Category: Links

Via Wired “Whatever hurdles OpenID has to clear to become a widely-adopted de facto standard, its blueprint for success lies at the bottom of millions of blog posts.”

Mike Rogoway writes “Here’s another week of forward looking developments in the Silicon Forest.”

Via the Attensa blog “Marshall Kirkpatrick has stirred things up for RSS followers with his post R.I.P Enterprise RSS on Read Write Web. As I write this, there have been 70 comments covering a range of viewpoints. Marshall’s post is one of several recent perspectives relating to what is commonly called ‘enterprise RSS.’ The crux of Marshall’s observation is that RSS has not been widely adopted by large organizations despite expectations a couple of years ago that RSS would be come a key enterprise tool.”

Via the AboutUs blog “RCC is about openness and inclusion, collaboration and community, creativity and flow and is open to anyone of any skill set that’s interested in wiki, open collaboration, public participation and free culture. You’re welcome to come for any or all of the three days. Notable wiki enthusiasts as well as other OpenTechnology and OpenCulture people will be in attendance.”

Several of us have read Marshall’s How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_build_a_social_media_cheat_sheet.php where he integrates data from many different sources and uses various plumbing tools to pull it all together. Marshall is a master of tools like Yahoo Pipes and Dapper, and it will be great to have him presenting at our Jan 27th meeting.

David Abramowski writes “Many entrepreneurs find themselves in a strange situation where they have built amazing technology, have all the right marketing materials and then come product launch day nobody pays attention. This can be rather demoralizing and a blow that many young start-ups will find hard to overcome. There is no one size fits all solution, but having a wide network of people who know you and your team will go a long way to breaking the ice. Not only will your network give you support and encouragement, you may also find much needed assistance in the strangest of places.”

Via the OpenID blog “2008 was an awesome year for OpenID where the community created significant momentum moving toward mainstream adoption. No, not every site on the web is using OpenID nor does every consumer know what OpenID does, but last year alone the number of sites that accept OpenID for sign in more than tripled. Today, there are over thirty-thousand publicly accessible sites supporting OpenID for sign in and well over half a billion OpenID enabled accounts.”

Via the brand new Portland WordPress User Group site “Tonight we held our first meeting. Attendance was around 40 people from a variety of backgrounds and skill levels that ranged from one attendee who doesn’t yet have a blog but is interested all the way up through seasoned developers. Here’s a summary of some decisions and directions that were discussed.”

Via Day On “Day On connects nonprofit organizations that need advice and assistance with volunteers who are ready to help. Our first project is Geeks Day On, a day of service during MLK Day, Monday, January 19, 2009 where geeks will offer free technology and Internet communications advice and assistance to nonprofit organizations.”

Via SXSW “The next SXSW Interactive mixer will be held at the Fez Ballroom in Portland (316 SW 11th at Burnside) on January 19th from 6:00pm – 8:00pm. RSVP to interpress@sxsw.com now to ensure your spot on the guest list. Porter Novelli, the official PR agency of SXSW Interactive, is the co-sponsor of these networking parties.”

Via Chris Anderson “CouchDB’s been seeing some interest growth lately, and we’ve been ‘on the cusp’ of an 0.9 release for a while. 0.9 is still ‘soon,’ but for those who don’t want to wait for a release, you’ll need to run against CouchDB trunk if you want to play with the latest codes.”

Mike Rogoway writes “I happened to be walking to a coffee with top iPhone developer Raven Zachary this afternoon when the news broke about Steve Jobs taking a leave from Apple.”

Cami Kaos writes “That’s right everyone, Masterbacon is almost upon us. Join the bacon loving masses this Saturday, 1 PM at Davis Street Tavern for a bacon contest. There will be a grand prize winner and a runner up plus several special awards. But don’t show up empty handed, all who attend are expected to participate in some fashion.”

Via Girl In Your Shirt “CitySpeek is a NEW micro-messaging service that allows you to stay in contact with friends, co-workers, teammates and customers. You can create public and private groups and upload photos.”

Alexander Howard writes “There you go. The top 15 Twitter acronyms, along with a few extra ones in the explanations. If you have others that you think should be included, add ‘em to the comments. @verso & @ahockley maintain a whimsical wiki called the ‘Twictionary‘ where you can find more coinages.”

Via the Beer and Blog, um, blog “Last Saturday’s End Bloglessness workshops were blogtastic, were they not? A huge success, I’d say. Many, many people arrived ready to be workshopped into shape. One couple built their wedding Web site, and several business blogs went up as well. You can be sure there will be more valiant strides towards the End of Bloglessness. Oh, yes. I’m wondering, though, how many blogs actually DID go up. Please leave a comment and let us know?”

Cami Kaos writes “On Saturday Cube Space played host to an awesome event called End Bloglessness. It was put on by the good people at Beer & Blog and was staffed by some wonderful volunteers, there are too many for me to name (especially since I didn’t make note of who all was there, sorry… my bad). “

Marshallk Kirkpatrick writes “Long time innovator Marc Canter has made a proposal for a system to let users integrate all their social networks from around the web into one central dashboard. He calls it the DiSO Dashboard.”

