Month: July 2008

We’re a Family of Bloggers…

It just dawned on me that my entire family is now blogging. 😀   This rocks.

My dad was the first one to start a blog.  You can find him on his personal blog Daily Grit, where he dives into issues he’s running into on a daily basis, and his neighborhood blog about living in Southwest Lansing.

You can find my mom at her new blog, Mrs. Thorp’s Third Grade Blog. She’s a retired teacher of many many years and is now imparting her wisdom into the blogosphere.

My soon-to-be brother-in-law Adam also has a blog. It’s called Ironies and Musings from a white, middle class, 20 something.

Both Adam and my sister have been in Easter Europe for the last little bit.   During the trip, she’s been doing some guest posts on his blog, which have been awesome.   I hope they’ll both continue to blog just as much, once they’re married.

Obviously, you can read me here. 🙂

So does your family blog? If so, drop links in the comments.

Library of Congress/Flickr Commons Highlighted in USA Today

This made my morning.  Flickr’s Commons project, which the Library of Congress helped to get off the ground and that I helped with from the Library’s side, was featured in today’s USA Today.

In the article, they give an update on the success of the project for the Library of Congress…

Six months into the project, the library has been able to update 500 photo records with new information provided by Flickr users — everything from names of people and places in photographs to specific airplane models shown in photos, says Helena Zinkham, acting chief of the Prints and Photographs Division.

And go on to say…

Both partners call the project a success. The photos have garnered 8.2 million views and 5,000 comments, and The Commons has attracted five other institutions: The Powerhouse Museum in Australia, the Toulouse Library in France, the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

8.2 million views.  Holy crap man!  That’s a lot.

I hope that you all will subscribe to the Library’s photos.  They’re adding more all the time.  Plus, keep tagging  and adding info to them.   This way more folks will be able to find them and enjoy them.

By the way, here’s one of the cool photos that the Library recently put on Flickr:

Random Thoughts from Facebook’s F8…

So I’m here in San Francisco at Facebook’s F8 conference.

At the beginning of the afternoon, everyone filed into the main auditorium room for Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote. I think everyone had that same Steve Jobs Keynote like anticipation about what he was going to say and if it was going to be something new and exciting.

They officially officially kicked off development around Facebook Connect, which is really cool but will be more fun when there are some more working examples to play with.  Sounds like this will come later this summer.

They also spent a lot of time talking about what the principles of good Facebook applications are and what they’re going to try and encourage moving forward.  This wasn’t that exciting.

What impressed me more was the setup of the conference.

Theses guys throw an impressive party.  It’s a big space.  Each section is cordoned off so that they can talk more indepth about different aspects around building for the platform.

They’re serving a variety of really good food.  It looks like they raided the local IKEA and got all kind of hipster furniture for folks to sit on.  Plus… the drinks are flowing and the music is pumpin’.

You can defintely tell that they’re trying to maintain the level of excitement around the platform that they got last year when it started.  Will they be able to get people pumped?  I dunno.  Only time will tell.

Kind of interesting… they did announce that there are 400,000 developers on the Facebook platform.  Now I wonder whether those are the number of active developers or the number of folks who installed the Facebook Developer application, which includes folks like me who’ve installed it once and haven’t touched it.

Regardless, 400,000 developers for one platform is A LOT of people.

Well… I’m back to the party. More blogging later.

Washington DC-based LivingSocial Raises $5 Million

My friends and the Washington DC-based LivingSocial company just raised $5 million dollars.  Congrats guys!!!

LivingSocial, a company that started out as a Facebook developer and is now creating social app across many social networks, raised $5 million in a series A financing that was led by Grotech Ventures. Steve Case also personally invested. (LivingSocial’s CEO and co-founder, Tim O’Shaughnessy, is a former AOLer who also worked for Case at Revolution Health).

iPhone Craziness in San Francisco…

So on the way back from a meeting in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco, I strolled by the flag ship Apple Store on Market Street.  On my way to the meeting I noticed that the “We’re out of the iPhone 3G” sign was gone so I thought maybe I could stop in and pick one up on my way back.

Much to my surprise.  There was a line going down the block.  One person mentioned that they had been there for two hours.

That’s CRAZY.  The phone has been out for a week and folks are still queing up for 2 hours?!?!?  NUTS!

My first gen iPhone is good enough that I’m not going to wait in that long of a line.

Congrats to Geoff Livingston & Livingston Communications for getting Acquired

Congrats to Geoff Livingston and everyone at Livingston Communications about being acquired.

Some of you may have seen the news today. I’ve sold Livingston Communications to the Toronto region’s Social Media Group (SMG). Maggie Fox, CEO of SMG will be my new boss, and I will serve the organization as Executive Vice President, Americas (Image: Maggie and I at Ford Headquarters last week).

Basically, I will serve major accounts as a lead strategist, head the DC office, market the company and continue blogging at the Buzz Bin (which will get a resulting content upgrade).

On my way to San Francisco…

So yeah… I’m sitting here in Dulles Airport on my way to San Francisco.

I’m kind of excited.  I’m taking Virgin America.  They really treat you right.  So… I’m looking forward to a comfortable flight.  Yay for electric plugs in the seats so you can plug in your laptop!

This week will be busy much like last week.  I’ll be at the Facebook Developer Conference f8.  I’m looking forward to hearing what they’ll announce and getting to meet loads of Facebook developers.

Will you be there? Drop me a line – justin@clearspring.com

What do you all think will be announced?

Much Love for the Seattle Web Community!

So I’ve been in Seattle the last couple of days for the SocialMediaCamp Seattle and Mashable SummerMash Party. It’s really been a blast.

The SocialMediaCamp was organized by the amazing Erica O’Grady.  It brought together this really cool swath of the Seattle Web Community.

I got to meet a lot of folks from big to small companies… from people that were just into social media as a hobby and from people that were social media consultants as their job.

The best part was, despite that I was an outsider to the Seattle Web Community, they welcomed me with open arms.  I got the chance to meet and get to know a lot of amazing folks.

Another highlight was being introduced to the local-Seattle company that was responsible for the Web app Whrrl.  This is REALLY cool.  It’s kind of like Yelp meets really neat location-based services.  I’ll be writing more about the app later.

I also got to spend sometime with the folks at Yoono. They’re a social browser plugin that does similar things to Flock but doesn’t require you to get a new browser.  It’s pretty neat but is still in its early stages.  The people behind the company were REALLY cool.

Later that evening, I went to the Mashable Summer Mash party.  That was really nice.  It had this awesome warehouse venue, which is MUCH bigger then any of the venues we’ve used for party’s in DC, which was nice.  It gave you room to breathe.

All in all this was a SUPER successful trip.  I can’t wait to come back and hang with the folks in Seattle.

Twitter, Serendipity, and Seattle

So… I’m sitting here in a Starbucks in Seattle.  It’s been a great weekend!!!

Upon arriving here, I was just kind of tooling around and seeing the sights.  I was meeting up with some friends for dinner later.

Unbeknownst to me, my buddy Saul from FreshBooks just happened to be in Seattle as well.  We ended up meeting up and he joined my posse for dinner.

How did we end up finding each other?  We are Twitter friends.  I was twittering about being in Seattle and he saw it and sent me a message.

It was cool to see first hand how Twitter can help with starting serendipitous adventures in your life.  Saul metup with us and we all had a grand time.

Have you had any serendipitous adventures because of Twitter?