portland

Portland MeeGo Network Meetup March 21

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The next Portland MeeGo Network Meetup will be on Monday, March 21 at 6:30pm at Kells. I know this isn’t a lot of advance notice, but to make it up to you, we have a great topic lined up for Monday. We’ll be talking about MeeGo In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems for cars, buses, airplanes, etc. with rich Internet and multimedia experiences to consumers while traveling. Tracey Erway will be telling us more about MeeGo, and Chris Norman will have a demo unit that we can view. If you want to learn more about mobile technologies for various vehicles, this will be a great topic, or you can just come hang out and talk about MeeGo.

It would be great if you could RSVP on Plancast to let us know how many snacks we should have available.

Agenda

  • 6:30 – 7:00: Hang out and talk to other people interested in MeeGo.
  • 7:00 – 8:00: MeeGo In-Vehicle Infotainment with Tracey Erway and Chris Norman

Logistics

  • Date: March 21.
  • Time: 6:30pm – 8:30pm
  • Location: Kells Irish Pub at 112 SW 2nd Ave.

Sign up on the Portland MeeGo Network Google Group to get email notifications of future meetups.

rss

Hacking RSS: Filtering & Processing Obscene Amounts of Information at SXSW

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My SXSW session this year, Hacking RSS: Filtering & Processing Obscene Amounts of Information, is at the coveted 9:30 am session time on the final day of SXSW, so I thought that it might be a good idea to outline the presentation here in the hopes that I can entice a few people  to drag themselves out of bed early to attend.

Presentation

You can listen to the audio of my presentation.

SXSW Hacking RSS: Filtering & Processing Obscene Amounts of Information

Description

Information overload is less about having too much information and more about not having the right tools and techniques to filter and process information to find the pieces that are most relevant for you. This presentation will focus on showing you a variety of tips and techniques to get you started down the path of looking at RSS feeds in a completely different light. The default RSS feeds generated by your favorite blog or website are just a starting point waiting to be hacked and manipulated to serve your needs. Most people read RSS feeds, but few people take the time to go one step further to hack on those RSS feeds to find only the most interesting posts. I combine tools like Yahoo Pipes, BackTweets, PostRank and more with some simple API calls to be able to find what I need while automatically discarding the rest. You start with one or more RSS feeds and then feed those results into other services to gather more information that can be used to further filter or process the results. This process is easier than it sounds once you learn a few simple tools and techniques, and no “real” programming experience is required to get started. This session will show you some tips and tricks to get you started down the path of hacking your RSS feeds.

A few specific topics

Logistics

  • Tuesday March 15 at 9:30AM
  • Venue: Austin Convention Center Ballroom C
  • Tag: #hackingRSS

UPDATED to add embedded slides on 3/15/2011 and add audio link on 3/23/2011.

Community Manager Tips

Community Manager Tip: Be There for Your Community

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Communities occasionally go through tough times, and it’s important as the community manager to be there and support your community as much as possible. For example, last Friday there was an announcement scheduled at 2am my time with a webcast that promised to have at least some impact on the community that I manage. Rather than sleeping until my normal wake up time of 6am, I pulled my butt out of bed to watch the webcast with the rest of the community and sit on IRC to support people and answer questions where possible. I thought it was important to be there for people in this case.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

  • None of us can be awake 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but we should be there during tough times.
  • Don’t be afraid to shift your work day to accommodate key community activities.
  • Pay attention to your community and anticipate times when they might need you more than other times.
  • Answer questions and be honest when you just don’t know the answers yet.

Recommended Reading

Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.

Illustration by elkokoparrilla used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

elsewhere

Blogging Elsewhere

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

MeeGo.com*

Rednecks in the Wild*

*Disclaimers:

  • GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily: I am a paid blogger for the GigaOM network.
  • MeeGo: I am a full-time employee at Intel and contributing to MeeGo is part of my job.
  • Rednecks in the Wild: This is a Fast Wonder LLC venture.
shared links

Blogging Elsewhere

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

MeeGo.com*

Rednecks in the Wild*

*Disclaimers:

  • GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily: I am a paid blogger for the GigaOM network.
  • MeeGo: I am a full-time employee at Intel and contributing to MeeGo is part of my job.
  • Rednecks in the Wild: This is a Fast Wonder LLC venture.
portland

Portland MeeGo Meetup on January 17

The next Portland MeeGo Network Meetup will be Monday, January 17  at 6:30pm at Kells. We will also be meeting at Kells on the third Monday of every month starting in March, but we’re skipping February to celebrate Presidents Day.

Our featured speaker this month is Quim Gil from Nokia, and we invite anyone who wants to learn more about MeeGo to come hang out and talk about the project.

