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Author Archive for Randy
22
Jul
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About to get on a plane and head down to the San Francisco Bay Area for the annual Maker Faire this weekend.
This is the first Maker Faire I’ve attended and I’ll be bringing Heather and Olivia in tow for the event. We’re all pretty excited for some hard core nerdery this weekend.
What is the Maker Faire?
From the site:
Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things.
The event takes place Saturday and Sunday at the San Mateo Fairgrounds.
If you are unfamiliar with the Maker Faire, here’s a little video.
If you’re going and want to meet up, call me at 415.297.4215. Alternatively, I’ll be on Twitter with status updates all weekend, so follow me here. Hope to see you there.
I’m doing a talk tonight at the Seattle Social Media Club Meeting tonight about using Twitter for business purposes.
Here’s the skinny:
Seattle Social Media Club
A Published Stream of Consciousness: Do Business and Micro-blogging Mix?
Thursday, May 1, 6:30 – 8 p.m.
Text 100 Office
Micro-blogging services such as Twitter are continually growing in popularity, but many business people are asking how this fits into their professional life. Announcing to friends that you’re “exhausted from a late Saturday night” or “going to buy tickets to the TP concert…anyone interested?” seems far removed from anything co-workers (much less your boss!) wants to know.
While Twitter is great for personal use, many companies are using micro-blogging to enhance their business communications as well.
Join the Seattle Social Media Club to discover how you can use micro-blogging services to enhance your personal brand, grow and strengthen your business network, notify customers, promote your blog and more.
Randy Stewart, social media strategist and Senior Product Manager of Boxbe will be presenting short introduction to Twitter and microblogging followed by an interactive forum designed to help you get the most out of your micro-blogging feed
Let us know you are coming by signing up here.
09
Apr
Flickr has video
Long rumored and shrouded in secrecy, Flickr launched video today. Video is restricted to 90 seconds and dubbed ““long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share.”
I think it’s a great addition to the site and like the idea of short clips rather than long form amateur video. This will be a great way to capture the moment to share with friends, family and co-workers that are often so far away.
Video up above is from my friend Josh Ellingson, a talented San Francisco artist.
Click through for a completely ridiculous video of Olivia.
13
Mar
SXSWi 2008 in pictures
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
I’ve been taking pictures of events for almost a year now and SXSWi was clearly the biggest event that I had undertaken. South by Southwest is both rewarding and grueling in the sense that meeting great folks, learning new things, trying to upload photos in somewhat real time while trying to get sleep is pretty difficult. You can sleep when you’re dead…
I’m not taking pictures for anything other than fun and personal enrichment (and to give something back to the folks who give so much of themselves to putting on these events). I really enjoy the work that Kris Krug [kk+] and Scott Beale [Laughing Squid] have been doing for years and hope to be as good as they are some day. I’m really thankful for all the tips and tricks that they have shared with me in the last year.
Not all the photos are gems, but I cut this group of pictures down from 700 pictures that I took down to about 160. If you want to see with folks on Flickr like best, go here for my 12 most “interesting” photos from South by Southwest Interactive 2008.
FYI - I’m shooting on a Canon Rebel XTi
You can view the rest of my Flickr stream here.
06
Mar
Twitter in Plain English
My pals Lee and Sachi LeFever of CommonCraft have done it again, just in time for SXSW. These guys do a really great job of explaining difficult topics in “plain english.” These videos are really great if you are just starting out trying to figure out this strange online world.
At last year’s SXSWi in Austin, TX, Twitter broke for the first time, err, um, was a break through product that helped people quickly figure out where the cool parties were and helped them track down their friends without calling them.
Since then, Twitter has been quickly adopted (and broken) by at least some of the masses (myself included).
I didn’t really get Twitter at first and I thought that it represented all the worst things about blogging (navel gazing, echo chamber). Here is a link to the day I spent talking about my cat in protest of Twitter. I even annoyed myself.
Eventually, I came around…
So, what the heck is Twitter? If you follow me on Facebook, you’ve probably seen my rapidly changing status. That’s coming from Twitter. And while I do kid about the Twitter uptime, by and large, they’ve created an incredible service based on something very simple.
Here’s CommonCraft on Twitter in Plain English.
06
Mar
SXSW Bound
I’m excited to be heading down to Austin once again for the yearly SXSWi Festival in Austin, Texas from Friday March 7th until Tuesday March 11. That little “i” next to SXSW means I’m not going to the film thing or the the music thing, I’m going to the nerd thing.
From last year’s SXSWi, here’s Ze Frank explaining SXSWi.
[thanks for the pointer/embed code, Scott Beale]
One day, when the kids are older, I’ll drag my wife out to Austin and we’ll do both Music and Interactive. Music, in particular, looks to be amazing.
Anyhow, if you are heading down and want to say hi, you can get in touch with me on my phone (if you have it), email me at randy@boxbe.com, direct message me on Twitter or turn up near me at one of the panels or parties I’m planning on attending.
