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Mar

SXSWi 2008 in pictures

By Randy Stewart 1 Comment

Categories: Events, Geek Fun, Pictures, SXSW and SXSW 2008

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 with mainly a Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens.

You can view the rest of my Flickr stream here.

Mar

Twitter in Plain English

By Randy Stewart 0 Comments

Categories: Blogging, Cool Tools, Geek Fun, SXSW, Social Media, Twitter, Twitters and Video

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.

Mar

SXSW Bound

By Randy Stewart 0 Comments

Categories: Conferences, SXSW, SXSW 2008, Social Media and Video

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.

Aug

Pix from Gnomedex

By Randy Stewart 0 Comments

Categories: Gnomedex

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.

Aug

Gnomedexmen ‘07 comic book cover

By Randy Stewart 2 Comments

Categories: Gnomedex

Ah Comic Life, how I’ve wanted to use you for some time. Gnomedex ‘07 was full of comic book characters so it only seems appropriate to create a comic to summarize the experience.

I had a great time at the conference and met a lot of great people. Now, to go get some social network fatigue…

A larger image is on Flickr. Please share.

Aug

Gnomedex 2007

By Randy Stewart 0 Comments

Categories: Conferences and Gnomedex

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.

Gnomedex site

Jul

Wordcamp 2007

By Randy Stewart 0 Comments

Categories: Conferences

Great meetup of the Wordpress faithful this year in San Francisco.

More comments later, cause man am I tired.

Apr

Down in SF this week

By Randy Stewart 0 Comments

Categories: Conferences

Just a quick note to anyone and everyone… I’m down in SF this week for Boxbe, Web 2.0 expo and Podcast Hotel if you want to meet up. Give me a call or shoot me an email.

cell: 415.297.4215
email: randy@boxbe.com

Mar

Austin bound - SXSW this weekend

By Randy Stewart 0 Comments

Categories: Conferences

I’m beginning to think conferences are my job… I think SXSW will make my 4th conference this year…oy. Maybe I’m just fulfilling my dream to be a trucker being on the road again.

If you’re in Austin this week(end) give me a shout! Email me at randy@boxbe.com if you want to talk social media, Boxbe, Bay Area vs Seattle, or where to get good BBQ in Austin. Look forward to seeing you there.

Feb

Mac blogger toolkit - Northern Voice 2007

By Randy Stewart 3 Comments

Categories: Blogging, Conferences, Cool Tools, Northern Voice 2007 and Software

CBC columnist and Mac geek, Tod Maffin ran another great session at Moosecamp around favorite productivity tools. Below are my favorites from the session.

ImageWell - Swiss Army knife for images (free)
Paparazzi - takes screenshots of full web pages.
TextExpander - condenses messages, phrases or code that you might reuse all the time into short keystrokes.
VoodooPad - wiki for your Mac. BEST NOTEPAD EVER!
Synergy - software for using one keyboard and mouse with two computers (and screens). Kind of like a KVM…
Hazel - best maid for cleaning up your Mac.
BrowserShots.org - test web designs on 31 different browser platforms.
QuickSilver - I’m hoping I’ll get this one day, but for now, I’ll point it out to all all of you

More tools

Audio of the session

image by Flickr user katiew

Feb

PhotoCamp at Northern Voice

By Randy Stewart 0 Comments

Categories: Conferences and Digital Cameras

Kris Krug, photographer extraordinaire, organized a conference within a unconference within a conference at this year’s Northern Voice. He collected an exceptional panel of other photogs and tech geeks.

High end consumer cameras

Tim Bray did a talk on high end compact cameras. Made me think about using the G3 again. It does shoot in RAW and it has the intervolator. I wonder if the G6 has that? If you are looking for a new camera, Tim posted his talk at the here.

Tim’s talk brought up some points that I’m always thinking about: I love my Canon Rebel, but there are serious costs to bringing it with me all the time. It takes beautiful pictures, but it’s big and bulky. The vast majority of the photos that I take are on my Canon SD450. Maybe I could learn to use it a bit better…

Color Profile Love

A huge THANK YOU to Matt Trent at UBC for teaching me in 10 minutes everything I needed to know about color profiles in Photoshop. I sat through an hour at a Macworld session years ago from someone who worked at Adobe and I didn’t get it. Now, I think I’ve got all I need to know.

The secret - if you work on a Mac and are posting photos online work with Adobe SRGB. Why? Safari reads numerous color profiles, but almost no other browser does. The color profile is smaller than Adobe RGB, but it is the lowest common denominator, thus will look the same on most browsers.

Hopefully, next year I’ll get to see your lab and work in HDR.

Matt Trent’s Moosecamp Presentation

Adobe Lightroom

Roland Tanglao led a session about Adobe Lightroom, which looks a lot like if iPhoto and Adobe Bridge had a kid. Oh, and apparently, in the photo world, black is the new white.

Lots of good features here, but not enough to pull me into another app. One interesting thing, though, it looked like Roland was running an older G4 laptop, but Lightroom really seemed to fly. If you’re looking for something a little more robust than iPhoto, Lightroom might be for you.

Thanks everyone for such an informative session! Look forward to seeing you next year.

Feb

Pix from Northern Voice

By Randy Stewart 2 Comments

Categories: Conferences and Northern Voice 2007

Chris Heuer, Social Media Club founder and all-around nice guy, has a great set of pictures up on Flickr from the conference so far.

Check them out here.

All Northern Voice photos on Flickr are here.

Photo by (or at least in his feed) Chris Heuer

Feb

10 tips for meeting people at industry events

By Randy Stewart 2 Comments

Categories: Building Community, Conferences and Links

My friend Andrew Chen has posted his thoughts on meeting people at conferences. Great list if you are in the mood to meet folks in your industry. Here are a few of the points:

Use pre-conference time wisely
Arrive early for some 1:1 time
Sit next to interesting people, and introduce yourself
Bring business cards, and ask for business cards

Some of these things might appear dead obvious, but you would be surprised how many people don’t follow them. Fact is, even if you are shy about meeting folks, other people are as well. Keep in mind, the main reason why people attend these events is to meet people.

Andrew, btw, just moved to Silicon Valley from Seattle. He’s an Entrepreneur in Residence at the VC firm, Mohr Davidow Ventures on Sand Hill Road. Sounds like a dream job to me! If you’re looking to get a company off the ground or join a startup, he might just be the guy to talk to.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ll be in Palo Alto this weekend and spending a little time in San Francisco on Monday and Tuesday.

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