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Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) on making it happen

Rick Turoczy on July 8, 2008

Sometimes, you just need a little push. Just a little one.

I mean, you know what you want to do it. You think you’re capable of doing it. It’s that you might not yet know that you’re capable of doing it—but you think you are. And, regardless of what “it” is, you could just use that little push. That little pearl of wisdom to get you off and running.

Enter Gary Vaynerchuk. And Legion of Talk, the new series of smart people telling us about their experience from Portland’s Legion of Tech.

So if you’re sitting there, feeling like you need that little push? Watch this.

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Need more? Watch parts two, three, and four.

Vaynerchuk leads—and inspires—by example

Vaynerchuk (“vay…ner…CHUK”) is known to millions as that wine guy from Wine Library TV and thousands of Twitter types as @garyvee. And he’s truly a Web 2.0 and social media Cinderella story.

But his story isn’t about the media, it’s about good old-fashioned following your passion and succeeding. With a little bit of tech thrown in for good measure.

(For those of you not familiar with Gary’s story, he managed to take his love of meeting people, added his interest in online video, and combined them in a way that increased his wine business tenfold in a few short years.)

And the public is taking notice. Public with a big “P,” like traditional media outlets. Like Nightline. Like Ellen. Like Conan. And that has catapulted Gary—in a relatively short time—from being atop the tech community to becoming a household word.

In fact, he’s easily joined the ranks of the Web 2.0 crossover stars.

“I am blown away,” said Vaynerchuk. “That I have been able to sign a six-figure book deal, have been offered over 100 television deals… [been] paid ungodly money to speak and consult… All because I sat and talked about what I knew.”

And while that’s impressive, it’s not half as impressive as the energy and enthusiasm Gary brings to the table when he shares how he’s done what he’s done, how he works to stay in touch with his community, and how he thinks that you, too, can make it happen.

Long story short, Gary leads by example.

Portland, Garyvee, Garyvee, Portland

And last week, having Gary in Portland to share that story with us was a memorable experience, to say the least. Having him hang out with us for another hour or two outside of Wieden + Kennedy, answering questions and sharing ideas—while ultrahip Blue Hour barflies shoved their way past—was unforgettable.

And sure, I may seem a little star struck. I may be a fawning a bit. But just because I’m gushing, doesn’t mean I’m wrong. You see, I’m not the only one who thought it was great.

  • Betsy Richter: Gary Vee brought the thunder
    “More like an old-time ‘come to Jesus’ stomp your feet and belieeeeve! prayer revival session – only peppered with blasphemies and exhortations of the most-definitely-not religious type, especially to the tech and/or marketing types in the crowd.”
  • Dawn Foster: Gary Vaynerchuk at Legion of Talk
    “If you aren’t loving what you do right now, you need to embrace your DNA figure out what you want and do it now. Figure out what you want to accomplish and work backwards from the goal.”
  • Bram Pitoyo: Legion of Talk – Gary Vaynerchuk on New Media, Personal Branding, and Promotion
    “This goes without saying, but the only way to be great is to be patient. Garyvee spoke about the fact that the facet of work that is both unglamorous and unknown to most people is the [thousands] of emails he answer[s]… everyday.”
  • Beantime: The Plight of the Passionate
    “Vaynerchuk’s take-away was this: if you are passionate about something, you can take that passion, and with time and attention spent on branding and promotion, turn that passion into ‘crazy’ success. ‘Crazy’ success, here I come….”

With Gary, Legion of Talk definitely started with the thunder. So who’s going to keep that thunder rolling? Funny you should ask. Next up for Legion of Talk is Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and the second “tourist” in space. If you’re interested in attending, please RSVP on Upcoming or register for your ticket.

Community: The Secret Sauce of a Successful Internet Startup

Rick Turoczy on July 8, 2008

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[Editor: Like many of you, I’ve long been a fan of Portland-based COLOURlovers, a site that fosters conversations around colors and palettes. We know about it, and have likely become fans, because of its vibrant community—a community that is the direct result of careful tending by its founder, Darius A. Monsef IV. And now, we’re lucky enough to have Darius sharing some of his insights on developing one of the most sought after features of today’s Web 2.0 sites, “community.”]

