Tag Archives: sxsw

shizzow

Shizzow Public Launch

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As the community evangelist for Shizzow, I am really excited to announce the public launch of Shizzow! Ryan, Mark and I have been working our butts off on this application in addition to all of our “real” work (jobs that pay the bills – consulting, in my case). We planned this launch right before SXSW to give people a week or so to play around with it, but I think that people will really be able to see it’s usefulness when a few thousand geeks descend on Austin next week.

In addition to the public launch, we are also opening our API up for public beta testing. We’ve had some developers working on it for the past couple of months, so we even have some alpha applications starting to hit the streets for testing.

I’ve covered the details of the launch over on the Shizzow blog, so please feel free to visit Shizzow to read the rest of the launch details.

Don’t forget that we will be talking about Shizzow and SXSW on Friday at Beer and Blog and again on Strange Love Live!

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

shizzow

Strange Love Live and Shizzow

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The entire Shizzow team, including yours truly, will be lounging on the Strange Love Live couch for the podcast this Friday evening (March 6th) around 10pm. We will be talking about some new happenings on Shizzow with a focus on our plans for attending SXSW and how you can use Shizzow to find the best parties and sessions as well as getting together for meals with friends. We’ll also be giving some general tips for attending SXSW for any newbies in the audience.

I encourage you to tune into the live video stream and chat room at 10pm on Friday, but don’t worry, you can download the audio podcast later if you miss the live version.

We’ll also be at Beer and Blog prior to the Strange Love Live appearance for more talk about SXSW.

sxsw

Win a SXSW Badge Upgrade at the PDX Pre-SXSW Party

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Good news for those of you coming to the PDX Pre-SXSW Party Part Two: The Unofficial Version!

I talked to Hugh Forrest at sxsw, and he has offered a free upgrade from an Interactive badge to a Gold badge for one lucky winner! Basically, this means that you get to attend the film tracks and screenings in addition to the interactive program.

Here’s how you can win:

  • You must have already purchased a sxsw interactive badge.
  • You must attend the PDX Pre-SXSW Party Part Two: The Unofficial Version this Friday (details below).
  • You must put your business card or piece of paper into the hat (or bucket or whatever container I can find).
  • You must be there when we draw the random name at 6pm.
  • There can be only one (winner).
  • I’ll put the winner in touch with Hugh Forrest to receive the upgrade.

If you missed my earlier post about the party, here’s what you need to know:

Since this is a community organized event, you’ll be buying your own drinks, but it will be just as fun! We’ll be pairing up with Portland Beer and Blog for this event, and it will be a great opportunity to chat with others about sxsw. We can find out who else is going and talk about ways to stay in touch at the event. If you are new to sxsw, you can get some tips from the experienced attendees.

Quite a few of us are planning to use Shizzow to keep in touch at the event to find the best sessions and the best parties. We even have a few things specific to sxsw that we plan to roll out prior to the event. If you want an invite to Shizzow, you can ping the community evangelist for Shizzow (me) by emailing me at the email address right there in the sidebar of this blog.

The Details:
Friday March 6, 2009 from 4:00pm – 7:00pm
Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub
928 SE 9th Ave, Portland, Oregon 97214
RSVP on Upcoming

sxsw

PDX Pre-SXSW Party Part Two: The Unofficial Version

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We had a great pre-sxsw party here in Portland on January 19 organized by the official staff of the sxsw interactive event. We had such a great time, that we decided to do a community organized, unofficial party exactly one week before the big event in Austin. Since this is a community organized event, you’ll be buying your own drinks, but it will be just as fun! We’ll be pairing up with Portland Beer and Blog for this event, and it will be a great opportunity to chat with others about sxsw. We can find out who else is going and talk about ways to stay in touch at the event. If you are new to sxsw, you can get some tips from the experienced attendees.

Quite a few of us are planning to use Shizzow to keep in touch at the event to find the best sessions and the best parties. We even have a few things specific to sxsw that we plan to roll out prior to the event. If you want an invite to Shizzow, you can ping the community evangelist for Shizzow (me) by emailing me at the email address right there in the sidebar of this blog.

The Details:
Friday March 6, 2009 from 4:00pm – 7:00pm
Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub
928 SE 9th Ave, Portland, Oregon 97214
RSVP on Upcoming

sxsw

SXSW Interactive Portland Meetup on January 19th

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Are you planning to attend SXSW Interactive or considering attending?

