Dave Olson hangs with Leo

In quite possibly one of my favorite Lab with Leo segments ever, Dave Olson chats with Leo about his multimedia publishing empire that started back in the 80’s and how now with the internet, it’s all coming back around, except this time, you don’t have to pay for copies on his parents ditto machine.

Dave, we have to hang out again soon….it’s been too long!
 

WordCamp Vancouver

Yesterday I attended the innaugural WordCamp Vancouver presented by Tazzu at the Network Hub.

The format was not unlike a BarCamp where people could submit topics they would present on. Unfortunately I was laying on a beach in Hawaii when it all happened (the advance submissions that is) so I missed the opportunity to participate as a presenter. Fortunately the plan is to have these frequently so there should be more chances to participate. Judging from the turnout, it could have possibly been a day long affair as there was no shortage of interesting topics and people interested in learning more about WordPress.

As much as I like the Network Hub, it’s not the best kind of venue for this kind of event - it’s just not big enough to accomodate the number of people that were interested in attending. There wasn’t nearly enough chairs for everyone and it was pretty tropical in there once people started showing up. There must be some place in Vancouver that can fit a large number of people, has decent wifi and supports some kind of food/drink service. Aside from UBC, SFU or one of the other school venues, there isn’t much that works.

I won’t recap the whole event because as she usually does, Rebecca liveblogged the entire event - well almost all of it since she was also a presentor, Raul covered for her during her segment.

The one presentor that I was surprised by was John Chow. He gave a presentation on making money from your blog. I had heard some (negative) stories about him and was expecting some kind of slimy, Tom Vu-like salesman and was impressed with his openness about how he became successful from blogging. He outlined how much money he makes from his blog, detailed the pricing structures and many key mistakes people make when trying to monitize their sites. His candor and self-deprecating humour was refreshing.

While I don’t necessarily agree with some of the tactics he uses, I don’t see them being much different than what you would see people in other types of business do to be successful - figure out the system and exploit it. I’m also not sure that his approach would work for many bloggers I know but he certainly has an interesting story and I thought he told it well. The audience was certainly hanging on his every word although some folks were definitely not impressed by his methods.

As with many of the local tech events, the evening wrapped up in a local restaurant for drinks with some old and new friends.

I’m looking forward to the next WordCamp for sure. You can see some of the other pictures I took in my WordCamp Flickr set.

New iPhone friendly plugin for WordPress

My pal and nacho eating drinking buddy Duane has been working away with Dale Mugford on some cool stuff for WordPress for awhile now and has finally made available a plugin, called WPTouch, that allows you present your site optionally to visitors using iPhones or the iPod Touch.

This plugin formats your WordPress site to better be viewed on Mobile Safari that is installed on those devices. There are a number of built in features beyond the presentation layer as well. It also gives you the option to view the ‘normal’ version of the site if you edit your theme (I haven’t yet). Up until now, I’ve had a simple plugin running on my site that simple changes the view of this site to remove the left and right gray sides that are unnecessary on a small screen.

I just installed the plugin after checking out a few versions over the past little while that Duane sent my way. So far I’m pretty impressed. I need to tweak a few things in my CSS files and possibly in the plugin as I’m not crazy about how some of my posts appear but it should be a trivial amount of effort to get it the way I like it.

Compare the different presentations:

I’m still undecided if I want these customized versions of sites when I surf on my iPhone. It’s more work to maintain the site in keeping plugins like this up to date as well as it kind of goes against the whole single version of the web thing. Another downside is that if I see something on a ‘desktop’ browsed version of a site and then because of formatting changes to the layout of the site on a handheld device, it can be pain to find what I was looking for if I have to fight the automatic formatting imposed on me. At least Duane’s plugin gives you the choice (assuming the site owner has made the changes necessary to their theme template). I *DO* enjoy some things to be custom formatted on my iPhone (like a number of Google’s apps) but it sets a precedent that I thought we were trying to get away from (browser specific versioning).

If you have one of the devices, let me know what you think of this site running on Duane’s plugin. While you’re at it, why not check out Duane’s other WordPress goodies on his newly launched site (with Dale Mugford), BraveNewCode.com.

Back from Austin - SXSWi 2008 Wrapup

I really wanted to do a proper, long and detailed wrapup post for SXSWi but I’m not going to because there was just so much going on and it’s still digesting in my mind what transpired in Austin. That and I’m really tired due to a day at the airport, flight delays and BBQ withdrawal.

So in no particular order, here’s some thoughts on what happened in Austin over the past week:

• this year was way bigger than last year - lots of people guessing on the numbers so take this with a grain of salt but it’s ’supposably’ 50% bigger than last year. So that puts it somewhere between 5000 and 10000 geeks in one place. This was especially evident since previously, you’d always run into people you know but this year, I know there were people I knew in Austin and yet I never managed to see them in the halls/panels
• I wished I made it to the I Can Haz Cheeseburger panel - they were actually giving out hamburgers to the audience
• 12 sessions per time slot does not work
• 10am panels are very hard to attend
• there needs to be more technical panels. Of all the ones I attended, only two could be considered (by me) technical and they were incredibly well attended - as in standing-room-only-geeks-sitting-in-the-aisles-fire-hazard kind of well attended. Of course since there was 12 sessions in every timeslot (plus other stuff in and around the convention center), it’s entirely possible there were more technical sessions.
  
