Category: Links

Kevin Spence writes “PortlandSmallBusiness will be a year old in August. I’m trying to figure out how to make the time working on this site worthwhile. There are aspects of this site that I enjoy but it has cut into my livelihood over the past year. I decided early on that this site would be distinct from my primary business (not a blog promoting that business) and should stand on its own. I’ve enjoyed some success growing the site but I’m not sure how to be make the site worthwhile to users and myself.”

Eric Nelson writes “Us Intrigees have hopped on the OpenID bandwagon. For me personally, becoming involved in the Portland community and companies like Vidoop and JanRain have really opened my eyes to the prospects and work going on with this piece of technology. Most of the conversations I hear about OpenID revolve around usability, including our own Nathan Bell’s thoughts on putting OpenID in the browser. However, I myself am not a tech guy, and see a bigger issue with adoption that needs to be addressed by those of us in the believer category, making it relevant to the majority of users.”

David Lowe-Rogstad writes “The first in a series of conversations with the Portland creative community to help each other understand how we can be more inclusive, collaborative and effective. We have been inspired by Portland’s creative technology community (Legion of Tech and Silicon Florist to name a few) to help facilitate an environment where we share ideas and create a place that draws the best talent and the best clients to Portland to get the best creative work possible.”

From Web Worker Daily “We’ve looked with some skepticism on OpenID in the past. Nevertheless, as more sites accept OpenID for login, it’s worth knowing about advances in the field. One recent change is the introduction of Emailtoid (that’s email-to-id, not some sort of android), which allows you to use your email address anywhere that you could use an OpenID.”

The Oregon Entrepreneurs Network has selected thirteen “Rogues and Renegades” (aka entrepreneurs) for the 15th Annual OEN Tom Holce Awards for Entrepreneurial Achievement. Finalists and award winners will be recognized during the event at the Oregon Convention Center on September 18, 2008. Congrats to all of the nominees!

Corvida writes “Last week I had the pleasure of flying out to Portland for Ignite Portland 3. I had a fabulous time and met some really awesomesauce people including one of my biggest idols Marshall Kirkpatrick, fellow Grand Effect Network member and now team writer for ReadWriteWeb, Frederic of The Last Podcast, and a host of other people that I’ll mention in another post that’s all about the trip to Portland. What I’m going to talk about in this post is what occurred at the after party hosted by Strands at Imbibe. “

Jason Kincaid writes “Over 16 months after first declaring its support for the OpenID authentication platform, Microsoft has finally implemented it for the first time, allowing for OpenID logins on its Health Vault medical site. Unfortunately, Health Vault will only support authentication from two OpenID providers: Trustbearer and Verisign. Whatever happened to the Open in OpenID?” Concerns are also raised about security, and Vidoop is mentioned as one of the companies improving the security.

Relive Ignite Portland 3, or see it for the first time, through the eye of Aaron Hockley.

Jason Grigsby writes “I’m speaking today at the Velocity Conference in San Francisco. Back in 2003 when John and I spent weeks working on performance, we never thought performance would reach the point where a whole conference would be focused on it. It’s an amazing thing.”

Di-Ann Eisnor writes “So, where does Platial/Frappr go from here? That’s what we’re thinking about these days. Maybe you are thinking about where you go now as well. In case you are, I thought I’d share a few ideas from The Art Of Travel that are helping me rediscover the original spark of our work.”

Chris Messina writes “The other night at Beer and Blog in Portland, fellow Vidooper Michael T Richardson announced and launched a new service that I’m both excited and a little apprehensive about.”

Bram Pitoyo writes “But to tell you the truth, I’m having a hard time deciding between what got me more excited about Ignite Portland: the wonderful presentation lineup, or the fact that I get to meet and connect with so many Twitter friends in real life?”

Andres writes “The tweets that I find most valuable are those in which someone either a) shares a URL to something worth checking out (e.g., geospatial news, a blog post, practical content, or videos that clearly show why John McCain is a complete dumbass), b) asks a technical or theoretical question that engages others, c) provides a collaborative discourse, or d) ‘re-tweets’ a valuable tweet by someone that I may not be following.”

In his usual brilliance, Louis Gray does a great job of capturing many of the reasons that I started Silicon Florist. He writes “Sometimes, when I talk to people about why I blog, and what I set out to accomplish through covering what I do, and engaging where I do, I say that I am trying to help shape the Web, and blogging as a whole, to be what I want it to be – a better community with some strong standards for engagement, ownership, news gathering and innovation.”

I honestly don’t even know where to begin here. But it mentions Vidoop, so I’m including it. Beyond that, it has some redeeming value as one of the most brilliant examples of absolute puffery and non-sequitur logic I’ve seen in some time. Of course, there’s always the possibility that it’s simply an ingeniously crafted trap, too.

Sam Churchill writes “I’m sorry to see it go. I’m using MetroFi’s ‘free’ service in Portland right now, and posting this story using it. The wireless service has been good enough for me not to abandon it. Many of the early glitches seemed to have been resolved (for me at least).”

Greg Hughes writes “Jeff Martens had an idea, one I had been thinking similarly about – but he vocalized it first (or ‘tweeterized it’ might be more accurate). I jumped right in and created a new LinkedIn group called ‘PDX Tech,’ a networking group for people in the Portland, Oregon general area who work in what we will loosely define as the technology marketplace. “

FOSSCoach is a series of events designed to share and improve the essential skills required to participate in collaborative, free and open online projects like Firefox® and Wikipedia. The first FOSSCoach session will be held from July 23-25 in Portland, Oregon, USA as a part of OSCON 2008. Participation is free.

