Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp’s Web 2.0 blog

So… yeah! I forgot to tell you all.  This weekend I’m on my way to BarCampPortland in Portland, Oregon.  I’m currently sitting in airport in Philly.  I have a small lay over.

I’m excited.  For one, I heart BarCamps.  They’re always just a wild ride.  You never know completely who you’re going to meet and get to know but you know they’ll be crazy smart and crazy passionate about tech/web-related things, which is AWESOME!

Plus I’m really excited to make this initial foray into the Northwest.  It’s not a place i’ve been yet.  I hear there is a lot of really cool tech going on up there.

It will also be an opportunity to tell a new audience about all the awesome things that we’ve been doing at Clearspring Central Command.  Can’t wait for this!

So… Portland look out!  I’m coming your way.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a brought back a popular exhibit entitled, “Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936.“  It chronicles the history around  the time when Adolf Hitler was able to get the Summer Olympics to be hosted in Berlin, Germany.

In addition to have an exhibit at the physical museum building (which I haven’t checked out yet), they have a Web site which carry’s a lot of the same content.

One of the REALLY powerful portions of the online content is audio interviews with athletes of that era and the decisions they made or were made for them around their participation in the games.

If like me, you found the content to be powerful, you can easily share the audio content with your friends because it is in a widget.  They use our Clearspring widget platform for distribution of the widget. (Full Disclosure: I work for Clearspring and used to work with a team member at the USHMM.)

Above is a screenshot of the widget.  I would have embedded it right in here but WordPress.com doesn’t allow the embedding of content from third-party sites, unless you’re a few special sites.  *sigh*

Regardless, this is a GREAT example of breaking your Web site a part into pieces and allowing people to spread amongst their communities.  I’m anxious to hear what kind of results the Holocaust Museum gets.

Widgets really do make everything better.  For a long time, widgets have made beer better.  Now widgets make the environment better too.

ABC and the Arbor Day Foundation are doing this REALLY cool campaign.  ABC picked 9 of their widgets and every 10 times someone watches a video on one of the widgets a tree sapling will be planted.

Use widgets, watch videos, and get trees planted.  That ROCKS!  Check out the post I did on the Clearspring blog and go use the widgets.  It’s for the environment man!

Here at Clearspring, some of our developers did a proof-of-concept using YouTube’s player user interface API and the Clearspring’s Launchpad Advanced to see what YouTube would look like with our share menu.  It’s pretty sweet.  Check it out.

I’m totally pumped.  I’m headed to Miami on Wednesday.  It’s so frickin’ cold in Washington DC.  It’s 82 degrees F in Miami right now.

I’ll be at BarCampMiami and Future of Web Apps (FOWA).  At FOWA, they have a killer speaker lineup like Kathy Sierra, Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuk, and others.

If you’re going to either of those events or live in the Miami area, drop me a line.  I’d love to meetup.

Last weekend in California there was the 2008 DEMO conference.   The conference serves as a launchpad for new Web startups.  It’s a great opportunity to see what the new thing is going to be.

Over at the GigaOm blog, they boiled down the four biggest themes that came from this year’s DEMO conference. One struck my eye:

Componentization of the web

The web’s full of pieces: static images, YouTube clips, Facebook widgets and Flash plugins. Startups want to let users rework these pieces their own way.

This is exactly what i’ve been saying.  When people find a Web site or piece of content they like, they want to be able to take it with them and do stuff with it.

This theme is also why I joined the widget platform company Clearspring.

So if you create online content, how are you allowing your users to grab a hold of and do stuff with the useful components?

As I mentioned earlier, Wednesday I started at the widget platform company Clearspring Technologies.  As part of my duties as Developer Community Manager, I’m going to be making contributions to Clearspring’s Community Blog.

On Thursday, I made my first post.  Here’s a snippet:

Upon entering our office complex in the morning, I was greeted by our local fire fighters.  Our office was without power because apparently a tree  fell on a nearby power substation.

When you’re a Web-based startup like Clearspring, it’s pretty hard to get any work done when there’s no power.  So what do you do?  You setup a mini-golf course around the cubicles and offices.   It was fun and a great way to get to know some of my co-workers.

There will be many more posts so stop by, drop me a comment, and say hello.

BTW, Here’s a fun sticker I found on our office Red Bull container.

So… it’s official.  I’m now the Developer Community Manager at Clearspring Technologies. There is a lot of work to be done and everyone here is very excited to see me get started.

Here’s to a new year and new opportunities.

Friday night and all day Saturday Washington DC held the inaugural WidgetDevCamp. 

It was a gathering of local geeks to talk about the issues relating to widgets and other modular social applications ( like Facebook apps.)  There was also a lot of widget and social application hacking.

On Friday night we gathered to talk about the overall goal of the event, we discussed high level issues and uses related to widgets, and also brainstormed widgets we wanted to build. Before and after there was also lots of time to hang out and relax.  It was a good opportunity to get to know others who were interested in the space.  I think there were 50-60 people who were there on Friday night.

On Saturday while only 30-40 people there, we had folks leading GREAT discussions.  There was everything from how to use widgets with the social graph, an overview of the Clearspring platform, widget best practices, desktop versus Web widgets, JavaScript vs. Flash vs. Flex for widgets, Facebook app development 101, and much more.  It was great!

Also we had a number of folks who spent a lot of time Saturday doing some coding.  We had guys writing widgets, Facebook apps, and some even playing with Google’s Android mobile platform.  At the end of the day on Saturday, we gave the different developers time to demo what they’d been hacking up and the demo’s caused some really great discussion too.

One conclusion that I walked away from the event with is that all too often people work on their various projects and home by themselves but they’ll have a TON more fun if they can do it with or around other people with like interests.  We need more co-working in Washington DC.  I’ll write more about this later.

If you’d like to have a WidgetDevCamp in your city, please e-mail me at justin AT clearspring DOT com.  I’d be happy to help however I can.

Note: First photo was taken by Jason Garber.  The second photo was taken by me.

 UPDATE: My apologies!  The event is on Monday not Tuesday.  Thanks John for the correction.

My good friend and recruiter extraordinaire Robert Neelbauer  along with one of his compadres is holding an event next Tuesday Monday called Social Matchbox DC.   It’s a job fair/meet and greet for local DC tech startups and local geeks.

I’m confident it will be a great event.  Unfortunately, I can’t be there but you should go, especially if you’re looking for a job.  A lot of local startups will be there… Razoo, Mixx, Webs (formerly Freewebs), Hotpads, Clearspring, Intridea Inc, CustomInk and others.