Commanding Chaos for Coworking, Open Source and Creative Communities

February 2008 Posts

Tampa Film Fan Immaortalized as a Comic

Tue, 02/26/2008 - 07:43 -- rprice

Tampa Film Fan is written by Lisa Ciurro. It's a local blog I read has been featured in the Tampa Tribune. My only question is this:

Your paper acknowledges bloggers?

Ours has plenty of bloggers that work for the paper or blog on behalf of the paper, but what's all this business about recognizing a job well done? I won't stand for it! (actually, I'll give a standing ovation for it.

Tampa Film Fan » i’ve blogged, been blogged about, and even blogged about blogging: now I’ve been blogjammed and i think i like it

Lisa CiurroI’ve been called a cartoon character before. Now, according to the Tampa Tribune’s BlogJam section, I actually am one!

Visit www.myspace.com/wikiworld to see more of Williams’ talent and creativity on display.

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BarCampOrlando April 5th & 6th @ Wall St. Plaza

Sat, 02/23/2008 - 18:53 -- rprice

April 2008 BarCampOrlando @ Wall Street Plaza, April 5th & 6th

View Video on Vimeo.

I'm recruiting presenters and attendees for the New Media Day. Be there, bring your A-game. (your B-game is equally welcome)

BarCampOrlando

At the last event, I think everyone's understanding that there were going to be some crazy awesome presentations as well as some mediocre ones was not very solid. I spoke to a few people who presented and said "I thought I was going to be all by myself in a room with like 5 guys all scratching their chins, but I was SO wrong", the other half of them said "I thought about presenting, but I didn't think I was 'good enough', but then I saw it was just a bunch of guys like me, so I'm going to blow them all out of the water this time".

Really, those are you only two options. You should have either presented at last year's BarCamp, or decided that you were definitely presenting at the next one. If you weren't there, then take my word for it and create a presentation. Really.

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Florida Creatives Graphics, Events List

Sat, 02/23/2008 - 14:43 -- rprice

All available on the Events page at Florida Creatives, there are some new additions to the page there.

First of all is this swanky promotional banner: I'm a fan. Also, notice the other new banner in the sidebar.

Click here to visit Florida Creatives

Right now it is the Erik, Chris, John, Alex and Ryan show - sorry if you got left out, but there's nothing stopping you from making your own banners, now is there? I actually think I should edit this to include Gregg, Greg and Cory somehow. There weren't lots of pictures of y'all though.

Also, I started a super-simple, easily-digestible list of recurring events sorted by day of the week instead of subject matter as it is currently on the Orlando networking events wiki page.

I tried to link everything to Upcoming.org to make a consistent experience for anyone clicking on those links. We also list lots of our stuff there and it's publicly viewable. Yahoo IDs are also pretty easy to find.

If you've got suggestions or you want to contribute, that's why registration for the site is open. I'll bump anyone up to Editor who asks.

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Will Your Subscribers Miss You?

Sat, 02/23/2008 - 10:44 -- rprice

Punk Marketing: Get Off Your Ass and Join the Revolution is a super-fantastic book by Richard Laermer and Mark Simmons. I saw it while strolling through the business section at a Books-A-Million and immediately fell in love with the artwork and the aesthetic of the whole book. I'm not exactly the target audience for this book, but considering that most of the media I consume is not about marketing explicitly, it was nice to see so much new millenium marketing material in the same place.

I also downloaded the audio appendix from Audible - Punk Marketing Manifesto: The Arguments (Unabridged) (the Amazon link for this isn't working right now, but I'm including it so I don't have to go back later). Both the book and this audio conversation about the book do a great job of setting up the idea that there is a different kind of marketer in the world: the one who understands that people are smart, who uses his day-to-day experiences to construct messages, who is constantly revising his mission. They even left Article #15 of their manifesto as a fill-in-the-blank for the readers of the book. That makes me feel like I belong to a community because I'm in the punk set now.

Today as I was looking over their recent blogs, I noticed this article about an ad campaign where they told customers the whopper was no longer on the menu, or gave them Big Macs or Wendy's burgers instead, and it got me thinking

New Coke + 22 years = Whopper Freakout
I love the fact they used what happened to Coke in 1985 to create a whopper of an idea, demonstrating in the most entertaining way possible how BK customers really feel about their Whoppers (if you see what I mean).

Even though I haven't had one in months, if went to Burger King and you told me the Whoppers were gone, I'd be moved to start a riot with the people in the dining room. They can't get rid of the Whopper! It's an American institution!

Right?

Then I started thinking about when this happens with media. This is the principle that LOST is built upon - right when you get so attached to the story that there's no possible way you can get to tomorrow without knowing what happens next, they end the episode (and sometimes go on a 5-week hiatus for Christmas, but they fixed that for Season 4). The worst example of this is Joss Whedon's Firely, which we learned to love on DVD, only to find out we could never have any more. It's like ordering an endangered species on the menu of a restaurant.

What about the independent media? Have there been times in my life when I was heartbroken about a podcast's cancellation, or a blogger's retirement?

