Category Archives: General

Demolicious!

Here are a few notes about some cool apps from Portland Web Innovator’s Demolicious tonight.

I Need to Read This

Designed to solve the problem of having too many tabs open in Firefox with links opened to interesting things that you don’t have time to read right now.  It doesn’t make sense as a bookmark and isn’t really a todo list. You get the pages out of tabs and into I Need to Read This to read them later. The site is designed to be simple and straightforward. You save stuff up there with a bookmarklet and then read it later using the read bookmarklet or get it as a feed. Voting is much more complex than it looks at first glance.

MioWorks

The idea is to help small businesses organize among themselves and connect with their customers online. Most consultants and small businesses have a bunch of subscriptions to systems for collaboration, project management, CRM, invoices, etc. MioWorks is a contact management system that went into beta last week, and they are actively looking for feedback to flesh out the rest of the functionality. It starts with contacts, their information, and conversations. They add notes, tasks, files, support / issues, and more along with the contact information. It brings all of this information together all in one place to create accountability and collaboration with clients for small businesses

VoteFair Ranking

The last component is the Negotiation tool. You can create a survey (survey, election, poll) and let people vote on a topic. You can use it for meeting times or any other votes requiring more than 2 choices. Because it allows people to vote for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choices, which can provide more accurate results than a single select vote.

Avatari

A new mac application that allows you to upload your avatar to many sites at the same time. Right now it only works for Twitter and FriendFeed, and he’s adding new ones if the API provides this functionality. The app is very simple. You drag an image into the app, and it changes your avatar for any accounts that you select in Avatari. It was just announced and made available tonight during Demolicious.

Black Tonic

This is a better way to present information to a client. You control the pace of the presentation, which doesn’t allow the client to jump ahead and keeps everyone in the same place without skipping around. This is great for creatives who want to tell the story and a narrative with reasoning behind the decisions. Presentation becomes a slide show that people can watch it again along with version tracking. You can upload photos and add notes.

If you want to demo your app in 3 months at the next demolicious, you can contact Adam DuVander.

SXSW 50% Off Sale: Companies and Communities eBook or Kindle Version

Companies and CommunitiesI’m so excited about going to Austin for SXSW that I decided to share the fun by offering my Companies and Communities: Participating without being sleazy eBook for 1/2 off. You can now order it from my website for only $9.99 from now through Tuesday, March 17 using the discount code sxsw09 in the shopping cart on Fast Wonder.

For the kindle lovers in the crowd, you can get a copy of the Companies and Communities eBook for the Kindle also at the low price of $9.99 from the Amazon Kindle Store.

Recent Links

Here are a few interesting things from this week that I wanted to share …

Future of White Boys’ Clubs Redux #fowaspeak | FactoryCity

Conference and hotel registration is now open! – Open Source Bridge

Knowing the Economic Environment of Your Business and Customers at Business of Business – byBarrett

JumpBox Official Blog » Introducing SnapLogic for Data Integration

Baron Landscape’s Broken Hours » Online Community Management Roundtable at the BLNW ‘09 Blog Pavilion, with Dawn Foster and Marshall Kirkpatrick

RSS: Boost Your RSS Efficiency

You can find my links on Delicious.

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

Online Communities: Thriving in the Downturn

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:

Blogging Elsewhere

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

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily

Shizzow

Portland Data Plumbing User Group (pdpug)

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

Blogging Elsewhere

Most of you know that I have been blogging on a few different blogs, so I thought it would be good to do a weekly summary with links to my posts appearing on other blogs.

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily

Shizzow

Top Fast Wonder Posts for 2008 and Some Silliness

I was looking at my Google Analytics for 2008, and I thought it would be fun to share some of the info.

Here are the top 10 posts or pages that generated the most page views for 2008:

  1. Taking Your Idea From Side Project to Startup
  2. Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks
  3. Starter Kit: Social Media and Social Networking Best Practices for Business
  4. Monitoring Dashboards: Why every company should have one
  5. Consulting
  6. Why You Should Avoid Mozy Backups
  7. Using Twitter for Brands or Corporate Identities
  8. Web 2.0 Starter Kit
  9. Hiring a Community Manager
  10. Starting Point

Most of my traffic comes from the typical sources: Google, Stumbleupon, and Twitter, but I also had a fair amount of traffic from ReadWriteWeb, eLearning Technology, Silicon Florist, and Metafluence.

The most common search results included: dawn foster, best community software, mozy restore, facebook for companies, community manager, shizzow, fast wonder, mozy sucks, and blogging tips.

I also enjoying going to the end of the list to find search results that brought a single person to my blog. Here are a few of the most amusing / interesting:

  • beer consultanting
  • breakfast places near san francisco bridge where king of jordan ate
  • bubble tea facility
  • clarinet atari
  • death of myspace
  • what is going on with all the social networking sites like wikis,blogs and twitter
  • man + woman + online communitties
  • handy tips + how to change a fluorescent kitchen unit bulb
  • green dragon dawn foster
  • facebook rss stalk
  • community manager career — why?
  • “highly illogical” spock
  • bill gates quote faster

OK, enough silliness for today. I hope all of you have a happy new year!