Blogging as Focus at South Sound Conference

I have posted over on Tacoma Tech Connect about saving the date for the next South Sound Technology conference on Dec 7th. I was Chair, Co-chair or emcee for the conference for the last five years but am retiring to ex-officio chair status this year.

However I still am involved in and enjoy planning for the event. At this time the topics of Security and Technology as an Economic Driver are two of the major focal points for the day.

I am ready to add a third topic for the afternoon speaker and panels and am looking for interest out there in making it happen. There seems to be a real strength in the blogging community in the South Sound. Truthfully, I am not sure if it is the same in every metropolitan area or not, but I suspect that we have many unique qualities specific to our region.

This is to name just a few.

The prototype for a community based, editorially driven blog in Exit133

A major newspaper that has made a direct and aggressive effort to make blogs part of their content in the Tribune. Not to mention leadership in "new journalism" efforts.

A community driven effort to aggregate from a variety of blogs all things Tacoma in FEEDTACOMA.

A strong civic communications driven effort through blogs by the Chamber of Commerce.

A blog built from scratch that balances everyday life and the technology community itself in Keven Freitas and the efforts of Jamie at Thrice All American.

An online comic syndicating itself through the South Sound blogosphere.

An eclectic mix of artists, parents, companies, publications and baseball fans all contributing to the cross pollination of information, promotion, advocacy and instigation. So many that I am certain I have overlooked quite a few. I apologize to you all. Feel free to describe your blog and post links in the comments.

My question to you. Is there enough here to build a program around? I believe so. What would the program look like? You tell me.

Holding a Virtual Scavenger Hunt

Today will be fun for me as I am holding a virtual scavenger hunt. It is something I have done for the last couple of years and I have always enjoyed organizing. Now it isn't quite as fun as a "run around the globe" scavenger hunt like the classic movie "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963)" or the not as good but funny "Rat Race (2001)" or even the not so good "Scavenger Hunt (1979)". The fact is you really don't need to run anywhere, because the hunting is all done online. A list of items that you need to acquire using different methods of search and application usage is handed out with a time frame for which they all must be discovered, created, recovered and printed out or emailed with links to the results.

It might be a shopping cart full of three very different and hard to find items, or the total box office receipts of a movie with Peter Sellers in it with the only information provided being three supporting characters or an email response from your local government official. It might be.

In this case, there will be teams of three competing and yes you will be graded. (prizes too)

For those in my Living and Working in a Virtual World class who read this blog. You have just been given a head start. Prepare your strategy and form your team so you can be ready later today.

Online News Association Event

With about one quarter of visitors to newspaper web sites coming from search engine results, ( according to data released last week from a custom Nielsen/NetRatings study for the Newspaper Association of America (NAA)), it is no wonder that "search engine optimization" was one of the discussion groups at the ONA event last Friday. The ONA is the Online News Association and their event sold out here in Seattle with over 90 journalists in attendance.

The News Tribune's Mark Briggs was there and shares a little of his experience on his Online in the South Sound blog. What is also heartening is that he reports around ten or so of his cohorts from the Trib were there as well.

Mark is the Assistant Managing Editor of Interactive Media at the paper, where he has been since 2004. Prior to that he was New Media Director at the Herald in Everett for four years. In the bio for the event, they mention a book he has written that is coming out soon. The title is "Journalism 2.0: A Guide for Journalists to Survive and Thrive in the Digital Age". (I have heard from Mark and if all goes well it will be out in June)

It is another example of how the South Sound is very representative of how media, news and information is changing.

CaringBridge and Linking Families through Virtual Community

If you have ever been affected by a tragic event or encountered a trial in your life that sometimes seems insurmountable, then you know the feeling of aloneness that can accompany it. In 1993 Howard Rheingold wrote about feeling a connectedness online in his book Virtual Communities, Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. (There is also a revised 2000 edition).

People who were looking for answers found friendship, advice, shared sorrow and support with others who they never physically had met. Their conversations and communications formed a kinship that became the basis for calling the geographically dispersed citizens members of the same community.

At CaringBridge, they embody the best of this phenomenon with their web services that allow for "A place to heal, celebrate and share."

CaringBridge is a nonprofit organization which offers free personalized Web sites to people who through life's circumstance and significant events need it most in order to stay in touch with family and friends. Their mission as stated is "to bring together a global community of care powered by the love of family and friends in an easy, accessible and private way."

On May 11, 2006, Jayna Bean Doll was born. In very short order her family found out that the right side of Jayna's brain was larger than the left and had not developed correctly. She was given Phenobarbital and was air lifted to Children's Hospital in Seattle.