Jake Kuramoto writes “Commenting on FriendFeed opens the conversation normally reserved to your blog readers to others in the extended network. However, the conversation becomes fragmented as some people comment on FriendFeed and others comment directly on the blog post. A few months ago, Glenn Slaven (thanks!) wrote a WordPress plugin to unite the comments in a single view, and I’ve finally got it installed and running here on our little blog. “

From InformationWeek “As expected, municipal Wi-Fi network provider MetroFi is switching off its free Wi-Fi service in Portland, as well as smaller projects in California and Illinois. The company ceased expansion of its existing networks last fall and said earlier this year that they would be shut down if no buyers emerged. Portland wireless chief Logan Kleier, who was instrumental in getting the MetroFi deal signed and underway, responded in surprisingly philosophical fashion to the project’s end. “

I would have commented on this post, but I had to login to do so. Buh dum bah. Oh settle down. I’m only kidding. Glad to see Brett (dieselboi) moving on to greener pastures. I’m looking forward to seeing this new effort flourish. I’m also looking forward to providing more details on that new home, next week.

Justin Kistner writes “My goal was to move my blogging activities to JustinKistner.com at the same time that I started on at Voce, which was 90 days ago. Instead, I got stuck. Originally I got stuck because I wanted to roll out a new design. Then I got stuck because I wanted to move my content from Metafluence over to JustinKistner.com. Then, I just got burned out.”

Nate Westheimer of BricaBox is going to share his mistakes with you. He writes “Whatever it is, I’m going to take a tremendous amount of experience, lessons, wisdom, etc with me. And, over the next few weeks, I intend on blogging diligently about every aspect of this failure. I’ve taken extensive mental notes on these lessons, and I look forward to sharing them with you. I think this process will help me institutionalize these lessons for myself, and of course I hope you can learn something from them as well.”

Love Ignite Portland? Then I bet you’ll love Back Fence PDX, too. Melissa Lion writes “Check out a few videos we shot at the June 19th event. We have fancier, professional video coming from the fabulous Brian Belefant, but here’s what we shot with a flip camera [Editor: Geek cred for Flip reference]. Enjoy!”

Justin Kistner (@metafluence and @beerandblog), who was kind enough to donate the theme design work for Silicon Florist and Ignite Portland, is up for a VH1 award for another blog he designed: The Roxy in LA. How cool is that? Your vote could help him win and give him and Portland some pretty cool cred.

The Online Marketing Summit will be passing through Portland on August 5. Interested in attending? SEMpdx can get you in with a 20% discount. Just use the code “IMAPORTLAND.”

Want some insight on where the Legion of Tech is up to? They do a great job of providing access to meeting minutes for your edification. (Minutes trail a month due to approval cycles.)

From the Strands blog “Good news for the mobile enthusiasts out there: MyStrands is now available on Nokia’s WidSets platform, bringing a new way to discover music and see what your friends are listening to, right on your cellphone. In the two weeks MyStrands WidSet has been available, more than 65,000 users have downloaded it!”

One of the things I love about Jive is how open they are with their creative process. Here’s another entry from Michael Sigler on their latest endeavor.

And Oklahoma is clearly not happy. Their loss is our gain.

Dave Hersh from Jive Software wins the E&Y Regional Young Entrepreneur Award and goes on to compete at a national level.

From the Reddit blog “Today we’re excited to announce that we’re open sourcing reddit…. When we say ‘open-source’ we mean specifically that the code behind reddit is available to the public for download, and we’re inviting the public to submit code to help improve the site.” Why yes, I am trying to plant ideas in your head. Why should The Oregonian have the only reddit site for local focus? I’m just saying. I mean, Michael Richardson and his cronies know a thing or two about Python, don’t they?

I found this post to be an interesting indicator of the transition of the Silicon Forest, from gigantic lumbering (pun intended) hardware companies to small nimble application companies. I don’t see that many IPOs in our future. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Kevin Spence writes “The most liked portion of the site are the blogs and the biz directory. Every registered user can create an entry for their business in the directory and can blog about their business. The traffic to the blogs has been up over the past month as more users have started blogging.”

GadgetTrak talks with the KATU folks.

Peat Bakke writes “Than Ignite Portland is the event for you, and tomorrow is the night to get your rear to the Bagdad Theater. The doors open at 5:30, but get there early — last time we hit capacity and had to turn away a few hundred people, and this time around the early bird tickets were all nabbed within 24 hours.”

Michael Weinberg writes “While I appreciate that in the aftermath of a large failure, such as MetroFi’s Portland network, there is a natural tendency to focus on the failure and to be pessimistic about the future, we feel that the Oregonian and the City are overlooking the great potential that still exists in the hands and minds of individual Portlanders willing to get involved and unwire Portland anyway. Consider this…”

Dawn Foster writes “Hiring a community manager can be tricky for companies, especially ones filling this position for the first time. Last week, someone told me they wanted to hire a community manager and asked me if I could put together a few resources to help get them started. I thought it would be more useful if I turned my email to him into a blog post so others could benefit from it.”

Gia Lyons writes “I haven’t blogged about how ridiculously extensible Jive Clearspace is. Or, how active the global Clearspace development community is. No need. Just check out the Clearspace Plugin Catalog, along with the discussions and ratings for each plugin to get an idea. Tell your geek friends about it.”

Tom Turnbull writes “Here is a good overview of what we are doing here at SplashCast filmed during our recent trip to NYC for the Advertising 2.0 conference.”

We recently realized that we’ve outgrown the Jive breakroom, and we’ve evolved away from the BarCamp Meetup name. So, we’ve renamed this monthly event to the Legion of Tech Happy Hour, and the event will now be held outside on the back patio of Plan B.

Dennis Howlett writes “I didn’t last as long as Sandy and was more scathing. Microsoft completely misread the show and ended up getting its clock cleaned, first by IBM and later by Jive Software. Much of the criticism was leveled in the Twitterverse.”