Ryan Price and the Media

Earlier this month, I tooled around Paris with Mike, Marc, Erik, John and about 800 other guys and gals for a big hippie free-software love fest. It was tons of fun, and I fully intend to keep bumping into these kids as often as possible.

Here is some proof:

A few days ago I was listening to @davewiner and @jayrosen_nyu on their Rebooting the News podcast, and dave was talking about his 40tweets app.

40twits takes a look at the stats for the shortened URLs you post to twitter and decides which ones are most popular, then displays them in order. Dave's current top link as about Wikipedia and Michael Jackson.

I don't know if it counts the link being retweeted, but I'm going to guess yes.

This got me thinking about one of the original features of twitter - the favorite. I remember using favorites a lot before I started following 1000+ people. Now I just sort of let the wave go by. Also, not every desktop tool has an easy/visible favorite button.

I put out a call to my twitter group: "when was the last time you favorited a tweet?" and got a big response. (displayed in reverse order)

Thanks @gilcreque, @modulist, @karschp, @thandelike, @ericschechter, @domhay, @staticnrg, @tiburon, @doreeno, @incanus77, and @mrscrumley for replying. Of everyone who participated, it seems like Eric Schechter and myself are the only two people who don't use it very often, or at all.

Looks like I'm not the only person thinking about the utility of Twitter Favorites. This post by Christopher Lynn is about the same subject.

TweetDeck has a view to let you look at your favorites, but I didn't see a place to add a favorite very easily - it's hiding under "other actions", which you see when you hover over the user's icon. Tweetie (desktop) requires a right-click, or you can press the "F" key, then a little star appears next to the tweet.

I currently pipe my blog feed to twitter, and I don't hear a lot of complaints about that. I'm thinking about piping my Delicious bookmarks to twitter as well. Do any of you folks pipe your bookmarks in? Would you like to see more useful links on twitter?

The spring has kept me busy, so I haven't been able to read every blog post on my RSS reader. However, the recent announcements around WordCampOrlando made me wonder what Josh had to say about it.

BlogOrlando 2009 from Josh Hallet's blog:

After a great deal of consideration I have decided not to host a big, public BlogOrlando this year.
...
It is the complete end? No. I may still hold a small private event this year, or may think about hosting an event in 2010. We'll see.

2 years ago, I talked about doing PodCampOrlando, but the farthest we got was a happy hour and photowalk (lately I've been using the site to teach people how to do stuff in Drupal). Honestly, the social media wave tends to hit Orlando a year or two after the West Coast, so while a small and intimate PodCamp would have been fun, it was hard to get the podcasters, videobloggers, and especially the news media to sign on for something like that.

BlogOrlando was serving many of those folks very well, but now there may be some room in the Orlando calendar to explode what was BlogOrlando into a WordCamp, PodCamp, PR-unconference, SocialMediaClub, etc.

There are a lot more podcasts being produced in Central Florida than there were in 2006, and the ones that are still around from those days aren't going anywhere.

Would you come to a PodCamp? What presentation would you give, or what discussion would you like to have? Do you understand what a PodCamp is?

12:00 - 1:30 PM, June 5th, July 3rd, August 7th, September 4th at CoLab Orlando

[caption id="attachment_760" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="It might look something like this"][/caption]

A few months ago, I attended my first DrupalCon, and what an explosion of open source community awesomeness it was. As Mike and I are running a fledging Drupal shop, I was subconsciously looking for a shop I could use as a signpost, a group whose values and practices were in line with where I would like to be in a few years. I met the fine guys and gal from Advantage Labs in Minneapolis/St Paul, and was introduced to some of the awesome stuff they do.

One really great thing they offer in addition to web hosting, consulting and training is what they call Lab Hours. Twice a week, anyone experiencing a hang-up in their site, or just folks who are interested in helping, come by their offices for some roundtable support time. A goal is set to accomplish a certain task at the end of 2 hours, everyone pairs off and work commences.

There is no "expert" in the room doing all of the work. It's roundtable style, and that's how it should be.

This is pretty much a direct physical manifestation of the kind of help you get in #drupal-support in IRC. I have helped out there a bunch, and then having heard about this concept, I decided Orlando could use some community helpdesk time as well.

Starting with the first Friday of the month, I'll start hosting Lab Hours of my own here in Orlando. If you've attended DrupalCamp Florida or a Drupal Meetup, if you've attended one of our DrupalEasy training days or webinars, or if you're just curious about learning how to use this open source content management system, you're welcome to come by and share.

If nobody shows up, I'm going to open up IRC and help people in other parts of the world. I also intend to show everyone where they can go and get more help outside of helpdesk time.

CoLab is Orlando's first and only coworking space, on the 6th floor of the Angebuilt building, 37 N. Orange Ave. It's right at the corner of Wall St and Orange Ave, above Subway. It's the perfect place to host an event of this kind.