Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for January 29

Via The Oregonian “To pay homage to their favorite pork product and win golden piggy trophies, 32 competitors showed up with tin-foiled pans of their beloved ‘meat candy’ dishes, ready to impress, boast and barter.”

Via the Linux Foundation “LinuxCon is a new annual technical conference that will provide an unmatched collaboration and education space for all matters Linux. LinuxCon will bring together the best and brightest that the Linux community has to offer, including core developers, administrators, end users, community managers and industry experts. In being the conference for ‘all matters Linux,’ LinuxCon will be informative and educational for a wide range of attendees. We will not only bring together all of the best technical talent but the decision makers and industry experts who are involved in the Linux community.”

Mike Rogoway covers the positive news coming out of the Silicon Forest this week.

John Metta writes “The line-up for Ignite Portland #5 is in, and yours truly is on the freight train headed straight for Public Humiliation, USA. I think this must be some kind of payback or revenge for laughing so hard when Cami Kaos went on about ‘her bluff being called.’ There I was, sitting with A.J. and Jon laughing it up. ‘Ha!’ I said, ‘She sent an idea as a joke and totally got called on it!’ Now here I am with waves of nausea spreading over me. Why? Because payback’s a bitch.”

Wende Morgaine writes “Are you worried about technology and information literacy in K12 and higher ed? If you are, I say, let’s get together. Let’s brainstorm. Let’s come up with one idea, or 100 ideas. And let’s implement something. Portland is a tech haven and heaven. Its an open source mecca. And we have the most engaged tech community (possibly in the world.) Let’s implement something great and create a model for school revitalization that will be copied in cities the nation over. We live in Portland. From our transportation to our city government to our tech community we create the kind of innovations that is studied and copied all the time. Yes we can. I am thinking we should meet each other at Ignite5 and plan our first brainstorming meeting in March 2009.”

Portland’s FiveEdge Media (John Weiss of Refresh Portland fame) gets adopted by innerecho “FiveEdge Media and Innerecho were both founded at about the same time with the same values: we believed in small teams, personal relationships, and the power of great experience design. This was not merely a coincidence. We the founders had actually begun a friendship five years prior.”

Amber Case writes “Are you into tech? Do you want to meet other tech types? Are you tired of eating lunch with the same people? Well you can meet a bevy of interesting people just like you if you attend a Lunch 2.0 event. Here in Portland, 100-150 Nerds flock to a local tech company to eat, greet, get clients, get hired, find employees, and exchange memes. Basically, it rocks—-nerd-style.”

Tim Sears writes “Our personal web footprint really is no longer just what we blog about, but is really a collection of our interactions across various social media. I can see this being the future of blogs, in that they are no longer blogs at all, but rather centralized portals to the content that person contributes across the web. The first natural question to this is how do you manage the firehose of content that we each contribute to social media every day? If people wanted to read every tweet you make, wouldn’t they just follow you on Twitter? This is where tags and hashtags come into play, in that we find meaning and value in content we contribute through the metadata we and others provide with it. It’s machine-readable, so it’s easy to process.”

Via Strands “We are happy to announce that Strands is partnering with the Spanish start-up 11870.com to offer the best personalized recommendations of services and places to their users. 11870.com, the European equivalent to Yelp, is used for people to save, share and keep track of the places and services they like around the world through reviews, pictures and videos.”

Aaron Hockley writes “With the fifth incarnation of Ignite Portland coming up in a few weeks, one issue surrounded in a bit of mystery is the process used to select the presenters. With far more entries than speakers (Ignite Portland 5 had over 80 submissions with less than 20 chosen to speak), many people wonder why they weren’t chosen or how the field is narrowed.”

Abraham Hyatt writes “Late last month, when the whole Gov. Blagojevich indictment situation was threatening to taint Barack Obama’s transition, two writers at the Politico put together a list of “five rules of scandal response” that the president-to-be had intentionally, or unintentionally, imposed on his staff. Rule No. 1 was simple: ‘Be transparent, to an extent.’ Sam Adams didn’t get that memo. As the opening days of the Breedlove scandal unfolded, Adams hid. He hid from the press, from his critics and from his city. And it’s too bad, because whether you support the mayor or not, he had an incredible communications tool at his fingertips: his Twitter account.”