Doterati Drama June 12, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Events, Web Sites, floridacreatives, Social Networking , 13 commentsLast night I actually took some time to start getting involved with the discussion over at Doterati, and then this morning, I am treated as though I am a hostile outsider, and I was told by Mark Krupinski to go and read the other blogs and comments that have shaped his comments into being so aggressive.
Apparently, everybody hates Ted Murphy. I don’t. I think he’s a smart guy who wants to do his job. The fact that he’s associated with this community is actually a boon, because he’s had several successful businesses. More than I can say for myself.
I thought Tara Lamberson and Ted were doing lots of the work, but I had noticed Dan Kinchen, Robert Dempsey and others leaving lots of “Welcome” comments on everyone’s profile. It actually seemed to me like there was a concentrated effort for one of those 4 key folks to leave a comment on every profile, so when I pointed this out to Mark, I used the s-word: spam. Apparently, this is some sort of a curse word. I was just calling it like I saw it. Not trying to stir up s-word.
I also stated my distaste at using Ning, which ships with tons of features, over starting with a blog or a forum and throwing a few widgets, then seeing where everything goes from there. On this point, I am corrected. Apparently, Mark and the rest of the Membership Committee (what, they have one of those, there have been seven meetings? was there an invite list for this?) decided to set up Ning to facilitate their own internal conversations, but I was getting lots of pings to come check out the site, so I thought that was the plan - Ning forever, go Ning! Ning is King!
Appartenly Mark was not ready for the onslaught of people. This is fine.
With an onslaught of people, especially people who have read or heard lots of crazy things about Ted Murphy, who is tangentially involved with this project, that is bound to bring down a lot more s-word and f-word and c-word and l-word.
Thus far, I have yet to weigh in on the subject. Some other folks have.
Alex Rudloff left some initial Orlando Tech Association thoughts on his blog which generated some discussion. Alex tends to be good at that. In his blog, he links to a post by Lawrence Salberg on the evil Ted Murphy and his attempt to start up a social network in Orlando. I believe Lawrence missed the target by a huge degree.
I have seen Ted Murphy’s social networking outreaches, and they are always way more obvious than just putting your name at the bottom of the page. I actually joined their meetup.com group because I will be attending the IZEA Fest (which is across the street from my house) because there will be some great speakers there. What I thought was outre was the message I was sent a few minutes later - get your friends to sign up and get 25% of their ticket price! Ah, there’s the PayPerPost we all know and love…
Just in case I haven’t made it clear Ted != Doterati. Ted is a member like anyone else, and from what I can tell, each member chooses his or her level of involvement, which is as it should be. Ted put up a few dollars to buy a domain name and a Ning account. That’s fair. My name is on the Florida Creatives domain, but I don’t claim ownership of the concept. Honestly, the meetup was originally conceived as a way to get everyone in the same room so we could talk about having conferences - which he have done, and the events were great. Really great.
I can only look ahead to the future of tech in Central Florida optimistically - in my own universe there used to be zero user-groups for PHP and Drupal, and now there are 3, and I’ve been asked to speak at all 3. Rock.
We are not operating in a silo here - there is a need for lots of cross-pollination and kumbaya here. If someone makes a comment against Doterati, don’t take it personally - what you have in fact found is a passionate participant who wants to be there, and clearly has an idea of how things should be done - encourage the commentary! Maybe after they’ve whined for a few minutes they’ll stop and take a look at the potential of the thing and set up in the corner holding a sandwich board, ringing a bell and crying about how everyone should be there and sign up for the site!
Once the snapback comes on this and folks can get over it, we can all take a deep breath, have a beer, and wonder what it was we all got so flustered over. For now, I’ll try to re-read my comments before I post constructive criticism.
I love all of you guys. Hope to see you all this Monday for Florida Creatives Happy Hour or Wednesday for the Doterati Town Hall.
Petentials Reviewed by Amber and Leo June 8, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Markteting, Podcasts, Links, Reviews, Web Sites, Entrepreneurship, itunes, Petentials, Social Networking , 4 comments
Hooray for Google Alerts, and my media habits. A few days ago, I got an email from the google (now with a new and un-improved favicon…blech). This email linked to a blog post that linked to a podcast, and that was exciting.
The blogger was Kym Huynh, one of the hosts of a brand-new podcast called Best of the Net. In their first episode, The Google Bar, the topic was Pets, and the first story was Petentials, which is just amazing.
Then as I’m listening to some of my weekly podcasts, I noticed something even more amazing.