Via The 451 Group “In the end, open source vendors that are willing and able to continue building, strengthening and investing in their communities — and we do see vendors catering to community users and even monetizing them via per-incident support, documentation and other services — are the ones who will benefit most when things begin turning around.”

Via the ExpressionEngine blog “Of course, the real reason you are reading this is for 2.0 news. At this point I’m obligated to gently remind you we promised an update the second week of January, which is next week. Specifically the next 2.0 update will be 1 week from today on Friday January 16th and a second update on friday January 30th (or thereabouts). In any case, there will be at least two 2.0 updates from us this month to keep everybody in the loop.”

Travel Oregon and Travel Portland are in the top 10. As it should be.

Via Calagator “Now that the beta version of the API has been released, you can finally build those Shizzow mobile apps and mashups you’ve been scheming about for the last couple of months. We wanted to make ourselves available to help you get off to a running start on your new Shizzow-based apps. Meet us at the Green Dragon on Thursday, January 15th at 5:00pm, and we can discuss the API as well as some of the architecture principles behind people, places and shouts on Shizzow.”

Cami Kaos writes “Friday night we recorded our first episode of the new year with guest Audrey Eschright. We returned to the format we’ve come to know and love, 30 minute tech episode (Calagator, Open Source Bridge and much more) followed by good ol’ afterhours where my mind was clearly on food.”

Via Cooking Up a Story “Cooking Up a Story (CUpS) is growing, and we are in the midst of some major changes that we hope you will like. One of the changes we are building toward involves bringing on regular contributors; people of passion, knowledge, and expertise within the food and sustainability movement to share their unique perspectives, and information. The operative word is “share”; not a one-way communication, but a catalyst for rich interaction and discovery to benefit all of us.”

Via The 451 Group “I am also inclined to agree with The Silent Penguin’s prediction that ‘companies offering open source products will realize that without a community – that actually loves and is enthusiastic about the software – they are nothing.'”

Via StepChange Group “On Friday we released this ‘Survivor IQ’ Widget for Ben Sherwood’s upcoming book “The Survivors Club”. There’s a ton of buzz about the book’s release on Jan 26th, and Ben has landed himself in Parade Magazine and Good Morning America.”

Aaron Hockley writes “WordCamp: Las Vegas was this past weekend and from what I saw, it was a great success. I’m a bit humbled that organizer John Hawkins had me present along with a rockstar cast of speakers including Chris Brogan, Jim Kukral, Liz Strauss, and Mr. WordPress himself, Matt Mullenweg. I had a blast. A big thanks to John and all of the other folks that made it happen.”

Via ReadWriteWeb “Communities have been a staple of the web 2.0 era and over the past few years a lot of enterprise community products have come onto the market. The Forrester report, authored by Jeremiah Owyang, notes that even in this down economy there is still demand for online community platforms – because they are a cost-effective way for companies to market their products and reduce support costs.”

Via Beer and Blog “This weekend’s workshop, End Bloglessness, was featured on Live @7PM. KGW is Portland’s NBC affiliate and has had an increasing connection with the local tech scene. Again, much thanks to them for the coverage and hope that it helps bring more blogless Portlanders to CubeSpace this Saturday!”

Melissa Lion writes “This two-hour class is an introduction for crafting narrative for the internet from idea to execution, with some glamorous grammar thrown in. Writers will learn to use the elements of narrative for various social media sites, gain confidence and tap into latent creativity necessary to generate words daily. This class is geared toward people wanting to improve their web presence, draw an engaged audience and create compelling content.”

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick shares the recipe for finding and following the leading thinkers on any topic. Follow this series of steps and you’ll soon have access to the experts on practically anything you can imagine.

Aaron Hockley writes “On Saturday at 10:45am (PST) I’ll be presenting Beyond Beer and Blog: How Social Media Lit Up the Portland Tech Scene at WordCamp: Las Vegas. I’ll be speaking about the Portland tech communities and how we’re using social media to drive all sorts of good things both online and offline. The event is being streamed on Ustream, so feel free to tune and listen.”

Josh Bancroft writes “I was listening to episode #370 of the This American Life podcast (which is one of my favorite podcasts), on the topic “Ruining It For The Rest Of Us”. At the beginning of the show, Ira was talking with a researcher who had done studies on the effect of “bad apple” behavior within teams. He looked at what effect someone who is a Jerk (insults other people, critical without offering a better option, etc.), a Slacker (doesn’t do any work, doesn’t seem to care, distracted), or Depressed (certain that ‘this will never work’, doomed to failure, etc.) has on the rest of the people on the team.”

Via WebVisions “Now in its second year, the Webvisionary Awards recognizes outstanding work in categories that range from web apps to community sites. The entries are judged by leading visionaries in design, technology, advertising and business strategy.”