When Amanda left Rocketboom, it was only a matter of time before my curiosity about "How well can they do this show without her?" was satisfied and I stopped subscribing. When my friend Emily moved to another city, the experience I was so in love with, that of creating media, was taken away from me.

I'm certainly in love with the creation process, but are my readers and listeners and viewers in love with me? Have I given them the ability to properly let me know they are? What would happen if I removed all of the permalinks? Would our lives be different if the moment of serendipity, when you find someone else operating on you wavelength, was stifled?

I'm really wondering what I'm going to do with Blogging Fringe this year. Last May, I was completely ready to dump my pocket change into it and get more entrenched in the Fringe community, try to figure out how to afford touring, make it an international experience. Then my dream swelled a little and I started thinking about schemes that would bring a much broader group into an I-love-this situation not just with a 2-week slice of the year, but with every day in a new city. Since then, Orlando Scene TV has proven the possibility of fanning the flames of someone who already possesses the spark of inspiration.

This is what I learned today - maybe for the second or third time - my content (at least in my estimation) is for those who are looking, not those I am looking for. My goals are often stated like I can show this product to anyone and be so confident in the message or the subject matter that they will have no choice but to fall in love. That's not the kind of media I produce. Maybe that's not the kind any of us are producing.

I'm broke, I've got a job I am in love with that doesn't pay me, I live where I love and I have people I love all around me. But I think I need to deprive myself of a few of these local comforts in order to learn something about myself, or just to find a way to make money.

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What's your interest in distributed social networking?

Sat, 02/23/2008 - 06:36 -- rprice

After watching Chris Messina's existential DiSo Interview, I decided to go check out a bit more about the distributed social networking stuff Chris and Steve Ivy have been working on - there are 160+ people on the mailing list now, and hundreds of threads.

Here's a little bit about the DiSo Project:

Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards - both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard apis, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides/legs/arms/spokes - pick your connection: Information, Identity, and Interaction.

DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: “to build a social network with its skin inside out”.

Our first target is Wordpress, bootstrapping on existing work and building out from there.
So what does that mean?

We’re building Wordpress plugins that implement or build on:

* Microformats like XFN, hCard, XOXO — wp-contactlist, wp-profiles
* OpenID — wp-contactlist, wp-openid-server
* OAuth
* …and others

They also ask you to state a reason for wanting to join the mailing list, which I've copied here:

I am a big fan of microformats and distributed, semantic applications. I work for a social network that's a little bit different because we're mapping the relationships between animals. It gets even more interesting there, because some animals live together, some animals play together, some share parents, and then they all have one or more people who take care of them. It's been difficult for us to take open source software and shoehorn the relationships into it, and what that means as far as a user experience goes.

One funny thing is the idea of your "active pet" or active profile - if a person can create multiple resumes, one for film jobs and one for programming jobs, for example, then maybe this idea of having multiple profiles is important. The people you play poker with on the weekends might not want to be notified when you update the work blog - others will.

So there's another layer. If someone subscribes to your updates, can they subscribe to a subset of those, so as not to get loads of BACN in their activity stream reader?

I think about these things.

If you haven't seen it, check out that weird animal social network.

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Social Media Café London

Tue, 02/19/2008 - 04:12 -- rprice

My last Friday in London was the cause for Likemind London and (directly across the street, 5 minutes after) Social Media Café. I'm pretty sure the idea is to eventually own a physical piece of "IRL" space - this goes beyond coworking - London has several coworking spaces already. We're talking a place for social media nerds or pros, however they choose to label themselves, to get together and talk. Now taking place every Friday Morning near London's glitzy West End, behind the theatre where you can see "Spamalot".

Don't believe me? Here's a video by Mike Atherton (sizemore).

Here's a bit from Lloyd Davis, the organizer, on Social Media Café as Platform:

“What I want to create is a platform that enables people to create value for themselves.”

The inspiration for this comes from the tech world - CP/M & MS-DOS, the IBM PC, the Internet, the Web, Amazon Marketplace, Craigslist, Ebay, Facebook - what they all have in common is that no matter how they get paid for or how they’re organised, or whether or not they make money for their inventors, they have also given other people the opportunity to create new relationships, markets and businesses that weren’t possible before

Also met some cool peeps there, they'll be showing up in the blogroll on the left sidebar soon, and probably the daily Ma.gnolia summary in the RSS as well.

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Some People

Mon, 02/18/2008 - 17:37 -- rprice

Some people are weird.

Some people send me emails and IMs late at night on the day after I got back from England. ::YAWN:: just writing the word yawn makes me yawn and then I feel even more tired. Still, I have something going on in my head that prevents me from going to bed until I pay them some attention. Inbox zero, or something like that, right?

Some people are warm, and pleasant to talk to, but still email me late at night on the day after I got back from England.

Some people ask me questions about Drupal stuff, then I try to answer them, but I second guess myself, because of all the yawning and tiredness. These people email me late at night on the day after I got back from England.

Some people make films about scientists who turn themselves into dogs, and comment on my blog about TurnHere late at night on the day after I got back from England.

Some people work on social networking sites... for animals.

I bear these people no ill will.

Some people are weird.

I think I belong to the group of some people. I just need to sleep.

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