Not sure why I didn’t think of this before, but thanks Paul Stamatiou for reminding me of this lovely tool.
Here is a slideshow of my Flickr pictures from Gnomedex 2007.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
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Author: Randy Stewart
Ok, so it was a smidge warm inside. Why I thought wearing a long sleaved shirt was a good idea, I’ll never know.
I try very hard to not be one of those people who incessantly compare this to that, saying it was better when blah blah blah. I remember lamenting at Ignite 3 that the draconian format had lost it’s edge as people got more accustomed to doing 5 minute presentations with auto advancing slides.
Last night, I got over it.
Wow… what a great event last night. So many good speakers, so many good ideas. Thanks again Brady (and Bre, wherever you may be) for a great night out.
I took a lot of photos last night but didn’t take many notes. I’ll collect what I’ve found below.
- Fluvial has a behind the scenes video
- Great summaries of the talks from Brett Nordquist here.
- Nanotech speaker Deepak Singh offers his comments
Video from Bryan Zug and PowerPoints of the talks will be up on the Ignite Blog soon.
Oh ya, and Noonhat still scares the shit out of me.
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Gnomedex 2007
I’m a wee bit excited about this year’s Gnomedex. Not as excited as that man —> ,
but excited nevertheless.
Last year was my first and my good pal Jeremy Zawodny (who is mysteriously absent from this list) was kind enough to show me around and introduce me to folks. I met a lot of really great people and am still enjoying the benefits of new friendships and business relationships.
Anyway, I had a great time and am pleased to be going again this year. I hope to meet many of you there.
Who’s coming?
If you are going to the show and what to get a sense of who is going to be there, I’ve created a series of pages on Netvibes so that you can go peruse the works of the people that will be attending. I used the OPML file provided on the Eventbrite page and imported and sorted all the attendees by last name.
Now this was the best way I could figure out how to represent such a large number of people, if you’ve got a better solution, respond or fire me an email to randy@boxbe.com. If I don’t know you, you’ll have to add yourself to my buddy list for email, but it’s pretty easy.
Clicking on the buttons below will create a Netvibes page to view the blogs of the attendees whose last names are with those letters. Netvibes wisely would not let me add all the feeds onto one page.
Lee and Sashi LeFever, they share, so I don’t have to write.
Seriously, I was just having this conversation with my friend Jay yesterday, who tells me he doesn’t get social bookmarking.
Jay – here ya go.
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iPhoto ’08 – screenshots and commentary
So, I’m an Apple fanboy who rushed out on the first day to get iLife & iWork ’08. Here are a few pix and comments of the new features (you can get a lot more here).
I don’t have .Mac anymore, but check out the gallery in action (Thanks Chris Messina)
Install
No doubt this would happen.
Update already?
Bought it today? Don’t bother registering.
No RSS autodetect, but you can still subscribe to photos
New Stuff
Photocasting is dead.
New organization of projects and slideshows
New icons
Events
Events are auto-created when you import a folder. Picks up the name, too.
As I suspected, Events are created auto-magically by date. Let’s call this an update of Rolls.
Least favorite item
iPhoto Library – now a big ass binary file that can become corrupt. Remember to back up your work, folks.
Looks good so far. Let’s see how it holds up over the next few days.
Free beer, nerds and a new lens to try out, what’s not to like. Chris Pirillo (of Lockergnome, Gnomedex and TechTV fame) helped organize a get together of over 150 Seattle area bloggers for a little sit down with the “old media” types at KOMO 4.
Great conversation with lots of “aren’t you famous on the internet?” and “stop twittering this.” Oh, will the wacky hijinks never cease?
Seriously, thanks to KOMO for putting on the event and getting me out of the house. Speaking of which, favorite shirt of the night? Clearly the “Stay at Home Blogger” t-shirt Jen Zug was sporting. Now, where is that photo?
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Under construction
God, it was everything in my power not to put an animated gif up. Instead, I leave you with a relic of the late 1990s.
I’m working on a redesign of Stewtopia based on Dean J Robinson’s Redoable template. Good stuff, but it’s taking a while to get everything up and running.
I hope to have this finished by early next week… I hope to actually blog again before then.
God, it was everything in my power not to put an animated gif up. Instead, I leave you with a relic of the late 1990s.
I’m working on a redesign of Stewtopia based on Dean J Robinson’s Redoable template. Good stuff, but it’s taking a while to get everything up and running.
I hope to have this finished by early next week… I hope to actually blog again before then.
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Wordcamp 2007
Great meetup of the WordPress faithful this year in San Francisco.
More comments later, cause man am I tired.
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Harry Potter mania grips San Francisco
So, I hadn’t really intended to go to a Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows launch party. I’m actually one book behind and my wife was getting the book (pre-ordered months ago) from the company that should not be named today.
But, after a great late dinner at Siam Lotus, I remembered that Booksmith was open for the event and I couldn’t quite go to bed yet. We wandered over at 11pm and the party had already started.
You gotta give it to Booksmith. This is why stores like theirs are still around despite deep discounts and giant booksellers like Barnes and Noble. To quote Samuel Jackson, personality goes a long way.
I suspect they might be around once Amazon has put Borders and Barnes and Noble out of business.
Check out more pix in my Flickr album.
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Moo Stickers are shipping
Those crazy Brits have done it again.
This morning, Moo’s latest product, Moo Stickers went live. They are promoting the stickers with free shipping for the rest of the month.
If you’re not familiar with Moo, they’re the guys that take your Flickr pix (or Fotolog, Bebo, Vox, etc) and make them into half size business cards. They’re fun, small and a great conversation piece when giving out business cards.