I was just talking to Hugh Forrest, SXSW Interactive Event Director, and he told me that they are organizing a meetup here in Portland on January 19th. I can say without hesitation that SXSW is my favorite event (outside of Portland). It is also affectionately known as spring break for geeks due to the large number of parties every evening, and the sessions never start before 10am to accommodate our late night partying.  The Austin BarCamp also runs in parallel to SXSW at a nearby location, so many of us hit BarCamp along with the main event. In other words, it’s a great event. You should join us at the meetup if you want to learn more:

January 19
6–8 p.m.
Fez Ballroom: 316 SW 11th

Here’s the catch: If you want to attend, you must RSVP to interpress@sxsw.com. Please be sure to put Portland in the subject line of the email (they are doing a few of these in various cities).

This will give you an opportunity to learn more about SXSW from the people who organize it.  If you’ve never attended or were on the fence about attending, it’s a great opportunity to learn more. For those of us who already love SXSW, it gives us an opportunity to get to know some other Portland people who plan to attend.

On another note, a few of us plan to use Shizzow to keep up with each other at the event and find the best sessions, parties, lunches, etc. If you don’t already have an invite and would like one, please let me know in the comments, and I’ll hook you up with one.

Tons of Portland people attend SXSW, and I strongly encourage you to think about going. It’s in Austin (the cool part of Texas), really smart people attend, there are great parties, and the sessions are amazing.

sxsw

Want to Vote on my SXSW Panel Proposals?

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I’ve proposed two panels for SXSW this year. If you are interested in these topics, want to see me speak, or want to get me into the conference for free, you should vote for one or both of these sessions 🙂

Quiz Show: Brilliant to Stupid Social Media Moments

Watch our social media contenders compete with each other in a no holds barred battle of the brains to answer questions about a variety of social media moments in history from the brilliant to the ridiculous to the stupid. See which of our “experts” comes out on top. (Vote)

Reputation Systems Smackdown: Community Benefit or Detriment

People are devious. If they can game your reputation system to achieve a higher status, members will try to rack up points. People are motivated by awards, but can reputation systems really encourage people to be productive community members. Maybe, maybe not. Come argue your position with our panel members. (Vote)

Also remember that hotels in Austin fill up ridiculously fast during SXSW, so if you plan to attend and have not secured a room, I encourage you to register now.


UPDATE 8/15/08:
I should have explained more about how SXSW picks panels. The process for most conferences is that you submit a proposal and some committee selects the ones that they think are most appropriate for the conference. SXSW is different. They ask people who plan to attend SXSW to use their panel picker process to rate the panels on a 5 star scale. They use this as input to select the panels.

So, this means that you don’t tell me that you want to see my panels, you need to go to the SXSW site and vote!

comic, sxsw

Twitter and sxsw

Yes, I was at sxsw last week as you know from the obnoxious and constant tweets about how awesome it was. I also heard a few people talking about how tired they were of hearing about sxsw.

On an unrelated topic, I was playing werewolf with the from the guys at Toonlet last night, and I thought it would be cool to play around with it over lunch today. I came up with this quick sxsw / Twitter comic:

Twitter at sxsw by geekygirldawn


Girl - normal: HOW WAS YOUR WEEK? Bow - normal: I WAS AT SXSW. YOU KNOW,

sxsw

Portable Social Networks session at sxsw

Here are my relatively raw notes from the session with David Recordon, Chris Messina, and others.

People are tired of re-creating our data and friend lists on every new sites. We need to make it easier to move content from one site to another. Every website starts from scratch instead of building on things you have already created. This is why Facebook apps have been so successful – you can use the apps with your existing friends and existing information.

You don’t necessarily want all of the same friends on every service, and you don’t want to impose your new apps / sites on all of your friends by flooding them with friend requests. You may also want to message people on other services and integrate with various services so that you can use the sites you like, your friends use the ones they like, and both can still communicate and share information between them.

Who owns your friends email addresses? Do you have a right to port your friends email addresses from Facebook to Plaxo? You want to be able to contact your friends and easily find their email addresses without violating the privacy of your friends.

Terminology is getting confusing for people. Social networking, social graph, etc. The web is way more than terminology, it is really about the people and the experiences. Should we be using the terminology “friends”? Are these people your “friends”, are they contacts, etc.? There are many more interesting ways to frame it around actions (Dopplr with fellow travelers).