• the panel rooms need to be reworked (again). Nothing sucks more than having to go from room 18ABCD to Room C - it’s like walking to Surrey from North Vancouver. I’m all for the walking but when you consider that a panel ends at say 11am and the next one starts at 11:30am, it doesn’t give you much time to actually talk to the panelists afterword, or with friends about the panel before you have to start hoofing it to the other end of the convention center to get a decent seat for the next session
  
• Twitter stayed up during the whole conference which is a huge deal since it was probably the number one web site talked about (yes, even more than Facebook and the infamous interview). Impromptu ‘Tweetups’ happened everywhere and were awesome. Your twitter name should be printed on the badge next year (everyone just wrote it on theirs this year)
  
• Internet access generally seemed better this year…except at my hotel which crawled. The convention center’s wifi was much more robust this year and they had a 802.11n access point which was great. Also more and more venues had free wifi so it made using Twitter and checking Google maps a breeze. My prepaid AT&T sim also got a good workout and thanks to some flaky hotel access, ended up costing more than it should have - see my $12 flickr photo for one example:
  
• Apple should have sponsored a shuttle to the Apple Store…there was a convoy of cabs there from the convention center on a daily basis.
• Canadians showed up in force this year. Not just the 20-30 Vancouverites I knew were going either….great folks from across this great land came down and had a great time
  
• Once again, the Raincity Studios crew had the best, most coveted t-shirts (read about it in the L.A. Times) and hosted the best party at the Iron Cactus. My second favorite shirt (after the Space Invaders RCS shirt) is the “Hacking is not a crime” shirt I picked up from the MAKE booth
• in Austin (and probably just for SXSW) the term ‘Ranch’ can mean many things. What I didn’t expect it to mean at the Pure Volume Ranch (home of the huge Digg party among others) is dirt floors covered in wood chips and port-o-lets. Moby and Kevin Rose didn’t seem to mind.
  
• Finally had a chance to visit the Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, Texas (outside of Austin)…been coming to SXSW for three years and always heard about it but never had the chance to make it out there. It lives up to the hype
  
• you can buy iPods at the Houston Airport from a vending machine
  
• iPhones were everywhere and mine at least was indispensable during the trip. From the wifi that was available everywhere, to the Google Maps locate me feature, it was easily the most used item I brought. Using the sched.org tool to make a customized calendar of sessions/events/parties to attend, it was easy to see where to go next or what our options were if we decided to change our minds.
• I was able to get a tag for my camera that I should have exploited more. Strangely, I saw all kinds of cameras (not just DSLRs) with the tag, including a tiny little lipstick-sized webcam. There also seemed to be some discrepancy as to who should get a tag as Peter was denied just minutes after I got mine.
  
• If you don’t like Rockband, be glad you weren’t at SXSWi….every second booth in the Trade Show had it setup and many events used it as a focal point
• Adobe had a sneak peak of their new Adobe Media Player in a bar with a live band and a skateboard halfpipe. Nothing kills a party faster than trying to demo your software on a projector in the middle of a bar AFTER a decent local band played while skateboarders used the halfpipe in front of the stage. Still surprised about the presentation’s inappropriateness and the fact they thought they had to explain RSS feeds to a room full of geeks. The Media player actually looks decent (if not a little iTunes-ish) but they really need to work on the promotion side of things and figure out who the people that attend Southby are
• Most heard/overused word/phrase I heard this year: ‘Fail!’ or used in a sentence: ‘Epic Fail!’. #2 was ‘iPhone’. #3 was “I’ll have another Shiner Bock”.
  
• There wasn’t as many MacBook Air’s there as I would have expected. Consensus from those I talked to about it was they were hoping for more from Apple - or technically less as they wanted a true replacement for the 12″ Powerbook in screen size (or even smaller). It definitely got a lot of looks and was asked to hold it many times. There were a ton of eeePC’s in attendence which was cool to see.
• I managed to head over to BarCamp Austin between sessions at the convention center and sit in (briefly) on the iPhone DevCamp. As if the fact there was too much concurrent content at SXSWi, the fact that an awesome BarCamp AND iPhone camp was going on at the same time. Too much to do, not enough time to take it all in.
  
• As if you aren’t already tired of me talking about the BBQ, all the food was amazing…well except maybe not that late night pizza from 6th street
  
  
• as I write this post, there are over 12,000 SXSW related photos on Flickr. I have about 200 in there.

That’s pretty much it for me and this post…as I said at the beginning, there is still a lot of digesting to do (bbq and otherwise) so I may add to this once I’ve had time to take it all in.

See you next year, Austin!

