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Yahoo has a Meme Tracker , WHAT? July 19, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Blogging, Trends, Web Sites , add a comment

Thanks to my Google Alerts, I found out that my latest blog post appeared on the Twitter News channel of a site called Buzztracker.com, which appears to be a Yahoo-powered memetracker, a-la AllTop.com, Technorati.com, TechMeme.com, Megite.com and scads of others.
Yahoo Buzztracker
One cool thing I thought they did was the very prominent placement of the MyBlogLog widget - it gives the feeling that the site is being actively contributed to, instead of controlled by RSS-crawling bots. I also got the sense via the topbar that there were several deep categories to explore.

They do have RSS feeds, but I think if they were to provide an embeddable widget for each topic, this service would be pretty interesting indeed. It looks like all the categories are likely controlled by a human, but that’s probably for the best (or maybe working at a magazine company has given me an inflated sense that editorial control is a good thing. yay wisdom of the crowds!).

Hey Mary Gardner, I heard you are getting into Twitter

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Career, Friends, Twitter, Orlando Business Journal , 2 comments

Shout-outs to Mary Gardner, who happens to be my manager’s wife. She is a very cool lady and someone you should all get to know. Here’s an excerpt of her blog where she recounts our meeting over lunch today with most of the PHP Team and a couple of project managers:

The Charisma Coach!: Hanging out with the Techies

They’re programmers who have a personal interest in social media as well as doing it for their jobs.

For me, it was so much easier hanging with them for an hour than reading a techie magazine, and easier to pick up on the language. They gave me content for an upcoming business article and ideas for others.

Hanging with those outside your own industry can give your own creativity a boost and sharpen your own knowledge about something that might be out of your comfort zone but that is interesting.

I told her she MUST go to BlogOrlando and add me on twitter as well as Eric and the other twitter folks at the table. For her it makes lots of sense, she is in the life coaching and professional speaking fields, and she wants to build a personal brand around celebrities with causes. I think she will find some great resources and utility through twitter, so Mary, hoping you have Google Alerts turned on, sign up; or if you saw the “new blog post” link in Twitter, good for you!

Either way, welcome to the Dark Side, Mary. I look forward to your update in my daily (OMG, they mean daily) Orlando Business Journal update.

Happy Happy Birthday to Me July 18, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech , 3 comments

Decided to take a picture to commemorate the occasion.
birthday
Birthday 2
Birthday 3
Birthday 4
I’m 26. Do the math.

Luck is where Preparation Meets Opportunity: CMU’s Randy Pausch July 12, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Career, Video, Trends, floridacreatives, Disney, Teaching, Storytelling, Love , 1 comment so far

So many great things in this video - it’s an hour and fifteen minutes, but you really should watch this.

Not only did Randy achieve his childhood dreams, but he has taken his process for doing so and boiled it down to this talk, which we can now pass on to others. This guy is dying, yet he is so positive. I love it and I love this talk. Thanks @supaben34 for bringing up my day (actually, my whole year).

Some key points:

Likemind.orl and Drupal June 19, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Drupal, Events, Coffee, floridacreatives, Likemind.orl, Teaching, open source , 2 comments

In about 10 hours a group of likeminded folks will get together for good coffee and conversations with friends and strangers. We do this once a month at the Lake Eola Panera Bread.

Likemind.orl Likemind Orlando is part of a larger group of events which started in New York with two guys who were having good conversations online, and decided to move them to the coffee shop. Their friends in other cities liked the idea, and now, Likemind groups meet in more than 50 cities around the world on the same day every month.

Chris Scott will now be officiating over Likemind with me, since Alex left and got himself a house and a life on the East Coast (of Florida). Congrats and best of luck to Alex and Kathryn.

***********

Also coming up in the next few days is the 3rd installment of he Florida Drupal User’s Group. Myself and Mike Anello will be teaching classes on CCK and Views, respectively. You are all certainly invited to check out this event and ask tons of questions - we have left ourselves 4 hours to cover these topics, as each of them is kind of a big deal on its own.

You can get information and directions about how to get to the MindComet offices on groups.drupal.org/florida - the office is in Maitland.

Florida Drupal Group
Saturday, June 21st
1pm - 4pm
MindComet - Maitland

What do you hope to get out of Doterati?

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Markteting, Orlando, floridacreatives, Doterati , 6 comments

A particularly salient comment by Mr. Alex on this Doterati thread:

We have three of the top 10 largest universities in the country within striking distance and a low cost of living. We have a ton of available angel money and an eager local government. We have affordable bandwidth and office space. We have a strong creative community in part from our proximity to Universal and Disney.

I’d say the Space Coast and lots of the engineering stuff in the area adds to the caché as well, and lots of folks have been quoting EA Games as a big deal… which it is. I think Bonnier (my employer) could be more active in the community as far as corporate presence and making Orlando look cool - what are we really doing on that end? I didn’t even know they were here until I found out about the job opening, and most people working next to me would say the same thing.

What do I want to get out of Doterati? Let’s have the ability for folks in other parts of the world search for something simple on Google like “Orlando tech” and find all of the great stuff happening here - which I think this group will accomplish.

Funny, I know that some folks (myself included) have tried to keep the “agendas” and “special interests” out of this - but the agenda is to make us look cool, plain and simple. The means to that end have been supplied in the posts all over the site.

Doterati Drama June 12, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Events, Web Sites, floridacreatives, Social Networking , 13 comments

Last 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

Best of the Net 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.

Net @ Night 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.

This is Internet TV May 31, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Podcasts, Video, Reviews, TV, Trends , add a comment


This is Internet TV, originally uploaded by Liberatr.net.

I’ve been hearing Leo Laporte talk about setting up his video streaming for weeks now, but he’s constantly down-playing the awesomeness of the whole thing. Today I finally had a few spare moments to check it out, and I have to say that this is what Internet TV is supposed to be. He’s got some great cameras and awesome lighting, and apparently he’s able to have guests in the studio as well.

This is every podcaster’s dream - you get to time-shift your shows, but you can have interactive features and discussion during the recording - there is a chat room under the video window at all times with a deluge of rolling comments from the TWiT Army.

Maybe Leo is a fluke because of all of his built-in celebrity, but I’m just happy he’s making this happen, paving the way for the little guys.

Nice work.

Internet TV in Action
This is a full-sized version of the video stream - that’s just a pretty thing - it looks and sounds fantastic.

Orlando PHP Tonight: Drupal May 27, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Orlando, Drupal, Events, floridacreatives, Teaching, Programming , 1 comment so far

At DeVry University near the Mall of Millenia, tonight at 7PM, I will be presenting at the 2nd ever Orlando PHP user group meeting. David and Derek asked me to come talk about Drupal after my peanut-gallery comments during last month’s framework shootout event.

Topics for discussion:

I will also be showing off some of the features we used to construct the OrlandoFringe.org, FloridaCreatives.com and Petentials.com websites.

For those curious to learn more Drupal, we have a whole slew of lectures planned into the fall through the Florida Drupal group on groups.drupal.org - our meetings are second? Saturdays of the month at the MindComet offices in Maitland, just off of 434.

In other PHP UG news, the Meetup.com PHP group, hosted first Thursday of the month at the Bonnier Corporate HQ in Winter Park Village (above Brio) will be coming up June 5th. 4 programmers representing Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Symfony will be building a blog in 10 hours using the same database tables, then taking another 10 hours to extend the blog platform. Hopefully this will serve as a fun and informative hands-on introduction to the strengths and weaknesses of these 4 popular PHP frameworks.

P.S. See Eric’s Blog for a description of the Shootout rules.