[HTML1]So many internet startups are trying to launch with “community” as the core of their business, but they seem to be flying blind as to how you go about growing a solid community. I’ve been asked to consult for a number of these startups. And while this could be a bad financial decision for my consulting business, I’d rather see more successful communities than fewer. So here are the basics of what you need to know and the rest you’ll just have to learn—albeit painfully—as you do it.

I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of building two great communities, one in the real world and one in the digital. The lessons learned in each worlds has meaning in the other and each can serve as a useful example to those who are working on nurturing their own communities.

My Community Director Resume

After packing up my bags and traveling without a specific destination to Thailand in the wake of the biggest natural disaster in modern times… I found myself in the middle of a micro-community of travelers who showed up to help with the Tsunami recovery work. Like any web community, people were from everywhere in the world and came from all sorts of backgrounds.

For five months I lived with this community. First as a volunteer, then as a project leader and eventually co-leading the group. From that experience we grew a non-profit that has since created volunteer centers to aid in disaster relief in six countries around world with the help of a community of 3,000+ volunteers.

Visit www.HODR.org to learn more and perhaps you’ll join us in a disaster zone sometime soon.

Before I packed up my bags and prepared for a place I’d never been to, in a disaster zone I couldn’t begin to guess what it would be like… I created a simple web service that allowed people to name colors and helped other people to rate and review those colors. Responding to early feedback I grew the concept into allowing people to put together combinations of up to 5 colors to also share.

I was the first member, but more than 100,000 have since joined. We’ve been nominated for Best Community Site in the Webby Awards two years in a row and have also received recognition for the quality of our community from several other periodicals and awards organizations.

Visit www.COLOURlovers.com to learn more or share your thoughts on whether silver satin is better than New Medicines.

Now that you have some insight into my experience, let me share some of the things I’ve learned.

Lessons for Building Quality, Thriving Communities

It could be the community in your five-person workplace, your blog readership or even a massive web community… but the lessons still apply. Here they are:

It Is and Has Always Been

One of the most important lessons that came from my time in Thailand was how in order to grow a solid community, you needed to be in the middle of it. The man who originally set-up the volunteer center to which we all arrived was a local who lived on the other side of the island. Since he was a family man, he made the trip to and from the volunteer center back to his house every night and morning. I can understand why he would, considering he had a nice comfortable home only 30 min away… but what happened in his absence almost tore the whole thing apart.

In the early days of a community’s growth, things change very rapidly. Because the group itself has only existed a short time and the early participants often cycle through in short spurts of time… there is no institutional memory. To the person who arrived this morning, we’ve always had a rule about eating lunch at 11:30… nevermind that we only made that rule up the night before. But to that new volunteer, who will in one week be an old timer to many more new people… it has always been so.

Within a week of showing up and seeing first hand the constant transition of ideas, cultures and people in our volunteer community… there was growing dissent about the so-called leader of our group who was never around and nobody knew what exactly he did. To them, he did nothing. Since they woke up in the middle of it all, went to work all day in it and laid down to sleep in the middle of it… this guy had no idea about anything.

Having since been the leader of a volunteer group, there are many things that go on above the ground that are not glamorous or all that fun… but are needed in order for the community to continue growing. For a leader, it is a constant balance of getting his head above the crowd to deal with long-term growth things while at the same time spending time shoulder-to-shoulder with the community.

LessonLesson: You must grow within your community, especially in the early days. Later, leaders will arise who can handle some of the day-to-day things and welcome new members. But in those first few days, weeks and months… you are the welcoming committee, janitor, house mom, judge, jury and banninator. Leading from the outside will only breed dissent and resentment among the early adopters… and without their early support your community will die before it really has the chance to grow.

Set an Open Border Policy with Your Neighbors

Immigration is a complicated and touchy subject in the real world, but online you need an open door policy from the beginning… even recruiting your first members from your related blogs, forums and communities.