Via Ignite Bend “Ignite Bend 1 has sold out! That’s right, all of our (free) advance tickets have been reserved. Now there are only two ways to try to get in the doors and enjoy Ignite Bend 1 live, and in person”

InsYght Consulting has launched a research project called “The PDX Gen-Y Project.” The purpose of the undertaking is to catalog or capture the life styles of Portland Oregon Gen Yers in 2009. The hope is that by creating a place for Generation Y in PDX to really express themselves or to witness their innovation and creativity, that both clients and other generations may have an insight into Gen-Y.

Via OurPDX “So we compared our calendars, checked sports schedules, ruled out the Obama inauguration day, steered clear of all of those Wednesday events, and finally settled on Tuesday, January 13th.”

Via the ORBlogs Blog “Well, we’re all back to work now that the holiday madness has ended, and that means that development is heating up again on ORBlogs. This year, Santa dressed up as Bill Jackson and left a development server under our tree. The server is at http://haxx.orblogs.org.”

Via Cooking Up A Story “We received a nice mention in the print edition of the Oregonian newspaper Food Day section yesterday. Thank you Kathleen Bauer, and the Oregonian! Below is an image from their online edition.”

Jason Harris writes “Ignite Portland has been a huge success and I’ve been very happy to watch the Ignite community really watch their program turn in to a success. This is why I was so happy to see that Bend, Oregon is going to start their own. That’s right: Announcing Ignite Bend!”

Via MacApper “Of all the game genres that have found their home on the iPhone, few have stood out as remarkably as tower defense. SubAtomic Studios, the developers behind one of the platforms leading tower defense games Fieldrunners, have just announced their second expansion-style for the award-winning title.”

Darius Monsef writes “Somewhere along the way we forget that failing is OK. We attach a negative association with failure and stop looking at it as a building block or a lesson. We only see it is a final result and lose perspective on the overall success of our ideas. The lost perspective is that failure acknowledges a flaw and gives you the opportunity to correct that flaw. If you’ve given yourself no room to correct it or have simply not allowed yourself to have any flaws… then you can never succeed.”

David Recordon writes “I’ve been up in Portland the past two weeks for the holidays which coincidentally is where Earth Class Mail is headquartered. A few days, ago their community manager @UncleNate shot me a message asking if I’d be interested in checking out their facility. So yesterday – yes they work on Saturdays too – I drove over to Beaverton to get a tour of their warehouse.”

Via The 451 Group “The figures for publicly disclosed venture capital funding in open source vendors during Q4 and FY08 are in and while the numbers themselves provide a mixed picture, the statistics don’t necessarily tell the full story.”

Via OPB “Social networks on the Internet like Facebook and Myspace have been around for years. But more recently, a new trend has emerged in the social networking world. People are creating smaller, theme-specific, and geographically defined social networks. From Portland, Elliot Ward reports.”

Via the Beer and Blog mothership “Last week we announced the addition of Michelle to the Portland Chapter as the Chapter Provost. This week we’re proud to announce the addition of two more people to Beer and Blog: Kelly Guimont as Mistress of Organizer Affairs, and Christine Kistner in charge of Development. Please also welcome our two newest chapters: St. Louis and Eugene.”

Mike Rogoway writes “I attended Clearwire’s formal WiMAX launch this morning at a South Waterfront hotel. They pulled out all the stops, with elaborate demos (on the Portland Streetcar, in pedicabs, in Smart cars, etc.) and a fancy A/V presentation more suited for Moscone Center.”

Via the AboutUs blog “Yesterday wiki enthusiast Stewart Mader commented on his weblog about a guest editorial on zdnet.com by SocialText’s Scott Schnaars which highlights an idea gaining groundswell in online communities as well as the AboutUs office – referring to those utilizing social networking tools (including wikis, blogs, etc) as people instead of users. The idea is more than a shift in terminology, but reflects the ever-changing nature of the web, from single “users” to vast communities sharing and building things together.”

Michael Richardson writes “Look, I love OAuth. It’s amazing. You should be using it if you aren’t. But it doesn’t really help against phishing attacks. The attack against an OAuth-enabled service is the same as an attack against an OpenID provider is the same as a normal phishing attack.”

Mike Rogoway writes “While reporting Sunday’s article on Clearwire, I spent more time trying out the company’s Portland mobile WiMAX service at the end of this week from eight locations around the metro area.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes “Will 2009 be the big year for corporate transparency, for a global conversation – perhaps for bargain basement online marketing tactics instead of old-school huge commercial campaigns?”

Dawn Foster writes “While many people use Yahoo Pipes to filter RSS feeds, Pipes can also be used to modify RSS feeds to work better for your purposes. In this example, we will add the author name to the beginning of the title to make it easier to see the author without opening the item in your rss reader. I recommend watching the Introduction to Yahoo Pipes: 2 minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo if you haven’t already, since we’re going use the basic pipe developed in that demo using fetch feed and sort modules, but without the filter module.”