All posts by Dawn

conference

Business Leader NW Supporting Non-Profits

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Are you on the fence about attending Business Leader NW here at the Oregon Convention Center on February 25th & 26th?

Here are a few things that might entice you.

$25 of your entry fee goes to a non-profit (if you use a discount code below):

  • SHS199: School House Supplies. A Portland nonprofit that provides free school supplies for teachers.
  • OFB199: Oregon Food Bank. Distributes food to regional food banks across Oregon and SW Washington.
  • CFF199: Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Provides funding for research to fight cystic fibrosis.

More details and links to registration on the BLNW blog.

Ask us questions in the BLNW Blogger Pavilion

From the BLNW blog:

The organizers are providing a 400 square foot space for a “Business Blogger Pavilion,” on the exhibit floor at the Oregon Convention Center. The pavilion will serve as a workshop for business people to meet with bloggers, web developers, technologists and a host of digital media and enterprise 2.0 experts. The goal is to connect the business community with bloggers and web experts. Bloggers will be featured in discussions at the pavilion on topics such as starting a business blog, marketing a business video and customer service 2.0.

I will be in the blogger pavilion, so please feel free to stop by and visit or ask us questions! I hope to see you there.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

shared links

Recent Links

I’m still figuring out how to deal with the Magnolia aftermath, but there were a few interesting things from this week that I wanted to share …

Ignite Portland 5 – Lots of fun… « Startup Geek in Portland Oregon

Meeting Space Available for Portland Tech groups announced at Ignite Portland « WebTrends

Light It Up

Ignite Show: Jason Grigsby on Cup Noodle – O’Reilly Radar

Online Community Expert Interview: Dawn Foster, Fast Wonder Consulting – Online Community Report

Social Media for Small Business « Nova Newcomer

Facebook to Launch Redesigned Pages for Businesses – Tour & First Impressions

What really happened at Ma.gnolia and lessons learned | FactoryCity

barcampportland

Want to Volunteer for BarCampPortland?

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We still have plenty of time before BarCampPortland on May 1 & 2, but it’s never too early to get people thinking about how they can help out with the event! If you love BarCamps as much as I do, please join us next week for our volunteer kickoff meeting. Anyone interested in volunteering for the event is welcome to attend!

BarCampPortland Volunteer Meeting
Monday February 23, 2009 from 5:30pm – 6:30pm
CubeSpace 622 SE Grand Ave
RSVP on Upcoming if you plan to attend

Want to help in some other way?

  • RSVP for the actual event on May 1 and 2 on Upcoming.
  • Sponsor! These events can’t be successful without our sponsors. Contact Todd Kenefsky (kenefsky on gmail) if you would like to sponsor a portion of the event.
  • Join our Mailing List: Sign up for our Google Group to get email announcements about future meetups and events.
  • Follow us on Twitter: Up to the minute breaking updates about the event as @BarCampPortland
  • Tell your friends: Don’t forget to use the BarCampPortland tag when blogging, posting pictures, etc.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

elsewhere

Blogging Elsewhere

Here is this week’s summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs:

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily

Ignite Portland

Business Leader Northwest Blog

If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.

General

Recent Links

I’m still figuring out how to deal with the Magnolia aftermath, but there were a few interesting things from this week that I wanted to share …

Find, Follow and Share Comments — BackType

Tags: rss, blog, tracking, comments, feeds

How to Use the New FriendFeed Search for Social Media Intelligence – ReadWriteWeb

Tags: friendfeed, social media, marshallkirkpatrick

Portland Code Camp v4

Tags: codecamp, portland, portlandcodecamp

3 Free, Useful SEO/Analytics Tools You May Not Use

Tags: Analytics, SEO

General

Online Communities: Thriving in the Downturn

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I’ve talked quite a bit recently about online community careers and how they are faring in this tough economy, which reminded me that I forgot to blog about the latest ForumOne Online Community Research Network study, Online Communities: Surviving & Thriving in the Downturn Economy.

