Technology Burner Technology Burner

It’s a constant question we hear over and over and over again at Compendium and at each of the conferences I’ve spoken at.

I'm thrilled to announce that the London Net Tuesday is officially here!  The community in London and around the UK is ready for a solid, monthly event that brings together social changemakers (whether a nonprofit organization in the traditional sense, a group of interested citizens, social venture capitalists or an individual with an idea) and technological forerunners together to mix, swap stories and ideas, build new relationships, and collaborate on new projects.

My good friend, Patric… aka Mr. Noobie, is giving away a Nintendo Wii! Patric has been a great friend of my blog over the last year and we’ve had many a cup of coffee with our friends at The Bean Cup.

If you are an avid reader of this blog you will already know that I am fascinated with Virtual Worlds and Virtual Events – but I was never truly enamored with Second Life and was not in favor of it for business from the start (must have been that scary looking penguin that tried to strike up a conversation with me)

All that aside – I encounter a virtual world from the moment I step foot into my house with my two boys being avid RuneScape players. So I can’t help but think there must be something redeeming here for businesses.

One thing I am investigating and heavily considering for 2009 is a Virtual Events Strategy. It’s like a virtual tradeshow but a space all your own for your own business events.

If you are an avid reader of this blog you will already know that I am fascinated with Virtual Worlds and Virtual Events – but I was never truly enamored with Second Life and was not in favor of it for business from the start (must have been that scary looking penguin that tried to strike up a conversation with me)

All that aside – I encounter a virtual world from the moment I step foot into my house with my two boys being avid RuneScape players. So I can’t help but think there must be something redeeming here for businesses.

One thing I am investigating and heavily considering for 2009 is a Virtual Events Strategy. It’s like a virtual tradeshow but a space all your own for your own business events.

The Knight News Challenge is giving away around $5 million in 2009 for the development and distribution of neighborhood and community-focused projects, services, and programs!

What fits the challenge?

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Special thanks to Doug for allowing me to guest post on his blog!

Today is the web's Earth Day!

One Web Day, created by Susan Crawford, builds on the idea that, like Earth Day in celebration of our environment, a holiday was needed to bring people together in celebration, sharing, learning, and activism focused on the Internet. Today, people are gathering around the world for online sharing and learning, as well as in-person activities and events.

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If you’ve not bought your tickets already, be sure to get them while you can! (And for a 15% discount, use code BLOGDISC)

This week I signed my personal site up for Google Apps. I’ve been getting a mountain of Spam since my email address hasn’t changed in years and my host (though I love them) will charge $1.99 per email address for Spam Protection, something that Gmail does for free. As well, with Gmail, you’re working with algorithms built by millions of other users so it’s quite accurate!

Brian Dear, founder of Eventful, talks to us about how structuring event data is helping people find the events that matter to them and their communities.

What does Eventful do?

Eventful's mission is to help people discover, track, create, and share events. Basically, we want to provide worldwide comprehensive service to help people find events everywhere. We're trying to address a major need that the Internet hasn't met until now, which is basically a search engine dedicated to event discovery.

We're trying to exploit technology to the fullest to help people with one particular niche, albeit a very large niche. On any given day, probably 50 million events go on throughout the world.

Social media practitioners must understand what not to do in the space, as the grassroots are extraordinarily unforgiving and interconnected. Don't be a weed. To wit, I received a message from a friend on Facebook, and immediately it struck me that he was shooting himself in the social media foot with an uzi. The message which I received was sent to 18 persons whose first name begins with the letter R. One can only assume that this instance of his message recurred many times, hence the uzi. It comes across as spam, however well-targeted it might be. It is a formula for failure.

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Maybe it was the quad-shot non-fat mocha? The hot lights? The megascreen? The ‘reverse’ auditorium’? Maybe all of the above - but I was nervous when I quickly spread through my presentation today at BlogIN. In fact, my heart was pounding pretty good before I got up to speak. That’s unusual for me. As soon as I started sweating from the lights, though, I noticed my voice shaking. Ugh.

Weird - because it was a comparably small audience with many folks that have previously seen me speak. I definitely felt a great connection to the audience, but was still nervous. Perhaps I’ve had a such a great string of events that it was time that I got stirred up a little.

{Cross posted in various forms at Vancouver Drupal Camp Group, Urban Vancouver and Now Public - please spread the word}

Eventbrite was founded in early 2006 and monthly volumes of tickets distributed are already in the millions with tens of thousands of users. I saw my first Eventbrite invitation from an event promoted by Dr. Thomas Ho and I’ve utilized it for 3 events already.