Agenda
6:30 – 7:00: Hang out and talk to other people interested in MeeGo.
7:00 – 7:15: Introductions
7:15 – 7:45: Quim Gil – MeeGo on Nokia Device Demo
7:45 – 8:30: Open Agenda item or Q & A

Logistics
Date: January 17
Time: 6:30pm – 8:30pm
Location: Kells Private Room Upstairs at 112 SW 2nd Ave.

It would be great if you could RSVP on Upcoming to let us know how many snacks we should have available.

If you want to get notifications about future meetings, you can join the Portland MeeGo Network Google Group.

Community Manager Tips

Community Manager Tip: Recognition and Thanks

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Community managers tend to be busy people, especially when you have an active community with many contributors, and it’s easy to forget to thank people for being really helpful in the community. I am as guilty of forgetting to thank people as anyone else, maybe more guilty of it. We need to remember that these people are contributing their valuable time to do something nice for us, and they deserve to be recognized for it in some way.

Here are a few ways to recognize your contributors:

  • Contact them and say “Thank You” for a specific contribution.
  • Make recognition a big part of your monthly metrics reports.
  • Hold special events, like Yelp does for their elite members.
  • Seek input on tough problems from your frequent contributors.
  • Do something nice for them.

Recommended Reading

Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.

Photo by William Arthur Fine Stationery used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

dawn foster

2010 in Review: Change is Good!

Every year, I like to write some kind of year in review blog post. I started writing these in 2007 as  a way for people that I don’t talk to very often to keep up with what I’ve been doing, but I’ve found that it helps me see what I’ve accomplished (or not accomplished) that I can use to reflect on what I want to do in the next year. You can find the 2007, 2008 and 2009 editions if you want to see how this year compares with previous years.

2010 in review

First, the big changes:

While all three of these were really hard decisions to make, I’m happy about each of them. I was really burned out in the first few months of 2010, and I’m just now starting to feel re-energized. The goal of each of these big changes was to free up more time for myself and more time to work on fun little projects that I’m passionate about doing.

Progress Toward my Goals for 2010:

If you go back to my 2009 post and look at my goals for 2010, I feel pretty happy about what I’ve accomplished. Here are those goals and my progress on each one.

  • Continue to do interesting work on fun projects where I can collaborate with cool people: My work on MeeGo fits this goal pretty well.
  • Start a few more websites: Well, maybe not a few, but I did start one: Rednecks in the Wild.
  • Stay healthy by continuing to work out and eat healthy food: I’ve been doing a lot of running this year, and even did my first 5K. I’ve also been making a real effort to eat more real food and less crap.
  • Spend more time reading a combination of fiction and business / technology books: I have read at least 45 books that I’ve counted, mostly science fiction / fantasy, which is about a book a week.
  • Take more beach vacations! Todd and I had a lovely Thanksgiving vacation in Hawaii this year.

Other Interesting Things I Did in 2010:

What I Want to Accomplish in 2011

  • Finish that cookbook that I’ve been threatening to write for the past 15 years. I started working on it over the holiday and am making pretty good progress.
  • Get back into doing some light programming for fun projects. I’ve been dabbling a bit over the last year, but mostly with things like shell scripts and awk that aren’t really programming, so I’d like to do more with PHP and APIs.
  • Work on a couple of side projects or random websites with the goal of helping to build more programming skills.
  • Be even healthier in 2011 to build endurance and strength with longer runs and more regularly hitting the gym to lift weights.
  • Continue to read regularly and take another beach vacation.
Rednecks in the Wild

Launching Rednecks in the Wild

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I like to occasionally launch random websites, so here’s my latest: Rednecks in the Wild. Rednecks in the Wild is a website where anyone can submit pictures of homo redneckus aka “rednecks” in their natural habitats.

Here’s how you can participate:

Here are a few of my favorite pictures so far:

Some of you may be wondering how Rednecks in the Wild got started. I grew up in rural Ohio, and I know that there are plenty of funny redneck pictures out there, so I bought this domain over a year ago with the idea of building this website. Shortly before the holidays, I started looking at all of the domains that I own and decided to start working on this one. I started building Rednecks in the Wild a couple of weeks before my vacation with the goal of launching it toward the end of the holidays. Some of you may have noticed a couple of posts on Twitter and Facebook with links to the website, but I’ve been relatively quiet about it to give me time to build up a good base of content before launching it. This is just a fun little project with no huge grand ambitions, but the hope is that at least a few people will get some enjoyment out of it.

Do you have a funny redneck picture to submit to Rednecks in the Wild?

Open source, research, and other stuff I'm interested in posting.