When I launched COLOURlovers I was part of a thriving Flash development community at the time (www.Kirupa.com) and I shared my site with some members. These initial Kirupians served as the first dual-citizenship immigrants to my new community. Not all fully converted to COLOURlovers and few gave up Kirupa for COLOURlovers, but since the sites were related—but not mutually exclusive—we were able to get things rolling with their support without negatively affecting the Kirupa community.

These early members were providing ideas to enhance the site and voicing their critical feedback about what worked and what didn’t. I took all of their words to heart and worked feverishly to create and launch enhancements that would grow the community.

LessonLesson: Leverage your involvement in related communities to first seed your community with participants. You can’t force these people to join… just extend an invitation to people who might have an interest in what you’re building and be ready to respond to their feedback.

Cities Grow from Towns and Towns from Villages

Don’t worry so much about jumping right into being a massive community. You need to take the time to be a village and figure out how everything works before you get into issues like mass transit, pollution and housing shortages. You also need to foster leaders within your village who will eventually become your city leaders.

When I went to Thailand, I handed COLOURlovers to my early members and pretty much left them unattended for the five months. Sometimes, blessings come in strange packages. For when I returned, I found a lot of interest had been built while I was gone…

But unfortunately, the community wasn’t able to rapidly grow unattended. In fact, I made a pretty huge mistake when I was building the database for the site: I set the primary key for the users table to be a small int… meaning the database broke once 255 people had registered and no more could sign up. (We were probably one of the first web 2.0 sites to launch a limited user-base private beta site… although fully unintentionally.)

LessonLesson: Hey kids! Don’t focus so much on being rich, respected doctors someday… enjoy being a kid and take to heart the lessons you learn from the bumps and scratches you get exploring your surroundings and figuring out just what your body is capable of doing.

And as your community continues to grow. Problems will arise. And, at times, even your most vocal proponent may think that…

Your Community… Honestly Sucks

This is very key feedback that you need to be willing to hear. I consistently hear bad ideas for sites where people are continually talking about how people will love the service and flock to it… but who have no early adopters. “No worries, we know the idea is great and as soon as we get it out to the masses we’ll be flooded with visitors.” More likely flooded in the sense of your first floor being under water and no ability to use your kitchen to prepare food.

LessonLesson: You need early adopters and they may not like what you’re doing. Be willing to hear this feedback and be flexible in developing your community in ways you might not have imagined.

How do you get the feedback you need? The community is waiting to give it to you. And that’s why…

Engaging the Community in Decision Making is a Must

Ebay = Ebooo!!!! When eBay made a major change to their feedback system recently, some of their sellers revolted in protest. This decision had a major impact on sellers and a lot felt it unfairly hurt them. I honestly believe there are hundreds of ways to skin a cat (not sure why anyone would) and if you bring your members into the decision making process you could end up with a better solution then you could have come up with on your own.

LessonLesson: You need to at least let them feel like their feedback is being heard. Not every idea must be put into affect and you can’t let your members totally direct what happens with your community, but you’ll have a much stronger adoption rate for new changes if the members feel like they were a part of the decision making process.

But for all the brilliant feedback of your most vocal users, don’t let the many suffer at the hands of the few. Always bear in mind that…

No One Member is More Important than the Whole

This is something I’ve experienced with COLOURlovers, but it is a lesson I learned with my non-profit community. As they grow, communities need leaders to step-up and take on extra responsibilities. In almost all situations, this will naturally happen. You begin to rely on these leaders so much, that sometimes you think the community wouldn’t survive without them.

In one of my volunteer communities, we had a small group of leaders who were growing exhausted from the hard work and irritable with new arrivals. They felt since they had been around longer that they were entitled to more than others. I struggled for a while to try and keep this group happy and spent considerable energy dealing with issues that were being created by these leaders. It was stressful because I thought that if I asked the leaders to leave I would have no ability to send my work crews out the next day. Without my leaders everything would crumble and I was sacrificing the happiness of many for the comfort of a few.