The survey was conducted in late November and early December with 90 people responding to the survey, and more information about the respondents and the survey can be found on the Online Community Report blog. Here’s a summary of the key findings.

Most communities have not been negatively impacted by the economy.

Image from OCRN
Image from OCRN

For those that have been effected, the hardest areas hit included.

  • Contractor staffing
  • Platform budget
  • Full time staffing

Communities are becoming MORE valuable to management.

When they asked:

Have your internal stakeholders (execs, management) attitudes toward the value of the online community changed because of current economic pressure?

Slightly more than half of the respondents (55%) said that their company internal stakeholder’s attitudes have changed towards the value of the online community because of the current economic pressure. For those whose stakeholder’s attitudes that had changed, over half of the respondents (55%) indicated that their internal stakeholder’s considered their online community more valuable because of the current economic pressures.

(Quoted from the Online Community Report)

The current economic issues are hitting every segment, but it’s nice to know that online communities are faring better than some other areas. This post is just a quick summary of the key points, so I encourage you to read more details on Bill Johnston’s Online Community Report blog.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Yahoo Pipes Videos

Using Location Data: 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo

Yahoo Pipes can make it easier to work with location data (latitude / longitude) across multiple RSS feeds, even when the original feeds have different ways of specifying the location data. In this demo, I’ll show you how to use the Location Extracter module to normalize the data and then filter on lat / long data to get results only within a certain area.

More Details

  • The Demo Pipe. A copy of the Using Location Data: 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Demo pipe click “View Source” to see the modules.
  • Fetch Feed. In this example, we will use a feed from Shizzow containing information about places and a feed from the USGS with earthquake data. Both store their lat / long data in different ways within the RSS Feed.
  • Location extractor. This module is atypical, since it takes no parameters and has no user configurable elements. It simply looks for lat / long data and saves what it finds as y:location.lat and y:location.lon.
  • Sort. Sort by date (descending) to make sure that the output from your various source feeds appears in sorted order.
  • Filter. We then filter the source feeds to include only the entries located in the western part of the United States (25 < latitude < 50 and -130 < longitude < -115).
  • Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe.

I’ve created many Yahoo Pipes, and most of them have been published on my Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks page where you can also learn more about my Yahoo Pipes Training courses.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts

elsewhere

Blogging Elsewhere

Here is this week’s summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs:

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily

Ignite Portland

Shizzow

If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.

Yahoo Pipes Videos

YQL (Yahoo Query Language): 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo

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After learning that Yahoo Pipes introduced a new module called YQL (Yahoo Query Language) last week, I knew that I had to find a way to work it into one of my 2 minute videos. YQL uses an SQL-like syntax for more powerful and flexible inputs into Yahoo Pipes; however, working it into a 2 minute demo was quite challenging, since queries can be complicated. I cheated a little by glossing over the query language and focusing on how to use YQL effectively within Pipes. Honestly, I’m never going to teach someone to use an SQL syntax without extensive training, so this 2 minute demo is really geared toward people with database experience or programming backgrounds. I also did a more complicated version of this pipe with a more extensive explanation that you might be interested in reading to get more details about using YQL within Pipes.

More Details

  • The Demo Pipe. A copy of the YQL: 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Demo pipe click “View Source” to see the modules.
  • YQL. The query:
    select * from flickr.photos.info(20) where photo_id in (select id from flickr.photos.search(20) where tags = “igniteportland”).
    Selects 20 photos from Flickr with the tag “igniteportland”. flickr.photos.search is used to find the images, but it doesn’t provide much information about the images, so I ran it through flickr.photos.info to pull in more data. If you omit the (20), YQL returns 10 results by default, and you can set this number to something appropriate for your needs.
  • Rename. Maps item.urls.url.content into the more standard item.link, which is recognized by RSS readers and the Yahoo Pipes output for clickable links back to the original content.
  • Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe.

I’ve created many Yahoo Pipes, and most of them have been published on my Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks page where you can also learn more about my Yahoo Pipes Training courses.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts