest Forum, an event that features entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and management executives who know what it takes to create and run successful ventures. For more information and a speak line-up, visit the Silicon Forest Forum.
  • The one Friday fixture that needs no reminder—Beer and Blog—starts at 4 PM at the Green Dragon. This week is a “topic” week. So stay tuned for the details on the speaker.
  • And beginning Friday evening and running through Saturday its From Side Project to Startup. I don’t have to tell you that launching a business into the wider world can be daunting or confusing, but it doesn’t have to be. If you learn from other people’s experiences. How? Join this hybrid scheduled and unconference event designed to take the entrepreneurial conversations that started at BarCamp Portland and Startupalooza to the next level. To take a peek at the complete agenda, visit From Side Project to Startup.

Whoof. That’s a lot of activity. Even for our usually hyperactive tech scene.

I’m going to be trying to make as many of these as I can—especially the ones where I’m lucky enough to be “on the agenda,” as they say.

Hopefully, I’ll see you at a few of them, too.

Oh, and one last thing. If you’re interested in keeping track of what’s happening in the Portland Web and startup scene, feel free to join the Silicon Florist group on Upcoming. That way, you’ll always be up-to-date on the latest and greatest events.

Can ORBlogs be saved? [Update] Yes, it can

Rick Turoczy on September 4, 2008

[UPDATE September 5, 2008]: Paul Bausch, the creator of ORBlogs was kind enough to respond to my email. His feeling is that while we may love the work that ORBlogs does—and how it works on the front-end—that the back-end was more spaghetti code than anything else.

As such, he suggests:

I’d be happy to dump a list of the active blogs, my db schema, or answer questions about how this or that works to get someone else up and running. But I really believe the code would do more damage than help—someone should make a new Oregon blogging directory of their own.

Great news! And, now, some work for us to do.

Thanks to those who have commented below offering their support. I will definitely be in contact with you on this project.

And if you’re interested in discussing this in person? Why not swing by Beer and Blog this evening at the Green Dragon where we’ll be discussing ORBlogs 2.0.

And I just got a tweet from John Metta that expressed a concern that this might lead to it becoming “PDXBlogs.” A valid concern, to be sure. But not the intent. While the bulk of the blogs currently indexed by ORBlogs are from Portland, it is my charge to help keep this discussion focused on an Oregon blog resource, by Oregon, for Oregon.

In fact, John may be our ORBlogs knight in shining armor.

Original Post

One of my primary inspirations for starting Silicon Florist was ORBlogs, a blog aggregator for Oregon-based blogs run by Paul Bausch.

It taught me that “thinking global and blogging local” could be a very viable way to communicate. And it taught me that—despite the ability to access information around the world—people are actually still quite interested in what their neighbors are doing in their own backyard. And saying. And writing.

And ORBlogs was the premiere source of that neighborly information. The stream of content that was “blogging in Oregon.”

But now that stream of information will be running dry. Sadly, it was revealed today that ORBlogs has decided to close its doors.

Paul writes:

I’m shutting ORblogs down now because the site continues to grow and the job of maintaining the site at the level I feel is necessary to keep it valuable has grown with it, putting it out of the bounds of a hobby. I wasn’t able to make ORblogs self-sustaining financially (let alone turn it into a job), and I can no longer devote the time to the site that it needs to grow. Blogging has changed significantly in five years, and blogging is no longer a hobby for many—it’s a job. Commercial blogging isn’t as interesting to me as the personal web and that factored into my decision as well.

After reading Paul’s news, I was kind of sitting dumbstruck. At a loss for words.

It really took the wind out of my sails. It was a complete punch in the stomach. For a number of us.

And no discredit to Paul. He bootstrapped this thing for 5 years. Five years! That’s like a millennium in internet time. I totally get it.

It’s sad news, to be sure.

Whoa, tiger. Who says ORBlogs has to close?

But then I quit moping.

Does it have to be? I mean, I was always taught the whole “if you love something, let it go” thing. But, quite frankly, I’m not willing to let this one go.

Paul built a resource that rallied—and completely codified—the Oregon blogging community. And that, my friends, is far too valuable to let slide by the wayside.

Because it’s actually bigger than Paul now. Too large for him to manage single handedly, for sure, but something that needs to continue. For the community. And for Oregon.

And if Jeff Martens, Aaron Hockley, Steve Woodward, Ryan Williams, Betsy Richter, Jack”Bojack” Bogdanski, Josh Bancroft, Doug Coleman, Gary Walter, Greg Hughes, Jim Mock, Curt Hopkins, Lizzy Caston, Rich Claussen, and Banana Lee Fishbones are any indication, I have the feeling I’m not alone in this opinion.

I’m not willing to let ORBlogs go softly into that good night. And I’m hoping you’ll join me and the folks above in finding a way to prevent that from happening.

Let’s save ORBlogs!

Are you in? Please comment below. And let’s make this happen.

We need to take the burden off of Paul, and manage to save this resource at the same time. I’m hoping you’ll join in the good fight and lend a hand.

[Update] J-P Voilleque has established a FriendFeed room to support the “Save ORBlogs!” campaign. Please join in!

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