It got to a non-pass point with this small group of leaders and they left. What immediately happened in the chaos of this change? People who had been around a little while and some fairly new people stepped up and assumed the leadership roles. I could have asked those troublesome leaders to leave ages before, and the organism that is the community would have replaced the roles on their own.

LessonLesson: There is always a number 2 or number 3 who is willing and eager to take on a bigger role. Your most active and valuable members will leave and a new batch will replace them.

The system, however, is not perfect. And it’s out of control. So sometimes, despite your best efforts, the whole thing will go sideways. Know that, as with most successful communities, someday you will be facing…

Pitchforks, Lanterns and an Angry Mob

If you let problems continue to grow a few disgruntled members will become an growing mob. If you don’t respond to this mob and address their issues personally you risk the mob becoming the masses… and if the masses revolt, you’ll end up with your head on a stick in the front lawn and a burning village.

If you’ve seen the animated film A Bug’s Life, you’ll have watched this lesson unfold in the form of grasshoppers and ants. The ants spend all year doing the work for the grasshoppers to gather a feast of food.

[Spoiler Alert] What the ants learn in the end is that they outnumber the grasshoppers 50 to 1 and if they unite they can run the grasshoppers out of town and no longer need to gather food for them.

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A web world example of this was when HD-DVD stories started getting removed from the social media site Digg.com. Members felt their words were being moderated by Kevin Rose and the Digg staff and they didn’t take to kindly to the moderation. What erupted were hundreds if not thousands of new submissions, comments and digs for the DVD key posts.

Having been through some similar experiences as a community director I felt simultaneously sorry for Kevin and highly amused watching the shenanigans unfold. I imagined how chaotic things must have been at Digg… The image that comes to mind is the scene at the end of The Matrix series where the millions of sentinels come flowing into the bay where the humans can’t shoot them down fast enough…

digg revolutions

Kevin eventually bowed to his community and submitted a blog post on the Digg blog with the title being the hacked key string.

LessonLesson: Stay in tune with your community and be transparent with them. If Kevin would have personally responded to why they were removing the HD-DVD keys posts sooner, he might have avoided the giant headache that was a major member revolt.

But for all of the consensus-building and listening to user input, it is important to remember that there must be balance. For, despite our best efforts…

True Democracy Doesn’t Work on the Web

At least not yet. Perhaps it is that with the enhanced ability to communicate more we haven’t enhanced the way people communicate. We have the same miscommunication problems we have in real life online… but they’re hyper sped up and 10x bigger. We also have way to much negative crap flying around the web and it is hard to stay in a constructive place when trolls, spammers and others pains in the ass keep dropping by to stir things up.

Your community needs to know there is a leader and they need to know you’re reachable and engaged. You don’t have to be the most active member but you need to be around. In the early days of your community you have to be everywhere as your community culture is totally you… but as more leaders emerge and the numbers grow, the culture will become partially directed by the community.

You need to be accessible to every member of your community. They need to know where to find you and to know that if they really need you… that you’ll be there. Maybe you only respond to emails or through in site messages… but I’d go so far as to put up your IM names and phone number. For three years any member of my site could have picked up the phone and called me on my cell if they had something to tell me. (The number on the site now goes to voicemail… but I’ll still call you back if you leave me a message.)

LessonLesson: Especially in the early days members of your community need to feel like they know you and that you are reachable. They also need to know that somebody at the end of the day will make a decision in a tough situation.

Sounds difficult doesn’t it? Well, it is. It takes a great deal of effort. And that immediately leads a number of folks to consider buying their way out of a difficult situation. This, too, is a mistake, because…

Buying a Community is Expensive and Will FAIL

You can pay to grow your community, but if you substitute the organic nature of feedback and enhancement that comes from the early adopter phase… you risk not learning the early lessons that will keep your community alive later on. Also, don’t confuse the passion and genuine interest of early adopters—who tend to join organically—for the participation of people who were externally motivated to join in.