Hope to see you there.
20
Feb
Ignite Seattle pix
I’ve posted my pix from last night’s Ignite Seattle event.
Ignite Seattle is a tech geek meetup held semi-irregularly that brings out some of the best and brightest in the Puget Sound region.
Had a great time and hope the next one isn’t so far off in the future. Wish my pix were better, but I’m still new at this whole photography thing.
Here is a link to my photos on Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewtopia/
Feel free to use my photos in blog posts and what not, just link back here for attribution.
20
Feb
Flickr
This is a test post from 
, a fancy photo sharing thing.
20
Feb
Flickr
This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.
20
Feb
Flickr
This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.
20
Feb
Ignite Seattle Pix
Ignite Seattle - Mission Control
Photo by by Randy Stewart.
I’ve posted my pix from last night’s Ignite Seattle event.
Ignite Seattle is a tech geek meetup held semi-irregularly that brings out some of the best and brightest in the Puget Sound region.
Had a great time and hope the next one isn’t so far off in the future. Wish my pix were better, but I’m still new at this whole photography thing.
Here is a link to the photos on Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewtopia/
18
Feb
Missing Kathy Sierra
As someone who designs products for a living, Kathy Sierra has been really instrumental in my continuing education of product design. Kathy has written a number of training books for O’Reilly and used to run a product design blog called “Creating Passionate Users”
Helping users “kick ass” has been my adopted mantra and I have Kathy to thank for that.
About a year ago, Kathy stopped blogging. I won’t talk about it here, but you can read about it on her site.
I really miss Kathy’s help in creating kick ass web sites so I was pretty happy to see this interview.
Here is a video interview from the recent Tools of Change conference. While the focus of the conference is publishing, this video serves as a great overview of Kathy’s studies and writings.
04
Feb
Tomorrow’s primary
I’d complained for years that the California primary (and a few others) were held too late to matter. You’d think that the 5th largest economy in the world might play a slightly larger role in picking our next president.
No sooner did I leave the state, did they switch the primary to hang with the likes of New York, Illinois and 20 other states in handing out the largest number of delegates in a single day. Ugh.
Hangin’ at the caucus
There is a tiny chance Washington votes might matter in the primary. I’ll be going to my caucus on Saturday, but hopefully, the race will be decided by then.
How am I voting (or whatever it is I’ll be doing at a caucus)? Well, I heart Bill Clinton and wish that we could go back to the heady late 90’s. Hillary… um, well, I really like Bill Clinton and I think that having Bill back would be swell.
That said, I gotta go with Obama.
Here’s a video that a pal of mine, Eddie Codel did talking about Super Duper Tuesday and Obama.
Get out and vote, California!
[video via Laughing Squid]
So, here’s a little story I’ve told a few times privately, but only once publicly before. It happened so long ago at this point, and given today’s news, it doesn’t really matter to the parties involved.
After a late Friday night down on the Santa Clara campus, I decided to sleep under my desk rather than drive home to San Francisco. I woke up the next morning to a loud booming voice that I thought I recognized. “Developers, developers, developers!” Ok, he didn’t actually say that, but I shuffled to my feet only to see Steve Ballmer standing outside my cube.
I didn’t actually scream, but I might have let out a small yelp. Now, I’m too old to hate now, but then, oh man, did I hate Microsoft. If you’ve ever heard me swear before (sailor’s blushing, etc), imagine the cacophony of swear words that was going off in my head at that particular moment.
Worse than just seeing Ballmer, I saw Jerry and TK as well. The only thing I could think was, “Holy crap, we’re being acquired.”
I mean, a clandestine Saturday morning meeting between the Evil Empire and the heads of Yahoo!? What else could it be?
I said to myself, “I’m so outta here if Microsoft ever buys us.”
As this happened 8-9 years ago, nothing ever came of it (as far as I know). Jerry later told me that meeting face to face was something that they did periodically and that they did it on the weekend so folks wouldn’t freak out or speculate. I don’t know if I bought it, but it was Jerry, so I let it go.
Yahoo! Today
I worked at Yahoo! from 1996 to 2001. It was the best of times. When I started there were less than 40 people there and when I left there were 3000 people. I think that especially back then, Microsoft acquiring Yahoo! would have destroyed the company.
I don’t work at Yahoo! anymore, but just given their shear size and the maturing of the company and the industry as a whole, would it be such a bad fit now? I really can’t say for sure.
Good luck
Yahoo! has been hurting for a while in the press and their stock has been fairly depressed. A lot of the down attitude toward Yahoo! isn’t so much a reflection of the company but a constant comparison to Google and their quarter after quarter barn burners.
Google is a tough competitor. Can a combined Microsoft and Yahoo! compete effectively? I hope so.
To all my friends and the rest of the folks down in Sunnyvale - I wish you the best.
Ich bin ein Yahooer!