Every week, Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte sit down to talk about the latest happenings on the Internet. A few weeks ago, they were complaining about not having any guests, so they solicited the audience to email in if they had a web startup. Being the faithful listener that I am, I had to tell them about Petentials. I really thought they’d have thousands of suggestions like this every week, so I didn’t exactly expect to hear anything too soon, but…
I was listening to this week’s Net @ Night, “Tiffany Roll”, and when Amber got to the letters, I heard her say “This week’s letter is from Ryan Price in Orlando…”
Excuse me?
…and then they talked about Petentials for the next several minutes. I stopped right where I was standing and smiled the biggest smile. Right after that I called Darren and told him the good news.
Let’s keep the good vibes going - I know lots of you folks out there have podcasts and blogs - how would you like to feature a new social network that has been covered by Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur? Yeah, I thought so…!
Listen to net@night 55: Tiffany Roll (RSS, iTunes)
Listen to Best of the Net 1: The Google Bar (RSS, iTunes)
Looking at the dates that these were released, I almost wonder if the Best of the Net show heard about us via the live stream that Amber and Leo do over at TwitLive.TV while they are taping the show. If so, that makes for a great follow-up to my previous post.
Petentials on Fox News April 11, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : News, Site News, Career, Markteting, TV, Petentials, Social Networking , 2 commentsPetentials on Fox 35 | Petentials Park
Also, here’s an email Darren sent out to friends and advisors.
As some of you know, the Fox reporter, David Martin, informed me today that the feature on Petentials was picked up by Fox national news. I think what this means is that it’ll be aired on local news shows throughout the country over the next several days…or weeks.
We’ve had about 50 new accounts created in the last 24 hrs. In fact, 4 have been added in the last 2 minutes. There are 20 people on the site right now.
It looks like we’re now getting some Tennessee traffic, so my guess is that we were on the early news in Tampa tonight and the late news in/around Cleveland, Tennessee. Exciting stuff!
Now it’s hit Minneapolis/St. Paul (and maybe others). 123 people currently on the site…and rising with every refresh! At least 20 new registered users in the last 20 minutes. Plus, we have someone who wants to be our community ambassador for Minneapolis/St. Paul.
Update: Detroit Free Press Article
BarCampOrlando Downtown April 5th and 6th, 10AM - 6PM April 1, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Podcasts, Orlando, SEO, Music, Links, Events, Video, Coworking, Trends, Standards, floridacreatives, mashups, Graphics, OrlandoScene, Teaching, open source, BarCamp, PodCamp, Storytelling, phone, Web Services, Social Media Events, Social Networking, Programming , add a comment
BarCamp Orlando is a weekend for all types of creative folks to come together and share with each other. The event is dubbed an “unconference”, a format which derives power from the people instead of the event organizers or the presenters. Everyone has an equal opportunity to get on stage and speak, teach or lead a discussion, playing off of the idea that at any given conference, the people in the audience have more knowledge collectively than the presenter(s) on stage.
This second installment of BarCamp will be held over 2 days, Saturday and Sunday, April 5th and 6th, in downtown Orlando at the Wall Street complex, from 10AM - 6PM each day. Registration is free, and a registration promises a shirt and lunch on the sponsors of BarCamp, businesses who are passionate about the technology and media communities of Central Florida.
Saturday is the designated “Dev Day”, playing host to everything from web programming to robot building and video game development and everything in between. iPhone hackers, guys with soldering irons, the latest technologies, and plenty that haven’t been realized yet. Every 30 minutes, both venues will have a different talk going on, so if you’re feeling lost in the jargon, apply the “rule of 2 feet” and check out what’s happening in the other room!
Sunday is dubbed “Media Day”, and is the place for storytellers, journalists, writers, designers, filmmakers, musicians, 2D and 3D artists, podcasters, bloggers and social networkers to show off their work, share their tricks or talk about the state of the industry. From 12 to 1 we will be talking about the “Past, Present and Future of Media in Central Florida”, hoping to give our community a sense of our story, and where we’re headed.
Registration is free, and the event runs from 10AM - 6PM both days with a lunch break at 1PM. The event will be housed in Slingapour’s and One-Eyed-Jack’s, with Wall St Cantina acting as our “hallway”. There will be projectors and microphones, chairs and a space to speak. All you have to do is write your name on the whiteboard and you get 20-25 minutes to share your passions with a group of energetic, engaged geeks and creatives. I would not use the words “captive audience” to describe the BarCamp crowd, because they all want to get involved.
Visit www.barcamporlando.org today and register for Dev Day, Media Day or both days. Wall Street Plaza is at 18 Wall Street Plaza, Orlando, FL 32801 - barcamporlando.org/where has a map to the venue and information about parking.
What’s your interest in distributed social networking? February 23, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Links, Trends, Standards, Web Sites, Petentials, Social Networking, OpenID, microformats , add a commentAfter 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.