Communities, like other organisms, are constantly rebuilding themselves. New cells are built and old cells die off… your early members will leave and new ones will join up. If your community does not organically grow at all and your numbers are growing only because of your paid efforts… you have no ability to continue the growth without spending more money. This is a dangerous position to be in.

LessonLesson: Exhaust your ability to share your community with possible early adopters for free before you start paying for traffic. You could pay to get 10x more visitors to your community early on, but feedback from people who organically joined and are contributing ideas and suggestions are 100x more valuable.

Hire No Consultants. Pay No Community Directors.

It is extremely important that you are in the trenches with your community when it is first getting started. I see startups all the time spending valuable resources to hire consultants to build their community and early buzz… but what they end up with is only a shot in the arm with no long term abilities to grow without paying for more help.

The pay to grow initially is a lot like the drug user who uses to be happy. As they use drugs they need more and more to continue to feel good. If you pay to generate growth, you’ll end up needing to spend more and more to create greater and greater results. Learn to be happy without drugs and you remain in total control of your happiness.

LessonLesson: If you spend the late and long hours in the early days of your community, pounding the keys, networking, promoting and sharing your community you’ll learn very valuable skills that will help your community grow in the future without needing to pay for outside services. Those outside services can be useful down the road when you use them to fill gaps in your growth strategies… and having learned the lessons early on you’ll better know how to direct an outside consultant to help you.

Final Lesson

You can’t buy lessons. Part of what makes you remember the important lessons is how much it hurts to learn them. Don’t be afraid to get a few bumps and bruises. Good luck and grow well.

Darius A Monsef IV, Internet AstronautDarius is an Internet Astronaut and the creator and editor of COLOURlovers.com. You can find him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Portland Web Innovators’ Demolicious features five new apps

Rick Turoczy on July 7, 2008

Last week marked the debut of Portland Web Innovators “Demolicious,” an opportunity for folks to provide a quick demo of some of the new apps and side projects on which they’ve been working.

The event was well attended and has been extremely well covered by Amber Case, Doug Coleman, organizer Adam DuVander, Dawn Foster, and Bram Pitoyo.

So I’m going to do what I do best and steal round-up their content:

Matt King demoed the Interface Content Management Framework (Pre-release)

  • Matt King: “It’s a content management system for content management systems.”
  • Amber Case: “Watching King make a website is like watching a chef make something, put it in the oven, pause the camera, and take it out again, completely finished. Except there’s no baking time.”
  • Doug Coleman: “For someone like myself that is interested in building content managed sites, this is cool. It should make my life easier. I will look for it when it is released.”
  • Dawn Foster: “It’s a pretty slick DIY, highly customizable CMS.”

Don Park demoed Do-it-yourself Friendfeed: An XFN spider. (Early release)

  • Amber Case: “He’s working on solving the problem that everyone faces when they join social networks and have to re-enter all of their social connections.”
  • Adam DuVander: “Try your Twitter page and see where it takes you.”
  • Dawn Foster: “The spider is pretty cool, and I’m going to have to take a closer look at this. It also reminded me to finish adding my rel=”me” tags; I added a couple a while ago, but was distracted by something shiny and never finished adding them.”

Lev Tsypin demoed Green Renter (Available)

I’ve had the opportunity to cover Green Renter before. It’s a service that helps people find green housing options in the Portland area.

  • Amber Case: “The founders also own greenowner.com and are looking into develop that, but feel it is more important to really nail down a niche before going on to develop other things.”
  • Doug Coleman: “Once again, Portlanders are leading the way in the whole ‘green’ movement.”
  • Dawn Foster: “The goal is to be the resource for sustainable buildings starting in Portland, but expanding out to other areas.”

Kevin Chen demoed Metroseeq (Available)

Metroseeq automatically find deals and coupons from local restaurants. The Wheel of Meals alone makes it worth a visit. And the recalibrating search algorithm makes is pretty cool, too.

  • Amber Case: “The ability for users to be able to find information from both offline and online sources effectively is the difference between Citysearch and Yelp.”
  • Doug Coleman: “Any product that grew from a college student’s free food association is alright in my book.”