The cows came home

I finally received my Moo cards that I had ordered at the beginning of February. This was my third batch and it was strangely the only one to take a really long time to arrive. I wonder if it had anything to do with an influx of orders from people getting them for SXSW which is also the place I was first exposed to them in the first place.
What are they? I tend to call them my ‘personal cards’ as opposed to my somewhat boring ‘business card’ that I have for my corporate day job.

Moo cards are small (about half as tall as a business card) but are very personal. You order them in batches of 100 and are comprised of text on the back and photos on the front. You can customize the text that appears on the back and the cool part is that you also get to choose what appears on the front. Since they partner with a lot of photo sharing sites (I use Flickr), you can easily pull your own photos into Moo and create the card front with these photos. Unlike getting cards from a traditional printer, you can choose how many of your 100 cards has which photos on them. You can get 100 of the same or 100 different photos on the front of the cards or mix and match as much as you want. Pretty cool for only $19.99 plus shipping - just try to get card stock photo cards from a local printer for that little.

My third batch has turned out the best…I decided to order a lot of different photos this time around instead of just a couple of my favs. I also got a few geekier photos in there since I’ll probably be giving a lot out at SXSW soon enough. I expect to come back from Austin with a ton of other people’s cards and look forward to the Moo party down there as well.
You can use an Altoids Chewing Gum tin as the perfect case for them too.

Chris Heuer interviews me

During the Northern Voice Opening Party, Chris Heur asked if he could do a quick interview with me. Chris was doing this to capture the event by talking to as many people as possible and asking them a couple of questions. He simply used his cellphone and a service called Utterz to record the interview and it automagically posted it to his blog, twitter and to his Utterz page (and possibly other places). He also managed to take a decent photo of me which is pretty much a miracle.

Hopefully I sound as cool as everyone else he interviewed during his trip to Vancouver. Thanks Chris…it was a fun thing to participate in and a cool way to capture the people attending the conference.

Northern Voice 2008 Wrap Up

Just like last year, I had a great time at Northern Voice. Like many (good) conferences, there is always too many people you want to talk to or meet and simply not enough time. Maybe next year there should be a scheduled block of ‘hanging in main hall’ just so you have a little more quality time between sessions to chat.

This year I convinced a few friends that might not ordinarily go to a conference like this to come out and I think they had a great time like I did. My favorite session easily was Kris Krug’s PhotoCamp and still think (like I did during BarCamp) that it could be it’s own stand alone conference. Dave Olson also had an outstanding session about making art instead of worrying about “fucking stats”. Looking forward to hanging more with these guys in Austin real soon.

I enjoyed all the sessions I attended (check out Rebecca’s always awesome liveblog posts of many sessions) but if there was one negative about the conference (which happens to all of them) is that there were a couple of sessions happening concurrently I would have liked to attend but had to make a choice. Judging from the results, Rachael Ashe’s session on light painting looked fantastic and I really should have went to it. I really like the mix of art that has worked its way into some of these tech(ish) events and it’s inspiring to see people doing really cool stuff right in front of you.

Using a cool trick Derek Miller shared at PhotoCamp, here is my Northern Voice wrap up in pictures:

I’ll try to tag as many of the photos as I can but feel free to tag yourself if I didn’t.

Special shout out to Jennie (who flew in from Pittsburgh!) and Dan (from Toronto) for coming out west for a few days. I wish we had more time to spend together.

I completely forgot to pick up a “Bloggable” T-shirt during the conference….maybe Boris can help me buy one. Maybe next year Basco5 can do some t-shirts too.

Northern Voice 2008

I’m at UBC this weekend attending the Northern Voice conference. Last night was the opening party/dinner at the Waldorf Hotel:

I’ll be taking photos all weekend and I’ll be posting intermittently. As usual, Rebecca’s got the live blog going on.

You can watch my flickr stream or all the photos tagged by the other attendees.

Third Tuesday for February 2008

I headed downtown tonight to check out Third Tuesday Vancouver at the Network Hub.

Jeff Young was the guest tonight speaking about many topics and their legal implications online. There was a lot of interesting discussion about copyright versus trademark, what aspects of a design can be legally owned, and the legal rights of bloggers and what (or who) they blog about. Jeff also spoke about a number of legal differences between Canada and the US.

Warren has the scoop over at TechVibes.

Thanks to Tod and Tanya for continuing to bring some great speakers out for this monthly event.

I encourage everyone to keep an eye on the Third Tuesday Vancouver schedule and come out to these very interesting (and free) talks.

Update: Raul has a recap now as well.

Northern Voice Keynote Speaker announced

Tickets are almost sold out to this year’s Northern Voice conference. It was just announced that Matt Mullenweg, creator of the Wordpress system that I use to power this site, will be giving the keynote at the conference…although there hasn’t been a post about Matt on the conference site, he blogged about it on his so it must be true.

I’ve had the chance to see Matt speak twice now: at SXSW last year and at WordCamp last summer. Like Larry Lessig, he knows how to give a great presentation. He also happens to have one of the coolest personal domain names : http://ma.tt although it sounds like it was a bit of an ordeal to acquire. Someone beat me to the one I should have gotten.

This year’s conference is shaping up to be a great one! See you at the Waldorf for the opening party!