Contacts can be imported by giving them your email address and *password*. Do you really want to do this? Does it set users up to be phished?

Google released an address book api that can be used to get your contacts without giving away your email address and password.

Building blocks exist today to build portable social networks:

  • hCard can be used to import contact information from other public services into another service. The point is to make it like magic: let them know what it does, what information would be shared, and how it will be used without necessarily confusing normal users with the terminology (leave it as a link or on an about page). Focus on explaining what you are doing for the user and not necessarily how you are going to do it. Also need to give people the option to only pull in certain contacts – just the ones that you want on a particular service.
  • Need better ways to validate which accounts belong to a friend by following a trail of links. Is the David Recordon on Twitter the same one as the one on Facebook. Once you can specify your accounts and your friends accounts, you can also focus on using the same methods to bring in additional content and information. You are already creating the information, but adding some additional annotation around it makes it easier to find and make the data portable. Google social graph api is one way to do this – all based on public data.
  • Enabling trust on the web with OpenID – you already have these accounts on the web, and OpenID is a good method of verifying your identity. You can use it to log in now and say who you are. If you have other profile information in your hCard, then the other site can discover it. But maybe you only want to share certain information.
  • OAuth is more about authorization than authentication. Authorizing access to your resources using tokens to sign messages, like what you do with Flickr uploader by going to the Flickr site to log in and give the uploader authorization to access your photos. OAuth is really important for giving control to certain websites without giving them access to your username and password, which on Google would give them access Google Checkout in addition to mail / contacts. You can also revoke the tokens and not have to change your password to revoke access. A lot of the big players are moving in this direction.

These ideas are a big part of the evolution of the web. It will be difficult, but it’s a bit of tough love in the meantime.

sxsw

Social Strategies for Revolutionaries Session at sxsw

Social Strategies for Revolutionaries was Charlene Li’s presentation to a full audience in one of the big rooms at sxsw. She will also be posting the slides on SlideShare after the presentation, so this post just covers a few of her key highlights.

There have been a few social revolutionaries driving campaigns like reviving Jericho with peanut shipments. This is a groundswell, a social trend where people get information from each other (also the name of her upcoming book).

Four-step approach to groundswell:

  • People – assess customers social activities.
  • Objectives – what are you trying to accomplish
  • Strategy – Plan for how you will get there
  • Technology – decide which technologies to use after you figure out the above 3 points

Age is a major driver of participation. Participation in social networks tends to drop off as you look at older populations, since much of the content isn’t geared to older people on social networks, but this is gradually changing.

Blendtec has increased sales dramatically from the viral nature of the “will it blend” videos on YouTube. Ernst & Young is successfully using Facebook to recruit college students, not by using it as a marketing tool, but by having conversations with students and answering questions at the executive level. She also used Josh Bancroft as an example of someone who made something happen inside a big company using social software (wiki) to create Intelpedia under the radar of the executives (bonus points for a little Portland geek cred) 🙂

Find and support your revolutionaries within your organization, and let those people use their passion to make the company better, but this involves education for executives to help them understand what is happening and why. You also need to make it safer to fail for the people who are driving these initiatives. It also helps to start small, but think big and iterate to make corrections and adjustments as you figure out what works and what doesn’t. The social strategy also needs to be the responsibility of every employee and not just one person or group. These transitions and cultural changes take time. It can’t happen overnight and requires a great deal of patience.

barcamp

BarCampAustin and BarCampPortland Compare & Contrast

This is my second BarCampAustin, and it’s been interesting to notice some of the similarities and differences between Austin and BarCampPortland. For some reason, Austin seems to have more presentations and pitches instead of the informal round table discussions that people seem to favor at BarCampPortland; however, Austin also has more of a party atmosphere. Last year, it was held in a bar with lots of drinks all day, and this year, they had beer on tap all afternoon. They also had a live band, karaoke, and stage diving. Austin throws parties; Portland plays werewolf 🙂

Both BarCamps tend to be full of really smart people with great questions and great conversations both in the sessions and in the hallways. I’ve been running into and meeting people that I only get to see in person at conferences like these. It seems like a lot of my techie friends seem to favor BarCamps, which isn’t surprising since many of them are fellow community managers and community-minded geeks.

On a final note, it wouldn’t be a whurley organized event without something over the top & crazy happening. BarCampAustin had a runaway battlebot that jumped the curb in the parking lot and attacked the air conditioner at a neighboring house. Final score: battlebot 1; AC unit 0.