Mounir Shita demoed GoLife Mobile (Available)

GoLife Mobile allows developers to build apps for use on any Java-enabled mobile handset using GoLife’s framework.

  • Amber Case: “It’s as semantic as a roving a meeting maker that negotiates meetups across dynamic time and space, as if the entire geography were a mobile, roaming office.”
  • Doug Coleman: “Their built-in advertising generator automatically generates revenue for your applications and objects and shares it with you.”
  • Dawn Foster: “It’s an object-oriented development framework with a revenue share built in to give developers a way to monetize their applications.”

And the most important part?

“As always, I am blown away by the things that are happening in the Portland Web Community,” wrote Amber Case. “Something amazing is happening in Portland. I’ve never seen anything like it. Everyone I meet is always working on something so interesting, and has an positive and innovative mindset on their shoulders. I’m eager to see what’s next.”

Doug Coleman echoes her response. “There are so many exciting things happening in Portland,” he writes. “I am happy to be part of such a thriving, creative and nurturing scene. I am looking forward to the next event put on by PDX Web Innovators.”

It’s like I always say. Everyone here has at least one side project; a side project that—anywhere else—would be a fully funded full-time job.

Cool stuff happening, to be sure. And that’s why I eagerly await the next Demolicious.

Slow news week? Not really

Rick Turoczy on July 3, 2008

Given the dearth of posts this week, you’d think nothing had happened in Portland, at all. Or that I simply wasn’t paying attention.

Luckily, neither is true.

As you’ve likely noticed, I’ve been heavy on the link round-ups, this week. And I’ve been holding back some of the major news.

Why? Well, I know folks are taking time off, enjoying the Portland weather, and *gasp* actually getting out from in front of their machines.

The stories will wait. And I want you to around to read them. I’m funny that way. So, they’ll be here next week, when you’re back at your machine and looking for the latest and greatest.

What kind of stories? Well I’m glad you asked.

  • Did you know that the inimitable Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV was in town, this week? That’s right. And he helped the Legion of Tech launch their first Legion of Talk. That’s news. And, hopefully, when I run the write-up next week, we’ll also have video. Because, honestly, you don’t really get the full effect of Gary unless you get the full effect of Gary.
  • And Portland Web Innovators held their fist Demolicious event, featuring five local developers and their current projects. Not only were all of the projects cool, there’s one in particular that I found so compelling that I thought it deserved a write-up of its own. Which one? You’ll just have to wait and see.
  • Silicon Florist acquired Portland Lunch 2.0, so all of the news and notes about Portland Lunch 2.0 will appear here, from now on. Including the write-up on the latest lunch at Wieden+Kennedy and the next lunch at Souk.
  • As always, there are a couple of top secret stories that may (or may not) break next week. That’s exciting, isn’t it?
  • Oh and that’s not all, my friends. I’m sure there’s some news that I haven’t even learned about yet. Like why were Gary V and Loic Le Meur both in Portland at the same time? Inquiring minds, inquiring minds.

So, take some time off. Relax. Celebrate your independence.

And may you and yours have a safe an happy Fourth of July.

I’m looking forward to posting more next week.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for July 02

Rick Turoczy on July 2, 2008

I Might Leave Twitter for Identi.ca

Aaron Hockley writes “I’m ready to move to Identi.ca. The big thing missing for me is… you. A lot of the PDX scene has joined (and added me… if you haven’t, I’m aaron on Identi.ca) but it seems folks are still posting mainly on Twitter. Join me in making the move.” [Editor: And I’m over there, too, as turoczy.]

Identi.ca Reply Sniffer at Fast Wonder Blog

Dawn Foster writes “It looks like a few of us are starting to play with Identi.ca. It’s just like Twitter, but without the community and without any real tools to support it 🙂 Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to track @replies. I’ve put together a quick Yahoo pipe that will catch at least some of your replies. This is highly experimental (pre-alpha stage maybe). Welcome to the Identi.ca Reply Sniffer Pipe.”

