"Helping Small Business help themselves - SolutionsArePower™" - 9 new articles
Gnomedex 8.0 Day 1 - Highlights of the Friday Afternoon SessionsAfter an amazing lunch (Gnomedex has the best food) we are ready to start the afternoon sessions. Boomer Generation Meets Generation Y
They talked about education and he looks at it a good place to network where he perspective was that it was necessary to get any kind of white collar job. Things sure have changed. They are seeing that people are feeling entitled to the technology they have access at work that they should have at home. This was the best talk yet this year. Social Media is For Good Causes TooNext we had Beth Kanter talk about Using Social Media for Good Causes. She used Facebook to create the group “Causes” and raised thousands of dollars for a non-profit helping Cambodia. Her work was so good that she won an additional $50,000 prize for her non-profit. She posed an interesting question - Does personality scale? It is about the ladder of engagement of those that are happy bystander all the way through instigators that create the involvement in a cause. She used her birthday to get 135 people to pledge money to her cause by giving her a birthday present. So what’s next? She was able to raise more money for other causes to send kids to college with the help of social media friends and tools like Twitter. She then asked everyone in the room (250 people) to donate $10 each to send three kids to college. Chris Pirillo came up and jumpstarted it with $100 and people ran up and started giving her $10 bills overwhelming her. By the end of the presentation $1800 was raised on the web site - IN LESS THAN 30 MINUTES. Amazing. If you want to donate to a great cause, check out her blog, find her on twitter and Facebook to connect with the charity and do some good. This was an amazing use of social media to do amazing small things to do one great big thing collectively. Salaam Garage and Telling a Story with PhotographyAmanda Koster is a professional photographer and she recently put together a site called Salaam Garage. She started her career as an anthropologist but took some photography classes and was hooked. She was backpacking East Africa with a friend and the only two words she understood were “Salaam Garage” and the word stuck with her. She started her presentation by saying “Hi, my name is Amanda Koster, and I do not have an iPhone” which got everyone laughing. She likes taking pictures that tell a story. She calls her technique “drive by shooting” and over time has built a collection from all parts of the world. Koster officially founded SalaamGarage in Jan. 2007 in response to years of countless requests, "Can I Come With You" regarding her international projects. As she saw people traveling, creating content, publishing and connecting through social media, she thought why not harness all this activity to cause positive change through sharing intentional content. Salaam Garage connects media savvy travelers and enthusiasts with international Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs). Travelers commit to creating and sharing unique, independent social media that raises awareness and causes positive change. The rest of the adventure is spent touring around the region, experiencing and exploring the culture and environment with an entirely new context. Amanda's photography site: www.amandakoster.com Learning about what a Serial Cyborg is with Nathan WadeMaybe its just me but when I think of Cyborgs I think of the Borg from Star Trek or that really bad movie from Jean Claude Van Damme. Nathan Wade of Serial Cyborg which he defines as “Serial Cyborg is a DICOM Voxel Based MRI wood sculpture, cut by an industrial CNC mill. The sculpture explores persistent physical distortion through a simple gestural movement; a serialization of human interplay with particle reality as machine visualizable data and re-instantiation of these streams into physical space. This artwork also aims to explore the notion of the modern human as Cyborg, augmented and abstracted through technology while engaging hybrid human definition. The synthesis of digital revealing and informing the physical, irrevocably altering both as extension of the other.” Yeah, that was a mouthful. It is really about how we evolved the term of what interfacing man with machine. Originally in the 1960’s a cyborg was thought to be an astronaut. In the 1980’s it was thought to be a destruction of race, sex, religion and the ambiguity to become whatever we wanted. Fast forward to the present and Nathan is studying how technology is an extension of human evolution. Interestingly enough was an informal poll of the audience and 90% of the audience said they would take electronic implants if they were available. Take that for what you will but it is compelling considering how much we do use and interface with technology these days to communicate and do business. Highlight of Ignite Seattle - Where the Hell is Matt?The Ignite Session are a mix of two-minute how-to’s, performance art, and comedy. Ignite is from O’Reilly and has been in select cities and now rolling across the country. All of the sessions were great but the one I thought was worth mentioning was the one done by Matt Harding on The Making of Where the Hell is Matt?