It became clear after many seizures that surgery would be necessary and at just 28 days old, she was handed to surgeons who performed a functional hemispherectomy.

This week she celebrates her first birthday.

Her story and the families can be found of the CaringBridge site at Jaynabean, the area her family has been using to keep everyone up to date. The site allows for the blogging a journal, a guestbook, photos, links, tributes and administrative log in for the author(s) of the content to keep everyone updated.

The site operates through donations from the families who use CaringBridge and from healthcare sponsors and corporations

A Quote Takes Flight in Cyberspace

“So, you never know how what you do will bloom into something new because of this technology”. That’s what Elana Lindquist wrote to me after I asked her about a story she had mentioned over the arts listserv.

Elana is a watercolor/sumie artist who began to paint as a way to relax and as she describes “discovered along the way, how much fun it is to create beauty using color and shape.”

In the mid 90’s Elana had also discovered and explored the power of the Internet as a way to network, learn and empower people and artists. She began writing about it online for several small publications. Like this blog, she starting addressing how artists could promote their talents on the Internet and published her thoughts and the thoughts of other creative entrepreneurs in an e-newsletter called “Fun with Success”.

It went offline about seven years ago, but another seed was planted in the process. In that publication she wrote once that...

“Success means fulfilling your own dreams, singing your own songs, dancing your own dances, creating from your heart and enjoying the journey, trusting that whatever happens it will be OK. Go and create your own adventure”.

Just last year, she googled her name and was a bit taken aback. That quote had taken up a life of its own. She had been quoted all over the place and in five different languages no less. What a pleasant surprise to find that a sentiment recorded in a newsletter read by a thousand or so had merely been the launching pad for something greater. The quote had become an inspiration for the afewlinesmore, awordtothewise.info, apricotisland among many, many other online communities as well as an e-newsletter of September of last year.

If you would like a chance to meet Elana and see her work, she will be at the Peninsula Public Library on May 8th at 7:00pm.

Vanity Search and the Social Meter

The quick and dirty of a vanity search is to search one's own name on an Internet search engine such as AltaVista, Google, Yahoo or whatever. But to sort through the inevitable onslaught of extraneous information, you have to refine your search. It can be a fun exercise as well. What about your civic side? Search on your name and your city. What about your artistic side? Search your name and your art form. What about your civic arts side. Search your….. OK, you get it. Wait, one more. Search on your name with your middle initial for your formal side.

One of the benefits, or risks, is discovering how many people in the world happen to share your name. Depending on how common or unique your name is, you can be buried or exposed if someone is looking for information about you. For me, it was a bit of a shock back in the early-mid 1990’s when I found a gentleman with my name, my occupation and some of my former work experience (we were both at Microsoft at one time) living in the same city as me. We didn’t overlap entirely in our profession but enough so that I would have the occasionally confused client.

Specialty vanity style searches are becoming more prevalent. If you are into research paper references then check out scholar.google.com to see who is referring to your work. Perhaps you are interested in where you may have appeared in print. Check out books.google.com.

For those into blogging I have a great site for you to check out. If you are a blogger who is interested in knowing where you fall on the popularity scale, check out www.socialmeter.com. The aggregator site counts up references and mentions of your blog and blogging then adds them up to a total score. There is no accompanying rating system that goes from “nobody notices me” to “omigod I'm soooo popular”, but is an interesting tool none the less.

Local Tacoma blogs that fare very well include many linked to from this page. Both www.exit133.com and www.kevinfreitas.net score over a 1000. With this post I will have increased their scores by one. This blog, Living and Working, is pretty new and relatively narrow in scope. That's how I can handle my score of 3. For now. (I linked to myself to see if I could make it a 4.)

UPDATE It appears as if SocialMeter is no more. It was always more a project than a product and the domain name now resolves to www.engrade.com.

Introducing iGoogle - at two years old

Lots of thoughts swirling around the introduction of iGoogle. Too many to remain focused within a blog entry so instead some random thoughts and a likely return to the topic later.

Two years in the making, the Google Personalized Home page is now officially iGoogle.

What do the Apple folks think about that?

It strikes me as getting closer to the services discussed in the short film EPIC. If you haven't viewed EPIC, where have you been? Funny that the impact of this short online feature has diminished because so many of its predictions have already come true, and that the remaining predictions are some of the most far fetched.

If you want to check out how to make your own home page go to. www.google.com/ig

I find it interesting that this story shows up on my radar right after I mentioned vanity searches in the previous blog. You can set the page up to bring you all the news about you!!

Love the different widgets and their ease of installation.

This is just one more way in which we will be putting ourselves out there for everyone to see.