Commanding Chaos for Coworking, Open Source and Creative Communities

July 2008 Posts

Yahoo has a Meme Tracker , WHAT?

Sat, 07/19/2008 - 05:08 -- rprice

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!).

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Hey Mary Gardner, I heard you are getting into Twitter

Fri, 07/18/2008 - 22:03 -- rprice

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.

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Happy Happy Birthday to Me

Fri, 07/18/2008 - 02:00 -- rprice

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

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Orlando Theatre Pot-Luck

Sun, 07/13/2008 - 17:08 -- rprice

Back in April, a bunch of local theatre folks got together to have dinner and meet up. Tonight was the second installment in what seems to be a 3-or-4-times-a-year event, held in local theatre spaces. The April 6th pot-luck was hosted by Mad Cow Theatre downtown, and today's was held in the lobby of the Orlando REP.

From the Wikipedia page on Potluck:

Folk etymology has derived the term "potluck" from the Native American custom of potlatch; the word "potluck", however, is actually of English origin. It is a portmanteau word formed from (cooking) pot and lucke. The earliest written citation is from 1592: "That that pure sanguine complexion of yours may never be famisht with pot lucke," Thomas Nashe. As this shows, the original meaning was "food given away to guests", probably derived from "whatever food one is lucky enough to find in the pot", i.e. whatever food happens to be available, especially when offered to a guest. By extension, a more general meaning is "whatever is available in a particular circumstance or at a particular time."

Potlatch is actually a good custom from which to derive this kind of dinner - the potlatch is often celebrated at special events, like births, celebrations of the harvest, and weddings. It is a show of wealth and prosperity, where the person holding the potlatch holds a feast, and trades some prized commodity for things they might need.

The tech community's BarCamp and the PR and Media community's BlogOrlando could be seen as a kind of potlatch - we're trading ideas and experience.

The idea for the Theatre Pot-Luck was originally spawned by local actor John Baker via Elizabeth Maupin's Orlando Sentinel theatre blog, which is also the best place see announcements for other upcoming events. The Orlando Arts Blog is another good place to check. Apparently, the Orlando Shakes has volunteered to hold the next one in a few months. Right now there is no organizer, it just sort of happens as someone steps up to offer space - which is, in my opinion, as it should be.

With Florida Creatives and BarCamp, the geeks are really fixated on a single person having all the ideas, and I think this is stifling the creativity and experimentation that could be happening if the organizations were more headless. One way we can do that with Florida Creatives is having chapters in other cities, which we are getting going in Melbourne/Brevard now, and hopefully more successfully in Jacksonville some day - the only stopping other cities is an initial organizer.

Yes, someone does have to take the reins, but only until it gains critical mass. Even when I tried to move the Happy Hour to the Fringe Beer tent some of the downtown folks still went to Crooked Bayou looking for their regular 3rd Monday beer-and-tots... funny.

I really meant to take some pictures, but when I was there, I just didn't see an opportunity.

What goes on at a theatre potluck? Well I talked to Arwen Lowbridge from Fractured Atlas in New York - she's down here visiting so she could check out Beth Marshall and Tod Kimbro's My Illustrious Wasteland - they were both also there, along with Betsy Maupin, of course - I ate dinner with them and (for a few minutes) John DiDonna, but he had to run.

Arwen and I waxed delicious about non-GMO, CSA farms, picking your own fruit, and having fresh food delivered to your house. I also had my first face-to-face meeting with Maupin, who said something to the effect of "You look bigger than on the Internet".

I later moved over to a table with David Almeida , Marcie and Stephen J Miller from Here Be Dragons. There were some interesting threads there too, like one about experimenting with different roles while you're in school, because once you're out, you get cast as yourself for the rest of your life. The other hot topic was nudity, since David had done a play at Fringe with an extended nude scene.

I also got to hear about the history of this event, which is really important to me. The more I get into this, I see myself leaning more towards the role of documentarian and historian. I'm actually thinking about shooting a 20-25 minute documentary in a few weeks if I get the logistics figured out - I also hope that I will be able to get the help with editing that I'm hoping for... more on this later.

Looking forward expectantly to the next Pot-Luck - next time I promise to bring something. Betsy's chicken and David's brownies were great, and I heard good things about some lo mein and Stephen's apple pie too.

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Luck is where Preparation Meets Opportunity: CMU's Randy Pausch

Sat, 07/12/2008 - 09:13 -- rprice

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:

  • The Head Fake: we don't send kids to sports to learn about football.
  • To achieve your dreams, you have to get over the brick walls. The brick walls are there to weed out the people who don't want to achieve their dreams.
  • Even if you are denied at first, you can still reach your dreams through karma and more brick-wall-jumping.
  • Carnegie Mellon's ETC is freaking awesome. So awesome, they're spreading their labs to other continents, and five companies have letters open guaranteeing to hire their students.
  • There are some great examples of interdisciplinary stuff - putting left- and right-brained people on the same teams.
  • It's nice to have metrics telling you how well you work with others.
  • Always put others before yourself.
  • If you are patient, everyone will impress you. Just keep waiting.
  • I am going to have to check out the Alice project, like a lot
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BlogOrlando, Pleasure Island's Last Hurrah

Wed, 07/09/2008 - 12:55 -- rprice

The dates for BlogOrlando have been announced. Held at Rollins College from Sept 25-27th, with the main event being held on Saturday the 27th (not Friday like previous years). If you haven't been to BlogOrlando yet, it's a really fantastic introduction to the world of blogging, and there should be lots of fun surprises this year. Last year there were some great discussions, and a few keynote presentations by folks like Shel Israel and Chris Huer (google their names).

Josh Hallet, the man behind the unconference, says registration should be open soon. You should be able to take care of that at BlogOrlando.com

If you didn't notice it yet, the very last weekend Pleasure Island will exist is the same weekend as BlogOrlando - as of Sept 27th (I'm assuming it will be open that day) the attractions will all be closed in favor of something more "family friendly". Considering the number of cameras and recording devices that seem to follow BlogOrlando participants wherever we go, wouldn't it be nice to have a big blogger party out there at the Island?

Save the Adventurer's Club! Kungaloosh!

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Florida Creatives Jobs Group

Wed, 07/02/2008 - 03:34 -- rprice

Re-posted from New Group: Jobs on FloridaCreatives.com

Since the beginning of Florida Creatives, the people have always clambered for a place to post and seek jobs. In the past, I have used the FLCreatives blog for this purpose, or some folks have used the Google Groups list: those days are over.

Florida Creatives Jobs

The ground rules:

Use this space to post job availabilities, or say that you are looking for work. Please understand that joining this list will (by default) sign you up to receive email for every post or comment in this group; you can always unsubscribe and re-subscribe any time you like.

NOTE: if you are posting jobs, please do not post the jobs to other groups, such as regional groups, without permission from the group's moderator. Dozens of people receive emails for each of the groups on our site, and we do not want to be labeled as spam.

Any comments should be directed to the complaints department at 1 /dev/null Ln, Peoria, IL 31337.

Post and seek as needed within the network.

Thanks @danielrsmith for being the final catalyst to set this up.

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