After he did his presentation, I along with a few others yelled “Dance for us!”, he started the music and told everyone to come up. Almost everyone did. Check out this video to see how much we all had. Tomorrow we will cover sessions that include Sarah Lacy, Dave Mathews (not the singer), CEO of Boxee, Scott Maxwell who drives the Mars Rover (here on earth). For now, we are getting ready for the big Gnomedex party at the ShowBox. It is a Seattle landmark and with free drink tickets and cameras to catch all the action, it should not disappoint. Gnomedex 8.0 Day 1 - Highlights of the Friday Morning Sessions
Next up was Tara Hunt who is with Ma.gnolia and they announced that they are going completely open source which should take their product to the next level. They are going to be the wordpress of social bookmarking allowing people to download and start their own social bookmarking platform. It was a good presentation about why being open gives you more power with the community you are trying to work with.
Last before lunch was Danny Sullivan on how using search can meet real life. He touched upon a couple of important points:
Great session and now it’s time for a great lunch, networking and video interviews of some of the attendees. Next is going to be coverage of the afternoon sessions. Stay Tuned. Gnomedex 8.0 Day 1 - Photo Tips in 15 Minutes with Kris Krug
For those of you who don’t know Kris, he is a fashion and editorial photographer based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and founder of photography studio Static Photography. He is an author, having co-written BitTorrent for Dummies with Susannah Gardner, and a technologist. He was also the president of Bryght (a Drupal development company) and founder of early web community spark-online.com. Now he is president of Raincity Studios who acquired bryght some months ago. Raincity studios is the A-Z supplier of web services from planning to development to implementation to hosting. Krug is the organizer and founder of PhotoCamp, a photography unconference with BarCamp origins, and has organized 5 of them including Northern Voice 2006, BarCamp Shanghai, Barcamp Vancouver, Northern Voice 2007 and Northern Voice 2008. Krug is a well known contributor to the Flickr photo sharing community website. His photographs have appeared in JPG Magazine, ION Magazine, Business Week, Wired Magazine, and others. He has published interviews with technology personalities in Digital Web Magazine, and he has covered events as diverse as SXSW, the 2006 Winter Olympics, and the Consumer Electronics Show. He has been a regular guest on The Lab with Leo, a talk show devoted to technology and its effects on the G4Tech channel talking about topics like Facebook apps to the growing Chinese market. As a speaker, he has been invited to a number of media and technology events, such as SXSW. He just got back from Beijing and taking photos at the Olympics. His big piece of advice that was non-technical was to find a theme of your pictures (faces, reflections) to find a style that people will recognize your work. Plus, and most of all, take photos every day if you want to get good. Here is a great summary of his tips for everyone with any kind of camera: Tips: - Work with Whatcha Got To check out his work, head on over to his Flickr site and start drooling. Gnomedex 8.0 Day 1 - Startup Lessons Learned by Ben Huh of iCanHazCheezBurger.comAfter a little coffee break we were entertained by Ben Huh of icanhazcheezburger.com which talked about the evolution of memes and the humor that can be funnier with the use of social media and the power of community. If you haven’t ever checked out that site or the original LOLCats.com with captions under funny pictures you are missing out on a core part of the funny side of the Internet. I love good presentations and his slides used the eras of grow for the site in one word formats like the site, for example “icantgetanysleep” or “programmatica” eras. He used lots of pictures and few words which made his talk funny and impactful. These are good lessons for any business person that has to present a topic that is left of center and needs to be recieved by everyone. Be Prepared for ScaleWithin in two weeks (Feb 2007) of starting the site, they had 2TB of storage to deal with and then they had to move to an easier content system. In this case it was WordPress.com to host and handle this type of system. They did it the following month. Every business should have a provider growth plan in place in case your growth plans outpace your predictions. Your Weekend “Project” might become a businessBen thought this would be a fun thing do as a weekend project but as the traffic grew from 0 to 15 million page views a month within a six month period he quickly realized that this is going to be a real business and not side weekend project. Good Solutions are Simple SolutionsBen commented that even though they tried complex solutions for some things they always found that the good solutions are the simplest. Complex content management system? No. Use a Blog. Big Content Delivery Network for our site? No. Host it on Wordpress.com Leverage Your Success and Branch Out if you CanSince the success of the site was rising and everything was scaling well, so he thought it would be a good time to leverage the success of a scalable model like this and branch out. This is how iHasAHotDog, FailBlog, GraphJam, PunditKitchen, TotallyLooksLike and EngrishFunny were born and are seeing the same success. If you can learn to scale your business, there is no limit to what it can do over the long term. You just need to prepare for it and tune it along the way. Shashi and Steve at Gnomedex 8.0 - Pre-event party
