Category Archives: Blogging

Launch of the DC Technology Network

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Screenshot of the DC Technology Network Ning Site

One thing that I took away from BarCamp DC was that there is a really awesome tech community in the Washington DC area. It may be spread across a number of groups. It may be in multiple states. Regardless, there is an awesome technology community that exists.

The question I and a number of others had was how can we bring this community together. We need one place online where the community can go to chat with one another and keep up with what’s going on. It’d aggregate a lot of information from other sites. My esteemed DC colleagues agreed.

I’m very happy to announce the launch of the DC Technology Network. It is a social networking site powered by Ning. While the site is very primitive (or beta) and still evolving, I think it’s a fun and interesting way for us to all stay in touch and maintain that awesome feeling that existed at BarCamp DC.

So… if you live in the Washington DC metro area (or formerly lived in the area) and want to stay in touch with your fellow local geeks, PLEASE SIGN UP for the DC Technology Network.

Have you signed up? What do you think? How can we make this more useful?

Sign-Up For MyBlogLog

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One of my favorite additions to this blog has been my sidebar widget for MyBlogLog.    It makes such a huge difference to be able to put the faces with the names of people who read the blog.  It does a lot to contribute to the community feel.

Community is really what a blog is all about.  It’s building a community around a set of ideas.

So… don’t lurk in the shadows.  Sign-up for MyBlogLog.  It will allow you to get to know the author and fellow readers of your favorite blogs better.

What Does The Web Standards Project Do?

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After Molly H.’s  Call To Action and follow up post (read them) on her blog, I started wondering what the Web Standards Project (WaSP) actually does.  I’m not saying this to be mean.  I’m genuinely curious.

If you look at the blog posts on their Web site,  most of them are updated very infrequently and when they are its very rarely meaty stuff.

What happened to the banner of radical transparency that we all hold so high?

I ask this question because as a Web Standardista I’m told that the Web Standards Project is where the best of the best come to hatch master plans to help conquer the world for Web Standards.

If the organization isn’t transparent with what’s going on… if they aren’t transparent with their discussions, how can they ask me to trust them as an organization?

What Bloggers Had To Say About BarCamp DC

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This is what bloggers had to say about Saturday’s BarCamp DC:

Brian Williams

“If anything, I think it was too full — or too short. There were so many great topics to cover and good people to lead discussions, I felt like we could have filled 3 days.”

Jared Goralnick

“Not since the heyday of Netpreneur have there been so many people in one DC room so excited about what’s happening online. This was evidenced by the high level of conversation, the community-willingness to share, and the pure geekery of the attendees (everywhere I turned were MacBooks, iPhones, live bloggers, and people uploading photos to Flickr).”

Russell Heimlich

“There were so many interested attendees that many had to be turned away at the door. Wow! I guess the DC tech community has been secretly yearning for a BarCamp to pop up in the area… I had a blast at BarCamp DC and can’t wait until they hold another one (I think I heard the next one would be in January), hopefully in a bigger space. I already know what my next topic will be.”

Jesse Thomas – “BarCampDC was awesome!!!”

Tom Bridge

“This weekend at the downtown offices of Fleishman Hillard, 100 or so geeks gathered for BarCamp to talk about matters technological. I know what you’re thinking already, “Geeks, inside on a weekend? Shocking!” But it’s more than that. So many things are happening on the web these days, the advent of the true mobile web, the adoption of portable identities, people creating content and sharing, and a lot of that is happening here in our backyard as well as out on the west coast.”

Zvi Band

“Attended my first (as well as DC’s first) BarCamp. It was an awesome experience. Not only did I learn a lot, but I met a great crowd of people. It was fascinating to discover a small but thriving community of similar web-heads…”

Leslie Bradshaw

“This weekend, Jesse and I attended the [first?] BarCamp held in DC. Met some super cool people, learned some very useful things (namely, at the: Google Analytics session, the widget session a la Clearspring and the Grids/systems session)… “

Nguyet -

“Overall, there were about 118 people attended. It was intimate. I’m proud to say that 200 OK were one of the sponsors…”

To celebrate our success, a bunch of went to get Maryland crabs for lunch today.

This Isn’t Journalism; Slate and TechCrunch Should be Embarrassed

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Recently Slate wrote a story about how Rudy Giuliani’s daughter had listed on her Facebook profile that she had supported Barack Obama for President.  Michael Arrington also covered the story on his Web site TechCrunch.

Does anyone else find it slightly disturbing that two well respected online publications would think it important enough to report this story?   Who gives a rats ass  what Rudy Giuliani’s daugther has on her Facebook page.  She’s 18 years old.

This is just cheesy American tabloid style journalism which I think is beneath Slate and TechCrunch.  You publish this story not because you think its important but because you want to score a quick shot at Rudy Giuliani.

Will Delta Air Lines Join the Conversation?

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Liz Lawley, professor in the IT Department at RIT (where I went to school), recently blogged about a negative experience that she had with Delta Air Lines.   She had paid extra money to have one of the Delta Air Line employees accompany her son, who was having his first unaccompanied flight. Unfortunately, things went very wrong…
The Delta employee accidentally put her son on the wrong plane and almost sent her son to the wrong city, until a much wider person noticed the error. Liz was pissed and rightly so.  If I had a child and this happened, I’d be pissed.  When she tried to follow up on the problem to see how it was resolved, she was pointed towards red tape.  Like any good Web 2.0 citizen, Liz Lawley blogged about the experience.

If I was Delta Air Lines, I would have one person in our marketing department who did nothing except monitor the Web and social media to see what people were saying about me.  If they did this, they would be able to see the concerns that Liz had about this issue.  They could then work with Liz to craft a solution to this problem.

If you’re a company or a person thats out there trying to accomplish something in the world, people may be talking about you or your organization.  You want to be a member of the community and a part of the conversation.

By being a part of the conversation, you can help to address issues before they spiral out of control.  By being part of the conversation and talking to people with concerns, you can create new evangelists and advocates for your organization.

“A place where everyone knows your name”

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I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about using blogs as a method of forming a relationship of trust with your readers.  What blogging does is make you available.

Blogging says I wanna have a conversation with you.  It says I care about what you think and I want your feedback.  It’s HUGE.

Blogging is a lot like a Professor’s open office hours.  It says I want you to come and chat with me.

It makes you and your opinions visible.

If I think about leaders in the technology industry, there are so many whom I feel like I know because I read there blogs.  They’re visible but also feel available.   If you asked me what their name was I could tell you.

But then there are those technology leaders who don’t publish blogs, I don’t know their names.  I don’t have the level of trust with them.

Lesson of the day: Blog

E-Mail was used for so much that Facebook, Pownce, and Twitter do better

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Since the dawn of e-mail, it has been used for every type of person to person communication that someone can imagine.

The thing is e-mail was getting used for so many different purposes that messages were getting lost. People were sending messages to say that they were on the way home from work and it was getting mixed in with everything else.

This is where lightweight messaging services like the Facebook Wall, Twitter, or Pownce.  They fill the role that email did but they do it better than email.

The Facebook Wall allows you to say a quick hello.  Twitter says what you’re up to.  Pownce allows you to send someone a quick link or file.   They each only do these simple tasks and they do it better than email does.  Plus with the messages siloed out into these different services, you can process them much quicker.

As Jeremiah Owyang points out, because of these lightweight messaging services, e-mail usage may be on the decline.  It really doesn’t surprise me.