Why I’m leaving Forrester

Where will Charlene Li be during her last days with Forrester? Right here in Portland at the Internet Strategy Forum Summit. Charlene writes “My last day with Forrester will be July 18th, a day that I look forward to with anticipation for the adventures that lay ahead, but also with sadness for the colleagues that I’ll leave behind. I’ll leave my good-byes until then, but please know that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the conversation that we’ve had on this blog over the past almost-four years.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Acquisition, Lunch 2.0v4 Recap, souk is Next

Rick Turoczy on July 2, 2008

lunch20.jpgRick has kindly agreed to let me do Lunch 2.0 stuff here on the Florist. This makes a lot of sense, since this is the place to get the lowdown on technology companies and the tech scene here in Portland and nearby.

Oh, and the people who go to these lunches actually read and comment here, big plus.

So, my first post-acquisition content is the recap of Monday’s Lunch 2.0v4, held at Wieden+Kennedy, and a reminder that the next iteration is coming up soon at souk.

W+K Recap
img_0257.jpgThis Lunch 2.0 was a little different than usual, which ruffled a few feathers, at least initially. Everyone has since hugged and sung Kumbaya.

Gaia Brown, the mastermind behind the W+K format, put together an ice-breaker activity that paired attendees with W+K people. From what I observed, people took the advance packets in varying degrees of seriousness, but the conversation flowed freely, regardless.

The lunch was held in the atrium at W+K in the Pearl, and I’d guess the attendance was probably more than 100, but less than 200. Yeah, I’m not a very good estimator. The raffle of swag went over well; gift baskets from several W+K clients were given away, and the final prize was several tickets to Inverge.

After chatting as pairs for a bit and listening to the raffle, people got up and milled around and talked, others played Rockband.

Next up, souk
souk.jpgAs Rick previously mentioned, the next Lunch 2.0 will be held at souk in Old Town on July 16, so pretty soon. RVSP on Upcoming if you plan to make it, and yes, we’re returning to the old format, with no work and no packets, just free grub and good company.

Old Town has been very good to Lunch 2.0, thanks to eROI and Vidoop and now souk. I guess this begs the question, are you a real company if you’re in Old Town and haven’t hosted a Lunch 2.0?

Your thoughts?
After four Lunch 2.0s here in Portland, I’m pretty happy with the progress. The event is dominated by Tweeters, which (sadly) is the primary means of promotion, yet another reason why I wanted to move here to the Florist.

So, fellow Florists, what do you think of Lunch 2.0 so far? Sound off in comments and stay tuned for more Lunch 2.0 action here on the Florist.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for July 01

Rick Turoczy on July 1, 2008

Office Snapshots: Vidoop Office

From the Office Snapshots blog “Hidden behind an unassuming green door in Portland, Oregon is Vidoop’s office: a nice, open, well-lit office space. Awesomely, the office also contains two of my favorite workplace features: red brick walls and plenty of food. Now if only they had a dog, they’d deserve all five stars.”

No Beer and Blog this Friday in observance of Independence Day

Beer and Blog takes the 4th off. “Please take this 4th of July to spend with your friends and family. You can still enjoy beer and maybe even blog, but you should def watch something blow up. It’s the American way.”

Gary Vaynerchuk at Legion of Talk

Dawn Foster is a consummate note-taker and queen of the wrap-up. Here’s her take on Gary Vaynerchuk’s talk on July 1 at W+K, “Tonight is the first in what will hopefully be a series of guest speakers for Legion of Talk, a Legion of Tech. event. Gary V. is in town for his book tour at Powells, and we were lucky enough to snag him to talk to us about how he has used social media to grow his family wine business.”

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Iterasi gets more social with RSS feeds, widgets, and public pages

Rick Turoczy on July 1, 2008

[Editor: Full disclosure, Iterasi is a client of mine, but I was not involved in this announcement.]

http://www.iterasi.net/user/siliconflorist?format=widgetN1Vancouver-based Iterasi, the service that allows you to create your own personal Wayback Machine, took a huge step forward in making its network of users more social, today, when they announced three major additions to their offering: public pages, RSS feeds, and widgets.