Yay! Stickers
I’ve got a special place in my heart for stickers these days. If you’ve got kids, you know what I’m talking about. I’m not sure what the fascination my little girl has with stickers, but I seem to recall getting sticker books when I was a kid.
Anyhow, I need to find some fairy princess mermaid ballerinas to take pictures of for Olivia. Moo has made it easy to make them into stickers for hours of entertainment.
(Oh, I’m sure they have other uses too, but 3 year olds have priority)
Special thanks to my pal Denise Wilton over at Moo for getting me a preview of the fun.
Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting through a meeting that Boxbe was being pitched for “buzz marketing” marketing services from a third party. This company proceeded to show us pretty graphs and charts that illustrated how social media marketing can help small companies grow more quickly. Hmmmm…
Social media, it turns out can also help spread word of mouth more quickly. Having popped into this meeting a little late, I didn’t get to introduce myself, but largely, I kept my mouth shut to see where this company was going with their presentation.
Then they started talking about how they have many “agents” that post on their own blogs as well as comment on message boards, other blogs and in social networks without disclosure of their interests. They then proceed to detail out how they use dial up accounts, coffee shops and IP masking to obfuscate their IP addresses so their “marketers” can have conversations with themselves.
Now, staying silent in this meeting proved to be more and more difficult. Finally, I asked if they used Pay Per Post and the guy pitching us said, “No, they disclose who they are marketing for.”
Not exactly the answer I was looking for.
After this meeting, which didn’t last too long, I felt like I needed a shower.
It’s pretty easy to see companies today using tactics like this, but somehow it still surprises me. Maybe Scoble’s book had a lot of influence on me. Maybe, just maybe, I have morals, but somehow even beyond that, maybe I’m just not that stupid.
I’m sure that in the short run, they could have helped us get more users for Boxbe, but in the long run, I have to think that this kind of sleazy marketing just comes back to haunt you.
Just ask John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods.
photo by Flickr user amy_kearns
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5 Freebase invites
If you’re a data/information infrastructure nerd like me, you’re gonna love Freebase.
Here’s a bit from O’Reilly:
But once you understand a bit about what metaweb is doing, you realize just how remarkable it is. Metaweb has slurped in the contents of several of the web’s freely accessible databases, including much of wikipedia, and song tracks from musicbrainz. It then turns its users loose on not just adding more data items but making connections between them by filling out meta tags that categorize or otherwise connect the data items, using a typology that can be extended by users, wiki-style.
It’s really freaking cool.
Anyhow, I’ve got 5 invites, so if you are interested, let me know. I know there is a fair bit of pent-up demand for these invites, so if you’ve got an invite to Spock or some other invite only Web 2.0 site, I’ll probably favor a request with a trade than one without.
Leave a comment or send an email to randy@boxbe.com
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In San Francisco, 6/25 – 7/4
Attention Bay Area peeps! I’m heading down to San Francisco for a wedding celebration of a good friend as well as turning up in the Boxbe offices for a few days.
I’m sending email out to folks to meet up while I’m around, but if you are around, I’d love to meet up.
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Skitch rules
Thanks to Tara Hunt for giving me an invite to Skitch. I’ve been jonesing to use this ever since I saw Guy Kawasaki demo it back in the beginning of the year.
Nothing too meaningful to say about it yet, other they’ve just completely replaced the aging, somewhat Macintel compatible, slow-as-molasses Snapz Pro. God, I can’t wait to uninstall that app. This is already so much easier and useful to use.
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Places to go while visiting Seattle?
Not completely in the vein of the rest of the blog, but I thought I would throw this out to see what I got from all y’all.
So, my brother, his wife and their 4 year old are visiting Seattle for the next several days and my sister in law is worried we’ll just sit around the house and talk rather than going out and doing everything their is to be done while they visit.
While I’ve lived in Seattle almost 2 years, I still don’t know the area that well (certainly not as well as natives) and I came up with a counter itinerary to their original.
For first time visitors (with a 4 year old) to Seattle, here’s what I recommend:
City neighborhoods tour
There is a lot to see here that doesn’t involve going inside and/or paying anything.
This could include:
Downtown
- Pike Place Market – ok, this one is dead obvious.
- Downtown Library – one of the most interesting pieces of architecture I’ve ever seen.
- REI Flagship Store – full rock climbing wall, outdoor track for test driving mountain bike. This may be the coolest store I’ve ever been to.
- Seattle Art Museum Sculpture Park (free) – very cool outdoor park with large amounts of running around space.
- Space Needle
Pioneer Square – oldest neighborhood in Seattle, hit Elliot Bay Books. I’m not sure if it’s the dirt or the old buildings that remind me of San Francisco the most.
Ballard
Chittenden Locks (free) – these are real, working locks for small, medium, large and xx-large boats. It’s really cool.
Fremont
The Troll, Lenin Statue and ICBM
Other trip ideas
Bainbridge Island Ferry (Free) – unless we take the cars.
I haven’t been to Bainbridge Island, but it sounds like a great place to visit. If nothing else, it’s a free ride across the Sound with sweeping views of downtown.
Snoqualmie Falls
Falls and town that were in Twin Peaks – taller than Niagra Falls
Golden Gardens or Alki Beach or Matthews Beach (free) –
in the city beach but only if it is nice and warm.
Discovery Park
Very large park (are we still in the city?)in Seattle with great views
Washington Park Arboretum and Japanese Tea Garden
As an aside, this is the first place I saw a bald eagle in the wild.
Rent Paddle Boats on Green Lake
Weather dependent.
Seattle Duck Tour
This is ridiculous, but maybe fun. Tour the city in vehicle that ultimately ends up in Lake Union and Portage Bay
$23 for adults $13 for kids.
Anything else?
Other thoughts and suggestions would be much appreciated.