.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for July 02

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.”

Acquisition, Lunch 2.0v4 Recap, souk is Next

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

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.”

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

[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

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.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for June 29

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.)”

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for June 28

SplashCast Owns Top Music Apps on MySpace

Via the SplashCast blog “SplashCast currently owns the top 12 of 20 most recently popular music applications on MySpace. Other than the Coldplay and LilWayne apps, SplashCast apps have more installs than any other artist-specific apps in the entire MySpace platform.”

Wi-Fi and the blues

Mike Rogoway writes “The Personal Telco Project, perhaps reinvigorated by the collapse of Portland’s citywide Wi-Fi project, is more active than I’ve seen it in months at breaking out new wireless initiatives.”

Twitter Status (well, the fake one anyways)

Scott Kveton pointed out the fake Twitter status blog. If you’re a Twitter user, you’ll get the joke. Unfortunately.

Mugasha Blog

Mugasha, a product of the recent Portland Startup Weekend, continues to make strides. I just noticed that they have officially launched their blog.

MetroSEEQ: Requesting feedback on information architecture

Via the MetroSEEQ blog “After nearly 3 weeks of launching metroseeq, I’ve received significant input on site usability. Therefore, I’ve decided to redesign with the objective to help users to find nearby businesses that have promotions quickly. This came as a natural evolution of the site as it was first designed to show off the pageless progressive search algorithm, but more people seems to be more interested in finding deals so thats’ what I’ll deliver and improve upon.”

An Open Letter to Mr. Panic & Mr. MacroMates

Kyle Meyer writes “You have so much going for you; you upload my files after every compulsive save, automatically. You organize my mess of websites into a visual metaphor that works impeccably well. You even house all the documentation I could ever need—right in that one gorgeous app. You’re even from my hometown of Portland, Oregon! I live right down the street from you, in fact. And yet, there’s a fundamental flaw that keeps me from purchasing and using Coda. I need Ctrl+Shift+W, Mr Panic. I want to love you, but I need your help.”

Free to Migrate

Chris Messina of Vidoop shares his thoughts on BarCamp, coworking, DiSo and open source in this presentation from Reboot 10.

Portland Web 2.0 startups get some love from Oregon Business Magazine

Oregon Business Magazine features Toonlet et alOne of the reasons I started Silicon Florist was to use my marketing powers for good, by casting the spotlight on “Portland Web 2.0 startups” and individuals who have been developing really, really cool things here in the Silicon Forest. But who, through sheer lack of time, may not have the opportunity or wherewithal to promote themselves as much as they would like.

I’m happy to report that a number of those companies just got a much brighter spotlight shone on them, thanks to Oregon Business Magazine‘s cover story this month “10 Coolest Tech Startups You’ve Never Heard Of.”

Among the Silicon Florist alumni featured are:

Gone Raw and Lumeno.us—two sites I haven’t yet had the chance to cover except via mentions in the Portland Startup Index—made it as well.

Congratulations to all of those featured for stepping on to a much larger stage! I’ll look forward to continuing to cover your progress and highlighting your wins.

Photo credit: Michael G. Halle

Portland Lunch 2.0 roadmap

Portland Lunch 2.0, admittedly a continually evolving work-in-progress, has quickly taken a firm hold—and sparked some interesting conversations—in the Portland tech community.

And like developing any product, even though the Portland Lunch 2.0 team (read Jake Kuramoto) hasn’t launched the latest version of their product—that version will launch on Monday—the team is already hard at work on the next version.

So, I thought it might be helpful to step into a product manager role, ever so briefly. Just so you can get the milestones and release schedule on your calendar.

Let’s take a glance at the product roadmap:

  • Portland Lunch 2.0 SP4 will be released Monday, June 30, at Wieden + Kennedy
    “On Monday June 30th, the PDX Tech/Tweeple community is cordially invited to join 50-100 W+K employees for a “blind date meets grade school birthday party” ad/tech extravaganza. It’s going to be a fun, it’s going to be quirky, and it’s going to rock RockBand style (literally).”
  • Portland Lunch 2.0 SP5 will be released Wednesday, July 16, at souk
    “The Portland Lunch 2.0 saga continues at flex term office space provider souk, once again in Old Town on July 16, 2008. We won’t stop until we have Lunch 2.0 at every, single business in Old Town.”
  • Portland Lunch 2.0 SP6 will be released…?

For more information or to RSVP, visit Upcoming for the Portland Lunch 2.0 SP4 and Portland Lunch 2.0 SP5 RSVP lists. If you’re interested in hosting SP6 or a later release, please ping Jake Kuramoto.

Universal Edit Button: Ward Cunningham, Mark Dilley, and Peter Kaminski

Like the little orange RSS chiclet, the Universal Edit Buttonlaunched last week—is, in my opinion, one of the most promising promotional tools for raising the visibility of wikis and other editable sites.

But in order for it to work, people need to understand exactly what it is.

To help further that understanding, Justin Kistner sat down with Ward Cunningham and Mark Dilley of AboutUs and Peter Kaminski of SocialText to discuss the impact and potential of the UEB.

“I heard about the UEB when it came out, and I thought it was really cool,” said Kistner. “Then I started talking to some other folks about it, and managed to get Ward, who devised the wiki concept, Mark, who had been coordinating the UEB launch activities, and Pete, who had been integral to the project, all on the phone.”

Kistner’s Skype conversation is available below. (Audio quality is a little rough at times, but the content more than makes up for it. And don’t be fooled at the beginning… You didn’t just initiate a Skype call.)

Just click the little gray arrow to listen.

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