Josh Lowensohn at Webware broke the news:

Web page archiving tool Iterasi is getting a small but important update Tuesday morning. Users can now share their stream of archived pages with others as an RSS feed, letting anyone view their saved items either directly in their browser or in a feed-capturing tool like Google Reader or desktop e-mail clients.

In my opinion, these seemingly innocuous changes actually mark a decided change in Iterasi’s stance. With these features, Iterasi moves from being an interesting personal service toward becoming a valuable social service. And by embracing features that allow me to distribute my saved pages to a much, much wider audience, they gain the benefit of more people encountering their service.

I have found a great deal of value in being able to save pages for myself. But now that I have the option of sharing pages with folks? It opens a whole new realm of use for me. Like a more typical social bookmarking service.

Fringe benefits abound. With RSS feeds and widgets, Iterasi just increased its exposure exponentially. I’ve added the widget to this post and I’ll likely add it to the blog (once the Mac version is out and I can use the service regularly.) And, I’m adding the RSS feed to my lifestreaming services, like FriendFeed and Strands.

What’s more, by launching public pages, Iterasi has the potential to rapidly increase its online footprint for search engines and the like—like any other public-facing social network service.

Now, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. As with any new feature on a BETA product, there are some rough spots and some nice-to-haves that didn’t make the cut. There are some areas over which I would like to have control, like skinning the widget and dealing with the publishing function.

But as I’ve mentioned, I see this release as less about “features” and more about “vision.” It’s clear to me that Iterasi is taking a much more social stance. And that’s a very good thing.

To test drive the product, visit Iterasi. To see the public page in action or to get the widget code, please visit the Silicon Florist page on Iterasi.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for June 30

Rick Turoczy on June 30, 2008

mapdango Is Now Available as a Google Gadget

From the Cartosoft blog “We are happy to announce that mapdango can now be integrated with iGoogle and other Google web pages as a Google Gadget.”

Gone Raw in Oregon Business

Via Needmore Notes “OregonBusiness magazine features Gone Raw in their July cover story: 10 Coolest Tech Startups You’ve Never Heard Of. Take a look and Meet some of the coolest startups running around Silicon Forest today. You’ll find us there, along with a handy drink-finding site (so useful in these hot, hot days in Portland), among others.”

The Mercury’s New Website: A User’s Guide!

From the Portland Mercury “Hallelujah, and whoop-dee-doo! The Mercury has a brand new sexified website, with all sorts of new toys for YOU to enjoy! Surf around and check out these great new features…”

Portland Links

Carolynn Duncan writes “Did I mention how much I like Portland? Well, maybe it’s partly because things are hopping in the startup community, and I had the opportunity to meet with some great people this week, including…”

CouchEngine – CouchDB with Action Servers

Chris Anderson writes “I’ve been working (along with some friends from the CouchDB-PDX group) to enhance CouchDB with the ability to run functions at query time, and return arbitrary JSON or text. You could use this to put a little server smarts into an otherwise mostly client-based application…. Everything is extremely beta right now (I just finished writing code 5 minutes ago) and the API’s could change a little as we write some applications using the development framework Greg’s cooking up.”

Silicon Florist: Jobs in the Silicon Forest

It’s looking like this experiment has run its course. Glad I tried it, but it’s clearly not providing much in the way of that amorphous “value.” Please don’t post any additional gigs. I’ll remove it once this gig times out.

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Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for June 29

Rick Turoczy on June 29, 2008

Find the free WiFi here…!

Betsy Richter writes “But if I need to find a WiFi node that also has pie? Is open 24 hours? Located near the place I’m going to be tonight? Or has a way to send my search via text message? I’m going to be using WiFiPDX from now on.”

Twitter track hack: Where there’s a will, there’s a workaround

From the hypocritical blog (my personal blog) “There’s only one problem: Twitter track has been broken for quite some time. And it’s showing absolutely no sign of being repaired anytime soon. But, I’ve come up with a workaround that’s helping me compensate for the lack of track. So I thought I’d share the hack. (I’m a poet.)”

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