Gotta get some rest for tomorrow but to keep you all in the loop, below is a photo feed of Gnomedex8 which has tons of pictures from the party and as time goes by will have more from the sessions. Tomorrow we will be covering some of the sessions and posting various video interviews Shashi and I do with the speakers and attendees. Shashi is Speaking - September 6 at the Seminar on Blogging, Social Networking and Social Media, Writing for the Web, and Professional Websites for WritersWhen Shashi speaks, we all listen. Even me. The proliferation of online tools, social networking sites, and Web markets has created a lot of opportunities – and revenue streams – for writers. But along with the possibilities may come some confusion. Do you need a website? What is Twitter? What's the difference between a blog and a vlog? Why do writers need Facebook? On September 6, Shashi will be on a panel in the second morning session of an all day seminar on some of the most popular and writer-friendly Web tools to help you find new work, promote your services, sell your book, and build your platform. His session in particular is as follows: Second Session, 10:30-11:45 a.m. — Social Networking and Social Media: How to Pump Up Your Marketing Efforts and Get the Most Out of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and More You know you're supposed to use all this social media stuff, but how? And for the love of everything writerly, WHY? This panel of social networking and social media experts will give you the basics behind this phenomenon, share examples of success stories, and help you figure out where to leave your social thumbprint. Shashi Bellamkonda (http://www.shashi.name/) Monte Lutz (http://www.edelmandigital.com) Alexandra Rampy (http://fly4change.wordpress.com/) For the full schedule, head over to the InkThinker blog. It is located at the Research Building, Room No. 163 George Mason University (Web site at www.gmu.edu) 4400 University Drive Fairfax, VA 22030. Member cost is $89, non-member cost is $129, and student cost is $49. To RSVP, call (202) 775-5150, send an e-mail to rsvp@washwriter.org, or register online at www.aiwriter.org. Please mention the event for which you are responding and your membership status. Up on MySolutionSpot.com - Marketer’s Corner: When should you utilize e-mail marketing for your business?Some of you might not be aware of MySolutionSpot.com, which is a small business and social networking portal built by the team here at Network Solutions. We covered the launch here. We just put up a good write up on when you should utilize e-mail marketing for your business. You can find the full article here. Below is the summary: Much has been written in the past about e-mail marketing over the last few years and it has become a popular channel to communicate with customers and market your products and/or services. The concept of e-mail marketing started as people sending text messages through ListServ's that communicated with a group that gave their permission to get the messages and participate in the responses. Slowly, people started to creep into these group e-mail services and promote their services that quickly got them banned. So they started to send those e-mails to people randomly and the concept of SPAM was born. There are great tips and tricks out there on the nuances of do's and don'ts so your e-mails are received and read versus being treated as spam and ignored. But where and why should you utilize e-mail marketing in your business? For the rest of the article, go to MySolutionSpot.com and check it out here. Creating an “Instant Intranet” - An Interview with Navin Ganeshan on Network SolutionsNavin is a startup guy working in a big company and he loves it. His role at Network Solutions is to manage the data warehouse and all of the analytics. He provides this internally for Network Solutions so operations, finance and marketing are on the same page. This is so they can see how they are performing and can make changes to grow the business. As he likes to say they are the "one version of the truth" for all the groups at Network Solutions. He has a lot of experience working with small businesses and has worked in startups so he knows what small companies need and the kind of tools they should leverage to make their business more efficient and productive. We discussed creating a collaborative online work center for your small team or an "Instant Intranet" and I was able to spend some time with him recently. Here is a transcript of our interview:
Steve: What are the components in an "Instant Intranet"? If you look at it as having a single intranet that represents your business' offline and online needs you can do a lot for very little cost and time to get up and running quickly. Steve: What products/services do you recommend to accomplish all these things? Steve: How can you leverage what we provide at Network Solutions? Steve: Have you seen companies that have implemented this and seen a dramatic improvement in productivity? Steve: With the move for companies to "be more green" and the push for virtual teams, can this help even the smallest of businesses accomplish this? Steve: How does someone get started and who should they look to for help when there is a problem? Steve: This has been some great advice for our readers. Thanks for the time today. Another Twitter Success StoryNetwork Solutions has been using Twitter for some time now to reach out to customers who toss out a message of help. Most don’t know that we’re there ready to help. Gerry is the primary voice behind @NetSolCares on Twitter. He also offers top notch support. Lorissa blogged about her reaction to receiving help on Twitter. She had no idea that it would be answered directly by Network Solutions & was pleasantly surprised.
She wrote,
We’re glad to offer this unique service & appreciate the positive feedback. More Recent Articles |
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